Taken from Susi Dent's Word of the Day -
‘Empleomania’
the desire to hold office or wield power, whatever the cost.
I shall say nothing else about the unfortunate Russians' overlord.
Every picture tells a story, writers tell a different story
Showing posts with label Learn something new every day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Learn something new every day. Show all posts
Friday, 25 February 2022
Friday, 12 October 2018
Pareidolia; I learn something new every day
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind
responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar
pattern where none exists. Common examples are perceived images of animals,
faces, or objects in cloud formations, the Man in the Moon, the Moon rabbit,
hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or
lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing indistinct voices in random noise such as humming machinery or electric fans.
Hence Surrealism I suppose, for the visual effects at any rate.
Saturday, 18 August 2018
It's the Environment, Stupid.
My recent reading matter has brought something to my attention. I read 'Reservoir 13', I have just finished Gerald Durrell's biography, now I am reading, with a little difficulty, 'H is For Hawk.' All these books have at their centre a depth of knowledge of and care for the natural world and man's involvement with it. This morning I woke up and realised that this is what I care for and about, more than anything else. How have I not been able to acknowledge this before?
Online, I read stories about environmental destruction and devastated communities, about for example, rhinos slaughtered for their horns and children suffering from terrible diseases. All these make me feel sad, more than sad, but the ones that make me feel desperate are the environmental stories and the slaughter of endangered, irreplaceable species. And so then I feel guilty about not caring enough for the suffering children. Maybe this feeling of guilt has clouded my sense of what is fundamentally important.
But thinking about it, my care about suffering children is innate. I'm a mother and grandmother, of course I care about the suffering of children. However I have to protect myself. If I grieve over every little boy with incurable brain damage or every little Yemeni girl starving to death before her mother's eyes, then I will die of exhausted grief and nobody will gain. Empathy can only go so far if an individual human being is to survive and remain sane. Think of the X Men founder Charles Xavier as a young man, having to learn to control his empathy before the mass of human suffering over-whelmed him. We all need to learn this - or switch the internet off.
A love for 'God's Creation' wasn't dutifully pumped into me as an infant, although christianity was vaguely involved. I was read bible stories involving animals at a sunday school that I attended for a couple of years. And I was read Kipling, the wonderful, poetic Just So Stories, the more adventurous Jungle Books, all about man and animals in natural settings. So partly by their chosen reading matter it was the adults in my family who began my deeper involvement in creatures and nature in general.
My mother's mother taught me many things in the garden, when I was very tiny, including the names of all the wild and tame flowers and that worms were good and should not be killed. My father's father, on the other hand, showed me that nature was to be tamed, controlled and turned to production in his burgeoning fruit garden, he would trap and shoot the pretty brown rats that dared to venture into his compost pits. Meanwhile his wife, my Granny, was allowed to feed 'her' robin, Bobbity, at a little bird table on the kitchen window ledge.
Their son, my father, loved wild and solitary places, marshes and mountains, deserts and rocky coasts. He was a twitcher and more. He showed me that nature was wild and free. When I was a confused, sulky teenager he drove us for many hours to Loch Garten, to show us the only ospreys then nesting in the UK. All I saw then was a distant bird, soaring, silhouetted against the grey sky and water. Nobody controlled that bird.
Today there are probably 300 pairs of osprey breeding in the UK. Should this give me hope?
Online, I read stories about environmental destruction and devastated communities, about for example, rhinos slaughtered for their horns and children suffering from terrible diseases. All these make me feel sad, more than sad, but the ones that make me feel desperate are the environmental stories and the slaughter of endangered, irreplaceable species. And so then I feel guilty about not caring enough for the suffering children. Maybe this feeling of guilt has clouded my sense of what is fundamentally important.
But thinking about it, my care about suffering children is innate. I'm a mother and grandmother, of course I care about the suffering of children. However I have to protect myself. If I grieve over every little boy with incurable brain damage or every little Yemeni girl starving to death before her mother's eyes, then I will die of exhausted grief and nobody will gain. Empathy can only go so far if an individual human being is to survive and remain sane. Think of the X Men founder Charles Xavier as a young man, having to learn to control his empathy before the mass of human suffering over-whelmed him. We all need to learn this - or switch the internet off.
A love for 'God's Creation' wasn't dutifully pumped into me as an infant, although christianity was vaguely involved. I was read bible stories involving animals at a sunday school that I attended for a couple of years. And I was read Kipling, the wonderful, poetic Just So Stories, the more adventurous Jungle Books, all about man and animals in natural settings. So partly by their chosen reading matter it was the adults in my family who began my deeper involvement in creatures and nature in general.
My mother's mother taught me many things in the garden, when I was very tiny, including the names of all the wild and tame flowers and that worms were good and should not be killed. My father's father, on the other hand, showed me that nature was to be tamed, controlled and turned to production in his burgeoning fruit garden, he would trap and shoot the pretty brown rats that dared to venture into his compost pits. Meanwhile his wife, my Granny, was allowed to feed 'her' robin, Bobbity, at a little bird table on the kitchen window ledge.
