Dr. Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and shrubbery. In 2012, she says, an oak tree assured her that a risky grant application — proposing research on sound communication in plants — would be successful. https://t.co/EAdCFhrQRU
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 31, 2019
Without going full Direction of the Road, I can conceptualize Dr. Gagliano’s perspective as described here:
Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and shrubbery. She recalls being rocked like a baby by the spirit of a fern. She has ridden on the back of an invisible bear conjured by an osha root. She once accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina, an ancient wind instrument, in a redwood forest. “Oryngham,” she says, means “thank you” in plant language. These interactions have taken place in dreams, visions, songs and telekinetic interactions, sometimes with the help of shamans or ayahuasca.
This has all gone on around the same time as Dr. Gagliano’s scientific research, which has broken boundaries in the field of plant behavior and signaling. Currently at the University of Sydney in Australia, she has published a number of studies that support the view that plants are, to some extent, intelligent. Her experiments suggest that they can learn behaviors and remember them. Her work also suggests that plants can “hear” running water and even produce clicking noises, perhaps to communicate.
Plants have directly shaped her experiments and career path. In 2012, she says, an oak tree assured her that a risky grant application — proposing research on sound communication in plants — would be successful. “You are here to tell our stories,” the tree told her.
“These experiences are not like, ‘Oh you’re a weirdo, this is happening just to you,’” Dr. Gagliano said. Learning from plants, she said, is a long-documented ceremonial practice (if not one typically endorsed by scientists).
“This is part of the repertoire of human experiences,” she said. “We’ve been doing this forever and ever, and are still doing this.”…
******
What’s going on in your garden(s), this week?
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
Ladyraxterinok
The idea of communicating with plants was ‘in’ during the early days of Doonesbury. One of the characters played music to keep his plants happy and healthy and help them grow.
Wallyz
When my transplanted kidney was failing, but before I went back on dialysis, I drove to see my sister and nieces. On the way back, I stopped to see Pando, an Aspen clone that is 100,000+ years old. I wanted to know if Pando had any wisdom for me.
Pando had the distinct attitude of not being interested in me, because he was busy doing tree shit. I took away that I should be more focused on doing human shit. It’s been good advice, so far.
Ladyraxterinok
The idea of talking to plants was ‘in’ during the early days of Doonesbury. One of the characters played music to keep his plants happy and healthy and help them grow.
frosty
@Ladyraxterinok: It’s been a long time but if I remember right that would have been Zonker serenading his dope plants.
One of the things I miss about dropping the newspaper subscription is no longer reading the comics. Back when Nixon was getting away with Watergate I’d start with the comics page …. and then throw away the paper without reading any of the rest of it.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
OzarkHillbilly
Ummmm… You’re a weirdo, this is happening just to you. And I am one who feels like trees are old souls and likes to sit and commune with them.
Amir Khalid
Non-human living things in general are smarter than humans like to think about. I am not entirely surprised that this could also be true of plants.
Sister Golden Bear
Good Morning, everyone (for me it’s actually late afternoon in Thailand).
Happily ensconced in the new hotel, with A/C controls that actually work properly, a TV without lots of static, a better view, a pool (not that I can go in the water) but I can sit out by it, and overall a much lighter and brighter room.
I don’t get the daily visit from the nurses,* but I’m healing well and still will go to the clinic twice a week for check-ups. The only annoyances that the floors are tile instead of carpet and sometimes it’s a bit noise if people are moving the chair around in the room above; and more seriously, the mini-fridge isn’t very cold, which isn’t help from keeping milk, cheese and some sliced meats for snacks. #FirstWorldTouristProblems
But I’m glad I made the switch, especially since the new hotel is slightly cheaper as well.
*That’s why the first time around patients are required to stay at the other hotel, and a factor in why I initially stayed there this visit.
Baud
On the subject of intelligent non-humans.
