![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Days of Our Lives has NOT been cancelled people. It's NOT on indefinite hiatus. The TV Line Article and other articles are NOT true.
They filmed episodes eight months ahead of schedule, they are going dark for production reasons and network negotiations. This happens all the time. And with most television series. Actors have different contracts. Soaps often have 13 week contracts.
Jason47's Days Website
8 hrs ·
REGARDING THE TV LINE REPORT, CALM DOWN "DAYS" FANS...
TV Line just posted an article about the entire "Days" cast being released from contract. With the show going on an extended production hiatus, this is a necessary business move. With most contract cycles only being 13 weeks, and the show going on hiatus for more than 13 weeks, this was the only possible option.
With "Days" now having taped into July 2020, and written episodes into August 2020, the show was always going to have to suspend production at this point until they get word from NBC about its renewal decision, since they are pretty close to having written the last episode of the current contract.
So, "Days" fans, don't look at this as a reason to worry, or a sign that NBC will not renew the show. This is just a necessary business decision. In fact, in the past, actors whose 13-week cycles ended during previous long production breaks, have quietly had their contracts lapse and then sign new ones when the show returns from break. So this is NOT the first time this has happened. It's just the first time it's been reported to this degree..
https://tvline.com/…/days-of-our-lives-cancelled-cast-fire…/
tvline.com
Days of Our Lives: Entire Cast Released From Contract — Is the End Nigh?
2. How Einstein Learned Physics
I admittedly scanned this. But you might find it interesting?
3. Hmmm...considering I keep everything seemingly forever...this is good advice. How Long Should You Keep Tax Records
One Year
Keep pay stubs at least until you check them against your W-2s. If all the totals match, you can then shred the pay stubs. Take a similar approach with monthly brokerage statements—you can generally shred them if they match up with your year-end statements and 1099s.
Three Years
Generally speaking, you should hold onto documents that support any income, deductions and credits claimed on your tax return for at least three years after the tax-filing deadline. Among other things, this applies to:
Form W-2s reporting income
Form 1099s showing income, capital gains, dividends and interest on investments
Form 1098 if you deducted mortgage interest
Canceled checks and receipts for charitable contributions
Records showing eligible expenses for withdrawals from health savings accounts and 529 college-savings plans
Records showing contributions to a tax-deductible retirement-savings plan, such as a traditional IRA
If you're among those taxpayers who no longer itemize deductions on Schedule A because the standard deduction was basically doubled beginning in 2018, you might not need to hold onto as many documents. For example, if you're not deducting charitable contributions anymore, then you don't need to keep donation receipts or cancelled checks for tax purposes.
Six Years
The IRS has up to six years to initiate an audit if you've neglected to report at least 25% of your income. For self-employed people, who may receive multiple 1099s reporting business income from a variety of sources, it can be easy to miss one or overlook reporting some income. To be on the safe side, they should generally keep their 1099s, their receipts and other records of business expenses for at least six years.
Seven Years
Sometimes your stock picks don't turn out so well, or you loan money to a deadbeat who can't pay you back. If that's the case, you might be able to write off any worthless securities or bad debts. But make sure you keep related records and documents for at least seven years. That's how much time you have to claim a bad debt deduction or a loss from worthless securities.
Ten Years
If you paid taxes to a foreign government, you may be entitled to a credit or deduction on your U.S. tax return—and you get to decide if you want a credit or deduction. If you claimed a deduction for a given year, you can change your mind within 10 years and claim a credit by filing an amended return. You also have 10 years to correct a previously claimed foreign tax credit. For these reasons, save any records or documents related to foreign taxes paid for at least 10 years.
Investments and Property
When it comes to investments and property you own, you'll need to keep some records at least three years after you sell.
For example, keep records of contributions to a Roth IRA for three years after the account is depleted. You'll need these records to show that you already paid taxes on the contributions and shouldn't be taxed on them again when the money is withdrawn.
Keep investing records showing purchases in a taxable account (such as transaction records for stock, bond, mutual fund and other investment purchases) for up to three years after you sell the investments. You'll need to report the purchase date and price when you file your taxes for the year they are sold to establish your cost basis, which will determine your taxable gains or loss when you sell the investment. Brokers must report the cost basis of stock purchased in 2011 or later, and of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds purchased in 2012 or later. But it helps to maintain your own records in case you switch brokers. (If you inherit stocks or funds, keep records of the value on the day the original owner died to help calculate the basis when you sell the investment.)
If you inherit property or receive it as a gift, make sure you keep documents and records that help you establish the property's basis for at least three years after you dispose of the property. The basis of inherited property is generally the property's fair market value on the date of the decedent's death. For gifted property, your basis is generally the same as the donor's basis.
Keep home-purchase documents and receipts for home improvements for three years after you've sold the home. Most people don't have to pay taxes on home-sale profits—singles can exclude up to $250,000 in gains and joint filers can exclude up to $500,000 if they've lived in the house for two of the five years prior to the sale. But if you sell the house before then or if your gains are larger, then you'll need to have your home-purchase records to establish your basis. You can add the cost of significant home improvements to the basis, which will help reduce your tax liability. (See IRS Publication 523 for more details.) Similar rules apply for any rental properties you own; save records relating to your basis for at least three years after selling the property.
4. Inside the World of Guide Dog Drop Outs -- yes, this surprised me too, I didn't know this was a thing. But I guess, it stands to reason...
n this highly competitive training, pup perfection is demanded — and not every student can make it to graduation. Here's what happens to the still very good boys who need a sudden ‘career change.’
When I meet Eddie, a yellow Labrador, at a friend’s family barbecue in Detroit, it’s clear he isn’t like other dogs. He knows how to sit, stay and walk (on- or off-leash), but his best trick is being able to read a room. Whether his role is to greet a guest, play with children or rest his head on my lap as we drink beers by the bonfire, Eddie always does the right thing. All the while, he’s never a nerd about his intrinsic obedience. “Dude, what’s your dog’s deal?” I eventually ask Delia Bryan, Eddie’s owner and a family friend.
“He’s a guide-dog-school reject,” she tells me.
Bryan’s family has raised guide dogs ever since she was a kid, when her sister begged her parents for a puppy and they countered with the idea of raising a guide puppy every year. Bryan’s mother, who ran a home-based daycare and had volunteered for a guide school before having a family, thought it would be a great way to teach her children the responsibility of having a dog, and how to say goodbye to one without it dying. Bryan remembers sobbing though many childhood car rides to send off dogs named Jude, Anthony and Kenny to pursue their careers. (Most were named after Catholic saints or dead relatives.)
Eddie
Like many guide dogs, Eddie, now 6, was born into the system through a breeding program at Leader Dogs for the Blind in Rochester Michigan. While dog owners can attempt to independently train their own service animals, most are bred by guide schools that identify breeds large enough to pull people out of traffic yet small enough to ride public transportation — Labs and retrievers mostly, with the occasional German Shepherd or boxer.
For their first seven weeks, dogs live at school and are carefully socialized by professional trainers, who introduce them to street sounds, other animals and people with funny hats. They’re also given the run of a sensory playroom full of stairs, mirrors and new surfaces to explore.
From there, the puppies are sent to live with volunteers for a year, where they learn basic obedience. Finally, they return to the school for four months of intensive training. Working with trainers, they learn how to lead people from point A to point B; to stop at curbs, stairs and obstacles like tree limbs; and to detect any change in elevation. Dogs live on campus with dog roommates, go on field trips to New York City to ride the subway (some schools even go to the theater) and attend picnics to get acquainted with their new teachers and classmates. It’s more or less dog college.
