Friday Flowers & Flotsam

From reading this blog, you might come away thinking I'm some sort of botany freak, what with the constant stream of flower photos I keep posting. But really that isn't true at all. Most of the time I can't identify them, and I'm sure I couldn't grow them, if I was inclined to try, which I'm not. Basically my interest here is that flowers tend to photograph well. I've tried taking pictures of other stuff, but quite often I end up looking like an incompetent schmoe. Flowers are easy.



Also, they're good blog filler for those days when I otherwise wouldn't get a post out the door. Take today, for example. The whole week's been consumed with RL work, and insufficient sleep, and I doubt today will be an exception. I may complain now and then, but I like my job; I just don't think it's much of a blogging topic. If work is all you can talk about in your non-work life, you probably need a nice tropical vacation, now.



So I started out gathering another batch of odds and ends, mostly stuff I ran across while feedgrazing last night & this morning. That's basically what yesterday's post was, so I was having trouble mustering enthusiasm for two of these babies in a row. It felt like cheating, somehow. I just looked at the list and figured, you know, it's nice and all, there's some good stuff there, but this post still needs more cowbell. Hence the flowers. The top is a magnolia or tulip tree I saw on the way to work a few days ago. The bottom two I have no clue about, I'm afraid.

Which brings us to today's tasty mishmash-o-links. A number of these were found while reading ORBlogs, so if you're a regular like me this may give you a certain feeling of deja vu.

• Butterflies goin' at it.
  
• Dogs in bee costumes
  
• The ongoing adventures of Chad Vader, Darth's underachieving kid brother, day shift manager at a grocery store.
  
• A chemistry student explains Hell.
  
• $11 Margaritas? Excuse me? Sheesh. I mean, price isn't the main reason I prefer beer, but it sure is a nice fringe benefit. You can get a hell of a lot of beer, good beer, for $11.
  
• Ooh, ooh, Dahlia alert. Upcoming show on the 25th, at a new club in Old Town that I've never been to. Yet.
  
• NYT on switching to the Mac. I've used Macs on and off since the 512KE era, back before Macs had hard drives, even. Most of the time I'm stuck with Windows (although home is an M$-free zone), but in my heart I never unswitched. Gee, aren't techie oldtimer reminiscences fun? I bet next you'd like to hear about IBM XT clones with 10MB HDs where you had to manually park the disk heads before shutting the machine down, or you ran the risk of serious hardware damage. Kids these days, they don't know how easy they have it.
  
• Yes, kids these days have it easy, not like us back in the dark ages circa 1980. You've probably seen that already, but my sister sent it to me, and I figured the modern thing to do would be to post an url rather than email a freakin' word document around. That's so 20th century.
  
• OTOH, back in the day we didn't have scary Windows security advisories to worry about. So maybe it all balances out in the end, I dunno.
  
• Remember this Sierra Mist commercial from a while back? Life really does imitate art, I guess.
  
• And what's with that tasting-the-baby-bottle business, anyway? It's discrimination, that's what it is.
  
• A Seattle blogger's rant about the city's "Discovery Institute", a leading outpost of the creationist fundie brigade.
  
• At a subway station in London, some cool mosaics of scenes from Hitchcock movies.
  
• Great post at Portland Food & Drink about the joy of sour Belgian beers. I think a lot of people don't get these, since they taste so completely different than the beer they're used to. A recent Saveur article covers some of the same territory.
  
• I pretty much always have to link to any cephalopod items over at Pharyngula, and here's the one for this week.
  
• Great recent Mideast piece at the Baltimore Sun. A choice quote:
  

  
  ... those blunders were the product of the neoconservative mindset, which habitually confuses what is desirable with what is doable. Neoconservatives also imagine that having a moral cause for war is the same thing as having a feasible plan.
  

  
  
• Pluto: Still sort of a planet! Huh.
  
• A post about being a kid and watching Night of the Living Dead in the theater, and being scared shitless for weeks afterwards. Eek!
  
• Skulls on a train!
  
• A site devoted to movies in the public domain