Respite

Well, my time in Africa, to no one's dismay, is finally drawing to a close. Before my much anticipated return to Florida, however, I get to take a little vacation. I'll be going on safari in the heart of the Dark Continent for a few days, so this will be my last post until, probably, December 1. I'll post again before I head home, of course, and said post will include pictures of lions and zebras and rhinos (oh my!). At least I hope so because if it doesn't it won't have been much of a safari ("and here is the Serengeti. The animals don't come to work until January but we have some lovely grasses…").

But seriously, folks, enjoy Thanksgiving and the mad crazy shopping crush on the 24th. And remember that I have to do all my Christmas shopping after I get home.

The Jump

Nifty

I just learned something cool! Burning Man 2007 is going to feature (well, not really, but it will occur during) a total lunar eclipse! On Tuesday night! At 0308 (technically Wednesday morning)! How cool is that? Clearly I have to go now.

Also readers of mine who don't read up on fellow Elm Street blogs owe it to themselves to drop over to Lucky Bob's place and read his recent post about Our Place. Good food for thought, and we can all use some good food now and then.

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Lack a daisy

I don't honestly know why I even came to computer lab tonight. Check email, I suppose. That's about it. It's one of those days, weeks... I won't say months. Last month was one of those months.

I'm about three weeks out, now. I'm ready to come home, in almost every sense but one--and that one is, now that I have a new job, I want to make it my own and improve it before I hand it off to somebody else. I need a bit of time to do that, but it'll get done. I've made a few changes already.

I was going to go to the gym tonight, but it's after nine and I haven't yet so the safe money is that I won't. It's been like five days. I don't feel as bad about it as I thought I would. I came out here with this great goal, this idea that here I was in a place for four months and change where I'd have nothing really to do but go to the gym. I was going to come home all buff and drive Smittygirl crazy (I may still drive Smittygirl crazy, but not for the same reason). Instead I've been to the gym less in the last four months than in any four month period before this going back at least two years. Oops. I could blame outside factors but the truth is I think Djibouti has just made me lazy. Lately I've actually been looking forward to going home so I can go back to the gym again. Really.

And what exactly have I been doing other than going to the gym? Um... let me get back to you about that. Really, I promise I will. I think. I'm thinking I may at least start riding the bike again. It's something. Not much but something.

I haven't written a great deal on the November book--I'm somewhere around 8000 words--but it does have a title now and the main character has finally been introduced, and with him has come the shape of a plot, or at least a driving idea. See, the main character is The Reporter (also the title). But really, the main character is also Mordecai Metropolitain, who is a reporter for the Porktown Banner.

Porktown is a very bizarre community, as my previous snippets from the book should make clear. The conceit is that Mordecai Metropolitain, although he lives in Porktown, lives in the real world. He eats at McDonald's and watches American Idol and reads Spider-man comics. Everyone else in Porktown--well, not everyone, there's a sizable expat community of people who, like Mordecai, grew up outside Porktown and know how ridiculous the place seems--eats at the local Chinese-Italian restaurant, Ramakrishna's, which usually has a mariachi band playing; they watch tv shows like Operation Fungicide, and read comic books like Creamy Porridge. And they think this is perfectly normal. To cash in on this Mordecai started drawing a comic making fun of Porktown, which he publishes in the Banner because the Banner is the newspaper of choice for expats (natives read the Bugle). And then he decided to turn the comic strip into a comic book, and created the hero, The Reporter, and the comic has become very popular.

And I haven't quite figured out how it's going to work, but at some point Mordecai, to his horror, starts to turn into his creation, starts to become a part of the bizarre insanity of Porktown. And of course the characters already introduced will themselves become a host of villains and minor heroes--obviously we know where The Canary stands in this group, but Melllllllody and Van (of the Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski clan) are still a bit up in the air. (Also, there's a Col Mustard now, and someone known only as The Candlestick, who were introduced waiting to see The Canary in his Conservatory). Obviously there's no way come hell or high water I'm going to get 50,000 words written by the end of the month, but this is certainly an amusing project and I'm keen to see where it goes.

And that's about all there is from Smitty's World for today.

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Conocarpus lancifolius solved!

Well, I won't say I didn't expect it… but my search for the truth of Conocarpus lancifolius has ultimately proved me right. To quote Marc Frank, the University of Florida Herbarium's Extension Botanist, "You have been misled by bad information on the web." And how.

Conocarpus is not a monotypic genus. The New York Botanical Garden has it wrong—but don't blame the Garden. The Garden posted inaccurate information on the internet, information from an early 20th Century botanical study by a fellow named Nathaniel Lord Britton, who took the time to include nice illustrations. It was the nice illustrations that led the Garden to use pages from the unpublished and incomplete work in its species descriptions on its web site. Other sources, including Princeton's WordNet and the writers of Wikipedia, took the Garden's information as gospel, because the NYBG seems a trustworthy source. But the Garden makes no claims as to the veracity of the information on its web page. It is, after all, there because of the pretty pictures.