Anne Laurie
@frosty:
I’ve had a subscription to GoComics.com almost since its inception, for just that reason. For a relatively small sum (IIRC $20 a year), I have a personal page with all my favorites set up, so that I can start every morning with a collection of strips & political cartoons that usually provide at least a few mood-lifters… including new Doonesbury strips on Sundays, and ‘vintage’ re-runs the rest of the week. (And unlike the dead-tree funny pages, I don’t have to skip past all the leaden unfunny crap!)
satby
Good morning to the Statesiders and good evening to our Asian based correspondents! Glad the new digs are an improvement @Sister Golden Bear: .
Was reading this in the Guardian and struck by how it parallels the clusterfuck here, even though it’s strictly about the UK.
Anne Laurie
@Sister Golden Bear:
Is there room to stuff in a bag of ice cubes, or even some frozen baggies / cans? We’ve done that on occasion when the mini-frig isn’t very frig — basically ‘assisting’, as though it were a motorized cooler box.
frosty
@Anne Laurie: I looked that site or the equivalent for awhile but it didn’t really click for me. Now that I have a serious internet jones (and the news is so depressing) it might be worth another look.
ETA The other bad thing about dropping dead tree news is that I didn’t spend 3 hours a day reading news. It’s gotten ridiculous.
raven
Just another day around here.
Phylllis
Hubby & I took a vote and idling about the house won out unanimously over getting dressed and driving half an hour to see the remastered Lawrence of Arabia at the movie theater.
frosty
@satby: The parallels are there, but there’s one significant difference (I hope): the US doesn’t have a “Leninest” opposition that hates democracy as much as the people in power who are busy destroying it. If accurate, this explains why no one wants Corbyn in charge, even as a caretaker. What an utter shitshow.
Millard Filmore
@Sister Golden Bear:
Maybe the temperature dial is set too low.
Maybe the plug does not reliably connect with the wall outlet.
Are you spending a lot of time outside of the room? In Thai hotels, if you take the key out of the holder it will cut power to most, or all, of the room.
Raven
@frosty: Depends on who you ask.
satby
@raven: raining here, which we needed. Probably will continue off and on all day. An aurora was predicted to be visible last night and tonight but the clouds will prevent that. Figures.
Sister Golden Bear
@Anne Laurie: There’s room. But I need to go over to 7-11 to see if they’ve got bags of ice.
It does seem to be getting better. I think the previous occupant may not have shut the door fully, which is easy to do. Did it myself before catching it.
On a different note, I’ve been wanting to pick up t-shirt for the local soccer team as souvenir.
The good news is that I found the team shop at a nearby mall.
The bad news is that they didn’t have anything large enough (it’s all Asian-sized).
The good news is that the team has an online store on Facebook, which has the shirt I want in my size.
The bad news is that you can’t actually buy anything there, although you can send them a message.
The good news is that the shop though the main store at the stadium probably has it.
So I’ll try there later this week.
Normally, I don’t like using Uber/Lyft, but the local equivalent, Grab, is a Maude-send for getting around since you can enter your pick-up/drop-off locations without having to try to translate things with the driver. (The clinic does give you a card with the addresses of the hotel, clinic and hospital translated into Thai, which is reassuring to have as a fallback.) Far less scary than using the songthaews, covered pickup trucks with rows of seats in the back that are the main in-town public transport.
Sister Golden Bear
@Millard Filmore: There’s no dial, but the power was off in the room when I got there because the key was out of the holder. I’ll ask the front-desk for a second key.
Didn’t think of that because at the first hotel they always put a second key in the holder — at least for Dr. Suporn’s patients. (His patients usually take up most of two floors of the hotel, so we do get special treatment.)
Chyron HR
Was it, though?
“I don’t see why that matters.” – Dr. Gagliano, probably
Ten Bears
When I first published it twenty years ago it wasn’t necessarily well-received; did well enough as a grad school essay but otherwise just another crackpot except, except … every now and then I hear some one make a joke about that crackpot that compared dBase to druid’s tattoos …
RAVEN
@satby: I meant that the boss lady has that kind of relationship with her plants. We’ve crossed into cool enough to have the windows open at night already!
