Animals
Far-flying British butterflies...some of these species fly so far they're found in the Eastern States as well as in Britain and Western Europe. Others have close relatives in the Eastern States.
Books
One doesn't review Jane Eyre, one announces it. This review quotes the love scenes as favorites. Forgive me, Gentle Readers, if I think the love scenes are the weakest part of the classic novel. Any two people can be mutually attracted and long nineteenth-century speeches about it can only be rated more or less cringe-inducing. Jane's appeal, like that of Shirley, is that they think about other things besides their hormonal feelings.
Cartoons
Dowdypants didn't say this, but she ought to have done.
To whom are we indebted for the photo? Google can't say. The fancy-schmancy new version of Lens is too cluttered with bells and whistles to do any actual searching.
Glyphosate Awareness
Old news story, with some evergreen facts that may be useful to people who find themselves sensitive to corn.
Another old news story with some facts that are still relevant, about other ways Bayer may be playing with food you eat:
Weather
It's being theorized that the cold weather this winter, such as it's been, is due to global warming. Well, that is a joke, but it's like an Ohio joke--ludicrous, but actually happening.
Some fun facts:
The University of Virginia claims the coldest temperature recorded in Virginia was ten degrees below Fahrenheit. Hoot! Silly flatlanders. That's the coldest temperature on their Swamp campus. Up here in the Point, my family remember 23 degrees below in 1985 (I was in Washington at the time and it was well below zero there too); the coldest temperature recorded during that freeze was either 30 or 34 below, depending on whose thermometer you accept, in Mountain Lake.
The biggest snowstorm recorded in Virginia was recorded by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Both of them independently recorded that they got three feet in one snowstorm in 1772. Loudoun County matched the record in 1996. In 2010 Dulles Airport measured almost four feet, but that was from two separate storms.
That's snowfall, considered all by itself. Old snowdrifts and wind have done much more than that. In 1857 Norfolk logged snowdrifts 20 feet deep, during a deep freeze that lasted long enough that people walked a hundred feet on the ice over the Atlantic Ocean.
The most unlikely snowstorm occurred on the fourth of July in 1920. The snow didn't actually stick to the ground, but all across North America people told their grandchildren they'd seen snow in July!
Nobody is expecting the current storm to approach those records.
Weather records are usually reported as "the hottest, coldest, most rain/snow," etc., "on this date," which means they're broken almost every year. Any day we might see the coldest thirtieth of January or the most rainfall on the ninth of February. That doesn't mean the coldest temperature, or even the coldest January; the twenty-ninth and thirty-first of January in other years might have been colder than the coldest thirtieth of January, or whatever. So in summer it's easy to get the impression that things are getting hotter--and, in winter, that they're getting colder. Actually, the only big change supported by evidence is that things humans do are making our cities hotter. In winter some people like that.
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