In fact, Engle described Conocarpus lancifolius a few decades before Lord Britton began work on his botanical study. But Lord Britton was primary interested in plants of the American tropics, and there's only one Conocarpus species in the Americas. Had he done more research he'd have turned up lancifolius and not claimed Conocarpus was a monotypic genus. Why he didn't is anyone's guess.

In any event, armed with pictures, a page from a study of Somali plants helpfully scanned and emailed to me by the Florida Herbarium's (an excellent institution) Marc Frank, and the truth, I will be taking it as my mission to correct the inaccurate information in WordNet, at the NYBG, at CABI, on Wikipedia, and elsewhere on the web, thereby making the Internet a better place.

Now the question is, how would I go about getting a permit to import specimens so I can deliver them to the Herbarium…

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If Chins Could Kill

I was sent Bruce Campbell's autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, by the inestimable Lucky Bob, who encouraged me to read it someplace where I wouldn't be concerned about laughing out loud. I am never concerned by such things, and I am already regarded by many people here as not fully sane. But the end of October seems to have reduced my ability to laugh out loud, even in private, at least for a while. So I didn't laugh out loud that much at the book.

But in any other month… well. This is a great book, a great read, funny and warm and full of passion. Mr. Campbell did what most people don't think they can really do—he followed his dream. He wanted to be an actor, because being an actor isn't really very much like working. Or at least that’s how it seemed. For Bruce Campbell, at least, acting turned out to be very much like work, hard sometimes, unpleasant, crazy, not especially remunerative. But throughout it he was what he wanted to do, what he had always dreamed of doing, and so the hardship and the struggle were never so bad, and what might have been grueling work seemed much more fun.

You may not have heard of Bruce Campbell. He admits this much on the back cover. But he also points out that his book isn't just for his fans. It's for anyone who wants to know what life in Hollywood is like for the majority of actors, for the working stiffs who come in every day and do the small roles and don't command $20 million per picture, who don't feed the tabloid machine and don't go testify before Congressional committees about their dimwit political opinions and don't headline summer blockbusters. There are lots of such people, far more than there are big stars, and to some degree Campbell is speaking for all of them.

If Hollywood is a hard place to make a living, but a kid from suburban Detroit with a big chin can make it, then what's to scare the rest of us off from trying our hand at what we really want to do? That's the message that underlies the whole book, and what a great message it is. Bruce Campbell may not be a household name, and you don't get the impression he wants to be anymore, but the friends he ran with as a kid all went out to Hollywood to make their way, and one of those friends (who appears throughout the book) is Sam Raimi, the fellow who made those little movies called Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. I don't know if you've seen those; they're only the best superhero movies ever made. Clearly you can do well doing what you really want to do.

I could philosophize a while here about how this was exactly the right book for me to read right now, and it was. But I'll spare you. I may not have laughed out loud every other page, but I wouldn't have laughed out loud at much the last couple weeks; doesn't mean I don't appreciate the humor. And whether you're a fan of Evil Dead or Army of Darkness or Brisco County, Jr. (or The Hudsucker Proxy, one of my favorite movies of all time) or not, Bruce Campbell is a funny man, a down-to-Earth guy with a great story to tell and a great way of telling it. You're going to like this book. Go read it.

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O Pioneers!

I bought this book, along with Goodnight, Nebraska, earlier this year when I was planning a long trip to Nebraska and wanted some background reading. That trip—the Nebraska Hedonism Tour, which was to begin with an old friend's wedding and included stops at nearly all of the state's dozen wineries and which I was greatly looking forward to—fell through when the trip I'm currently on came up. Consequently O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather, languished on my bookshelf for a while. It being a bit of Classic American Literature such as you might read in high school, it might have languished there for a long time (high school literature and I have had a bad relationship ever since Mrs. Foust's interpretation of Silas Marner), so before I left home I placed it among a pile of books to have my folks send me out here when I ran out of other reading material.

I've never read Willa Cather before. She was apparently quite the interesting character in her own right. O Pioneers! follows, in bits and pieces, the life of Alexandra Bergson of Nebraska and her family, of how the high plains were tamed by the hand of man and the plow. Actually, in this case, it's the hand of woman that does much of the work. Cather's Alexandra is a strong-willed woman who makes her way by her own wits. She may not get her hands dirty with the farm work, but she is one of the first large-farm managers in history and in an era when women weren't expected to manage anything and even their rights to property were suspect. Parts of the critical commentary that lead off the book—as it must lead off all "classic" literature as if readers cared what some literary critic has to say about a book who's value is adequately proved by its staying power—describe it as one of the first important pieces of feminist literature, as if somehow O Pioneers! is less about the strength of ingenuity, the American spirit, the truth that all individuals have power and worth, and instead is some sort of proto-chick lit, Bridget Jones on the High Plains.

