Music Video: Norwegian Recycling "Singularity" (Travis / Iyaz / Kelly Clarkson / Oasis / Christina Aguilera / No Doubt)

I'm not positive the embedding is going to work here; the first couple times I tried it, the video didn't show up in preview. (Here is the link to YouTube, if it doesn't work.)

This one is unusual because 1) A lot of people have heard it already (the video has 280,000 views), and 2) It's pretty. "Pretty" isn't a quality one normally finds in mashups (I can think of a few others; "Building an Enigma" comes to mind [UPDATE: Sorry, the link to "Building an Enigma" was broken shortly after I posted this. It's Sarah McLachlan / Enigma, if you want to try to search for it.], as does DJ Earworm's 2008 United State of Pop, at least in places), and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's harder to do?

Anyway. I got very excited about Norwegian Recycling when I heard this, hunted all over the internet for more of his stuff,¹ downloaded a shit-ton of it, and then was quietly disappointed. It's not that the other stuff is bad -- it may yet grow on me, actually, and I like "Miracles" (which also probably counts as "pretty") well enough² -- but it all sounds very much the same, somehow. Maybe I just haven't listened to them enough yet. I don't know. In any case, this is easily my favorite of the songs he's done.

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¹ Why is it always "his?" Where are the female mashup artists? I know there have to be some out there somewhere. 1000 PATSP points to anybody who can point me to one. (PATSP points are not redeemable for cash, goods or services.)
² Actually, more people seem to like "Miracles" than "Singularity;" "Miracles" has over a million hits. I think "Singularity" is the better composition, though. Some of that is because I get all itchy whenever I hear the word "miracle" that many times in a non-mayonnaise context.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

On either Wednesday or Thursday this week, I got up, let Sheba out of her crate, drank coffee for a while, and then went into the plant room and found a small pile of greenish vomit with leaf chunks in it. This much has happened before, usually when I'm watering, and I've been assuming that she was just picking up dead leaves that had fallen on the floor as the plants got moved around, and the leaves in question were usually safe stuff like Pilea and Nematanthus, so I didn't worry about it much. But in this case, I hadn't been watering yet, and these leaves were awfully green. Investigation of the plant room turned up a Yucca guatemalensis with some recently-torn leaves.

Obviously nothing happened, and she's okay, but it was still alarming. She's never acted particularly interested in the plants before (though the Beaucarnea on a low shelf in the plant room has tipped over, repeatedly, under suspicious circumstances). I don't know what would have changed.

The husband noted that she hasn't been able to eat grass lately, like she used to do a lot, because the grass is all dead and/or under snow, and I suppose Yucca would sort of resemble grass (especially this particular plant, which is a couple cut-back canes that resprouted two weak little baby shoots). I guess if throwing up was the point, then it worked the same as grass, too. And the Beaucarnea also looks grassy, barely, so we might have an explanation for those cases as well. But that all sort of begs the question of why the sudden need to eat grass in the first place. It's not like her diet's changed.

Anyway. So it looks like maybe it's time to go spray everything with the bitter-apple stuff again. I feel sort of silly doing it, because it'll wash right off again the next time I water, but if she needs the reminder, then I suppose I will anyway.


Meanwhile: picture of Nina beginning to shed (you can sort of see in the picture that the area behind her head, and around her left front foot, is a little lighter than the rest of her skin). She sheds her skin all the time, but I don't usually notice until it's well underway.

Music Video: DJ Lobsterdust "Knock Out Eileen" (LL Cool J / Dexys Midnight Runners mashup)

I'm not sure what to say about this one. It's another mashup that's maybe not so much good as it is surprising. But hey. Maybe you're in the mood for surprising?

Pretty picture: Buddleia NOID with Vanessa atalanta

Another out-of-season photo (this is dated 28 August), because I'm kind of at a loss for ideas and the plants here have abruptly stopped being interesting. (The Peperomia pereskiifolia is blooming, but if you've ever seen Peperomia inflorescences, you'll understand why I didn't think that was exciting enough news to turn into a post.) But everybody likes butterflies.

Everybody except the Moth Supremacists, anyway.

I also have a wee bit of news, which is that Wallace's Garden Center, in Bettendorf, IA, is in fact going to do the Orchid Show thing again this year, on March 12 and 13. I'm planning to be there on the 12th, so if you live in the vicinity and go on the 12th too, then we could both be in the same building at once. Which is exciting enough on its own, but of course if we told one another how to recognize us, then we could also meet and talk about the orchids as well. We could have conversations like,

"Did you see this one over here that I can't pronounce?"
"I did! I couldn't pronounce it either!"
"Yes. It is very unpronounceable."
"Pretty, though."
"Oh yeah, sure, pretty. Definitely."

