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OK, not directly. But as if we needed another reason why increased levels of carbon dioxide caused by global warming is generally bad, recent studies have shown that undesirable plants such as Poison Ivy love CO2. It makes them grow faster and bigger, more resilient to pesticides, and their irritant even stronger. Basically, more CO2 makes Poison Ivy into the cockroach of the plant world. I got a bad case of Poison Ivy a couple summers back and it was a major drag, so poison ivy sucks big time, and anything that makes it stronger is bad…very bad. (Alright, I know poison ivy is not harmful to most non-human animals and is an important part of the eco-system, blah blah blah).
But…wait a minute. Don’t all plants love CO2? Wouldn’t many plants thrive in a warmer climate with higher levels of CO2? Why just poison ivy? I did a quick search and came up with a lot of anti-global warming sites that said rising CO2 levels was cyclical and natural. (There’s something about the “Global Warming Is A Myth!” pushers that make me feel like they are trying to get me to join a cult, or buy a drug that will ultimately do nothing but cause explosive diarrhea, or a buy a pet that will destroy your life if you feed it after midnight).
But then I found an article on Yale Global Online about a study that global warming spurs asthma and allergies, since increased levels of CO2 seems to make invasive plants in particular, such as ragweed, even stronger.
So spread the word. Global warming will give you a disgusting rash – so let’s do our part to be more eco-friendly. Seriously, people. Nobody likes to be itchy.
Read more about global warming on nrdc.org >>
Ah, Paris! (pronounced “pari”)
Instead of stupefying yourself with the drivel saturating the media about that nuisance of a girl who got out of jail, why not talk about the other Paris, the capital of France, instead? It’s so much more interesting and it won’t slowly kill your soul.
Here’s a sprinkling of really random things about Paris that I find interesting:
Paris was named after the Parisii, a Celtic Iron Age people who lived along the Seine River from circa 350 B.C. to the Roman era.
Paris is a culinary mecca. Adolphe Duglere, chef at the famed Cafe Anglais, was known as “the Mozart of the kitchen.” In 1867, he served what was arguably the greatest dinner in European history to Russian czars, now known as “The Dinner of the Three Emperors.” See what was on the menu>> Yummm…
Paris has one of the most remarkable sewer systems in the world, and it even has a museum called Musée des égouts de Paris, or the Paris Sewers Museum so one can learn about its ingenious engineering. C’est très bizarre, non?
Speaking of engineering, Paris is filled with incredible architecture, from to the Notre Dame Cathedral to the Arc de Triomphe.
I once drew the Centre Pompidou, its exposed skeleton of colored pipes and all, (which was said to “turn the architecture world upside down” by the New York Times) as a visual aid for a French class project in high school and it was a bitch. (I wanted the Louvre, but the subject was already taken by a classmate.)
The Louvre was built in 1190 by Philippe Auguste as a fortress to protect the capital from the Anglo-Norman threat. Going through many transformations, part of the chateau became a museum in 1793, and the collections gradually spread through the entire building.
The Eiffel Tower weighs 10,000 tons.
There are about 10,000 books that have been written about Paris.
An 18th century Parisian architect planned to construct a bordello in the shape of a giant phallus (hee hee). Got this from the editorial review of Paris: Capital of the World by Patrice Higonnet.
One of my heroes, Gordon Parks, when he went to Paris on assignment in the 1960’s for Life Magazine, said that it was the first time he could breathe and spread his wings as an artist without being oppressed by racism*
*paraphrased, not a direct quote
As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Paris is always a good idea – the film “Sabrina” (1954)
I was watching a great documentary series “The Galapagos” on the National Geographic Channel, saw some Galapagos bees pollinating away, and realized I never found out what happened to those missing bees from this past winter so I did some googling.
