Columbus Circle

There was a cool scene from Taxi Driver where they frame the Senator Palantine during one of his speeches at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, with his arms raised matching the statue, but both heads being cropped out of the picture, to show Travis' disconnect from the rest of the world. But I went by and took a few pictures of the zone for myself. The first two are of the same statue, Columbus, but from different angles:

The specific statue from Taxi Driver:

Going for a taste?

Who gets it?

Me and my Wire references...

Taking Pictures of my Computer Screen

The above picture is of my computer screen as I examine Google Maps. It was late at night and I was trying to get a sense of my morning bike ride. I ride from the white arrow on the right hand side to the whitish patch a half-inch away from the pen's point.

Sometime soon I'll have some better pictures of this area, otherwise known as "The 'Hood".

Shrike's Spikes

Sometimes I get maybe too into a subject. I'll spend hours reading about it online, and usually relay ideas here or work them into different aspects of other pieces I'm working on. One thing you learn if you're like that--having an insatiable thirst for knowledge and data--is that there's always something else cool that you've never heard of.

I've typed plenty of words over my plenty of blogs about the extant dinosauria--birds. I, like so many others, am intrigued by birds. On Netflix we found a BBC documentary series on birds, eight or nine episodes, and having watched them, another crazy piece of bird knowledge was bestowed upon my humble head.

Shrikes. I had never heard of the shrike, a series of passerine birds. Passerines are the perching-birds, but you would easily recognize other members as crows and ravens and jays and cardinals.

One of the crazy things about shrikes, though, is that they have a special way of storing food:

They leave their dead and/or dying prey impaled on thorn bushes or barbed-wire fencing or other sharp objects. They do it to bugs and lizards and small mammals, like the above I nabbed from a Google search.

How had I never come across shrikes before?

Not Quite Babylonian Gardens...

...But we have some hanging produce:

The large tomato plant that starred in my Lonely Harvest post has grown through the wire grating even more, and the weight of the tomato currently growing from it has caused this dangling look. I took the above picture from the street looking up at the balcony.

Balcony Blueberries Update

These guys are coming along nicely, if slowly:

The bigger ones are starting to get blue. Exciting times, indeed.

Dinosaur Tree 2

This post is a sequel to a post from June of 2009, a post about the non-flowering living fossil Ginko Biloba trees that find themselves all around the world.

Down here in the Long Beach corner of Southern California, in my neighborhood there are two different examples of more or less living fossil trees/plants.

The first they have along Broadway in some decorative locations. They are the fern trees:

Ferns are some of the oldest plants that aren't mosses. They don't respawn themselves from seed, rather they use especially tiny spores and the wind to replicate themselves. Having been around for hundreds of millions of years, they predate both the conifers and the flowering plants by many eons.

The view of the center of the fern, where new arms unfurl themselves is one of the recognizable characteristics of ferns.

The next plant is more of a small tree, but given enough time it could grow into what we today consider "tree-size". It's so ancient that it just does its own thing, and today we think it's small relative to the conifers and flowering trees that came later, and even smaller than the fern-trees from above. It's not older than ferns, but is older than conifers and flowering plants, and only related to seeded plants from very far back. I'm talking about cycads:

They look similar to palms, but have tougher fronds built of conifer-like waxy needles. The tips are sharp and annoying, and near the base of each fronds stalk are a series of serrated edges, making it a formidable plant indeed. The trunk, which may be hard to see here, is similar to the fern-tree.

The fronds don't really unfurl the way the fern's do, but they do propagate from the center. This plant, and others in the cycadia family, developed maybe one-hundred-fifty-million years ago in order to survive big, tough plant eating dinosaurs. The dinosaurs, in-turn, evolved into even tougher plant eaters, and the biggest and baddest digesters in the world aty the time, the triceratops and ankylosaurs of the later Cretacious, right before the extinction event 65 MYA, were able to digest this pointy wonder.

Today they grow naturally in random spots around the world, in Africa and South America. But they are hardy and look nice, and they have been used as decorative plants on more than a few occasions. The one I took pictures of is outside the four-plex I live in.

Also, in 2011, in the post about Zilker Prehistoric Garden in Austin, I incorrectly call the cycad that's growing out of a rock "an ancient palm". Cycads and palms are only very loosely related and developed similar looks through separate lines of evolution.