Throughout, however, they can be booted for health problems, lack of confidence, distractibility, not walking or going to the bathroom on particular surfaces, having an underbite, barking at bearded men, being too high-maintenance and much, much more.
Eddie made it through all of his training before his second birthday and even attended a graduation ceremony. It was there, though, that things went to shit. More specifically, racquetballs did him in. He no longer wanted to graduate as much as he wanted to wag his tail, play fetch and disrupt a very serious ceremony. The balls were put away, but his concentration was broken beyond repair. After the ceremony, the Bryans were told Eddie wouldn’t be continuing his work.
To me, this sounded like entrapment. Not to mention unfair, since it took only one strike for Eddie to strike out. “That’s how they find out how serious the dog really is,” explains Bryan. “It’s like those tough job interviews where they take you out drinking to see how you’ll act.”
“Less than 5 percent of dogs are cut out for service-dog work, and many ‘wash out’ during training,” says Nicole Ellis, a certified dog trainer and pet expert with Rover.com. Ellis estimates that guide-dog students who are trained by their owners instead of schools have about a 20 to 30 percent success rate, whereas dogs who are trained through institutions have a success rate of around 50 percent. The attrition rate is higher than most colleges and companies because people’s lives depend on these dogs making the right decisions. So they aren’t exactly set up for failure, but many of them will due to the nature of the work.
“We don’t say the F-word. We prefer ‘reassigned,’ ‘career-changed’ or perhaps ‘withdrawn,’” says Rob Clarke, the owner of Maddie, a black Lab, who was withdrawn from training after being used to breed other guide dogs. By the time she was done having puppies and training to be a guide dog, Maddie was almost 3 years old and set in her ways. “She was too used to me and not confident in her trainer,” Clarke explains.
So, if I fail at something -- I was reassigned, career-changed or withdrawn? Cool.
5. Continuing with the weird animal stories... When Squirrels Were One of Americas Most Popular Pets
In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.
“Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!”
Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,” according to Katherine Grier’s Pets in America, being relatively easy to keep.
By the 1700s, a golden era of squirrel ownership was in full swing. Squirrels were sold in markets and found in the homes of wealthy urban families, and portraits of well-to-do children holding a reserved, polite upper-class squirrel attached to a gold chain leash were proudly displayed (some of which are currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Most pet squirrels were American Grey Squirrels, though Red Squirrels and Flying Squirrels also were around, enchanting the country with their devil-may-care attitudes and fluffy bodies.
By the 19th century, a canon of squirrel-care literature emerged for the enthusiast. In the 1851 book Domestic pets: their habits and management, Jane Loudon writes more about squirrels as pets than rabbits, and devotes an entire chapter to the “beautiful little creature, very agile and graceful in its movements.” Squirrels “may be taught to jump from one hand to the other to search for a hidden nut, and it soon knows its name, and the persons who feed it.” Loudin also waxes on their habits, like jumping around a room and peeping out from wooden eaves, writing that “an instance is recorded of no less than seventeen lumps of sugar being found in the cornice of a drawing-room in which a squirrel had been kept, besides innumerable nuts, pieces of biscuit.” Loudon’s advice: when your squirrel is not running around the room, provide it with a tin-lined cage that has a running wheel.
6. And yet another one... What Do Animals See in the Mirror?
The idea for a tool to probe the basis of consciousness came to Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. while shaving. “It just occurred to me,” he says, “wouldn’t it be interesting to see if other creatures could recognize themselves in mirrors?”
Showing chimpanzees their reflections seemed like a fascinating little experiment when he first tried it in the summer of 1969. He didn’t imagine that this would become one of the most influential—and most controversial—tests in comparative psychology, ushering the mind into the realm of experimental science and foreshadowing questions on the depth of animal suffering. “It’s not the ability to recognize yourself in a mirror that is important,” he would come to believe. “It’s what that says about your ability to conceive of yourself in the first place.”
Gallup was a new professor at Tulane University in Louisiana, where he had access to the chimps and gorillas at what would later be known as the Tulane National Primate Research Center. The chimpanzees there had been caught as youngsters in Africa and shipped to America, where they were used mainly in biomedical research. By comparison, his experiment was far less invasive. He isolated two chimps in cages, and placed a mirror in each cage for eight hours at a time over 10 days. Through a hole in the wall, Gallup witnessed a shift in the chimps’ behavior. First they treated the reflection like it was another chimp, with a combination of social, sexual, and aggressive gestures. But over time, they started using it to explore their own bodies. “They’d use the mirror to look at the inside of their mouths, to make faces at the mirror, to inspect their genitals, to remove mucous from the corner of their eyes,” Gallup says.
Gallup was sure that the chimps had learned to recognize themselves in the mirror, but he didn’t trust that other researchers would be convinced by his descriptions. So he moved on to phase two of the experiment. He anesthetized the chimps, then painted one eyebrow ridge and the opposite ear tip with a red dye that the chimps wouldn’t be able to feel or smell. If they truly recognized themselves, he thought he knew what would happen: “It seemed pretty obvious that if I saw myself in a mirror with marks on my face, that I’d reach up and inspect those marks.”
That’s exactly what the chimps did. As far as Gallup was concerned, that was proof: “the first experimental demonstration of a self-concept in a subhuman form,” he wrote in the resulting 1970 report in Science. “It was just clear as day,” he remembers. “It didn’t require any statistics. There it was. Bingo.”
But the result that really blew Gallup’s mind came when he tested monkeys, and discovered that they did not do the same. The ability to recognize one’s reflection seemed not to be a matter of learning abilities, with some species being slower than others. It was an issue of higher intellectual capacity. Gallup had obtained the first good evidence that our closest relatives share with us a kind of self-awareness or even consciousness, to the exclusion of other animals. Here, finally, was an experimental handle on a topic that had been the subject of speculation for millennia: What is the nature of human consciousness?
Gallup wasn’t the first to come up with the notion that it might be significant if a person or animal recognizes itself in the mirror. He would only later learn that Charles Darwin had shown mirrors to orangutans, but they didn’t figure the mirror out, at least while he was watching. Darwin had also noted that, for their first few years, his children couldn’t recognize themselves in their reflections. In 1889, German researcher Wilhelm Preyer became the first to posit a connection between mirror self-recognition and an inner sense of self in people.
More than 50 years later, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan conceived of a childhood “mirror stage,” in which mirrors contribute to the formation of the ego. By 1972, developmental psychologists started using mark tests similar to Gallup’s to pin down the age at which children begin to recognize themselves in the mirror: 18 to 24 months.
Meanwhile Gallup, who moved to the University at Albany-SUNY, became interested in whether any non-primates could pass. In the early 1990s, he encouraged one of his Ph.D. students, Lori Marino, to explore the question. Working with Diana Reiss at Marine World Africa USA in California, Marino exposed two bottlenose dolphins at an aquarium to a mirror. Like the chimpanzees, the dolphins learned to use the mirror in a variety of ways, even “having sex in front of the mirror with each other, which we call our dolphin porno tapes,” Marino says. The three researchers published the results, saying they were “suggestive” of mirror self-recognition.
