You know you are sick when making instant ramen seems like entirely too much effort. At least I have made it out of bed and into the living room for the first time in 20 hours.

Flexible Squares is an LJ S2 style that looks nice and clean and preserves subject lines, alphabetical text icon list, linking to a comment starting at that comment, no problem posting comments, etc, etc. As in, I'm vaguely aware they changed something from my friendslist but you can't tell it from my own experience, as I've always had my LJ set up to use my own format everywhere (way too many people set up their LJ design to look shiny and be unreadable.)

Here, have a kitty.

One of my favorite books ever is Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams, and one of most memorable stories in it is the story of the last Rodriguan wild coffee plant. It had been thought extinct for years, until in 1980 a local teacher was showing pictures of the many extinct flora and fauna of Rodrigues to his class, and a student named Hedley Manan said "but there's one of those by my house."

And one it was; the only one. In the book, the story is memorable for the tale of the fences the government kept building around the plant, which convinced the locals it was special, which meant they kept cutting off bits, and so the government would build another fence around the fence.

But the afterlife is perhaps more interesting. In 1986, botanists at the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens managed to get a cutting to root. It grew and flowered and they were able to clone it repeatedly, but it and the clones never produced fruit no matter how they tried to fertilize them. They began to think it might be male, and in fact they were right. And if that was true, their wild coffee plants would never be able to produce seeds, and cafe marron would remain a living dead plant, only reproducible in captivity.

But these were no mere mortal gardeners; they persisted, and after 17 years of experiments, their clone produced one fruit, with seven seeds.

None of which germinated. And the same procedure repeated produced no more fruit.

But as I said, these were no mere mortal gardeners, and finally they found the right combination of stresses and environment that would force the plant to occasionally produce a fruit. And four of the five seeds from that second fruit sprouted, and more than 50 from the others they were able to produce from the clones. And when the plants grew to maturity, some of them were female, and fertilized produced a proper fruit, with scores of seeds. Which, since plants are generally polyploid, had a great deal of genetic diversity despite coming from a single forefather.

And last year, many saplings and hundreds of seeds were taken back to Rodrigues, to be planted in reserves and hopefully eventually all over the island.

There's a lot to be depressed about these days, when looking at the environment. So sometimes you need a good story, and the pure determination that it took to get a hopeless case, a solitary male plant, into a whole forest of diverse and fertile seedlings, that's a good story.

Just in case you aren't aware of what a truly loathsome person John C. Wright is, he demonstrates again by ranting about how Terry Pratchett is Hitler. Yes, really.

http://www.scifiwright.com/2011/10/the-watchtowers-of-atlantis-tremble/

The part in the comments where he's fantasizing about punching Pratchett is particularly disgusting.

tersa mentioned that we were watching the highlight version of X-Files, so I thought I'd post my list and logic:

Season 1:

Must sees: Pilot, Deep Throat, Squeeze, Ice, Beyond the Sea, E.B.E.. Darkness Falls, Tooms, The Erlenmeyer Flask.

Pilot and Deep Throat are key setup episodes for the mytharc and Erlenmeyer Flask setup for the next season. Beyond the Sea for Scully's personal arc, EBE for the introduction of the Lone Gunmen. Squeeze, Tooms, Ice and Darkness Falls as excellent standalones.

Maybe: Conduit, Fallen Angel, Eve, Gender Bender.

Of these, we only ended up watching Conduit, for background on Mulder's sister, and also for Mulder looking angsty and pretty. Fallen Angel is for the most part duplicated by EBE more interestingly.

Don't see: The Jersey Devil, Shadows, Ghost in the Machine, Space, Fire, Lazarus, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Born Again, Roland.

Some are terrible (Spaaaaace!) some are just mediocre.

