Siargao Zingiber Project - 1

Following on from my Pano'on 1 and Pano'on 2 posts, I've got all enthused about ginger plants.

It seems, according to John Mood, a 20-year expert on ginger (Zingiber) plant taxonomy, that we may just have a new species on our hands.

Here, it's called kayaskason, and it's very common. John asked me to preserve the leaves and inflorescence (a la herbarium, pressed between newspaper sheets). This is a bit difficult, because we don't get newspapers hereabouts, and the big fruits don't really press very well.
However, I'll do my best.

I proposed, very strongly, based on the first specimens that Ron brought to me, that the damned plant didn't have flowers.

But it does.

Here's a picture of one, a bud popped into a vase of water at 5pm and open and greedy at 7pm.

I'm not a botanist, so I really didn't know that my photo was upside down.

It looked extraordinarily like the face of one of the local horseshoe bats. Even down to the two very small 'eyes' either side of its 'nose'.

Now, if I was a bat, I'd visit this flower, and land on the strong stem just behind it. Then I'd bend over, and find I was facing the thing upside down. I would be doing 69 face to face with a friend from another biological kingdom.

Probably, I'd lap up all the ants crawling around the nectar, and then lap up some of the delectable stuff for myself.

Pornography - Some Observations

I don't like pornography - at least, I don't like the stuff that's peddled for inadequates on the internet and in those top-shelf magazines in plastic bags.

If I want to see a c**t in all its great wonder, I really don't have to go to a Broadway movie house, as I once did, to be confronted by a magnified vagina in full, glorious, slippery Technicolor, forty feet high.

I can buy a girl in Cebu for less than the price of a 'Playboy' magazine, and see for myself.

But I do like subtle, arousing (in all the best senses, physical as well as sensual, spiritual, etc, etc) stories and pictures that lead me on to think and feel more ... and more.

One of the very first genuinely porno film scenes I ever saw (in the sense that it aroused real physical feelings in me, not just prurient ones) was the scene in Tom Jones (1963) where Albert Finney and Joyce Redman dine together. Their lip-smacking, smirking attention to each other, while they were only eating something, gave more than a few hints, and stimuli for the imagination, than could any pictures of 40ft high c**ts.

That wonderful scene can be seen here

Amimintiks Can See Round Light & 100,000 Colours

Update: 9 July 2008.

Original post here.

I've just learned that my tasty crustacean doesn't have quite the fastest movement of any animal (some ant can snap its jaws faster) but it is the only animal known to see Circular Polarised Light.

The story (I missed it when it came out in March) is at the Wired Science blog.

If you want to know what Circular Polarised Light is, then look at a related news story by the same writer, Brandon Keim, at Wired Science, where this photo came from.

Next time I get some, I'll look 'em right in the eyes before I cook ém.