Millard Filmore
@Sister Golden Bear:
Ahh! The Baht Bus. In Pattaya the fare is 10 Baht and covers the whole route. As frequent as an elevator. Great if you are healthy, bouncy, and spry.
raven
@Ten Bears: Published what?
OzarkHillbilly
Instead of school supplies, this year I’m shopping for a bulletproof backpack
I got nothing to add.
Jeffery
Was just out in the yard murdering a few plants. To me they are weeds.
RAVEN
@OzarkHillbilly: Steel pot.
satby
@RAVEN:
Been like that here for several weeks, which is heavenly. My favorite time of the year is now, comfortable days even when warm and cool nights perfect for sleeping. This is my summertime, because I hide out during the real hot humid one.
My grandmother also used to talk to her plants and tell them they were all beautiful. We just assumed she was a bit bored after Gramps died.
Jeffro
@OzarkHillbilly: Yup. Bulletproof backpacks, teacher in-service trainings on how to stanch gunshot wounds, and high schools now being designed with curving corridors and spots that provide protective cover. Oh, and teachers being told to lock doors when class is in session – that is, to actually keep kids locked in their classes all day every day. And adults wonder why kids have record-high levels of anxiety these days.
It’s like that Churchill quote on steroids: Americans do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else…but with guns maybe we never run out of “solutions” to test before doing the obvious, sane thing.
J R in WV
@Phylllis:
Well, we’re not as organized as all that…
But I’m betting that once the time to have departed on the 45 minutes drive to the nearest theater willing to show Lawrence of Arabia even the one showing early this afternoon rolls around, we won’t be dressed to go to town, but will be hanging out around the house.
May be some football also too.
I do have a self-selected task regarding two boxes of old family photos my cousin loaned me, and scanning them into the new HD I got for that express purpose. Which I’m sneaking up on being able to begin soon.
I remember seeing Lawrence when it first came out. A great film. Maybe we’ll make it to town after all… we’ll have to see what happens!
Baud
@Jeffro:
Freedom!
Sister Golden Bear
#StrangeTravelMoments – Watching “Black Panther” dubbed into Chinese with Thai subtitles. The other night it was a British movie dubbed into German with Thai subtitles.
Earlier today it was a “cave boy and his wolf” movie — subtitles needed. ? “Alpha” was actually well-acted and beautifully filmed. It’s got an 80% rating on Rotton Tomatoes.
MazeDancer
The New York Times discovers Shamanism/Earth/Plant Spirit Medicine – choose your name – only100;000 years after it began,
Guestimate on that start date. If, when humans were protozoa, the receptive among us were listening to the seaweed, gotta roll it back. Way, way back.
Dorothy A. Winsor
We’re going to see “Blinded by the Light” today.
J R in WV
@TerryC:
This remark is from a previous garden chat last week. The local fruit of nut harder to get to is hickory nuts. Really hard, with shell involved with the nut meat. My grandpa used to use a tiny railroad rail anvil and a small hammer to crack the nuts, and then one of grandma’s hat pins to pick the nut meat out of the very involved shell.
Anne Laurie, please post you email address, as I tried twice to send you some pictures of our new garden path and pond and some actual plants. One was kicked back by a mail server somewhere as undeliverable, and the other attempt accidently was received by a professor at Tulane who was nice enough to warn me that it wasn’t yet received by the intended recipient. You.
Thanks!
Amir Khalid
@Sister Golden Bear:
Uber sold its south-east Asian operations to Grab a few years ago and got out. Grab has always been bigger and more successful in the region — from what I hear it’s less unpopular with drivers, more customer-friendly, and more compliant with regulators. You can even order food and plan trips and make deliveries to customers via Grab.
Raven
@J R in WV: There’s only one game and that’s tonite, OU-Houston.