Still, they were missing the crucial mark test for another decade. The biggest hurdle was anatomical: The dolphins didn’t have hands to touch a mark. But Reiss and Marino, by then at the New York Aquarium, designed a modified test. When marked with black ink on various parts of their bodies, the dolphins flipped and wriggled in an attempt to see it, convincing the researchers and many others that they recognized themselves.
7. Ghosts of War in a Wisconsin Forest - An Afghanistan Veteran's struggle with Ecology and Memory
Every day, I start the shift by throwing on my marking gear. It’s not as heavy as my kit in Afghanistan, just an easy 40-odd pounds with the paint. Instead of a blaze orange cruiser vest like the ones my co-workers use, I still take the old tactical vest I wore over my armor back then. The mag pouches hold the Relaskop I use to measure tree height, and the dump pouch holds my clipboard of data cards, with room to spare for the wild mushrooms and onions I collect. Add to that my four-gallon backpack paint sprayer and I’m ready to go.
Sometimes I think about the blood on the vest. You can’t see it anymore; everything I own is splattered with timber-marking paint nowadays. We use water-based paint for marking in pine stands, and oil-based for hardwoods. The water-based paint wears off of hardwood bark after only a few years. My best friend bled on me during a firefight. He had been hit in the fingertip by something minor enough to not notice, but because it was during a fight, the Army would call your family and freak them out no matter how quaint the injury. The paint manufacturer uses citrus oil, so by the end of the day, my beard smells like an orange from the overspray. We didn’t tell our NCOs he had been hurt. He’s been dead five years. He shot himself.
After spending six years overseas, I came back and couldn’t deal with the hectic lower-48 lifestyle, so I went to Alaska. When I first became a forest ecologist, I’d wanted to do research, make the world a better place through learning. But I learned quickly that none of it mattered if policymakers ignored your work. Last year, I decided I needed to be involved in direct management, and took a job in the Wisconsin northwoods. It took 18 months to finally get VA appointments for my TBI and PTS. The doctor tried several medications to help me. One of them made me certain I was having a heart attack. Thinking I was dying, I made peace with God on the floor of my one room cabin. Next time I saw him, the doctor told me to just smoke cigarettes to dull the anxiety. He said he couldn’t do anything for my other symptoms.
I spend my time working in Wisconsin’s second-growth forests, administering timber sales and marking trees for harvest. Old growth takes a long time to regenerate, so I help the process along by cutting to favor the old growth species. In a hundred years or so, I hope my grandkids will walk through the forest and think well of what I did. The next VA doctor told me he thought I was just a drug addict looking to score Xanax when he saw my medical allergies. So I chew nicotine gum like a fiend to keep the edge off.
Each forester has a signature in the trees they select to cut, and those they leave behind. The Alaska VA just threw their hands up after that and left me to my own devices. On my marking crew, I have a guy that leaves trees with cavities for wildlife like bats and birds, and a guy that prefers to leave certain species like the American basswood, which readily hollows out to make an animal habitat as well as producing a small edible seed for birds. I had to be a lab rat in a medical experiment to get care for my brain injury. Every morning I inject the hormone my damaged pituitary gland can no longer produce. Me, I prefer leaving mast species like black cherry and oak, which drop massive amounts of fruit and nuts for wildlife, as well as our forest’s old growth species like white pine, yellow birch, and eastern hemlock. Sometimes when we’re in training or office meetings, just the sound of that many people breathing and fidgeting around me drives me up the wall. Afterward, I find myself alone out in the forest, crippled by the realization that I’ll never be able to cope with close proximity to people again.
Forests aren’t static; each one has disturbance regimes that reset them, segment by segment, until the whole thing is new again. I can’t get the time off work to drive two hours to the local VA frequently enough for mental health services, and the local civilian doctors are useless for combat trauma. Back home in Alaska, fire and beetles did the job. Here, we have periodic wind storms. A thunderstorm passed through today, dropping walnut-sized hail and blowing trees down around me. I thought I might die as I hid under a big sugar maple. I realized that I couldn’t remember precisely how many friends wound up in flag-draped coffins, but that more had died by suicide than from enemy action.
8. Meet Maria Sybilla Meridan -- the Naturalist Who Painted Insects in Living Color
Maria Sibylla Merian was a leader in natural science, an ecologist and an entomologist before those terms existed. Merian looked at the world differently from other naturalists. While men such as Carl Linnaeus worked hard to classify and categorize isolated dead specimens of animals and insects, Merian chose to study them as living creatures. As a result, she witnessed behaviors, changes, and interactions that others could never have seen.
Merian was born in Frankfurt in 1647. Her father died when she was three years old, and her mother married Jacob Marrel, a painter who encouraged Maria to develop her artistic skills and her passion for collecting bugs. Marrel left the family when Merian was 12, and from then she worked to support herself and her mother. She collected insects to paint, and would often stay up late and paint by candlelight to be sure of catching the moment when a chrysalis opened.
One of the boldest choices Merian made was to undertake a perilous expedition to the Dutch colony of Suriname.
After separating from an unhappy marriage, Merian became an unusual figure in 17th century Dutch society. She was a self-supporting female scientist in a time when women were largely homemakers and barred from institutes of higher learning. After moving to Amsterdam in 1691, she taught painting to fund her expeditions.
One of the boldest choices Merian made was to undertake a perilous expedition to the Dutch colony of Suriname. When she arrived there in 1699 with her youngest daughter, Merian was frustrated by the total lack of natural curiosity of the colonists, and their unwillingness to assist her. So Merian turned for help to the enslaved Africans and Indigenous people of Suriname who worked on the Dutch plantations
While Merian lamented some of the harsh treatment of slaves on the plantations, she was certainly no abolitionist herself. She stayed in the territory of the Dutch West India Company, which had become rich by trading people. Merian kept slaves of her own in Suriname, and in so doing, she supported and participated in the colonial practices of her time. Because of this, we have to doubt how willingly assistance was given to her research efforts.
African and Indigenous slaves were instrumental in Merian’s work in Suriname...
We do know that African and Indigenous slaves were instrumental in Merian’s work in Suriname, bringing her samples she might never have reached, and teaching her how to use certain plants. In one story, enslaved Indigenous women showed Maria how some particular seeds were used to terminate pregnancies and spare their own children from enslavement. Merian recorded and used native names for many of the plants mentioned in her book Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.
Metamorphosis was a cornerstone of Merian’s theories of insect life, and was a major way she diverted from common wisdom of the time period. In her 1679 Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung (The Caterpillars’ Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food), she depicted the complex life cycles of moths and butterflies. This directly refuted the generally accepted truth of “spontaneous germination” — the ancient theory that life can come from non-life, such as the idea that insects erupt spontaneously from decaying matter or dust, frogs are birthed from raindrops, and wheat left in a dark corner will produce mice.
Merian’s work was referenced heavily in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), which presented the first systematic classification of species. She received praise from Goethe for her ability to blend art and science. And Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, cited her in his influential work The Botanic Garden. Indeed, she was well regarded by many of her educated contemporaries and received a sponsorship from the City of Amsterdam to support her Suriname expedition.
So why is her name completely absent from the subsequent 300 years of ecology?
So why is her name completely absent from the subsequent 300 years of ecology? In The History of Creation (1866), Ernst Haeckel called Merian “the forgotten mother of animal developmental biology and ecology.” As recently as 1982, she was completely omitted from Ernst Mayr’s Growth of Biological Thought which recounted 2000 years of biological study. Merian’s work was always published under her own name, so there was no chance of her discoveries being mis-attributed to other people. So how was she lost?
