Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
Garden art, PhotoShopped images, etc.
Over the weekend, I couldn’t resist Simpsonizing myself. And it actually came out pretty good.
It wasn’t 10 minutes later that I read what I have to agree is the truth about this little feature in the Onion AV Club Tolerability Index:
As usual, AV club is right.
I’m actually early to the party this time. With rain headed our way, I thought it good to go ahead and do this month’s scans. Click images for larger view. Apologies for lazy nomenclature and mis-IDs.
Update [7/15/2007]: As Layanee and Carol both pointed out, there’s a big article on scanning in the latest Horticulture (which has been sitting in my huge stack of unread gardening magazines). It’s by Ken Druse, so you know it’s gotta be good. (Print’s not dead. Sign up for a free issue of Horticulture.)
Monarda, Asian lily, sedum, spiraea, lychnis, Rosa ‘Cuisse de Nymphe’, allium, daucus, stachys (the other one), Scotch thistle.
Astrantia, viola, sorbaria (about to pop), verbascum, sedum, that weed that looks like fried eggs, digitalis, Verbena bonariensis, Verbena hastata, coneflower, teasel, rock garden campanula?, wild composite (aster?).
Digitalis, Asian lily, allium, astilbe, monarda, sorbaria (popped), astrantia.
I’ve had LiveEarth — Al Gore’s climate crisis concert extravaganza — on in the background while blogging tonight. I’ve learned a few things:
I’m sorry I missed the Spinal Tap set featuring a performance of Stonehedge.
It’s easy to dismiss efforts such as these as all hype. But I don’t. I see the names of kids (mostly kids, I guess) scrolling across the screen who at least took the time to visit the LiveEarth website and took the LiveEarth pledge, and I’m encouraged. And I recall a similar concert more than 20 years ago, just about this time of year.
On July 13. 1985, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s LiveAid concert reached 1.5 billion people worldwide to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia.
I was a wired gardener back then, too. I remember weeding and listening along with the rest of the world on my cassette player/FM radio strapped to my belt, and realizing (while Phil Collins was singing “I can feel it coming in the air tonight … “) that the world had changed.
Is there still hunger in Ethiopia? You bet. But while I’m no fan of unfettered globalization, I’m glad that word travels faster and farther than it did just a generation ago. We’ve still got some work to do to make sure that that word is truth. But I, for one, am hopeful.
Look for Al to declare in October or November.
Updated/bonus track: So they could get a venue on every continent, LiveEarth included a pre-recorded performance by Nunatak — a garage band of British researchers in Antarctica. (Do they have garages in Antarctica?) They’re not bad, really — especially when you consider how cold their hands must be.
Yesterday was Frida Kahlo’s 100th birthday. Today’s NY Times has an article and multimedia feature about a huge show featuring her work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
While Frida’s painful self-portraits fascinate me, I like to think that it was on her good days that she turned to plants as the subject of her work.
See, for example, Still Life with Parrot. I also posted some other pictures here.
Slow new day — what with only commutations of felony sentences and such to report on. So the NY Times reports on a new 708-page tome about the modernization of Europe: The Pursuit of Glory – Europe 1648-1815. (Europe’s Rise to Power? Thank Better Roads, Revolutions of All Sorts and Turnips.)
Turns out turnips can share in the credit for bringing Europe out of the Dark Ages:
While everyone likely to read this book has heard of the scientific revolution, brought about by people like Isaac Newton, and the industrial revolution that began toward the end of the period (both well covered here), the agricultural revolution occurring at the same time was equally important. In 1648 European agriculture had not changed much since medieval times. But enclosure, manuring, crop rotation, new crops like turnips and clover, and improved breeding brought forth a large increase in food production.
One result was a golden age for the landed gentry, whose rent rolls increased sharply, and their conspicuous consumption along with them. (Robert Walpole employed 50 people just to weed his gardens.) Another result was the freeing of manpower to work in the factories that were beginning to spring up in the English countryside. The industrial revolution came about because of turnips as well as steam engines.
