Welcome to Thursday, April 25, 2024, and it’s National Zucchini Bread Day (It’s really more of a cake). I refuse to show a picture of this odious confection. It’s made because when you grow its equally odious precursor vegetable, you get a lot more than you can use. Given that it’s not very good, people wind up foisting it on others.
When I lived in Davis, CA, where zucchini grows like weeds, I was always having the Green Devil pressed upon me, and at all affairs there was zucchini bread. Yes, I know that readers will say, “I like it,” but they have palates of asbestos. The ONLY vegetable that should be made into a cake is the carrot, and there should be lots of cardomom, raisins, and, of course, a cream cheese frosting. Fie on zucchinis and fie on the bread.
If you Google “zucchini bread is bad,” you get this (their bolding):
Why is zucchini bread a thing?
Zucchini is abundant in the summer months, and it’s fun to incorporate this vegetable when baking, too. Zucchini adds flavorless moisture. We’re talking pure moisture with zero savory vegetable flavor. I don’t think I would bake a cake with a green vegetable if I could taste it.
That pretty much says it all! For concurring opinions, see here. “Flavorless moisture” and “I wouldn’t make a cake with a vegetable if I could taste it.” Isn’t there a better way to add moisture?
Okay, if you must see one, here it is; I’m showing you this just so you can avoid anything that resembles it.
It’s also ANZAC Day, honoring the Kiwis and Aussies that have died in wars, National Telephone Day, National Plumber’s Day (which plumber?), National Steak Day (in the UK), National DNA Day, celebrating the “completion” of the Human Genome Project in 2003, World Malaria Day, and World Penguin Day
Here’s a picture of some pengies I took in 2022:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 25 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Lots of news that you probably know: Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan got multibillion-dollar aid from the U.S. yesterday (with some of the Israel aid going to Palestine), and as of October, airlines won’t be able to rip you off as much. But I’ll highlight a lesser-known event: one that involved Russia being the sole member of the U.N.’s Security Council to veto what seems like a sensible resolution:
Russia on Wednesday vetoed a U.N. resolution sponsored by the United States and Japan calling on all nations to prevent a dangerous nuclear arms race in outer space, calling it “a dirty spectacle” that cherry picks weapons of mass destruction from all other weapons that should also be banned.
The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 13 in favor, Russia opposed and China abstaining.
The resolution would have called on all countries not to develop or deploy nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction in space, as banned under a 1967 international treaty that included the U.S. and Russia, and to agree to the need to verify compliance.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said after the vote that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow has no intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space.
“Today’s veto begs the question: Why? Why, if you are following the rules, would you not support a resolution that reaffirms them? What could you possibly be hiding,” she asked. “It’s baffling. And it’s a shame.”
It’s not baffling: Russia (and probably China) aim to produce space-launched nuclear weapons. What I want to know is why, if there’s already an international treaty, signed by Russia, banning the deployment of nuclear weapons in space, they voted on it again, and why Russia vetoed it?
*A WSJ article on Columbia University shows that President “Minouche” Shafik is in trouble. (I predict she’ll resign or be fired. The protestors have returned to Columbia, the tents are back up, along with the drums and chants, all classes have gone hybrid for the rest of the semester, and Shafik is NEGOTIATING with the miscreants. Some want her gone because she’s coddling the protestors, while others want her gone because she called the cops and had them arrested and many suspended. Regardless, she is now waffling:
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik is facing mounting discontent as the school grapples with intense protests over the Israel-Hamas war, with the latest round prompting administrators to switch to hybrid classes for the remainder of the semester.
Late Monday, the university said students could choose to attend classes in person or online for the final weeks of the term, a sign that leaders don’t expect an immediate end to the tension on campus.
Criticism of Shafik has taken a variety of forms in recent days.
Some faculty and student groups have called on her to step down, citing her statements to a congressional committee last week that seemed to set limits on what is acceptable for professors to say in academic settings. Others say she trampled on students’ free-speech rights by calling in police last week to shut down a demonstration. Still others say they are disappointed by how little Shafik has done to quash protests. Meanwhile, other professors and alumni say changing leadership now would throw the campus into further chaos.
Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, testified before a congressional committee last week. PHOTO: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/ZUMA PRESSThe Columbia and Barnard College chapter of the American Association of University Professors has drafted a resolution censuring Shafik, and is seeking to get it before the University Senate for a discussion later this week.
. . .Columbia officials met with representatives for student protesters until 2 a.m. Tuesday, and that work continues in good faith, said Chang. “We have our demands and they have theirs,” he said Tuesday afternoon.
He said the protest “is in violation of university rules, full stop,” and the school is concerned as the encampment continues to grow and people who aren’t affiliated with Columbia remain present. “We are acting on concerns we are hearing from our Jewish students, and we are providing additional support and resources to ensure that our community remains safe,” he said.
Among the protestor’s demands are that Columbia divest from investments in Israel and that none of the protestors be disciplined. (The latter means that they don’t really want to engage in civil disobedience, which means you accept the legal consequences of your actions in an attempt to move people morally.) But since when do students get to dictate University policy to administrators. Daniel Diermeier at Vanderbilt had the right idea: don’t negotiate, just arrest and expel when demonstrations are illegal.
Here’s the Speaker of the House, Republican Mike Johnson, speechifying at Columbia yesterday. Make of it what you will (he went to talk to the school’s Jewish students), but I certainly don”t approve of those protestors who keep trying to shout him down. At least he sees what “free speech” constitutes at Columbia. (See the WaPo’s article, archived, about how Johnson escalated the tension” at the school.”
*The NYT is finally pushing back against the execrable music of Taylor Swift, which of course is wildly popular among young women but, to my ears at least, mediocre. They’ve now published two articles about how her latest pretentiously-titled double album (“The Tortured Poets Depatment, with 31 songs) may be too much, and “On ‘The ‘Tortured Poets Department’, Taylor Swift could use an editor,” and “Taylor Swift has given fans a lot. Is it finally too much?”
From the first piece:
For all its sprawl, though, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production. (Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working together since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.
As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!
. . .Swift has been promoting this poetry-themed album with hand-typed lyrics, sponsored library installations and even an epilogue written in verse. A palpable love of language and a fascination with the ways words lock together in rhyme certainly courses through Swift’s writing. But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities. It is also an art form in which, quite often and counter to the governing principle of Swift’s current empire, less is more.
Sylvia Plath once called poetry “a tyrannical discipline,” because the poet must “go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of “The Tortured Poets Department” would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.
And the second:
On a new podcast episode, which was released over the weekend, Hubbard and his co-host, Nora Princiotti, were among those who pointed out that while the album may be imperfect, Swift simply may have needed to purge herself of the songs on “Poets” to process a turbulent time in her life.
Princiotti said she enjoyed much of the album and was careful to stipulate that “Poets” did contain several “special songs.”
But she also allowed for some “tough love.”
“Musically, I do not really hear anything new,” she said, adding that Swift “could have done a little bit more self editing.”
“I don’t think the fact that this is a double-album that is more than two hours in length serves what’s good about it,” Princiotti said. “And I think that for the second album in a row, I’m still sort of left going, ‘OK, where do we go from here?’”
Princiotti ultimately graded “Poets” a “B.” And in the world of her podcast and universe of Taylor Swift, Princiotti acknowledged — that might have been an all-time low.
Here’s the unmemorable title song, in which Swift sounds like a bargain-basement Joni Mitchell. The words are tortured and the tune is unmemorable. Songs like this won’t be played on Oldies Stations of the Future:
*The CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, has defended herself against charges, leveled by now ex editor Uri Berliner in a Free Press piece, that the station’s pervasive wokeness was creating a huge bias (and costing the organization money, trust, and listeners.
Maher said NPR should be open to criticism, but defended the news organization against the charges Berliner laid out.
. . . “We have robust conversations across the organization, including in response to the article,” she said. “Clear and well-reasoned pieces” from reviewers, like a write-up from NPR’s public editor and Poynter executive Kelly McBride that examined coverage of Israel and Gaza, have “found that our journalism is really solid,” Maher said.
