Monthly Archives: March 2022

The Aftermath: Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo 2022 – 6

In many ways, and I speak from experience, being a vendor at an Oddities & Curiosities Expo is like being a barista in a shopping mall Starbucks on the first shopping day of the holiday season. Namely, the crowds come pouring in right after the doors open, and you only realize that the doors are closed when the crowd lets up and you get a chance to check the time. In small retail, this isn’t a bad thing, and my only regret was not being able to get a quick shot of what little was left at the booth after the Expo closed. Suffice to say, for this coming Austin Oddities & Curiosities Expo in June, the selection will be greater because of the number of plants out of winter dormancy, AND there should be room in the truck for a few surprises that nobody is going to expect. And after that, it’s only a short six weeks until Aquashella Dallas.

As always, there are a lot of people to thank for this year’s Dallas Expo running as smoothly as it did, starting with the Oddities & Curiosities Expo staff and crew. Three years after the first one rolled into town, and they still act as the gold standard for convention and exposition operation: when I compare them in professionalism and sheer hard work with the Texas Frightmare Weekend crew, this is an incredibly high compliment that I don’t give our quickly or easily, but they earn it every time. Here’s to their organization and curatorial skills (I may not have been able to leave the booth, but I saw a lot of other vendors’ works going by, and the Expo crew works incredibly hard to keep a wide and surprising variety of goods in each show), here’s to the fellow vendors who made setup and teardown as easy and friendly as it should always be, and here’s to everyone who came out to look around and left with plants. You’re the reason I do this multiple times a year.

Fin.

The Aftermath: Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo 2022 – 5

Every year, the first show of the season usually gives a hint as to the general vibe for the rest of the year, and if this holds true again this year, 2022 should be wild. The first and most obvious point about this year’s Oddities & Curiosities Expo was the huge and wildly enthusiastic crowd, especially considering all of the other events going on in Dallas at the same exact time, which once again blows Dallas’s undeserved reputation for being boring and conservative out of the water. (If anything, the upcoming Texas Frightmare Weekend a month from now should be even bigger and more intense, seeing as how all three days are very nearly sold out as of this writing.) That, though, wasn’t a surprise. The surprise? The amount of cash being used.

Let me explain. For the last decade since cheap and effective credit card readers became available to small sellers, the shift has obviously been going toward plastic. Credit cards take up little room, they’re replaceable if lost or misplaced, they don’t require lots of change, either in bills or in coin, and they still work even when saturated in boob or crotch sweat. (And yes, WE VENDORS KNOW THESE THINGS. WE FERVENTLY WISH WE DID NOT KNOW THESE THINGS, BUT WE KNOW.) The nearly universal consensus is that most attendees of events like these born after 1980 go through weeks and months without every encountering paper or metal money, and they don’t really miss it. They will, though, ask “Do you take cards?” because of the number of vendors who will only accept cash, to which I give my standard response, “Where the hell do you think you are: the Twentieth Century?”

That was the surprising part: you still have people using cash at events such as these, as it’s easy to track and even easier to set yourself up with a spending limit. However, not only do you have fewer vendors who only take cash, but even fewer who complain about it. At the rate things are going, give the small vendor arena five years, and the only people taking cash will those deliberately refusing to leave 1999. It’ll be very interesting to see how many customers will go to the effort of carrying cash just to buy from them, or if they’ll just buy from someone else.

To be continued…

The Aftermath: Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo 2022 – 4

For those lamenting having to miss out on the Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo this year (to be fair, there was a lot of interesting things happening in Dallas this last weekend, and the beginning of spring is when we all start budgeting our weekend time because we know the heat will be upon us soon enough), take solace in two bits of knowledge. Firstly, the Oddities & Curiosities Expos are traveling shows, spread all over the United States, so odds are fairly good that they’ll show up to a major city near you eventually. For instance, your humble chronicler makes the first of two trips to Austin in 2022 on June 18, where the Triffid Ranch returns for its third appearance at the Expo at Palmer Event Center in downtown Austin. The fervent hope is to spend at least a couple of shows in 2023 outside of Texas entirely, and the Expo crew is one that is worth joining in that endeavor. Details will follow as they come along.

