Lady’s Slipper Orchids – No Match for the Mower

Yellow Lady’s Slipper Orchids growing in the ditch opposite us. You can see our trees at the top of the photo. At the far right of the photo is the stalk of a flowering Meadow Rue.

I’ve blogged about the Lady’s Slipper Orchids several times:  Lady’s Slipper Orchid – Surprise in the Ditch and Lady’s Slipper Orchid Mimics the Old Masters. In that post, I mentioned the fate of the orchids when the county mower bears down on them.

This year the mower arrived earlier in the season than normal and chopped off the Orchid flowers before they had a chance to go to seed. It would be an understatement to say this made me very sad. I had been visiting them and taking pictures of them every morning when I went for my walk. It was while I was photographing them that I discovered the delicate flowers of a meadow rue nearby. (Also a plastic lid and a red straw, which I’ll remove once I don’t need them to accurately mark the location of the now decapitated flowers…)

I first found the Lady’s Slipper in 2011, and while I would have loved to have one growing on my property, I contented myself with visiting them in the ditch (especially since they have established a dozen or so new clumps so close to our place.) The mower changed all that. I’m going to research the probability of success if I transplant one or two of the plants onto my property…

As for the Meadow Rue – turns out I have hundreds of them in our woods, now that I know what to look for!

Plant Profile
Common Name:  Lady’s Slipper Orchid (yellow)
Scientific Name:  Cypripedium parviflorum
Hardiness:  Zones 3-7 – found in many parts of Canada and the United States. It is a hardy plant.
Growth:  A Perennial that varies in height depending on location. In the north it can often be found in open locations with full sun. In other locations it will be found in cool rich woods.
Blooms:   Large deep-yellow flowers with long yellow-to-brown corkscrew lateral petals. Blooms over a 2 to 3 week period in early to mid spring.

Greater Roadrunner

The Feather Files
Name: Greater Roadrunner
Species: Geococcyx californianus
Native to and Migration: Year round resident of the desert and semi-open, scrubby habitat of South West United States and Mexico
Date Seen: March 2018; April 2015
Location: North of Fountain Hills, Arizona
Notes: These raven sized birds eat mostly animals – almost anything they can catch: small mammals, reptiles, frogs, toads, insects, centipedes, scorpions, and birds. Rattlesnakes are also on the menu. They are fast and agile on the ground, but aren’t strong fliers. When threatened or displaying to a rival, they erect their crest.

The roadrunner in the first two photos was in our yard. The last photo was a bird in the neighbourhood. Sadly, they did not find and remove the rattlesnake that liked to hang out on our patio.

Television Quotations

Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now, to quote myself at my most pretentious, is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.
– Tom Lehrer –

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television’s message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth and fresher breath.
– Dave Barry –

Cable TV is now evenly divided between shows about preparing food and shows about losing weight.
– Andy Borowitz –

How can you put on a meaningful drama or documentary that is adult, incisive, probing, when every fifteen minutes the proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper?
– Rod Serling, speech at Ithaca College (New York), quoted in Reader’s Digest, vol.121, 1982 –

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book.
– Groucho Marx –

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
– Erma Bombeck –

If it weren’t for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn’t get any exercise at all.
– Joey Adams –

If television’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.
– Dorothy Gambrell, Cat and Girl Volume I –

If you have to get your news from TV, get it from the Comedy Channel. It’s just as accurate, with the added benefit of making you forget your Prozac for a few minutes.
– Greg Tamblyn –

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you’d find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.
– Dave Barry –

I wish there was a knob on the TV so you could turn up the intelligence. They got one marked “brightness” but it don’t work, does it?
– Leo Anthony Gallagher –

Remote controls are quite handy. They let you see that there’s nothing worth watching on TV a lot faster.
– Melanie White –

Seeing a murder on television… can help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
– Alfred Hitchcock –

So long as there’s a jingle in your head, television isn’t free.
– Jason Love –

Television has changed a child from an irresistible force to an immovable object.
– Author Unknown –

Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
– Fred Allen (1894 – 1956) –

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your home.
– David Frost –

Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up every time.
– Alfred Hitchcock –

Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
– Bill Gates –

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.
– Raymond Chandler, 1946 –

There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment possibilities than the TV set.
– Harriet van Horne –

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.
– Steve Jobs –

We owe a lot to Thomas Edison – if it wasn’t for him, we’d be watching television by candlelight.
– Milton Berle –

The Climate Change Bus!

Sometimes the best way to help people accept differences of opinion is to use an analogy that everyone can understand and possibly agree with.

