La Casa Grande Colectiva

Tag: species

  • identifying the plants in the yard

    We recently had a house guest, Aaron, who works for the Chicago Park District maintaining parks and natural areas. He walked around the yard identifying everything he could. There were several prairie species, and lots of invasive weeds. We learned that the big pink flowers that the carpenter bees love is called Joe Pie Weed.
    Joe Pie Weed and carpenter bee
    We also found the beautiful orange flowers of butterfly milkweed.
    Butterfly milkweed (native) topview

    There were a couple plants the Aaron couldn’t recognize.  I found the flickr photo pool called ID Please, where you upload photos of plants and animals you can’t identify and the people who troll that group ID them for you.  I was able to identify this mallow plant and some comfrey that way.

    Scroll through the slideshow to see some of the identified species.

    Vodpod videos no longer available.

  • Green Porno!!! Yay!

    This evening a little more than half of us LaCasans were sitting around the kitchen table eating 123salsa when I happened upon a short article in Scientific American from last July about brief nature films the beautiful Isabella Rossellini was making about insect sex. It claimed she was dressing up as the insects and using cutouts and puppets to act out the, uh, insect sex!?! This sounded so delightfully absurd that I shared it with my fellows and Maria said she’d heard about them and proceeded to call up said short films on her laptop. Oh my god!!! And I do not say that lightly. We could scarcely believe our eyes  and ears. Okay, so perhaps for me the fact that I’ve had a crush on Ms. Rossellini (mmm, that Italian/Swedish accent) for many years (as has my youngest brother) adds a whole extra dimension of delight, but really, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. (If you’re unfamiliar with her, really, brush up on your knowledge as she’s an enjoyable actor with a heavy pedigree. Here’s the wikipedia page if you’re interested.)

    Anyway, to laugh that hard while being educated is a thing of beauty. Isabella is shameless and fearless in her portrayal of species bent on procreation, wonderfully naughty and absurd. Catch her smile as she portrays a fucking fly. There are two seasons now, the first dealing with insects, the second with marine creatures. Please, if you haven’t seen them, do a marathon! They’re very short, creative and wonderfully surreal:  Green Porno!