Meanderings, 9 March 2024
Good morning, friends! Here comes the Spring (I hope).
Photo by Sergey Shmidt on Unsplas
An apocalypse of cicadas! Maybe Revelation had them in mind (ha)!
You can run. You can hide. But it's very unlikely you'll be able to avoid the billions of periodical cicadas set to emerge from the ground all across Illinois this spring and summer.
"They've been underground for 17 years," Allen Lawrance, associate curator of entomology at the Peggy Notebart Nature Museum in Chicago, said. "They have a synchronized emergence where they all come out at the same time ... it's going to be pretty exciting."
But it's not just the 17-year cicadas that are expected to crawl up from the ground. According to Lawrance, two groups of cicadas — one known as Brood XIII, the other as Brood XIX — will surface at the same time in Illinois, creating a rare event that hasn't happened for 221 years.
Brood XIX will emerge "all across Northern Illinois," while Brood XIII will be in the southern part of the state, Lawrance said, with some parts of the state seeing both. And while different broods of periodic cicadas typically emerge most years across different parts of the U.S., it just so happens that this year, the crown belongs to Illinois.
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — High school basketball playoff tournaments are underway in parts of Oklahoma, but a mother and son say they’ve already won. The pair had a full circle moment at a game on Tuesday as they got to officiate together on the court.
“I mean, as a parent, for you to be able to share something as momentous as this, I mean, we’re the first mother son duo to in the history to be at the state tournament together. It is surreal. It’s very special,” said Vickie Roop, a referee.
Vickie and Robert Roop are mother and son and got to officiate a game on the court Robert once played at.
“It’s just, you know, kind of different just maybe a little less stressful than playing in it,” said Robert Roop, Vickie’s son.
The full circle moment for the pair goes back even further than Robert’s basketball days on the court.
“Back in 1988, one morning, they were short officials at a little league game. My husband got me out of bed. We grabbed Robert and his baby sister, put them next to the scorers table in a playpen. That’s where the journey began,” said Vickie.
Vickie and her husband, Rick, used to officiate together. Rick tragically passed away in 2013.
Lisa Clark Diller, memoir, and history:
We want our Truths to also be true. Stories that are trying to get us to change our minds and hearts are doing so based on the fact that they have veracity, even if it is at arm’s length. It is possible that young people who are being so influenced by science fiction and fantasy writing over the past couple decades may not care so much in the future about whether the stories that shape them have any sort of accuracy, but in the meantime stories that are rooted in the reality of Earth as it is now still have primacy in social justice or other motivational movements.
This is where the work of the Historian is so valuable. Sometimes our writing isn’t as compelling as that of a novelist, but our work is important because for people who want to do things in the world, who want to be active citizens or understand society—facts and data about what has happened are foundational. We do the grunt work for folks who can create characters to represent the past and engage readers. Occasionally we even write well enough to reel in casual readers—who then become sympathetic actors in their society. Journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns relied on much of the scholarship of historians to write important non-fiction that effectively explained the Great Migration and its impact for a much wider audience than had professional academic writing over the last fifty years. But it couldn’t have happened without the groundwork of scholars.
Plastics are now everywhere, with tiny fragments found in several major organs of the human body, including the placenta.
Given how easily the microscopic particles infiltrate our tissues, it's vital that we learn exactly what kinds of risks they could pose to our health.
Researchers have been busy studying the effects of microplastics in mini-replicas of organs, and in mice, to get a sense of how they might impact the human body. However, the concentrations of microplastics used in those studies might not reflect people's real-world exposure, and few studies have been done in humans.
Now, a small study in Italy has found shards of microplastics in fatty deposits surgically removed from patients who had an operation to open up their clogged arteries – and reported their health outcomes nearly 3 years later.
Removing fatty plaques from narrowed arteries in a procedure called a carotid endarterectomy reduces the risk of future strokes.
The team behind this new study, led by Raffaele Marfella, a medical researcher at the University of Campania in Naples, wondered how the risk of stroke – as well as heart attacks and death – compared between patients who had microplastics in their plaques and those who did not.
Following 257 patients for 34 months, the researchers found nearly 60 percent of them had measurable amounts of polyethylene in plaques pulled from their fat-thickened arteries, and 12 percent also had polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in extracted fat deposits.
PVC comes in both rigid and flexible forms, and is used to make water pipes, plastic bottles, flooring, and packaging. Polyethylene is the most commonly produced plastic, used for plastic bags, films, and bottles, too.
The Rev. Otha Durrett probably knew he’d done wrong six decades ago by claiming a 51-pound muskie he caught on another man’s unattended bank-pole. The Kentucky preacher just couldn’t admit such a sin once the rumors started and the bank-pole’s owner took him to court.
The fish’s rightful owner, Quentin Vance, 45, had baited his two bank-poles with 10-inch suckers on Feb. 18, 1965. Vance then anchored his two setups—one “a great big long pole about 12 to 15 feet long,” and the other “just a cut off” branch—into the west bank of the Little Barren River near its confluence with the Green River in Hart County, Kentucky.
Vance then went to his nearby home in Canmer but returned to the confluence at least once—around noon Feb. 20—to check his lines, leaders, hooks, and bait. While checking the suckers and verifying their good health, Vance saw a huge muskie surface. He could only hope it would hit one of his suckers.
Later that afternoon, the Rev. Durrett of Greensburg, stopped by Vance’s home, presumably for fishing advice. Vance and his family were reputable fishermen, and Vance was a serious muskie hunter known to share his expertise, even with visiting anglers. After talking with Vance, the preacher headed for the confluence.
The Rev. Durrett later claimed he checked Vance’s bank-poles and re-baited one of the hooks with a sucker he caught with his rod and reel. He said the fresh bait almost immediately triggered a strike. He then grabbed the bank-pole, and saw a muskie shoot 10 feet into the air.
The fish eventually broke the line when it “gave a flounce” in the shallows. The preacher claimed he then grappled bare-handed with the big muskie, and yelled to a nearby “colored man” for help. The men grabbed the fish under its gill plates and dragged it onto the riverbank. The muskie measured 52 inches in length, with a 27-inch girth.
Despite its immense size, the muskie apparently was never submitted as a possible Kentucky record, even though the state allows bank-poles—a pole and line with no reel—for such honors. The Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources states that fish submitted for record consideration must be caught “by rod and reel or on a pole and line.” Fish caught on trotlines, or by snagging, snaring, noodling, or bow-fishing are not eligible.
Sarah K. Terry of Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, holds the state’s hook-and-line record, a 47-pound muskellunge she caught in November 2008 on Cave Run Lake.
HT: DM
Speaking of … birds, how about this yellow-billed loon?
The fountains at Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas were paused after a rare bird stopped by for a visit.
A Yellow-billed Loon was seen taking a dip in Lake Bellagio, the resort shared on X Tuesday evening.
“The Fountains of Bellagio are paused as we work with state wildlife officials to rescue a Yellow-billed Loon, one of the 10 rarest birds in the U.S., that has found comfort on Las Vegas’ own Lake Bellagio,” the resort said.
The Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) became involved in relocating the bird.
“Rest assured, our experts have determined that the Bellagio fountains pose no harm to the bird, and we have instructed the hotel that the fountains can continue to operate without risk to any wildlife,” NDOW shared on Facebook.
The juvenile bird was safely captured Wednesday morning and relocated to a more suitable, remote location with space, food and quiet surroundings, according to a NDOW Facebook post.
Thank you Scott for your Saturday Meanderings