Planning for season 2:

Must sees: Little Green Men, Duane Barry, Ascension, One Breath, Irresistible, Colony, End Game, Humbug, Anasazi

LGM is setup for the season, Colony, End Game, Anasazi, ah back in the days when the mytharc seemed to make sense. Duane Barry, Ascension, and One Breath for Scully-arc. Irresistable and Humbug as excellent standalones.

Maybes: The Host, Red Museum, Aubrey, Die Hand Die Verletzt, Död Kalm, F. Emasculata, Our Town.

I suspect I'm going to recommend The Host, both because it's very memorable, and because you get more of a sense of the Mulder and Scully working apart but together dynamic and thus setup for her disappearance. Die Hand Die Verletzt seems beloved by many (I've been crossreferencing with the Geos ratings to bolster my memory), but I remember it as underwhelming. Död Kalm I rather liked, and and if we want some leavening of the very mytharc heavy selections above I might throw it in.

Don't see: Blood, Sleepless, 3, Firewalker, Excelsius Dei, Fresh Bones, Fearful Symmetry, The Calusari, Soft Light.

Sleepless is the first appearance of Krychek, but it's not very good and he appears in the next two that we are watching, so I don't think it's necessary.

Season Three is where it is really going to get hard, if we keep going. I count 12 must-sees just on first pass, and that's leaving out significant Mulder, Scully, and Skinner-centric episodes.

Is it just me, or did Delicious suddenly roll back to the old style? No mention of stacks, and I can get more than 10 things on a page and tags with / in them.

Did anyone else just have their livejournal theme turn to something else? Mine has suddenly become a very ugly blue narrow boxed theme instead of my nice mellow non-space wasting theme, and I've had my chosen theme for so long I can't even remember what the name is to fix it. Grr.

There's apparently going to be a re-do of Rurouni Kenshin. It'd be nice to see one with the proper ending and not a vague wandering off to cancellation.

I was sorting Rurouni Kenshin discs this morning, as part of spring cleaning and purging. katchootoo was getting rid of most of her DVDs and kindly gave her RK discs to me, as I knew I was missing some. In the process of sorting, I discovered that she had brought most of the series twice, first standalones, and then the fancy edition boxes, but not all of either. And I had a nearly overlapping set standalones, and I spent a while trying to decide which mix and match I wanted. And then I realized that I had also brought season 1 as a single (not fancy edition) box , and that duh, each of the fancy boxes also represented a season, so I had a perfectly sensible and fairly compact set. Apart from the fact that the fancy boxes' lid keeps coming off.

But I also have my original set of individual dvds for seasons 1 and 2, missing the first episode of season 2, and katchootoo's set of individual dvds for seasons 1 and 2, missing the last episode of season 2. This is somewhat of an excess of Rurouni Kenshin.

So I was reading Fujiwara no Michinaga's Full Moon poem, as you do, and ended up wandering onto wikipedia. After attempting to follow the daughters' imperial families, I was forced to make a chart, and I must share it with you.



This is only a highlight -- everyone at the top level is cousins as well.

That is one of the few family trees that I have seen that rivals Charles V of Spain for paucity of grandparents and great grandparents, especially the lower left where Michinaga's daughter has two sons who both marry their aunts, with whom they have children that promptly marry each other.

I was wondering how it was we don't get the same sort of stories from Japan as we do about Charles V (and Juana the Mad and all that lot), but then I noticed that neither Go-Reizei or Go-Sanjo had any children that lived, so they probably were feeling the effects. Plus at the time Japanese emperors were just disposable puppets so you didn't get the "empire resting on a drooling idiot" effect.

Sometimes when you leave perfectly reasonable margins of error -- a few extra minutes on the trip to Sky Park, a few extra minutes for the shuttle, two hours to get through security and drag yourself to the farthest reaches of the airport -- you end up with no traffic, a shuttle that leaves the moment you set foot on it, a security line that moves like lightning, and your flight is at the _closest possible_ spot to security, as in about 100 feet to the left.

And then you find yourself sitting at the gate with two hours to kill.