Shala K. Howell's Blog, page 20

Wordless Wednesday: Contentment

Every once in a while my cat does something that perfectly illustrates the meaning of a word. It’s his superpower. This week, the word he chose was contentment.

Related Links:

Applied Vocabulary, Episode 3: “What is bliss?” (Caterpickles)More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles

Who was Uranus?

While reading Dava Sobel’s book The Planets last week, I realized that of all of the planets, I probably know the least about Uranus. Not just because we don’t know that much about Uranus. I wish I could blame it on that.

No, it’s because for me, Uranus has an unpronounceable name. One either has to say the to-my-ears ugly ur-un-us, or go with the borderline disreputable ur-ray-nus. To talk about the planet, I have to make a snap decision between enduring dissonance or discomfort. Most of the time, I choose to endure neither, and simply avoid asking any questions about Uranus at all.

(Some days, I can barely even endure saying the word in my head, much less speak it out loud.)

But there was no avoiding Uranus while reading Sobel’s book. She has an entire chapter devoted to it. And in that chapter, she mentions off-hand that while the other planets are named after Roman gods, Uranus was named after a Greek myth. I didn’t know the story of Uranus off-hand, and Sobel didn’t deign to tell it.

My mind, sadly, couldn’t let it go. So I decided to look it up.

Who was Uranus?

(In my own defense, while researching this post I looked up what Edith Hamilton’s Mythology — the reference text of my childhood — had to say about Uranus. He appears in a genealogy chart as the husband of Gaea and the father of the Titans, but otherwise Hamilton has very little to say about him. When she tells his story on pages 66-67, she calls him Father Heaven, with the exception of one instance, in which she calls him Ouranos. Even the Index merely lists Uranus as the father of Cronus. No wonder my high school self didn’t pick up on it.)

In the beginning, Greek mythology states, there was Gaea, Mother Earth. Although Gaea herself was born spontaneously either out of Chaos or nothingness, depending on who is telling you this ancient Grecian story, she found that in herself she was not sufficient. She created a partner for herself, Uranus, Father Sky, and married him. Out of their union came the Titans, who would go on to become the parents of the much more familiar to us Olympians.

[image error]Uranus, Father Sky (Image from GreekMythology.com)

By all accounts — or at least, by all the accounts that actually mention him — Uranus was a terrible husband and a worse father. According to Hamilton, the first few of his children with Gaea had a hundred heads and fifty heads – each. Uranus couldn’t stand the sight of these monsters, so as soon as they were born, he shoved them deep back into Mother Earth. Multiple times he did this, causing Gaea extreme pain. (The three Cyclops and the Titans which followed he allowed to roam free.)

Unable to bear the agony of holding her many-headed and many-handed children in her womb any longer, Gaea created an adamantine sickle and begged her free-ranging Titan and Cyclops children to use it to destroy their father. Only Cronus was brave enough to actually attack Uranus and overthrow him. Cronus then crowned himself king of the gods.

Being a terrible father and a worse husband apparently ran in the family. Having heard that one day one of his kids would overthrow him, Cronus proceeded to eat all of his kids, except for Zeus. Cronus’ wife Rhea, in despair over the deaths of her previous children asked Gaea for advice when Zeus was born. (Gaea, after all, knew a thing or two about dealing with murderous husbands.) Gaea told Rhea to replace baby Zeus with a stone, and to trick Cronus into eating the stone instead of his newborn son. Somehow this plan worked. Zeus grew up in hiding and ultimately displaced Cronus as king of the gods.

The Greek Uranus is the father of the Roman Saturn and grandfather of the Roman Jupiter. Wait, what?

. This bothered me while I was researching this post. After all, Saturn and Jupiter are both Roman gods and Uranus was a Greek one.

(Hey — it’s been a long time since high school. I’d forgotten how closely the two mythologies were intertwined.)

In Sobel’s book she points out that at the time Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, educated Westerners were in the habit of lumping Roman and Greek mythology together and calling the whole thing “Classical.” Hamilton also talks about Greek and Roman mythology as being essentially the same thing. And I’ll confess, most days I’ll happily do that myself.

But is it true? Are the Greek and Roman versions of these gods really just the same person with two different names?

Did the Romans just steal the Greek gods wholesale?

From what I can tell, yes, at least the major ones. Before the Romans encountered the Greeks, their gods were ill-defined but immensely practical beings with names like One Who Guards the Cradle or One Who Presides over Children’s Food (Hamilton, p. 41). According to Hamilton, these early Roman gods didn’t really have much personality of their own. So the Romans latched onto the Greek stories with their gloriously defined personalities and frankly comedic possibilities (for example, all those tales of Hera, the perpetually jealous married to Zeus the chronically unfaithful and hopelessly indiscreet). Over time the existing Roman gods, such as they were, became identified with and subsumed into their Greek counterparts. Even the Romans considered them to be the same as their Greek counterparts, just with different names, in most cases.

