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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.