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conuly
In Fierce Opposition to a Muslim Center, Echoes of an Old Fight
The comments are absolutely worthless, but get a load of this gem:
"How true. We all remember Catholic suicide bombers and how they wanted to replace the US constitution by biblical law (is there such a thing?) and how they chanted "My Catholic God is Great" after cutting the heads of innocent Protestants"
1. No, honey, that's the largely Protestant fundies you're talking about.
2. I guess nobody remembers the Spanish Inquisition anymore?
Many New Yorkers were suspicious of the newcomers’ plans to build a house of worship in Manhattan. Some feared the project was being underwritten by foreigners. Others said the strangers’ beliefs were incompatible with democratic principles.
Concerned residents staged demonstrations, some of which turned bitter.
But cooler heads eventually prevailed; the project proceeded to completion. And this week, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Lower Manhattan — the locus of all that controversy two centuries ago and now the oldest Catholic church in New York State — is celebrating the 225th anniversary of the laying of its cornerstone.
The Rev. Kevin V. Madigan, who is the pastor of St. Peter’s, said that when he began reading about the history of his church early this year in preparation for the anniversary on Tuesday, he was not initially struck by the parallels between the opposition it had faced and what present-day Muslims have encountered in proposing a community center and mosque near ground zero.
“There was no controversy when they first proposed it, and we were just pleased to have a new neighbor,” said Father Madigan, whose church, at Barclay and Church Streets, sits two blocks from 51 Park Place, the site of the proposed Islamic center. Both are roughly equidistant from the construction zone at ground zero.
But as an uproar enveloped the Islamic project over the summer, the priest said he was startled by how closely the arguments and parries of the opponents mirrored those brought against St. Peter’s in 1785.
Father Madigan detailed those similarities in a letter to parishioners over the summer, in two sermons at an interfaith gathering last month and at a special Mass last Sunday marking the church’s anniversary.
For starters, he said, there was the effort to move the planned church somewhere else.
City officials in 18th-century New York urged project organizers to change the church’s initial location, on Broad Street, in what was then the heart of the city, to a site outside the city limits, at Barclay and Church. Unlike the organizers of Park51, who have resisted suggestions they move the project to avoid having a mosque so close to the killing field of ground zero, the Catholics complied, although they had no choice.
Then there were fears about nefarious foreign backers. Just as some opponents of Park51 have said that the $100 million-plus project will be financed by the same Saudi sheiks who bankroll terrorists, many early Protestants in the United States saw the pope as the enemy of democracy, and feared that the little church would be the bridgehead of a papal assault on the new American government.
The Park51 organizers say they will not accept any foreign backing. But with about only 200 Catholics in New York in the late 1700s, most of them poor, St. Peter’s Church would not have been built without a handsome gift from a foreigner — and a papist at that — $1,000 from King Charles III of Spain.
The angry eruptions at some of the demonstrations this summer against the Muslim center — with signs and slogans attacking Islam — were not as vehement as those staged against St. Peter’s, Father Madigan said.
On Christmas Eve 1806, two decades after the church was built, the building was surrounded by Protestants incensed at a celebration going on inside — a religious observance then viewed by some in the United States as an exercise in “popish superstition,” more commonly referred to as Christmas. Protesters tried to disrupt the service. In the melee that ensued, dozens were injured, and a policeman was killed.
“We were treated as second-class citizens; we were viewed with suspicion,” Father Madigan wrote in his letter to parishioners, adding, “Many of the charges being leveled at Muslim-Americans today are the same as those once leveled at our forebears.”
The pastor said he respected the feelings of those who lost relatives or friends on 9/11. “They bear a grief that is inexpressible,” he said. Park51’s organizers, he added, would have to “make clear that they are in no way sympathetic to or supported by any ideology antithetical to our American ideals, which I am sure they can do.”
But he said Catholic New Yorkers had a special obligation. The discrimination suffered by their forebears, he said, “ought to be an incentive for us to ensure that similar indignities not be inflicted on more recent arrivals.”
Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children
A woman misquoted in the article has her comment here.
My view is that if picture books aren't selling, it's because they only come in hardcover! I don't want to spend $16 on a new picture book when I can spend half that price on a longer chapter book! Sure, I can buy used, but that doesn't help the new books get printed, does it?
Picture books are so unpopular these days at the Children’s Book Shop in Brookline, Mass., that employees there are used to placing new copies on the shelves, watching them languish and then returning them to the publisher.
“So many of them just die a sad little death, and we never see them again,” said Terri Schmitz, the owner.
The shop has plenty of company. The picture book, a mainstay of children’s literature with its lavish illustrations, cheerful colors and large print wrapped in a glossy jacket, has been fading. It is not going away — perennials like the Sendaks and Seusses still sell well — but publishers have scaled back the number of titles they have released in the last several years, and booksellers across the country say sales have been suffering.
The economic downturn is certainly a major factor, but many in the industry see an additional reason for the slump. Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.
“Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’ ” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. “There’s a real push with parents and schools to have kids start reading big-kid books earlier. We’ve accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books.”
Booksellers see this shift too.
“They’re 4 years old, and their parents are getting them ‘Stuart Little,’ ” said Dara La Porte, the manager of the children’s department at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington. “I see children pick up picture books, and then the parents say, ‘You can do better than this, you can do more than this.’ It’s a terrible pressure parents are feeling — that somehow, I shouldn’t let my child have this picture book because she won’t get into Harvard.”
Literacy experts are quick to say that picture books are not for dummies. Publishers praise the picture book for the particular way it can develop a child’s critical thinking skills.
“To some degree, picture books force an analog way of thinking,” said Karen Lotz, the publisher of Candlewick Press in Somerville, Mass. “From picture to picture, as the reader interacts with the book, their imagination is filling in the missing themes.”
Many parents overlook the fact that chapter books, even though they have more text, full paragraphs and fewer pictures, are not necessarily more complex.
“Some of the vocabulary in a picture book is much more challenging than in a chapter book,” said Kris Vreeland, a book buyer for Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, Calif., where sales of picture books have been down. “The words themselves, and the concepts, can be very sophisticated in a picture book.”
They can, for example, be written with Swiftian satire, like “Monsters Eat Whiny Children” by Bruce Eric Kaplan, a new book about children who are nearly devoured as a result of bad behavior.
