Space Is Real

By: | March 8, 2024

A defensive back playing for a Texas university football team recently said something unusual into a press microphone. “I don’t believe in space,” he said. “I’m religious, so I think, like, we’re on our own right now. I don’t think there’s, like, other planets and stuff like that.” 

I welcome eccentric ways of thinking. Being bogged down by rational observation can hide glimmers of truth science doesn’t see. Believe away, I think, which the young football player did, using the word ‘heliocentric,’ saying he doesn’t believe the Earth revolves around the sun. “I started seeing flat Earth stuff, and I was, like, that’s kind of interesting,” he said. “They started bringing up some valid points.”

The mind doesn’t always take kindly to infinity heaped with countless nuclear engines swirling through galaxies as numberless as the stars. It might be easier to think of space as a canvas, a background, nothing to see here. There’s a reason Galileo stood trial before the church.

Several days before these quotes came out, I attended an event for Rebecca Boyles’ wonderful new book, “Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are.” She described how moon dust is like tiny splinters of glass, not softened by the erosive processes we experience on Earth, no wind to blow it around, no water to wear it down. As of the lunar landing in 1969, NASA scientists weren’t sure if the dust might be flammable, insisting astronauts re-enter their lander without any on them, which they found to be impossible because the minuscule barbs of bolide ejecta stuck to everything. Everyone held their breath and, thank goodness, the dust turned out to be inert. That is real. 

I took the football player’s quote to Richard Panek, another writer for LWON, and in a video chat his mouth struggled to come up with a response. He finally said, “It’s a new one on me. It would never occur to me. It would be like saying the ocean isn’t real. It makes no sense.”

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The Queen’s Speech

By: | March 6, 2024

This piece initially ran exactly a year ago, and it’s no coincidence that the Canadian Broadcasting System had me on air again today. This time, though, it was a program called Good Question, Saskatchewan! which addressed the issue of why that province (mostly) dodged the hassle of daylight savings time. If you would like to hear more on this question, here’s the podcast of it. I’m pleased to report our bi-annual ritual of self-sabotage continues to unite us in hatred and annoyance.

Twice a year, for more than a decade, now, I have addressed the nation.

Today, I do so again. At 6am it’s Ottawa, then I’m swiftly on to Thunder Bay at 6:10. My voice will echo through the kitchens of Saint John at 6:20 and rustle the lace curtains in the Anne of Green Gables parlours of Charlottetown at 6:40. Cape Breton, Moncton, Winnipeg, Yellowknife, Regina, Prince George, Kelowna, Fredericton, Kitchener-Waterloo. And what that voice will be saying – what it has always been saying – is that daylight savings time is stupid. Again and again, to 14 separate cities, year after year.

And it’s been working. During the time I have been regularly interviewed on the CBC syndication desk about daylight savings, by dint of a professional focus on circadian rhythms, some questions have remained the same. We’ve talked about how the lost hour during our spring forward leads to population-level effects on heart attacks and traffic accidents. We’ve talked about its origins as a satirical proposal and the fact that its energy-saving theory has never panned out in practice.

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Amphorae

By: | March 4, 2024
Ancient Roman glass (1st-6th century CE) at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento
From the collection of Marcy Friedman.

This post first appeared in March 2021. My longing for more spontaneous museum visits continues.

A little over a year ago I made an unplanned trip to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I had driven to the city to run errands but then decided to go look at art instead, a moment of pre-pandemic spontaneity that felt indulgent then, and now, I imagine, would feel like intense catharsis. It was a rainy Sunday; I remember stepping over crushed magnolia blossoms on the wet pavement. I paid my admission and declined the headset tour, bought a cup of coffee in the museum cafe and drank it in the light-filled glass atrium, a relatively recent expansion of the oldest public art museum west of the Mississippi River.

I enjoyed all of the exhibits, more or less, but one installation made such an impression on me that I still think about it: A collection of 1st-6th century Roman glass jars, flasks, juglets and perfume bottles called amphoriskos. The placard by the case was succinct, noting only a few physical details like “turquoise twin handles, spiral and zig-zag trailing,” and “globular sprinkler with pinecone.” It didn’t say anything about how the glass was made, where it was found, or how the donor, a local painter, acquired it. I left the museum without asking, not realizing it would be the last time I’d visit.

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Any Chance You Have Time to Read This Post?

By: | March 1, 2024

*If you are home and not busy, would F. be able to get a Ziploc of ice?

*Would one of you be able to do Monday morning carpool next week?

*Any chance you’d have time to work Friday lunch? S. is home sick.

*S. is staying home sick. Is there any chance you have time to do lunch today?

*Is one of you going to be home today? S. is home sick but I might leave him for an hour so I can exercise and not [have a mental health crisis] . . .  He says he is fine by himself but if something catches fire he will come and get you.

