From The Danger Garden

Spring is a nice time in Southern California.  Like Springs everywhere plants here begin to grow again.  And so it is with Leslie's collection of carnivorous plants.  We call them CPs for short.  She has a lot of CPs in her garden.  It's a dangerous place to be if you're an insect.

(Click on any picture for better viewing.)

In the winter she cuts these little insect-meat eaters back and we wait for new shoots to sprout out in the brighter sun and higher temperatures.  Or maybe we wait for new sprouts to shoot out.  This year has not disappointed.  In fact it's been downright amazing.  I have taken many photographs.

Leslie grows multiple varieties of Saracennia, commonly known as Pitcher Plants.  These bad boys trap their unsuspecting little buggers in tall horn-like pitchers.  The pitchers have a cap on them giving them the profile of a large animal with its mouth open.

The different varieties are colored with combinations of green and red and white.  There are colored veins of great intricacy.  And little hairs that help ensnare dinner.

Before the pitchers form, they send out thin stalks with a round bulb on the end.  This becomes the flower with droopy petals.

The plants send out flat stalks which slowly open into the pitchers.  Then they just spend the rest of the year waiting for food to fly right in.

Leslie has many other varieties of CPs.  Here are a few pictures of Sundews.  This guys full name is Drosera capensis.  Sundews catch their food using little balls of stickum from which a hapless six-legger can't escape.  Clever.

Here's a drosera flower stalk with delicate purple flowers.  Apparently there's a good reason CPs have tall flower stalks.  They need to trick insects into pollinating them.  If the flowers are too close to the parts of the plant which catch the insects, pollination won't happen.  Once the plant sex is over, however, the insect is back on the menu.

Other Mixed Meters posts in which carnivorous plants play a role.
Freud Was Wrong About the Cigar
Carnivorous Plants (with pictures of many different types of CPs)

Pets For Leslie

Leslie spent much of July in Mexico dealing with things wormy. Before she left, she asked me to post one picture of our pets to Facebook every day. When I suggested this might be a form of homesickness she disagreed, suggesting she was merely 'pet-sick'.

After a while, instead of still shots, I created short videos of the pets accompanied by bits of music from my pieces.  There were 18 posts in all.  I called the entire series "Pets For Leslie".

Since most Facebook postings disappear without a trace after about 8 hours I've decided to post everything here.  It's a kind of Pets For Leslie Archive.   After all, Mixed Meters is for ever, sort of.

Dramatis Personae:

Chowderhead as the Big Red Dog

Doctor Pyewacket as the Little Black Kitty

Spackle Puss as The Big Gray and White Cat

Crackle Pop (seen only in video) as her brother The Even Bigger Gray and White Cat

Click any of the stills for enlargements.

I've combined nine of the short videos into this one YouTube post.  I called it Pets For Leslie.  I think the random bits of my music form an interesting pastiche.

This music of Dr. Pyewacket in a Pot is Garbage Days of Winter 2014

Leslie found Doctor Pyewacket in the bushes near our home back in May.  You can see pictures and video of him when he was just a few weeks old in the eponymous post Doctor Pyewacket.

Not enough pet pictures for you yet?  You can still see the many previous Mixed Meters posts about cats and dogs and other animals.   Remember Mixed Meters is (seemingly) for ever.

Winter 2013 from The Seasons

Today is an equinox, the cusp of the old and the new season.

That's why I'm posting another episode of The Seasons.  I've been doing that for every season for a while.  The latest completed northern hemisphere season was the winter which began in December 2013.

Click here to hear Winter 2013 © David Ocker, 4405 seconds

Winter 2013 is 73 minutes long.  Be warned!  One full hour of those 73 minutes is pure silence.

If you're new to Mixed Meters you're probably wondering why a piece of music is 80% nothing.  Frankly, I don't have the energy to invent yet another explanation of what this music series is about.  I suggest you try reading this instead.

If you want to explore the web of intrigue which is the entire series called The Seasons - lately I've been posting both long and short versions -  you can read all the posts.   Also, all the links are on this page.

The Seasons is my exceptionally loose way of keeping time.  Here's a cute video (which I found via this blog) about a guy who has it down to the nanosecond.

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Today I learned that yesterday was Taxonomist Appreciation Day.   Everyday it's something, isn't it?

At Mixed Meters we appreciate a taxonomist every day.  That's because Mr. Mixed Meters is married to a polychaetologist named Leslie.  You can read all the Mixed Meters posts about Leslie.  There are quite a few.