Since Climate Change is one of these divisive issues, let’s pretend it is two Hop-On Hop-Off Buses on different routes and look at the stops each has made to get to today.

(An afterthought: it has been pointed out to me (in the comments below) that this post has a derisive slant and that it is highly unlikely that the varying schools of thought will agree on much of anything. I agree completely that I present politicians, mass media, alarmists and extremists in an unfavourable light. I apologize in advance if I offend you, but I’m not going to rewrite the post, so let the chips fall where they may.)

Bus One, Stop 1, in modern times, was at a location called Global Cooling.  Global average temperatures cooled by about 0.2°C after 1940 and remained low until 1975. It is believed this was caused by a rise in aerosols in the atmosphere released by industry and a number of volcanic eruptions.

Bus One, Stop 2 was at a location called Global Warming.  That was the first place many people, scientists for sure, boarded. There is general agreement that the Earth’s surface temperature has risen by .8 degrees Celsius or 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880. Scientists believe global warming has been caused by both human activities (such as the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests) and natural causes.

Bus One, Stop 3 is at the location called Climate Change (the scientific version), which can be changes in Long-term averages of daily weather and/or Short and long term change caused by El Niño (the warm phase of ENSO); La Niña (the cold phase of ENSO); volcanic eruptions; solar radiation; earth’s orbital changes; continental drift; seasonal changes; and arctic oscillation.

Bus Two, Stop 1 is a bus that was called into service by people who didn’t think Bus One went far enough or fast enough. This bus stop is called Climate Change  (the political version) and now Climate Emergency. It is a popular boarding place for politicians and the mass media. Their goal is to create fear in the general population, stop the use of fossil-fuels and facilitate the redistribution of wealth.

Fear mongering is the deliberate use of fear based tactics including exaggeration and continuous repetition to alter the perception of the public in order to achieve a desired outcome.
– Wikipedia –

Bus Two, Stop 2 is at a location called Severe Weather Events. This is where  people board if they have been led to believe that weather is the same thing as climate and that storms, fires, hurricanes, floods, cold weather, hot weather, rain, and drought are all caused by Climate Change.

Sadly, this is also the Stop of Deception for two reasons: Weather isn’t Climate and Climate Change hasn’t, so far, caused extreme weather events.

Good weather, bad weather – these are the conditions of the atmosphere  over a short period of time – minutes to months. They are not Climate, which is how the atmosphere has behaved over relatively long periods of time – 30 years or more.

If you have unlimited time and patience, read the recently released IPCC -SR15  Chapter 3 Impacts, (the observed sections) which state that most of the actual ‘observed changes’ of floods, hurricanes, monsoons, etc were “non-statistically significant”.  In other words, extreme weather events cannot yet be linked to Climate Change.

Pragmatic Environmentalists will happily verify this. They produce data, charts and graphs that show that today’s extreme weather event is usually not so extreme if you look at historical records.

Bus Two, Stop 3 is popular with Climate Alarmists or Extremists – people who believe Climate Change is an existential threat (a threat to human existence that could cause human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity’s potential). These people sometimes demonize opinions or facts that are contrary to their beliefs and some have suggested that ‘Climate Deniers’ should lose their jobs, go to prison, or be killed.

Bus One, Stop 4 is home base for Climate Realists. They are skeptical of some of the claims made by government, mass media, alarmists and extremists. They believe Climate Science is rapidly changing and that humans will figure out ways to both respond to and adapt to Climate Change in a strategic, thoughtful and fact based manner that doesn’t denigrate or demonize anyone.

To be clear, no particular absolute global temperature provides a risk to society, it is the change in temperature compared to what we’ve been used to that matters.
– Real Climate.org –

Last but not least – think about the vast difference between the climate of the Middle East and the climate of Canada. People are extremely adaptable… and think about a wider range of solutions than those presented by a single special interest group.

Interesting further Reading: Politics Disguised as Science: When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’

What Say You – are you on Bus One, Bus Two or do you hop-on and hop-off both of them?

Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay

The Feather Files
Name: Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay
Species: Aphelocoma woodhouseii
Native to and Migration: Year round resident of the dry lowlands from Nevada, United States into Mexico
Date Seen: April 2016
Location: Grand Canyon, Arizona
Notes:  Unlike some other species of Jay, this one does not have a crested head.

Chaos in the Garden

This is one of my flower beds. It has been over 20 years in the making. In that time, a small tree grew – casting more and more deep shade. The plants that liked sun weren’t so happy about this. Some died – I thought. So I planted others, only to have the dead sometimes reappear (yes, tulips, I’m talking about you and your splashes of red in a bed that once was yellow, blue and purple!)