So, yes, it apparently would have been fine with the Romans for us to equate their god Saturn with the Greek Titan Cronus. And that probably means that we can also merrily swap out the Roman Jupiter for the Greek Olympian Zeus. Uranus has a Roman equivalent too, Caelus (pronounced CHIE-loose, although many people use the Latinized version of the name Uranus, Ouranos, instead).

Still, while I feel better about willfully and wantonly using the Latin and Greek names for the gods as I wish, none of this answers my original question.

Why didn’t Herschel follow the existing planet naming scheme and use the Latin name for Uranus when he named his new planet?

Why didn’t Herschel name his new planet after the Roman version of the sky god?

Herschel, it turns out, didn’t want to name his new planet after a god at all. Instead, he wanted to name it George after his patron, King George III.

In her chapter on Uranus in The Planets, Sobol points out that at the time King George would have just lost the American colonies, and Herschel may have thought that having a new planet to call his own would console him.

While Herschel’s plan to name his new planet Georgium Sidus (Latin for George’s Star ), was extremely popular in Britain, astronomers elsewhere were less fond of it .

In 1782, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode recommended that astronomers take the naming decision out of Herschel’s hands entirely. Bode proposed that they follow the existing pattern of naming the major planets after the most important Roman deities instead of using the planet to honor Britain’s erratic King George III. Since the new planet lay beyond the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, it seemed most fitting to name it after Saturn’s father and Jupiter’s grandfather.

Although the other planets used the Roman names, Bode argued that in this one case, they should use the Greek name, because …. wait for it … he thought Uranus would be easier to pronounce.

Apparently, Uranus wasn’t that easy to pronounce though, even for astronomers steeped in classical mythology, because for the first 70 years after its discovery, . Astronomers didn’t settle on calling the planet Uranus until 1850, when Her Majesty’s Nautical Almanac Office finally swapped Georgium Sidus for Uranus.

Related Links:

Gallery of NASA images of Uranus (NASA)How do you pronounce Uranus? (Universe Today)Who discovered Uranus? (UniverseToday)Uranus used to be called the schoolyard friendly “George” (Mental Floss)Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton The Planets by Dava Sobel

Wordless Wednesday: Roses

My neighbor’s rose bush has both orange and pink blooms. I’ve never seen anything like it. When I asked over the weekend, my neighbor told me that this particular variety of rose was called Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors.

Related Links: 

More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles

Why did the Bird of Paradise flower evolve to look like that?

It’s easy to see how the Bird of Paradise flower got its name. Especially if you happen to walk by one at night. It really does look like someone crafted a tropical bird’s head out of flower petals.

[image error]Bird of Paradise at night, somewhere in San Jose, CA this past February. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Now, I’m no botanist, but anecdotal evidence from lots of visits to arboretums and botanical gardens in the past has taught me that when highly specialized and unique structures arise in plants, there’s generally a reason for it. And that reason often has to do with pollination.

Plants use their flowers to attract pollinators

Flowering plants need to move their pollen from one flower to the next in order to create the next generation.

Pollen typically doesn’t move on its own though. Plants rely on insects, birds, and even the wind to shift their pollen around to the necessary spots. As a hayfever sufferer, I try to ignore the wind’s role in these sorts of things. When I’m walking around the Outside World, I prefer to focus on pollinating agents that don’t make me sneeze, like bees.

It’s easy to see how a bee or a butterfly could pollinate a plant like the rose. After all, roses have a strong scent to attract the bee’s attention and short round petals which provide easy access to its nectar (and the pollen lurking nearby).

[image error]This dark pink rose has lots of short round petals. Great for easy access pollination by bees and butterflies. (Photo: Shala Howell)

At first glance, though, a Bird of Paradise looks more forbidding and much less inviting.

So why did the Bird of Paradise evolve to look like it does?

The Birds of Paradise here in California all live in gardens. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pollinator come near them. Instead, gardeners make sure the Birds of Paradise get whatever it is they need to keep blooming.

But what about in the wild? How do Birds of Paradise survive in their native habitat without gardeners to keep them fed and flourishing?

Wild Birds of Paradise are only found in subtropical parts of South Africa

Wild Birds of Paradise can only be found between the southeast KwaZulu-Natal and the south-central Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa.

