Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community seriesfor those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.
I had a strange wake up call this morning…the Head & Neck Cancer Clinic wanted me to have a CT Scan in an hour. So I rolled out of bed, did that thing, and came home to finally have my coffee. My day has been a little out of whack…but I have found a few things to start some conversation.
Sex has NEVER been simple
From The Guardian, Archaeology’s sexual revolution
In the early summer of 2009, a team of archaeologists arrived at a construction site in a residential neighbourhood of Modena, Italy. Digging had started for a new building and in the process workers unearthed a cemetery, dating back 1,500 years. There were 11 graves, but it quickly became clear that one of them was not like the others. Instead of a single skeleton, Tomb 16 contained two and they were holding hands.
“Here’s the demonstration of how love between a man and a woman can really be eternal,” wrote Gazzetta di Modena of the pair, instantly dubbed “the Lovers”. However, according to the original anthropological report, the sex of the Lovers was not obvious from the bones alone. At some point, someone tried to analyse their DNA, but “the data were so bad”, says Federico Lugli at the University of Bologna, that it looked like “just random noise”.
For a decade, the assumption about the Lovers’ sex remained unchallenged. Then, in 2019, Lugli and his colleagues decided to try a newly available technique for determining the sex of human remains using proteins in tooth enamel. To their surprise, the Lovers were both male. The pair suddenly became potential evidence of a fifth-century same-sex relationship.
The article goes on to describe other finds, such as the grave of a Viking warrior, long wrongly assumed to be male. It’s a good read.
Planting Trees
I had an e-mail today about a board game I had ordered. The publisher, Sinister Fish Games, is having 9000 trees planted to offset the carbon emissions from the production of their game. Would that more businesses were so responsible!
But as to other trees, here is something from Atlas Obscura:
How to Resurrect Gold-Rush Era Orchards Ravaged by Fire
The 2018 Carr Fire destroyed historic fruit trees—but not the will to make them bloom again.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 23, 2018, in the heart of Northern California’s Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, a vehicle towing a dual-axle trailer blew a tire. As the steel rim scraped the highway’s pavement, sparks flew into the dry grass lining the road and ignited what became the Carr Fire, the most destructive fire in National Park Service history. Over the next five weeks, the conflagration would tear through 97 percent of Whiskeytown’s 250,000 acres, incinerating almost everything in its path.
The fire leveled administration buildings and reduced park residences to piles of ash. Marinas, boats, and bridges were heavily damaged or destroyed. Thousands of trees were blackened and burnt, including many in the park’s historic fruit orchards, which were planted at the height of the California Gold Rush and had survived more than 150 years of fire, floods, and drought.
A few weeks after the fire was contained, Keith Park, a NPS horticulturist based in the San Francisco area, made the four-hour drive to Whiskeytown to see if the flames had spared any trees in those storied orchards. It was the second time in three years that Park had visited. In 2016, he collaborated with colleagues on an orchard management plan, meticulously cataloguing, photographing, and assessing Whiskeytown’s centuries-old fruit trees. Now, he was documenting their demise.
And he found little signs of life. The orchards will be retored as best as possible.
Beers for Betty
From the 1/17/22 Washington Post:
For years, bar patrons bought beers for Betty White hoping she’d come claim them. The funds are now going to animal charity.
For several years, people in Mineral Point, Wis., have been buying beers for Betty White at a local pub and tallying them on a chalkboard, in the hope that one day she might stop by and drink them — though not all in one sitting.
Even though she will not be able to enjoy her designated drinks at the pub, fans from near and far are continuing to buy beers in her honor — with all proceeds going toward animal charities, a cause that was close to her heart.
Cheers, Betty. We miss you!
Miscellany
Mourning in America…
The weekend begins now. Come in, be comfortable, and share your day, your weekend plans, your menus! This is an open thread.