. . .What is needed is a more comprehensive business strategy, she said. “How do we actually go out and grow audiences, how do we use data in order to inform our decisions, how do we understand what’s working?” she said.
Part of it will be changing the tone of its broadcasts. Research shows people see the network, which includes over 240 member organizations, as “accurate and intellectual,” she said. “We want to be able to speak to folks as though they were our neighbors and speak to folks as though they were our friends.”
. . .Maher became part of the story when critics including writer Christopher Rufo—of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank—resurfaced her past posts on X that indicate liberal leanings and progressive views. In 2018, she called former President Donald Trump a racist in a post that has since been deleted, and a couple of years later she shared a photo of herself in a “President Biden” campaign hat.
“There are many professions in which you set aside your own personal perspectives in order to lead in public service, and that is exactly how I have always led organizations and will continue to lead NPR,” she said.
Rufo and others also circulated a video clip from a 2021 interview in which Maher describes the First Amendment as the top challenge in the fight against disinformation. Maher was referring to the difficulties of regulating social-media platforms. She said it was important for tech companies to have free-speech rights, but “it also means it’s a little bit of a tricky road to be able to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad information come from.”
Well, I suppose listeners should give her a chance, but her boilerplate prose doesn’t hearten me. “A more comprehensive business strategy?” How to grow the audience is to have VIEWPOINT diversity to both challenge the audience and provide something for every thinking person, not all of whom are woke. She doesn’t point out any problems, but actually praises the organization’s accuracy and intelligence. So what needs changing? Berliner had an idea, but Maher doesn’t seem to agree.
*A migrating male mallard has been clocked as flying at nearly 100 mph, much faster than I imagined. (h/t Charles). It’s as fast as a MLB pitcher’s fastball, and twice as fast as a cheetah!
Spring waterfowl migrations are in full swing as millions of ducks, geese, and other species depart the southern U.S. and Central America and head toward Canada to live out the warm months. One drake mallard fitted with a GPS tracker from the Cohen Wildlife Ecology Lab at Tennessee Tech broke a lab record on April 6 by reaching a top speed of 99.3 miles per hour somewhere between southern Minnesota and the Canadian border.
For context, that means the duck was flying as fast as Hall-of-Famer Aroldis Chapman’s fastball and twice as fast as the world’s fastest land mammal, the cheetah, can run. The Cohen Wildlife Lab posted the feat to its various social media accounts Tuesday, along with a map of the greenhead’s northwesterly route.
Here’s the route it took from western Tennessee to its present location in Saskatchewan:
Spring waterfowl migrations are in full swing as millions of ducks, geese, and other species depart the southern U.S. and Central America and head toward Canada to live out the warm months. One drake mallard fitted with a GPS tracker from the Cohen Wildlife Ecology Lab at Tennessee Tech broke a lab record on April 6 by reaching a top speed of 99.3 miles per hour somewhere between southern Minnesota and the Canadian border.
For context, that means the duck was flying as fast as Hall-of-Famer Aroldis Chapman’s fastball and twice as fast as the world’s fastest land mammal, the cheetah, can run. The Cohen Wildlife Lab posted the feat to its various social media accounts Tuesday, along with a map of the greenhead’s northwesterly route.
Covering 600 miles in 8 hours means the duck maintained an average speed of 75 mph during that time. The lab’s principal investigator and assistant professor of wildlife ecology and management Bradley Cohen pointed out in a reply to a commenter that mallards usually migrate at an altitude of 4,000 to 5,000 feet at night. (The lab did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
While this particular drake broke the lab’s record, it’s not unheard of for ducks to travel at these breakneck speeds when they get good wind at their backs. One pintail hen flew from eastern Russia to California — some 2,000 miles — in 25 hours, maintaining an average speed of 80 mph as it traversed the width of the Bering Sea. The next day, it crossed three flyways and landed in Louisiana.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili pulls a long cat face, probably in an attempt to get fed.
A: You have sad eyes.Hili: I’m doing my best.
Ja: Masz smutne oczy.Hili: Staram się.