Each year, the coveted Randolph Caldecott Medal goes to the most distinguished picture book published in the United States. (This year it went to “The Lion and the Mouse” by Jerry Pinkney, an adaptation of the Aesop’s fable with luminous images and no words at all.)
Still, many publishers have gradually reduced the number of picture books they produce for a market that had seen a glut of them, and in an age when very young children, like everyone else, have more options, a lot of them digital, to fill their entertainment hours.
At Scholastic, 5 percent to 10 percent fewer hardcover picture books have been published over the last three years. Don Weisberg, the president of the Penguin Young Readers Group, said that two and a half years ago, the company began publishing fewer titles but that it had devoted more attention to marketing and promoting the ones that remain. Of all the children’s books published by Simon & Schuster, about 20 percent are picture books, down from 35 percent a few years ago.
Classic books like “Goodnight Moon” and the “Eloise” series still sell steadily, alongside more modern popular titles like the “Fancy Nancy” books and “The Three Little Dassies” by Jan Brett, but even some best-selling authors are feeling the pinch. Jon Scieszka, who wrote “Robot Zot,” said his royalty checks had been shrinking, especially in the last year.
“We see the stores displaying less picture books, and publishers are getting a little more cautious about signing up new projects,” Mr. Scieszka said. “You can feel that everyone’s worried.”
Borders, noticing the sluggish sales, has tried to encourage publishers to lower the list prices, which can be as high as $18. Mary Amicucci, the vice president of children’s books for Barnes & Noble, said sales began a slow, steady decline about a year ago. Since then, the stores have rearranged display space so that some picture books are enticingly paired with toys and games.
Other retailers have cut shelf space devoted to picture books while expanding their booming young-adult sections, full of dystopic fiction, graphic novels and “Twilight”-inspired paranormal romances.
“Young adult fiction has been universally the growing genre,” said Ms. Lotz of Candlewick, “and so as retailers adapt to what customers are buying, they are giving more space to that and less space to picture books.”
Some parents say they just want to advance their children’s skills. Amanda Gignac, a stay-at-home mother in San Antonio who writes The Zen Leaf, a book blog, said her youngest son, Laurence, started reading chapter books when he was 4.
Now Laurence is 6 ½, and while he regularly tackles 80-page chapter books, he is still a “reluctant reader,” Ms. Gignac said.
Sometimes, she said, he tries to go back to picture books.
“He would still read picture books now if we let him, because he doesn’t want to work to read,” she said, adding that she and her husband have kept him reading chapter books.
Still, many children are getting the message. At Winnona Park Elementary School in Decatur, Ga., a recent book fair was dominated by chapter books, said Ilene Zeff, who organized the fair.
“I’ve been getting fewer and fewer picture books because they just don’t sell,” Ms. Zeff said. “By first grade, when the kids go to pick out their books, they ask where the chapter books are. They’re just drawn to them.”
On a recent discussion board on Urbanbaby.com, a Web site for parents, one commenter asked for recommendations for chapter books to read to a 5-year-old, and was answered with suggestions like the 272-page “Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster and “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum — books generally considered more appropriate for children 9 to 11.
Jen Haller, the vice president and associate publisher of the Penguin Young Readers Group, said that while some children were progressing to chapter books earlier, they were still reading picture books occasionally. “Picture books have a real comfort element to them,” Ms. Haller said. “It’s not like this door closes and they never go back to picture books again.”
Some states may be drugging incarcerated kids to control their behavior. Well, no shit.
Here's a quote from a brilliant guy who thinks the government is going to force people to eat their veggies. LOL!
Children need more play
Not enough PWDs on TV, again I say "well, no shit"
Let's not forget the extrasolar earthlike planet
An article on renegade female Catholic priests.
Migrant ‘Villages’ Within Beijing Ignite Debate
The community is walled and gated, an enclosure of rows of crowded low-rise homes and shops, where people live under the gaze of surveillance cameras and apart from the city. The police patrol around the clock, and security guards stop unfamiliar faces to check identification papers. In the morning, only one gate is open, through which parents head off to work and children go to school. At night, the gate is locked, preventing street loiterers from trespassing.
The area, Shoubaozhuang, is not one of the affluent, gated residential compounds springing up around Beijing, but a poor village of rural migrants toiling at low-paying jobs. It was chosen, along with 15 other areas in the Daxing district of Beijing, to be walled off to outsiders, in what officials say is an experimental effort to curb crime. The authorities say the experiment has been a success — the Communist Party-run People’s Daily said the crime rate in the walled villages in Daxing district dropped by 73 percent from April to July this year — and the “walled village” concept is being quickly expanded to other districts outside Beijing’s center that are populated by migrant workers.
Ultimately, the project could encompass an area of 291 square miles with a population of 3.4 million people, more than 80 percent of them migrant workers.
Some residents welcome the walls and gates as a way of fighting crime, but critics have seized on the ghettolike villages as a jarring sign of the barriers facing rural migrants settling in urban areas. They say the real intent of the new measures is to keep track of the migrants, and some have labeled the policy a form of apartheid.
This is not the first time Beijing has experimented with walling off migrant workers, though previous attempts have been on a much smaller scale. In the weeks leading up to the 2008 Olympics, the city similarly blocked off workers’ dorms near construction sites as part of an intensive campaign to secure and sanitize the city. The city government labels it “community-style management.”
But experts remain dubious about the long-term effects of life inside the walls on residents who are already socially marginalized migrants or local poor.
“To the migrants, the policy conveys the message that the capital is not theirs, but a capital for citizens with Beijing hukou,” said Peng Zhenhuai, director of the Local Government Research Institute at Peking University, referring to China’s household registration, or hukou, system.
Although increasingly relaxed in recent decades to help integrate laborers into cities, the system still effectively limits many migrants from permanently settling their families in cities by tying access to subsidized services like public education to one’s place of birth.
A newly released report from the municipal legislature indicates that Beijing’s “floating population” had exceeded 10 million by the end of last year, including 7.26 million migrants. As the city’s boom creates jobs in construction and service industries, some villages like Shoubaozhuang, with less than 1,000 original inhabitants, have seen their populations explode in the past five years with the influx of migrants. Most live in low-rise apartments or extensions to buildings constructed by the original inhabitants.
But the population spike has also brought the problems of the city to these areas, most notably petty crime. According to Daxing officials, 80 percent of the crime in the past five years took place in areas dominated by migrants. In Shoubaozhuang, locals have been vexed by everything from street fights to stolen laundry.