Despite the respect and admiration of her peers, Merian’s work did not enrich her family, and she was buried in a pauper’s grave after having to sell many paintings and specimens. In the years after her death, changes were made to her illustrations. The scenes she had depicted accurately, based on meticulous observation, were altered to incorporate imaginary insects and re-colored to be more aesthetically pleasing.
To some, the obvious errors and fictions in subsequent printings of her work were similar to other stories she told – such as a tarantula that can eat a bird, or the notion that ants can build bridges with their bodies, animal habits that we now know to be common in the tropical areas Merian visited.
Illustration of butterflies and a pineapple from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium by Maria Sibylla Merian
Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium
Public domain.
The naturalist Lansdown Guilding took it upon himself to write a scathing critique of Merian and her work, particularly her Suriname illustrations. 100 years after her death, he published Observations of the Work of Maria Sibylla Merian on the Insects of Surinam. Guilding himself had never travelled to Suriname, yet he felt confident enough to publish this text that ridiculed Merian for “careless”, “vile and useless” inaccuracies that “every boy entomologist” could spot.
And yet the sexist tone of [Guilding’s] criticism is impossible to miss.
Of course, his critique was based on the versions of Merian’s books that were altered after her death. And yet the sexist tone of his criticism is impossible to miss. Guilding’s point is further undermined by his dismissal of all observations that resulted from collaboration with African slaves and Indigenous people, whom he considered to be innately unreliable.
With her reputation in tatters, Maria came to be viewed as a silly old lady who made pretty pictures, which continued to be admired in the art world, but were no longer considered scientific.
The record began to be rectified 300 years after her lifetime. In 1993, Sharon Valiant wrote Maria Sibylla Merian: Recovering an Eighteenth-Century Legend. In this piece, Valiant reviews some recent publications of Merian’s work, which included collections held in the Soviet Union, and the first ever English language publication of the re-titled Maria Sibylla Merian in Surinam.
9. The Prisoner - Why Can't People Understand That I'm Not a 12 Year Old Boy Any More? Why Can't I be Given a Second Chance
Every once in a while, Edwin Debrow dreams that he is a boy again. He is standing in a field of freshly mowed grass. It is a warm day, with no clouds in the sky. The sun is on his face. There are no smells of sweat and urine, and there are no sounds of steel doors opening and closing, no guards barking orders, no inmates shouting curses.
Edwin bends down and takes off his shoes. He begins to run—he hasn’t been allowed to run for his entire adult life—and his bare feet feel cool against the grass. He smiles. Soon he is laughing out loud. He throws his arms above his head. This must be what joy feels like, he thinks.
And then he wakes up in his bunk bed, in cell 37 of Building Three at the William G. McConnell Unit, a maximum-security state prison in the South Texas town of Beeville. He shuts his eyes and tries to fall back asleep. He wants to keep running. All he wants to do is run.
***
Just after midnight on September 21, 1991, a San Antonio school teacher named Curtis Edwards was found sprawled across the front seat of a taxi that he drove part-time at night to earn extra money. He had been shot point-blank in the back of the head. It was a gruesome scene: blood and bits of brain were scattered throughout the car. A few days later, police announced they had made an arrest in the case. Edwards’s killer, they said, was a twelve-year-old boy named Edwin Debrow. Apparently, investigators said, Edwin had shot Edwards while attempting to rob him.
At the police department, a photographer from the San Antonio Express-News took a photo of Edwin as he was being escorted down a hallway by a uniformed officer and a detective. Edwin, who was just four feet eight inches tall and 79 pounds, was wearing a T-shirt, basketball shorts, and unlaced high-top tennis shoes. His face was peeking out of a suit coat that the detective had thrown over his head in hopes of protecting his identity.
Almost overnight, Edwin became one of Texas’s most notorious criminals. People were stunned that such a small child could have committed such a cold-blooded killing. A prosecutor for the Bexar County district attorney’s office called Edwin a “sick little monster.” In a speech addressing the problems of the inner city, President George H. W. Bush went so far as to single out Edwin, describing his behavior as “truly horrifying.”
Today, Edwin is 37 years old. He is five feet ten inches tall, and he weighs 170 pounds. He looks a little like the boxer Floyd Mayweather, and because of the exercises he does every day in his cell—endless numbers of push-ups, crunches, pull-ups, and leg lifts—he is built like him too, with broad shoulders, a tapered waist, and biceps the size of baseballs. His head is shaved, and his arms and chest are inked with tattoos. “When my mom comes to see me, she always says I still look young,” Edwin told me during one of our conversations. “But I know she’s only trying to make me feel better. I know I’ve got the prison look.”
“The prison look?” I asked.
He gave me a thin smile. “The look of someone who’s not going anywhere soon.”
Edwin has been behind bars since the day he was arrested: he is now more than halfway through a forty-year sentence that a juvenile court ordered him to serve as punishment for Edwards’s murder. Although he has been eligible for parole since 1999, the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles have refused to release him, always citing the severity of his crime. If he continues to be denied parole, he will not be released until September 2031. He will be 52 years old.
For decades, the members of the criminal justice system have argued about what should be done with kids who commit violent crimes. Lawyers, judges, police officers, politicians, and victims’ rights advocates have debated whether lawbreaking youngsters should be treated as regular criminals or as misguided delinquents with potential for rehabilitation. Is the public better served by putting them in adult prisons and keeping them off the streets for years and years? Or does the experience of incarceration only make them more disturbed and even more dangerous?
In Texas the law allows for very strict punishment of juvenile offenders. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, of the 140,000 inmates now housed in its prisons, approximately 2,000 are there for crimes that they committed as juveniles, which state law defines as anyone under the age of seventeen. Nearly a hundred of those inmates committed their crimes when they were only eleven, twelve, or thirteen years old. Of that group, only two have served more time than Edwin. “I’m considered the bad seed, the worst of the worst, all because of one stupid, terrible thing I did when I was twelve,” he told me.
He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Why can’t people understand I’m not that twelve-year-old boy anymore? Why can’t I be given a second chance?”
10. Ending on another fandom note...this is one I follow.
In the current X-men run, current X-men writer/show-runner, Jonathan Hickman, has come up with a rather innovative way to deal with shippers and shipwars. Also a way to get rid of annoying romantic love triangle angst. He's created a polygamous relationship.
Wolverine, Jean, and Scott share quarters on the moon. Jean's room is between theirs, with interconnecting doors from both sides into hers. Also, it's hinted that Jean, Scott, and Emma may share one as well.
That's rather innovative. Instead of choosing one ship over the other -- choose both.
This way Wolvie/Scott, Scott/Jean, Wolvie/Jean, Scott/Emma, and Emma/Jean shippers can be satisfied. Although I'm guessing Wolvie/Emma may be out of luck.
Hickman has also apparently put Magneto/Xavier and Moira McTaggart into a polygamous relationship.
I'm highly amused.
Now, if only Joss Whedon were quite this advanced with Buffy...I think he sort of was, but the network was definitively not.
11. On a Final note? It's freezing here. In the single digits by midnight. No snow though. Not really any rain either. Just jumped from 56 degrees to well 20 degrees with wind chill over a 12 hour period.
Gotta love this time of year. It's dark early. It's cold. It's warm. It can't make up its bloody mind. And...people like to party and drink and eat lots of sugary stuff and lots of carbs...ugh. Bears have the right idea. Wake me up when it's April.