To be continued…

The Aftermath: Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo 2022 – 3

If there was any downside to this first Oddities & Curiosities Expo, it was that just like everyone else, an increase in prices was inevitable this year. The last time fuel prices went this high, back when the Triffid Ranch was a tiny operation, fuel costs for shipping was enough to move so many businesses to using plastic instead of glass for storage (take a look at a typical grocery store and note that about the only things in the condiments section in glass are ones incorporating lots of vinegar if you don’t believe me). For a lot of reasons, this really isn’t an option as far as the plants are concerned (he said, once again rueful about the effects of Texas sun on most plastics), so everything had to jump in price a bit.

The upside was having a conglomerate of customers who not only understood, but still commented on how low prices were. Well, I’m trying my utmost: as I’m constantly trying to explain to MBAs who want to argue about the viability of a carnivorous plant gallery (most of whom have problems spelling “MBA” without at least a spotter and a coach), making a profit is important, but it’s not the only reason for doing this. Yeah, the look on kids’ faces when they see a carnivorous plant up close for the first time isn’t something that pays the rent, but if profit was the sole criterion for doing this, I’d start a hedge fund.

To be continued…

The Aftermath: Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo 2022 – 2

For all of the praise you’ll see coming from this direction about the Oddities & Curiosities Expos, one thing I can’t recommend is any particular vendor to recommend. It’s not that I can’t think of any, or that each Expo hall isn’t packed solid with intriguing and fascinating vendors carrying items of all sorts. The problem is that I’m lucky to be able to get out of the Triffid Ranch booth space the whole day long, so seeing anybody else except in passing just isn’t an option. Apologies to my cohorts and colleagues in this: all I can tell everybody else is “go buy lots of great stuff from everybody else, too.”

The Aftermath: Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo 2022 – 1

Now that things are going back to something approximating “normal” (although I wonder who decided the baseline), it’s quite nice to get back to taking the Triffid Ranch on the road. The Oddities & Curiosities Expo remains one of the best shows of its type for road trips: it runs in multiple cities through the year, each Expo has a good mix of local vendors and vendors who follow most if not all of the annual tour, and each Expo runs in a locale with excellent parking and an easy-to-access venue. In a way, it also doesn’t hurt that each Expo is only a one-day affair: with both Dallas and Austin shows, we vendors are nearly stripped clean by the close of business, and a second day might just kill us all. At the same time, the number of interesting people, both newcomers and old friends, at each show makes it that much harder to break down and go home on Saturday, because there’s a part that wishes that greeting everyone on a Sunday was an option.

To be continued…

The Aftermath: Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo 2022 – Introduction

It’s a little hard to believe that the first Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo was only three years ago, and not just because everything before March 2020 feels like the Ordovician. The crew, the attendees, the venue…everything and everybody was running on all cylinders in 2022, leading to one of the largest and most intense shows this humble chronicler has ever experienced. In 14 years of Triffid Ranch shows, not only is the Oddities & Curiosities Expo the Euclidean ideal of how events of this type should be run, but it’s the one traveling show that would get me to plan an out-of-state event without hesitation.

Oh, there were issues, but those were completely unavoidable. The ice storms that hit Dallas in February and early March assured that Venus flytraps and North American pitcher plants were just starting to wake up from their winter dormancy, so the variety of carnivores for attendees to view was a little limited. That didn’t bother anybody at all, and the only real issue was having enough room for everyone to get a good look at the plants without having to crawl on each other. Considering the size of the crowd, the crawling part was a challenge.