I don't know whether there are actually that many people reading PATSP who live in the area, or, if there are PATSP readers in the area, whether any of them would find being in my vicinity and having conversations about verifying the viewing of orchids particularly exciting. But this would be the time to start making plans, if anyone is close enough to the Quad Cities to think this sounds like a good idea. (If we planned it well, we could hit the QCBC before or after, too.) E-mail if you are so moved, and we'll make plans to make plans.

The Botanical Taxonomist's Junk Drawer

The spreadsheet I use as the master census for all my indoor plants has a column for the family of each plant. Most of the time, filling it in is straightforward. Stenocereus is in the Cactaceae. Vriesea is in the Bromeliaceae. Phalaenopsis is in the Orchidaceae. However: a fairly large subset of plants were problematic, when it came to determining family affiliation, because the usual sources of information didn't agree.

Aloe vera.
For example: is Aloe vera in the Asphodelaceae, as Wikipedia claims, or should I go with davesgarden.com and put it in the Aloaceae? Or maybe GRIN and Tropicos are more authoritative, in which case I should put it in the Xanthorrhoeaceae. Or maybe the old cactus and succulents book I bought at a secondhand store a few weeks ago should be considered, in which case there is a case to make for the Liliaceae. Without a compelling reason to take one source over the others,¹ I was left to guess, or go with the first one I encountered, or whatever.

And this scenario happened over and over and over, see below.²

• Dracaena: Ruscaceae, Ruscaceae, Asparagaceae, Asparagaceae
• Agave: Agavaceae, Agavaceae, Asparagaceae, Asparagaceae, Amaryllidaceae
• Chlorophytum: Agavaceae, Liliaceae, Asparagaceae, Asparagaceae
• Sansevieria: Ruscaceae and Agavaceae, somehow; Ruscaceae; Asparagaceae; Asparagaceae
• Haworthia: Asphodelaceae, Aloaceae, Xanthorrhoeaceae, Xanthorrhoeaceae, Liliaceae
• Cordyline: Agavaceae, Asparagaceae, Asparagaceae, Asparagaceae
• Aspidistra: Ruscaceae, Ruscaceae, Asparagaceae, Asparagaceae
• Beaucarnea: Ruscaceae, Ruscaceae, Asparagaceae, Liliaceae

Sansevieria trifasciata 'Moonglow.'
Which is discouraging, if you like to know how your houseplants are related to one another.

But then, a couple weeks ago, The Phytophactor (whom you should really be reading, by the way) posted a link to The Plant List, an on-line database of plant names. TPL isn't the only database on-line that includes the obsolete names, but it does appear to be up-to-date,³ and it's the only one I know of that's been endorsed by the Phactor, as he calls himself sometimes, so, you know, whatever the hell. So I looked up every genus of plant I've got, checking to see that I had the right family written down, and -- hold on to your mind securely, now, because I am going to BLOW IT⁴ -- every single one of the cases I was unsure about, according to TPL, belongs in the Asparagaceae.

Aloe? Asparagaceae.

Dracaena? Asparagaceae.

Aspidistra, Haworthia, Aloe, Beaucarnea, Agave, Sansevieria, Chlorophytum? All Asparagaceae.

Cordyline fruticosa 'Kiwi.'
Now. There's no particular reason to believe that TPL is more right about this than Tropicos, or GRIN. There may in fact not even be a way to be right about this at the moment, given that taxonomy is normally a somewhat fluid science, and this has only gotten worse lately, with the arrival of cheaper gene sequencing and all the close genetic analysis it permits. But one will notice that TPL's Asparagaceae-as-junk-drawer policy has one big advantage over Tropicos and GRIN, which is that it's really, really simple. Faced with a dauntingly huge number of unclassified or ambiguously-classified plants, one can take fifteen minutes or so to put them all in the Asparagaceae and then take the whole department out for drinks for the rest of the day. Which is why I'm happy to ignore the possible existence of (for example) the Xanthorrhoeaceae, which is sickeningly difficult to type anyway,⁵ and follow their lead. If taxonomic consensus changes later, as it surely will, well, at least I know I didn't waste a lot of time learning useless information.⁶

So if you're ever in a situation where you have to name a houseplant's family, and you have no idea -- which, okay, I can't think of any plausible scenarios when that might happen, but you never know -- guess the Asparagaceae. Everybody else is.