I learned about TAD because Leslie left a browser window open.  Possibly she wanted me to see a definition of taxonomy ("The study of organisms and how you phylum.")  It makes more sense with the graphic.  She knows I like puns.

More likely she simply forgot to close the browser window.  That window is how I happened upon another cute video, an animation about a taxonomic expedition hunting for ants.  It's very tightly cut to the music of Rodrigo y Gabriela, a MM fave.

Leslie goes on expeditions like this.  The difference is that her expeditions always involve the ocean because she hunts sea worms instead of ants.  I steadfastly refuse to accompany her because I prefer to stay home and write music every day.

Carnivorous Plants

A few years ago Leslie acquired some strange little plants which get their nourishment by eating insects. She purchased these from a vendor at a local plant show. I was skeptical about them at first until I noticed that the number of flying insects in our yard had decreased noticeably.

The vendor is Don Elkins and he calls his company Mesa Exotics. Last weekend we visited his greenhouse in Arroyo Grande, near San Luis Obispo. While Don and Leslie talked exitedly about the care and feeding of these little meateaters, I amused myself by snapping a lot of pictures.

(Click on any picture for an enlargement. Hover over them for a bit of description)

Leslie was kind of like a kid in a candy shop.  We returned with a car full of bits of unusual and unfamiliar vegetation, all of it designed to make an insect's life a short one.

Outside, next to empty farmland, was a field of pitcher plants.  These plants have a long tube into which unsuspecting insects are attracted by some sort of smell.  Once inside, the little fly can't escape and it gets digested.  How does that work exactly?  I haven't a clue.

Leslie refers to carnivorous plants as CPs.  CPs come with a wide range of techniques for snaring their prey.  Here are some examples beginning with a Pygmy Sundew.

I thought the little droplets on this plant were actually water.  I was informed that it is slime made by the plant.  Somehow this attracts small insects.

This plant is called a Butterwort.  The leaves are very smooth to the touch because they're covered with tiny, slimy hairs which trap small insects.  This particular plant has been dining well lately.

The next two are from the genus Nepenthes.  These produce colorful pitchers suspended on long elegant vines.  The first picture shows a living pitcher, the second shows one which has died.

This is an extreme closeup of the flower of a Bladderwort.  The flower is very tiny.  It's called the Angry Bunny.

The most famous CP is the Venus Fly Trap.  Don had a lot of them in his greenhouse but I didn't snap any decent pictures of them.  Here's one of Leslie's plants which had captured a large scrumptious moth that couldn't get away quite fast enough.

Leslie had clearly found a kindred spirit in meeting Don.  They both have considerable enthusiasm and excitement for these curious species.  We'd like to thank him profusely for sharing his time and expertise and passion for these little carnivores.  Also, thanks for the cool plants.

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There's been a recent spate of news about Sheep-Eating Plants. Here's an article which details these and other, even stranger, carnivorous plants.

Leslie and David's First Score

It's our first score.  Every American school child who ever studied the Gettysburg Address will understand.

Exactly twenty years ago today, on November 1, 1992, about 4 or 4:30 p.m., I married Leslie Harris. Best move I ever made. Love you honey.

We can always remember the year because it happened during the run-up to a Presidential election.  Ross Perot lost a few days later.  So did George Bush.

After the ceremony there was a party. We had spent months negotiating countless details with Leslie's mother Betty who financed the shindig.  She had been waiting a long time to have a wedding.  Everything came off really well.

Lots of pictures were taken that day - although not so many as might be taken now when everyone has digital cameras.   We have kept just one particular wedding picture on display for all twenty years.  It sits in a place of honor, on our chest of drawers in our bedroom in a cheap plastic holder.

Yep, it shows the two of us consummating our nuptials with cake, a chocolate cake covered in chocolate frosting.  It was delicious chocolate cake!

Sadly, neither of us got to taste much of it that night because each time we put our plate down, to fulfill some duty as Bride or Groom, the plate and portion of cake would be bussed away by the staff.  This happened repeatedly.

Also, we don't know who the third person in the picture is, the one behind the door.  Our best guess is she was one of the servers who plated the cake and then kept snatching it away from us.

The bakery which made the cake provided us with a fresh new top layer free of charge for our first anniversary.  We finally got to enjoy the cake then.

