Politics Plus

My favorite time of year is here again – AUTUMN!

So once again you get my annual fall foliage portfolio.  And as always, it seems pretty logical the best way to begin our overview of the story behind fall’s phantasmagorical foliage fling is with … well, an overview of the vast verdant vegetation of the vales and vistas of Vermont.  (OK, OK – there probably are a few other states included – but that ruins my alliteration.)

So Just Try and Stop Me from Telling You Why Leaves Change Color

To understand why leaves change colors we need to realize that it’s part of a (hopefully) endless cycle.  Once a new leaf if fully formed, usually around June, the next thing a tree spends its energy on is setting the following year’s leaf buds.  The job of the leaves currently in place is to create and store food as carbohydrates/sugars necessary for that task.  And unlike us, trees are unique in that they’re able to manufacture their own food/energy, courtesy of photosynthesis.

Chlorophyll is the green pigmented chemical in leaves that uses the energy provided by the sun during the process of photosynthesis to convert water taken up by the roots and carbon dioxide taken from the air into sugars and starches – nutrients that the tree needs for growth – while giving off oxygen as a by-product.

But the chlorophyll that gives trees their green is not the only color pigment present in leaves all summer.  Working just as hard in the leaves are the carotenoids (carotene and xanthophyll).  These pigments are important in capturing light energy needed in the process of photosynthesis.  It’s just that the carotenoids are masked by the overpowering green of the chlorophyll during the summer months.

But with the coming of autumn, as daylight hours shorten and temperatures cool down, cells near the juncture of the leaf and its stem start to divide very rapidly.  This creates what is called an abscission layer.  This corky abscission layer of cells is the site where the leaf will eventually break from the tree and flutter to the ground.  That corky layer then serves to protect the branch through winter after the leaf leaves.

The rapid growth of that corky layer begins to physically block transport of nutrients needed by the leaf to manufacture the carbohydrates.  Consequently the photosynthesis that’s been creating chlorophyll (which is not a very stable chemical and has been rapidly broken down and replaced throughout the summer) ceases.

Once the chlorophyll is gone, the carotene and xanthophyll chemical pigments that have been present all summer long can now take center stage.

These carotenoids (carotene and xanthophyll) give their characteristic orange and yellow colors to not just leaves, but also to carrots, corn, canaries, and daffodils – as well as egg yolks, rutabagas, buttercups, and bananas.  And they account as the predominant color in about 15-30% of our tree species – typically the hardwood species of hickories, ash, maple, yellow poplar, aspen, birch, black cherry, sycamore, cottonwood, sassafras, and alder.

And the third class of color that trees have (the first two being chlorophyll and the carotenoids) are the reds and purples of anthocyanin.  But unlike the other two classes, anthocyanin has not been present in the leaves the whole summer.  The anthocyanins are created brand new –  just for autumn’s fall foliage!

Why the tree would expend its precious energy, when it’s shutting down for the winter, for the creation of a new product is not understood.  But we do know the brighter the sunlight during this period, the greater the production of anthocyanins – and the more brilliant the resulting reds and purples.  This pretty direct proportion of redness to sunlight exposure explains why the periphery of hardwood trees are bright red, while the foliage lower down and inside are the more typical oranges and yellows.

Anthocyanins also account for the coloring of cranberries, red apples, blueberries, cherries, strawberries, and plums.  They are present in only about 10% of hardwood species – mainly maples, sourwood, sweetgums, dogwoods, tupelos, cherry trees and persimmons.

But in a few lucky areas — most famously New England — up to 70% of tree species are the type that produce the anthocyanin pigment.  That high concentration of a single color (the reds of anthocyanin) accounts for the intense but relatively brief autumnal color display in New England.  Whereas in most other areas that have a higher mix of tree varieties the colors may not be as intense, but the season lasts longer.

You can see where your particularly area is peak-wise with this Interactive Peak Color Map.  Just slide the circle on the bar to the date you want.

Click Me for the Map

Time to enjoy some of my new favorite photos of the fantasia of fall …

Drone View of Fall Foliage in Quebec

A Tree Allée in Germany 

Bears Rocks in West Virginia 

Drone View of Farm Fields Cut Through a Forest in Keene, Ontario

Fall Foliage in the Fog

Drone View of Winding Road Through the Bogata Forest in Romania

Swans Enjoying the Autumnal Splendors

We’ll see you again next year!

I suppose I could tell you my allergies have been acting up …

But I don’t have allergies.

Or maybe I’ve been having some GI problems …

But that wouldn’t be accurate.

The truth is I’ve been trying to come up with a topic – but had Bupkis …

Until last night when one of Trump’s advisors stepped up and provided me with my topic!

But it’s evolved over time, and I want to get it right.  Plus I HAVE to core aerate the lawn today.  And if any of you have ever rented a core aerator … well, my condolences!

It’s my least favorite yard chore – and it’s a helluva a lot of work … especially turning the damn monster around.  I’ll be sore for a couple of days.

Sadly, there will be no “Friday Fun” this week either, because I’m not in the mood.

As I had said, I didn’t do one last week because I was heading up to my Mom’s for a pill caddy restocking and looking forward to a mini-reunion w/ my brother and sister-in-law, who were flying in from Tampa.

But sadly, we had a very tragic Labor Day reunion.  Mom & I learned that my brother’s PCP is sure his unexplained 75# weight loss over the past 9-10 months is due to cancer – but she hasn’t found the primary site yet.

But worse is that my sister-in-law passed away.

