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That feeling when
you’re watching an unredeemably awful show and find yourself emotionally invested in shipping two of the characters. (Yeah, just…around episode 9 of Ikkitousen I want Ryomou and Hakufu to ditch this lousy show and run away together. (I even want it enough to come to Tumblr and admit to willingly having watched nine and counting full episodes of fucking Ikkitousen.))
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Opuntia violacea “Santa Rita”
The name of a purple Prickly Pear cactus in my cactus garden. According to the tag, the pads turn a more intense purple whenever the plant is “under stress”. And being ‘under stress’ from drought is just part of being a cactus, in the same way that being “under stress” is part of being a retaining wall or a supporting beam. Still, what the tag seems to say is “the more miserable your plant is, the better it will look”. The plant equivalent of Phalaris’ bull.
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More adventures in organic gardening
My grandmother has something of a problem with feral cats invading her yard, which bring fleas, which then infest the lawn and bite her whenever she goes out. She never uses pesticides of any sort on her plants, which is probably a good idea, but the fleas are really getting to be too much, so I got a package of nematodes a few days ago. Going to apply them to her lawn tomorrow evening, and hope they’re effective. Even in this heat, even with a pretty severe infestation.
And my war on the squash borers continues. I found a wound in the stem of one of my plants this afternoon, and sluiced it out with both BT from a spray bottle and BT in a syringe. If there was a caterpillar in there, I can’t imagine it survived. (My garden time these days is a lot of huddling over in the grass with a pile of Q-tips and syringes and chemicals. (Organic chemicals/bacteria/creatures in liquid suspension, that is, but still.))
That said, the summer squash variety called “Tatume”, seems to be a relatively tough little fucker so far. The stems on the other summer squashes are big and juicy and spongy and, frankly, fragile; the Tatume have smaller, smoother, woodier stems and I have yet to see any holes in ‘em. The Tatume also don’t have a bush-type growth habit, which I, uh, didn’t expect. They’re sending out big long runners in all directions, which I’m having to redirect and unwind from neighboring plants. Still, the more stems they have, the better chance they have to survive a borer attack, seems to me.
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It’s titledThey Die By Dawn- described as a western featuring black cowboys, conceived and directed byJeymes Samuel of The Bullitts (a collaborative group of artists - both music and film - headed by Samuel).
And you’ll be impressed with this all-star cast forThey Die By Dawn:Idris Elba,Jesse Williams,Michael K. Williams,Isaiah Washington,Bokeem Woodbine,Clifton Powell,Harry Lennix,Denzel Whitaker,Roger Guenveur Smith, Rosario Dawson,Kelly Hu, Shanola Hampton,Erykah Badu, and others.
But it’s not a feature film unfortunately; it’s a short (I don’t have length info yet).
The film is reportedly based on a series of real-life stories.
Here’s the synop:
Four outlaws with a bounty on each head, set a date for a shootout in Langston, Oklahoma. The last man takes the collective bounty. Violence and mayhem ensue.
Info is limited at the moment, but I did find one profile of The Bullitts that said the project“aims to intertwine narrative, suspense and music into one studio development.” In essence, they plan to make a film :)
I’m definitely curious what Samuel is cooking up here, especially with this cast.
The film is currently in production, with shooting apparently already underway - if not very soon to be - in Melody Ranch, Los Angeles.
Rosario Dawson tweeted the pictures above and below of some of the cast members in costume, on set.
Read more at ONTD:http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/69391287.html#cutid1#ixzz1wSL8tsYOOkay. Who knew about this and DIDN’T TELL ME IMMEDIATELY?
Tumblr, we’re obviously going to have to double feature this with Django Unchained.
Anyone who wants a piece of this will have to get in line behind me.
Oooooooooh. I DO WANT. (I have a guilty love of Westerns. Wish this were going to be feature length, but regardless. YES.)
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Peter Cushing
Vincent Price
Christopher Lee
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May 25, 1989
I love that this Tumblr exists.
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From an honest to god tax lawyer billboard ad in Rockwall, Texas
“Ready to pay your ‘fair share’?
We didn’t think so.” -
I’ve seen enoughThis isn’t phallic at all.
hentaiCaravaggio paintings to know where this is going.(via ladysisyphus)
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awwwww
Got back a letter in response to my inquiry of Cross Roads, Texas, one of a list of places in the county too tiny to have (or at least reliably respond to) e-mail, so that I visited ‘em in person. The only construction permit they issued in January 2011 was for a single solar panel installation on the roof of someone’s house.
Their town hall, when I visited it last week, was about dentist’s office-sized and staffed by two ladies and a grey cat.
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Castor bean: DO NOT EAT
Just planted two castor bean plants, from which you get both castor oil and ricin, in an open area where I can keep an eye on ‘em. This’ll be nightmare fuel for days.
Kinda surprised that the nursery I got them from, which is a pretty reputable place that’s gotten big in the area marketing organic gardening classes and selling chickens and that sort of wholesome thing…not only didn’t keep them behind glass in a locked cabinet like aerosol spray paint in the art store, but didn’t even mention anywhere on the label or the sign that these little guys were “THE WORLD’S MOST POISONOUS PLANT”.
Of course, that last is A. from USA Today and B. from 2006 and the angle they were pushing was terrorists are coming for your landscape plants. On a more reasonable note, the seeds are the most poisonous part of the plant, and you can avoid having to worry about those by just deadheading the spent flowers rather than allowing them to develop into pods. (Still pretty horrifying to read the castor bean section on, I think, Dave’s Garden, with at least one person asking what they should do if they wanted to make lotion from the deadly seeds, should they just, you know, mash up these seeds in a blender? WTF NO DON’T DO THAT.)