This anniversary marks the beginning of Leslie and David's Second Score - we should celebrate with some chocolate.  Twenty years from now, at the beginning of our third score, I promise to post more wedding pictures here on Mixed Meters.  I wonder who will be running for President then.  I wonder what kind of cameras we'll have.  I wonder if the bakery will give us a free chocolate cake.

Chocolate Tags: wedding. . . marriage. . . matrimony. . . nuptials

Freud Was Wrong About The Cigar

Leslie has a lot of strange plants in her garden. She keeps working on raising orchids and has gotten good with african violets.  Her best category lately has been various carnivorous plants - like pitcher plants or Venus flytraps. They eat insects and we love them for it.

She came home with a new Venus fly trap the other day plus something she called a "sensitive" plant. The web tells me that it's also called mimosa pudica.  I don't know what this species has in common with a mixture of champagne and orange juice.  Probably nothing.

She demonstrated the wonderous properties of mimosa by raising the thing a couple inches and dropping it on a table.  The leaves reacted by curling up.  Self-defense, I guess.  The poor thing is probably afraid of its own shadow.

I whipped out the aging point-'n'shoot from my pocket and made a video of this vegetarian flight response.  Later I edited the video a bit, adding titles and repeating a section in slow motion (that worked better in my imagination than in reality).  The whole video barely breaks a minute.

Here it is if you want to watch. You can see part of Chowderhead on the ground behind the table. The finger aggravating the poor sensitive plant belongs to Leslie herself.

When I'd finished video editing I decided to it would be better with some music. I dropped a few tracks onto the video and I found one that seemed to work well enough. It's called Freud Was Wrong About The Cigar. I don't know why I called it that.

Since only the first minute of the piece was needed for the video I figured I'd link to the complete online version on the off chance that someone who reads Mixed Meters is obsessed with cigars. That's when I discovered that I had never uploaded FWWATC.   I composed it in May of 2011.  It's on my iPod where I listen to it periodically.

I don't know why I didn't share it.  Better late than never.

Click here to hear Freud Was Wrong About The Cigar - © 2012 David Ocker - 108 seconds

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This is Freud's first appearance on Mixed Meters.

You can see a cigar in this post about a Fourth of July barbecue.

Cigarettes have come up previously in conjunction with my Mother and Ronald Reagan.

Cigar Tags: Freud. . . cigar. . . plants. . . 30 Second Spots

Russian Bestiary

This is the final post of the "Leslie's Russian Pictures" trilogy. Part one Leslie and Vostok or part two Leslie and Vladivostok are just one click away.

This chapter is devoted to animals.  What better animal to begin with than a marine worm, Leslie's passion and ultimately the very reason she made her trip.  This cute little Russian critter, named Hydroides ezoensis, is a fan worm.  The big black eyes are all in your imagination.

In the first set you'll see Leslie making friends with a fluffy feline, a hungry horse hoping for handouts from inside the car (notice its nose reflected in the rear-view mirror) and a disinterested, unfenced bovine.

Here are two pictures of skeletons taken at the natural history museum of the Institute for Marine Biology in Vladivostok: a segment of whale spine and a whole seal. 

This is another marine invertebrate collected by Leslie's colleagues:  a live amphipod named Pleustes incarinatus.  I think it looks like a football helmet.

Here are several more marine animals - two dried-up old stars, a picture of a crab advertising seafood for sale and a good looking octopus which, not long after the picture was taken, became dinner for a pack of hungry biologists.

Two terrestrial invertebrates: a cricket with front claws designed to dig in dirt and a corpulent green caterpillar.

And we end our pictorial visit to Russia with a ceramic peacock and a little orange pixie.

You may enjoy other Mixed Meters' articles about Russia (which have more words and fewer pictures than this one):

• Ilf and Petrov "Someone needs to ask whether our incessant chase after the almighty dollar is really worth it."
• Theremin's Bug "the next time you accidentally walk out of the store with an item you picked up, thank Leon Theremin for the alarm which reminds you to pay."
• Sergey Kuryohkin, Pianist of Anarchy "when happenings were happening in the U.S. their creators weren't known for extreme musical stylistic variety in the way Kuryokhin seems to have embraced so naturally."
• Testimony - memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich "if Shostakovich knew how to keep his mouth shut and only ventured to tell his stories when he knew death was near, who among us can blame him."

Don't forget, the pictures enlarge if you click on em.

Russian Fauna Tags: Russian Fauna. . . travel photos