I really wish I could claim to have just instinctively understood where that part of South Africa was, but I didn’t, so I tracked down a map. As you can see, the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces are along the Indian Ocean coastline.

[image error]I’ve edited the map to show you where the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces are. (Map via the Orange Smile Travel Guide, South Africa)



How does the Bird of Paradise survive in the wild?

Birds of Paradise rely on birds to spread their pollen. In their native habitat, that typically means the Cape Weaver, a type of sunbird that feeds on the rich nectar at the heart of the Bird of Paradise flower.

[image error]The Cape Weaver in this photograph looks so fierce, because he was guarding his nest at the time. (Photo: Brian Radford via The Internet Bird Site)

To reach the nectar, the birds must reach far down into the flower, at just the right angle. Conveniently, the Bird of Paradise has evolved to provide a handy perch that birds can rest on while they’re feeding. That’s part of what the blue petals are for.

[image error]A full-grown Bird of Paradise features three orange flowers paired with three strong blue petals that birds can use as perches while they access the nectar. (Photo: Shala Howell)

While the birds are feeding on the plant’s nectar, anthers (the part of a flower’s stamen that contains the pollen) are thrust upward out of hiding by the bird’s weight. The anthers lightly brush the bird’s feet, coating them with pollen.

The next time the bird lands on a Bird of Paradise, it transfers that pollen to the new plant. Voila! Pollination achieved!

Remember when I said that I’d never seen a pollinator go near any of my local Birds of Paradise?

Apparently I just need to keep looking. While researching this post, I found this picture of a common yellowthroat warbler feeding on a Bird of Paradise in southern California.

Sure enough, he’s sitting on that handy blue perch.

[image error]A yellow-throater warbler feeding on the nectar inside the Bird of Paradise. Picture taken in Southern California, via Hoffman et al’s report on pollination of Birds of Paradise outside South Africa from the South African Journal of Botany.

The San Diego Zoo also has a picture of a hummingbird sipping the nectar from a Bird of Paradise on its website. With its long beak, the hummingbird doesn’t have to worry as much about achieving just the right angle to reach the nectar and so can feed while flying. Hummingbirds, apparently, don’t always pull their weight when it comes to helping the Birds of Paradise pollinate.

At any rate, I’m going to keep watching for birds near my local Birds of Paradise. If I see any, I’ll take a picture and post it here on Caterpickles.

Related Links:

Bird Pollination of the Bird of Paradise (In Defense of Plants) Birds of Paradise (Teleflora Blog) Birds of Paradise (The Flower Expert) Efficient avian pollination of Strelitzia reginae outside of South Africa (Science Direct)Birds of Paradise (Animals and Plants at the San Diego Zoo)

Wordless Wednesday: AI-powered race cars

Over spring break, The Twelve-Year-Old participated in a coding camp that taught her how to race cars using AI coding languages. She had a fabulous time. The first day I picked her up, she told me excitedly, “Mommyo! My car runs on Raspberry Pi!”

So of course, I responded: “What a coincidence. So do I!”

Judging by her instructor’s groans, this was not the first time he’d heard that joke. Won’t be the last, either. Lots more #MomJokes where that came from, people.

Related Links: 

More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles

Book Review: Because I Wanted to Play with You

Because I Wanted to Play with You

By Tamiko Pettee

Self-published, 2008

Genre: Picture Book

I review a lot of books on Amazon, so periodically self-published authors will reach out to me to ask me to read and review their books as well. I don’t always have time to read longer books, but generally I say yes to children’s books. It’s tough being a self-published writer, and compiling the reviews you need to be included in Amazon’s algorithms is pretty important to your overall success. (Speaking of which: If you’ve read my book What’s that Mom?, but haven’t reviewed it on Amazon yet, please do. Reviews are astoundingly helpful.)

Recently, Tamiko Pettee reached out to ask me to review Because I Wanted to Play with You in exchange for a free ebook copy of it. Although I normally restrict these sorts of reviews to my Amazon and Goodreads accounts, I decided to highlight her book on Caterpickles as well. Her deceptively simple little picture book touches on a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. 

What the book’s about

Jake Hedgehog loves playing with his best friend Sam. But when Sam receives a smartphone from his parents, he loses all interest in playing with Jake. All he ever wants to do is play games on his new phone. No matter how nicely Jake asks, Sam just won’t play with him. 

One day, Jake gets so fed up, he hides Sam’s phone so that Sam would be forced to play with him. As you might expect, Jake’s plan doesn’t work out quite the way he’d hoped.

In the end Jake admits what he’s done, returns the phone, and apologizes. Sam forgives him, and in the process, realizes that the people around him are more important than the phone in his hand. 

