botany, shoes, books, and justice
I went to the Grand Canyon for the first time the other day. It’s a little like seeing the ocean for the first time. It is so big that my (albeit already poor) depth perception was completely thrown off. Most people said I shouldn’t go on a cloudy day, but I liked the clouds. It was really windy and there were some gaps that created some fantastic light effects that a better photographer than me would have taken advantage of.
Make sure you’re using something like St. Ives Apricot Scrub that has ground up organic things, like jojoba seeds or walnut shells. A lot of brands use plastic to scrub your skin off. This is bad. According to Richard Thompson in Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us
They’re selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-size pieces of plastic to be swallowed by little sea creatures.”
I finished reading Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream today. It was an amazing book that detailed our response to 9-11 and compared it to how we responded to another national crisis: the conflicts with Native Americans when the nation was forming. Basically, we create a myth of weak women as a way to make the men look good and give us a good excuse to commit atrocities. We should stop lying to ourselves and ask (and answer) some hard questions. She also included a summary of what’s happened to the women we said we were invading Iraq and Afghanistan to save.
Not only did White House vows to safeguard the rights of Afghan women prove hollow, our woefully inadequate attempts at “reconstruction” only served to make their conditions worse. By 2006, the news was bleak: honor killings were dramatically on the rise (with 185 women and girls killed in the first nine months of the year), about 40 percent of women reported that they had been forced into marriage, about 50 percent had been beaten by their husbands, three hundred girls’ schools had been set on fire in the last year and several teachers killed, as little as 3 percent of girls were enrolled in schools in some regions and many had retreated to secret home classes, no women were appointed to the new Afghan cabinet, and the director of the women’s affairs ministry in Kandahar had been gunned down in her own front yard.
The pattern would repeat in Iraq, a nation that had made significant progress in advancing women’s rights from the sixties to the eighties. Once more, the United States promised heightened security and freedom for Iraqi women, and once more our policies helped accomplish the opposite. By 2005, human rights organizations were reporting a sharp rise in rapes, abductions, and sexual slavery; severe restrictions on women’s ability to travel, go to school, and work; and the return of Sharia law in a U.S.-brokered constitution that also restricted women’s reproductive, employment, marital, and inheritance rights. “Misery gangs” roamed the streets, tormenting and beating women who did not dress or behave “properly.” In Basra, it became a capital crime for a woman to wear pants or appear in public. By 2005, several women’s rights activists and female political leaders, along with one of the three female members of the Iraqi Governing Council, had been murdered, and even Bush’s former female supporters in Iraq were in despair. “I want the American people to know that our dreams are gone, our work was in vain,” wrote Raja Kuzai, an obstetrician and former member of the Iraqi assembly’s constitution-drafting committee, who once hailed Bush as “My Liberator.” “There will be no future for our children and our grandchildren in the new Iraq,” she said. “The future is for the clerics.”
We make awesome tamales.
Equisetum aren’t the only organisms that use silica in their cell walls. Algae in the phylum Chrysophyta (golden-brown algae) use it to make “seeds.” Golden-brown algae are often found in ponds and shallow lakes that freeze from top to bottom in the winter. How is the poor little alga going to eat or swim around in a block of ice? It cannot! This could lead to a huge tragedy involving many many dead algae. But golden-brown algae just pack up all the important parts into an itsy bitsy glass box (called a statospore), snuggle up in the muddy pond bottom, and wait until the ice melts.
It’s snowing outside and my migraine has abated. Now I’m studying for finals and enjoying my hot chocolate. Snow makes studying so much nicer.
You may be familiar with the plant genus Equisetum, more commonly known as horsetail or scouring rush. Scouring rush is a practical name based on where Equisetum is found and what it’s good for. Rushes generally grow in water and Equisetum, while not exactly a type of rush, certainly won’t be found far from a stream. And this plant was used for scrubbing pots before the invention of that rough green stuff on all the sponges you buy now. It’s so effective at pot-scrubbing because its cell walls contain silica.
This study tries to explain how the heck silica gets from hanging out in dirt to being a component of cell walls. It’s not that simple. Remember when you were a kid and ate dirt? You didn’t suddenly develop skin like sandpaper. Conclusion: Equisetum is cooler than kids.
Some people say you should make tea with it for hypothyroidism or try eating it if it’s a problem in your garden. I would really only suggest ingesting it if you feel that hypothyroidism or weeds in your garden make life not worth living as it’s toxic enough to kill a cow through disruption of thiamine metabolism.