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For folks interested in drawing more complex backgrounds
So, lately I’ve been learning how to really use Illustrator, for the purposes of making maps, and playing with information exported from GIS software.
But for the drawing I do for fun (and post here) — Illustrator’s perspective guide tool is also proving very, very handy. You can take something you’ve drawn in Photoshop, and then where in Photoshop you might have used the pen tool to make sure all your parallel lines converge to a single point — you can instead import a copy of your drawing into Illustrator, and use their perspective guide tool to fix your perspective. Then, once you’ve drawn all your architecture/background as vector paths in Illustrator, you can move those paths back into Photoshop and add whatever stroke you want to them there.
There are some great instructional videos on Illustrator and the perspective guide function in particular at this link. (Just keep clicking back to the older pages for all of them.)
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squash blogging
Well, I gave in and drenched all my squash plants in Bacillus thuringensis v. kurstaki bacterial spray. Went back again to wipe the stems free of borer eggs today, and not only were there a crapload more eggs, but there were more and deeper small wounds in the stems. THOSE BASTARDS.
I’d have preferred to stick with nothing stronger than insecticidal soap and clove oil, but this stuff still counts as ‘organic’, as I understand it. I mean, I remember reading about it in Organic Gardening magazine when I was a kid. At least, it’s not poisonous to humans. I understand that the main worry is environmental; that in the process of spraying for pest caterpillars, you’ll catch the food plants for other, possibly endangered, butterfly species as well. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do this; my milkweed and parsley are not near the squash (the snapdragon vines, which the Buckeye butterflies eat, are—in case of blowback from the sprayer I may want to wash them off tomorrow morning when I water), and I was using a tiny leaky nearly useless half gallon hand sprayer pointed straight down at the ground a couple feet away (and then a little hand spray bottle when the sprayer gave out), not a North by Northwest style crop duster.
I’ll be washing and rewashing my hands a bit for the next few hours, of course, just because (seriously, though, you’re supposed to be able to eat vegetables sprayed with this stuff with no ill effects), but if the squash survive the season this year, it will all have been worth it.
Next stage, if caterpillar damage continues, I inject this stuff straight into the hollow stems of the squash. (I had no luck trying to buy a syringe from the local pharmacy, though. Attempted to explain that I wanted to use it on my plants, but just got weird looks. Got a marinade injector instead, but that needle’s awfully thick.)
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Further adventures in watching terrible ecchi and moeshit for the lesbians
I may just try watching the first episode of Ikkitousen. Mostly because Ryomou is most awfully good looking, but also because something utterly brainless sounds good right about now.
(I assure you, whatever it may do, it can’t possibly out-sleaze Seikon no Qwaser.)
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mfw
Yeah, this was me this afternoon. (If you’ve never seen Arachnophobia—why on earth haven’t you?) There was less rubber and pesticide and more tweezers and Q-tips and peroxide.
If you don’t know what a squash borer is, you’ve probably never tried raising zucchini (or any other summer or winter squash). Squash borers are the reason why your zucchini plant suddenly mysteriously keels over dead one day and you don’t know why—they lay eggs inside the stems and then the caterpillar bores its way out. It’s kinda like Alien. No, it’s exactly like Alien.
I’ve got 6 or 7 of the cutest little squash plants, just reaching the age when they start to bloom. And the hell of it is, a few days ago I saw the cutest little red-furred and blue iridescent winged fat little moth sitting on top of one of them, and because I didn’t know what it was, I just picked it up and admired it, then let it go. IDK if my inherent love of caterpillars and all lepidoptera could have moved me to actually step on the thing, if I had known then what I know now—that it was an adult squash borer moth—but it would have been close.
MY EVIL NEMESIS CAN’T POSSIBLY BE THIS FUZZY
So anyhow, the bases of almost all of the plants were studded with tiny brown eggs, and I scrubbed them furiously with the Q-tip and the peroxide until I’d gotten all the eggs off. Still have a terrible feeling that my plants are now full of squash plant chest-bursters, but hopefully enough constant vigilance and daily tweezing and scrubbing will save at least some of them.
I’ve heard good things about using Sevin or other noxious chemicals to kill borers, of course, but I’m not about to do that.
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Oh, and the name “DISH”
Turns out it was renamed. It used to be called “Clark”…though it seems it only existed under that name for 5 years previous to the renaming: it was first incorporated in 2000, renamed in 2005. So it’s not an old city by any means, but its creation as a city did precede the corporate sponsorship. From the Wikipedia entry on DISH (And yes, the ALLCAPS is official.)
DISH is a town in Denton County, Texas, United States. The town had an estimated population of 218 on July 1, 2009, according to the United States Census Bureau.[1] This community, established in June 2000, was originally named Clark. In November 2005, the community accepted an offer to rename itself “DISH” (all capital letters) as part of a commercial agreement with a satellite television company.[2] The municipality was previously named after its founder, Landis Clark, who incorporated it in June 2000 and served as its first mayor. Clark was beaten by one vote in the spring 2005 election by Bill Merritt. In exchange for renaming the town, all residents of the town have received free basic television service for ten years and a free DVR from Dish Network. There was no formal opposition to renaming Clark; twelve citizens attended the council meeting to support the measure. In the January 10, 2006, episode of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, correspondent Ed Helms produced a news segment about DISH.
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