As you’ve probably heard, this past winter, millions of honey bees mysteriously vanished without a trace in over 20 states, which has much more dire consequences than a shortage of honey. More than 90 crops in the U.S. depend on their pollination, worth about $14 billion a year to the economy. Bees directly & indirectly affect about 1/3 of the typical American’s diet – the healthier part, that is. Source: New York Times “Losing Their Buzz”>>)
Despite the sequence of the entire honey bee genome being published in October 2006 to better understand these insects, and a House Hearing called in March to pinpoint the cause of this disappearance, currently called “colony collapse disorder” or “CCD,” nobody has come up with a definite reason why this happened. There are of course, tons of theories from viruses, stress, pesticides causing disorientation, global warming to alien abduction.
Curious to see if there have been any developments on this phenomenon, I did a quick news search, and have so far only come up with an article about scientists in Ontario, Canada, getting funding in late May to solve the bee mystery. (read it on cbc news >>) And then I saw on The Daily Green that Beekeeper Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture Magazine, blogged that there’s no buzz on CCD, and that the summer hives are looking good (I’ll take his word for it, he seems like he’s a Jedi Master of Beekeepers). So I’ve gathered that as of yet, this issue is still unsolved. I’m very curious to see if and when they come up with an answer.
My theory? The pesticides were stressing out the bees, making them loopy and thus easier to herd and persuade. The aliens took this chance to abduct the bees because they are mad about global warming. (We’re wrecking the planet and there’s no point in invading earth and taking over it anymore and they have to look elsewhere.)
Learn more about Colony Collapse Disorder on Wikipedia >>
Extending above the photosphere or visible surface of the Sun, the faint, tenuous solar corona can’t be easily seen from Earth, but it is measured to be hundreds of times hotter than the photosphere itself. The clusters of the majestic, hot coronal loops span 30 or more times the diameter of planet Earth.
Music produced by the Sun’s Atmosphere? A picture forms in my mind of a future in which the privileged few dress to the nines and hop on privately chartered space shuttles for a night at the Solar Opera. The guests would be seated in a hovering amphitheatre specially designed to withstand the sun’s heat and filter its rays, optimized for a spectacular, literally out-of-this-world light & sound show… The reality is a bit less romantic, but still pretty amazing.
Astronomers recorded sound waves emitted by the looping magnetic fields along the Sun’s outer regions, or the corona, which carries magnetic sound waves. Unfortunately, we humans can’t hear these sounds since our hearing range is between 20 to 20,000 hertz, while the solar sound waves are more along the lines of milli-hertz-a-thousandth of a hertz.
I don’t quite understand all of this, as to my chagrin, I’m not smart enough to grasp astrophysics, but I’m going to try my best to break down what I do understand in layman’s terms:
One of the astronomers likens this phenomenon to the solar energy plucking a guitar string. Explosive events at the sun’s surface produce acoustic waves that bounce back and forth between the ends of the loops, setting up “standing waves.” So imagine a guitar string being plucked by microflares (tiny, frequently occurring solar flares) which produce sound waves that reach tens of miles, traveling at speeds of 45,000 – 90,000 miles per hour, releasing the energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs. (Considering that the speed of sound on Earth at sea level in static conditions is about 761 miles per hour, it boggles the mind!)
Forget the opera, this sounds like one hell of a badass rock concert. Too bad we can’t hear it.
This study will be presented at this week’s Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Lancashire, England. Read more about this on Yahoo News >>
(To avoid confusion, by perdu, I’m referring to the French word for “lost”, not the brand for factory farmed chicken, hehe).
I’ve always been drawn to survivor stories. Real ones…I’m not talking about the reality series “Survivor,” (which I am proud to admit I’ve never ever seen a single episode of). Survival stories are inspiring. They put things into perspective. They’re entertaining stories of real people with sometimes superhuman strength, or at least strength of mind. They display the power of mind over body. Do you fight or flee when disaster strikes? Those who decide to fight can find they are capable of extraordinary things when looking death in the face. We can do things unfathomable in our day-to-day lives to keep from perishing and beat the odds. Take a page from Hannibal Lector’s book? Pass the fava beans, please! Eat bugs? Lay off me, I’m starving! Saw off a limb? No problemo.
I’ve also never seen ABC’s series “Lost”, but I’d imagine that the following true story could be the basis of a French spin-off of “Lost” called “Perdu!”
