Leopard is Out

Tonight Apple Computer released the latest version of Mac OS X, called Leopard. Mason and I went to the St. Louis Galleria to the Apple Store there, and waited in line with a few hundred other people until 18.00, when the nice Apple guys threw open the doors so we could buy the our own copies of the coolest OS on the planet.

Before they opened the place up, the Apple guys were toddling around the line taking pictures with their iPhones. They were pretty excited about the whole thing.

Mason and I got free t-shirts, having been among the first 500 people in the store. The funniest shirt they had showed the Windoze logo in some crosshairs, with the words "Hasta la Vista" above. Nice.

The Leopard installation onto my MacBook Pro actually did not go without a hitch; I had a bit of trouble initially. But I more or less magically got out of it, and all seems to be well.

I saw my friend Errol Sandler just before I got in the store. Errol is a former colleague from Ann Arbor, and it was great to see him.

Stinkhorns Again

The thing about mushrooms is that they can be pretty hard to identify. I posted recently about some stinkhorns I found in my backyard, and I identified them as Phallus impudicus, the common stinkhorn. Well, I looked them up in another really great mushroom book I have, "Mushrooms of Northeast North America" by George Barron, and I also checked out a voucher specimen at the Missouri Mycological Society's website. That voucher specimen is of Phallus ravenelii, or Ravenel's stinkhorn, and it looks an awful lot like the common stinkhorn. So now I'm wondering whether the ones I saw are P. ravenelii rather than P. impudicus.

The way to distinguish the two, according to Barron, is to look for the chambered ("morel-like") head after the spore-mass is removed from P. impudicus. Oops, too late for that! The picture of the voucher specimen (collected by Brad Bomanz) appears to show some of the spore-mass removed, but I have to say that the head of that specimen doesn't look particularly morel-like to me. For an example of a morel, check out the same collector's picture of Morchella deliciosa.

See? Told you mushrooms are fun!

Radiohead's Latest

Radiohead have shaken things up a little bit by making their latest album, "In Rainbows," available only from their website, and for exactly as much as you feel like paying for it. Yep, that's right, pay what you want for it and download away, DRM-free. As I write this, the last song of the album is playing on my iPod. The whole album, start to finish, is brilliant, well worth what I paid for it.

And just how much did I pay for it, seeing as I could pay whatever I wanted? Well, I sort of took what I thought was the average cost of a 10-song album on iTunes, converted that amount to pounds, and paid that much. The only disappointment I had was that there was no album art associated with the mp3 files; no worries, there are plenty of candidates out there for you to download. Anyway, I hope you buy the album, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Kata

This evening I've been practicing my Shotokan kata. Since I started training again after a long absence, I've mostly been doing Heian Shodan and Heian Nidan when we're asked to practice "our kata" in the dojo. I'd pretty much forgotten all the ones I'd learned in North Carolina, and I really need to get them back and train them hard. It finally dawned on me (duh) that I'm probably not going to be able to do that by just going to class; I'm going to have to work on them outside of class as well.

So, tonight I worked on Heian Sandan, Heian Yondan, and Heian Godan. I'm still a bit rusty, but I think I can at least make it all the way through each of them now. There's still some muscle memory left for a lot of parts, which helps. I'll work on these until I get them down again, then I'll work on Tekki Shodan and Bassai Dai (my favorite of all the kata I've learned). Once I get those, that will pretty much get me back to where I was before I moved to Massachusetts and stopped training in Shotokan.

By the way, I've been training at the Missouri Karate Association for about 2 months now (minus a couple of weeks for business travel), and I think the instruction there is great.

Stinkhorns

When I was just a little kid (I think we were living in Columbia, MO, at this time), my dad took my brother and me out into the woods to look for mushrooms. It must've been autumn, because there were lots of dead brown leaves on the ground. In some of those leaves, I found a single morel mushroom, which we picked and brought home and sauteed in butter. This outing left a pretty big impression on me, because I remember it to this day, and I still very much enjoy mushroom hunting and mycology in general.

Today while I was mowing the lawn (in Wildwood, MO) I found a few very interesting mushrooms in the backyard. These mushrooms are called stinkhorns. They're members of the Phallaceae, for reasons which should be obvious from this photo. In particular, these are Phallus impudicus, the common stinkhorn.

David Arora, in his excellent book "Mushrooms Demystified," says that the stinkhorns' most outlandish feature is the unpleasant odor of the mature spore slime, aptly described as "indiscreet." As proof of this I need offer no further evidence than to point out the green bottle fly perched atop the center specimen, apparently enjoying himself. Stinkhorns are malodorous (and, frankly, kind of funny) but not overtly poisonous, and can be hunted by their scent alone.

I'm not going to eat these, despite the fact that they aren't poisonous. The fruiting bodies evidently grow from "eggs" which one Cpt. Charles McIlvaine said "demand to be eaten." I'm kind of thinking, um, not so much. But aren't mushrooms fun?