The Communist Party secretary for Beijing, Liu Qi, endorsed the new policy in early July, calling it a “positive and effective exploration in the course of Beijing’s urban-rural integration” and proposed extending it citywide. In the Daxing district, 76 villages are set to follow the example of the first 16 by the end of the year. The Changping district, on the northern side of the city, announced plans in July to enclose 100 villages, 44 to be finished within the coming months.
Many experts say that instead of building new barriers, the government should concentrate on forging ahead much faster with tax reforms, expanding low-income housing and transferring factories farther inland, to ease the settlement of migrants into cities, satellite communities and towns closer to their home provinces.
“The integration should come as a result of human interaction, and the government should orient its policy to the needs of its population,” said Lu Jiehua, a professor of sociology at Peking University. He said the government could adopt a policy of allowing migrants in large cities access to social services based on the number of years they have lived there.
Beijing police officials and the village committee representatives equate the enclosed villages to the gated communities in more affluent neighborhoods.
“It offers them the same service as the high-class apartments in the city,” Li Baoquan, a member of a village committee in charge of public security in part of the Changping district, said in a telephone interview. “Of course the villagers would support it.”
And despite the heated social debate and extensive local news media coverage, villagers, burdened with the more pressing issues of finding decent-paying jobs, affordable medical care and schooling for their children, seem far less concerned with the walls in their midst.
A fruit vendor in Shoubaozhuang who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said he had had a few less customers since the enclosure policy was instituted, but also realized the benefits of having a security guard living next door. “He is doing his duty,” he said. “I am selling my fruit. I try not to cross paths with him.”
Gong Daocui, who arrived in Beijing from Chongqing in 2006 to live with her son, said: “We are all workers. What say do we have in the policies they make?”
She sells skewers of vegetables and meat cooked in a spicy soup along the main alley of Banjieta Village, which will soon be enclosed. “If the business can keep going, so be it,” she said, smiling and looking away. “If it can’t, I will pack up everything and retire to my hometown.”
An article on Romansh
The people of this corner of Switzerland are arguing whether language is a matter of the heart or the pocketbook.
Depending on whom you talk to in the steep, alpine enclaves of Graubünden, otherwise known as Grisons, the easternmost wedge of the country, there is either strong support or bitter resistance to Romansh, the local language. “When people talk about the death of Romansh,” said Elisabeth Maranta, who for the last 18 years has run a Romansh bookshop, Il Palantin, which sells books in Romansh and in German, “then I say that there are days when I only sell books in Romansh.”
Yet Ms. Maranta herself illustrates the fragility of Romansh. A native of Germany, she came to Chur 38 years ago with her husband, but does not speak Romansh herself, which is hardly a liability since virtually all Romansh speakers also speak German. While she is an ardent champion of Romansh, she can be bleak about its future. Asked why most of the books in Romansh she sells are poetry, she muses: “When a patient is dying, he writes only poetry.”
Romansh is the direct descendant of the Latin that was spoken in these mountain valleys at the height of the Roman empire, and shares the same Latin roots as French, Italian or Spanish. So isolated were the people who spoke it in their deep valleys that not one, but five, dialects grew up, though the differences are not substantial.
In the 19th century, monks in the region developed a written language. The valleys produced their own writers in Romansh, mostly poets, yet it was not until the mid-16th century that portions of the Bible were published in the language. In 1997, the first daily newspaper in Romansh, La Quotidiana, appeared.
It was always a regional tongue, with the number of Romansh speakers probably peaking around 2.2 percent of the total Swiss population in the early 19th century; but then, of course, the population of Switzerland was only about 1.6 million people, a fraction of what it is today, when less than one percent of the population — about 60,000 people — speaks Romansh.
Only a few decades ago, Romansh was looked upon as the patois of the poor country yokel; today it is experiencing a tenuous rebirth thanks to grass-roots revival programs and government support. Switzerland declared it an official language in 1996, though with limited status compared with the country’s other official languages — German, French and Italian — and now spends about $4 million a year to promote it.
Out in the village of Trun, up the Rhine Valley, Fritz Wyss is a fan of Romansh. “I see it as an advantage,” said Mr. Wyss, 51, who runs the little butcher shop on the main street of Trun, where almost 90 percent of the people speak Romansh and all his products are marked in German and Romansh.
“But some of my colleagues say to me, ‘What are you doing with the signs in two languages?’ ” saying that Romansh next to German made his shop look provincial. “But I’ve only had good results.”
“Our kids who learn Romansh have advantages when learning languages like Italian and French,” he said.
His neighbor, Ursulina Berther-Nay, 65, agreed. “People are proud of their language, and everyone makes an effort to preserve it,” she said, speaking German in her comfortable living room. She and her husband speak only Romansh at home. “It wasn’t always that way,” she said. “People used to be ashamed of it.”
Yet when asked whether she believed Romansh was endangered, she replied, “Yes, for sure.”
“We are too few, and the outside influences are so many,” she said. In church, hymns and prayers are still in Romansh, she said. But now there are too few Romansh priests, so the village pastor is from Poland and though he speaks Romansh passably, he prefers to preach in German.
Business leaders say that clinging to Romansh comes at a cost, as the region gradually evolves from farming and forestry to tourism and light industry.
In his offices as chief executive of Hamilton Bonaduz, the Swiss affiliate of an American company specializing in medical and research equipment, Andreas Wieland sometimes wishes he could bid Romansh a revair, or au revoir, altogether. About one-third of his 700 employees have advanced degrees in science or engineering, he explains, so he favors English and German over Romansh and Italian, the two smallest languages in Switzerland.
As his views became known he was invited in August to a conference on language but declined to go, writing instead to the organizers:
“Romansh and Italian may have great value culturally and politically, but for our export economy they have no relevance and belong rather in the category of folklore.”
“Our employees communicate far more often with Beijing or New York in English,” he went on, “than with Vicosoprano in Italian or Tujetsch in Romansh,” referring to two villages in the region.
Mr. Wieland, 55, insists, “I am not against Romansh.” At company receptions, he said, “we never serve salmon and Champagne,” but local beverages and the thinly sliced air-dried raw beef for which Graubünden is famous. The company has 50 trainee positions and likes to hire locally, he boasts, but “for these people, Romansh cannot be a boost to their careers.”