*******************
From Jesus of the Day:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Not Another Science Cat Page:
From Masih: a singer of protest songs in Iran gets sentenced to death:
Urgent plea: we must take action now before it’s too late. Toomaj Salehi, the Iranian rapper, has been sentenced to death for daring to advocate the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran through his music. Regime in Iran wants to execute him for the crime of being the voice of… pic.twitter.com/V1cI2IIzUZ
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 24, 2024
I put this here because people don’t seem to realize that peaceful demonstrations (i.e., without violence) can also create a climate of hatred on campus as well as preventing people from doing what they’re supposed to do in college: learning and promulgating knowledge. It’s a stupid mistake to equate all peaceful demonstrations with ones that don’t need to be dismantled. Columbia University is an example of a “nonviolent” demonstration where the cops needed to be called in. Now they’re back, and real academic life at Columbia has stopped for the semester.
Calling in police enforcement on nonviolent demonstrations of young students on campus is an escalatory, reckless, and dangerous act.
It represents a heinous failure of leadership that puts people’s lives at risk. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 24, 2024
From the Babbling Beaver, a site that mocks MIT:
Our “elite” universities have entered the final stage of self-destruction. It can’t happen soon enough.
Time to turn off the money spigot. https://t.co/CiBVXpw5GF
— BabblingBeaver (@Babbling_Beaver) April 23, 2024
From Barry, a baby armadillo:
What is the name of this animal? pic.twitter.com/uEfVMnIJdw
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 23, 2024
From Jez, who says, “So much for ‘Never again!'”:
University of Vienna 1938 barring Jewish students
Yale University 2024 barring Jewish students pic.twitter.com/Hp1jxxcWML
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) April 22, 2024
From Malcolm: two woodcock crossing the road (he adds, “annoying music”). Nobody knows why they walk this way:
A driver waits while watching a woodcock finish crossing the road. 😂 pic.twitter.com/eKHlQ2Zz6K
— Figen (@TheFigen_) April 20, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I tweeted:
When I look at these pictures, I always think of the last moments of terror experience by those moved immediately from the cattle car to the gas chamber (they were also stripped of clothing). https://t.co/Fn6vvn64wH
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 25, 2024
Two tweets from Matthew. His first comment is correct: “BIG!”:
Size of this moose
pic.twitter.com/CmJSsLjtP4— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 23, 2024
This one just gets a “!”:
This was the anaconda that defecated on me…
It was in the Pantanal, Brazil – maybe 20 years ago now. I can still remember the smell… pic.twitter.com/N4oajV1EiX
— Dr Erica McAlister (@flygirlNHM) April 23, 2024
Of course, as I am sure that I am just the first to comment, the duck’s speed in its medium, the part it is responsible for, is closer to 50mph (still impressive to me) with the 50mph tailwind providing a supplement to achieve a 100mph groundspeed. A cheetah might call this a “wind assisted” record as in track meets.
I dislike zucchini, but don’t mind zucchini bread. I haven’t been offered any in years, though.
The zucchini subject always amuses me when in Canada. I understand that Canada has two “ official” languages, English and French however if you ask for courgette in most shops you get a blank look sometimes even in Quebec and Canadians insist they are not like “Americans”
Courgette or if you prefer zucchini, is a good vegetable easy to grow with many interesting varieties best eaten nice and fresh and not overcooked but “ bread” definitely not!
I love baby zucchini. They barely need any cooking and have a nice flavour. Stops the glut too.
So so on the bread but then I am so so on most cakes
Zucchini should always be baby. That is the point. That is what makes them delicious.
Your diatribe on zucchini bread is one of the funniest things I’ve read recently.
I can get behind Steak Day, though. I’d eat it every day if I could. But damn, it’s expensive these days.
The title track by Swift reminds me a lot of Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen – although the latter song is a million times better.
Call Me Maybe at least has a memorable hook.
———–
Part of it will be changing the tone of its broadcasts. Research shows people see the network, which includes over 240 member organizations, as “accurate and intellectual,” she said. “We want to be able to speak to folks as though they were our neighbors and speak to folks as though they were our friends.”
———-
I don’t get it. We all have neighbors that are stone cold idiots, and friends that gossip without knowing the facts. So why the desire to shed the image of “accurate and intellectual” and take on the role of a gossiping idiot?