They filmed episodes eight months ahead of schedule, they are going dark for production reasons and network negotiations. This happens all the time. And with most television series. Actors have different contracts. Soaps often have 13 week contracts.
Jason47's Days Website
8 hrs ·
REGARDING THE TV LINE REPORT, CALM DOWN "DAYS" FANS...
TV Line just posted an article about the entire "Days" cast being released from contract. With the show going on an extended production hiatus, this is a necessary business move. With most contract cycles only being 13 weeks, and the show going on hiatus for more than 13 weeks, this was the only possible option.
With "Days" now having taped into July 2020, and written episodes into August 2020, the show was always going to have to suspend production at this point until they get word from NBC about its renewal decision, since they are pretty close to having written the last episode of the current contract.
So, "Days" fans, don't look at this as a reason to worry, or a sign that NBC will not renew the show. This is just a necessary business decision. In fact, in the past, actors whose 13-week cycles ended during previous long production breaks, have quietly had their contracts lapse and then sign new ones when the show returns from break. So this is NOT the first time this has happened. It's just the first time it's been reported to this degree..
https://tvline.com/…/days-of-our-lives-cancelled-cast-fire…/
tvline.com
Days of Our Lives: Entire Cast Released From Contract — Is the End Nigh?
2. How Einstein Learned Physics
I admittedly scanned this. But you might find it interesting?
3. Hmmm...considering I keep everything seemingly forever...this is good advice. How Long Should You Keep Tax Records
One Year
Keep pay stubs at least until you check them against your W-2s. If all the totals match, you can then shred the pay stubs. Take a similar approach with monthly brokerage statements—you can generally shred them if they match up with your year-end statements and 1099s.
Three Years
Generally speaking, you should hold onto documents that support any income, deductions and credits claimed on your tax return for at least three years after the tax-filing deadline. Among other things, this applies to:
Form W-2s reporting income
Form 1099s showing income, capital gains, dividends and interest on investments
Form 1098 if you deducted mortgage interest
Canceled checks and receipts for charitable contributions
Records showing eligible expenses for withdrawals from health savings accounts and 529 college-savings plans
Records showing contributions to a tax-deductible retirement-savings plan, such as a traditional IRA
If you're among those taxpayers who no longer itemize deductions on Schedule A because the standard deduction was basically doubled beginning in 2018, you might not need to hold onto as many documents. For example, if you're not deducting charitable contributions anymore, then you don't need to keep donation receipts or cancelled checks for tax purposes.
Six Years
The IRS has up to six years to initiate an audit if you've neglected to report at least 25% of your income. For self-employed people, who may receive multiple 1099s reporting business income from a variety of sources, it can be easy to miss one or overlook reporting some income. To be on the safe side, they should generally keep their 1099s, their receipts and other records of business expenses for at least six years.
Seven Years
Sometimes your stock picks don't turn out so well, or you loan money to a deadbeat who can't pay you back. If that's the case, you might be able to write off any worthless securities or bad debts. But make sure you keep related records and documents for at least seven years. That's how much time you have to claim a bad debt deduction or a loss from worthless securities.
Ten Years
If you paid taxes to a foreign government, you may be entitled to a credit or deduction on your U.S. tax return—and you get to decide if you want a credit or deduction. If you claimed a deduction for a given year, you can change your mind within 10 years and claim a credit by filing an amended return. You also have 10 years to correct a previously claimed foreign tax credit. For these reasons, save any records or documents related to foreign taxes paid for at least 10 years.
Investments and Property
When it comes to investments and property you own, you'll need to keep some records at least three years after you sell.
For example, keep records of contributions to a Roth IRA for three years after the account is depleted. You'll need these records to show that you already paid taxes on the contributions and shouldn't be taxed on them again when the money is withdrawn.
Keep investing records showing purchases in a taxable account (such as transaction records for stock, bond, mutual fund and other investment purchases) for up to three years after you sell the investments. You'll need to report the purchase date and price when you file your taxes for the year they are sold to establish your cost basis, which will determine your taxable gains or loss when you sell the investment. Brokers must report the cost basis of stock purchased in 2011 or later, and of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds purchased in 2012 or later. But it helps to maintain your own records in case you switch brokers. (If you inherit stocks or funds, keep records of the value on the day the original owner died to help calculate the basis when you sell the investment.)
If you inherit property or receive it as a gift, make sure you keep documents and records that help you establish the property's basis for at least three years after you dispose of the property. The basis of inherited property is generally the property's fair market value on the date of the decedent's death. For gifted property, your basis is generally the same as the donor's basis.
Keep home-purchase documents and receipts for home improvements for three years after you've sold the home. Most people don't have to pay taxes on home-sale profits—singles can exclude up to $250,000 in gains and joint filers can exclude up to $500,000 if they've lived in the house for two of the five years prior to the sale. But if you sell the house before then or if your gains are larger, then you'll need to have your home-purchase records to establish your basis. You can add the cost of significant home improvements to the basis, which will help reduce your tax liability. (See IRS Publication 523 for more details.) Similar rules apply for any rental properties you own; save records relating to your basis for at least three years after selling the property.
4. Inside the World of Guide Dog Drop Outs -- yes, this surprised me too, I didn't know this was a thing. But I guess, it stands to reason...
n this highly competitive training, pup perfection is demanded — and not every student can make it to graduation. Here's what happens to the still very good boys who need a sudden ‘career change.’
When I meet Eddie, a yellow Labrador, at a friend’s family barbecue in Detroit, it’s clear he isn’t like other dogs. He knows how to sit, stay and walk (on- or off-leash), but his best trick is being able to read a room. Whether his role is to greet a guest, play with children or rest his head on my lap as we drink beers by the bonfire, Eddie always does the right thing. All the while, he’s never a nerd about his intrinsic obedience. “Dude, what’s your dog’s deal?” I eventually ask Delia Bryan, Eddie’s owner and a family friend.
“He’s a guide-dog-school reject,” she tells me.
Bryan’s family has raised guide dogs ever since she was a kid, when her sister begged her parents for a puppy and they countered with the idea of raising a guide puppy every year. Bryan’s mother, who ran a home-based daycare and had volunteered for a guide school before having a family, thought it would be a great way to teach her children the responsibility of having a dog, and how to say goodbye to one without it dying. Bryan remembers sobbing though many childhood car rides to send off dogs named Jude, Anthony and Kenny to pursue their careers. (Most were named after Catholic saints or dead relatives.)
Eddie
Like many guide dogs, Eddie, now 6, was born into the system through a breeding program at Leader Dogs for the Blind in Rochester Michigan. While dog owners can attempt to independently train their own service animals, most are bred by guide schools that identify breeds large enough to pull people out of traffic yet small enough to ride public transportation — Labs and retrievers mostly, with the occasional German Shepherd or boxer.
For their first seven weeks, dogs live at school and are carefully socialized by professional trainers, who introduce them to street sounds, other animals and people with funny hats. They’re also given the run of a sensory playroom full of stairs, mirrors and new surfaces to explore.
From there, the puppies are sent to live with volunteers for a year, where they learn basic obedience. Finally, they return to the school for four months of intensive training. Working with trainers, they learn how to lead people from point A to point B; to stop at curbs, stairs and obstacles like tree limbs; and to detect any change in elevation. Dogs live on campus with dog roommates, go on field trips to New York City to ride the subway (some schools even go to the theater) and attend picnics to get acquainted with their new teachers and classmates. It’s more or less dog college.