A recent news story reported that two French men, Guilhem Nayral and Loic Pillois, were found after they had been reported missing in late February 2007 after a hiking trip in French Guiana. They survived by trapping insects and beetles and eating frogs and tarantulas. Insects and spiders and frogs, oh my! Read the full article here. If you read French (which I barely can), check out the family blog set up for their rescue efforts with a happy final post announcing their safe return.
Here are a few of my favorite survival stories:
He’s No Ordinary Joe
Mountain climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yaters were the first people to ever reach the summit of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. On their descent, Simpson fell into a crevice and broke his leg. With no food, water, or shelter, he crawled and hopped for 5 miles, subsisting on eating snow, finally collapsing near the base camp in a delirious state where he started to yell. Yates, still at the base camp, heard his cries. Simpson wrote a book entitled Touching the Void on his experience and an acclaimed documentary of the same name was made in 2003.
Teenage Girl sole survivor of a plane crash in depths of the Peruvian Jungle
I first heard this formidable story from my brother. Seventeen-year old Juliane Koepcke was flying in a Lockheed Electra on Christmas Eve, 1971, when lightning struck and she fell out of the airplane into the Peruvian Jungle. She experienced an acute heightening of senses which has been known to occur in extreme survival situations, recalling that the jungle trees looked like cauliflowers as she was falling. She awoke in the jungle, still strapped in her airplane seat. Deciding that if she stayed put, she would surely die, she set off into the jungle. She headed downhill,remembering something her father (both her parents were researchers that worked in the jungle) said about going downhill to find a river to follow, as rivers sometimes lead to civilization. Resting during the hot hours of the day and traveling at night, she survived for 11 days in a nightmare-ish state, without any shoes or survival gear, eaten alive by leeches and various tropical insects that bore into her, laying eyes, and producing worms that hatched out of her skin. She found an empty hut, and collapsed. The next day, three hunters found her and took her to a doctor. (Source: Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why. W.W. Norton & Company, 2003)
Man amputates his own arm
There have been several accounts of people who have severed their own limbs for the sake of survival. Here’s a relatively recent, widely publicized account. Mountaineer Aron Ralston was hiking and rock climbing in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, when a boulder large enough to fill the back of a pickup truck crashed down on his right arm, pinning him in a 3-foot wide space. After 5 days, he was seriously dehydrated and had two options: free himself or die a slow death. He took out his pocket knife and cut his arm off, just under his elbow. Fashioning a tourniquette, he rappeled down to the canyon floor and hiked seven miles, all the while bleeding profusely, until he found help. He was still coherent when he was rescued. Read more in Time Magazine’s May 2003 article Survival of the Fittest >>
Suggested Reading:
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why by Laurence Gonzales
I just had a dentist appointment and a crown put in, blech. On one hand, I consider myself lucky that the closest to torture I’ve ever gotten to is in the dentist’s chair. On the other hand, there’s never been any information I could give up to make the torture stop; I just have to sit there until they’re done with whatever they’ve got to do. I’ve spent quite some time at the dentist over the years, being rather unlucky with dentistry.
My earliest dental nightmare occurred when I fell on my face when I was a kid as I was hanging upside-down on the monkey bars, and both my front teeth were pushed back – yowwza! Thank God they were my baby teeth. And then came the braces for many years, oral surgery, and so on and so forth. I just think of Dustin Hoffman’s Marathon Man and tell myself that it will at least never come to that (knock on wood that I’m not ever kidnapped and tortured for information I don’t have by a crazy Nazi dentist!)
Oh, the horrors…that suction device with the horrid sound that never quite sucks up all the spit, the horrible tastes and that oh-so-spine-chilling electric drill. And to add insult upon injury, I had to shell out so much for this procedure that I could have bought 2-3 pairs of Manolo Blahnik’s for the price of one fake tooth — aka a crown. (And I don’t even own one pair of Manolo’s…is that fair?)
Alright, in all things being equal, I love my dentist. She’s very skilled, no-nonsense & fast, and I appreciate that she doesn’t make inane small talk and expect you to reciprocate when there are ten tools stuck in your novocaine-numbed mouth. So for being a sadist, she’s pretty cool.
