Friday Flora, Jacob and Esau Edition

Friday Flora Jacob and Esau Edition

Here is the Friday Flora, the fragrant popcorn flower, Plagiobothrys figuratus.  Doesn't look like much, but it almost gave me a heart attack.

It is growing in the middle of one of our pastures, between the barn and the east shelter.  That pasture is a problem for us:  it is the low point of the entire field, and sits on a lens of pure clay, so it becomes a vernal pool.  We've done a lot of work to drain it, including cutting in drains and perf-pipe and so on.  It's better than it was, but that just means that the puddles that the water goes over the tops of the feet rather than over the tops of my boots.  The situation is made worse by the fact that the last two years, we've had to run heavy tractors over that pasture during the wet season, in order to get fencing put in and build shelters.  It's not generally the best idea to do such construction work in February, but that was when the contractors were available.

Now, though, the pasture is drying out, and is merely muddy, rather than wet.  The popcorn flower's plant grows while inundated, and blooms as the last water disappears.  Our rutted, soggy pasture is now sprinkled with these cheerful little blooms.

If you live in Douglas County and talk with ecologists, or look for information on popcorn flowers in Douglas County, you will hear and see much about the rough popcorn flower, Plagiobothrys hirtus.  It is downright famous, and rightly so; it is one of the most critically endangered flora in the world, and it grows only in three sites, all in the drainage of the North Umpqua river in Douglas County Oregon--nowhere else in the world.  When I talked with the NRCS and USDA people about starting the fencing project, they always mentioned that we'd have to do a pro forma ecological survey, and that it would find nothing but it's obligatory because of the rough popcorn flower.  That was a couple of years ago.

A few evenings ago I was out doing the evening chores and in the dimming light I see this little flower, which jiggled a couple of loose neurons and brought up the name "popcorn flower."  It being 2016, I whipped out my iPhone and Googled "popcorn flower Douglas County Oregon" and the great Google coughed up a slew of pictures and information, all about P hirtus.  Here, for comparison, is a picture of the flower of P hirtus:

When you're doing chores, and light is dimming, and you've got a lot to get done, and you're unaware of the existence of any other Plagiobothrys species because one is hogging all the bandwidth, it is easy to come to the conclusion that you've just found the mother of all white elephants--an endangered species in one of your pastures right in the middle of your farm that you're trying to develop.  It took some pretty focused effort later that night to reveal that there are other species of popcorn flower in Douglas County.  Also, they look nearly identical to the rough popcorn flower, but they are as common as dirt and can be found from here to Illinois.

So, here we have P figuratus, in all its diminutive and unendangered glory.  How can I be sure?  One source mentions that absolutely certain identification depends upon microscopic examination of the scisson scars on the 1.5 milimeter seeds, but the quick-and-dirty way is to look at the stems.  P hirtus is a hairy plant, while its brother P figuratus is smooth.  

When I went out the next morning to do the chores,  I was immensely relieved to see smooth stems holding up those cute flowers.  Now I just go on my way, doing chores and enjoying the sight of these charming little flowers, enjoying their company as I do with the buttercups and clover and the rest.  Every once in a while, I will even step on one, accidentally.

Monday Musical Offering--post-recital detox edition

Classical music is pretty thin on the ground here in Mayberry-on-Umpqua.  There is a youth orchestra, which symbolizes a parental investment in something that is not felt to be worth attention continued into adulthood; the same organization will occasionally sponsor a concert at the community college.  There's a community concert series, which brings in a lot of pop/classical crossover stuff that I don't really care for.  There's a concert chorale, which brings Handel's Messiah around every year, plus one other concert, which needs to include some pop.  There's a local winery that brings in some very good musicians from Eugene every now and then for some chamber music.  That's pretty much it.

The Real Doctor and I went to a recital last weekend at the winery: a graduate piano student at the U of O, from Russia, playing some standards--Beethoven's 1st sonata, Chopin's 2nd sonata, and the first set of Impromptus by Schubert.  I don't like to slag on people, so I'll say that it was the best piano recital I'd been to in years, and there were one or two interesting ideas.  I will note that the guy played like he was trying to fill a concert hall rather than a tasting room, and that there was very little in the way of tenderness.  It was a highly testosterone-driven bit of music making, and it left me feeling, in sympathy with the poor piano, a bit pummeled.  There were also more than a few memory lapses, one quite severe, that left me feeling terribly anxious.  And the piano itself isn't wonderful--a Pearl River upright, with a tone that left the Real Doctor and me feeling a bit on edge.  

I was sort of hoping for a concert experience that would provide a nice break from the frenzy of the last few months.  Instead, I've spent what music-time I've had in the last week listening to Radu Lupu and Mitsuko Uchida and others, trying to re-find a musical center.  

Oh well.  I can look forward to August, when the Douglas County Fair will be hosting Cheap Trick.  

Tuesday Tool Shoveling $#!+ edition

The tool of Tuesday, reported a few days late, is the five-tined manure fork.

I spent a lot of time this week cleaning up--sorting through the desk, through the piles of mail, through my parents' mail, magazines, newspapers, all the thousands of leaves of paper that arrive and stack up in a household over the course of a couple of months of inattention.  Another set of piles occupied more time, as I worked my way through a great deal of laundry.  It's all a lot of work, and profoundly unsatisfying, especially now that the weather has turned nice and I can glance out the window and see green fields and blue skies and black and brown lambs frolicking between the two.  It is completely occupying for a whole day, and at the end one doesn't feel as though one has accomplished much of anything.  Very much a Red-Queen race.

