deciduous

We were rather taken with this stunning ensemble of trees turning from green to gold with red-accented vines in a parking lot near home—there’s happily quite a spectacle to see with the changing of the seasons but sometimes there’s the most contrast when it’s removed from the forest a bit. The chloroplasts in plants would be optimised for absorbing light across all spectra should leaves be black and while there’s a wide range in colouration, botanists aren’t sure exactly why most vegetation is green and not a darker shade. I wondered if the changing colours was just the onset of shedding them, the parts dying—or whether the process weren’t something more poetic, like the death of a star with the different phases and outcome it goes through as its energy sources dwindle.
I don’t think one can quite bear out that metaphor but it turns out that it’s a gross over-simplification to say that trees shed their leaves because of the cost of maintaining a green mantle during the winter months outweighs the photosynthetic benefits. The chemical responsible for the yellow and orange hues is always present in the leaves but is masked by renewed chlorophyll during the growing season.
The chemicals responsible for purples and reds are produced at the end of summer and slowly become a part of the tree’s complexion. Brown is the absence of pigment altogether.
Trees undergo this transformation to prevent water loss primarily and in certain climes to stave off freezing of extremities but there’s a whole host of other reasons including foiling the camouflage of herbivores, avoiding infestation, advertising its seeds and berries and to even stunt the growth of close neighbours. The clusters of dead leaves that remain attached and aren’t dropped, called marcescent, are even kept around by design as in the Spring they are a store of nutrients and they mask growing buds and ensure that any animal foraging for these new shoots gets a nasty taste for the effort.

a poet and didn’t know it

Our sincere gratitude to Nag on the Lake for introducing us to the rather remarkable troubadour known as Poetweet that will cull one’s Twitter feed for lyrical snippets and combine them into one of three poetic forms. We were really impressed with the eye-rhyme that it found amongst our twiterpation, pairing fascist with Zeitgeist or “a send away service for souvenirs” with “and their houses in dire need of repairs,” but I think we write about too many non-sequitir things to get an authentic couplet—and that gave us an idea. Granted Dear Leader is a sub-literate sophist and a general menace to language in any capacity, Poetweet was nonetheless also willing to take the dotard’s handle and make him sound a bit like a bard. Give it a try yourself at the links above.

gravel and fire

Of course not without antecedents and followers in the same tradition and I guess that were are all standing on the shoulders of trolls, Public Domain Review introduces us to the land-developer turned politician (both of dodgy success) finally turned dystopian author and advocate for the Catastrophism trope of history began enjoying far greater reach and influence, master of disaster Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, who was more or less single-handedly responsible for the triad of the most irresponsible, intractable themes in pseudoscience and pseudohistory that were still made to entertain today. The Minnesota congressmen published his signature volume in 1882, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, whose theories propelled the allegorical ideal Republic of Plato into a rather more literal interpretation of a lost continent and an advanced civilisation that ring the edges of our collective thoughts. Though the flooding of the Mediterranean took a mere instance in geological terms and perhaps the earliest ancestors of modern humans might have been witness to a time when the sea was a dry valley, the change certainly was not overnight nor generational. Most academics do not ascribe to the theory that change is driven by cataclysmic events over the gradual progression of nature, but by dint of the monomyth of a Great Flood—though I imagine that any flood can be privileged in the imagination of those who experienced it—and the fact that the City of Troy was being excavated and was not just a story after all, it all proved too tantalising and Donnelly was able to channel the populist movement in science and was also credited with giving rise to Mayan studies and mysticism through various citations of contemporary exhibitions.
No Ancient Aliens quite yet but we’re seeing what a fertile ground Donnelly is creating in the imagination of his readership. Encouraged by the reception of his first work, he followed on a year later with Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel that held that a near-collision with a comet was incident to history’s accidents, including the extinction of the woolly mammoth and the romancing of Norse mythology, and while somewhat resonant in other fields, if the Earth were subject to such formative, disruptive events, life would have never had the plateau of stability needed to develop into complex beings. Moreover, Donnelly’s writings were fraught with all sorts of fanciful racial ideas that some people will always latch on to as validating. Under a pseudonym, he also published a series of anti-globalist speculative fiction novels, Caesar’s Column, set in the post-apocalyptic ruins of America in 1980, informed by the Haymarket riots that had recently transpired in Chicago. Though we are all living with the legacy of Donnelly’s influence and appeal and many others championed these ideas, Donnelly was discredited in his own lifetime and never published again after a book tour in England where he tried to foist on the public his theory that Francis Bacon was the author of the canon of work attributed to William Shakespeare. The Britons were having none of that and shut him down.

ultramar

Though the people of Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the rest of the Caribbean will survive and come once again to thrive despite of Trump’s nihilistic disdain for brown people whose vote and adoration could never be curried in a way that counts with the help of individuals and the world, it is deeply shameful who the Dear Dotard would rather focus his efforts at driving yet another wedge through a precariously united society and fanning the flames of a culture war by politicising sportsball than spare a thought for his territories beyond the seas.
Apparently his reticence over the devastation that Hurricane Maria wrought and the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico—with a population of three and a half million American citizens (with an asterisk of course since they are mostly affiliated with the Democratic Party, non-Caucasian and they cannot vote in federal elections) was beginning to surpass the threshold of bad press as Trump started to terrorise and ingratiate himself on the island’s poor governor who is beholden to Trump’s whims now and in the future, who in turn praises the federal government for its aide, in the face of Trump begging off because of logistical challenges—the Atlantic Ocean. To redress this empathy deficit (and for whatever reason, Trump sees now as an appropriate time to raise the spectre of Puerto Rico’s already wrecked economy and its indebtedness to Wall Street) in the meantime, several cruise ships have been diverted and formed a flotilla to deliver vital food, water and supplies and ferry thousands back to the mainland. The extent of the damage and the hardships ahead are really yet to be fully formulated as there’s been little chance to survey and assess, and this recovery is not Dear Leader’s reality television—please don’t let this too become his show—but rather we pave the path to restore the lives and means of seeking a livelihood to the peoples of the Caribbean and to make this moment a pivot point where our compassion for one another and consideration of our choices for the planet and the climate come into sharper focus—with or without the leadership of America, which is sadly now, even in these moments of crisis that they’re supposed to be a source of reassurance, only a divisive force to play both sides against the middle.

console

We enjoyed pouring over these exacting, surreal schematic photographs of (mostly) Mid-Century Soviet æsthetic gallery of control rooms of power plants, flight towers and other utilities curated by Present /&/ Correct (sundries for the modern workspace) via Boing Boing. Unfortunately, there’s no captioning and not much further information to research, as we’d love confirmation that some of these spaces have been conserved (and I’m sure some have been) in their original state and still in use.

gyres and eddies

In order to draw attention to the daunting problem of oceanic pollution and the impending calamitous crisis of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a group of artists and activists are giving this whirling vortex of litter and plastic founded circa 1985 and the size of France all the trappings of statehood, with citizenship, passports, a flag, stamps and currency. On World Oceans Day observed a few months ago, the group applied on behalf of the Trash Isles to the United Nations for recognition and membership, in the hopes that with the primus inter pares effect, the world might start to take the problem with the severity it demands.