South of Hamilton’s offices, across the craggy Julier Pass, the village of Samedan, for centuries Romansh speaking, is trying to prove Mr. Wieland wrong. Where schooling was once only in Romansh, inroads by German prompted the local leaders to introduce changes. Now, for the first two years, classes are taught in both Romansh and German, and in one or the other in the following years.
Asked about Mr. Wieland’s criticism, Thomas Nievergelt, a lawyer who is Samedan’s part-time mayor, replied: “I have to contradict that. Our results clearly show that the pupils’ performance is no better or worse regardless of language.”
Language, he added, is not just about getting a job. “Language is a question of the heart, not just of understanding.”
One on dishes LIKE ratatouille
WHEN Julia Child introduced it to Americans back in the 1960s, ratatouille was pretty exotic. But it caught on so completely that, for many people, that’s where the eggplant repertory begins and ends.
It was true in my kitchen for a long time, too. But when I began exploring the cuisines of the Mediterranean, I discovered that beloved ratatouillelike dishes exist just about everywhere you go. It’s no coincidence: Mediterranean cuisines have long had an affinity for eggplant, and eggplant has an affinity for olive oil, garlic and onions. When the new foods that came from the Americas — peppers, summer squash and especially tomatoes — took hold in the region, a number of closely related dishes were born, including what we call ratatouille — and a man from La Mancha calls pisto, an Ikarian Greek calls soufiko and a Turk calls turlu.
The dishes are all made with abundant olive oil and simmered slowly and for a long time, traditionally in earthenware pots. They are recognizably different, though, because of their seasonings. The beguiling sweet and savory flavors in a Turkish turlu — cinnamon and coriander, fenugreek, mint and dill — are nothing like the earthy flavors in the layered parsley and oregano-seasoned Greek briam, the paprika and vinegar-spiked juices of an Andalusian alboronía or the thyme-scented essence of a ratatouille.
The dishes vary in other ways. In Majorca and Greece, potatoes are added to the mix, which makes these medleys substantial enough to serve as a main dish. You find additional summer vegetables like green beans and okra in the stews from Greece and Turkey. One of my favorites, Catalan samfaina, is often used as a sauce for rabbit, chicken or salt cod. The ingredients are chopped very small, tossed with olive oil and cooked for hours until the mixture is so thick and caramelized that it’s described as a vegetable marmalade. Ligurian rattatuia, almost identical to its cousin and near namesake across the border, can also be classified as a sauce, to accompany gnocchi, pasta or fish.
When you get into the kitchen, know that no two Mediterranean cooks make the same dish exactly the same way. Some Turkish cooks use up to a cup of olive oil when they make turlu, while others rely on a mixture of water, olive oil and tomato purée as a cooking medium. One cook will layer the vegetables after first cooking them in olive oil, then finish the dish in the oven or on a slow burner while another will stir everything together. Majorcan cooks from one village or restaurant may use a pungent tomato sauce in their layered vegetable tumbet; others use simple chopped tomatoes.
In my kitchen, I stray from the authentic recipes. If one-quarter or one-third cup of olive oil will work for a recipe that calls for one-half to one cup, I’ll always go for the lesser amount. You can use more if you prefer the robust flavor, texture and heft of abundant olive oil.
And when I want to brown eggplant, I don’t fry it in batches in oil; I know how thirsty eggplant can be. Instead, I toss all of the eggplant with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and either roast it in the oven or brown it in a heavy nonstick pan.
Sometimes the stews can be watery at the end of cooking. One solution is to wait; time and again, I’ve left turlu or ratatouille overnight to find the juices reabsorbed, the stew thick and satiny the next day. You can also drain the cooked vegetables in a colander set over a bowl and reduce the juices to a thick, intensely flavored syrup that you then pour back over the stew.
These aren’t dishes that you throw together for supper after work. There are a lot of vegetables to chop (and in some cases to sauté) before the long simmer on the stove or in the oven. The simmering is pretty much unattended — an occasional stir if it’s not a layered dish — but you do have to be around.
Your efforts, however, can yield dinner for the rest of the week. The stews always taste better the next day (and the next — you can keep them in the refrigerator for about five days), as the flavors meld and ripen. They’re delicious hot or cold, and they freeze well. Leftovers become new meals as they’re mixed with scrambled or poached eggs (traditional especially in Spain and North Africa), spooned over a piece of fish or mounded onto a bruschetta.
This is time well spent.
Briam
Samfaina
Turlu
We may have found the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder!
It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?
Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.
Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.
A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.
Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.
Liaisons between the military and academia are nothing new, of course. World War II, perhaps the most profound example, ended in an atomic strike on Japan in 1945 largely on the shoulders of scientist-soldiers in the Manhattan Project. And a group of scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula has researched bee-related applications for the military in the past — developing, for example, a way to use honeybees in detecting land mines.
But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the first time that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security Department and academia have teamed up to address a problem that both sides say they might never have solved on their own.
“Together we could look at things nobody else was looking at,” said Colin Henderson, an associate professor at the University of Montana’s College of Technology and a member of Dr. Bromenshenk’s “Bee Alert” team.
Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines. A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal. Even learning how to mash dead bees for analysis — a skill not taught at West Point — became a factor.
One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die — they fly off in every direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed. That makes large numbers of bee autopsies — and yes, entomologists actually do those — problematic.
Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.
“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”
Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. And several RNA-based viruses had been detected as well. But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae.
“Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army’s analytic software tool could do. “We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,” he said.
The Army software system — an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics — is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for.
But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees.
Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom.
The first steps were awkward, partly because the Army lab was not used to testing bees, or more specifically, to extracting bee proteins. “I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.”
The process eventually was refined. A mortar and pestle worked better than the desktop, and a coffee grinder worked best of all for making good bee paste.
Scientists in the project emphasize that their conclusions are not the final word. The pattern, they say, seems clear, but more research is needed to determine, for example, how further outbreaks might be prevented, and how much environmental factors like heat, cold or drought might play a role.
They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus — controllable with antifungal agents — especially when the virus is detected.
Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity.
In any event, the university’s bee operation itself proved vulnerable just last year, when nearly every bee disappeared over the course of the winter.
