Eastern Cauliflower Mushroom - Sparassis crispa

Information from: (disclaimer - never eat wild mushrooms without positive identification)

The Audubon Society Field Guide to

North American Mushrooms – Alfred A Knopf

Eastern Cauliflower Mushroom - Sparassis crispa

Description: Large 6-12” wide, 6-10” high, stalkless, rounded mushroom with fine wavy, white to pale yellowish, flat-edged, leaflike branches.  Spores 4-7 x 3-4 µ; oval, smooth and colourless. Spore print white.

Edibility: Choice.

Season;  July – October.

Habitat;  Open oak and sandy oak-pine woods.

Range;   Eastern North America.

Comments; - can be common in wet summers, but is rare in dry weather. When fresh it is white or whitish, has a crisp texture and is usually large enough to provide several meals. Nothing known to be poisonous even remotely resembles this Elizabethan ruff of a mushroom.  Also known as S. herbstii­

A Little Closer

Contrails

The Mointeach by Norvellhimself

In A Sunburnt Land

In May of 1993, at 11:03 p.m. of the 28^th, seismographs all over the Pacific region recorded a very large scale disturbance in the Great Victorian Desert of Western Australia.  The recordings didn’t present the profile for either earthquakes nor mining explosions – and they were showing that the blast was more than 170 times more powerful than any mining explosion ever known in that region of the world.  In fact the shock was more consistent with a large meteorite strike than anything.  Such a strike would have made a crater with a circumference of many hundreds of feet but no such crater could be found.  The general world could have cared less and so seemingly did Australia, for a day or so later the news was dead and life carried on.

Meanwhile in Japan a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo had come into being and in 1995 gained notoriety when it released great quantities of the nerve gas Sarin into the Tokyo subway system killing at least 12 people.  The ensuing investigation into their background found that the Aum Shinrikyo cult owned half a million acres of desert property in western Australia very near the site of the mystery event of 1993.  There, authorities found a laboratory of unusual sophistication and focus, and evidence that the cult members there had been mining uranium.  It also emerged that Aum Shinrikyo had recruited into its’ ranks two former Soviet nuclear engineers – and since the cults avowed aim was the destruction of the world it seems quite credible that the desert event may have been the background work for blowing up Tokyo.

This was the subject of a 1997 news story in the C section of The New York Times – but surprisingly nowhere else, not even in Australia. If any agency has ever taken steps to measure radiation around the mystery site it has never been publicly reported.

This information is contained in the book ‘IN A SUNBURNED LAND’ by Bill Bryson ©2000

My Country

I love a sunburnt country

A land of sweeping plains

of rugged mountain ranges

of droughts and flooding rains 

Dorothea MacKellar