IRIDES

While hoping that ‘iri’ was not a plural form of ‘iris,’ I discovered that ‘irides’ is. Far from coincidentally, there were several species of iris flowering in China Camp State Park this weekend.

I’m fairly sure the white one is Douglas’s iris (Iris douglasiana), given the equal length of the corolla and ovary, and the last one is probably a bowl-tubed iris (Iris macrosiphon), given the blue color and super long corolla (though I don’t quite see the bowl at the base of the flower). I neglected to inspect the genital configuration of the first, so it shall remain anonymous.

Despite past fungal smorgasbora (almost certainly not the proper plural), China Camp seemed bereft of my new saprophytic friends. Well, one exception: velvety earth tongue (Trichoglossum sp., or possibly a Geoglossum):

On a completely different note, why didn’t anyone tell me Freaks and Geeks was so good? Maybe you did, but why didn’t you then epoxy my face to the nearest cathode altar and force feed me its sweet irradiation? I mean, I could have been lamenting its cancellation for years. Their high school is crueler by far than mine ever was, but the depiction of social class and its bizarre refractions into the classroom and schoolyard seem so amazingly real. That last sentence deserved a clever turn on the word ‘class’ that I was unable to provide. English, you deserve a more capable lover. One that can satisfy. You know what I mean.

But the show is great. Deeply funny, and the kids are almost all wonderfully believable to a T. The parents are strange caricatures of dorky parents, the intended effect of which is a mystery to me. Do they appear from the kids point of view? Are they cheap laughs? Distilled embarrassment? Placeholders for future character development?

I also find it increasingly disturbing that television shows that truly appeal to me inevitably get cancelled, if they have not already succumbed to such a fate. Yes, most TV is trash, an even higher proportion than in other media, but I suspect it’s still the most widely beheld form of storytelling in America, and possibly the one that crosses the most social boundaries. Yes, the “news” is now ideologically narrowcast, but Lost isn’t, is it? So what does it mean that my taste in trash runs toward fare that falls flat in the barometer of American cultural approval? Yet another blow to one of my vanishingly few group identities, that’s what.