Once you pay admission and are let in, you start out in a room full of terraria.  There are various bugs, reptiles, and amphibians kept in here.  Here is a yellow frog (I didn’t note what type it is or what its native region is):

And here are 2 specimens of one of a few varieties of walking stick type bugs they had:

Hint: the bugs look like yellow leaves amid the green leaves.

Once we finished with that room, we headed through a positive-pressure chamber and then into the conservatory proper:

What you see in that picture is only about 10-20% of the space.  There are lots of species of butterfly and moth in the place, just flying around free.  Fortunately, they land a lot, which makes it easier to get pictures:

This is called a glasswing, for the obvious reason:

The big, red object that it’s perched on is a feeder, filled with nectar of some kind.  There are a lot of these around, as well as actual flowers for the insects to feed on.

In the middle of our visit, one landed on my leg:

It slowly walked upward, and I had to just let it do its thing, as they have a strict rule against touching the animals (because of potential contamination).  Once it got near my hip it decided to take off again.  You might think that the butterflies would often land on people in this space, but it’s apparently a rare occurrence.

Here are 3 ricepaper butterflies at a feeder:

This is some type of moth:

An owl butterfly:

IIRC, below is a blue morpho.  The inside of its wings are the really vibrant, blue side, but it only showed that side when in flight (and it was hard to get a good picture of them in motion):

Here’s a video of one feeding, and not sitting still:

The place also had birds in the conservatory.  This is a Gouldian Finch:

There were a bunch of them perched in a few trees, and some more (younger ones, maybe) in a couple of cages.

Also, running around the ground were these little quails:

They were funny to behold.  They mostly kept to the dirt areas under the bushes and trees, but would occasionally hop down into the walkway, run across, and hop up into the next dirt area.

Not pictured, we also were able to look in some windows at their nursery, where they’ve lined up bunches of cocoons, and you can occasionally see one break out as a newly-winged organism.  Also, apparently when they’ve recently finished metamorphosis, their wings are a bit too wet for them to fly.  We encountered one on the path that was having a hard time getting off the ground.  An employee said it was probably newly released from the nursery and still needed to dry out a little.  He picked it up by letting it walk onto a foam paintbrush (no touching, after all), and then he deposited it on a nearby branch so it would be out of harm’s way.

That was pretty much it.  If you like butterflies, or insects in general, the place is well worth the $12 admission.  I might like to visit again in the summer, when they’ll have their outdoor garden in bloom, attracting native species to it.

Usually the cats are more discreet when they go undercover.

“Perhaps my patronus is a plectranthus.”

The message today was not from the staff of MoveOn, as is often the case, but from a member using a petition site setup by the group, which enables mailing of petitions to other members.  The text claimed that Apple’s Siri, a sort of artificial intelligence search program that runs on the newest iPhones, was acting in an anti-abortion manner in dealing with family planning queries from users.  The message listed one source – this article from Raw Story, a site I hadn’t heard of.

This evening I looked at that article, which lists a bunch of other things one can find info on through Siri (some of them illegal).  I also googled some other information about this issue.  There are a number of other items about the story (including this post by PC Mag) that relate Apple’s response.  The company denies any anti-choice intent on their part (and I believe them, as they’re generally a pretty liberal company).  One possibility they suggest for the problem is the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the word “abortion” in searching for abortion services – the word is perhaps not used so much by advocates, but more by opponents.

Apple does point out that Siri is still a beta product, and they mention their intention to fix this glitch.  That seems good enough to me.  I don’t know how bombarded with angry e-mails they might have been as a result of this petition message (which assumed the worst of Apple, and was titled “iphone’s big secret”), but the company should weather the “storm” fine.  Whatever controversy has been stirred up seems to have been mild, and I think most people have probably, like me, thought “That’s odd,” and then waited for more info to come out.

BTW, after coming up with the title for this post, I googled the words “conspiracy siri”, and while there were one or 2 hits for the abortion story, nothing seemed to come up with that as a phrase/play-on-words as I intended it.  There are, however, a number of hits on some supposed conspiracy with a Catholic Cardinal named Siri.  I didn’t read much about that, but it looks intriguing.

The camera kept wanting to focus on the screen, so I tried getting pictures through screenless windows, though I didn’t have as direct a view through those:

Nevertheless, it was a really pretty sunrise.  It was also transient – less than 10 minutes after I took these pictures, the sky was just gray.

As I recall from when I first heard of this day’s designation, the reason for this being a day of online deals is that people would return to work after 4 days off and would do a lot of shopping online, presumably because they have better Internet access at work than at home (FWIW, the Wikipedia article on the day bears this out).  I would guess that a lot more Americans these days have Internet connections at home that are perfectly fast enough for shopping, but now that the day is established for marketers, it probably will be a special designation for many, many years.

Here’s what I find confusing: offering all these deals would seem to encourage workers to spend their time buying stuff rather than working.  In other words, on this day each year, one segment of the business community – retailers – is attacking the productivity of the rest of the business community.  Are there employers that resent this marketing?  Have they tried to put any pressure on retailers (and would it do any good, since promotions like this seem to be very helpful to retails bottom line?)?  Do lots of employees run afoul of computer use policies today?

I googled a few news stories on this, and it seems like businesses do seem to lose a lot of productivity on the day, but they have different ways of coping with it.  Some places probably don’t have an issue, simply because they keep a tight rein on what sites can be visited from their network.  Nevertheless, this is one issue where the business community is certainly not of one mind (alth0ugh that community might be less monolithic in general than I give it credit for).

