Wednesday Wings

Bee on purple aster

Bees and I share a passion for asters

Today’s Wednesday Wings is the other kind of wings, the one on insects. We’re having a wonderful September or a way too hot one, and at least the bees are enjoying it.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

White butterfly on purple flowers

Way too light. See the opposite of a black hole in shape of a butterfly

Bumblebee in purple flower

Can’t show you my face, I’m eating

Yes, we’ve got tons of golden rod here as well. The bees seem to like it

Bee on golden rod

No easy picture taking as the wind was gently blowing

Bee on succulent

Bzzzzzzzzzz

Bumblebee on purple aster

What does the colour look like to a bee?

Bougainvillea

Nightjar has submitted absolutely gorgeous Bougainvillea pictures with a short story with a question at the end. To which my answer is YES.

I let Nightjar take from here:

Last week as I looked through the window I saw a lady that lives a few streets away from me pointing her phone at my front door, as if taking a picture. I was confused at first, but then I realised what was likely going on. Our Bougainvillea is putting on quite a show this year, hanging from the balcony and almost completely covering our front door in a ridiculous abundance of pink. In fact, there is no way she was taking a photo of anything else, because everything else is under that pink cover. So later that day, I decided to go out and take a few pictures myself. Now let me ask you, if you were passing by my house and saw this, wouldn’t you be tempted to stop for a few shots too?

©Nighjar, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Tree Tuesday

These photos were sent in by Opus and were taken in a bristlecone pine grove near Lone Pine, California. I think they make a brilliant set. Their beauty is stark and tortured and they evoke feelings of tenderness and vulnerability in me. Well captured, Opus. I’m so glad you shared them. Thanks.

©Opus, all rights reserved

©Opus, all rights reserved

©Opus, all rights reserved

Anatomy Atlas Part 23 – Circulatory System

We looked at our heart, but not at all the piping connected to it. There is rather a lot of it and this picture shows only a very, very small part.

There will be talk about testicles, read at your peril.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Whilst the air pipes in the lungs are optimized for keeping constant pressure, for veins and arteries this is not the case. Perhaps there is less selective pressure for optimisation, or it is not possible to achieve? I do not know. The truth is however that there are a number of sub-optimal divisions and loops and one of them is so peculiar that once you learn about it, you will not forget it.

Professor Kos explained to us, that one such badly optimised division is at least in part responsible for the fact that one testicle is usually lower than the other, and the one that is lower is usually the left one. When you look at the picture at the right side and follow the vena cava inferior down from the heart past venae hepaticae you will come to a cross junction where from it split two venae renalis. And looking further down you will find out that venae testicularis do not both split of from the vena cava inferior symmetrically, but vena testicularis sinistra splits of from venna renalis at a near right angle. That is bad engineering – right angles mean loss of pressure automatically.

However when looking at the left side, where arteries are depicted, both arteriae testicularis split symmetrically and directly from arteria abdominalis at an angle in the direction of the blood flow.

This means that whilst fresh blood supply for both testicles through arteries is about equal, the outflow via veins is not. That means different blood flow rates through the testicles, leading to their different sizes and also different position. Because testicles regulate their temperature (which has to be lower than body temperature) via positioning, and this way the left testicle has to hang lower in order to keep the same temperature as the right one.

Sometimes It Happens…

… that a real sunset looks so cheesy you would think reality has no style whatsoever. I glanced out of the window before going to bed and I had to try and make some pictures, the sky was unreal.

Pictures straight from the camera, no adjustments, only resized.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.


Jack’s Walk

September Daisies, ©voyager, all rights reserved

Pink, ©voyager, all rights reserved

I’ve been waiting for these little daisies to bloom for almost 2 weeks and I’d about given up on them. Every day I’d see one or two small flowers open here or there, but not really together and no big show. Imagine my surprise then this morning finding the whole patch blooming at once with their shiny pink faces cheerfully aimed at the sun. Ha! I say to Autumn…not yet, not yet.

Harakka Island – Chapter 7

When we last left Ice Swimmer’s series Harakka an Island we were at the top of the island. Where to next Ice Swimmer?

 

Chapter 7 – Back from the Top and Downhill

 

 

1. View East from the Laboratory Front Yard, ©Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved

Now we’re back from the top of the island, in the front yard of the Artists’ Building, looking east, the pier is behind the red wooden buildings. We’ll go a bit south and go down the hill back towards the crossroads.

 

2. Down to the Crossroads, ©Ice Swimmer all rights reserved

We’re going down the same road we got up to the Artists’ Building. The history exhibition building is to the left and the pier from which we came is on the other side of the crossroads. We’ll be going to the right from the crossroads, to the south.

(link to previous post, Harakka an Island, Chapter 6)

Mushroom!

Kestrel was mushroom hunting one of her finds turned out to be quite interesting. I will let her take over from here.

©kestrel, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

 

I went on a foray looking for mushrooms and noticed this. It’s a hump in the duff, right in the middle of the photo.

 

It’s hard to see what might be in there! I went around to the other side of this shrump (a hump in the duff where a mushroom is emerging).

 

That looks pretty exciting. I cleared away some of the debris to see better what was in there.

 

Aha! It’s Hypomyces lactifluorum, also called the Lobster Mushroom. It’s so fascinating: this is a parasitic mold attacking another mushroom. The original mushroom is Russula brevipes (Short Stemmed Russula) which although edible, is rather bland and crumbly. H. lactiflulorum attacks and parasitizes it, causing it to become dense and firm. They are often quite large.

Monday Mercurial: Medusa

During our holiday we took a boat trip around the harbour, with many jellyfish swimming around.

I can tell you, taking pictures was a “treat”. If they were close to us the boat would move fast and they’d be gone quickly, if the were further away the light broke too much on the surface for my angle.

Still, there were some nice ones.

Jellyfish in water

©Giliell, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

 

Behind the Iron Curtain part 17 – Advertisements

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

For today I had to pick a theme that is really, really short.

And there really is not much to say about this, astounding as it might sound in today’s time. Nowadays commercial advertisements are everywhere – not only on TV and in magazines, but in newspapers, on billboards along the roads, on buildings and, of course, on the internet. And from what I gather, they were very common in the West in the past too, minus the internet.

However behind the Iron Curtain, commercial advertisements were very nearly unknown. The only place I remember ever seeing them was on TV between the programs – but never in the programs. Such a thing as an advertisement in the middle of a movie or a tv-series episode was unheard of.

Another typical feature of the advertisements that I remember was that they were product-oriented, not brand oriented. Since all brands were state-owned, and all production was centrally planned, there were no brands that would compete to sell the same product. Further the advertisements were so dull, that I only remember a single one – for milk. A glass of milk stood on a table, a man walks up to it, drinks it, and puts the empty glass back to a background of singing chorus “For your beauty and your health. What? Of course milk, milk, milk!”

Where I live we did pick up West German TV, so we knew that things look differently over there, but not knowing German, we did not know how different they are and what lies in store for us. This is one of the rare instances when I think that the “good ol’ times” actually were, you know, good.