Kill the Sprickets, Kill Them All

By: | March 14, 2016

304068392_f7cc464f13_bHELEN: I like bugs. I started a Ph.D. in ants (and quit, but still think ants are awesome). I have blogged in this space about butterflies. I think the coming of the 17-year-cicadas is one of the most exciting things that happens in the world. My record is quite clear on this: me and bugs, we have no dispute. But I make an exception for camel crickets. They are horrible. Just horrible.

ANN:  They’re horrible.  They’re poop-brown, have way too many legs, and they jump exactly whatever height you are.  They jump on your body, you make involuntary noises.  They were in my basement, hordes of them.  I used to love finding them dead in the bucket of plant fertilizer or drowned in the basement toilet.  Wikipedia says they live in damp, dark places and in Japan they’re called toilet crickets.  In Baltimore, we call them sprickets.  Do they call them that in DC too?  

HELEN:  I haven’t heard them called sprickets down here in DC, but it’s possible that I just haven’t had enough conversations about them. Which is why I’m so glad we’re doing this.

CASSIE: I never saw a spricket or heard of a spricket until I moved to Baltimore. I rented this awesome apartment on St. Paul Street. The first time I went into the basement to do laundry, there they were. I hated them immediately, but it was months before I realized that they are a real thing with a name that exists places other than my basement. A real species.

It’s their stupid leaping that gets to me. Footsteps make them explode into the air like leggy popcorn kernels in a too-hot pan. But often as not, they would crash into me, not leap away from me. WTF, evolution. Go home. You’re drunk. This might not sound like such a grievous offense, but try walking into a dimly lit cement room where insects are ricocheting off every surface, including your body. It’s the stuff of goddamn nightmares. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 12, 2016

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What a week! Is there a theme? Sort of. Something about things that have power over our behavior. Some are real, some are tricks of a sort. Some are Andy Kaufman (again).

Guest poster Ann Garvin tells us that we are doomed to eat all the M&Ms because they come in so many pretty colors (the point being, manufacturers know how to affect our behavior when it comes to nutrition).

Erik looks at the fascinating history of homeopathy and the famous rebels who made it a thing. His piece is Part One in a “series” of two.

Sally, in Part Two, grabs the homeopathy baton and runs with it to the UK where she’s sure that the government’s support of this non-medical medicine is a sneaky and grand test of the good-old placebo effect.

Jenny (that’s me) says goodbye to winter by considering fire: Why is its raw power so intriguing to some but mundane to others?

And Erik started out the week with more political ranting…let’s just say Donald Trump, Andy Kaufman, and Berkeley Breathed walk into a bar. Don’t miss this one.

 

 

The Placebo President

By: | March 11, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-03-10 at 10.41.41 AMAs I have occasionally mentioned on this blog, I am currently working on a book on the many ways that our own brains can deceive ourselves. Placebos, hucksters, healers, hypnotists, and con men – it’s all in there.

It’s a fascinating subject and one that constantly reminds me to be careful about what I think I know. Our brains are wired to be accept what we see based on the things we expect to see. And sometimes, like with the gorilla in the basketball game, the most obvious thing can slip past our eyes just because it’s not what we were expecting.

Such as the fact that Donald Trump is actually a brilliant 1970s-era comic in disguise.

Continue reading →

Crackle, Hiss, Pop

By: | March 10, 2016

IMG_6103March showed up last week, on little cat feet rather than lion paws. A gentle snow jacketed the crocuses before watering their roots. The least patient daffodils opened, heads dipped against any last-ditch icy gusts. Spring’s legs are wobbly, but she’ll find her stride soon enough.

Still, at my little cabin in the Virginia woods, the nights remain cold. So we keep working our way through the woodpile, building the season’s last fires. We stack a trio of big, dry logs in the fireplace before bed, so the heat rises and swirls around us as we sleep. In the wee hours the fire slows to a simmer, and when we get up we stir the hot embers and feed them fresh wood, and ourselves fresh coffee, enjoying warmth through to our aging bones for one more day.

This my favorite turning point of seasons, the transition from hunching by the stove to cracking winter’s glue where windows meet their wells. Opening to those first warmish breezes and hearing the crosstalk of so many birds is a happy, cleansing ritual for me. And nothing feels better than the morning sun on a winter-weary face.

But spring’s stirring means my parting with other favorite ritual: watching fire burn. Continue reading →

Homeopathy Part One: Rebels of Medicine

By: | March 8, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 10.00.23 PMToday’s post is the first of a two-part series on homeopathy. Look for another tomorrow by LWON’s own Sally Adee. 

In 460 BCE, a rebel was born. Ruggedly handsome, fluffy hair that drove younger girls crazy and a gleaming bald pate that made the older ones swoon.

His buddies called him “The Father of Medicine,” “Ἱπποκράτης” or just “The Hippo.” His enemies called him that “that bald guy who gets angry whenever I beat my patients with a flaming branch to appease the god Hephaestus.”

He was Hippocrates of Kos and he rocked the Western world like almost no other human being in history.

Twenty-two centuries later, another rebel was born just a short 1,000 miles to the north. Samuel Hahnemann was equally popular with the ladies (or lady – he had eleven children) and had similarly luxurious hair on some of his head.

What did these two rebels have in common? It turns out quite a bit.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Dirty Bomb of Nutrition

By: | March 7, 2016

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The hard thing about teaching nutrition to college students is that, as far as eating healthy is concerned, they’ve heard it all before. In fact, Michael Pollen’s phrase, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”– is about the best 3-second nutrition message around. I find myself wanting to repeat this phrase to my students and dismiss class for the semester.

I don’t, though, because “Not too much” is the dirty bomb of nutrition. Whenever I ask my class if they have eaten a Hershey’s Chocolate Kiss in their lifetime, I already know the answer. It’s always 100% hands raised.

Hershey’s has our number. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 5, 2016

shutterstock_156034427February 29 – March 4, 2016

This week, Helen and her friends became famous using nothing but some marshmallows and an idea. Here’s the blow-by-blow of her brush with celebrity.

Craig reports from the Bering Strait where, as ever, he walks in two overlaid landscapes, separated by thousands of years.

Rose has a fantasy life in a town she’s never been to – one that shares her last name. Should she dare to go and face the reality?

Michelle follows developments at Project Puffin, which not only restores the range of seabirds in Maine but provides valuable insights into their marine environment.

My ancestors, the Holland Brothers, brought the first motion pictures to North America. And little old Ottawa was in the middle of it all.

Image: Shutterstock

The Holland Brothers

By: | March 4, 2016

Blacksmith Scene (1893), thought to be the first staged narrative in film

Last summer, after a decade in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I moved south to Ottawa. It is a city that holds deeper roots for me the longer I dig. Every day, I pass the park where my high school friends used to hang, and I pick up my son from an after-school program in the church where my parents were married.

Here, the experimental farm where my mother had her first summer job, picking strawberries. There, the yellow thing that has usurped the lot of my grandparents’ house. Its windowpanes have prominent Xs instead of + shapes. (Actually, maybe I like it.) We play at the beach in Britannia Bay, where my great-great-uncle drowned in a sailboat accident. His body was never recovered, so presumably he’s still there.

But there are clear familial voices from still further back – ones that blend with the ghost of another city in the same place. It wasn’t Ottawa in the early 1800s when my four-times-great-grandfather arrived from Montreal – it was a timber hub called Bytown, and Confederation was yet to bring Canada into being. Continue reading →