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Fuck these fucking interesting times.

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I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

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Republicans don’t trust women.

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Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

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Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

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An almost top 10,000 blog!

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A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

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You are here: Home / Garden Chats / Open Thread: Thursday Garden Chat

Open Thread: Thursday Garden Chat

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From commentor Feebog:

Attached is a pic of my harvest from the middle of last week. Grape tomatos, early girls (still going) and romas. Plus a yellow zuc and a small bell pepper. I’m in SoCal and the weather, except for last week, has been surprisingly mild.

***********

From commentor RossinDetroit:
__

This mantis took over a large blooming sedum plant on our porch for a couple of weeks. He was right next to the front door so we called him Buggsy the Doorman. I left the porch light on at night to attract more food insects for him. He grew from a nymph to an adult, then wandered off on his mantis business. We get a lot of mantises in the summer and I always try to protect them because we like big cool weird insects.


***********

Not much gardening around here this week, because I’m recovering from unpleasant allergic reactions to the nasty, tiny-pink-blossomed invasive that’s trying to take over our back yard. Spousal Unit haz a sad — he thinks it’s “cute” — but that particular creeping crud is gonna be Roundup’d as soon as local weather conditions permit. Anybody got recommendations for a shade-tolerant grass seed or grass replacement that will stand up to foot traffic and won’t poison our little dogs?

Reader Interactions

48Comments

  2. 2.

    BGinCHI

    Ross, if you get Michael Moore in your porch plants you’re never going to get rid of him.

    Even salt won’t melt him.

  3. 3.

    TheOtherWA

    I love that RossInDetroit left the porch light on so the mantis would get lots of buggy meals.

    The good news from here in WA is the recent heat we got has finally started my grapes ripening. Snacked on a few, but they need another week or so. This summer hasn’t been a complete waste after all.

  5. 5.

    Yutsano

    Why I love Dawgs:

    i was thinking of a full blown assult on the seven senses by pirating social media, the internet and tv. overiding the system and intentially crashing the instituitions of greed, than egging the masses against the establilshment in a bid to topple the dominant discourse and establishing a strong civil liberty protecitng government bent on equality and forward thinking economic standards based on renabi

    Direct quote from the work Dawg. I larfed.

  7. 7.

    mikej

    @TheOtherWA: Too hot and too muggy today. 77F and 65% is awful. Did 6 miles today and was soaked. It even looked like a nice normal pnw fall day until you went outside. Bleh.

  9. 9.

    jharp

    Had a mantis crawl into the minivan in northwest michigan just yesterday.

    And emerge whilst I was driving down the highway on my long trek home.

    A little startling but not a big deal at all.

    That is why men rule the world.

  10. 10.

    Platonicspoof

    . . . I’m recovering from unpleasant allergic reactions to the nasty, tiny-pink-blossomed invasive that’s trying to take over our back yard.

    Does it have a white latex juice in the stems (spurge family)?
    Glyphosate (lots of companies besides Monsanto sell it now) kills most weeds, so identification probably a moot point, just curious what it looks like.

  12. 12.

    mantis

    We get a lot of mantises in the summer and I always try to protect them because we like big cool weird insects.

    Thanks!

  13. 13.

    Anne Laurie

    @Platonicspoof:

    Does it have a white latex juice in the stems (spurge family)?

    Dunno, my problem is an exaggerated inhalation reaction — usually I stay away from the plants, but Idiot Dog #1 was outside at 2am barking and would not be deterred until I marched out into the misty dark & grabbed him. My eyes were swelling by the time I came inside, I started sneezing minutes later, and for the next 48 hours my joints hurt like I’d been beaten with sticks.

    The Spousal Unit took pics, but he hasn’t gotten around to uploading them, and I haven’t found anything on Dave’s Garden that matches — 3″-4″ tall plants, simple pointed dark green leaves set in alternate pairs, multiple yearly flushes of magenta-pink bead-like florets. I try to avoid the most toxic chemicals, but since we’re on two official Superfund sites, that’s more on general principles.

