Johnny Rose

An ex-Moonie named John drove me home from the airport tonight. He told me his father was a preacher (Church of Christ, with which I'm not familiar) and a schoolteacher in New Jersey. When he graduated from high school his parents gave him a deal: if he went to the whatever religious college they wanted him to attend for a year, they'd pay for that school or whatever other school he wanted for the rest of the time. His year at the religious college was difficult (this was back in the early 70s, and the school had an issue with hair that was long enough to touch the collar), so after that he went to the University of Texas.

Right after he got there, he met the Moonies on campus. Moonies, of course, are the followers of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. I have to admit that I'm not too familiar with these guys, either. But John got involved with their fundraising arm pretty much right off the bat. And he raised money for the Moonies for the next 11 years. He visited the Rev. Moon about 1 month into it, at his multimillion dollar mansion in Tarrytown, NY; that helped me understand why the fundraising was so important.

One of the things the Moonies did (do?) was sell roses in bars. I suppose guys would buy them for whoever they were with at the bar, but the first thing that I thought of was guys buying them for their wives so they don't get too busted when they stagger home. John laughed at that and said that he always told guys to knock on their door and throw the rose inside; if it didn't come back, the guy was in relatively good shape with domestic governance.

John said his parents really had a good time with him with all this. He mentioned that he had a younger brother, so I asked him about how his brother turned out. He said that one summer when he was staying at the Rev. Moon's mansion, his brother came to visit him and told him that he was gay. John asked whether he had told their parents, and he said that he had. At that time, their grandmother was living with their parents. Evidently, when all that came out, she told the brother, "I don't know why they're making such a big deal about this. When your father was your age, he was queer as a three-dollar bill."

John still sells those roses in bars on Friday and Saturday nights. Everybody calls him "Johnny Rose." He says sometimes he gives away more roses than he sells. Sounds about right.

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?

Prius

I ordered a Prius Friday night. I'm kind of exited about it. I very much like the fact that they're better for the environment than most vehicles -- I want to do my part. I also like the fact that it's such a techy car. The number of bells & whistles on this thing for geeks is just amazing.

Not that I'm a geek or anything. I hasten to add.

I know this will get me in trouble with my brother's wife, who does marketing for Hummer. I think I'll just get 48 mpg driving over that bridge when I come to it. ;-)