But I digress. Had I read O Pioneers! in high school I might have hated it, because it is somewhat slow. Cather's narrative jumps years at a time, sixteen years at one point, and glosses over the most interesting bits, the specifics of how Alexandra and her wit and her brothers and their work managed to make something out of the harsh terrain of the Nebraska plains: one chapter ends with Alexandra convincing her brothers to go along with her scheme, and the next begins with the statement that the scheme has worked brilliantly.

Of course I may be interested in how they got from A to B, but Cather knows better that the story doesn't hang on how exactly the transition occurred, only that it did, and how it affected the characters and the country and the people around them. This doesn't mean the narrative is fast paced. But the book is short and it moves along, the characters are well-drawn if always somehow a bit distant, and the writing is not heavy or difficult (the book was written in 1913). I read the whole book in about four days without spending undue time doing so.

The editor's occasional footnotes and endnotes can be annoying, and seem entirely random. One page has four footnotes, elaborating on the local flora Mrs. Cather names without description. Another page has more local flora treated in the same way by the author, but without the footnotes, as if the editor though we poor readers would be flailing about wondering what a snow-lily was but wouldn't be bothered by the mysterious marsh-trumpet. None of the footnotes add a thing to the story and their inconsistency is more annoying than anything. When possible, it's best to find copies of classic literature that are simply presented as they are and not beaten into submission by editors and critics; this is not always possible when purchasing books online, which is why bookstores are still so much more fun.

Ultimately the book brought to mind the truth that we have no more real frontiers in America, and that being in such control of the land as we are we as a people tend to forget what it took to get us to where we are. Alexandra Bergson's America was not a global Colossus bestriding the seven seas, and the simple questions of existence, of food and shelter and survival, were much more in her mind and the minds of her fellow Americans than they are in ours today; reading the book reminds us of that. For that reason if for no other O Pioneers! deserves a wider audience.

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Understanding Iraq

I bought Understanding Iraq, by William Polk, at the beginning of this year when I expected to deploy there. That deployment fell through, and there is no Understanding Djibouti. So I read this book instead. We could all use a little understanding.

Unfortunately, I can't review this book and adhere to my "no political content" policy, so I won't try. The book is interesting; it is slim and well-paced and written by an old hand with no need to prove his academic credentials to anyone, so it's easy to read. That said, the author, a trained historian, has very well-defined political opinions, and it is hard not to see that from the first section of the book, on ancient Iraq. It's tempting to say his opinions are formed by years of study, and of course to some degree they must be—and the author has spent a significant amount of time living and working in Iraq and so knows the place well apart from his study—but two people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions. Readers inclined to Mr. Polk's point of view will find this book a quick read and a useful resource in discussions of the topic. Readers on the other side of the aisle will not be so inclined.

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The Prophet and The Messiah

I don't know how to review this book, The Prophet and the Messiah, by Chawkat Moucarry, which is I have not reviewed it before now. The book was written by an Arab Christian who has made a career teaching Muslims and Christians about each other. That such a job is both vitally important and woefully neglected is undeniable. The book was written to reach people the author cannot reach himself.

It is certainly a good book and absolutely worth a read by any Christian, any Christian at all whether he or she engages with Muslims or not. There are too many myths, too much shouting, too much demonizing and burying of truth in our society. Shouting pundits and crying televangelists do nothing to bridge the yawning gap between our faiths and in fact simply make it wider. We American Christians foment hatred and false truths about Muslims just as surely as Middle Eastern Muslims do so about us.

The book is valuable especially to Christians working in evangelism. Moucarry does not begin his discussion by claiming Islam is wrong and its practitioners evil, as so many evangelists do. It's hard to minister to a people you think to be demons, doubly so when you don't understand where the people are coming from. Muslims are justifiably proud of their faith, and any attempt to evangelize to them that starts with "you're wrong and here's why" will cause offense and close ears and minds and hearts, and is a waste for both parties.

Moucarry starts by discussing the differences between Islam and Christianity; this discussion is clearly geared toward a Christian audience and seeks to put to rest the myths Christians tend to hear about Islam. He then goes on to discuss the myths Muslims are taught about Christianity, at some length, and where they come from and why they are myths and, to some degree, how Christians can explain these things to Muslims without offending them. He then goes into specific doctrines of Islam that Christians can question validly, and why similar doctrines of Christianity are defensible against questioning by Muslims. Finally he treats the question of the truth of Islam, of whether there is genuine revelation in the faith and what we might learn from it.

It can be a difficult book to read, especially in the early going when Moucarry cites Islamic false claims about Christianity in one chapter and only in the next chapter gets around to laying out the truth. Reading with an open mind is absolutely vital, and a Bible is a necessary resource. But difficult though it may be, the book is a worthy read and I recommend it highly.

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Smitty's Polipicks Scorecard

Well, I said I'd edit this post, so I have. This is as of Thursday at 1900 local.