After the tooth-drilling fun today, I decided to gather a mouthful, er rather, handful, of tooth related things in my post. I ended up reading way more on teeth than I ever wanted to know, but here’s a selected list for you, dear reader:
- The earliest known toothbrush dates back thousands of years. Known as a “chew stick”, this brush was made by chewing or mashing small twigs or tree roots until the fibers at one end became loose enough to form a rough brush. The cleaning surface had much the same effect as chewing the end of a toothpick. Some native Australian and African people living traditionally still clean their teeth with chew sticks. source >> (Hey, that’s just like in Clan of the Cave Bear – the book, not the movie — guess Jean M. Auel did her research)!
- False teeth date back as far as 700 BC. The Etruscans designed false teeth out of ivory and bone that were secured into the mouth by gold bridgework. Read more about the history of dental hygiene on about.com >>
- Disgusting news hot off the press – am I thankful I read this after my dentist visit: Dentist guilty of urinating in surgery sink >>
- Tooth Fairies: The tooth fairy seems to have originated in American folklore in the early 1900’s. I never believed in the tooth fairy. My brother and I were led to believe that our teeth magically transformed into quarters underneath our pillows…that’s perfectly logical, right? Santa comes down the chimney with gifts, and fallen baby teeth morph into money. No tooth-gathering fairy flying into our bedrooms for us, thank you… that’s just unrealistic. To check out the history of the tooth fairy, check out The Straight Dope.
- Elephants have the largest teeth in the world. An elephants’ tusks are actually modified incisors. Click here for an exhaustive list of sometimes-gross, sometimes-interesting oral trivia compiled by a dentist if you dare.
- Searching for a gift idea for the person that has everything? Do you just want to really freak someone out? I stumbled upon a site that sells “Bone Clones: Osteological Reproductions” where you can pick up a complete set of Megalodon Shark (prehistoric shark) teeth replicas for only $1600. They also sell replicas of all kinds of bones. Hey, to each his own.
- Funniest evil dentist in a movie: Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors
- Scariest evil dentist in a movie: Laurence Olivier in the aforementioned Marathon Man
- Most unappealing movie title ever (I can’t bring myself to watch this film despite its critical acclaim): The Secret Lives of Dentists
Finally, what about future developments in dentistry? Here’s my bet:
THOMPSON’S TEETH: The only teeth strong enough to eat other teeth!
CRUNCH cRunch CruNCH. The above is one of the commercials from the brilliant animated series Futurama. (It’s one of my all-time favorite shows…and there are new episodes coming to Comedy Central in 2008, I can’t wait!!) Of course, on wikipedia, someone has compiled a complete list of Futurama products if you’d like to peruse it.
OK, I’m done. I vow to NEVER write about teeth again on this blog.
The above photo was taken from: http://www.watersheds.org/nature/gallery3/pages/TinyFrog.htm
I’m in upstate NY right now, and I just noticed today that the annual chorus of adorable “peeping” could be heard from the breeding ground of the little frogs dubbed “spring peepers”. The sound is just so cute (they sound like the chirping of chicks). I’ve actually never ventured into the soggy grounds where they hang out to catch a glimpse of them, but here’s what I found out about my little amphibian friends who create such a lovely audio ambiance when I open my windows, heralding the start of spring.
The Spring Peeper, or the Pseudacris crucifer, is a small tree frog very common throughout eastern America. They’re nocturnal, and only grow to a full size of up to 0.75 to 1.5 inches long. Their very loud, high pitched mating call gives them the nickname, “spring peepers.” The peeper has a vocal sac under its chin. To make the peeping sound, the frog fills the sac with air (like a balloon), and then pushes the air out, producing two peeping sounds (one sound when the air goes in and one when the air goes out). Sometimes, a peeper makes sounds while sitting in holes or crevices in the soil; the hole acts like a megaphone, making the sound even louder.
To hear sound clips and learn more, click here or check out the wikipedia article. Peep Peep! Happy Spring!
