Another artist in the borderlands between graphic art, illustration, and cartooning: the creator of this work, “Rainbow Whiskers”, which my family picked up at the Columbus Museum of Art in a sale of reproductions around 1980:
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Our copy (now with me in Palo Alto) bears a message from the Lung Association, by way of the cats:
We Don’t Want You To Smoke
Yesterday (while working on my “Plant families” posting, on the rose family) I came across the Wikipedia page for the agreeable plant Cotoneaster, which sent me on a complex journey through pronunciation and etymology, botanical taxonomy, English morphology, lexical semantics, and the pragmatics of expressions of resemblance.
Some notes on plant families (where a family is a taxon above the genus and species and below the series and order), in minimally technical language, for the aid of the friend who tours Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden with me. Here, notes on some plant families that are especially prominent for one reason or another.
I note that botanical taxonomy (which plants are assigned to which taxa, on what grounds) and its accompanying nomenclature are often deeply unsettled matters: taxonomists disagree as to how taxa are circumscribed and as to what labels to use for these taxa.
There are over 600 plant families in most systems, but many of these families are small or not of great interest to most people dealing with the plant kingdom. Here I’ve picked 5 families of high interest, plus 4 more that merit some attention. The Big 5 come up again and again in our tours of the Gamble Garden.
Today’s flower, a mountain penstemon, Penstemon heterophyllus × laetus ‘Margarita BOP’ (according to the source, Altman Plants in Vista CA, BOP signifies that it was discovered at the Bottom of the Porch). Beautiful, and drought tolerant too. A somewhat different P. heterophyllus:
A linguistic bonus: the family to which the genus Penstemon belongs.
On the 10th I posted here on pizza, especially Neapolitan pizza, where I quoted from Wikipedia:
Authentic Neapolitan pizza (pizza napoletana) is typically made with San Marzano tomatoes grown on the volcanic plains south of Mount Vesuvius, and mozzarella di bufala Campana made with the milk from water buffalo raised in the marshlands of Campania and Lazio. This mozzarella is protected with its own European protected designation of origin.
Then on the 16th, along came Nicholas Blechman (website here), the art director for the NYT Book Review, with a 10-panel piece “The Mystery of San Marzano”, in the Sunday Review about those tomatoes: it turns out that their name is protected in the E.U. too. The third panel:
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As Blechman notes in the sixth panel,
In the European Union, tomatoes can be labeled San Marzano only if they meet the stringent criteria of a government-approved consortium, or consorzio. Every detail is regulated.
From O. Henry in 1906, the collection The Four Million:
The Four Million is the second published collection of short stories by O. Henry originally released in 1906. There are twenty five stories of various lengths including several of his best known works such as “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Cop and the Anthem”. The book’s title refers to the then population of New York City where many of the stories are set.
(The 2014 census estimate for NYC was 8.49 million — more than doubled in nearly 110 years.)
Meanwhile, the number of spam comments afflicting this site passed 4 million yesterday. (more…)
I walk past a small office building in Palo Alto every day, a house at 625-631 Emerson St. that was rebuilt and turned into offices some years ago. Last week they replanted their garden on the street, replacing a row of very pretty small (white-fowered) rose plants with a tricolor border: those white roses, red geraniums, and low-growing plants with velvety gray leaves. I recognized the gray plants as “lamb’s ears”, or Stachys lanata (which turns out to be a synonym for Stachys byzantina):
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S. byzantina as a groundcover
Today’s Zippy, in which Z-Man transforms the combover king into a Donald-Duck talking drug mule for a Mexican drug cartel (a just fate, I suppose):
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Z-Man seems to have appeared just once before on his blog: 8/8/12: “The caped psychopath gets flown to Ashtabula”. But here are two earlier strips:
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(Mostly about music)
The song came by in the middle of the night: an elegant jazz-piano version. Unfortunately, I missed the information about the performer, but I then found out a good bit about the song.
