I am not having sex with Spike! But I'm starting to think that you might be.

Buffy ,'Dirty Girls'


Natter 71: Someone is wrong on the Internet  

Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.


Jessica - Feb 28, 2013 12:31:37 pm PST #13127 of 30001
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset

(and no, i have no idea how to sex a tree)

Flowers = male

Fruit = female

That said, I have no idea how one pollinates an avocado.


le nubian - Feb 28, 2013 12:37:16 pm PST #13128 of 30001
"And to be clear, I am the hell. And the high water."

So I discovered (no pun intended) that my Discover card was compromised. Someone bought $350 worth of clothes from zara.com.

In addition, three plane tix were purchased from Spirit Airlines. The thing about airline tix is that the passenger name shows up when you buy tix. One person has a ticket for March 1, but somehow I don't think they will be getting to where they want to go.

Discover sent me new cards all of the sudden and I did not realize that they had started a fraud investigation because my name had been compromised.


-t - Feb 28, 2013 12:37:55 pm PST #13129 of 30001
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

I just googled and UC Riverside says avocado flowers have both male and female organs. Commercial growers use bees as pollinators because the flowers are actively male at different times than they are actively female (and which is when varies by variety. I probably could have worded that better)

Eta: aw, crap, le nubian. It sounds like Discover is on top of it, I hope this doesn't lead to problems for you.


erikaj - Feb 28, 2013 12:41:24 pm PST #13130 of 30001
"already on the kiss-cam with Karl Marx"-

I like avocados, but they kind of don't like me back. Eat my share, too.


erin_obscure - Feb 28, 2013 12:41:52 pm PST #13131 of 30001
Occasionally I’m callous and strange

oooh, you can indeed buy avocados online


Burrell - Feb 28, 2013 12:42:47 pm PST #13132 of 30001
Why did Darth Vader cross the road? To get to the Dark Side!

Flowers = male

Fruit = female

Huh. Now see I'd been told (erin too, seems like) that some trees were male and some were female, but if Jessica is right, then all trees are both. Or is it that all trees have flowers but only females bear fruit?

edited to add: Thanks -t for the Google-fu


erin_obscure - Feb 28, 2013 12:43:58 pm PST #13133 of 30001
Occasionally I’m callous and strange

I did some more research (it's been years since I hoped to get my own fruiting trees) and it's more a matter than productive trees are a result of grafting, rather than planting a bunch and letting bees and wind sort things out.

eta: not that that answers the question of tree sex, but apparently avocado trees aren't very good at mating. Or have been bred to not be good at mating so people like me will be dependent on grocery stores for creamy green goodness.


Liese S. - Feb 28, 2013 12:55:54 pm PST #13134 of 30001
"Faded like the lilac, he thought."

Shoot, LeNub, I feel you.


billytea - Feb 28, 2013 12:57:26 pm PST #13135 of 30001
You were a wrong baby who grew up wrong. The wrong kind of wrong. It's better you hear it from a friend.

Huh. Now see I'd been told (erin too, seems like) that some trees were male and some were female, but if Jessica is right, then all trees are both. Or is it that all trees have flowers but only females bear fruit?

From Wikipedia, 85% of flowering plants are not only bisexual but hermaphroditic, i.e. their flowers have both male and female parts. Another 5-6% are bisexual, but each individual flower is either male or female. Only 6-7% of flowering plants are dioecious, i.e. each whole plant is entirely male or entirely female.

One noteworthy dioecious example is Amborella, because it diverged from other angiosperms (flowering plants) right at the base of the angiosperm family tree, about 130 million years ago. It's now found only on New Caledonia, which has been isolated for the last 65 million years or so. (This is how I came across it, as I'm currently reading a book about evolution and geographic dispersal patterns.)


§ ita § - Feb 28, 2013 12:59:18 pm PST #13136 of 30001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Ooh, LeN--it's nice to think the rug will be jerked out from underneath them at the last minute. Shame their clothes can't disappear right off their bodies when they're at the grocery store. I hope everything clears up simply. Wait--do you have the name of the person? Can we cyber-vendetta them????

One more meeting left for the day. One more meeting...

I can tell from quick googling that the Shorty people take themselves seriously, but how seriously are they taken? I noticed that, as usual, Misha's fans were rallying for him to win a Shorty award, and it worked (which means he wasn't up against someone from Teen Wolf...) and they sent him a questionnaire which he completely refused to take seriously: [link] I wonder if they'll let him play again... But the questions are both vapid and self-important. Good lord. How do you use social media to motivate yourself or others to live a healthier life?. Why would you ask that of the guy whose campaign video was fucking armadillos (literally)?

Ha ha! My manager was trying to offer my time to the more junior BA. Does she not understand she's already sold me body and soul to a man who comes to my desk after 4pm and tells me he needs stuff "before early tomorrow morning"? I don't mind doing the work for him, but I am going to have set expectations across the board.

I need to get my time management in fifth gear now, both personally and professionally. The project management course I went to this week wasn't anything new, but it's never not useful to get out of the office and see everything presented together by and with fresh eyes, especially in a forum where I could talk my ass off (about project management). So it didn't change my life, but it is reminding me of things I was letting slip through the cracks (all my meeting invites, even the most ad hoc ones, should have some info in the body about what I expect to achieve during the meeting--we get really slack about expecting people to get it from the title, or working it out when we get there, for example)