saplings or wingdings

While on our recent holiday in France, we noticed quite a few very majestic trees that ornamented the campsites and other grounds. Judging from the seed-pods, I thought they were perhaps vanilla but a friendly British couple told us that they believed they were Indian Bean Trees. We brought home the gossamer seeds from an old husk and set them aside for a few weeks. Meanwhile, I began noticing several cultivars, especially around Wiesbaden.
The plant is native to the American south—that sort of Indian, and with the taxonomical designation of Catalpa bignoniodes after the Muskogee and Cherokee for it, wing-headed for the distinctive shape of their big, heart-shaped leaves, which unusually secrete their own nectar. The wood of the tree was chiefly used for railroad ties, as it was solid and resistant to rotting. H did a bit of research, and after a patient few days (approximately a week before the first green shoots appeared, being kept in terrarium-like, hot-house conditions), we started to get a few seedlings, and then more and more. I know that one day, they’ll out-grow house and home but we’ll be sure that there’s a little grove of them in the future.

standard-bearer

Although the team comprised of refugees and asylum-seekers competing for the first time on the world stage in the Olympics marched under the banner of the Olympic flag, accompanied by the anthem of the Games, a group called Refugee Nation founded under the auspices of Amnesty International has commissioned a flag for these forcibly displaced peoples in orange and black, recalling the life-vests that saved many on their dangerous and desperate crossing and the many lives lost on the journey. The organization hopes that this will be a symbol of solidarity and good will after the event ends and the immigration crisis continues.

goldilocks

With understandably more exuberance than expected an as yet to be confirmed finding, Der Spiegel’s English edition is reporting that astronomers may have detected an exoplanet (not such a novelty these days with over three thousand verified sightings and a conservative estimate of a billion planets in our galaxy) with a proximity to its host star that we believe would create conditions ideal for life as we know it (there are dozens of these candidates as well—not to be sniffy about it), and lastly the possible planet was spied just in the star system closest to us.
When I first saw the headline, I admit that I kind of dismissed it—vaguely remembering, as Universe Today expands on, that we had found a planet already four years ago in this projection of the constellation Centaurus that we would aim to reach, with the technology of yesterday, within the next fifty years. Supposedly sighted by the same Chilean observatory under the auspices of the European Space Agency, the article quotes unnamed sources ahead of the official announcement to come within days. The 2012 detection was found to be a false-positive though I don’t remember anyone rolling back the fanfare—and probably rightly so, and although the astronomy community is cautious, that did not stop the writer from speculating on the types of flora and fauna that might thrive there, under the feeble light of the red dwarf, Proxima Centauri. We will be spacefarers no matter the outcome, but having a port on the horizon this tantalisingly close is a great motivator.  Be sure to watch for the announcement; watch the skies. 

5x5

hop’n gator: interesting trivia about Gatorade and beer and their short-lived unholy merger

enter the dragon: the philosophical notebooks of Bruce Lee

 lullaby: parent finches signal to the unhatched broods about global warming

unwaxed: maybe there are benefits to flossing after all, if our simian friends are so keen to do it

history, ink: an interesting look at the last surviving tattoo parlour in Jerusalem that original catered to medieval pilgrims to the Holy Land