This year I gave up on order and accepted plant Chaos. Even chaos will take time, though. There are bare spots where some things, like my bleeding hearts, all died this past winter. As George W. Bush said:

Topaz Studio filter “Ghost Town”

What George Bush actually said was “…And, you know, it’ll take time to restore chaos and order – order out of chaos. But we will.” Some media outlets shortened the quote to “It will take time to restore chaos” which triggered the usual crowd to make fun of him – but I think the shortened quote perfectly describes my new gardening mantra.

Topaz Studio filter “HDR”

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
– Henry Adams –

Topaz Studio filter “Rock”

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.
– Terence McKenna –

Topaz Studio filter “3D Sketch”

Chaos is not the lack of order, it is merely the absence of order, that the observer is used to.
– Mamur Mustapha –

Topaz Studio filter “Abstract”

All of these photos were altered with Topaz Studio filters.

What say you – which photo is most chaotic?

Politics and Government Quotations

Canadian

A fine city with too many socialists and mosquitoes. At least you can spray the mosquitoes.
– Ralph Klein speaking in 1990 as a Progressive Conservative MLA from the City of Calgary –

Canadians often point out that while the American constitution promises “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the constitution of Canada – written in the 1860s in England – sets a more modest goal: “Peace, order, and good government.”
– Robert Fulford –

Give me better wood and I will make you a better cabinet.
– John A. Macdonald –

Here in Canada, national political campaigns are brief: We begin by pretty much ignoring the whole thing for a few weeks – then there’s a debate, a little yelling, maybe some pointing, every leader buys a bunch of Timbits and, boom, suddenly it’s election day.
But in the United States, presidential campaigns last longer than all pregnancies and most wars.
– Scott Feschuk, MACLEAN’S Magazine, September 3, 2012 –

The trouble lies in the fact that a Canadian Prime Minister has never been exiled to the Arctic.
– Stefansson Vilhjalmeer –

To create a housing shortage in a huge country, heavily wooded, with a small population – ah, that’s the proof of pure political genius.
– Author Unknown –

Other

A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.
– Caskie Stinnett –

An intelligent Russian once remarked to us, “Every country has it’s own constitution; ours is absolutism, moderated by assassination.”
– Georg Herbert –

A politician can appear to have his nose to the grindstone while straddling a fence and keeping both ears to the ground.

Arguing with Liberals – It’s like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good I am at chess, the pigeon is just going to knock over the pieces, crap on the board, and strut around like it is victorious.
– Author Unknown –

By keeping the population in a state of artificially heightened apprehension, the government-cum-media prepares the ground for planting specific measures of taxation, regulation, surveillance, reporting, and other invasions of the people’s wealth, privacy, and freedoms.
– Robert Higgs -Fear: The Foundation of Every Government’s Power –

“Dad”, the little boy asked, “Do political plums grow from seeds?” “No, son,” replied the father. “They’re the result of clever grafting.”

Democracy consists of choosing our dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.
– Alan Coren –

Democracy is an interesting, even laudable, notion and there is no question but that when compared to communism, which is too dull, or Facism, which is too exciting, it emerges as the most palatable form of government. This is not to say that it is without its drawbacks – chief among them being its regrettable tendency to encourage people in the belief that all men are created equal. And although the vast majority need only take a quick look around the room to see that this is hardly the case, a great many remain utterly convinced.
– Fran Lebowitz –

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
– H. L. Mencken –

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
– James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994) –

Did you ever get to wondering if taxation without representation might have been cheaper.
– Robert Orben –

Dogbert’s Home Safety Tips #2 – Your household may have a member who can legally vote but probably shouldn’t.
– Scott Adams –

Fear mongering is the deliberate use of fear based tactics including exaggeration and continuous repetition to alter the perception of the public in order to achieve a desired outcome.
– Wikipedia –

For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
– Author Unknown –

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
– George Bernard Shaw –

How does a bureaucrat wink? He opens one eye.
– Author Unknow –

In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.
– Author Unknown –

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
– Winston Churchill –

I should run for political office just to see what kind of scandalous dirt they dig up. It would be nice to piece together my twenties.
– Need to Vent Freely –

Managers and supervisors with large numbers of people under them – each with his own ideas – must sometimes feel like Charles DeGaulle, who once lamented, “Nobody can simply bring together a country that has 265 kinds of cheese.
– Author Unknown –

Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.
– Norman Ralph Augustine –

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.
– Jean Baptiste Colbert –

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
– Winston Churchill –

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
-Mark Twain –

The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.
– Maureen Murphy –

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.
– George Burns –

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
– Kurt Vonnegut –

What if I told you that the left wing and the right wing belong to the same bird.
– Indian Observation –

Why doesn’t a bureaucrat look out his office window in the morning? Because he needs something to do in the afternoon.–

U.S.A.