+1
I don’t like being called “folks” and they already DO sound like they’re talking to a neighbor or a friend. That’s why I can’t stand listening to them.
That Tortured Poets Department tune strikes me as a subtle, stealth -mode call to action. I sure wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the mosh pit when it is performed. To “cleanse the palate” I feel like listening to some “Hair of the Dog” by Nazareth -perhaps that will get me into morning Chores Mode.
Just a late note from yesterday’s next to last WEIT post (“McWhorter et al:….”): I recommend reading the full articles from their archived sites that Jerry has provided. They are an excellent set both from well-known and not so well-known sources that Jerry has sourced for us. Thank you PCC(E)!
Speaking of Taylor Swift and current popular music more generally, I’ve been watching the current season of American Idol and the stark differences between current popular music and popular music from earlier eras has really stood out to me.
Many of the final 24 contestants that made it past the auditions have put on some very good vocal performances. Something I began to notice is that very often when a contestant had a great performance the song was an older “classic” from the 60s, 70s or 80s. And when they had a lackluster performance very often the song was from the past 10 years. And to my mind the reason for their lackluster performances often was not because they sang badly but because the song simply was not a good song.
This became hugely evident, to me anyway, when comparing one particular night’s performances with another particular night’s. One night the theme was the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. The contestants had to pick songs by Hall of Famers. All of these songs were older. It was an exceptional night. Nearly all of the contestants had great performances. The next night the theme was Billboard #1 hits. Nearly all of the contestants picked recent hits, and nearly all of them had lackluster performances, particularly in contrast to the exceptional previous night. One of the judges even commented on it. He didn’t make the connection I did, or at least he didn’t say it out loud, but he noticed the difference and commented on it.
Something else that was really noticeable to me, in current pop music the music itself is of secondary importance at best. It’s simply used as background filler for the vocals. It’s boring, seemingly by design. Most current pop artists are individual singers rather than groups. In a group you have a number of musicians collaborating to create a song and motivated to make their contribution to it a vital part of the final piece. In current pop music you have a celebrity singer backed by some dull overly processed, factory mass produced background music that is hardly distinguishable from any other current pop song’s backing track.
Re: Taylor Swift.
Much of the pop music of the last 3 decades has morphed into
the producer being the dominant partner with the “artist”
in the creation of a product that will sell to their target audience.
This creates a situation of uniformity and conformity to move as much
merchandise as possible. There’s only so much wiggle room in the
world of teenage angst or rap for unique creativity.
Having a good producer, recording engineer, and a great touring
company can make you into a billionaire in a few years.
You know who I’m talking about.
In at least one way I give Taylor Swift due respect, she does write her own songs. So many pop artists these days don’t, the machine you described does that for them. They are more like mere figure heads, the “face” of the product. Even their vocals are so heavily modified they might as well be AI generated.
One pintail hen flew from eastern Russia to California — some 2,000 miles — in 25 hours, maintaining an average speed of 80 mph as it traversed the width of the Bering Sea. The next day, it crossed three flyways and landed in Louisiana.
Hope they don’t find a way of weaponizing them.
And I think the critter is a ‘dillo.
I don’t know about the speed of Mallards, but I definitely know that Aroldis Chapman is not in the Hall of Fame. He is still an active player. You have to be retired for five years for election to the Hall of Fame (except Roberto Clemente who died on an humanitarian mission).
Perhaps it should have said Nolan Ryan!!
You took the words right out of my keyboard. And if I had to bet, I’d bet that Chapman will never be in the Hall of Fame. He’s had some very good stretches to his career, but not Hall of Fame good.
Yes, whoever wrote that should have used Ryan’s fastball as a comparison.
Getting off my pedantic baseball soapbox now.
When my son was 10, we were watching Nolan Ryan’s last MLB career game on TV together. As Ryan worked his way through the batting order, a young rookie up from the farm came to the plate for his first ever major-league at-bat. He fouled off the first pitch. My son remarked, “That’s pretty good, you know. He can say the very first ball he swung at in the Majors was thrown by Nolan Ryan and he hit it.”
Thanks for the memory. T-ball season starts next week!
