Please Plant This Book by Richard Brautigan

image: Wikipedia

Books Are People, Too:

This is the rarest of Brautigan’s books. Four are currently listed on ABE, ranging from $395 (for an incomplete set) to $1,250.

pleaseplantthisbook.com:

Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book in the Spring of 1968. It consisted of eight packets of garden seeds, each printed with a poem, all gathered in a small folder.

Here is a digital version of Please Plant This Book, typographical errors and all. Seeds not included.

more info at the Brautigan Bibliography and Archive

aqua forest aquarium

The International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest 2008

via Weekly Teinou 蜂 Woman

stray bullets

Humans Have Astonishing Memories, Study Finds If human memory were truly digital, it would have just received an upgrade from something like the capacity of a floppy disk to that of a flash drive. A new study found the brain can remember a lot more than previously believed.

NASA to Explore 'Secret Layer' of the Sun Next April, for a grand total of 8 minutes, NASA astronomers are going to glimpse a secret layer of the sun. Researchers call it "the transition region." It is a place in the sun's atmosphere, about 5000 km above the stellar surface, where magnetic fields overwhelm the pressure of matter and seize control of the sun's gases. It's where solar flares explode, where coronal mass ejections begin their journey to Earth, where the solar wind is mysteriously accelerated to a million mph. It is, in short, the birthplace of space weather.

ET could 'tickle' stars to create galactic internet Advanced extraterrestrial civilisations may be sending signals through space by "tickling" stars, new research suggests. The signalling would be the galactic equivalent of the internet.

also:
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The 10 most decadent dictators (via)
Al Capone’s Island (via)
How to be a thrifty gardener

viddy:
Welcome to my Study 5
Ah Pook Is Here
Billiard playing robot

20 Deadliest Plants on the Planet

Doll's Eyes (Actaea pachypoda)

Plants feed us, heal us, provide us with raw materials, aesthetic pleasure and shade. Plants are good, right? These plants... not so good.

20 Deadliest Plants on the Planet
via Dark Roasted Blend

Here are three commonly found toxins, and the plant species that mollify their effects.

Chart: Plants for Your Health

From GOOD Magazine

More info here and here

New parasitic plant now has a scientific name

From Cryptomundo:

On May 2nd, I ran the story here about George Yatskievych, the scientist with the Missouri Botanical Garden who has rediscovered and identified a rare parasitic plant (above). A single specimen of the plant was found in Mexico in 1985. The plant wasn’t seen again until St. Louis botanist George Yatskievych and a colleague found it in a pine oak forest in Mexico’s mountains.

Sunday Excursions: Sunday Gumbo

Let's hit the ground running...

The Man is keeping me down, pt. 1













WebПарк.ру: Котейки (39 фотографий)
via not enough memory
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The Man is keeping me down, pt. 2












Article: Gas to Hit $7 a Gallon
thanks, Joanne
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4. Amorphophallus: means, literally, "shapeless penis." The name comes from the shape of the erect black spadix.

from Eight of the World's Most Unusual Plants (1-4) (5-8)
via Vitamin Briefcase
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Humanzee















From The Scotsman:

A LEADING scientist has warned a new species of "humanzee," created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting.

"If you put human sperm into a frog it would probably create an embryo, but it probably wouldn't go very far," he said.

"But if you do it with a non-human primate it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it could be born alive."

RUMINT has it that humans have been "experimenting" with chimps for some time, though this has never been verified. A few beers, a lonely night, some local fauna...

Some even maintain that chimps are human.

For those of you that missed it, meet Oliver. Many thought he was a humanzee, but genetic tests showed that he was a "normal" chimp.

There's more here.



via Delicious Ghost
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Why do ghosts wear clothes?

Four nights a week, I give ghost tours.

To be honest, I have minimal interest in ghosts. I'm more into the folklore and history, but hauntings are a big part of life in Savannah. I have talked to over a hundred people in this town who have had ghost experiences. These are largely professional or salt-of-the-earth types and they're very matter-of-fact, almost bored, with it. (And let's forestall the "were they drunk?" quips. None that I know have ever seen anything of the sort while intoxicated.)

I usually don't tell people this, even on my tour, but I have seen many things here that I cannot explain. Not ambiguous maybes, but real, often 3-D, actualities. Fifteen years in New Orleans and I never had a single experience. Nearly eight years in Savannah, I've had at least two dozen. I won't go into too much detail here, but if you want to know more, contact me.

I do not believe that there is such a thing as paranormal. It's not that I don't feel that these phenomena are real, they are. I just strongly suspect that they are quite natural, normal and scientifically explainable. We merely lack the perceptual tools to measure them. Whether they are the spirits of the departed, psychic residue, time warps/loops, the product of a geomagnetic anomaly, some other type of entity or any combination of, or all of the above, the ones that are real are real and therefore, knowable. If it is merely some sort of sensory or psychological event or state, this should not dismiss anything. Even so, it warrants serious study.

But back to the matter at hand. One thing that has always puzzled me is, why do they wear clothes? This has always been a bullet point for skeptics. I'm not sure if any of the explanations in this article are sufficient, but it begs pondering. (One that I saw in a downtown cemetery was fully clothed in his authentic 19th century Sunday finest. He disappeared while I was standing about ten feet away from him. I saw another dressed in a Confederate uniform outside of the Bonaventure Cemetery. He walked behind a tree and when I went to look, he was nowhere to be found.)

via Mysterious Universe
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Hut, hut, hut, hut!













from TIME
via FFFFOUND!
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In brief:

The U.S. Civil War almost became an Iraq-style insurgency

Worry about the Daemon not Grand Theft Auto
via Danger Room

Weird Story of the Week: Con Man Reality TV
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Serve with a little...

Gotan Project - Triptico (live)


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Enjoy your week. Y'all come back now.