Jeffro
@Baud: I forgot about the buckets of rocks some school divisions ‘install’ in each classroom, so that the kids and teachers can throw rocks at a gunman. American “innovation” in action! Go team!
If I was teaching and my school division tried to put me through an in-service on stanching gunshot wounds I would quit and proceed to the nearest tv station to talk about it. I am not blaming teachers who stay, not at all: whether for a paycheck or for the kids or both, I ‘get’ that. But personally, I’d walk right the hell out and go get in front of a camera about it.
Raven
@Jeffro: What would that accomplish?
JPL
I talk to the trees, but they don’t listen to me.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: Subtitles not needed.
@Amir Khalid: I’ve heard they’re better to their drivers. Grab still takes 25%, so I tip generously, especially given how inexpensive it for me with a U.S. income.
I haven’t tried ordering food yet. Didn’t know they also did customer deliveries.
JPL
@Jeffro: Tony Dokoupil the co host of CBS This Morning has this tweet about his mother
twitter.com/tonydokoupil/status/1167088120493481984
It’s gruesome.
joel hanes
@J R in WV:
I’ve shelled hickory nuts, and I’ve shelled black walnuts.
IMHO, Iowa black walnuts are marginally more difficult.
(I once spent a day searching the internet for a machine or tool that would shell them; as nearly as I can tell, several have been invented and sold over the years, but none worked well enough to be successful, and so there were no new ones to be bought)
But someone shells enough of them that black walnut fudge is a thing in the Amish areas of Iowa, and in my hometown, the hundred-year-old ice cream shop makes black walnut ice cream, which is simply amazing.
Jeffro
Oh nothing, never mind (!)
No one’s standing up to this nonsense, no one’s raising a fuss, and so now we have people shopping for backpacks with armor plate and teachers being trained to stanch bullet wounds in their students. Maybe the answer isn’t to quit and get in front of a camera…maybe it’s to take a sick day and get in front of a camera, or to leave directly from the in-service session and go visit one’s local/state reps after calling the local news station. But to just roll along with this stuff and not say/do anything? That’s nuts.
Jeffro
@JPL: Thank you – yes, that is the training I was referring to up above.
OzarkHillbilly
@J R in WV: @joel hanes: You can get sacks of black walnut meats here. I don’t have a discerning enough palate to make it worth my while.
My pig farming buddy has a number of black walnut trees on his place. The pigs go thru one like it was nothing at all, it sounds like somebody eating a really crunchy bag of chips, and hurts my teeth to watch them. Black walnut shells make some of the best abrasives one can buy and I have read that a handful of bw sand in the crank case can destroy the engine of a log skidder in 10 seconds or less.
.
Alain
Not so much talking with animals, but I recently read about a group of trees with interconnected roots that keep a nearby stump alive, transporting food and water at night to it.
Also heard a fascinating interview with (I think) a Finnish researcher who talked about trees communicating and helping each other out.
Having observed the behavior of many animals and insects, I think that intelligence and emotions and curiosity is not limited to the apes. And I’m certainly not going to assume that plants can talk and think, but communicate and react, sure.
debbie
What are the odds? I just listened to an interview with Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, on NPR’s On Being.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: there’s a black walnut tree across the alley from me. Last year I decided to try to harvest some nuts, but about 3 nuts later I left the entire bag I had gathered for the squirrels. I may try doing natural walnut tie-dye on an old t-shirt though, that stain is forever.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Seconded. You might like listening to my link above.
J R in WV
@Sister Golden Bear:
Glad to hear you are doing well on your second visit to Thailand. Take care, keep in touch.
debbie
@Jeffro:
I didn’t realize it was a 4-year-old tweet, but Stonekettle retweeted this:
What’s surprising is that Abbott never thought to delete it at any time since.
OzarkHillbilly
@Alain:
The theory I have read is they do so chemically. If a tree is attacked by say bark beetles, they put out enzymes to fight the invaders. Other trees are able to sense this and start to up their defenses in preparation for the coming onslaught. There is more than a little evidence to support this theory. Insects have long been known to communicate chemically, such as ants putting down a trail of pheromones to a food source.