To be continued…

Have a Safe Weekend

And so the Triffid Ranch show season starts this weekend with the Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo this weekend: after this, it’s back to the gallery for a month. This weekend is going to be a weird one…

The Aftermath: March 2022 Open House the Third

The last open house before the gallery renovation starts, and things were BUSY. Not so busy as expected in April and May, but after one last cold snap in the previous week to say goodbye to winter, surprising brisk. Why, it’s as if people are actively looking forward to regular Saturday open houses or something.

As a warning, April won’t be as consistent with open houses: toward the end of the month, the Porch Sales outdoors return, and the plan is to try evening and Sunday events for those who can’t get out on Saturday mornings. That’s part and parcel for the extensive changes to gallery operation over 2022, so just keep checking back for updates.

For those who missed out this month, this is sadly the last open house for a little while. The weekend of March 26 is dedicated to the Oddities & Curiosities Expo in Dallas’s Fair Park, and then the weekend of April 2 goes into much-needed renovation time. After that, though…

Have a Safe Weekend

Another Saturday in March, another open house, open from noon until 5. (Incidentally, for those who have only come out to the gallery in winter, the next few months should be very instructive. This week is the traditional week for switching the gallery’s light timers to a 12-hour schedule from the 8-hour photoperiod that runs through winter, so if various plants are going to bloom, the next month will see them doing so. With everyone else, the additional four hours of light should stimulate a whole new run of fresh growth, so that leads to all sorts of new possibilities. Either way, the plants you may have seen in December are going to be drastically different by the beginning of April.)

Pivoting (Back) to Video

Okay, so the last of the big winter freezes has (probably) passed by Dallas, and the Sarracenia and temperate sundews are starting to wake up from winter dormancy. The move to the new house is complete (the workroom may look as if Hunter S. Thompson camped there for a month, but this is an example of “no battle-ready unit ever passed inspection”), the gallery renovation ramps up this week, and show season starts next weekend. So what’s next? Video!

After a hiatus set off by Day Job schedule conflicts and a vastly increased show and open house schedule in 2021, it’s time to start giving interested passersby better views of the gallery and what to expect. That includes biting the bullet, swallowing my general loathing of the platform, taking advice from the Dallas Observer, and starting a TikTok account. Go give TexasTriffidRanch a view: it’ll mostly be views of new enclosures, ongoing shows, and ongoing projects, all with a minimum of mugging, synthesized voices, and filters.

(I WILL give TikTok high credit for one thing. When setting up a business account, the huge library of royalty-free music available to those accounts is exceptional. Without fail, finishing an enclosure video, entering a soundtrack reference that seems particularly appropriate, and scrolling through the options finds something even better. I’m willing to stick with TikTok just for the music library.)

This is, of course, a sideproject: the real plan is to start up new Twitch streams and YouTube videos by the end of April. Barring something critical, and 2022 has already filled itself with critical issues, this is now a viable plan. Now it’s up to the plants.

Personal Interlude

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to those who celebrate. While the rest of Dallas focuses on excessive drinking (this incredibly NSFW piece, and I’m not kidding about it being NSFW, should be the city’s anthem today), my personal anthem is a bit more traditional. (Of course, the song needs to be flipped for me: my father was a Scot Catholic and my mother an Irish Lutheran, but you know how it goes.)

State of the Gallery: March 2022

Ah, March in Texas. As much as everyone wants to joke about Texas weather in general, the real fun is waiting for the week of St. Patrick’s Day/the vernal equinox, because just about anything can happen. Tornadoes, dust storms, snow…stick around Dallas long enough, and you’ll see almost everything. This year, the tornadoes stayed away for a bit, but we got hail across the northern half of Dallas County, thankfully not large enough to cause sustained damage or injury, but still a bit disconcerting. I suspect that March 2023 is the month for asteroid strikes, but we’re only halfway through March 2022, so it could be setting up for the end of the month. (April 2 marks the fortieth anniversary of the dust storm that gave me a particularly distinctive scar that allows me to tell if my hairline is receding, given to me in a pig pen no less, so I literally have some skin in Texas weather prognostication.)

