Pretty picture: Bulbophyllum lobbii

I responded to some of the comments people left on the previous post, but if you don't feel like checking on them:

The U.S. has not devolved into a Mad Max-style wasteland full of people shooting at one another, as it appeared might be the case following Dallas. So we have that going for us, at least, and I'm genuinely a little surprised. I remain really anxious about next week's Republican National Convention -- it would be difficult to create a more powder-keggy situation on purpose -- but maybe that, too, will pass without the country falling to pieces. Maybe there will even be no bloodshed. We can hope, at least. 2016 really should throw us a break sooner or later.

And as far as taking comfort from nature goes, of course that's a good thing. Election years are always¹ hard on me, but this year has been especially bad. It's much easier for things like Orlando / Philando Castile / Alton Sterling / Dallas to knock me off balance if there's also an election happening. And things get even worse if I start making weird assumptions like "calm" = "unconcerned," as I was kind of doing in that last post. So if looking at pictures of orchids is part of how you manage to stay functional, I apologize for making it more difficult to do that.

At the moment, I would really like to find something to do, but either don't have the resources or the temperament or both for most of the Black-Lives-Matter-related things I can think of, and to be honest I'm probably not in the right frame of mind to be useful at the moment even if presented with something useful to do.²

But we have an orchid, at least. And it's a pretty nice one, even. Bulbophyllum lobbii is apparently another really variable orchid species; the previously-seen B. lobbii specimens haven't looked much like this at all:

Bulbophyllum lobbii 'Kathy's Gold' (2013)

Bulbophyllum lobbii 'Sonoma Gold' (2015)

I suppose the other possibility is that some of these are misidentified, but on-line image searches show a lot of different-looking plants. I'm assuming it's probably just that variable.³ This year's plant is easily the prettiest of the three. Lucky for us.

In other news, I can now report that all five Amorphophallus are alive and working on leaves (or maybe blooms, but I'm assuming leaves):

It's still ridiculously late for this to be happening, and some of the leaf buds are still so short you can barely see them in the picture, but everybody's accounted for, and at least I don't have to worry that they've rotted. Hopefully they'll have time for photosynthesis before fall arrives.

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¹ (For values of "always" greater than or equal to 1998.)
I paid attention to elections, and cared who won, prior to 1998, but it became personal in '98 because that was the year that all politicians of both parties ran against Ellen DeGeneres, and I was pretty newly out to people myself, and it was really, really tough to hear some of the things people were saying about LGBT Americans.
2004 and 2010 were also unusually difficult -- '04 because that was the year of "maybe we need a Constitutional Amendment to prevent the gays from getting married," and '10 because that was the year when Iowa's elections were partly focused on recalling the judges who had ruled in favor of gay marriage in 2009. So every six years, I guess, is an especially bad election for me, but none of them are ever actually good. And none of the especially bad ones were competitive with 1998 until this year.
² But e-mail or comment anyway, if you hear of something.
³ Like Rhynchostylis gigantea, it has a pretty large natural habitat -- Borneo, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines -- which probably explains a lot of the variation. It's also possible that they look different depending on growing conditions; I believe the 2015 and 2016 specimens were entered in the show by different exhibitors, based on how they were tagged and displayed.

Pretty picture: NOID NOID orchid

Obviously something Oncidium-related. No tag, though.


wrong tags: 8.5
incomplete tags: 1
missing tags: 13

I'd like to write more about the orchid, but since I don't have an ID for it, and it's not my personal plant, there's not much to say. And anyway I'm sort of preoccupied by the mass shooting in Connecticut. (Also the mass shooting in Oregon last Tuesday. And the fourteen others in 2012 before those two. And the one that happened yesterday in Alabama but didn't kill anybody except the gunman.)

I tried for a few hours on Saturday to come up with something to say about all that. But I failed. Wrote lots of stuff, deleted lots of stuff. The Onion has it pretty well covered anyway.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

(Background. I couldn't locate the original Boston Globe version of the story on-line.)