Throughout, however, they can be booted for health problems, lack of confidence, distractibility, not walking or going to the bathroom on particular surfaces, having an underbite, barking at bearded men, being too high-maintenance and much, much more.
Eddie made it through all of his training before his second birthday and even attended a graduation ceremony. It was there, though, that things went to shit. More specifically, racquetballs did him in. He no longer wanted to graduate as much as he wanted to wag his tail, play fetch and disrupt a very serious ceremony. The balls were put away, but his concentration was broken beyond repair. After the ceremony, the Bryans were told Eddie wouldn’t be continuing his work.
To me, this sounded like entrapment. Not to mention unfair, since it took only one strike for Eddie to strike out. “That’s how they find out how serious the dog really is,” explains Bryan. “It’s like those tough job interviews where they take you out drinking to see how you’ll act.”
“Less than 5 percent of dogs are cut out for service-dog work, and many ‘wash out’ during training,” says Nicole Ellis, a certified dog trainer and pet expert with Rover.com. Ellis estimates that guide-dog students who are trained by their owners instead of schools have about a 20 to 30 percent success rate, whereas dogs who are trained through institutions have a success rate of around 50 percent. The attrition rate is higher than most colleges and companies because people’s lives depend on these dogs making the right decisions. So they aren’t exactly set up for failure, but many of them will due to the nature of the work.
“We don’t say the F-word. We prefer ‘reassigned,’ ‘career-changed’ or perhaps ‘withdrawn,’” says Rob Clarke, the owner of Maddie, a black Lab, who was withdrawn from training after being used to breed other guide dogs. By the time she was done having puppies and training to be a guide dog, Maddie was almost 3 years old and set in her ways. “She was too used to me and not confident in her trainer,” Clarke explains.
So, if I fail at something -- I was reassigned, career-changed or withdrawn? Cool.
5. Continuing with the weird animal stories... When Squirrels Were One of Americas Most Popular Pets
In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.
“Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!”
Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,” according to Katherine Grier’s Pets in America, being relatively easy to keep.
By the 1700s, a golden era of squirrel ownership was in full swing. Squirrels were sold in markets and found in the homes of wealthy urban families, and portraits of well-to-do children holding a reserved, polite upper-class squirrel attached to a gold chain leash were proudly displayed (some of which are currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Most pet squirrels were American Grey Squirrels, though Red Squirrels and Flying Squirrels also were around, enchanting the country with their devil-may-care attitudes and fluffy bodies.
By the 19th century, a canon of squirrel-care literature emerged for the enthusiast. In the 1851 book Domestic pets: their habits and management, Jane Loudon writes more about squirrels as pets than rabbits, and devotes an entire chapter to the “beautiful little creature, very agile and graceful in its movements.” Squirrels “may be taught to jump from one hand to the other to search for a hidden nut, and it soon knows its name, and the persons who feed it.” Loudin also waxes on their habits, like jumping around a room and peeping out from wooden eaves, writing that “an instance is recorded of no less than seventeen lumps of sugar being found in the cornice of a drawing-room in which a squirrel had been kept, besides innumerable nuts, pieces of biscuit.” Loudon’s advice: when your squirrel is not running around the room, provide it with a tin-lined cage that has a running wheel.
6. And yet another one... What Do Animals See in the Mirror?
The idea for a tool to probe the basis of consciousness came to Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. while shaving. “It just occurred to me,” he says, “wouldn’t it be interesting to see if other creatures could recognize themselves in mirrors?”
Showing chimpanzees their reflections seemed like a fascinating little experiment when he first tried it in the summer of 1969. He didn’t imagine that this would become one of the most influential—and most controversial—tests in comparative psychology, ushering the mind into the realm of experimental science and foreshadowing questions on the depth of animal suffering. “It’s not the ability to recognize yourself in a mirror that is important,” he would come to believe. “It’s what that says about your ability to conceive of yourself in the first place.”
Gallup was a new professor at Tulane University in Louisiana, where he had access to the chimps and gorillas at what would later be known as the Tulane National Primate Research Center. The chimpanzees there had been caught as youngsters in Africa and shipped to America, where they were used mainly in biomedical research. By comparison, his experiment was far less invasive. He isolated two chimps in cages, and placed a mirror in each cage for eight hours at a time over 10 days. Through a hole in the wall, Gallup witnessed a shift in the chimps’ behavior. First they treated the reflection like it was another chimp, with a combination of social, sexual, and aggressive gestures. But over time, they started using it to explore their own bodies. “They’d use the mirror to look at the inside of their mouths, to make faces at the mirror, to inspect their genitals, to remove mucous from the corner of their eyes,” Gallup says.
Gallup was sure that the chimps had learned to recognize themselves in the mirror, but he didn’t trust that other researchers would be convinced by his descriptions. So he moved on to phase two of the experiment. He anesthetized the chimps, then painted one eyebrow ridge and the opposite ear tip with a red dye that the chimps wouldn’t be able to feel or smell. If they truly recognized themselves, he thought he knew what would happen: “It seemed pretty obvious that if I saw myself in a mirror with marks on my face, that I’d reach up and inspect those marks.”
That’s exactly what the chimps did. As far as Gallup was concerned, that was proof: “the first experimental demonstration of a self-concept in a subhuman form,” he wrote in the resulting 1970 report in Science. “It was just clear as day,” he remembers. “It didn’t require any statistics. There it was. Bingo.”
But the result that really blew Gallup’s mind came when he tested monkeys, and discovered that they did not do the same. The ability to recognize one’s reflection seemed not to be a matter of learning abilities, with some species being slower than others. It was an issue of higher intellectual capacity. Gallup had obtained the first good evidence that our closest relatives share with us a kind of self-awareness or even consciousness, to the exclusion of other animals. Here, finally, was an experimental handle on a topic that had been the subject of speculation for millennia: What is the nature of human consciousness?
Gallup wasn’t the first to come up with the notion that it might be significant if a person or animal recognizes itself in the mirror. He would only later learn that Charles Darwin had shown mirrors to orangutans, but they didn’t figure the mirror out, at least while he was watching. Darwin had also noted that, for their first few years, his children couldn’t recognize themselves in their reflections. In 1889, German researcher Wilhelm Preyer became the first to posit a connection between mirror self-recognition and an inner sense of self in people.
More than 50 years later, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan conceived of a childhood “mirror stage,” in which mirrors contribute to the formation of the ego. By 1972, developmental psychologists started using mark tests similar to Gallup’s to pin down the age at which children begin to recognize themselves in the mirror: 18 to 24 months.
Meanwhile Gallup, who moved to the University at Albany-SUNY, became interested in whether any non-primates could pass. In the early 1990s, he encouraged one of his Ph.D. students, Lori Marino, to explore the question. Working with Diana Reiss at Marine World Africa USA in California, Marino exposed two bottlenose dolphins at an aquarium to a mirror. Like the chimpanzees, the dolphins learned to use the mirror in a variety of ways, even “having sex in front of the mirror with each other, which we call our dolphin porno tapes,” Marino says. The three researchers published the results, saying they were “suggestive” of mirror self-recognition.
