Monday Cup Of Links #22 - Space Salad, Fiery Poetess, Sea Turtle GPS, Dropped Caps
Wash Hands For At Least 20 Seconds
Happy Monday!
Hope you’re stocked up on supplies and can work from home for the next few weeks while the Coronavirus loses steam. I have a stack of unreturned library books, thank heavens SFPL has removed late fees.
India House is at about 6300 words right now, and while that’s slower than I hoped, it’s at least consistent. The NaNoWriMo-style 1667 words on weekdays and 3000 words on weekends thing is great if I have nothing else to do, but it burns me out if I have any other responsibilities, like feeding myself. 500-700 words a day is great, because at the very least, it doesn’t seem like an insurmountable goal when I sit down to write.
Onto our links!
NASA Scientists managed to grow lettuce on the International Space Station. They were identical to earth-grown lettuce, raising hopes for the next round of experiments, which will involve tomatoes and peppers. I wonder if they’ll use the genetically modified tomato bushes I talked about earlier?
I’ve always wondered about the origin of the name Varghese. It’s a Kerala Christian name, and I’ve never heard any variation anywhere else in the world. Turns out, Varghese is a variant of George/Georgios. Now going deeper into that will take you to the history of Christianity in Kerala, which came in the 1st Century CE (which is why the Syro-Malabar church still has prayers in Greek/Aramaic, and they all have Old Testament names). And digging even more will lead you to the historic port of Muziris on the Kerala coast, which was a hub for centuries for all who traded in the Arabian Sea.
A sea turtle swam 22,000 miles from South Africa to Australia in three years. The whole article is so heartwarming. A Japanese fishing boat found Yoshi, the loggerhead turtle, with a damaged shell, and gave it to Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium to care for. After 20 years, they realized Yoshi was at the age where she would mate, and started training her to find her own food, and swim longer and longer distances. When they released her in 2017, she swam north along the coast of Africa for a year, before realizing her error and swam back, and then onward to westarn Australia. They tracked the whole thing by satellite. Isn’t it a wonderful world we live in, where we can follow this?
ICYMI: Episode 4 of Anandamath - The Sacred Brotherhood. The show is now also available on Spotify!
For Women’s Day, Live History India has a great piece on Subhadrakumari Chauhan, a poet whose fiery poems we all learned in school. One that is especially memorable is the poem about the Rani of Jhansi, Laxmibai, and her valiant fight against the British in 1857. I didn’t know much about her, probably because I didn’t pay attention. Turns out, she was a lawmaker, and she and her husband were sent to prison many times. Even more interesting, she mentored another great woman poet, Mahadevi Verma, right from school. And her daughter married the son of Premchand, the most renowned Hindi novelist.
It always surprises me how all the famous people are connected. I suppose networking is pretty dang important in life, because it’s a scene/coterie that makes change happen. Or if it’s an individual that makes change happens, they end up promoting their coterie, because that’s who they know and trust when they end up with unexpected success.GIF of the week: A woman drops her cap from the 9th floor of a parking garage. What happens next will astonish you. (No, really, I wouldn’t clickbait if it wouldn’t actually astonish you).