Dog Vomit Slime Mold Fuligo septica

 That's what I have in my flowers/bushes in front of our condo.  I took a photo and posted it on Facebook. Someone identified it. It's bright yellow early in the morning. It even has a Latin name, and was identified and named in the 1700s.

Dog Vomit Slime Mold (Fuligo septica) · iNaturalist

Folklore

In Scandinavian folklore, Fuligo septica is identified as the vomit of troll cats.[18]

In Finland, F. septica was believed to be used by witches to spoil their neighbors' milk. This gives it the name paranvoi, meaning "butter of the familiar spirit".[8][19] In Dutch, "heksenboter" refers to "witches' butter". In Latvian, the slime mold (amongst other slime molds) is called "ragansviests" as "witches' butter" or "raganu spļāviens" as "witches' spit" but it is unclear about the origins of these names.

Human pathogenicity

The species is known to trigger episodes of asthma and allergic rhinitis in susceptible people. [20][21]

Lakeside 2019, Week 3

I loved our cute hydrangeas that Loretta planted for us last summer, but they didn't make it through the winter.  She said she had something that would work better, but it was such a cold and rainy spring, they didn't get planted.  Well, the first day of summer came, it was getting hot so I took things into my own hands, which have 2 brown thumbs, and I fixed those hydrangeas with $5 blooms from Wal-Mart.  I'm also wearing my $5 hat from Wal-Mart to shade me on my walks and protect me from dive-bombing mother birds that attack.  However, about 3 hours later, Loretta showed up with two new bushes (I have no idea what they are), so I've already had to transplant my fake flowers to the back of the house.

2019  

 

2018

The rest of the plants are doing so-so, but since July is almost here, I was hoping for more oomph.

 

 

Tonight's program is Michael Stanley and band, a Cleveland group from the 80s which our daughter has heard of but we haven't.  Last night was "Six Appeal" an a cappella group from Minnesota. This is the week of July 4 and this year we won't have anyone with us.  Bob is thinking of marching in the parade with the Guys' Club.  It's a long walk. And not much fun to watch alone.

The programming for the lecture series is on Artificial Intelligence with David Staley, Director of the Humanities Institute, OSU and something on capitalism by same speaker.  We'll be gone Tuesday for a quick trip back to Columbus.  Chef Stacy will be back on Friday for another cooking lecture. 

David Staley giving a Ted Talk about Columbus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=20&v=SXYh3F4-_ko

3678

Lest we diverge from the evolution party line

The Feb. 15 issue of Nature (445/7129) has an interesting article on the plants native to South Africa's Cape region. There are more than 9,000 plant species, 6,000 found in no other country in the world, and most of those are in the western region. Compare this to the entire area of the British Isles which is home to about 1500 plant species.

There seems to be some fear by the author that a person might conclude such fantastic variety, beauty and diversity were designed by a mind larger and more complex than ours rather than just happening by accident over a few million years. The terms "evolutionary approach," "evolutionary isolation," "evolutionary tree linking," and "bouts of evolution," appeared once; "evolutionary heritage," "evolutionary radiations," "evolutionary tree," and "evolutionary diversity," appeared twice; but the phrase "evolutionary divergence," (which reminds me of idiopathic, meaning "we don't know why this happened") appears 10 times in the article. And it isn't even a very long article!

Monday Memories

Monday Memories

Did I ever tell you about my green thumb?

On one of my parents’ visits (they lived in Illinois and we live in Ohio) when our children were about 4 and 5, my mother gave them each a small potted houseplant. I think they may have been starts from her kitchen window collection. I'm absolutely terrible with plants, but these two little things (I never took them out of their original pots and have no idea what they are called) managed to survive on my window sill at our house for over 30 years. They always looked just awful, but they were alive, and I admired their spunk.

People who knew about plants would pause at the window and try to snip off a few dead leaves and make suggestions like, "Why are you binding up their poor little feet in those small pots," or "Have you thought about fertilizer, moving them, trimming them, etc." But the two little plants just kept on keeping on, year after year, through pre-school, grade school, high school, birthday parties, prom dates, family crises, the kids moving out and finally moving on to their own marriages and homes and coming back to visit. In fact, those poor little scruffy, pitiful, limp plants sat on the window sill through two wedding brunches, in 1993 and 1998 (one described last week).

Before we moved to the condo in 2002 I gave one plant to my son, who seems to know about how to encourage green things. He even has a cactus collection; flowers bloom around his mailbox. The other one I put in the stairwell for a bit of greenery that wasn't artificial. Every now and then I'd bring it to the kitchen so it could look out the window, but there really is no place for plants in this kitchen. In general, condos are a bit light-deprived. Our house had 34 windows; the condo has maybe 10.

In mid-May of 2002 the remaining stunted, deprived plant started to falter. When I returned home from my parents' burial (Mom died in 2000 and Dad in 2002, but they were interred together) in late May I thought maybe it needed more sun since it had been accustomed to an east window at our house. So I put it outside in the covered entry area--you know--fresh air, sunshine. It works for people.

It continued to wilt, obviously in the throes of a death struggle. One little vine was left with green leaves among some sticks. After 32 years, I actually bought a bag of potting soil--something I'd never done when the little twig still had a chance. I moved it to a larger pot and put it on the deck on the north side to see if I could encourage it. But I think it knew its job was over.

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