Dinosaur Plant

For Christmas, I received two dinosaur plants (Selaginella lepidophylla; a spike moss sold by Dune Craft under the name Dinosaur Plant and Resurrection Plant – I got one of each)… Ok, I confess: only one was a gift.  The other I bought for myself from Think Geek using my Geek Points while Christmas shopping for my family’s gift exchange.  Regardless, these things are super cool.  They come all dried up, curled in a ball, and all they need is a bowl of water to come back to life and keep living, at least so the company says.

I brought one back to life on New Year’s Day (I thought it was fitting) and took pictures of it every time I thought it looked significantly different.  It unfurled in about an hour and a half and it started the moment I ran it under the tap to rinse it out.  You can actually see it moving!  I’m not kidding.  It’s not a slow process.  It moves in jerks, which makes it fairly easy to see.  I put some of the pictures below in order so you can see the progression.  If I had more time, I’d figure out how far apart each was taken and post that information, but alas, my dissertation needs writing.  So what am I going to do with the other plant?  My plan is to see how the first one does.  If it does well, I might try planting the other one in soil.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

What you start with:

Here are both packages with one set of their contents: a plastic bowl, "lava" rocks, and the plant.

The sleeping plant.

 The re-hydration and unfurling process:

 

 

J. Paul Getty Museum Photos

Here are some of the photos I took at the J. Paul Getty Museum in L.A. yesterday.  I haven’t altered these at all (except for the panorama), so please excuse the crookedness of some of them.

J. Paul Getty Museum Trip

Staircase at the Getty Center

Today I took a family trip to the J. Paul Getty Museum in West Los Angeles.  It was hard to get past the hoards of misbehaved visitors to enjoy the art and architecture, but there were moments of surprising peace and inspiration.  Obviously, you can’t really get through everything in one day, so we just visited the exhibits that were near by the Lyonel Feininger exhibit that most of us wanted to see.  One of the the things I liked most about the Feininger exhibit was that they displayed his photos side-by-side with his sketches and drawings.  He used his photography to enhance his drawing and vice versa.  Sometimes having varying interests can be an asset.

Part of the reason for going to the museum was to take photos, one of which you’ll see above.  Taking photos in on crowded museum grounds is an exercise in patience.  When we got to the garden, we really wished we could have taken kite air photos over the pond.  The shrubs and plantings are so intricate, you really can’t do them justice from a human vantage point.  Maybe one day I’ll get to.

On a practical note, if you’re going to the Getty, the best food deal is quite possibly the bean & cheese burrito from the coffee kiosk.  At just over $3, it’s at least half the price of everything else and it’s a substantial amount of food.