In various developments, the gallery renovation and reorganization starts this month, with the height of the revival in April in time for the Manchester United Flower Show, tentatively scheduled for April 23. It’s already starting with moving the taller enclosures to the front, but it’s the detail that should get everyone. (The designer keeps joking that it needs to look like a Rainforest Cafe as designed by Peter Jackson, but we also agree that it might benefit from a few pylons. If you can’t have fun with the concept of a carnivorous plant gallery, then why even bother?)

On the event front, the last March open house opens the door at noon on March 19, and this is the last open house for a little while. Part of this is because of the Oddities & Curiosities Expo at Dallas’s Fair Park on March 26, and part is to take a break to finish up the renovation. When it’s ready and open houses and Porch Sales start up again, the skies will light up with the news.

Other than the weather and renovation fun, the rest of the month goes toward further surprises, particularly involving the big Texas Frightmare Weekend show at the end of April. Between new enclosures debuting at the show and new species never before encountered at a Frightmare, anyone wanting to attend should get their weekend passes before the show sells out. Yeah, go ahead and laugh, but Frightmare sold out completely in 2019, and the number of people looking forward to coming back out for the traditional April show after two years of lockdowns suggests that you should get those passes NOW.

And in final news, the Day Job that kept things going at the gallery since the end of 2020 ends as of March 18, and I’m currently cleaning up everything for the final cleanout. If you want to know details, come out to the next open house: with luck, some of my former coworkers will be there, too, so you can ask them directly if my work persona is any different from the gallery persona. And after they stop twitching on the floor because they can’t laugh any harder…

The Aftermath: March 2022 Open House the Second

This last week, Dallas’s weather confirmed the general warning I give people about any kind of gardening, whether with carnivores or any other plant: don’t make plans to get anything in the ground until after St. Patrick’s Day, Sure, the weather can be perfect from the middle of February on, but eventually one last big winter storm comes through and turns every fresh new seedling to mush. That last storm, which may or may not be the absolute last until November, dropped temperatures well below freezing, dumped rain and sleet across North Texas, and frosted back any number of plants not adapted to that sort of rapid temperature change. By Saturday, though, the temps were pushing toward normal, and the people of the general Dallas area responded the way they always do, which is to get out and do as much outdoor stuff as they can stand before summer heat starts.

As it turned out, because of so many outdoor activities, this last weekend’s open house was relatively quiet, but it was also incredibly productive. The gallery renovations continue, with the front space beginning to shape up, and the light timers switched to a spring/summer photoperiod to encourage both new growth and blooming. Likewise, more and more of the old workspace is moving to the new house, allowing both more enclosure construction and more room for new displays. By mid-May, longtime visitors won’t recognize the place, and that’s the whole idea.

We’re now at the halfway mark for March shows. The last Triffid Ranch open house for March runs this coming Saturday, March 19, from noon until 5:00, and then things start organizing for April. Feel free to spread the word: this is the last time to see the gallery before the Oddities & Curiosities Expo show in Dallas’s Fair Park on March 26. And it’s time to get back to it.

Have a Safe Weekend

The weather may shift back and forth, but at least the Triffid Ranch has a warm and dry space indoors. The March open houses continue this Saturday, running from noon until 5:00 pm, with free admission and masks being highly recommended, and an encore on March 19. Meanwhile, back to building new enclosures to fill the front space.

Enclosures: “Rotor” (2022)

A preamble on the enclosure backstories:

With enough dedication, almost anything can become a source of energy. Gather enough dead flies and pile them up, and the options increase, depending upon the gatherer’s needs and resistance to revulsion. When that pile of dead flies encompasses the known universe, the only question is how much energy a project needs and how long it endures.