The comments are absolutely worthless, but get a load of this gem:
"How true. We all remember Catholic suicide bombers and how they wanted to replace the US constitution by biblical law (is there such a thing?) and how they chanted "My Catholic God is Great" after cutting the heads of innocent Protestants"
1. No, honey, that's the largely Protestant fundies you're talking about.
2. I guess nobody remembers the Spanish Inquisition anymore?
Many New Yorkers were suspicious of the newcomers’ plans to build a house of worship in Manhattan. Some feared the project was being underwritten by foreigners. Others said the strangers’ beliefs were incompatible with democratic principles.
Concerned residents staged demonstrations, some of which turned bitter.
But cooler heads eventually prevailed; the project proceeded to completion. And this week, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Lower Manhattan — the locus of all that controversy two centuries ago and now the oldest Catholic church in New York State — is celebrating the 225th anniversary of the laying of its cornerstone.
The Rev. Kevin V. Madigan, who is the pastor of St. Peter’s, said that when he began reading about the history of his church early this year in preparation for the anniversary on Tuesday, he was not initially struck by the parallels between the opposition it had faced and what present-day Muslims have encountered in proposing a community center and mosque near ground zero.
“There was no controversy when they first proposed it, and we were just pleased to have a new neighbor,” said Father Madigan, whose church, at Barclay and Church Streets, sits two blocks from 51 Park Place, the site of the proposed Islamic center. Both are roughly equidistant from the construction zone at ground zero.
But as an uproar enveloped the Islamic project over the summer, the priest said he was startled by how closely the arguments and parries of the opponents mirrored those brought against St. Peter’s in 1785.
Father Madigan detailed those similarities in a letter to parishioners over the summer, in two sermons at an interfaith gathering last month and at a special Mass last Sunday marking the church’s anniversary.
For starters, he said, there was the effort to move the planned church somewhere else.
City officials in 18th-century New York urged project organizers to change the church’s initial location, on Broad Street, in what was then the heart of the city, to a site outside the city limits, at Barclay and Church. Unlike the organizers of Park51, who have resisted suggestions they move the project to avoid having a mosque so close to the killing field of ground zero, the Catholics complied, although they had no choice.
Then there were fears about nefarious foreign backers. Just as some opponents of Park51 have said that the $100 million-plus project will be financed by the same Saudi sheiks who bankroll terrorists, many early Protestants in the United States saw the pope as the enemy of democracy, and feared that the little church would be the bridgehead of a papal assault on the new American government.
The Park51 organizers say they will not accept any foreign backing. But with about only 200 Catholics in New York in the late 1700s, most of them poor, St. Peter’s Church would not have been built without a handsome gift from a foreigner — and a papist at that — $1,000 from King Charles III of Spain.
The angry eruptions at some of the demonstrations this summer against the Muslim center — with signs and slogans attacking Islam — were not as vehement as those staged against St. Peter’s, Father Madigan said.
On Christmas Eve 1806, two decades after the church was built, the building was surrounded by Protestants incensed at a celebration going on inside — a religious observance then viewed by some in the United States as an exercise in “popish superstition,” more commonly referred to as Christmas. Protesters tried to disrupt the service. In the melee that ensued, dozens were injured, and a policeman was killed.
“We were treated as second-class citizens; we were viewed with suspicion,” Father Madigan wrote in his letter to parishioners, adding, “Many of the charges being leveled at Muslim-Americans today are the same as those once leveled at our forebears.”
The pastor said he respected the feelings of those who lost relatives or friends on 9/11. “They bear a grief that is inexpressible,” he said. Park51’s organizers, he added, would have to “make clear that they are in no way sympathetic to or supported by any ideology antithetical to our American ideals, which I am sure they can do.”
But he said Catholic New Yorkers had a special obligation. The discrimination suffered by their forebears, he said, “ought to be an incentive for us to ensure that similar indignities not be inflicted on more recent arrivals.”
Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children
A woman misquoted in the article has her comment here.
My view is that if picture books aren't selling, it's because they only come in hardcover! I don't want to spend $16 on a new picture book when I can spend half that price on a longer chapter book! Sure, I can buy used, but that doesn't help the new books get printed, does it?
Picture books are so unpopular these days at the Children’s Book Shop in Brookline, Mass., that employees there are used to placing new copies on the shelves, watching them languish and then returning them to the publisher.
“So many of them just die a sad little death, and we never see them again,” said Terri Schmitz, the owner.
The shop has plenty of company. The picture book, a mainstay of children’s literature with its lavish illustrations, cheerful colors and large print wrapped in a glossy jacket, has been fading. It is not going away — perennials like the Sendaks and Seusses still sell well — but publishers have scaled back the number of titles they have released in the last several years, and booksellers across the country say sales have been suffering.
The economic downturn is certainly a major factor, but many in the industry see an additional reason for the slump. Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.
“Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’ ” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. “There’s a real push with parents and schools to have kids start reading big-kid books earlier. We’ve accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books.”
Booksellers see this shift too.
“They’re 4 years old, and their parents are getting them ‘Stuart Little,’ ” said Dara La Porte, the manager of the children’s department at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington. “I see children pick up picture books, and then the parents say, ‘You can do better than this, you can do more than this.’ It’s a terrible pressure parents are feeling — that somehow, I shouldn’t let my child have this picture book because she won’t get into Harvard.”
Literacy experts are quick to say that picture books are not for dummies. Publishers praise the picture book for the particular way it can develop a child’s critical thinking skills.
“To some degree, picture books force an analog way of thinking,” said Karen Lotz, the publisher of Candlewick Press in Somerville, Mass. “From picture to picture, as the reader interacts with the book, their imagination is filling in the missing themes.”
Many parents overlook the fact that chapter books, even though they have more text, full paragraphs and fewer pictures, are not necessarily more complex.
“Some of the vocabulary in a picture book is much more challenging than in a chapter book,” said Kris Vreeland, a book buyer for Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, Calif., where sales of picture books have been down. “The words themselves, and the concepts, can be very sophisticated in a picture book.”
They can, for example, be written with Swiftian satire, like “Monsters Eat Whiny Children” by Bruce Eric Kaplan, a new book about children who are nearly devoured as a result of bad behavior.
Each year, the coveted Randolph Caldecott Medal goes to the most distinguished picture book published in the United States. (This year it went to “The Lion and the Mouse” by Jerry Pinkney, an adaptation of the Aesop’s fable with luminous images and no words at all.)
Still, many publishers have gradually reduced the number of picture books they produce for a market that had seen a glut of them, and in an age when very young children, like everyone else, have more options, a lot of them digital, to fill their entertainment hours.