Still, they were missing the crucial mark test for another decade. The biggest hurdle was anatomical: The dolphins didn’t have hands to touch a mark. But Reiss and Marino, by then at the New York Aquarium, designed a modified test. When marked with black ink on various parts of their bodies, the dolphins flipped and wriggled in an attempt to see it, convincing the researchers and many others that they recognized themselves.
7. Ghosts of War in a Wisconsin Forest - An Afghanistan Veteran's struggle with Ecology and Memory
Every day, I start the shift by throwing on my marking gear. It’s not as heavy as my kit in Afghanistan, just an easy 40-odd pounds with the paint. Instead of a blaze orange cruiser vest like the ones my co-workers use, I still take the old tactical vest I wore over my armor back then. The mag pouches hold the Relaskop I use to measure tree height, and the dump pouch holds my clipboard of data cards, with room to spare for the wild mushrooms and onions I collect. Add to that my four-gallon backpack paint sprayer and I’m ready to go.
Sometimes I think about the blood on the vest. You can’t see it anymore; everything I own is splattered with timber-marking paint nowadays. We use water-based paint for marking in pine stands, and oil-based for hardwoods. The water-based paint wears off of hardwood bark after only a few years. My best friend bled on me during a firefight. He had been hit in the fingertip by something minor enough to not notice, but because it was during a fight, the Army would call your family and freak them out no matter how quaint the injury. The paint manufacturer uses citrus oil, so by the end of the day, my beard smells like an orange from the overspray. We didn’t tell our NCOs he had been hurt. He’s been dead five years. He shot himself.
After spending six years overseas, I came back and couldn’t deal with the hectic lower-48 lifestyle, so I went to Alaska. When I first became a forest ecologist, I’d wanted to do research, make the world a better place through learning. But I learned quickly that none of it mattered if policymakers ignored your work. Last year, I decided I needed to be involved in direct management, and took a job in the Wisconsin northwoods. It took 18 months to finally get VA appointments for my TBI and PTS. The doctor tried several medications to help me. One of them made me certain I was having a heart attack. Thinking I was dying, I made peace with God on the floor of my one room cabin. Next time I saw him, the doctor told me to just smoke cigarettes to dull the anxiety. He said he couldn’t do anything for my other symptoms.
I spend my time working in Wisconsin’s second-growth forests, administering timber sales and marking trees for harvest. Old growth takes a long time to regenerate, so I help the process along by cutting to favor the old growth species. In a hundred years or so, I hope my grandkids will walk through the forest and think well of what I did. The next VA doctor told me he thought I was just a drug addict looking to score Xanax when he saw my medical allergies. So I chew nicotine gum like a fiend to keep the edge off.
Each forester has a signature in the trees they select to cut, and those they leave behind. The Alaska VA just threw their hands up after that and left me to my own devices. On my marking crew, I have a guy that leaves trees with cavities for wildlife like bats and birds, and a guy that prefers to leave certain species like the American basswood, which readily hollows out to make an animal habitat as well as producing a small edible seed for birds. I had to be a lab rat in a medical experiment to get care for my brain injury. Every morning I inject the hormone my damaged pituitary gland can no longer produce. Me, I prefer leaving mast species like black cherry and oak, which drop massive amounts of fruit and nuts for wildlife, as well as our forest’s old growth species like white pine, yellow birch, and eastern hemlock. Sometimes when we’re in training or office meetings, just the sound of that many people breathing and fidgeting around me drives me up the wall. Afterward, I find myself alone out in the forest, crippled by the realization that I’ll never be able to cope with close proximity to people again.
Forests aren’t static; each one has disturbance regimes that reset them, segment by segment, until the whole thing is new again. I can’t get the time off work to drive two hours to the local VA frequently enough for mental health services, and the local civilian doctors are useless for combat trauma. Back home in Alaska, fire and beetles did the job. Here, we have periodic wind storms. A thunderstorm passed through today, dropping walnut-sized hail and blowing trees down around me. I thought I might die as I hid under a big sugar maple. I realized that I couldn’t remember precisely how many friends wound up in flag-draped coffins, but that more had died by suicide than from enemy action.
8. Meet Maria Sybilla Meridan -- the Naturalist Who Painted Insects in Living Color
Maria Sibylla Merian was a leader in natural science, an ecologist and an entomologist before those terms existed. Merian looked at the world differently from other naturalists. While men such as Carl Linnaeus worked hard to classify and categorize isolated dead specimens of animals and insects, Merian chose to study them as living creatures. As a result, she witnessed behaviors, changes, and interactions that others could never have seen.
Merian was born in Frankfurt in 1647. Her father died when she was three years old, and her mother married Jacob Marrel, a painter who encouraged Maria to develop her artistic skills and her passion for collecting bugs. Marrel left the family when Merian was 12, and from then she worked to support herself and her mother. She collected insects to paint, and would often stay up late and paint by candlelight to be sure of catching the moment when a chrysalis opened.
One of the boldest choices Merian made was to undertake a perilous expedition to the Dutch colony of Suriname.
After separating from an unhappy marriage, Merian became an unusual figure in 17th century Dutch society. She was a self-supporting female scientist in a time when women were largely homemakers and barred from institutes of higher learning. After moving to Amsterdam in 1691, she taught painting to fund her expeditions.
One of the boldest choices Merian made was to undertake a perilous expedition to the Dutch colony of Suriname. When she arrived there in 1699 with her youngest daughter, Merian was frustrated by the total lack of natural curiosity of the colonists, and their unwillingness to assist her. So Merian turned for help to the enslaved Africans and Indigenous people of Suriname who worked on the Dutch plantations
While Merian lamented some of the harsh treatment of slaves on the plantations, she was certainly no abolitionist herself. She stayed in the territory of the Dutch West India Company, which had become rich by trading people. Merian kept slaves of her own in Suriname, and in so doing, she supported and participated in the colonial practices of her time. Because of this, we have to doubt how willingly assistance was given to her research efforts.
African and Indigenous slaves were instrumental in Merian’s work in Suriname...
We do know that African and Indigenous slaves were instrumental in Merian’s work in Suriname, bringing her samples she might never have reached, and teaching her how to use certain plants. In one story, enslaved Indigenous women showed Maria how some particular seeds were used to terminate pregnancies and spare their own children from enslavement. Merian recorded and used native names for many of the plants mentioned in her book Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.
Metamorphosis was a cornerstone of Merian’s theories of insect life, and was a major way she diverted from common wisdom of the time period. In her 1679 Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung (The Caterpillars’ Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food), she depicted the complex life cycles of moths and butterflies. This directly refuted the generally accepted truth of “spontaneous germination” — the ancient theory that life can come from non-life, such as the idea that insects erupt spontaneously from decaying matter or dust, frogs are birthed from raindrops, and wheat left in a dark corner will produce mice.
Merian’s work was referenced heavily in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), which presented the first systematic classification of species. She received praise from Goethe for her ability to blend art and science. And Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, cited her in his influential work The Botanic Garden. Indeed, she was well regarded by many of her educated contemporaries and received a sponsorship from the City of Amsterdam to support her Suriname expedition.
So why is her name completely absent from the subsequent 300 years of ecology?
So why is her name completely absent from the subsequent 300 years of ecology? In The History of Creation (1866), Ernst Haeckel called Merian “the forgotten mother of animal developmental biology and ecology.” As recently as 1982, she was completely omitted from Ernst Mayr’s Growth of Biological Thought which recounted 2000 years of biological study. Merian’s work was always published under her own name, so there was no chance of her discoveries being mis-attributed to other people. So how was she lost?
