I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
— Mark Twain
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Perhaps a man who has been judged a rapist, fined $355 million, barred from doing business in New York, impeached twice, and facing 91 felony counts should not be President.
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA)
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You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say.
Botanically, a nut is a dry fruit consisting of a seed inside a hard shell. The acorn is a nut. So are chestnuts and hazelnuts. Beyond that, it gets complicated.
Peanuts are, in fact, legumes, members of the pea family. Cashews, almonds, peaches, and mangoes are drupes — fruits in which a fleshy part surrounds the shell protecting the seed.
In the case of cashews and almonds, we toss the fleshy part and eat the seed. With peaches and mangoes, we eat the fleshy part and toss the seed.
Walnuts and pecans, experts say, exhibit characteristics of both drupes and nuts and thus are hybrids. Now you know.
Trade School
A few years ago, my county’s main high school moved to a larger and snazzier home, and the old campus became the Career Center, which provides vocational training and college prep. Honestly, the place could hold a dozen career centers. It consists of the main buildings, the stadium, the gym, and half a dozen ballfields. Most of that is useless to a career center and sits idle. Oh, well.
On a positive note, the Career Center is a great place to take Jake for our morning walks, especially on weekends, when he can go off-leash. The campus is well-maintained and nowhere near people or traffic.
Also interesting is a fenced area where some of the handiwork of the vocational students is stored. Classes are taught in carpentry, metal-working, etc., and at various times, I’ll see newly-built doghouses, sawhorses, or work benches. Or evidence of welding practice on wheelbarrows, tables, or grills.
Very cool to see, actually.
Melitta
I would eat dirt before using a Keurig coffee pod, and I stopped using paper coffee filters years ago. I prefer a permanent filter that I simply rinse and reuse. That’s how I roll.
That said, the paper filter was a big deal when it was invented in 1908 by German housewife Melitta Bentz (1873-1950).
In Melitta’s time, most coffee was brewed by dumping ground-up coffee beans into hot water, allowing it to steep, and waiting until the grounds settled to the bottom… more or less.
Melitta punched holes in a brass cup and lined it with a piece of extra-porous blotting paper her son used in school. She tossed in the ground coffee, poured hot water over it, and bingo.
Her invention blossomed into a popular and successful product. Melitta’s family still runs the business and produces 50 million (landfill-bound) coffee filters per day.
2. Only once, in 1972, has a professional football team gone undefeated the entire season and then won the Super Bowl. What team was it?
3. The Canary Islands, located off the west coast of Africa, is a territory of what country?
4. Petrology is the scientific study of what?
5. What is the world’s largest lizard?
The Answers…
1. Cynophobia is the fear of dogs. Curiously, the word is pronounced syno, not kyno, although derived from kyon, the Greek word for dog. Kyon, also curiously, is pronounced cue-on.
2. The Miami Dolphins.
3. Spain. The Canaries are a major tourist destination due to the balmy weather, pristine beaches, and spectacular mountains and forests. The islands, population about two million, get over 12 million visitors a year.
4. Sorry, nothing to do with fuel. Petrology is the branch of geology that studies the formation of rocks. The Greek word petros means rock.
Another scientific study is out that finds a correlation between higher intelligence and liberal political beliefs.
What? Smart people tend to be liberals? Golly! Knock me over with a feather.
The new study was by psychology researchers at the University of Minnesota. They examined siblings with the same upbringing, raised together, seeking to identify factors that influenced their development.
Specifically, the researchers studied 200 families with multiple children. In some families, the kids were biological siblings. In others, they were adopted. In some cases, they were a mix.
The key finding: within families, a sibling with a higher IQ is more likely to be politically liberal than a sibling of lower IQ. This was consistent in both biological and adoptive families.
The study concluded that being smarter “is correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal political beliefs.” It said the results imply that “being genetically predisposed to be smarter causes left-wing beliefs.”
The researchers were careful to add, “There is no law saying that intelligent people must always be supportive of particular beliefs or ideologies.” How intelligence affects us “is likely dependent on our environment and culture.”
Also, I should point out that we’re talking about psychology here, which is an inexact variety of science. Physics or chemistry, it ain’t.
The US Forest Service oversees 370,000 miles of unpaved roads. If that number doesn’t impress you, consider that the federal highway system — the Interstates plus all the numbered US highways — totals about half that.
Most forest roads were built by lumber companies over the years and abandoned to the government when the logging was done. The roads are used minimally, and they are a huge detriment to animals and ecosystems. They erode and channel silt into waterways, divert rainfall, and allow traffic, people, and noise to invade the backcountry.
Lately, people with good sense are proposing that we get serious about decommissioning forest roads. The idea is to plow them up to aerate the soil, get rid of the unneeded ditches, bridges, and culverts, and let Mother Nature do her thing. I’m in.
Dune
“Dune: Part Two” is big in theaters right now, but I’m not sure I want to see it. Part one was a pretty good Lawrence-of-Arabia style epic. But I can’t get past the fact that, in my arrogant opinion, the story is simply unpleasant and distasteful.