Tuesday I took a break from paper-pushing, and mucked out the doe's portion of the barn.  Yes, it's hard labor, and yes, it is also a Red Queen race, but for whatever reason, shoveling out real manure leaves you with more of a feeling of having gotten something done.

Wednesday Wordage Wodehouse edition

Let us pause to give thanks to the universe for giving us P. G. Wodehouse.  We've had a long run of rainy, gloomy weather, and I was in a rainy, gloomy mood.  Wodehouse, like Mozart, can remind you of the existence of fairer weather.

George wandered down Shaftesbury Avenue feeling more depressed than ever. The sun had gone in for the time being, and the east wind was frolicking round him like a playful puppy, patting him with a cold paw, nuzzling his ankles, bounding away and bounding back again, and behaving generally as east winds do when they discover a victim who has come out without his spring overcoat. It was plain to George now that the sun and the wind were a couple of confidence tricksters working together as a team. The sun had disarmed him with specious promises and an air of cheery goodfellowship, and had delivered him into the hands of the wind, which was now going through him with the swift thoroughness of the professional hold-up artist.

--From A Damsel in Distress, later made into a movie musical, music by the Gershwins, the scene that gave rise to "A Foggy Day in London Town."

Public opinion polls from Mayberry-on-Umpqua

Okay, granted that newspaper readership skews old, and granted that newspaper-writer-in-ship skews crotchety, but I was still surprised by the "question of the week" for our local newspaper's opinion page.  The question was "what are the issues that are most important to you in the presidential election."  Over 400 people responded.  There was no majority, but the most common answer of all, for over 25% of the respondents, was...

...gay marriage.


Gotta say, I'm pretty flabbergasted by that one.  That it's even an issue is incomprehensible to me; that it's the most important issue in a presidential race in 2016 to some people makes me feel like I am living either in a different century or on a different planet.  I mean, really?

Wednesday Wordage Maybe shoulda rethought that acronym edition

A couple of sightings on trucks while driving around today, of companies that might ought to have considered a logo instead of an acronym:  a trucking and logistics firm called "UTI," and a Supplier of Utility pipes etc, proudly branded "PUS."  I guess I can just be glad that UTI and PUS were not traveling together.

More late night thoughts after too much news and too much wine

I heard an interesting program on the radio (http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2016/02/10/prisons-around-the-world) about how prison is viewed in different countries.  The U.S. was an early reformer of prisons, but (especially with the invention of privately-run prisons in the U.S.) we seem to have lost sight of what prison is about.  Rehabilitation and reintegration into society have faded as goals, displaced by a stridently punitive attitude and an inhuman quest for profit.  In some countries, however, there has been an increasing emphasis on making offenders, especially younger offenders, into useful members of society.

There's a lot going on there, and a lot of it has to do with wether or not we regard ourselves as a society.  If you view society as a single entity, then healing society means healing the atoms that make it up.  If you view the state as the representative of the will of society as a whole, then of course the state should use tax money to do this work.

If you follow the inspiration of Margaret Thatcher and the modern development of conservatism, then there is no such thing as society--we are all individuals, all for ourselves and against each other.  A war on crime too easily becomes a war on "other"--other races, other classes.  It becomes too easy to find support for locking people up and throwing away the key.  It becomes too easy to yield to an animal demand for blood.  Prisoners are not to be rehabilitated or given anything, only punished.  The state is not us or our agent; it is also "other", so it has no more business looking after prisoners than, say, a private company. If state or company abuses prisoners on the way to making a profit, so what?  It is always "other" getting hurt.  And, as the researcher on the radio pointed out, as long as society doesn't exist and there is only "us" and "other," all "other"s are assumed to be bad.  Indeed, that is precisely the dominant attitude in this well-armed neck of the woods.

I am too much of a collectivist to see the merit of this view, which has gained such traction in our country.  I am too rooted in a tradition that encourages me to see all "others" as equally human.  So I was pleased to hear about programs that could take people--mostly young adults--who had been failed by family or education, who had gone wrong and done wrong, being helped back onto a good path.

Then I heard other stories on the radio, about executives at a coal company deliberately endangering miners for profit, about executives of an energy company poisoning a river, about a leading presidential candidate enthusing about torture, about a government choosing to poison its constituents with lead, about a county sheriff who engaged in torture and abuse of prisoners, and so on.  There are miscreants out there, and these folks have done a lot more to destroy the fabric of society than a punk with a revolver holding up a convenience store, or even a murderer or rapist.  They have generally been doing what they do for twenty, thirty, fifty years. The longer they have done it, the more profit they've derived, the more firmly they believe in their actions' absolute righteousness.  In most cases, they admit no wrongdoing, and such contrition as is seen is mouthed by their defense attorneys during their sentencing--and never again.

I don't know--can such people, who I must acknowledge as my fellow humans, be reformed?  Can they be redeemed?  Their energy and skills directed towards mending the society they've assaulted?  Or is a punitive model appropriate for such people? How does society heal itself of such cancers?  I do not know.