Saturday Summary

Some facts are just words I can't really get my mind around. Recent pictures from the repaired Hubble Space Telescope [above is one but not the one I'm writing about] have detected a galaxy at the farthest edge of the visible distance. The bit of light they see is calculated to be 13.2 Billion light years away! This pushes the age of the beginning of the whole shebang [Big Bang?] of known existence way, way back.

So up to modern day reality: The new US Congress is 17% women. The new parliament in Iraq is 25% women. Something to ponder, isn't it?

We see a lot of hype about the foods that are great for us and going to make us the picture of health and will do away with those baddie free radicals, etc. What about all that pomegranate stuff we've been buying? It's main healthful ingredient is polyphenol. We're already getting plenty polyphenol if we've been drinking regular tea. Compare the price of a tea bag with a bottle of pomegranate juice. To my taste, I prefer the tea anyway. And what about the supposedly miraculous acai berry [which I have not figured out how to pronounce yet]? Their active ingredient is anthocyanin. You can get it in you apple-a-day, in cherries, blueberries, radishes and nearly every red fruit.

Here's the tiniest mind boggler of the week: A flea can jump 350 times it's body length. That's how they get from one dog to the next. If a person could jump that far he would seem to be flying from one football goal post to it's opposite across the field.

Finally while we are having an unusual number of snow storms across North America, up in the arctic tundra area, they are having a milder than usual winter -- which is not to say it's balmier than here. It's partly to do with what's called La Nina -- the sister of El Nino [both of which words need a tilda over the n but I don't now how to do that]. The northern hemisphere wind patterns are different than they've been in a very long time. If the 19th century explorers looking for the Northwest Passage were adventuring today, they actually would find it possible to sail, at least for a few short weeks in the summer, from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the top of North America.

Below is a photo out my sewing room window when the sun was sparkling the ice on that little forsythia bush.