None of this is to say they are having a conversation tho. Their bodies respond to chemical and behavioral stimuli and their neighbors respond to them. Evolution is amazing and has been perfecting life for billions of years, coming up with a thousand (million? billion?) and one different ways to accomplish the same goal: Procreate.
Immanentize
@joel hanes:
Ugh. Black walnuts. My neighbor has a huge, beautiful black walnut tree in his front yard and half the walnuts fall into my yard. They start out the size of a fist, but once you dry the husk to a point it can be removed, they are just good walnut size. Then getting them open. Double blech.
But as Satby said, that stain is forever!
SiubhanDuinne
@Phylllis:
I, on the other hand, am eagerly going to see Lawrence of Arabia this afternoon. (The evening screening wouldn’t get me back home until well past 11:00 pm, and at my age I don’t much like to drive after dark.)
Have mentioned previously the TCM Movie Classics series. Over the past few years I’ve revisited old favourites, and seen films on the big screen I had only ever caught on a small TV or DVD, and in many instances seen for the first time movies that somehow escaped me altogether on first release. They (TCM and Fathom) should be announcing the 2020 series soon.
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly:
The lack of clear communication among trees is the fault of the Ents who lost the Entwives.
Phylllis
@J R in WV: There’s another showing Wednesday, but that’s a school night for me.
Immanentize
@Raven:
Put September 14 on your calendar! Owls versus Longhorns. Texas death match. Loser leaves town.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Immanentize: Can you blame the Entwives for hitting the road? Those guys were boring.
Spanky
NHC Outlook:
Immanentize
@Dorothy A. Winsor: “Hey, Knothead, I’m leaving! I’m moving to San Francisco with Peachtree.”
“Don’t be hasty!”
frosty
@satby: “natural walnut tie-dye on an old t-shirt though, that stain is forever.“
Yes, exactly. We had half a dozen walnut trees where I grew up. I remember the stains. And the feeling when your brother’s aim was good and he nailed you in the small of the back!
oldgold
@Phylllis:
Idling about the house naked always gets my vote.
Phylllis
@SiubhanDuinne: We’ve done a couple of them, including Saving Private Ryan recently. Just not up for it today. Alien is probably a lock though, since I never saw it in the theater.
debbie
@Phylllis:
When Alien premiered in NYC, the only open seats were in the front row. Never again!
Phylllis
@debbie: But now you can get your tickets in advance online, and select which recliner you want.
debbie
@Phylllis:
A very good thing!
HalfAssedHomesteader
@Sister Golden Bear: What is it with 7-11s in Thailand? Have a friend who biked there and remarked that he couldn’t make a turn without running into one.
Pete Mack
Believe the technical term is ‘fruitcake’ not ‘weirdo’ here.
OzarkHillbilly
Now on day three of a very long 4 day Labor day wkend. The first 3 days are an over the top extended celebration of our Son in law’s 40th b-day. My introverted ass does not do well among large groups of people (60-80 in this case) I do not know in enclosed spaces, especially 100 decibel ones. Even more so when I know 90% of them are RWNJs. But family is family and when duty calls I tolerate, or at least suppress any homicidal urges I may have. Needless to say the Friday night surprise party was… trying. After exchanging pleasantries with the 3 or 4 people I actually knew, I found a place of refuge where I was all but entirely ignored. Probably because I was wearing my “Make Racism Wrong Again” hat, and just like a Monarch Butterfly’s bright colors or a rattler’s tail, it screams to MAGAs, “DANGER DANGER, KEEP AWAY!!”
Other than my wife, only one person was brave enough to approach my 8 top.
“Is anybody else sitting here?”
“No.”
“Can we join you?”
“Sure”
And he walked away, never to return. It would seem that humans too understand and respond to chemical and behavioral communication.