So. The picks were:

LA 2 - Jefferson in second place
TX 22 - Lampson wins, by 2-5
FL 16 - Mahoney wins, by 3-5
FL 9 - Bilirakis wins, by 8
FL 13 - Jennings wins, by 4-6
FL Guv - Crist wins, by 8+
FL AG - Campbell wins, by 2-3
FL CFO - Sink wins, by 4-6
FL Ag Commish - Bronson wins, by 20+
Hills Commish - Norman wins, with less than 40%
FL Sen - Nelson wins, Harris makes 40%+
RI Sen - Whitehouse, by 4
PA Sen - Casey, by 7
NJ Sen - Menendez, by 4
MD Sen - Steele, by 3
VA Sen - Allen, by 2
TN Sen - Corker, by 5
OH Sen - Brown, by 10
MO Sen - McCaskill, by less than 1
MT Sen - Tester, by 5
Dems gain 4 Senate seats
GOP retains control of Senate.

Okay, so how'd I do? I score one point for a correct call, minus one for an incorrect call. Plus one if I get the score exactly right, minus one if I'm more than four points off, no score otherwise.

In LA-2, Bill Jefferson came through in first place. Minus one.
In TX-22, Nick Lampson won by 10 points with over 50%. Plus one for the call, minus one for underestimating the size of the victory. -1 overall.
In FL-16, Tim Mahoney won by one point. Score one for the win. 0 overall.
In FL-9, Gus Bilirakis won by 12. Score one for the win. +1 overall.
In FL-13, Vern Buchanan seems to have won, although there will be a recount. Assuming his win holds, that's minus 2. -1 overall.
In the FL Guv race, Crist won by 7. So close. 0 overall.
In the FL AG race Bill McCollum won by more than 2. -2 overall.
In the FL CFO race, Alex Sink won by 8. -1 overall.
In the FL Ag Commish race, Charlie Bronson won by 13 (far less than 20). -3 overall.
In the Hillsborough Commission District 7 race, Jim Norman has won but got more than 50% of the vote. -3 overall.
In the FL Senate race, Bill Nelson won (+1), by 22 points (+0), and held Krazy Kat to under 40% (-1). -3 overall.
In the RI Senate race, Whitehouse won by six. -2.
In the PA Senate race, Casey won by 18. -2.
In the NJ Senate race, Menendez won by 8. -1.
In the MD Senate race, Cardin won. -3.
In the VA Senate race, Webb won. -5
In the TN Senate race, Corker won by 3. -4.
In the OH Senate race, Brown won by 12. -3.
In the MO Senate race, McCaskill won by 1. -1.
In the MT Senate race, Tester won by 1. 0.
So I'm net zero, not bad, really, considering I lost most of those points for getting the margin of victory wrong and not for the actual pick. Of course, add in the fact that the Dems gained 6 seats (probably; there's always the chance of a recount but Webb is ahead by 7000 votes) and took control of the Senate, and I'd be at -2. Not very good.

Still, imagine if you'd bet against the house!
And, just so I can feel a little better about myself... if I didn't score the margin of victory at all, I'd actually be +10 for races, and +6 taking into account the control of the Senate, the Hillsborough county race, and Harris being kept under 40%.

The Jump

Polipicks

Every even year for some time I've made a handful of political picks in certain races. Mainly these are just bets I make with myself and I don't often mention them to others. But I figure I'll put them here this year so that I can't pretend I picked any upsets I don't actually pick, and so that you can all laugh along with me when we see how far off I am on Wednesday morning.

I would consider this post more under the heading of "gambling/parlor games" than actual politics, since these picks are not based on my own personal leanings. However, in keeping with my no-political-content policy, I am not posting my reasoning behind these picks; rest assured I have some and am not just throwing darts (although that might be more accurate).

To give you some idea of my record, in 1998 I called Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and said Howard Dean would run for president in 2004. In 2000 I called Bush for president, but also said Ralph Nader would take at least 5% and guarantee the Green Party nationwide ballot access and a spot in the prez debates in 2004. In 2004 Senate races, I said Mel Martinez would lose in Florida (I was wrong and I've forgotten who his opponent was) and Inez Tenenbaum would beat Jim DeMint in South Carolina. I've gotten progressively worse as time has gone on, so this should be an interesting batch of picks.

1. U.S. House, Louisiana, District 2

The incumbent is democrat Bill Jefferson, the fellow who had $90k in bribe money stashed in his freezer when the feds raided his office earlier this year.

I predict Jefferson will finish in second place but force a runoff. I also predict he will win the runoff in December.


2. U.S. House, Texas, District 22

The incumbent is republican Tom Delay, who is barred from running again because he says he moved to Virginia, but didn't say so in time to get his name taken off the ballot, so the GOP candidate is a write-in.

I predict Nick Lampson, the democrat, will win by 2-5% against GOP write-in candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. I also predict he will only get one term.