At Scholastic, 5 percent to 10 percent fewer hardcover picture books have been published over the last three years. Don Weisberg, the president of the Penguin Young Readers Group, said that two and a half years ago, the company began publishing fewer titles but that it had devoted more attention to marketing and promoting the ones that remain. Of all the children’s books published by Simon & Schuster, about 20 percent are picture books, down from 35 percent a few years ago.
Classic books like “Goodnight Moon” and the “Eloise” series still sell steadily, alongside more modern popular titles like the “Fancy Nancy” books and “The Three Little Dassies” by Jan Brett, but even some best-selling authors are feeling the pinch. Jon Scieszka, who wrote “Robot Zot,” said his royalty checks had been shrinking, especially in the last year.
“We see the stores displaying less picture books, and publishers are getting a little more cautious about signing up new projects,” Mr. Scieszka said. “You can feel that everyone’s worried.”
Borders, noticing the sluggish sales, has tried to encourage publishers to lower the list prices, which can be as high as $18. Mary Amicucci, the vice president of children’s books for Barnes & Noble, said sales began a slow, steady decline about a year ago. Since then, the stores have rearranged display space so that some picture books are enticingly paired with toys and games.
Other retailers have cut shelf space devoted to picture books while expanding their booming young-adult sections, full of dystopic fiction, graphic novels and “Twilight”-inspired paranormal romances.
“Young adult fiction has been universally the growing genre,” said Ms. Lotz of Candlewick, “and so as retailers adapt to what customers are buying, they are giving more space to that and less space to picture books.”
Some parents say they just want to advance their children’s skills. Amanda Gignac, a stay-at-home mother in San Antonio who writes The Zen Leaf, a book blog, said her youngest son, Laurence, started reading chapter books when he was 4.
Now Laurence is 6 ½, and while he regularly tackles 80-page chapter books, he is still a “reluctant reader,” Ms. Gignac said.
Sometimes, she said, he tries to go back to picture books.
“He would still read picture books now if we let him, because he doesn’t want to work to read,” she said, adding that she and her husband have kept him reading chapter books.
Still, many children are getting the message. At Winnona Park Elementary School in Decatur, Ga., a recent book fair was dominated by chapter books, said Ilene Zeff, who organized the fair.
“I’ve been getting fewer and fewer picture books because they just don’t sell,” Ms. Zeff said. “By first grade, when the kids go to pick out their books, they ask where the chapter books are. They’re just drawn to them.”
On a recent discussion board on Urbanbaby.com, a Web site for parents, one commenter asked for recommendations for chapter books to read to a 5-year-old, and was answered with suggestions like the 272-page “Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster and “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum — books generally considered more appropriate for children 9 to 11.
Jen Haller, the vice president and associate publisher of the Penguin Young Readers Group, said that while some children were progressing to chapter books earlier, they were still reading picture books occasionally. “Picture books have a real comfort element to them,” Ms. Haller said. “It’s not like this door closes and they never go back to picture books again.”
Some states may be drugging incarcerated kids to control their behavior. Well, no shit.
Here's a quote from a brilliant guy who thinks the government is going to force people to eat their veggies. LOL!
Children need more play
Not enough PWDs on TV, again I say "well, no shit"
Let's not forget the extrasolar earthlike planet
An article on renegade female Catholic priests.
Migrant ‘Villages’ Within Beijing Ignite Debate
The community is walled and gated, an enclosure of rows of crowded low-rise homes and shops, where people live under the gaze of surveillance cameras and apart from the city. The police patrol around the clock, and security guards stop unfamiliar faces to check identification papers. In the morning, only one gate is open, through which parents head off to work and children go to school. At night, the gate is locked, preventing street loiterers from trespassing.
The area, Shoubaozhuang, is not one of the affluent, gated residential compounds springing up around Beijing, but a poor village of rural migrants toiling at low-paying jobs. It was chosen, along with 15 other areas in the Daxing district of Beijing, to be walled off to outsiders, in what officials say is an experimental effort to curb crime. The authorities say the experiment has been a success — the Communist Party-run People’s Daily said the crime rate in the walled villages in Daxing district dropped by 73 percent from April to July this year — and the “walled village” concept is being quickly expanded to other districts outside Beijing’s center that are populated by migrant workers.
Ultimately, the project could encompass an area of 291 square miles with a population of 3.4 million people, more than 80 percent of them migrant workers.
Some residents welcome the walls and gates as a way of fighting crime, but critics have seized on the ghettolike villages as a jarring sign of the barriers facing rural migrants settling in urban areas. They say the real intent of the new measures is to keep track of the migrants, and some have labeled the policy a form of apartheid.
This is not the first time Beijing has experimented with walling off migrant workers, though previous attempts have been on a much smaller scale. In the weeks leading up to the 2008 Olympics, the city similarly blocked off workers’ dorms near construction sites as part of an intensive campaign to secure and sanitize the city. The city government labels it “community-style management.”
But experts remain dubious about the long-term effects of life inside the walls on residents who are already socially marginalized migrants or local poor.
“To the migrants, the policy conveys the message that the capital is not theirs, but a capital for citizens with Beijing hukou,” said Peng Zhenhuai, director of the Local Government Research Institute at Peking University, referring to China’s household registration, or hukou, system.
Although increasingly relaxed in recent decades to help integrate laborers into cities, the system still effectively limits many migrants from permanently settling their families in cities by tying access to subsidized services like public education to one’s place of birth.
A newly released report from the municipal legislature indicates that Beijing’s “floating population” had exceeded 10 million by the end of last year, including 7.26 million migrants. As the city’s boom creates jobs in construction and service industries, some villages like Shoubaozhuang, with less than 1,000 original inhabitants, have seen their populations explode in the past five years with the influx of migrants. Most live in low-rise apartments or extensions to buildings constructed by the original inhabitants.
But the population spike has also brought the problems of the city to these areas, most notably petty crime. According to Daxing officials, 80 percent of the crime in the past five years took place in areas dominated by migrants. In Shoubaozhuang, locals have been vexed by everything from street fights to stolen laundry.
The Communist Party secretary for Beijing, Liu Qi, endorsed the new policy in early July, calling it a “positive and effective exploration in the course of Beijing’s urban-rural integration” and proposed extending it citywide. In the Daxing district, 76 villages are set to follow the example of the first 16 by the end of the year. The Changping district, on the northern side of the city, announced plans in July to enclose 100 villages, 44 to be finished within the coming months.