My wife brought herself a plate of food and I got up to mine. When I came back 4 people had joined her (never, never, leave the lair unguarded). Seeing as I knew one of them was among the few non-RWNJs there and the other 3 were his friends I decided against abandoning the den.
The long night ended with my safe retreat to our small quiet acreage of sanity in the hills and hollers.
Yesterday started with lunch at Sugar Fire (the Big Muddy was a big deliciously muddy mess that I managed to eat all of)(dinner was unnecessary) and from there we went to the Pinckney Bend Distillery in New Haven on the running full banks of the very wide and muddy Missouri. (not in flood anymore, barely)
Being unable to engage in any kind of sane nonpolitical conversation (I did not try very hard) I decided to wander (as is my wont in the best of circumstances). I haven’t been to NH in quite a few years and was pleasantly surprised ti find that it was not the dying town I thought it was turning into the last time I’d been there. They even have a still operating single screen movie theatre (currently showing “Dora”).
The big find was the Astral Glass Studio (2:47 video of glass blowing). Really cool place with nice people, great demonstrations with narration, and super cool glass art very reasonably priced. I found my wife at the distillery and told her of it and that they would be giving demos soon. She asked me to tell her daughter so I did and everyone at their table seemed enthused to go visit, but when my wife and I left nobody was following. I thought maybe they had decided to keep the rattlesnake at somebody else’s arm’s distance, but after about 5 minutes they all came trooping in (app 20 strong) for the show and appreciated the art of what they were doing. I think half to 3/4s of the folks bought something.
That was my good deed for the wkend, rewarding these artisans with an appreciative audience that had money to burn in return for a good show. Really good folks in that shop, and due to the fact that both glass blowers independently, and very quietly, complimented me on my choice of chapeau, blue blooded liberals making their way in the red seas of rural Misery.
If you ever get a chance, stop in. You won’t be sorry.
Van Buren
I recall reading about a pharmaceutical researcher in the Amazon who asked a shaman how his people had come to learn the uses of so many plants, and the answer was basically, we ingest shrooms and the trees tell us what they’re good for.
oatler.
In “Simon, King of the Witches” there’s a scene where Simon brings his girl to picnic under a tree; then exchanging greetings with the tree, he finds they aren’t welcome there and they go elsewhere.
Steeplejack (phone)
Good morning, all! ?
Some “garden” pictures I ran across: “Land Artist Arranges Stones and Leaves Into Mesmerizing Mandalas and Spirals.”
Emma
Y’all are having great fun with the concept but I can categorically say that sitting in your garden and simply letting your mind focus on problems can produce amazing results.
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: Protect yourself among the magas because they can be rabid.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@OzarkHillbilly: I don’t do well in large groups either. I don’t understand why people like them.
The glass blowing sounds great, though!
OzarkHillbilly
@Steeplejack (phone): Cool stuff.
OzarkHillbilly
@JPL: I think that’s just what they say about me. I’ve got one more afternoon to make it thru which should be much better: BBQ at their house.
@Dorothy A. Winsor: There was a time when I tolerated it better. I can still go to outdoor festivals and such (and Women’s March) but as soon as I am in an enclosed space, especially a loud one which is actually physically painful to my ears, I just shut down. I have to go elsewhere just to catch my breath.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
NH? New Haven or New Hampshire? Love both, but if the latter, you can always escape to the mountains or ocean!
MomSense
I would be more inclined to believe that plants communicate with each other. This sounds to me much like a god experience. God appeared to Moses in a shrubbery after all. I think people project these experiences onto God or trees or whom/whatever and then ask for qualities like strength, patience, etc back. Having this kind of relationship with plants is probably the least harmless unless the poplars tell her to chop down all the birches or some such.