*Did R. seem ok to you on Friday? She’s been kind of low energy all weekend.

*Could I have a grownup buddy . . .to hide in the kitchen with me . . .?

*Can we split carpool Tuesday?

*Could S. come over to your house until about 3?

I was feeling weirdly uncomfortable last week when my husband went out of town. Being on my own with the kids is easier than it’s ever been—they’re friendly and fun to be with about 95% of the time, which is more than I can say for myself. On request, they empty dishwashers and make beds and get ready for school and even cook their own mac & cheese. There were no health emergencies, work crises, or other issues that made it particularly stressful.

I couldn’t figure it out until I looked at my texts.

Ugh. I hate asking for help. Typing out all those texts a second time feels like chalk squeaking along the inside of my ribs, a combination of how awkward each question sounds (“any chance”? Double ugh!)  and the fact that I had to ask it at all. The accumulation of each small request seems to weigh much more than it should.

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Snapshot: The Raccoons of Jewel Key

By: | February 28, 2024

First light on Jewel Key found the tide out and the raccoons hungry. I followed one along the exposed tidal flat that rimmed the south edge of this Everglades islet, Chokoloskee Bay at our backs, the glittering expanse of the Gulf of Mexico before us. The raccoon, or her ancestors, had come here under her own power, paddling the straits between mangrove islands; on past South Florida kayaking trips we’d actually seen the mammals swimming, bedraggled heads bobbing like coconuts in the chop. She scuttled over rocks and stranded kelp, ignoring the human shadowing her not ten feet away. Shortly she stopped, jammed one of her nimble paws into a crevice, and began to rummage in the crack’s invisible depths. She gazed at the sky in concentration, the universal look of an intelligent, dexterous creature trying to grasp an object she can’t quite see — the same look I wear whenever I try to fish my dropped cell phone out from beneath the driver’s seat. After a minute or two her paw emerged, gripping some kind of fleshy invertebrate, a shrimp maybe, or a small octopus. She lifted it to her mouth and tore in with the gleaming daggers of her teeth, lips audibly smacking. 

Watching her feast called to mind the Kelp Highway hypothesis, the notion that humans first dispersed through the Americas by following the Pacific coastline and snacking on clams, mussels, snails, crabs, and other bounty along the way. I don’t know how many of the Everglades’ mangrove islands are inhabited by raccoons, but it was easy to imagine them likewise colonizing the archipelago by hopping from land mass to land mass, sustaining themselves on the spineless creatures they pried from tide pools and rock shelves. To be a smart, resourceful mammal is to forage in the littoral zone, whether you’re a primate or a procyonid. 

Nobody Was Here

By: | February 26, 2024

I don’t know how I managed to not know this for my whole life, but here it is: the Americas were the last continents to have people on them. By around 30,000 years ago, all the other continents had people on them. We didn’t have any people. Nobody. Empty of people.

Why not? How do continents gets their people anyway? Well, in the beginning people evolved. They evolved in Africa, and later maybe some kind of evolution refinements were going on in Europe and Asia and Australia. But not here, not in the New World. I asked a couple of anthropologists, “Why not?” And they said “Nope, before 20,000 years ago, no evidence of people whatever. They just didn’t evolve here.”

“Well why not?” I said. “Wrong monkeys,” they said, and I’m paraphrasing. The great apes with the capacity for evolving into humans didn’t live here. We had only miscellaneous little monkeys — the New World monkeys which, granted, evolved from Old World monkeys but neither one evolved into humans. No, I don’t know why not.

So if people didn’t evolve here, they must have come in from the outside, from the other continents, immigrated in like immigrants, right? Right you are. Once homo sapiens — wise humans, somebody’s sense of humor I guess — evolved in Africa, they headed out on all directions. By 40,000 years ago, they’d moved over into Asia, down into Southeast Asia, up into Siberia, even to Australia, and up to Europe. They didn’t get to the Americas until about 20,000 years ago. The Siberians must have gotten curious about the stretch of land crossing the ocean to the east and trekked across it.

These people, the Asians, came in waves: an early, maybe the first, wave went straight south along the west coast, and by 14,500 years ago was at the tip of South America. Other waves, maybe around the same time, maybe later, came inland into North America, down an ice-free corridor between glaciers, then skirted the bottom of the glaciers and headed south and east — though the archeological evidence is indirect at best and inevitably hit-or-miss.

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Birding – PUBLISHED, Finally

By: | February 21, 2024

We, the People of LWON, write whatever the f*** we want. But on days when we just can’t, we rerun an old post. Today, I just can’t. And yet rerunning old posts is against my personal religion. So today I am excavating the blog post that I partially wrote in the summer of 2021 and then left sitting at the top of our content management system for two and a half years, where all of the People of LWON could see “Birding – DO NOT PUBLISH” every time they logged in. Now, their nightmare is over. Here it is, with notes.

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