My brother said that my sister-in-law didn’t feel that well on their flight up last Friday, and Mom and I didn’t actually see her until lunch on Saturday.  She told me then that she was up all night w/ chest pain radiating to her scapula accompanied by nausea and vomiting.

I immediately said those are pretty classic symptoms for an MI and you need to go to the ER and I mean right now!  But she refused saying that she felt much better now, and she actually did eat a good lunch.  I tried several times to convince her to go – but she refused.

In late afternoon my brother came down and said his wife was still nauseated w/ vomiting – but no chest pain.  I asked if I could try again to convince her to go, and he said, “You know how stubborn she can be.”

I told him we had nothing to lose.  She needs to be in the ER NOW and she’s not.  If she refuses my suggestion we’re at the same place as we are now.  He agreed it’s worth a try, and this time she agreed.

My brother took her to the nearest ER where they diagnosed atrial fib (which they were able to convert), but a CT scan showed a volvulus (twisting) of her hiatal hernia that needed emergency surgery that they were not able to do.  So they transferred her by ambulance to the U. of Iowa Hospital.  (Iowa City is only an hour away from where I grew up.)

She got there ~ 1 AM on Sunday morning, and they repeated a bunch of tests and studies, and said she did NOT need surgery and dismissed her ~ 10 AM.

When they got back she still felt nauseated and had persistent vomiting.  I didn’t see her again until Monday noon when she came down briefly to say “Hello” to our aunt and her sister (my pseudo-aunt from the KCMO Metro who went back to Illinois w/ her sister for an extended visit after a wedding on August 12^th; I brought her back home w/ me yesterday).

At that time, my sister-in-law told me then that she was going to go straight to the ER from the airport when they got home from their 6 PM flight.  I told her I thought it was a good idea.  She only stayed a couple of minutes because she felt so ill.

Mom and I didn’t see her again until I loaded up their rental car for them, and she again said she was going to go straight to the ER from the airport.

But when they landed, she didn’t.

She told my brother that she was feeling better and decided she’d wait until the morning so she could see her PCP.

Later on that night she came into my brother’s study, said I think I’m having a heart attack, keeled over and died.  My brother tried doing CPR while calling 911, and the police and paramedics arrived shortly thereafter, but to no avail.

What a tragedy!  I have no idea if things might have been different if she had actually gone to the ER straight from the airport or not – but it literally makes me sick to think about it.

Now my brother is faced w/ a diagnosis of cancer, loss of his wife and Hurricane Irma is bearing down on Florida (although it looks like it’s going to head more toward the east coast than the Gulf coast).

Poor gut can’t catch a break.

Her three boys from her first marriage (her first husband died at a relatively young age) are in Iowa, Illinois and one in the Tampa metro, have been very helpful and my brother has largely deferred to their wishes.

She’ll be cremated and the ashes transferred to Iowa for a funeral service a week from this Saturday in the Waterloo area.  I’ll go up for it, but Mom is not sure if she’ll make the two-hour drive w/ me for it.

She has a plot next to her first husband, but I don’t know if the ashes will be buried their or in a columbarium.

My Dad passed away on September 10, 1962, so Labor Day has never been one of my favorite holidays.  Even more so now.

I honestly believe that this week will mark the downfall – and removal – of Twitler from office.  The utter ugliness of the “Unite the Right” rallies this past  Friday night and Saturday ending in tragedy when a homegrown domestic terrorist murdered Heather Heyer, an innocent protestor, is something we’ve all witnessed.

Twitler’s abysmal response to it leads me to believe this is the beginning of his end-days.  But there are so many tangents involving this horrific week I decided that it’s too difficult to find a single, unifying thread for a relatively short post – so I’ve chosen to do a potpourri approach to capture some of the highlights (there were some), lowlights (there were many) and even a few that hopefully will make you smile if not chuckle out loud.

As we know, the ostensible “reason” the white supremacists, KKK and neo-Nazis united to put on their rallies was the removal of a statue honoring Robert E. Lee.  And yesterday Twitler announced he is foursquare against “the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments”.

This I find very odd because all those Confederate statues and monuments celebrate LOSERS!  I thought Twitler did not like LOSERS!

But I did enjoy the inventive approach of someone in Phoenix decorating a Confederate monument there (Phoenix?  That surprised me, too) with a “2^nd Place – Participant” banner, adding “You Lost – Get Over It”

We’ve all seen the photos and films of the Friday night Tiki torch rally …

Now I will admit they’ve gotten rid of the sheets and updated their uniforms, but …

I think we all knew that Twitler’s reading of a ghostwriter’s measured remarks from a Teleprompter on Monday in response to the domestic terrorism could not last.  And sure enough, by Tuesday he was again revealing his true white supremacist self with that “Both Sides Do It” crap while claiming that some of the Nazis are “very fine people”.

So let’s take a closer look at what I thought we all believed were the “Good Guys” …

Yep – turns out we WERE right … change that to CORRECT.  And again, the “Good Guys” had some inventive responses

And yet Trump still doesn’t seem to understand he’s backing LOSERS!

So to help him out I think it behooves us to provide him with a very, VERY simple algorithm flowchart that even he should be able to understand

On the bright side, it seems the media folks have finally realized they should have never engaged in all their false equivalency trying to normalize the evil that is Trump-incarnate during his campaign against Hillary …

Hopefully they – and at least some republicans – will read the tea leaves and recognize their failings …

And rid our country of this pestilence …

So reasonable voices, like those at the University of Virginia candlelight vigil honoring Heather Heyer,  may rise again …