Despite the respect and admiration of her peers, Merian’s work did not enrich her family, and she was buried in a pauper’s grave after having to sell many paintings and specimens. In the years after her death, changes were made to her illustrations. The scenes she had depicted accurately, based on meticulous observation, were altered to incorporate imaginary insects and re-colored to be more aesthetically pleasing.
To some, the obvious errors and fictions in subsequent printings of her work were similar to other stories she told – such as a tarantula that can eat a bird, or the notion that ants can build bridges with their bodies, animal habits that we now know to be common in the tropical areas Merian visited.
Illustration of butterflies and a pineapple from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium by Maria Sibylla Merian
Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium
Public domain.
The naturalist Lansdown Guilding took it upon himself to write a scathing critique of Merian and her work, particularly her Suriname illustrations. 100 years after her death, he published Observations of the Work of Maria Sibylla Merian on the Insects of Surinam. Guilding himself had never travelled to Suriname, yet he felt confident enough to publish this text that ridiculed Merian for “careless”, “vile and useless” inaccuracies that “every boy entomologist” could spot.
And yet the sexist tone of [Guilding’s] criticism is impossible to miss.
Of course, his critique was based on the versions of Merian’s books that were altered after her death. And yet the sexist tone of his criticism is impossible to miss. Guilding’s point is further undermined by his dismissal of all observations that resulted from collaboration with African slaves and Indigenous people, whom he considered to be innately unreliable.
With her reputation in tatters, Maria came to be viewed as a silly old lady who made pretty pictures, which continued to be admired in the art world, but were no longer considered scientific.
The record began to be rectified 300 years after her lifetime. In 1993, Sharon Valiant wrote Maria Sibylla Merian: Recovering an Eighteenth-Century Legend. In this piece, Valiant reviews some recent publications of Merian’s work, which included collections held in the Soviet Union, and the first ever English language publication of the re-titled Maria Sibylla Merian in Surinam.
9. The Prisoner - Why Can't People Understand That I'm Not a 12 Year Old Boy Any More? Why Can't I be Given a Second Chance
Every once in a while, Edwin Debrow dreams that he is a boy again. He is standing in a field of freshly mowed grass. It is a warm day, with no clouds in the sky. The sun is on his face. There are no smells of sweat and urine, and there are no sounds of steel doors opening and closing, no guards barking orders, no inmates shouting curses.
Edwin bends down and takes off his shoes. He begins to run—he hasn’t been allowed to run for his entire adult life—and his bare feet feel cool against the grass. He smiles. Soon he is laughing out loud. He throws his arms above his head. This must be what joy feels like, he thinks.
And then he wakes up in his bunk bed, in cell 37 of Building Three at the William G. McConnell Unit, a maximum-security state prison in the South Texas town of Beeville. He shuts his eyes and tries to fall back asleep. He wants to keep running. All he wants to do is run.
***
Just after midnight on September 21, 1991, a San Antonio school teacher named Curtis Edwards was found sprawled across the front seat of a taxi that he drove part-time at night to earn extra money. He had been shot point-blank in the back of the head. It was a gruesome scene: blood and bits of brain were scattered throughout the car. A few days later, police announced they had made an arrest in the case. Edwards’s killer, they said, was a twelve-year-old boy named Edwin Debrow. Apparently, investigators said, Edwin had shot Edwards while attempting to rob him.
At the police department, a photographer from the San Antonio Express-News took a photo of Edwin as he was being escorted down a hallway by a uniformed officer and a detective. Edwin, who was just four feet eight inches tall and 79 pounds, was wearing a T-shirt, basketball shorts, and unlaced high-top tennis shoes. His face was peeking out of a suit coat that the detective had thrown over his head in hopes of protecting his identity.
Almost overnight, Edwin became one of Texas’s most notorious criminals. People were stunned that such a small child could have committed such a cold-blooded killing. A prosecutor for the Bexar County district attorney’s office called Edwin a “sick little monster.” In a speech addressing the problems of the inner city, President George H. W. Bush went so far as to single out Edwin, describing his behavior as “truly horrifying.”
Today, Edwin is 37 years old. He is five feet ten inches tall, and he weighs 170 pounds. He looks a little like the boxer Floyd Mayweather, and because of the exercises he does every day in his cell—endless numbers of push-ups, crunches, pull-ups, and leg lifts—he is built like him too, with broad shoulders, a tapered waist, and biceps the size of baseballs. His head is shaved, and his arms and chest are inked with tattoos. “When my mom comes to see me, she always says I still look young,” Edwin told me during one of our conversations. “But I know she’s only trying to make me feel better. I know I’ve got the prison look.”
“The prison look?” I asked.
He gave me a thin smile. “The look of someone who’s not going anywhere soon.”
Edwin has been behind bars since the day he was arrested: he is now more than halfway through a forty-year sentence that a juvenile court ordered him to serve as punishment for Edwards’s murder. Although he has been eligible for parole since 1999, the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles have refused to release him, always citing the severity of his crime. If he continues to be denied parole, he will not be released until September 2031. He will be 52 years old.
For decades, the members of the criminal justice system have argued about what should be done with kids who commit violent crimes. Lawyers, judges, police officers, politicians, and victims’ rights advocates have debated whether lawbreaking youngsters should be treated as regular criminals or as misguided delinquents with potential for rehabilitation. Is the public better served by putting them in adult prisons and keeping them off the streets for years and years? Or does the experience of incarceration only make them more disturbed and even more dangerous?
In Texas the law allows for very strict punishment of juvenile offenders. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, of the 140,000 inmates now housed in its prisons, approximately 2,000 are there for crimes that they committed as juveniles, which state law defines as anyone under the age of seventeen. Nearly a hundred of those inmates committed their crimes when they were only eleven, twelve, or thirteen years old. Of that group, only two have served more time than Edwin. “I’m considered the bad seed, the worst of the worst, all because of one stupid, terrible thing I did when I was twelve,” he told me.
He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Why can’t people understand I’m not that twelve-year-old boy anymore? Why can’t I be given a second chance?”
10. Ending on another fandom note...this is one I follow.
In the current X-men run, current X-men writer/show-runner, Jonathan Hickman, has come up with a rather innovative way to deal with shippers and shipwars. Also a way to get rid of annoying romantic love triangle angst. He's created a polygamous relationship.
Wolverine, Jean, and Scott share quarters on the moon. Jean's room is between theirs, with interconnecting doors from both sides into hers. Also, it's hinted that Jean, Scott, and Emma may share one as well.
That's rather innovative. Instead of choosing one ship over the other -- choose both.
This way Wolvie/Scott, Scott/Jean, Wolvie/Jean, Scott/Emma, and Emma/Jean shippers can be satisfied. Although I'm guessing Wolvie/Emma may be out of luck.
Hickman has also apparently put Magneto/Xavier and Moira McTaggart into a polygamous relationship.
I'm highly amused.
Now, if only Joss Whedon were quite this advanced with Buffy...I think he sort of was, but the network was definitively not.
11. On a Final note? It's freezing here. In the single digits by midnight. No snow though. Not really any rain either. Just jumped from 56 degrees to well 20 degrees with wind chill over a 12 hour period.
Gotta love this time of year. It's dark early. It's cold. It's warm. It can't make up its bloody mind. And...people like to party and drink and eat lots of sugary stuff and lots of carbs...ugh. Bears have the right idea. Wake me up when it's April.