3. U.S. House, Florida, District 16

The incumbent—-well, not anymore—-is Mark Foley. His name is still on the ballot, and to vote for state rep Joe Negron, the GOP's replacement candidate, voters will have to mark the box by Foley's name; write-ins will not be counted.

I predict the democratic candidate, Tim Mahoney, will win by 3-5% of the vote.


4. U.S. House, Florida, District 9

The incumbent, who is retiring this year, is Gus or Mike Bilirakis, whichever one is the father.

I predict Gus or Mike Bilirakis, whichever one is the son, will win by 8% despite high democratic hopes.


5. U.S. House, Florida, District 13

The incumbent is republican Katherine Harris, who is running for the Senate this year.

I predict democrat Christine Jennings will win by 4-6%, and will be re-elected in 2008, and will swiftly enter the democratic leadership (by 2009). (No, I don't know her personally and I did not donate to her campaign.)


6. Florida Statewide Races

Governor: Charlie Crist, the republican, will win in a walk, by at least 8 points.

CFO: Alex Sink, the democrat, will win by 4-6%.

Atty Gen: Skip Campbell, the democrat, will win by 2-3%.

U.S. Senate: Bill Nelson will best Katherine Harris by 17-19 points; he will not hold her below 40% of the vote.

Agriculture Commish: Republican Charlie Bronson by 20+.

7. Hillsborough County Commission At Large District 5

Jim Norman is the incumbent. Norman faces an independent candidate, Yamel Arronte, whom no one takes seriously, and democrat strip-club/fitness center magnate Joe Redner, whom no one takes seriously. Jim Norman will win, but the other two candidates will have a higher combined vote total by more than twenty points (i.e. Norman gets less than 40%).

8. Hot Senate Races

Rhode Island: Sheldon Whitehouse (D) by 4

Pennsylvania: Bob Casey (D) by 7

New Jersey: Bob Menendez (D) by 4; also Menendez will not serve a full term

Maryland: Michael Steele (R) by 3; also he will not be re-elected in 2012

Virginia: George Allen (R) by 2; also he will retire in 2012

Tennessee: Bob Corker (R) by 5

Ohio: Sherrod Brown (D) by 10

Missouri: Claire McCaskill (D) by less than 1; recount and lawsuit to follow

Montana: John Tester (D) by 5

Assuming no upsets in other races, this amounts to a net gain of four for the Ds, so the GOP retains control of the Senate.

Hey, a lot of people make picks every Saturday and Sunday on football games and so forth. I don't know too much about football (although, ahem, I am beating Mike Golic in ESPN College Pick 'Em), so I make picks in politics. The principle's the same.

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Joy

I'd forgotten how excited you get when the end of a deployment starts creeping closer. With shorter deployments, of course, you don't get real excited about going home until about two weeks out. But with four months, the anticipation starts to build a bit sooner than that.

Yesterday I put in my pax request to go home. This may sound odd, and in fact it is—we have to actually fill out paperwork to be permitted to go home. Obviously it's a formality, since the deployed unit doesn't have the authority to keep you more than a few days past your expected departure date. But it is still sort of funny, having to do the paperwork. And it's also sort of exciting—if I didn't have to throw in the paperwork I wouldn't be thinking about going home yet, but of course now I am. And I'm just giddy with anticipation.

Okay, that may be going a bit far. But it may help to explain the sort of things I've been writing lately in this November novel I'm not working nearly fast enough on. (All the same it'll be an amusing thing when it's done.) For example, consider the following:

It was inevitable that an impressionable young man like Cartwright would fall into the seedy underground of the music performance business, working with such notorious musical gangsters as Joel "The Piano Man" Williams and Vinnie "Three Fingers" Dragovich, the noted Serbian banjoist and jewel thief. By the age of twenty, Cartwright was running an illicit distribution ring for throat palliatives and medical tape, and five years later he made his name with the great Horn Mute Heist of '72, which forced the cancellation of an entire season of the Porktown Philharmonic and nearly brought down the stock market.

I've been having great fun coming up with titles for the comic books published in Porktown: Megatronic Superzoids, Ratboy and Catwoman, Fungible Man, and of course Lusty Pirates!, my personal favorite. In addition to the Reporter, a noted comic book superhero available to Porktown readers is Creamy Porridge, "a superannuated superhero popular with the over-80 set." Who wouldn't want to read that?

I feel like posting a picture, so here is one of Looking Glass Mountain in North Carolina.

I'm not sure where this little book is going, but The Reporter is a character in the book and also a superhero in a comic book in the book, although I don't think the comic book is based on the character. Although I haven't even started his backstory (I know what it is, though), it appears as though I've laid the foundation for his main villain, Canary Cartwright. It's interesting, I came up with The Canary's name without realizing that Cartwright was one of the dozen parts of Van's name (Van being the character who starts the whole thing off). Clearly the two are related (and I've been watching too much Bonanza), though I haven't figured out how yet. They don't seem to know each other very well, if at all. I'm not writing fast enough to make 50k by the end of the month (especially with the safari), but it's certainly entertaining. At least it's entertaining me.