That’s a nice memory.
The zucchini diatribe was brilliant. Very funny!
On this day:
404 BC – Admiral Lysander and King Pausanias of Sparta blockade Athens and bring the Peloponnesian War to a successful conclusion.
1644 – Transition from Ming to Qing: The Chongzhen Emperor, the last Emperor of Ming China, commits suicide during a peasant rebellion led by Li Zicheng.
1792 – Highwayman Nicolas J. Pelletier becomes the first person executed by guillotine.
1792 – “La Marseillaise” (the French national anthem) is composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
1846 – Thornton Affair: Open conflict begins over the disputed border of Texas, triggering the Mexican–American War.
1849 – The Governor General of Canada, Lord Elgin, signs the Rebellion Losses Bill, outraging Montreal’s English population and triggering the Montreal Riots.
1859 – British and French engineers break ground for the Suez Canal.
1901 – New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates.
1915 – World War I: The Battle of Gallipoli begins: The invasion of the Turkish Gallipoli Peninsula by British, French, Indian, Newfoundland, Australian and New Zealand troops, begins with landings at Anzac Cove and Cape Helles. [Anzac Day was commemorated for the first time on this day in 1916.]
1933 – Nazi Germany issues the Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities limiting the number of Jewish students able to attend public schools and universities.
1944 – The United Negro College Fund is incorporated.
1953 – Francis Crick and James Watson publish “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” describing the double helix structure of DNA.
1954 – The first practical solar cell is publicly demonstrated by Bell Telephone Laboratories.
1960 – The United States Navy submarine USS Triton completes the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.
1961 – Robert Noyce is granted a patent for an integrated circuit.
1974 – Carnation Revolution: A leftist military coup in Portugal overthrows the authoritarian-conservative Estado Novo regime and establishes a democratic government.
1982 – Israel completes its withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula per the Camp David Accords.
1983 – Pioneer 10 travels beyond Pluto’s orbit.
2001 – President George W. Bush pledges U.S. military support in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
2014 – The Flint water crisis begins when officials at Flint, Michigan switch the city’s water supply to the Flint River, leading to lead and bacteria contamination upon the citizens.
Births:
1599 – Oliver Cromwell, English general and politician, Lord Protector of Great Britain (d. 1658).
1710 – James Ferguson, Scottish astronomer and author (d. 1776). [Known as the inventor and improver of astronomical and other scientific apparatus, as a striking instance of self education and as an itinerant lecturer.]
1873 – Walter de la Mare, English poet, short story writer, and novelist (d. 1956).
1874 – Guglielmo Marconi, Italian businessman and inventor, developed Marconi’s law, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1937).
1892 – Maud Hart Lovelace, American author (d. 1980). [Best known for the Betsy-Tacy series.]
1900 – Wolfgang Pauli, Austrian-Swiss-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1958).
1903 – Andrey Kolmogorov, Russian mathematician and academic (d. 1987). [Contributed to the mathematics of probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory and computational complexity.]
1908 – Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (d. 1965).
1917 – Ella Fitzgerald, American singer (d. 1996).
1923 – Albert King, African-American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 1992).
1928 – Cy Twombly, American-Italian painter and sculptor (d. 2011).
1929 – Yvette Williams, New Zealand long jumper, shot putter, and discus thrower (d. 2019). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
1933 – Jerry Leiber, American songwriter and producer (d. 2011). [Wrote “Hound Dog” with Mike Stoller for Big Mama Thornton – if you haven’t heard her version you should!]
1933 – Joyce Ricketts, American baseball player (d. 1992).
1940 – Al Pacino, American actor and director.
1943 – Tony Christie, English singer-songwriter and actor.
1944 – Len Goodman, English dancer.
1945 – Stu Cook, American bass player Creedence Clearwater Revival, songwriter, and producer.
1945 – Björn Ulvaeus, Swedish singer-songwriter and producer.
1947 – Johan Cruyff, Dutch footballer and manager (d. 2016).The
1947 – Cathy Smith, Canadian singer and drug dealer (d. 2020). [A Canadian occasional backup singer, rock groupie, drug dealer, and legal secretary, she served 15 months in the California state prison system for injecting actor John Belushi with a fatal dose of heroin and cocaine in 1982.]