Many experts say that instead of building new barriers, the government should concentrate on forging ahead much faster with tax reforms, expanding low-income housing and transferring factories farther inland, to ease the settlement of migrants into cities, satellite communities and towns closer to their home provinces.
“The integration should come as a result of human interaction, and the government should orient its policy to the needs of its population,” said Lu Jiehua, a professor of sociology at Peking University. He said the government could adopt a policy of allowing migrants in large cities access to social services based on the number of years they have lived there.
Beijing police officials and the village committee representatives equate the enclosed villages to the gated communities in more affluent neighborhoods.
“It offers them the same service as the high-class apartments in the city,” Li Baoquan, a member of a village committee in charge of public security in part of the Changping district, said in a telephone interview. “Of course the villagers would support it.”
And despite the heated social debate and extensive local news media coverage, villagers, burdened with the more pressing issues of finding decent-paying jobs, affordable medical care and schooling for their children, seem far less concerned with the walls in their midst.
A fruit vendor in Shoubaozhuang who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said he had had a few less customers since the enclosure policy was instituted, but also realized the benefits of having a security guard living next door. “He is doing his duty,” he said. “I am selling my fruit. I try not to cross paths with him.”
Gong Daocui, who arrived in Beijing from Chongqing in 2006 to live with her son, said: “We are all workers. What say do we have in the policies they make?”
She sells skewers of vegetables and meat cooked in a spicy soup along the main alley of Banjieta Village, which will soon be enclosed. “If the business can keep going, so be it,” she said, smiling and looking away. “If it can’t, I will pack up everything and retire to my hometown.”
An article on Romansh
The people of this corner of Switzerland are arguing whether language is a matter of the heart or the pocketbook.
Depending on whom you talk to in the steep, alpine enclaves of Graubünden, otherwise known as Grisons, the easternmost wedge of the country, there is either strong support or bitter resistance to Romansh, the local language. “When people talk about the death of Romansh,” said Elisabeth Maranta, who for the last 18 years has run a Romansh bookshop, Il Palantin, which sells books in Romansh and in German, “then I say that there are days when I only sell books in Romansh.”
Yet Ms. Maranta herself illustrates the fragility of Romansh. A native of Germany, she came to Chur 38 years ago with her husband, but does not speak Romansh herself, which is hardly a liability since virtually all Romansh speakers also speak German. While she is an ardent champion of Romansh, she can be bleak about its future. Asked why most of the books in Romansh she sells are poetry, she muses: “When a patient is dying, he writes only poetry.”
Romansh is the direct descendant of the Latin that was spoken in these mountain valleys at the height of the Roman empire, and shares the same Latin roots as French, Italian or Spanish. So isolated were the people who spoke it in their deep valleys that not one, but five, dialects grew up, though the differences are not substantial.
In the 19th century, monks in the region developed a written language. The valleys produced their own writers in Romansh, mostly poets, yet it was not until the mid-16th century that portions of the Bible were published in the language. In 1997, the first daily newspaper in Romansh, La Quotidiana, appeared.
It was always a regional tongue, with the number of Romansh speakers probably peaking around 2.2 percent of the total Swiss population in the early 19th century; but then, of course, the population of Switzerland was only about 1.6 million people, a fraction of what it is today, when less than one percent of the population — about 60,000 people — speaks Romansh.
Only a few decades ago, Romansh was looked upon as the patois of the poor country yokel; today it is experiencing a tenuous rebirth thanks to grass-roots revival programs and government support. Switzerland declared it an official language in 1996, though with limited status compared with the country’s other official languages — German, French and Italian — and now spends about $4 million a year to promote it.
Out in the village of Trun, up the Rhine Valley, Fritz Wyss is a fan of Romansh. “I see it as an advantage,” said Mr. Wyss, 51, who runs the little butcher shop on the main street of Trun, where almost 90 percent of the people speak Romansh and all his products are marked in German and Romansh.
“But some of my colleagues say to me, ‘What are you doing with the signs in two languages?’ ” saying that Romansh next to German made his shop look provincial. “But I’ve only had good results.”
“Our kids who learn Romansh have advantages when learning languages like Italian and French,” he said.
His neighbor, Ursulina Berther-Nay, 65, agreed. “People are proud of their language, and everyone makes an effort to preserve it,” she said, speaking German in her comfortable living room. She and her husband speak only Romansh at home. “It wasn’t always that way,” she said. “People used to be ashamed of it.”
Yet when asked whether she believed Romansh was endangered, she replied, “Yes, for sure.”
“We are too few, and the outside influences are so many,” she said. In church, hymns and prayers are still in Romansh, she said. But now there are too few Romansh priests, so the village pastor is from Poland and though he speaks Romansh passably, he prefers to preach in German.
Business leaders say that clinging to Romansh comes at a cost, as the region gradually evolves from farming and forestry to tourism and light industry.
In his offices as chief executive of Hamilton Bonaduz, the Swiss affiliate of an American company specializing in medical and research equipment, Andreas Wieland sometimes wishes he could bid Romansh a revair, or au revoir, altogether. About one-third of his 700 employees have advanced degrees in science or engineering, he explains, so he favors English and German over Romansh and Italian, the two smallest languages in Switzerland.
As his views became known he was invited in August to a conference on language but declined to go, writing instead to the organizers:
“Romansh and Italian may have great value culturally and politically, but for our export economy they have no relevance and belong rather in the category of folklore.”
“Our employees communicate far more often with Beijing or New York in English,” he went on, “than with Vicosoprano in Italian or Tujetsch in Romansh,” referring to two villages in the region.
Mr. Wieland, 55, insists, “I am not against Romansh.” At company receptions, he said, “we never serve salmon and Champagne,” but local beverages and the thinly sliced air-dried raw beef for which Graubünden is famous. The company has 50 trainee positions and likes to hire locally, he boasts, but “for these people, Romansh cannot be a boost to their careers.”
South of Hamilton’s offices, across the craggy Julier Pass, the village of Samedan, for centuries Romansh speaking, is trying to prove Mr. Wieland wrong. Where schooling was once only in Romansh, inroads by German prompted the local leaders to introduce changes. Now, for the first two years, classes are taught in both Romansh and German, and in one or the other in the following years.