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The Conocarpus lancifolius Saga

They say in prison a man'll do most anything to keep his mind occupied... (ten points if you know the quote)
The same is true on deployments. Since this is the first location I've ever been to that had actual trees, I thought I'd try to determine what kind of trees we had on this base. Acacia nilotica was easy. The others... not so much.

I started by going through the list of trees at the Djibouti Flora website. I’d copy down the latin name of the tree and paste it into a Google image search. Frequently if I didn’t find any pictures with the genus and species names, I’d try a search with just the genus name.

In so doing I searched for the genus Conocarpus, meaning to look for Conocarpus lancifolius. Conocarpus is the genus name for the Buttonwood tree (sometimes called Button Mangrove although it is not a mangrove), a common tree in South Florida and the Everglades to there and to the Caribbean and parts of South America and west Africa. The buttonwood is notable for, among other things, the fruit it produces, which is a small cone-like structure (hence the genus name) containing dozens of tiny seeds and borne in clusters on the branch. This is an excellent picture of buttonwood leaves and fruit. The picture posted here is one I took of Conocarpus lancifolius for comparison, as are all other pictures posted here (linked pictures are of other trees).

The search for Conocarpus turned up numerous pictures of buttonwood. Here is another good picture of the leaves and fruit, this time of a plant with more lanceolate leaves than in the other picture, and the fruit is still very young.

Although those are pictures of Conocarpus erecta, they were similar enough that I concluded the mystery tree was most likely a Conocarpus lancifolius. This made sense as the two species seemed quite similar: both are commonly used for firewood and especially charcoal, as the wood is very dense; both bear cone-like fruit in bunches (the mystery tree’s fruits are smaller and don’t seem to turn red, although I can’t verify that); both are popular for their salt tolerance. The lancifolius has thinner, more lanceolate leaves (hence the name), smaller fruit, and seems to grow taller and is more commonly a single-trunked tree than erecta, at least by my observation. But they are clearly similar trees and it makes sense that they would share a genus.

Although there were no good pictures of lancifolius on Google, there are three very good descriptions of the plant. This comes from a university in Kenya, part of a series on trees that would be good for agroforestry in Kenya. It notes the local name of the tree, in Somali (it doesn’t appear to have an English common name), is Ghalab. The name in Arabic is Damas. Among other things the paper notes that the seeds are difficult to extract from their covers (as are the mystery trees seeds), germinate in standing water, and their viability is quite short (which means I don’t know whether I’m going to be able to get any home, though rest assured I plan to try).

The next resource is from the IUCN Redlist of Threatened Species, which provides the tree’s entire taxonomy, notes it is native to Somalia and Yemen, and says the genus contains just two species. The Redlist (it’s worth surfing around the Redlist’s site if you’re ever curious about threatened or endangered plant species native to your area that you could plant in your garden) is interesting in that it is the most up-to-the-minute information available. Changes in taxonomy take several years if not more, so if the mystery tree had indeed been removed from the genus Conocarpus, we can assume the IUCN would know.

Far and away the most fascinating piece is this history of the Haller Park Bamburi Nature Trail in Mombasa, Kenya. It doesn’t have any pictures of Conocarpus lancifolius, but the tree was used by the Bamburi Concrete Company in their successful rehabilitation of the wasteland created by their excavation of limestone from a quarry not far from Mombasa. The essay is several pages long but well worth a read because it’s quite an interesting story, especially given that the Bamburi Concrete Co. undertook the rehabilitation in 1971 for no reason beyond that it seemed like a good idea at the time. There was no government grant, no Greenpeace protest. This was just plain good corporate citizenship in a country noted more for corruption than good corporate behavior. This study is actually referenced in the university website linked above.

Conocarpus lancifolius was used by the Bamburi Co. as a pioneer species in the limestone rock, and the tree was considered the most successful of the three species so used (the other two being coconut palm and Casuarina (also called Australian pine), a plant you should never ever plant ever for any reason anywhere in the United States no matter how pretty you think it is).

So I was satisfied that I’d positively identified the mystery tree. And then I came across Conocarpus latifolia.

I found it because two months went by between when I first located lancifolius and when I started looking for it a second time, by which time I’d forgotten the correct name. I knew what it sounded like, and tried latifolius instead. This led me to latifolia. And this led me in turn to some surprising information. For example according to Wikipedia, the Buttonwood is the only tree in the genus Conocarpus. This was attested by the Free Dictionary among other dictionaries, all of which clearly used the same basis for their information since the wording was exactly the same. This source seems to be WordNet 2.0, from Princeton University. Princeton, though a fine institution, is not known for its botany program (it doesn’t have one; the closest it has is a strong program in evolutionary biology). Nonetheless, I decided that perhaps I had been mistaken all along, and that the mystery tree must not be a true Conocarpus.