  14. 14.

    Comrade Kevin

    I have had a stressful week. My mom, who had a heart attack five years ago and had a stent put in, had the stent get clogged on Tuesday morning, and it caused another, small heart attack. She has been in the hospital ever since, but should get to go home Friday. I have basically spent the whole week at Stanford hospital.

  15. 15.

    Elie

    @Comrade Kevin:

    Terrible!

    My best to you and your Mom.

    Take care of yourself. What you describe is extremely stressful. Try to eat relatively well and get as much rest as you can…

    I am glad she is going home…

  21. 21.

    Triassic Sands

    because we like big cool weird insects

    And mantises are definitely one of the cooler, weirder insects we have in the US. They always seem downright alien in appearance, but for some reason there isn’t anything creepy about them at all. (If they were 200 feet long, I might feel differently — see “The Deadly Mantis.”)

    “In all the kingdom of the living, there is no more deadly or voracious creature than the praying mantis.” — Dr. Nedrick “Ned” Jackson (played by William Hopper in “The Deadly Mantis”).

    When I was a kid, my family would pile in the car on weekends and go to the drive-in theater. Although we saw a variety of films, the ones that made a lasting impression on the kids were all the B science fiction movies we saw. My sister and I still laugh about some of the worst/best. Unfortunately, we somehow missed “The Deadly Mantis,” which judging from the trailer I just watched was not a strong contender for any Oscars — not even in special effects or make-up categories.

    William Hopper undoubtedly turned in one of his typical “strong” performances (strong, as in oak or wooden), like those he became best known for as Paul Drake on Perry Mason. Looking at IMdB, I noticed that Hopper made both “The Deadly Mantis” and “20 Million Miles to Earth” in 1957, a film we did see on the big, big screen. (Important scientific note — the film’s creature, an Ymir, supposedly came to Earth from Venus, but at its closest Venus is 25-26 million miles from Earth — didn’t they know that in 1957? I mean, what’s wrong with “25 Million Miles to Earth?”)

    Maybe “The Deadly Mantis” would have been better if Ray Harryhausen had done the special effects as he did in “20 Million Miles to Earth.” (Not to mention the original “King Kong” and “Mighty Joe Young” for which Harryhausen won an Academy Award for Special Effects.) In “20 Million Miles to Earth” Harryhausen gives us an epic mixed martial arts bout between the Ymir and an Indian elephant.

    Sigh, those were the good old days.

  23. 23.

    Platonicspoof

    @Anne Laurie:
    Usually people sensitive to touching the spurges (the other hazard is children tasting the milky sap)
    have a skin irritation (blisters in the case of Euphorbia myrsinites), so your reaction sounds more serious.
    Since I’ve seen a mantis camouflaged to match the roll of chain link fence it was sitting on, and Buggsy the Doorman is blending in with the sedum in the first pic, I started googling for the adaptation, and ran across
    these pictures of the orchid mantis.
    Best wishes to you and your mom Comrade Kevin. My mom didn’t have a heart attack, but she also had a stent put in about five years ago.
    Just the operation was frightening to her.

  24. 24.

    Martin

    Your job creators in action:

    The (anonymous) board member admitted that when the board hired Leo Apotheker as CEO, almost no board members bothered to meet him.
    __
    Equally remarkable was the board member’s explanation for this behavior:
    __
    “I admit it was highly unusual,” one board member who hadn’t met Mr. Apotheker told me. “But we were just too exhausted from all the infighting.”

    The folks in charge of one of the nations most revered companies, a Dow 30 component, were too tired to meet with the new CEO before they hired him. In the 11 months since he was hired, HP lost nearly half of it’s value (about $40B) and laid off ballpark of 10,000 employees. Morale is low, the company is rudderless, and now the person who blew through $130M of her own money in order to lose the governors race by 12 points is about to take over. Since she was one of the board members too tired to meet with the former CEO, I guess she’s an improvement in that the current board has at least met her.

