Howard Zinn‘s recent death got me thinking. The fundamentalists have been insisting that we should “teach the controversy” and offer creationism as a viable alternative to evolution when instructing our impressionable youth.
OK. I’ll go for that … if they’re willing to require that Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” also be taught in our schools. What? That’s too controversial? I thought so …
After a 15+ year layoff from homebrewing, I cooked up a batch of mead around the holidays. It’s a small batch that I intend to bottle and try next Christmas, assuming everything goes reasonably well.
I pitched the yeast and put it in the laundry room to ferment, but it was only about 60 degrees in there so I moved it out to the stovetop in a covered pot. Then I racked it to a carboy on Christmas Eve. It’s been sitting in the carboy since, gurgling away while the yeast converts that sugar to alcohol. I’m hoping it will yield two wine bottles of mead.
I’m planning a few more small batches, this time using local honey. I have a sourwood honey I want to try, and also some clover. Might try a melomel with the clover honey …
Caught an amazing edition of Radiolab this week while I was out driving around. It turned into one of those moments where I took the long route so I could hear the entire thing.
It was a vigorous defense of parasites. Yes, parasites. The details of how the zombie wasp, the blood fluke and the nematode operate are diabolically cool.
This is long but if you listen, go all the way till the end. That’s the part that really piqued my interest. They discuss how parasites can affect the way animals behave (one parasite infects the brains of rats to make them attracted to cat urine so the rat will approach cats, get devoured and allow its parasite to move to a cat, the only host where it can reproduce). And then they speculate about how this might affect human behavior.
Could a cat-borne parasite be responsible for schizophrenia?
Are parasites slowly manipulating us and turning us into a race of zombies, much the way wasps do to cockroaches in the YouTube clip above?
Fascinating.