For a significant amount of the time the civilizations of the so-called Young Worlds Alliance developed and utilized faster-than-light travel, strange rotors had been found on worlds, moons, asteroids, and comets throughout the YWA. As the YWA expanded its explorations, more rotors turned up, with the highest concentrations around stellar clusters, black holes and neutron stars, and gas giants. They received the name “rotors” because they tended to rotate slowly in place, suspended sometimes a hair’s width from a cliff face or an asteroid’s surface, but their purpose was as mysterious as their builders. Estimates as to the time they were placed in their locations ranged from one thousand to one billion years, with very young blue giant stars having roughly as many as white dwarfs nearly emptied of fusion fuel. They were incredibly resistant to moving from their location, and every attempt to push or pull them away was matched with enough resistance to destroy or threaten to destroy the opposing force or mechanism. After a while, they were studied from a distance and otherwise ignored: with so many more accessible wonders, understanding the rotors was left to students with more patience and a higher resistance to frustration.

That situation lasted until a particularly neglected and ignored rotor student decided to try mapping rotor concentrations in its own galaxy, and then across the YWA. Individually, they showed no perturbations in local gravity: if anything, they tended to blend in with gravity wave scans. The reason for this became obvious with subsequent maps: the rotors were small but significant sources of gravitic flux throughout their range, subtly dragging through space-time at the edge of gravity wells and capturing the energy. One or two were barely noticeable, but with potentially billions, the rotors had the potential to change the flow of galaxies and possibly the expansion of the universe.

As for what that energy was used for, a sudden onslaught in rotor research discovered the micro-wormholes that endlessly form and unform through space-time tended to last longer around a rotor than the usual microsecond observed elsewhere, and in higher concentrations. The rotors may have generated and concentrated energy, but the micro-wormholes transported it, and the next question was “Where?”

The real question should have been “When?”

Dimensions (width/height/depth): 18″ x 24″ x 18″ (45.72 cm x 60.96 cm x 45.72 cm)

Plant: Nepenthes “Rebecca Soper”

Construction: Glass enclosure, polystyrene foam, vacuum-formed plastic, found items.

Price: Commission

Shirt Price: Commission

The Aftermath: March 2022 Open House the First

March is always interesting around the gallery: as expected, March 2022 so far is a cross between a frilled lizard and a common house cat. Not that this is going to last, because things are going to get weird.

Now what’s going on, you may ask? Well, besides the number of first-time visitors coming by because of their enthusiasm for Atlas Obscura (including one couple from Minnesota), plans for updating the front of the gallery continue. The current joke involves the front room resembling a Rainforest Cafe as designed by Peter Jackson, and that might be the understated version. By the time the front and the back are complete, most regulars won’t recognize it, and that’s the whole point. Now to get back to work.

One additional surprise: for the last year, the Nepenthes hemsleyana in the enclosure Bat God has been, well, a little fussy. Oh, it adapted well to its new enclosure, and it’s enthusiastically vining and growing up the sides. The problem was that while leaves on the vine grew as enthusiastically as the vine itself, the plant wasn’t producing any of its famous upper pitchers at the ends of said leaves. Instead, a new offshoot from the base started sprouting last December, and finally the first pitcher on the offshoot opened just in time for the open house. With luck, this will be the first of many, and that ongoing vine is getting trimmed, cut into segments, and rerooted to produce more N. hemsleyana plants for future enclosures. Keep checking back, because the front of the gallery may be loaded with more bat plants before you know it.

Meanwhile, the open houses continue over the next two weekends, with the Triffid Ranch opening doors on March 12 and 19. After that, as mentioned before, it’s all about the Oddities & Curiosities Expo show in Dallas’s Fair Park on March 26. (For the next two weeks, I’ll have a limited number of posters and a much less limited number of postcards for the Expo show available at the front of the gallery, so feel free to come by either open house to pick up yours.) See you then.

Have a Safe Weekend

We’re now into March, which means that the kidney stone of calendar months is finally over. As things start to warm up, keep an eye open for outdoor events toward the end of the month and into April, culminating with the first Triffid Ranch show of the year at the Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo on March 26. In the meantime, we’re back for another Saturday afternoon open house this weekend, starting at noon and running, as usual, until 5:00 pm. Never let it be said that it’s dull around here.