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| I do what I want. |
1) In the course of attempting
to discover the age, provenance and value of my late grandmother's
hen-on-nest glass candy dish, I stumbled upon something known as
“chicken eyeglasses.” Yes, these are eyeglasses for chickens.
They're also called chicken specs or chicken goggles. Some of them
have rose-colored lenses, so your chickens will be more optimistic.
Actually, if you read that
old advertisement, you'll now know that the point of chicken specs is
to keep the chickens from pecking each other to death or, presumably,
at least keep them from pecking each others' eyes out since it's hard
to peck someone's eyes out when he's wearing safety goggles. Some
chicken eyeglasses strapped onto the chicken's head, while others
were held on by a cotter pin through the nose. The rose-colored
tinting was intended to stop chickens from recognizing blood on their
fellows, since it seems chickens will peck to death anything that is
bleeding.
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| They're like sharks that way. ~ Anrdei Niemaki |
Chicken eyeglasses were
invented by Andrew Jackson Jr. in 1903. They are no longer
manufactured, but they remained in use until at least the early
1970s, and were outlawed in the UK in 1982.
2) Uranium glass is
glass which contains uranium. Wikipedia tells us that it's “negligibly
radioactive” and “considered to be harmless,” which just as
comforting as hell, especially when you learn that some older pieces
contain as much as 25 percent uranium in the glass mixture.
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| There's no way that is "negligibly radioactive." |
Uranium glass dates back to
Roman times, because honestly, what doesn't. In 1912, R.T. Gunter of
the University of Oxford discovered a mosaic containing uranium glass
in a villa on the Bay of Naples. At that time, many of the world's
most fashionable place settings and other household goods were made
from uranium glass. It's first major manufacturer was Josef Riedel,
who a glassblower who produced uranium glass pieces in Bohemia from
1830 to 1848. Other glassmakers across Europe began manufacturing
uranium glass, and it enjoyed a heyday of popularity lasting from
about 1880 to about 1920. Manufacture of uranium glass in the United
States ceased with uranium restrictions during the Cold War, and
never really picked back up again, possibly due to Americans'
inherent uneasiness about things that set off Geiger counters.
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| Just a little quirk we have. |
3) Speaking of things that
glow, on 6 April 1862, the Civil War Battle of Shiloh left 16,000
soldiers wounded. As the Civil War buffs in the group will know,
soldiers of this period were especially prone to infection, which was
odd since
germs hadn't been invented yet. Nevertheless, as the
soldiers sat in the rain and mud for two days and nights, awaiting
medical care (you thought it was bad now), some of them noticed a
strange phenomenon, namely,
that their wounds glowed at night. As
more time passed, it became obvious that those with the glowing
wounds were enjoying higher survival rates and faster, cleaner
recoveries than their non-illuminated brethren. The
soldiers nicknamed the phenomenon “Angel's Glow.”
One hundred and thirty-odd
years later, teenager Bill Martin visited the battlefield with his
mother, a microbiologist. When Bill asked his mother if a bacteria
could have been responsible for the Angel's Glow, she encouraged him
to find out for himself by performing an experiment. With the help of
a friend, Jon Curtis, Bill discovered that the bacteria Photorhabdus
luminescens was responsible.
These bacteria enjoy a symbiotic relationship with nematode worms.
They live inside their digestive tract, coming out to play when the
nematode worm burrows into the body of an insect larva. The
bacteria's glowing secretions kill the insect and any other bacteria
nearby, allowing both it and the nematode to feed greedily on the
poor insect's flesh. When they're done, the nematode swallows up its
regurgitated friends and emerges, where it finds a fresh selection of
insects who came for the light show, but will stay for the agonizing
death.
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| Yay. |
Bill
and Jon concluded that the soldiers' glowing wounds were full of
these worms and P. luminescens,
which don't typically infect humans, but stopped other infections by
killing off any other bacteria in the wounds. The kicker? The normal
human body temperature is too high to allow these bacteria to
survive, but that was okay, because these soldiers were experiencing
severe hypothermia.
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| Oh. Good. |
4) The
other day, I saw a white deer. I had heard there were some around,
but I'd never seen one before. At first I thought it was a goat.
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| Not a goat. |
Accordingto Wikipedia and this girl I went to high school with, white deer are
not albinos but are expressing a recessive genetic trait. Imperfect
expression of this trait results in a piebald. Complete expression of
the gene results in a fully white deer. Sadly, this requires quite a
lot of inbreeding, at least in the white-tail deer species that we
have around here. (The European red deer
may express leucism, a
genetic trait similar to albinism, that causes the deer's skin and
coat to lose its natural reddish color).
According
to
this blogger with The Crazy Eyes, the sighting of a white deer is
a prophecy of great things to come. It's a sign that I'm about to
embark on a period of unprecedented and unpredictable spiritual
growth.
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| Time will tell, I guess. ~ Dave Spicer |
Interestingly
enough, Seneca County, New York, there is a herd of about 700 deer,
300 of white are snow white, living on land that was formerly the
Seneca Army Depot. About 60 years ago, the depot commander forbid the
killing of any of the white deer prevalent in that area. He wound up
creating a genetic bottleneck, and, inside the shelter of the depot
fence, the white deer flourished – at least, as much as you can
flourish when you're suffering from reduced fertility and
deformities.
The herd
of white deer is the largest in the world, but, since the depot's
closure, its future has hung in the balance. White deer are
especially vulnerable to predators, due to their visibility. The land
they're living on is New York's largest swath of undeveloped real
estate, and corporate interests have their eye on it.
Conservationists want the white deer protected, presumably because
they're messengers from the spirit world.
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| Or something. |