According to the Wikipedia article, the tree formerly known as Conocarpus latifolia is now called Anogeissus latifolia; it surprised me that this had not come up before when I was searching for information about this tree in August. I looked up Anogeissus, which turns out to be a tree native to India that is clearly not the mystery tree. These pictures should be enough to satisfy anyone as to that.

Once clear that Anogeissus latifolia was clearly not the tree I was looking for, I started trying variations of latifolia, and hit upon lancifolius, where I rediscovered the articles I’d seen two months before. Now I was satisfied that indeed the latifolia, native to India, and the lancifolius, native to Somalia, were clearly not the same tree. But why all the references to Conocarpus being a monotypic genus?

I went to every resource I could find that described Conocarpus erecta, the Buttonwood, in any detail, looking for references to it being the only species in its genus. Floridata, Purdue horticulture, Virginia Tech, the University of Florida… on and on, no site that described the Buttonwood indicated that it was alone in its genus. No site that described lancifolius indicated that it was alone in the genus, but neither did any site mention what other species might be in the genus.

I went back to Wordnet, whence the “monotypic” definition seems to have sprung. It is not a dictionary of exhaustive research, but rather an attempt by the Cognitive Science Laboratory to “produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications.” It was created and is maintained by a psychology professor. No doubt the mission of WordNet is a good one and the results positive, but how certain can we be that the definitions therein of an obscure botanical taxon are necessarily correct?

So I emailed Wordnet to see where their definition came from; no response as yet. I also commented to the individual who wrote the Wikipedia article to see where his/her definition came from. Then I sat back and waited to see if anybody actually knew anything or if this was just some sort of information loop.

The individual who wrote the Wikipedia article got his information from the New York Botanical Garden, which indicated a monotypic genus. However, on my description he looked into it at other places, including the IUCN, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, and CAB International. CABI, however, indicates that Conocarpus lancifolius is also the same as Anogeissus lancifolius, an assertion that frankly seems to be incorrect.

Anogeissus lancifolius is only described in a two locations: one, CABI, and the other being the recently edited Wikipedia article which links to CABI. I’m not one to say CABI is wrong but, CABI certainly doesn’t have anyone agreeing that it’s right. I strongly suspect that CABI has created their description on the basis of whatever authority moved the former Conocarpus latifolia into the Anogeissus genus; but latifolia and lancifolius are not and have never been the same tree.

The FAO page linked above describes both Conocarpus lancifolius and Anogeissus latifolia, leaving little doubt that the two trees are very different things. IUCN we’ve already discussed.

It’s worth pointing out that there are multiple taxonomic authorities, two of which have dealt with Conocarpus. Listed as Engl. and Bedd., there is clear disagreement between the two; Bedd. seems to believe that latifolia and lancifolius are the same thing and creates the nonexistant Anogeissus lancifolius. Meanwhile Engl. clearly describes Conocarpus lancifolius as a separate species unrelated to Anogeissus. At any rate, this seems to be the case based on CABI; that may simply be a typo and I've found no other descriptions of the tree citing Beddome, only those citing Engle. (Engl. is Adolf Engler, a German botanist and taxonomist in the late 19th Century. Bedd. is Col. Richard Beddome, a British military officer and amateur naturalist who described many of the plants of India.)

I went ahead and wrote to the University of Florida Herbarium (FLAS) to ask if they could shed any light on the matter, being as they are a notable repository of information and particularly qualified to discuss Conocarpus, as the Buttonwood is a Florida native tree. Haven't heard anything back yet. I have, however, gone on and put up a Wikipedia article for the mystery tree under the name Conocarpus lancifolius, and we'll see what happens.

You may ask, why do you care, Smitty? And so I'll refer you back to the very top of this post: On deployment, a man'll do most anything to keep his mind occupied...

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November Novel Update

It's been quiet lately at work and I've been doing a bit more reading in the evenings than the last week or so. One of the books I started was Bruce Campbell's autobiography, which has been great fun. And lately I've been engaged in a fierce (well, not really) debate about the correct taxonomy of one of the common trees on this base, Conocarpus lancifolius, which doesn't have an English common name but is called ghalab by the Somalis. It's quite a nice tree but there's a dearth of agreement as to what, exactly, it is. I'm going to post a couple pictures shortly along with a long and rather dry explanation of the naming controversy, which is not as yet settled (I've brought in the New York Botanical Gardens and the University of Florida Herbarium to help, and may have to try to get myself a wood sample to bring home). This is fair warning.

And I've been pecking away at my 50,000 word novel for National Novel Writing Month. I haven't quite managed the word count I'm going to need to reach 50k, and what with the safari coming up the last week of the month I'm thinking I need to at least give myself the first four days of December. Just to be fair, you know.

As of this writing I have 2778 words, not counting the title. I cheated, though, because the main character--acutally, it appears he's going to be peripheral--is named Ivan Marion Cartwright Harrison Templeton van Arden Telemann Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski. That's ten words right there. Of course, he goes by Van and his full name is only reported once.

