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TarzanThere is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic. |
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Thursday, July 8, 1999
Two years ago: Camping Day 2
It's frustrating for me that I've fallen so behind here, so I'm going to take a deep breath, and get back on the track.
We last saw Anita, Jack and Jack's daughter H---- tottering home exhausted from the fireworks over Elliot Bay. On Monday, Jack did his laundry, then the three of us went downtown to see Tarzan. Oh, man, that Tarzan is a hunk! I did enjoy it. Gorgeous animation, and I liked the voices.
Jack put off going back north until late in the day. "All we'd do up there is sit in a motel room!" he said, so delayed it as long as possible. I enjoyed having them here, but I didn't feel comfortable going to my computer and writing about spending time with Jack, when that meant not paying attention to him while he was actually available! My two guests finally left around eight o'clock, but I wasn't in the mood to write, by that time.
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Tuesday I got an interesting message from my friend, polymath Jon Singer. A very rare flower would be blooming on the University of Washington campus -- one of the largest "flowers" in the world -- and it would smell like rotting meat! (I use the quotes because it's really an inflorescence, or flowering body.) Here's what Jon wrote:
There is a peculiar aroid plant that grows in Sumatra. This plant is a huge bulb, which typically grows one leaf per year. When the leaf dies, the plant puts up another. A mature bulb puts up a leaf that looks rather like a small tree, with a stalk that is maybe 10 feet tall, and with similar spread.
When the bulb gets big enough (and we are talking in terms of hundreds of pounds here, at least for the largest ones), it may put up an inflorescence instead of a leaf. The inflorescence looks sort of like a huge shapeless putz in a tutu. (A really large one can be more than ten feet tall, and this is the largest known "flower" in the world.)
It is pollinated by some sort of carrion beetle, so it stinks wretchedly. (Two years ago, at Kew Gardens, 30,000 people came to see one of their plants bloom. It didn't stink much, and almost everyone was disappointed. I think one flowered at the New York Botanical Garden last year and was, uhh, powerfully fragrant, much to the delight of the botanists there and of many small children.)
The plant is known in nature only in Sumatra (though it has smaller relatives, which I presume are known from various places), and is, even now, not particularly common in cultivation. It has been flowered in captivity (so to speak) only 8 or 9 times in this century, most recently a fortuitous double flowering at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.
The largest bulb of Amorphophallus titanum at the Botany Department greenhouse at the University of Washington has put up a flower, and if it didn't open yesterday evening, many of you may have a chance to see it. (This msg is primarily going to people in the Seattle area.) This is the first time that A. titanum has ever flowered west of St. Louis, MO, on this continent.
When I was there yesterday afternoon, the thing was 70" tall. It seems to be growing about 2" per day at this point, and is coloring up quite nicely. Doug Ewing, the fellow who runs the greenhouse, says that the flower typically opens in late afternoon, a process that takes about 6 hours. As it opens it heats up, and as it heats up it stinks. (There may be more than one period of heat generation and smell.) They also flowered a smaller relative about three days ago, which Doug says smelled more or less like the stuff they put in natural gas so you'll know if you've got a leak. That flower is salmon-colored and about a foot tall. It's rather pretty. I sniffed at it, but the scent had dissipated. (They do have a number of fragrant orchids that you can sniff if you like sniffing things. Some of them smell like a wet cucumber, but some are rather sweet and pleasant.)
I intend to be at the Botany greenhouse around 4pm today to see how things are progressing. There's no guarantee about when the flower opens, but it clearly won't be too many more days, and could easily be today if it didn't already do its little thing last night.
I didn't get a chance to go see the flower, because I wanted to go to the special dance/practice or practice/dance that the Savoy Swing Club was holding. This Tuesday night event was being held because the club is committed to renting the Russian Center every Tuesday night, including those Tuesday nights between class sessions. There had been a lot of brainstorming on an email list connected with the club about the best way to use this time slot. We have a Friday night practice every week, but some folks said they can't make it on Fridays. Others are too shy, as beginners, to attend the club's monthly dances, or go out dancing to some other place. So this event was created to bridge that gap.
I hope some of those folks actually turned up! The dance was fun, though rather warm. Karen Holt, one of the organizers, was shocked by the heat, but it wasn't any warmer than any summer night at that hall. I think the only thing I'd have changed was to not have such a long lesson-time in the middle; that really broke my dance momentum, although the subject was a good one (the Jitterbug Stroll, a swing type of line dance) and the teacher, Guy Caridi, was very good, and very generous to donate his efforts.
I left a few minutes before ten o'clock, unfortunately forgetting the club t-shirt I had just bought, darn it! I walked home down Fifteenth, looking back over my shoulder very often to see if the bus was on its way. I made the right choice by keeping on walking; for once, the bus didn't pass me on its way, so if I'd waited at the stop, I'd still have been there at the time I got home, if that makes sense.
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I had a meeting today for an exciting project outside of work; but I can't say much about it, yet (ha! I'm such a tease).
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Columbine, of Scherzi & Sospiri (and that's one of the more difficult titles to spell if one isn't Italian or Musical -- and have you seen the new domain for Michael Brown's "My Life" journal aka beathappening? http://maupuia.com/mylife/, indeed!) has been talking about what she likes to talk about. Or hear about. My thought, when she said, "I don't want to talk about daily life. I hate talking about daily life," and implied that she didn't want to hear about problems unless it was by way of asking for ideas or assistance -- "Ah, how very Thinking of her." This is proverbially a problem with male/female communication, but it's not always gendered that way. Women engineers have said to me, "I get so tired of talking with Z about topic XX, when zie doesn't want to consider ways to make the situation better!"
But since that entry, Columbine has expanded on this in several ways, and it seems that the real question is what she thinks that friends want to talk about with her. I think.
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