I have had many spiritual like experiences in nature – but that is because I feel peaceful when I’m in a forest. Maybe I’d be a Hawthornian if that were a religion. I did develop quite a close relationship with a maple known to my kids and their friends as “the climbing tree” because it had nice, low branches. It developed a large fissure in its trunk and I used to chase off the woodpeckers when they showed up. The kids and I did a lot of hugging of that tree and eventually the fissure healed up. Did we have anything to do with it? Doubtful. Is loving trees a good thing for kids to feel? Yup.
So I welcome our plant overlords. I hope they forgive us our trespasses because we’ve been horrible.
OzarkHillbilly
@MomSense: Sapsuckers love maple sap, the source of Maple syurple, but the rarely do any lasting damage..
Brooklyn Dodger
@Sister Golden Bear: Thanks for the link. What a beautiful film! Tiny bone fracture keeping me off the pavement for a couple of weeks so looking for diversions.
Miss Bianca
Well, great. It’s not like I needed one *more* thing to fret about when I accompany D on a logging expedition. Altho’ I do find myself thanking the poor beetle-killed trees as we cut them up for our winter fuel. We have electric heat in the house but 95 percent of the heat comes from keeping upstairs and downstairs woodstoves cranked.
Jinchi
Please. Everyone knows that oak trees are notorious liars.
Miss Bianca
@Jinchi: Nah, they’re not liars per se – they just shade the truth a lot.
Sister Golden Bear
@HalfAssedHomesteader: I’m not sure, but there’s at least four 7-11 within a 10-minute walk of my hotel.
Convenient for stocking up on supplies, especially since there’s no longer a grocery store near the original hotel I was at (where you’re required to stay for the initial surgery) and in any event it required crossing the pedestrian overpass to get to,* which one usually can’t do for at least a week-and-a-half after returning from the hospital. (Aside from not having the energy to do it, climbing that many stairs can cause complications like breaking stitches.)
*Both hotels and the clinic are on a six-lane highway that goes through the center of Chonburi, and has a concrete center divider to discourage people from making near-suicidal jaywalking attempts. So there’s pedestrian overpasses every couple hundred meters. (There’s a reason why Thailand is among the top 10 highest traffic fatality rates in the world.) There are a handful of crosswalks that go through the barriers, but I’ve only attempted them late at night when the traffic is light. Easier to do this time around, but still can be a bit scary.
@Brooklyn Dodger: Glad you liked it. Hope your recovery goes quickly.
Peter
As someone who is currently on ayahuasca, I’d like to say that Marianne Williamson has a plan to make all trees citizens, with full rights, including voting for trees over 18, and…
*vomits*
mrmoshpotato
@Phylllis: Alien on the big screen is awesome. Well worth going to go see.
luc
Please excuse me, but the Monica Gagliano “research” smells very much like Voodoo. Please also see:
blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/08/28/not-so-smarty-plants/#.XWvomTfYo3E
MoxieM
Good Morning (barely). My Great Aunt Margaret always said, “Trees would make a lovely civilization, if only they could talk.” Lady was ahead of her time apparently!
Elizabelle
@Sister Golden Bear:
Enjoying your updates from Thailand. Glad it is going well, and keep on keeping on.
tybee
@Jinchi: damn.
Hob
I first heard of Gagliano from a brief mention in the comic book Swamp Thing in 2013 or 2014. I think she was pretty obscure then, but a New Yorker profile came out around the same time – not sure if the comic was after that, or if the writer had found out about her independently since she made a good fit for the storyline (there’s a scientist who’s communicating with plants, and his mentor name-drops Gagliano). Anyway, at the time she was either not so far into the “they’re talking to me personally” stuff, or she was soft-pedaling that part to the press, because the coverage was just about her somewhat scientific-sounding work. I always got an iffy vibe from her, though – even when she wasn’t making these particular claims, she tended to explain her beliefs to a lay audience in a very crankish way, like you would not talk that way if you were a scientist who was genuinely on to something and wanted to convince reasonable people of it, you would talk that way if you wanted to convince gullible people or if you weren’t reasonable yourself. But to her most zealous online fans, all skeptics are of course motivated by not wanting to hear the truth.