In a depressingly dark and violent feudal society in the future, opposing forces try to outflank and kill each other. Finally, a messiah arises and sets off a galaxy-wide holy war, killing 61 billion people. The Star Wars universe is bleak, too, but at least it has good guys. Dune kinda doesn’t.
In addition, it doesn’t help that the novels were written by Frank Herbert, a writer with some commendable ideas, but also a right-wing nutjob. Herbert believed that the feudal world he described is the best model for human society. Seriously.
Herbert said all forms of government are corrupt, and the most efficient solution is authoritarianism; in exchange for power, strong figures will take care of the common folk.
If Herbert were still around, he’d be a fan of Putin, Erdogan, and Xi and probably a MAGA.
Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr. (1920-1986)
Pythons
Snakes are reptiles. In effect, legless lizards. The python is a nonvenomous snake variety of about 40 species found in Africa, Asia, and Australia, plus that pesky invasive population in the Everglades. Pythons squeeze their prey, suffocate it, and swallow it whole.
The largest is the Burmese python of Southeast Asia (you know, the location of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma). Burmese pythons can be nearly 20 feet long and weigh a couple of hundred pounds. Occasionally, a big one will consume a deer or an alligator.
The smallest species is Australia’s pygmy python (aka anthill python because they like termite mounds). Adults weigh about half a pound and are about 20 inches long. Typical prey: mice.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
— Oscar Wilde
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He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was a highly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic individual, full of empty childish fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everyone’s personality, in an overwhelming degree — and this is another reason why they fell for him.
— Carl Jung, describing Adolph Hitler
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If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
— Charles Darwin
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Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty.
High on the list of people I have admired over the years is the late J. C. Collins of Pecos, Texas, the grandfather of my ex, Deanna. He was a genuinely nice guy and the epitome of the kindly grandpa: patient, gentle, supportive, even-tempered.
He was a telegrapher for the Santa Fe Railroad in the days before wireless communications. He sent messages over the telegraph lines, tapping out the dots and dashes in Morse Code. Deanna still has a few old keying devices he used on the job.
He grew up in Kentucky, and he had the amazing ability, learned as a kid, to identify virtually every species of tree he saw. White oak, red maple, sugar maple, sycamore, willow, walnut, white pine, spruce — he knew them all. It was uncanny.
I can remember testing him, and, with a chuckle, he would reply with a name and maybe a few facts about the species. I am still in awe.
Jim Crow
I live in Jackson County, Georgia, which, like most of the South — most of the country — has an ugly history regarding race and justice. Slavery ended with the Civil War, but, as you probably learned in school, the white majority had no intention of treating blacks as equals or relinquishing any power.
By the 1880s, whites in Jackson County outnumbered blacks by a large margin, so the black vote was inconsequential. Therefore, black men were allowed to vote if they payed a poll tax. But eventually, local activists began lobbying to allow black men to serve on juries. As if.
In 1881, the editor of a local newspaper wrote that, although some black men might be qualified to serve on juries, there is “a higher law of moral integrity.” And moral integrity, he wrote, is something “our colored brethren do not possess.” What a sanctimonious jerk.
In the South, the white establishment prohibited blacks from serving on juries until the Supreme Court forced it on them in 1935.
Today, our conservative white brethren don’t want real history taught in schools because, you know, feelings might get hurt. These dipsticks think like their ancestors. Jim Crow isn’t dead.
Know Your Camels
The camel is an ungulate, a hoofed mammal, native to Asia and Africa and noted for the hump, or humps, on its back. The hump stores fat (not water, as often believed), which the animal can convert to energy as needed. This allows them to survive for long periods without food or water in the desert regions they inhabit.
The three living species of camels are the one-humped dromedary (or Arabian camel) of the Middle East and Sahara Desert, the two-humped bactrian camel of central Asia, and the wild bactrian of remote China and Mongolia.
Dromedaries make up 94 percent of the camel population, bactrian six percent. Only about 1,000 wild bactrians remain, and they are listed as endangered.
● Native Americans introduced early European settlers to cranberries, which the colonists called “craneberries” because cranes ate them. The name evolved to cranberries for… reasons.
● Ten percent of humans are left-handed.
● Poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), who famously celebrated nature throughout his career, was born on Long Island and lived in Brooklyn most of his life.
● When French clothing designer Louis Réard created the bikini swimsuit in 1946, he named it after the US nuclear testing site Bikini Atoll because, he said, he wanted to make a fashion statement as explosive as an atomic bomb.
● The English word cake is derived from koek, the Dutch word for cake. The word cookie comes from the Dutch koekje — little cake.
● The carbon footprint of Amazon.com is twice that of the Republic of Ireland.
● Poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac are members of the Anacardia family of plants, as are cashews, pistachios, and mangos. All six contain the irritant urushiol, which will seriously mess you up — which is why cashews and pistachios are roasted before sale, and why you are well-advised to wash a mango before peeling it.
● The human heart beats about 100,000 times a day. That’s about 35 million times per year and roughly 2.5 billion times over an average lifetime.
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