This book has not led in any of the directions I considered in the last post. It's clearly straight farce. The action takes place in the city of Porktown, which is a state capital. The climate is uniformly warm and breezy because of the high proportion of state legislators and advertising agencies that call the place home, such that none of the characters are actually sure what time of year it is (it's the month of Checkuary). One of the other characters is named Melllllllody, although she doesn't pronounce the extra six L's (unlike her mother Ellllizabeth). Like all fifteen year old girls dream of doing, Melllllllody ran away from home and took work on the tugboats and garbage barges that ply the Dreary River, which runs into Gabba Gabba Bay at Porktown. The character I now suspect of being the central character in the story so far doesn't have a name. He goes about in a tweed smoking jacket and blue velvet cape and calls himself The Reporter. Clearly he's some sort of superhero, although at present his only superpower seems to be predicting traffic accidents.

Remember when I said, it doesn't have to be good? Right. I do take my own advice, even if no one else does.

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Write a novel in a month?

My esteemed friend mentioned over on his blog that November is National Novel Writing Month, the goal being to write a 50,000 word... um... piece of fiction, in the month of November. This boils down to 1667 words per day, which is significantly less than I did on Lauderdale on good days. But "good days," on Lauderdale, were days in North Carolina on the porch where the only thing I had to do all day apart from writing was fix and consume meals. I could put in 10,000 words on such a day if things were going well.

Now I have a job that keeps me busy from 0730 to 1700 or so. I should at least be able to get 1667 words a day at the speed I type. But what to write about? I've decided this is the perfect opportunity to explore science fiction, cyberpunk, or noir, all three of which I've considered trying my hand at.

Since the goal of National Novel Writing Month is not to produce a good novel, but just to write for the sake of writing (something too few people do), it seems a great opportunity to give one of those genres a shot. And I think everyone else should, too. So I'm challenging my readers--well, my readers who blog, and my other readers who have any sort of emotional connection to the little silhouetted tree there on the right and didn't just give birth, and my other readers who think it sounds fun--to join me, and apparently also Scanime, and at the end of the month we'll see just exactly how ridiculous the things we've come up with are and pass them around and have a good laugh. Come on, you know it sounds like fun. Admit it. Even if you don't hit the 50,000 word mark, you can at least try, right? Right. So it's settled then. And since the 1st is already almost over for me you all have a head start.

Remember, it doesn't have to be any good. It just has to be.

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A Bit of Politics After All

I'm sorry, I just can't resist this. Not watching the TV news I missed this when it happened. Apparently Mr. Teresa Heinz went out to California to campaign for... I don't even know, Phil Angelides I guess, not that it would make a difference for him; anyway, he went out to California and gave a speech to a bunch of college students that included the following presumed "joke:"

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t - you get stuck in Iraq.

He actually said that. That may just have been the most wildly offensive thing anybody has said this entire campaign season. I mean, that makes things Krazy Kat Harris said during her wacky primary campaign (notice how quiet she's been lately? The truth is setting in...) positively charming and witty.

After the 2004 race the man is a bit of a joke already. He should stop trying to tell them.

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Memoirs of a Geisha

I wasn't sure whether I was going to like this book. I don't know why I wasn't sure, I just wasn't. But it was insanely popular and they made a movie out of it. Arthur Golden is no doubt a reasonably wealthy author now (he should help out his brother Al with that Temple football program...) and he managed it by completely ignoring that old saw "write what you know."

So of course I was interested in what the book was like, but as I said I wasn't sure I'd like it.
And the truth is were it not for the stationary bikes in the gym I might not have gotten past the first ten chapters or so. It was the only thing I had that I could read there (the rest of my books at the time were all larger format) so I read it.

It does start a bit slow, at least to me. This is the problem I'm having with Lauderdale right now, in fact, is figuring out how to increase the pacing in the early part of the book without sacrificing the myriad setups to later events. I'm actually rather happy to see that Memoirs has a bit of the same problem, but it seems that millions of Americans were willing to keep reading without benefit of a stationary bicycle, so perhaps there's hope for Lauderdale, too. Not that I'm done working on it, of course.

After the first fifty pages or so, however, I was sufficiently absorbed by the characters that I was quite happy to continue reading. This is true skill, taking characters with whom most readers have nothing in common and making them not just interesting (of course they'll be interesting), but sympathetic as well.

Truth is, I rather enjoyed the book. I'm still a little confused by that. Not much actually happened; there was very little action. I had an inkling what certain of the characters were going to do before they did it, sometimes quite some ways out. But that didn't make the book any less enjoyable.

I'll be putting the movie on my Netflix queue, if only to see how the filmmaker portrays Gion. But the book was good. It was well worth the read; I'm glad I picked it up, and glad I set aside my doubts.
But I'm also glad for the stationary bike.

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