Jake’s solution to this in this book — to steal Sam’s phone — is both believable and obviously a terrible idea. And that makes this book a great conversation starter for parents looking for a way to talk to their kids about balancing their electronic devices with their real world relationships. 

But while reading Pettee’s book, I found myself thinking about that scene in the 2009 film adaptation of Coraline where Coraline is doing everything she can to get her parents’ attention, but they are too busy working to notice her. However important Pettee’s reminder that people trump electronic devices may be, this isn’t a new issue. And it’s not just a problem for our kids.

How can we teach our kids to prioritize real-world relationships when we adults also seem more interested in our devices than the people around us?

Here at Caterpickles Central, we’ve been trying to balance our virtual and physical worlds for quite some time. Given what we do for a living, and the world my daughter is likely to step into, it seems pretty important to figure this out.

We’ve started by setting a couple of simple boundaries to protect family time.

1) No phones at meals. We put away our phones when we’re eating as a family. If you absolutely positively have to use one, you ask for an exemption. If everyone agrees, fine. If not, whatever you wanted the phone for has to wait. We’ve been doing this one for years, and I’m pretty happy with how it has worked out overall. 

2) One screen at a time. Sometimes we’ll be watching TV, and I’ll glance over and find The (now) Twelve-Year-Old playing games on an iPad. Or glance down, and find myself scrolling through Twitter on my iPhone. Whenever this happens, I can’t help but wonder. If whatever we’re doing on the main screen isn’t worth our full attention, why are we doing it at all? Hence the one screen at a time rule.

These two boundaries are a good start, but not a complete solution. I would love to also limit overall screen time, but in practice I find limiting screen time nearly impossible to do. Most of my daughter’s school work has to be completed online, and she’s started using a computer to write her own stories as well. Which means I can’t tell just by looking at her whether she’s doing homework, working on her latest story, or just chatting on Google docs with her friends.

[image error]

Life was so much simpler when this was her screen. (Photo: Shala Howell)

I can’t always tell what she’s doing any more, but I can tell how many screens she’s using to do it. For now, I’m hoping keeping her to one screen at a time is good enough.

I’d love to hear from you. How do you balance tweens and screens in your house?

Before I forget… A note on availability

Pettee’s ebook does something I’ve never seen before. It restricts downloads to color- and popup-capable e-readers. Which means you’ll be able to download a copy for a Kindle Fire or the Kindle reading app on your iPhone and iPad, but not for a regular black and white Kindle. Fortunately, there’s a print version available for $10.99.

Wordless Wednesday: Cherry tree in bloom

I had more or less stopped doing Wordless Wednesday posts last year, but recently my daughter told me that she missed seeing them. I have to admit, I missed them too. Pictures like these are a helpful counterweight to the news. So I’m resurrecting Wordless Wednesday as a regular feature of the blog. 

Related Links: 

More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles

“Why does bug spray smell so icky?”

[image error]Happier times, when a girl could take her stuffed dog for a walk in the evening without being slathered with all that icky anti-bug and -sun stuff. (Photo: Shala Howell)

The Twelve-Year-Old may be getting the answers to her own questions now, but fortunately, her five-year-old self asked me enough questions to last a lifetime.

Like this one.

“Mommyo, why does bug spray smell so icky?”

I don’t know about you, but I have a terrible time convincing anyone in the family to wear bug spray. It just smells so bad. Sadly, that stink is pretty essential to the process.

Bugs, it turns out, adore the scent of our shampoos, soaps, conditioners, and perfumes. They’re also pretty fond of the carbon dioxide in our sometimes stinky-to-us breath and sweat.

Bug sprays work, not by killing the bugs around us, but by covering up the smells which invite bugs to bite us. The most effective bug sprays smell just as bad to bugs as they do to us. EPA-approved sprays containing DEET are the stinkiest and most effective, repelling both you and the bugs around you for up to five hours. Citronella and other essential oil-based repellents wear off faster.

Sadly, explaining how bug sprays work to my now twelve-year-old daughter some seven years after she’d forgotten she’d ever asked the question isn’t making it any easier to convince her to use it.

But sometimes, you just have to wear it anyway.

Fortunately, we live in a cool area, so minimizing our need for bug spray by wearing long pants, long-sleeved shirts, socks, and closed-toe shoes isn’t too bad — even in summer. Now that we are all much more aware of (and wary of) the chemicals that make up the products in our lives, we have taken to spraying the bug spray on top of our clothes, rather than directly on our skin, which helps too.

Even so, I sometimes think my daughter’s favorite part of getting out and into nature these days is the bit where she goes back inside and into the bath.

Which is a shame. Especially now that we live in an area full of spots like this.