Of course there's a website.

Sheba had a rough week this week; on Wednesday night, she started acting like she was in pain -- random yelping, shaking/trembling, reluctance to go up or down stairs, sort of an overall slow/lethargic thing. So we took her to the vet on Thursday, and he gave us painkillers for her and told us to try to keep her as inactive as possible for the next week or so and see if things were getting back to normal. I got the impression that he's leaning toward a pinched-nerve/pulled-tendon sort of theory, that it's not anything that would require further intervention, but we have to wait and see.

So if you've donated money recently, that's where most of it went (I also got a couple more shop lights, a week or two ago), and Sheba says thank you.

Or, she would say thank you, if she were awake and spoke English. So far, the painkillers (Rimadyl) mostly seem to make her sleepy. And her English has never been very good.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Sheba was limping a little bit early in the week, and then again on Tuesday or Wednesday, but neither the husband or I could see anything wrong with her foot -- there were no cuts or puncture marks or anything. So it could have been a joint issue, rather than a foot issue. We may never know, because she'd stopped doing it by Thursday.

Other than that, nothing big going on with Nina or Sheba.


I checked on the barn swallows about a week ago -- I've been trying hard not to disturb them, so this is only the third time I've so much as looked in the nest. The parents were kind of freaked out anyway. They flew around me for a little while before settling on a power line and watching intently:


I couldn't get a terribly good photo, because of the way the nest is positioned, the camera quality, lack of light (overcast that day), and so forth, so I'm not sure if both of the eggs hatched, but I think the photo shows one in the back left corner of the nest, with its head pointing to the left, and a second one sort of across the middle of the nest, with its head pointing to the lower right. Hard to be sure, though. I'll have to check again in a week or two.


I know the nest is still being used, though, because when I sit on the couch in the living room, I can see the parents occasionally flying in and out, particularly around 6-7 PM.

Finally, if you didn't know already, the New York Senate voted late last night to approve gay marriage for New York. The other chamber of the NY legislature had already voted on this and passed it, and the governor signed it immediately after, so it's a done deal. The Empire State Building was lit up in rainbow colors last night, to mark the occasion:

Empire State Building lit up in rainbow colors last night. Photo from Twitter User @ComfortablySmug. (Link to original version.)
This more than doubles the number of Americans who live in a state with gay marriage. (NY - 19.4 million; MA + IA + CT + VT + NH + DC combined - 15.7 million) It's still only 11% of the U.S. population, but progress is progress.

Pretty picture: Clivia miniata 'Belgian Hybrid Yellow'

Doesn't sound like a proper cultivar name at all as far as I'm concerned, but that's all the ID I have to give you.


I realize that yellow Clivias are harder to find and therefore more valuable, among those people who value Clivias, but I'm kind of thinking I don't like them as well as I like the regular orange kind. Not that it really matters to me personally -- I have one of each, and neither has ever flowered. (I suspect I don't have a cold enough spot for them during the winter.) I'm just thinking, you know, the yellow blooms ain't all that. I could get excited over a real, vivid, saturated yellow, but this whole cream-color-we're-calling-yellow fails to move me.

I'm posting the picture anyway because 1) I had another picture, over a year ago, from a different store, that I never got around to posting, and 2) because I noticed that the tag refers to the plant as a "bush lily."


I guess this is what we're calling them now. (The older common name, "kaffir lily," turns out to be a racial slur. Weird how none of the old houseplant books mention that.) I'd kind of hoped that everybody'd just switch over to calling them "clivias," but apparently that's too much to hope for.

Elsewhere on the Web

Plant Chaser: Look Jane Look
Summary: Somewhere in the Philippines, a Dyckia 'Platyphylla' blooms. Includes some surprisingly neat close-up photos of the true flowers.

The Scientist Gardener: Better Chemistry Through Breeding
Summary: About the genetic and chemical basis for the colors of peppers and other plants, with pretty pictures.

