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let alone furry creatures up in the trees Wednesday, March 19 2014
After some number of hours of web work, late this afternoon I had an overwhelming desire to take a nap. Eleanor was already in the bed when I arrived for my nap, and it's always good to nap with a dog even if we aren't spooning (unlike Ramona, Eleanor is not an especially snuggly dog). Another thing that was nice about the nap was that it was raining fairly hard outside and (unlike Gretchen) I love the sound of rain when I'm sleeping (or about to fall asleep).
Meanwhile Gretchen had given one of her ethical dietary lectures at Sullivan County Community College, and she'd stopped on the way home near Ellenville and bought a great diversity of produce. With that as a raw material, tonight she prepared an odd meal consisting of, on the one hand, a stack of handmade spring rolls, and on the other, a large pyrex tray of baked cauliflower with "wing sauce," resembling the faux Buffalo wings we'd eaten at Mohawk Bend in Los Angeles. It was good food for eating while watching Jeopardy, and surprisingly filling as well. The Colbert Report isn't broadcasting this week, so instead we watched the second installment of Neil deGrasse Tyson's update of Cosmos, the one where he carefully leads viewers through an explanation of Darwinian natural selection. "This is pretty basic stuff," Gretchen observed. "A lot of people just don't get it, so this is good," I replied. For people like Gretchen and me who love animals, there's no ick factor in being related to monkeys. I suspect that it's difficult for modern numbskulls living in exurbia to imagine they are even related to humans who lived in houses without electricity and internet, let alone furry creatures up in the trees, but Tyson did what he could to break it all down. Having watched this episode, I'm generally in agreement with the folks on Slate Culture Gabfest that it's all a bit bombastic and dumbed-down. But it's not aimed at people like me or even people like Gretchen (intelligent people with almost no science education); it's obviously designed for kids and perhaps their overworked, mentally-distracted and somewhat incurious parents. If it can move the dial even a little bit away from the widespread medievalism in the American mindset, it will have done its job.
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