savage garden

These flowers with up-turned petals that hide their plant-business below are a variety of Alpen-glöckchen (Soldanella, little coins in Latin but I guess in English, they're known as snowbells) remind me of the piranha plants of Super Mario Brothers. They unfortunately are rather delicate and fussy things and tend not to do well in captivity. Another long-term inmate is blooming upside-down, whose made of sturdier stuff, more adapted to neglect and smothering, with an ugly little flower unfolding. This Zanzibar Gem (Zamioculcas zamiifolia—also called the ZZ Plant, a Zamie or eine Glücksfeder) or most-fittingly the Eternity Plant.
Though not a tuber, like a potato or a tulip, it forms bulbous reservoirs of water at its base that can (within reason) be either stored for drier times or squished, transmuted into leaf-form in response to the environment—or the watering-can. H had had one for years that I fawned over and over-watered but I am glad we have an understudy doing well. Not that I mind these untraditional flowers one bit, but I had the notion that house-plants that require a certain maturity before blooming, unlike the weird probing cactus, the baobab trees and the giant schefflera that has been proudly sprouting these little giraffe horns every year since would only do it once and take a rest from such activities.

photo-bomb or underwater

In the proud tradition of Cake Wrecks, which received a restraining order probably like this tumble-blog to cease and desist for poking fun at laziness and sloppiness, there is a fascinating collect of horrendous real estate photographs. Seeing these choice examples, some of which are not too far away from unenticing and rather inexplicable advertisements that we've encountered ourselves.
These disasters, with funny commentary included, do not just come from severely distressed markets or places with such a housing-storage that the mere whisper would draw interest but rather from contributors and readers of classifieds all over the world, and it makes me wonder if the down-swing in the housing-market isn't also due too bad presentation. There were too many awful and awkward pictures to list, causing genuine curiosity about what was hoped to convey by framing these images, and one should browse through the gallery in order to check the reputation of your scout and agent.

hanging gardens

Though with certainly no mad intent to improve upon or replace nature on the sizable green reserves of one of the world's last few city-states, Singapore has erected these giant supertrees in a park as a breathtaking backdrop with a bridge and paths for tourists a hundred meters above the natural canopy for the surrounding skyscrapers. These other-worldly artificial trees do not only have a photovoltaic array to help power the nearby office buildings but also provide a protective cage for fostering vines, orchids, and other rare creeping plants in a trellis that makes a sort of bundle of living cables. Be sure to check out the link for a gallery of amazing pictures of the supertrees and the Flower Dome of Singapore.

raubgold or double-quick time

After studying a cipher subtly scribbled on a music score, a Dutch film-maker and musician is convinced that the lost cashe of Nazi treasure is buried somewhere under the town of Mittenwald, in the Isar valley and near Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Austrian border—Der Spiegel International reports. Although the treasure-hunter's focus is not exactly the stuff of the Da Vinci Code, the patriotic march having not been composed as a vehicle for hiding in plain sight and transmitting secrets, but rather a collection of documents thought to be from the personal secretary of Adolf Hitler (though a chain-of-custody has not been established with certainty), which includes a copy of the sheet-music foot-noted that supposedly point to the exact location of the hidden, legendary Alpine treasure-trove. Preliminary excavations are underway in Mittenwald and although nothing might be unearthed, the notion has a lot of people intrigued.