Asked about Mr. Wieland’s criticism, Thomas Nievergelt, a lawyer who is Samedan’s part-time mayor, replied: “I have to contradict that. Our results clearly show that the pupils’ performance is no better or worse regardless of language.”
Language, he added, is not just about getting a job. “Language is a question of the heart, not just of understanding.”
One on dishes LIKE ratatouille
WHEN Julia Child introduced it to Americans back in the 1960s, ratatouille was pretty exotic. But it caught on so completely that, for many people, that’s where the eggplant repertory begins and ends.
It was true in my kitchen for a long time, too. But when I began exploring the cuisines of the Mediterranean, I discovered that beloved ratatouillelike dishes exist just about everywhere you go. It’s no coincidence: Mediterranean cuisines have long had an affinity for eggplant, and eggplant has an affinity for olive oil, garlic and onions. When the new foods that came from the Americas — peppers, summer squash and especially tomatoes — took hold in the region, a number of closely related dishes were born, including what we call ratatouille — and a man from La Mancha calls pisto, an Ikarian Greek calls soufiko and a Turk calls turlu.
The dishes are all made with abundant olive oil and simmered slowly and for a long time, traditionally in earthenware pots. They are recognizably different, though, because of their seasonings. The beguiling sweet and savory flavors in a Turkish turlu — cinnamon and coriander, fenugreek, mint and dill — are nothing like the earthy flavors in the layered parsley and oregano-seasoned Greek briam, the paprika and vinegar-spiked juices of an Andalusian alboronía or the thyme-scented essence of a ratatouille.
The dishes vary in other ways. In Majorca and Greece, potatoes are added to the mix, which makes these medleys substantial enough to serve as a main dish. You find additional summer vegetables like green beans and okra in the stews from Greece and Turkey. One of my favorites, Catalan samfaina, is often used as a sauce for rabbit, chicken or salt cod. The ingredients are chopped very small, tossed with olive oil and cooked for hours until the mixture is so thick and caramelized that it’s described as a vegetable marmalade. Ligurian rattatuia, almost identical to its cousin and near namesake across the border, can also be classified as a sauce, to accompany gnocchi, pasta or fish.
When you get into the kitchen, know that no two Mediterranean cooks make the same dish exactly the same way. Some Turkish cooks use up to a cup of olive oil when they make turlu, while others rely on a mixture of water, olive oil and tomato purée as a cooking medium. One cook will layer the vegetables after first cooking them in olive oil, then finish the dish in the oven or on a slow burner while another will stir everything together. Majorcan cooks from one village or restaurant may use a pungent tomato sauce in their layered vegetable tumbet; others use simple chopped tomatoes.
In my kitchen, I stray from the authentic recipes. If one-quarter or one-third cup of olive oil will work for a recipe that calls for one-half to one cup, I’ll always go for the lesser amount. You can use more if you prefer the robust flavor, texture and heft of abundant olive oil.
And when I want to brown eggplant, I don’t fry it in batches in oil; I know how thirsty eggplant can be. Instead, I toss all of the eggplant with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and either roast it in the oven or brown it in a heavy nonstick pan.
Sometimes the stews can be watery at the end of cooking. One solution is to wait; time and again, I’ve left turlu or ratatouille overnight to find the juices reabsorbed, the stew thick and satiny the next day. You can also drain the cooked vegetables in a colander set over a bowl and reduce the juices to a thick, intensely flavored syrup that you then pour back over the stew.
These aren’t dishes that you throw together for supper after work. There are a lot of vegetables to chop (and in some cases to sauté) before the long simmer on the stove or in the oven. The simmering is pretty much unattended — an occasional stir if it’s not a layered dish — but you do have to be around.
Your efforts, however, can yield dinner for the rest of the week. The stews always taste better the next day (and the next — you can keep them in the refrigerator for about five days), as the flavors meld and ripen. They’re delicious hot or cold, and they freeze well. Leftovers become new meals as they’re mixed with scrambled or poached eggs (traditional especially in Spain and North Africa), spooned over a piece of fish or mounded onto a bruschetta.
This is time well spent.
Briam
Samfaina
Turlu
We may have found the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder!
It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?
Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.
Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.
A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.
Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.
Liaisons between the military and academia are nothing new, of course. World War II, perhaps the most profound example, ended in an atomic strike on Japan in 1945 largely on the shoulders of scientist-soldiers in the Manhattan Project. And a group of scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula has researched bee-related applications for the military in the past — developing, for example, a way to use honeybees in detecting land mines.
But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the first time that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security Department and academia have teamed up to address a problem that both sides say they might never have solved on their own.
“Together we could look at things nobody else was looking at,” said Colin Henderson, an associate professor at the University of Montana’s College of Technology and a member of Dr. Bromenshenk’s “Bee Alert” team.
Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines. A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal. Even learning how to mash dead bees for analysis — a skill not taught at West Point — became a factor.
One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die — they fly off in every direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed. That makes large numbers of bee autopsies — and yes, entomologists actually do those — problematic.
Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.
“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”
Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. And several RNA-based viruses had been detected as well. But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae.
“Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army’s analytic software tool could do. “We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,” he said.
The Army software system — an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics — is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for.
But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees.
Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom.
The first steps were awkward, partly because the Army lab was not used to testing bees, or more specifically, to extracting bee proteins. “I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.”
The process eventually was refined. A mortar and pestle worked better than the desktop, and a coffee grinder worked best of all for making good bee paste.
Scientists in the project emphasize that their conclusions are not the final word. The pattern, they say, seems clear, but more research is needed to determine, for example, how further outbreaks might be prevented, and how much environmental factors like heat, cold or drought might play a role.
They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus — controllable with antifungal agents — especially when the virus is detected.
Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity.
In any event, the university’s bee operation itself proved vulnerable just last year, when nearly every bee disappeared over the course of the winter.
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Date: 2010-10-08 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-08 09:26 pm (UTC)Um, yeah, there are Catholic terrorists. They're called the IRA. Of course, it's not the original IRA that are the terrorists now and their issues are political as well. They are also an incredibly small percentage, and not at all representative, of the world's approximately 1 billion Catholics.
So, it's almost exactly the same as the Muslim terrorists these people are worried about.
how they wanted to replace the US constitution by biblical law (is there such a thing?
Someone clearly hasn't read the Old Testament. Besides, it's generally not the Catholics that talk about how the US is a country founded on Biblical laws like the 10 Commandments.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-09 03:14 am (UTC)