Their son, my father, loved wild and solitary places, marshes and mountains, deserts and rocky coasts. He was a twitcher and more. He showed me that nature was wild and free. When I was a confused, sulky teenager he drove us for many hours to Loch Garten, to show us the only ospreys then nesting in the UK. All I saw then was a distant bird, soaring, silhouetted against the grey sky and water. Nobody controlled that bird.
Today there are probably 300 pairs of osprey breeding in the UK. Should this give me hope?
Sunday, 10 June 2018
The Fair Weather Gardener - Triffids
Things that I don't recognise still come up in the garden. The latest, looking like triffids, appeared in April, pushing up through the undergrowth by the pergola. Several stiff stems with dark blueish green leaves arranged regularly up the stems. I believe the term for the leaf appearance is glaucous, good word! So, glaucous leaves, stiff straight stems and once three feet high, it produced thin branches with softer bright green leaves.
My triffids were interesting looking and quite architectural so I left them for quite a while as I didn't know what they were. The soft green leaves became bracts around tiny yellow flowers, which insects seemed to like, so I continued to leave the triffids alone. Hover flies seemed especially keen on the miniscule flowers and last weekend I saw my first wasp this year, also showing great interest in the triffids.
Then the flowers began to produce large, green berries, each with three lobes. At this stage I decided I really should take them more seriously, they were about to produce seed, did I want them to spread? I'm not in principle opposed to immigrants, but the garden's quite small so invaders are another matter, I have enough trouble with hops and ground elder.
I asked a few people, posted a pic on Facebook, but nobody seemed to know. So in depth research was in order. How did people ever do this type of thing before the internet? Google is an amazing research tool, almost everything you can think of is out there, somewhere in the aether!
After a few hours going through a range of search terms and looking at hundreds of photos of plants with green leaves, I came across the euphorbias. Now I've admired euphorbias in other people's gardens, but the triffids didn't much resemble any I could remember seeing, until I saw a photo labelled Euphorbia Lathyris. So my triffid is Euphorbia Lathyris, otherwise known as caper spurge, also known as the mole plant because it's said to repel moles - old gardener's wives tale?
Caper spurge facts - it grows over much of Europe and Asia but has probably been introduced to the UK. It's now widespread and often comes up in abandoned ground. It's a biannual so that makes sense, it likes to be undisturbed. I remember seeing the stems and glaucous leaves last year, but the bed was overgrown and anyway they weren't nearly so tall, so I didn't register that they were something unusual.
The other important facts about caper spurge: when ripe the seed heads expel seeds quite explosively, scattering them far and wide. Also the berries, which are said to look like capers although I can't really see it, are very poisonous and the milky sap is also poisonous and corrosive, causing skin irritation and serious harm if it gets in your eyes. In days of yore, beggars were said to have rubbed the sap into their skin to cause sores and so get more sympathy - another old gardeners tale?
Anyway the caper spurge is now in the bottom of a garden bin, waiting to go to the dump. I compost a lot of things but decided this toxic plant might be unsuitable. I did enjoy watching it grow and I've no doubt that there are more triffids seeds lurking in the soil, just waiting to spring up. I might once again let them grow for a couple of years before they seed, because they're interesting plants.
h
After a few hours going through a range of search terms and looking at hundreds of photos of plants with green leaves, I came across the euphorbias. Now I've admired euphorbias in other people's gardens, but the triffids didn't much resemble any I could remember seeing, until I saw a photo labelled Euphorbia Lathyris. So my triffid is Euphorbia Lathyris, otherwise known as caper spurge, also known as the mole plant because it's said to repel moles - old gardener's wives tale?
Caper spurge facts - it grows over much of Europe and Asia but has probably been introduced to the UK. It's now widespread and often comes up in abandoned ground. It's a biannual so that makes sense, it likes to be undisturbed. I remember seeing the stems and glaucous leaves last year, but the bed was overgrown and anyway they weren't nearly so tall, so I didn't register that they were something unusual.
The other important facts about caper spurge: when ripe the seed heads expel seeds quite explosively, scattering them far and wide. Also the berries, which are said to look like capers although I can't really see it, are very poisonous and the milky sap is also poisonous and corrosive, causing skin irritation and serious harm if it gets in your eyes. In days of yore, beggars were said to have rubbed the sap into their skin to cause sores and so get more sympathy - another old gardeners tale?
Anyway the caper spurge is now in the bottom of a garden bin, waiting to go to the dump. I compost a lot of things but decided this toxic plant might be unsuitable. I did enjoy watching it grow and I've no doubt that there are more triffids seeds lurking in the soil, just waiting to spring up. I might once again let them grow for a couple of years before they seed, because they're interesting plants.
h
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