In the past I have mentioned Narbonic, by Shaenon Garrity, and her strip Skin Horse that was new at the time.  She collaborates with Jeffrey Wells on Skin Horse (they co-write it, and she does all the art), and now that it’s been running for a few years, I can say a bit more about it.  The strip is basically about a secret government agency that helps nonhuman sapients cope with the world (in short, they’re black ops social services).  Where Narbonic was about a mad scientist, Skin Horse (that title, BTW, is a reference to the Velveteen Rabbit) often involves the main characters taking on the products of mad science as their clients.  The situations and plot lines in the strip are generally silly and imaginative, such as one that involved the ongoing discovery of various creatures having created their own clashing civilizations in the basement archives.

Clockwork Game is a historical comic, dramatizing the history of a real device – a seemingly chess-playing automaton known often as “The Turk”, for its decoration as though it were an Ottoman figure from a certain period.  Jane Irwin is the creator, as well as having written and drawn earlier the fictional Vögelein graphic novels.  The strip covered much of the life of the device’s inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, and his displeasure with something he built as an amusement coming to overshadow his more practical creations.  Currently, the story is concerned with the work of the man who acquired the automaton after Kempelen’s death, what he did with it and other technologies.  The comic is really neat as an interesting look at some history of technology that I wasn’t aware of, and several famous personages are encountered in the strip.

Finally, for a few years I’ve been reading Octopus Pie, by Meredith Gran.  I may have mentioned her briefly in my NEWW posts, but I don’t think I talked specifically about the strip.  OP follows the lives of several friends/acquaintances in Brooklyn, and is generally a humorous comic, though it has had its more serious stories.  For the most part, it’s a slice of life type of comic, but the art style is quite cartoony, and occasionally it gets out of the realm of our usual reality.  Gran has a great gift for dialogue, and often the characters say hilarious things, or at least say things in a funny manner.  The strip pokes fun at a lot of aspects of modern urban life, such as hipster culture, organic food stores, bike culture, drugs, etc.  The main character, Eve, is an excellent cranky protagonist, and she has a great foil in her really laid-back roommate Hanna.

You might wonder why this warrants a blog post.  It’s true that I done plenty of oven cleaning before in my life, but this time I used the oven’s self-cleaning feature.

And yes, if you’re wondering, I have never used the self-clean feature before.  Not on this or any other oven.  There were plenty of times in the past the oven we had was not self-cleaning, and I’ve never liked the idea of using the caustic spray-on cleaners, so I’ve always cleaned the oven by getting in there and scrubbing, often with a soapy steel wool pad.  It does the trick, but takes a bunch of work.

We decided recently that we really ought to try this self-clean thing (heck, the technology has only been around for 3 decades or so).  Not having done it before, I wanted to make sure I knew what to expect.  I read the manual for the range, which warned that the area around the stove should be well ventilated, and that fumes could pose a danger to pet birds if they were too close to the kitchen.  I also did some Googling of the process, and found a lot of people who love self-cleaning ovens and swear by it.  I also found a few people who said that they or their children had gotten really sick from the fumes.  So, I was a little trepid about it.

I plunged forward and did it last night, though.  It was a good time to do so, as a bunch of stuff dripped from apple pies on Thanksgiving, and the stuff burnt on the bottom of the oven.  The manual said it would take about 4 hours, and it ended up taking a bit more than that before the indicator said it was done.  The vent fan was running on high speed most of the time, and while there were some unpleasant smelling fumes for the first hour or two, it wasn’t too strong (we didn’t need to open a window or anything).  It was pretty late when it finished, so we turned it off and went to bed, letting it cool overnight.

This morning I opened up the oven and, as promised, there was just a bit of ash in the bottom:

I wiped it up, then cleaned the racks and put them back in.  It may be a bit odd that it took me so long to give this technology a try, given how my work and home life have often involved using lots of high-tech items, but there you go.  I’m certainly a convert to this method, and will use it again.

However, I had missed one important aspect, which was pointed out to me the other day: the place is a Strip mall.

Yeah.  That is all.

We first worked on the pies.  I don’t like making pie crust, but my partner is good at it and likes it.  The situation is the opposite with the filling, so while she was cutting butter and rolling dough, I was peeling, coring, and slicing apples.  We put together 2 pies , and here they are before they went in the oven:

The pattern on the first one may look familiar to you.

There is generally extra dough leftover after pies are assembled, so we put it in small pieces on cookie sheets, and sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar:

We had enough of those to fill 3 sheets (not to the wind).

Here are the finished pies (in late afternoon sun):

After the pies were done, I went out while there was still daylight and picked kale and chives in the garden (yes, both are still alive):

I spent about 2 hours on the cooking of dinner, and I made all the following dishes, except for the popovers.

Sweet potatoes that have been steamed, before mixing in the dressing:

After dressing (they got a little mashed from then stirring):

Mashed potatoes and celeriac (with minced chives):

Beets (white and striped):

Broccoli and purple cauliflower:

The cooked kale:

Salad:

The sauerkraut (which was merely taken out of the fridge – we made it weeks ago):

Warm, fresh popovers:

We finished dinner a little while ago, and are waiting to have room for pie.  The aftermath of all this food includes, of course, a lot of dirty dishes to do:

We do have a dishwasher, but I expect it will still take a day or so to get caught up on those.  We also have plenty of leftover food, so we’ll have nice big dinners for a few nights, yet.