Politics Plus

Yesterday, my mail contained a jury summons. That’s the kind of mail that gets me off my fanny to go out to the mailbox, and of course I did. Now, I’ve seen this film before, so I know it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll have to serve. Also, it isn’t until the end of April. So it’s cool. Also, I had a hard time finding things that were both interesting and not repetetive. There was a whole lot of repetition going on yesterday. I got to the point that if I had had to read one more story about a racist Republican Senator, I might have barfed. So I filled in with the Smithsonian, which is trivial, but at least different. (The Food for Thought is also just for fun.)

Cartoon

Short Takes –

The New Yorker – Radio Ukraine
Quote – The station staff has dispersed, with Bogdan Bolkhovetsky, the general manager, and Roman Davydov, the program director, holed up in a town in the Carpathians, keeping production moving over unreliable Internet and communicating with listeners by text. They don’t know how many of their broadcasting stations are still functioning, and their tower in Kyiv could be destroyed at any time. But “we are not doing anything heroic,” Bolkhovetsky told Nicolas Niarchos, who visited their makeshift studio. “We are still in a lot of luck, having what we have right now. Thousands of people were not so lucky as we are. . . . We’re just doing what we can under these unusual circumstances.”
Click through for David Remnicks podcast and/or even more articles on the war.

Smithsonian – Take the cherry blossom personality quiz to see which species speaks to you!
Quote – Six varieties of cherry blossom trees bloom in the Smithsonian Gardens, each with its own unique flowers and features.
Click through for the quiz. As usual, there are questions for which no answer is right for me, and it will probably be the same for you. But at least it’s fun looking at the pictures. (I came out as the “weeping” cherry tree.)

Women’s History – Wikipedia – Rosalind Franklin
Quote – Rosalind Elsie Franklin … was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognized during her life, for which she has been variously referred to as the “wronged heroine”, the “dark lady of DNA”, the “forgotten heroine”, a “feminist icon”, and the “Sylvia Plath of molecular biology”.
Click through for bio. You may have heard of her. Watson and Crick could not have completed the DNA model without her work Women from prehistory and up to the end of the Middle Ages appear to have had less difficulty getting recgnized for their accomplishments, and lso more freedom to make them, than from the Industrial Revolution forward.

Food For Thought: