by Grania
Good morning, welcome to another week!
Today is World Sparrow Day and the Great American Meatout (tofu for you today!) and ahem, Extraterrestrial Abduction Day although even the Believers are skeptical as to whether it is celebration-worthy or not. It is also the Spring Equinox in the Northern hemisphere.
Oh, and if you are looking for meatless recipes today, you can do no better than check out the large back-catalogue of Smitten Kitchen.
Today is the birthday of movie director Spike Lee (1957), Roman poet Ovid (43BC) and Lee “Scratch” Perry (1936), Jamaican singer, songwriter, and a formative character in promoting reggae and dub music.
In Poland Hili is being mindful of the changing seasons and has temporarily switched out her editor-in-chief hat for her orchard inspector one.
A: What do you think?
Hili: Another two weeks and it will be time for the first spraying.
In Polish:
Ja: I jak?
Hili: Jeszcze ze dwa tygodnie i pora na pierwszy oprysk.
Good morning there
How could you miss International Day of Happiness!
http://www.dayofhappiness.net/#join
Bah!
Humbug!
Even my supermarket sent me an email about the International Day of Happiness! 🙂
Was joy unrelenting in Chateau Hastie ?
Um, no … But at the risk of sounding melodramatic, it rarely does when you live alone.
Still, I’ve got some episodes of BBT recorded that I haven’t watched yet – that always helps. 🙂
The happiest countries are assessed today to correspond to the Day of Happiness. Norway is at the top.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-39325206?SThisFB
I submit that it’s possible, easy actually, to go meatless without resorting to tofu.
Eggs? Dairy? Beans and rice? Beans and corn?
Also, for anyone who actually likes the stuff, I would ask you to do a little research on the soy industry in the US. Their behavior is not what you’d call “progressive”. L
Farmers in the Midwest would need no research since they all work for them.
Hence my link to Smitten Kitchen which is largely tofu-free (and gorgeous).
Smitten Kitchen. All hail. Best bread, best deserts, best almost everything. Hail Deb.
Happy equinox everyone. I’m just reading Steven Weinberg’s “To Explain the World”, dealing with the discovery of science. In the ancient world astronomy was an important branch of science because if it’s use in creating calendars. In the Christian era, fixing the exact date of Easter and keeping it’s celebration on the exact day was an obsession. Differences lead to war between the Irish and Roman branches of the Church.
My daffodils are still under a foot and a half of snow (NE US).
Weird, scary weather. It has been more like May than March here, several days in a row of almost record heat. We’re supposed to get more normal weather by the end of the week, but even with the cool-down, it will still be above normal. L
Extraterrestrial Abduction Day?
FFS! Don’t encourage them!
(Is there a day for mutilating cattle?)
cr
Isn’t that World Hamburger Day?! https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/hamburger-day/
There’s an extended article on Daniel Dennett in the New Yorker. “Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul”. I haven’t read it yet, but it promises to be good.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul
The other day on Astronomy Picture of the Day they posted a time-lapse movie of the earth, showing how the plane of the light and dark side of the earth changes over the year. At equinox the plane is vertical from pole to pole, as shown here: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170319.html
Just like the moon.
And we’re used to seeing that ‘split’ shown vertically, always. In temperate latitudes it’s ctually at an angle but we unconsciously make allowance for that.
BUT – flying to Abu Dhabi across the Indian Ocean one night, I could see the bottom half of the moon perfectly clearly, even craters on it in my little camera at max zoom, the top half was obscured. I thought, how extraordinary, there must be a remarkably dense, flat and even high cloud layer over us (yes I know, at 30,000 feet!) and extending to the west and the bottom edge is cutting off the top half of the moon. But this persisted for half an hour.
It wasn’t till viewing my photos, months later, that I worked it out – seen from the equator, the half-moon is split horizontally.
http://cr01.info/misc/P1000404a.JPG
cr
In the still snow covered north the spring equinox is just a bad joke!
Chris (“I’m an astronomer, get me a monocle!”) Lintott shares your joy.
https://twitter.com/chrislintott/status/843772765706633216
Grania missed Vera Lynn’s 100th birthday.
I have a copy of Lee Perry’s produced album “Super Ape.” It is the dark, subterranean, moss-covered side of reggae. A truly surreal experience.
Agree. I love his music. And though I really like Bob Marley’s work, by comparison, once you have listened to Perry, Marley sounds a bit sanitized.
Just curious…what do you spray the orchard with…pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, or?
Spring spraying is with fertilizer and pesticide.