1958 – Fish, Scottish singer-songwriter. [Got his name because of the time he spent in the bathtub as a student.]
1964 – Hank Azaria, American actor, voice artist, comedian and producer. [Known for voicing many characters in the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons since 1989.]
1964 – Andy Bell, English singer-songwriter.
1969 – Renée Zellweger, American actress and producer.
Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. (Epicurus):
1566 – Louise Labé, French poet and author (b. 1520).
1744 – Anders Celsius, Swedish astronomer, physicist, and mathematician (b. 1701).
1800 – William Cowper, English poet (b. 1731).
1840 – Siméon Denis Poisson, French mathematician and physicist (b. 1781).
1878 – Anna Sewell, English author (b. 1820).
1890 – Crowfoot, Canadian tribal chief (b. 1830).
1921 – Emmeline B. Wells, American journalist and women’s rights advocate (b. 1828).
1972 – George Sanders, English actor (b. 1906).
1976 – Carol Reed, English director and producer (b. 1906). [He is best known for Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), The Third Man (1949), and Oliver! (1968), for which he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Director.]
1995 – Ginger Rogers, American actress, singer, and dancer (b. 1911).
2002 – Lisa Lopes, American rapper and dancer (b. 1971).
2004 – Thom Gunn, English-American poet and academic (b. 1929).!
2008 – Humphrey Lyttelton, English trumpet player, composer, and radio host (b. 1921).
2010 – Alan Sillitoe, English novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet (b. 1928).
2011 – Poly Styrene, British musician (b. 1957). [“Oh Bondage Up Yours!”]
2018 – Madeeha Gauhar, Pakistani actress, playwright and director of social theater, and women’s rights activist (b. 1956). [Her Ajoka Theater’s plays were frequently based on social and human rights issues – for example female literacy, honour killings, and religious extremism. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.]
2023 – Harry Belafonte, American singer, activist, and actor (b. 1927).
Woman of the Day:
[Text from Wikipedia]
Dame Yvette Winifred Corlett DNZM MBE (née Williams; born on this day in 1929, died 13 April 2019) was a New Zealand track-and-field athlete who was the first woman from her country to win an Olympic gold medal and to hold the world record in the women’s long jump. Williams was named “Athlete of the Century” on the 100th anniversary of Athletics New Zealand, in 1987.
Williams was born on 25 April 1929 in Dunedin. She grew up there and attended Otago Girls’ High School. While at high school, Williams played several sports, making the top netball team and playing for Otago and the South Island. Williams also represented Otago, the South Island and New Zealand (1950, 1953–55) in basketball.
Williams joined the Otago Athletic Club in early 1947, mainly for social reasons. Two months later, she came to national attention when she won the shot put at the New Zealand athletics championships. She went on to win 21 national titles across 5 disciplines: shot put (1947–54), javelin (1950), discus (1951–54), long jump (1948–54) and the 80 m hurdles (1954). With 21 New Zealand titles, she is the joint second-most successful New Zealand female athlete at that level, with Beatrice Faumuina and Melissa Moon, behind Val Young (35 titles).
Jim Bellwood, who had moved to Dunedin in late 1947 or early 1948, became her trainer. When Bellwood moved to Auckland in 1952 to teach at Avondale College, Williams followed, boarding with an aunt and uncle in Devonport.
Controversially left out of the New Zealand team for the 1948 Olympic Games in London, Williams won the long jump title at the 1950 British Empire Games in Auckland. Her winning leap of 19 feet 4+5⁄8 inches (5.91 m) broke the national, Empire Games, and British Empire records. At the same competition, she also won the silver medal in the women’s javelin, with a throw of 124 feet 6+3⁄4 inches (37.97 m).
In 1951 Williams jumped 20 feet 1+3⁄8 inches (6.13 m) at a meet in Melbourne, the third-best distance ever by a woman at that time, increased her New Zealand shot put record, and also became the New Zealand discus record holder.