    Yep, these are the economic geniuses the GOP want to give tax cuts to.

  25. 25.

    Martin

    @Triassic Sands: Mighty Joe Young is my mom’s favorite movie from that era. Mine was ‘Them’, which apparently was the first of the giant insect movies. For some reason it was played often on NYC TV in the 70s.

  26. 26.

    Helen

    @Martin: Board members beget board members, beget board members. It’s why CEO’s make so much money. Every board member is a CEO on their friend’s company. They vote each other boatloads of money. This is shocking, why?

  27. 27.

    opie jeanne

    The mantis pictures are really cool. We had one by our front door that lived on a rose bush and a big clump of lavendar. We looked for her every morning when we left the house. We worried that the green lynx spiders that lived on the lavendar would get her but as she grew we decided that they had better watch out or she’d get them.

    We called her Binky for no good reason.

    Here she is, smiling for the camera:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/snowwhite/47156927/in/photostream/

  28. 28.

    Elie

    @opie jeanne:

    Aint no spider gonna get this gal…

    Watched a nature show on mantises — my gawd they are brutal. Of course, once in a while they do get gotten by birds, etc and each other or katydids, etc.

    They are just uncanny — they are “aware”…when you look at them…

  29. 29.

    Martin

    @Helen: Yep. HP board members get paid $100K per year, plus $2k per meeting and travel expenses paid, and the right to buy stock at a discount. But apparently that’s not enough to meet with the person they’re charged to hire.

    But it’s their tax rate that’s apparently the real villain in all of this.

  30. 30.

    Helen

    @Martin: I work at non-profits. Even though I have an Ivy league post grad degree. Board member of non-profits (most, anyway) are asked to give money; not take.

  31. 31.

    Origuy

    I work at HP. Is it selfish of me to wish she’d been elected Governor instead?

    I kind of liked Apotheker. At least I got the sense that he valued R & D, unlike his predecessor.

  32. 32.

    Martin

    @Origuy: My condolences. If she was governor, she would have found some other way to fuck you guys up, I’m sure.

    I liked Leo as well for the most part. I thought the WebOS decision was shortsighted – I think you guys should have stuck that out. But I think PSG is a money hole – HP has almost nothing to add to a commodity market – it’s a lot of effort with not much payoff. Leo’s main failing was being complete inept at articulating the strategy, not so much the strategy itself. Was PSG going to be spun out, not spun out, let’s create a committee and study it for 6 months, what?

    I don’t know – you guys are in a tough spot. Like everyone else, I want the old engineers from stem-to-stern HP back. Maybe Meg will do okay – she didn’t fuck up eBay, but then I think eBay was in one of those situations where success was almost inevitable. But I can’t say I’m optimistic.

  34. 34.

    TheMightyTrowel

    Totally OT: The US rugby team (the Eagles) just scored a try against australia – the first try australia has conceded in the first 2 weeks of the Rugby World Cup. GO EAGLES!

  37. 37.

    harlana

    ok, i gots no garden stories but this is classified as an open thread so here goes, a question inspired by a previous post:
    why do gay republicans exist? i don’t get it, at all. can somebody pls explain this to me?

  38. 38.

    harlana

    oh and shut down the gov’t, deny distaster funding and rightly blame it all on republicans! keep it up, turdlings! let the people know what you’re all about – more cheering death and booing soldiers! this is going nicely.

  41. 41.

    RossInDetroit

    More bugs: I found a stag beetle (example) at work. If you haven’t run into one of these, think of Chuck Norris as a 1.5″ long bug. It had gotten into a hallway through an open door. I had to pry it loose from the rug with a plastic fork so I could toss it in a bucket and move it outside before someone saw it and stepped on it. Or had a heart attack. I wish I had pix but I had only my phone cam on me.

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