Cactus Blog: Bitter Root
Summary: Pretty pictures of Lewisia cvv.

One of my Lewisia pictures, from long ago.
Freewill Applicator: On Corporate Law
Summary: Probably best explained by the first two sentences:

Corporate law is the story of made-up characters and their relationships. And it is the story of the real people whose duty is to do what the imaginary characters need.

And then it kinda goes on from there. Nothing to do with plants, but I liked it.

The Variegated Thumb: Plant Find: The Cucumber Orchid
Summary: Zach has a Dockrillia cucumerina now, a plant I'd never heard of before and wouldn't believe in if he didn't have pictures.

The Consumerist: Don't UPS Drivers Realize Customers Have Security Cameras?
Summary: Please don't send me plants via UPS ever, thanks.

The Planetary Society Blog: A dog-bone-shaped asteroid's two moons: Kleopatra, Cleoselene, and Alexhelios (via Bad Astronomy)
Summary: There's an asteroid orbiting the sun that's shaped like a dog bone and has two moons. The main point of interest is the animation showing the three objects together.

~

And one entire blog:

Fuzzy Foliage
Summary: Blog about gesneriads in general, but Saintpaulias in particular. If you have questions about the African Violet Society of America, this is the person to ask. Or at least a person to ask.

Iowa Grandmother Speaks in Favor of Gay Marriage

(Via.)

Pretty picture: Ananas 'Ivory Coast' inflorescence

So far, this is turning out to be an unsatisfactory week. I'm not sick, and nothing in particular has happened: mostly I'm just really tired, like, the sort of tired that normally only happens during the week after a Daylight Saving Time switch.

Election years tend to be hard on me. Particularly terrible were 2004 (the year all Republicans ran against the state of Massachusetts and/or gay marriage) and 1998 (the year all politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, ran against Ellen DeGeneres). This one's not looking good either,¹ and the recent string of suicides by young gay men and teens hasn't helped.

There are worse things to be than gay, this election cycle. The house hasn't been foreclosed on, nobody's lost a job, we both speak English, neither of us are, or could be mistaken for, Muslims. However bad of an election year this is to be gay, it's way worse to be Muslim.

But even so. The election is making me tired, and anxious. Also I'm not sleeping well, as of the last three nights (though that has more to do with indigestion than the election), and the not sleeping well is also making me tired, as not-sleeping will do.

Therefore, colorful pictures of pineapple flowers. I don't know whether pineapple flowers require commentary, but if they do, I can't come up with any, so think of something really cool and funny, the kind of thing a well-rested person with no worries would say, and then imagine I said it.

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¹ There's at least a decent chance that some of the Iowa Supreme Court justices who wrote the pro-gay-marriage decision in Varnum v. Brien last year are going to be recalled: to put this in perspective, no judges have ever been recalled in Iowa since the state adopted the current recall system in 1962.
The reason it's close this time is that the bigots are out to punish the judges for the Varnum decision, and they're getting lots of money (from the Mormon and Catholic churches, primarily, though not exclusively) to convince people to recall. If the judges are removed, it doesn't change the law -- you need a constitutional amendment for that, and it's hard to change the Iowa Constitution, requiring multiple large-majority votes -- but it's a signal to the other judges. If you like your job, rule the way we want you to.
If the judges are recalled, then the governor -- who will almost certainly be Iowa Governor For Life Terry Branstad (governor from 1983 to 1999, and very likely also 2011-2015), a Republican, will be the one to choose their replacements. Branstad's been kind of coy about gay marriage thus far, not making it a central campaign issue. What he has said on the matter falls somewhere between not encouraging and downright incoherent.
In the event, I'm not sure what would happen if the Iowa Constitution were amended to officially exclude gay marriage, whether the husband and I would remain married under the law or not. The precedent from California suggests that we would, but California didn't change their constitution over it, either, so who knows. Even if it didn't affect me directly, it still wouldn't be fair, obviously.