I spent much of Saturday taking pictures of orchids. Here are a few. There are many more here, here, here, here and here.
Month: November 2017
Orchid show, odds and ends
Some of the orchids on the sale tables at the Kansas Orchid Society show, November 4-5, 2017, at Botanica in Wichita, Kansas. A couple of panoramas of the show. These are large pictures; right-click and open in a new window to see at full size. Some low-resolution interactive panoramas of the orchid show. Click on … Continue reading “Orchid show, odds and ends”
Some of the orchids on the sale tables at the Kansas Orchid Society show, November 4-5, 2017, at Botanica in Wichita, Kansas.
A couple of panoramas of the show. These are large pictures; right-click and open in a new window to see at full size.
Some low-resolution interactive panoramas of the orchid show. Click on the titles to see them in motion at their Flickr pages.
Orchid show, fourth pair of tables
Bulbophyllum, pleurothallids and miscellaneous genera at the Kansas Orchid Society’s show and sale, November 4-5, 2017 at Botanica in Wichita, Kansas. Click to embiggen and to see with better color. Right-click and open in a new window to see the pictures at maximum size.
Bulbophyllum, pleurothallids and miscellaneous genera at the Kansas Orchid Society’s show and sale, November 4-5, 2017 at Botanica in Wichita, Kansas. Click to embiggen and to see with better color. Right-click and open in a new window to see the pictures at maximum size.
Orchid show, third pair of tables
Phalaenopsis, Dendrobium, Oncidium and allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. As usual, click to embiggen and see with better color.
Phalaenopsis, Dendrobium, Oncidium and allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. As usual, click to embiggen and see with better color.
Orchid show, second pair of tables
Mostly Vandas, slipper orchids and their allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. As before, click to embiggen and see with better color.
Mostly Vandas, slipper orchids and their allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. As before, click to embiggen and see with better color.
Orchid show, first pair of tables
Mostly Epidendrums and Cattleyas and their allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. Click to embiggen and see with better color. There’s lots more to come.
Mostly Epidendrums and Cattleyas and their allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. Click to embiggen and see with better color.
There’s lots more to come.
Late-night urban observation
“Neighbor” is a synonym for “jackass.”
Greetings from East Feffy Foofy
A long time ago, back before the last ice age, I came across a short piece called something like “In Space with Runyon Jones” in a collection of science fiction stories. It was a series of vignettes in which the young Jones encounters a variety of aliens while traveling in spaceships, which the editor of the anthology had gleaned from a novel by Norman Corwin. I was curious to read the rest of the book, but it was long out of print by then, and has never been reprinted. I never found it in any library or used book store.
A few years ago, I remembered the story and thought that perhaps it might be possible to locate a copy of the book online. While searching, I found that Corwin’s story had first been a radio play, “Odyssey of Runyon Jones,” broadcast in 1941. It’s available here. Once you accustom your ears to the low-fidelity sound, it’s entertaining listening. Runyon’s dog Pootzy has been hit by a car and killed, and Runyon wants him back. He braves bureaucracy, meets Father Time and Mother Nature, and eventually finds his way to Curgatory and a trick ending.
Ten years later, Corwin turned the radio play into the novel Dog in the Sky, of which I eventually located an affordable copy. In addition to expanding the episodes in the play, he introduced a sub-plot involving a Mr. B.L.Z. Bubb, a bureaucrat very interested in Runyon’s quest, and adds details of Runyon’s adventures as he travels from planet to planet. The Bubb business is never very interesting and it eventually fizzles out, but the aliens Runyon meets are what caught my attention in the excerpts I read years ago, and are what might make the book worth reprinting someday. There are quite a variety of them, including an interplanetary perfume salesman, a lonely robot, a very important businessman from Venus, and a spooky cat/woman. And a certain 62Kru:
62Kru returned to his monologue as though nothing had happened. “Love is science. Science is love. That is all the protons and isotopes know, and all they need to know. The beta ray hankers for the gamma, both are enamored of the delta, and all in turn adore the lambda.
You see, friend, we Hankerites deplore the fact that the galaxies are rushing away from each other. This is because of a misunderstanding which occurred some billions of years ago. We aim to rectify, restore and reunite the estranged universe, to bind all together under the harmonious love of the true Hruh, whose throne is everywhere and anywhere. Blasphemers and atheists have tried to prove that Hruh is really nothing but
but the true Hankerite is unshakable in his faith, resolute in his virtue, confident in the supremacy and inviolability of love, and we have already killed several million disbelievers to prove this.
*****
Something else I stumbled across at Archive.org: the A.M. Yankovic/W. Carlos version of “Peter and the Wolf.” It’s not the best example of either’s work, but it has its moments. The recording is probably still under copyright, so it may disappear from the site at any moment.
(My favorite version is the that by the Royal Ballet School, with Anthony Dowell as narrator and Grandfather. It starts here.)
Annual task
It’s the season when I search for calendars that I can stand to look at every day during the coming year. I recently visited a shop at a regional mall, where I was surprised to see not only a Hatsune Miku calendar, but also two of Sailor Moon, one large and one small.
I found a number of Japanese calendars online that might be of interest to some visitors here. Unfortunately, most listings don’t include a sample image. The calendars are probably like the ones I’ve bought in the past, with six poster-sized pages, each representing two months, rather than twelve foot-square images.
A curiosity: there’s a Crassula ovata calendar, though the illustrations displayed don’t much resemble a jade plant. C. ovata is an easy plant to grow, aside from being a magnet for mealybugs, but I wasn’t aware that it’s “lucky.”
Elsewhere, there are calendars of Edward Gorey and Heath Robinson, but none of Glen Baxter.