Field of Science

Tree fall shows several kinds of strangeness


Dearest Mary forwarded this image to me surmising that the Phactor could best deal with the fundamental strangenesses exhibited. While somewhat uncertain whether this is a complement or says something else about my blog persona, this is pretty spooky. Firstly, who and for what reason puts a half sized giraffe in their yard? It isn't handsome and it isn't cute or funky, it's just strange. Now a cement hippo or 250 pound sleeping sow, that could be funky, at least we hope so in the case of the latter, not the former. Second, that sod is the stuff of lawn care commercials. It ripped up like old green shag carpet. Remember shag carpet? No, good, best forgotten. But thirdly, what the heck is going on with the surface under the tree and sod? Was this subdivision developed on a former airport runway? Was this a Love Canal covered with concrete to make it semi-safe for living upon? Six inches of sod with tree roots under the sod and neither could penetrate the tarmac beneath, so after all that rain, you do get the impression that it had rained a lot, a top heavy tree just ripped up the sod from the runway beneath. Actually another image does come to mind. Many, many moons ago the Phactor took a field trip to a quaking bog, a wetland where a more or less solid mat of sphagnum and vegetation floats. Not too large arvbor vitaes grow upon the mat, and if someone really, really big gives a jump, the resulting "ripples" make the trees quake, rocking back and forth. So this is more or less the exact opposite of a quaking bog, a solid rock bottom anti-bog upon which grows a mat of vegetation. Wonder what made it quake? Guess they should plant smaller trees, and get smaller lawn animals. Still another image is that the tree has opened its maw in order to grab some small person or large dog that has happened to walk by on the sidewalk, and the picture captures the capture moment, shades of some Harry Potter movie. Any other ideas? And even more thanks to Mary for sparing us the Joyce Kilmer poem that accompanied this and other tree pictures.

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