So, it's been a while since we posted last. That's because not too much stuff has been happening that is worth blogging. Katie is still slogging away at her classes (she finishes her first semester in just a few days) and I have been finishing up some of the admin work at Mannes and then working on my dissertation.
Some of the things that did happen of note were the leaving of Ben and Jara on the one hand, and Kyle and Nancy on the other. Ben and Jara, the owners of the four birds, moved to Madison, Wisconsin to start masters degree programs. We helped them load up their U-Haul truck after having them over one last time. Kyle and Nancy left for Bloomington where Kyle just got a job as a professor at Indiana University. We didn't have to help them load a van since IU is paying for their move. At least we have some folks to visit across the midwest if we ever take a big driving trip.
As to the title of this post, Katie and I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden ( http://www.bbg.org/ ) yesterday to see the blooming of the corpse flower. Scientifically known as the Amorphophallus titanum, it was first discovered by Westerners in 1878 in western Sumatra. It flowers only rarely in cultivation--BBG has had their specimen since 1996--but the botanist said it blooms about every three years in the wild. The last time a corpse flower bloomed in NYC was in 1939 in the Bronx (and then they made it the borough's official flower!) Anyway, it gets its name because it smells horrible, which attracts the carrion beetles and sweat bees that live in Sumatra. We stood in line to see this beast (about 6 feet tall). The botanist at the garden said it had smelled like a rotting rat, but it only emits this awful, penetrating stench for 8 hours, and it had done so the day before we saw it. There was only a slighty musty smell when we saw it. Oh well, maybe we'll get to smell a corpse flower someday. One final, amusing note about this interesting plant: if you look again at the scientific name, you'll see it means "gigantic mutant phallus!" In Victorian England, where this flower was first cultivated in the West, governesses would shield the eyes of the impressionable young women when visiting the botanical garden. Needless to say, among the hundred or so people who were there when we viewed it, I saw no evidence of such protective activity.