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¹ Okay, it's not that tough of a decision: GRIN and Tropicos are the best bets, because Wikipedia and davesgarden.com collect their information from their users, and one hopes that GRIN and Tropicos have higher standards than that. And the book, being from 1958, doesn't really have a chance of being correct. But still -- unless I'd heard otherwise at some point, I used to assume that family assignments were fairly solid, and that information from one source ought to agree with information from the others, so frequently I only looked at one source and went with whatever it said. So in a lot of cases I didn't know what GRIN and Tropicos said.
² (In order, references are: Wiki, dave, GRIN, Tropicos. When there's a fifth, it's the 1958 book.)
³ Mostly I'm assuming it's up to date because it includes such personal bugbears as the reclassification of Dracaena marginata as Dracaena reflexa var. angustifolia, which is so obviously wrong that I refuse to accept it, and I am confident that future taxonomists are going to back me up on this one. Sadly, the more plausible substitution of Dracaena fragrans for D. deremensis is there too: I'm reluctant to give up the name D. deremensis.
⁴ Original source of this line: Sady Doyle. Ordinarily I wouldn't give credit, but ordinarily I'd try harder to change the line to make it my own, too. Also I think Sady is awesome.
⁵ Seriously, like two thirds of the name is "aceacaceaeceae." How are my fingers supposed to keep that straight? I suppose at least I can be grateful that I'll probably never have to prounounce it.
⁶ For the record, I'm not actually accusing TPL of being lazy. I'm sure they have their reasons for classing all these together, which are all scientifically-based and everything. I'm agreeing out of laziness, though.

Music Video: Titus Jones "Good Girls Burn Miami" (Sean Kingston / Cobra Starship / Shakira / Lady Gaga / LMFAO mashup)

Another thumpy/throbby club-type mix, like "I Wanna Bulletproof Dancer." I like "Dancer" better, but "Good Girls" has going for it that it's sort of made me okay with Sean Kingston, who I took an extreme and irrational dislike to when "Beautiful Girls" was on the radio all the time. (It was lunge-at-the-dashboard-if-the-first-two-notes-came-on-the-car-radio kind of dislike. I still feel that way about that song, but at least the disgust no longer bleeds over to Kingston's entire repertoire and makes me want to scratch out his eyes with potato peelers and stuff.¹) The Shakira helps.

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¹ I don't knoooooooow. I don't! I just hated the song the first time I heard it, and ever after. At least some of this has to do with feeling like it was trivializing depression, but that makes it sound like I had reasons, which I really don't think I did. Maybe some long-repressed childhood trauma involving a similar-sounding song. I don't know. For obvious reasons, I've never listened carefully to "Beautiful Girls" to see whether I could figure out the problem.

Random plant event: Dendrobium keiki

I was worried at first that this meant that the plant was upset with me about something, or that it was giving me a keiki instead of flowers, but what I found on-line seemed to be suggesting that although a Phalaenopsis producing keiki might have a backhanded, passive-aggressive meaning like that, Dendrobiums don't necessarily mean anything by it: it's just something they do from time to time. Which, if that's the case, then I'm happy for the opportunity to propagate, I guess. Can anybody confirm or refute?


I also don't know which of my two Dendrobiums this is, 'Karen' or "Humphrey Bogart." They're in different media, but at some point I lost track of which was in fir bark and which was in coir. I'm about 60% sure this is 'Karen.' I'd have preferred to propagate "Humphrey Bogart," given the choice.

Music Video: 10000 Spoons "Precious Bleeding Love" (Depeche Mode / Leona Lewis mashup)

As I sort of hinted at last Saturday, I think a lot of the reason I find mashups interesting and worth listening to is that a good one can make me like a song I previously hated.¹ There's one mash-up out there that actually sort of makes me feel warmly about Journey. (You're not going to find it at PATSP, though, because anything with that kind of destructive potential needs to be tightly restricted. Obviously.)

I didn't necessarily hate Leona Lewis, but the song sounded kinda dumb to me the first time I heard it. And it didn't help that I misheard "keep bleeding" as "keep breathing," the first time, which was just confusing.² Put her in front of a Depeche Mode song I already really liked, though, and suddenly I like the lyrics just fine. So I'm forced to conclude that I'm mostly interested in the particular palette of instruments playing behind the singer, not what he or she is saying, even though I'd always thought I mostly cared about the words. Better to find this out sooner rather than later, I suppose.

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¹ Or at least that's the right-brain reason: the left-brain reason is that I am continually amazed that pop music is so interchangeable, that so many songs change chords at the same moments, that so many have the same structure, that it's all so homogeneous. Even songs that sound like they have weird chord progressions, like Nirvana's "Lithium" or Beyonce's "Single Ladies," seem to fit right in with everything else. Somehow, this manages to surprise me every time.
² I also heard "Baby, this time I'll be bulletproof," in La Roux's "Bulletproof," as "Maybe this time I'll be bulletproof," which changing that one consonant sound makes it a very different, and much more depressing, song. In my defense, I don't think she's enunciating very well.
I also always mishear Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," though: I always hear "It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not" as "It doesn't make a difference if we're naked or not." That's the only reason I like the song at all, and it makes no sense unless you know how I'm interpreting that line.