[image error]Redwood Grove Park in Los Altos, California. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Related Links: 

Illnesses on the rise from mosquito, flea, and tick bites (CDC VitalSigns)
How does bug spray affect insects? (SFGate)
How does bug spray work? (Plunketts Pest Control)
“Why are girl mosquitoes silent?” (Caterpickles)
“Do mosquitoes migrate?” (Caterpickles)

50 States of Public Art: The Work Now program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

After heading south for the winter, we here at Caterpickles Central are cautiously migrating back north for our monthly public art fix. For the first spring installment of our ongoing series, The 50 States of Public Art, we visit Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where an unconventional public art program is being used to give jobs to homeless residents looking for work.

The Work Now program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Public Art Program: Work Now

Purpose: Provide a day’s labor and $50 to homeless residents searching for jobs in the area

Location: One of the SEPTA concourses in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Starting April 1, a new public art program will provide a steady stream of day jobs to some of the homeless residents of Philadelphia. The program, called Work Now, may at first glance seem similar to day labor programs in places like Lexington, Kentucky and Portland, Oregon. Those programs, aimed at clearing the streets of panhandlers, have homeless residents picking up trash, pulling weeds, and performing other types of manual labor.

Like those programs, Work Now won’t ask its workers to pass a drug test or present an ID. But unlike those programs, Philadelphia’s Work Now program will put its participants to work creating public art–specifically, painting a mural in the SEPTA concourse. Philadelphia’s program is also unique in that it employs trained peer specialists–people who have a history of serious mental illness or substance abuse–to provide encouragement and support to the day laborers employed by Work Now.

Philadelphia’s program, which has been funded for two years of operations by a variety of private donors, will be run by Mural Arts Philadelphia and the nonprofit Mental Health Partnerships. The program will operate five days a week, and give 10 workers the opportunity to earn $50 a day painting the mural.

It seems really weird to post a public art story without a photo. 

Because the mural associated with this program hasn’t been painted, or even started yet, there are no photos to post of it. But I wanted to give you a taste of the community mural scene in Philadelphia, so I found a photo of a different mural painted under the auspices of Mural Arts Philadelphia, although not as part of its Work Now program.

[image error] Sanctuary. (Artist: James Burns. Photo: Steve Weinik. Source: Mural Arts Philadelphia.)

Want to see it for yourself?

Painted by James Burns in November 2016, Sanctuary is located at the corner of 13th and Chancellor Streets in Philadelphia’s Central City neighborhood.

Related Links:

From panhandling to paycheck: How day labor can provide opportunity to Philly’s homeless (by Samantha Melamed, March 6, 2019, The Inquirer)
Information page for Sanctuary at Mural Arts Philadelphia




Take Our Poll

Aunt Meg consults Caterpickles: “Do they really still use leeches in modern medicine?”

My sister and I have been talking about medical things more than usual lately, and since she also inherited our family’s wildly roving mind, somehow we got on to the topic of leeches, and whether this medieval practice was still popping up in modern medicine.

In researching this question I rapidly discovered that reading about how leeches operate in a medical setting makes me regret my breakfast choices. But I promised my sister that I would post something about modern medical use of leeches on Caterpickles.

What’s a blogger to do?

Write a super short, photo-less post that points readers to credible sources written by authors with more robust stomachs, greater courage, and more extensive knowledge.

Here goes.

Yes, leeches are used in modern U.S. medicine. 

Thankfully, as far as I can tell, today’s doctors don’t use leeches as widely as physicians in past centuries did. Once upon a time, physicians thought that blood-letting was a great treatment for almost anything that ailed you. Even as late as the 19th century, leeches and blood-letting were the go-to treatment for everything from tonsillitis to hemorrhoids (shudder).

That said, the FDA cleared leeches for use as a living medical device to clear localized blood clots in veins back in 2004.

Today, doctors primarily use leeches to:

help heal surgical wounds (particularly those from plastic surgery)
heal skin grafts
restore circulation in blocked veins
act as a temporary vein after surgically reattaching various limbs

Whew. I survived this post.

Y’all, do me a favor and no one tell Meg that when the FDA approved leeches as a living medical device, they also approved maggots.

Related Links: 

Leeches cleared for medical use by FDA (WebMD archives, 2004)
Modern leeching (ScienceNetLinks)
Maggots and leeches: Good medicine (USA Today, Health and Behavior Archives, 2004)
When leeches are used in modern medicine: Have we turned back time? (US New & World Report, 2018)

Palate cleanser:

[image error]“Is it safe to come out yet, CatMom?” (Photo: Shala Howell)



Take Our Poll