At the 1952 New Zealand championships, Williams became the first woman in history to jump over 20 feet (6.10 m) more than once, winning the long jump title with a distance of 20 feet 7+3⁄4 inches (6.29 m), but the distance was not recognised as a world record as it was wind-assisted. Also in 1952 she recorded a score of 4219 points in the pentathlon, setting a New Zealand record that stood for 10 years.
Williams won the gold medal in the long jump at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki; her winning distance of 6.24 m was a new Olympic record and 1 cm short of Fanny Blankers-Koen’s world record set in 1943. Also at Helsinki, Williams finished in sixth place in the shot put and 10th in the discus throw.
In February 1954, Williams broke the women’s long jump world record at Gisborne, New Zealand, with a leap of 6.28 metres. Later that year she travelled to Vancouver for the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, winning gold medals in the long jump, discus, and shot put, all with Empire Games record performances, and finishing sixth in the 80 m hurdles. She announced her retirement from athletic competition in November 1954. At the time she ranked number one in world track and field history in the long jump, fifth in the pentathlon, 12th in the discus throw and 19th in the shot put.
Williams married Buddy Corlett, a member of the national basketball team, in Auckland on 11 December 1954. The couple had four children, including national basketball representative Neville Corlett; Auckland provincial rugby union player Peter Corlett, and Karen Corlett, who represented New Zealand in rhythmic gymnastics at the 1977 world championships.
Williams’ younger brother, Roy Williams, won the decathlon at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica.
Buddy Corlett died on 9 May 2015.
Williams died in Auckland on 13 April 2019 at the age of 89, 12 days before her 90th birthday.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvette_Williams
Zucchini, as you say, is good for adding moisture so that the real stars of zucchini bread are the spices, nuts, and other tasty elements. Call it Cinammon-Cardamon-Walnut Bread and it can escape the zucchini curse.
I therefore give points to zucchini for being mostly flavorless. Moisture is good. Worse are those “foods” like tripe or some varieties of game which only pass muster in dishes designed with heavy flavors to mask the disgusting taste. “You won’t even know you’re eating it” can be an alarming recommendation.
I generally hate memes, but I came across one a few days ago that I hadn’t seen before and haven’t seen since, that I think is relevant to much that comes across the wire here:
Willpower dissolves in alcohol
Reality dissolves in ideology
Integrity dissolves in money
Nice!
Now, let’s figure out some way to construct a syllogism here, and we can unlock the secrets of the universe…
Also, the top speed of a cheetah (for short bursts) is 65-75mph, fwiw.
Love the Zucchini Chronicles. I also like Zucchini bread. The zucchini adds a subtle flavor, but I agree that moisture is the main function. Actually, the main function is to get rid of superfluous zucchini without having to feel guilty about throwing it out. My mother used to add chocolate chips to the mix, which was really good!
And, the news of the day is, again, largely bad. The mallard news is one good story—a tale of strength and endurance. The speed is interesting, but I’m somewhat more amazed by how high they fly. Our friends with private airplanes often fly below that altitude. Imagine looking up and seeing mallards going by.
Oh Jerry, about the zucchini bread. All I ask is that you try the recipe in Beard on Bread. If you do, I will promise to experiment by making zucchini bread without zucchini, trying different and equally tasteless substitutes for moisture. I would report back. Is it a deal?
I’m not hugely familiar with Taylor Swift’s music but I’m amused how she lives rent-free in a lot of right-wingers’ head. They’ve even transferred their misplaced loathing to her boyfriend.
“1982 – Israel completes its withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula per the Camp David Accords.”
What country does this? Sinai is larger than all of Israel. Just for the chance of peace?
Onwards Israeli heroes.
D.A.
NYC
The animal looks like an armadillo.
I think you can love any vegetable you grow personally in your own garden. They exude the taste of “freshness” and make moi happy!
I’m not going to be here to see if Swift lives up to her revenue generating music, I include concert tours… look at what they offered Abba, the Beatles (before they were two) to reform and tour after disbanding. 50 plus years on, these acts aŕe still selling / streaming, being listened too and making new fans. If Swift can do that then I think it deserved she have a place on the stage with the above.
But none of the above have anything on the great classical composers, for some, 250 years of listening pleasure.