A child can go only so far in life without potty training. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation’s state legislators.
– Dave Barry-

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
– Gerald R. Ford –

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
– Rosalynn Carter –

Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn’t grow up can be vice president.
– Johnny Carson –

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
– Douglas Casey, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University –

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
– Ronald Reagan –

I don’t think America should elect any President in 2016. We kneed to be single for a few years and find ourselves.
– Author Unknown –

I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first four hundred people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
– William F Buckley –

If con is the opposite of pro, then isn’t Congress the opposite of progress?
– Jon Stewart –

I feel like Trump and Clinton are two divorced parents, fighting for custody of us. And we just wanna go live with grandma.
– Laugh OR Croak –

If We Quit Voting, Will They All Go Away?
– Bumper Sticker –

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
– Abraham Lincoln –

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.
– George H. W. Bush –

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
– Adlai Stevenson –

Talk is cheap…except when Congress does it.
– Author Unknown –

The American taxpayer is another scarce natural resource that will be depleted unless used only when absolutely necessary.
– Author Unknown –

The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
– Ronald Reagan –

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
– Ronald Reagan –

The only thing I fear more than the government shutting down is the government staying open.
– someecards –

…this (American) presidential campaign is about twice the average gestation period of an orangutan. The 2016 Canadian federal election will have a gestation period between that of a wolf (64 days) and a leopard (94 days). A mere nothing.
– David Shribman, Globe and Mail, August 4, 2015 –

Trump is what happens when you spent the last 7 Thanksgiving dinners lecturing your angry uncle from your Vox index cards.
– Clarice Feldman, American Thinker, November 13, 2016 –

Trump uses Twitter like a stick with words written on it. Think about a man using that stick to poke a bear. The stick keeps the man away from the bear, but he can still poke the bear with his stick. So he pokes and prods and pushes the bear with the stick.
– Willis Eschenbach –
Willis then asks the question – does it matter what is written on the stick (which is what the media dissects word by word) or is the only thing worth considering: what does the bear do when it is poked?

What could be worse for a creaky, cancerous political system than what the Democratic and Republican parties are brewing up? Nothing really. This is as bad as it gets… First: Do I even bother to vote?
For those who do cast a ballot, there is the even sadder choice: Which candidate do I loathe the least?
– Ron Fournier, The Atlantic, American election 2016

Years from now, when telling my future grandchildren about 2015, I will speak at length about the treachery, fibs, toxic scoops, deceits, tall tales, viral hoaxes, half-truths, tomfoolery, unverified junk and fake news.
“What a time to be alive,” I will say. “You just didn’t know what to believe in 2015.”
– From The Truth Wasn’t Out There –

Anise Swallowtail Butterfly

Bug Bits
Name: Anise Swallowtail Butterfly
Species: Papilio zelicaon
Native to: Western North America
Date Seen: May 2012
Location: Southern Alberta
Notes: A large butterfly – 52 to 80 mm (2.0 to 3.1 in) similar in color to the Canadian Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly – except quite different when you look more carefully!

DoodleChaoes – Line Riders – Blue Danube

DoodleChaos has a new Line Riders upload on YouTube. Be sure to watch to the very end – best chuckle of the day!

The DoodleChaos artist, Mark Robbins, draws with Line Rider, an online application that allows you to make videos by drawing lines on which, Bosh, a little person on a sleigh, slides along the path you draw.

Mark matches the movement of the Line Rider with the music he has chosen. If you want to understand just how difficult and time consuming this is, go to the Line Rider site (click play to start) and try drawing a few lines! See if you can keep the little sledder from crashing!

This is the track I drew (after a lot of tries…)

And this is what happened to the Line Rider as he attempted that last climb…

Crash…

Red-Breasted Nuthatch

The Feather Files
Name: Red-breasted Nuthatch
Species: Sitta canadensis
Native to and Migration: Found throughout much of Canada and the United States. Can be resident or a short-distance migrant.
Date Seen: September 2016
Location: North of Calgary, Alberta
Notes: These birds wander up, down and sideways along trunks and branches of trees. They eat mainly insects, but in fall and winter they will eat conifer seeds. We call them and other small birds like them, hoover birds. Flocks of them hop across the patio and lawn picking up the spruce seeds that our forest sheds all over our property.

Topaz Studio Filter that emphasizes the feathers

Another Topaz Studio Filter