10 Things: Bird, Artichoke, Ghost
What to enjoy, examine, hear, smell, cook, sip, and consider this week.
Hello! Welcome to an email where I tell you about some things I’ve really been enjoying over the past seven days. And I have ELEVEN this week, which is ONE MORE than ten. This is math. This is how math works.
Three free above the fold, and recipes, songs, and photos of plants for the paid subscribers. (Become one!)
THIS NEW SONGBIRD!!!
THERE IS NO PIECE OF NEWS I COULD LOVE OR HAVE EVER LOVED MORE THAN THIS. (Thanks to Kat for the tip.) A new songbird hybrid has been discovered by a birder in Pennsylvania. Things to love about this:
It is the opposite of a bird going extinct.
It is a cross between a rose-breasted grosbeak and a SCARLET TANAGER. For personal reasons, I turn upside down about tanagers, and so should you — for your own reasons.
That means that two gorgeous songbirds saw each other and were like, “You are beautiful, let’s mate” to each other. ROMANTIC!
Yes, birds definitely have aesthetic preferences like that. I will not entertain argument to the contrary.
This bird was discovered by a regular man who just likes birds a lot, and it was discovered using the excellent and amazing Merlin app, which allows you to record bird sounds on your phone and it IDs them. An app has done a cool thing that is better than anything any other app has ever done.
They didn’t have to kill the bird to verify its newness. They took some blood, and they let him go.
A mushroom grow kit
I bought a pink oyster grow kit from Far West Fungi for $25. It worked really fast, and was mind-blowingly cool.
It will produce mushrooms at least two more times (and maybe even three), and then I can put what’s leftover in my garden as mulch. It has already paid for itself, mushroom-wise. It was also just such a pleasure to watch and notice and learn about as it grew.
We cooked these mushrooms, and I was impressed by how they looked like salmon. We put them on a flatbread, and it was my favorite possible flatbread. I will buy more of these, forever, until I am dead or out of money or they are no longer available.
More “Maintenance Phase.”
After last week, I started listening to lots of episodes of “Maintenance Phase” because a reader told me it had shifted their perspective on fatness and bodies. I’m hooked. I have listened to six episodes now and found all of them to be well-researched, illuminating, and interestingly (funly!) reported. (Spell check is trying to say that “funly” isn’t a word, which is so unfun of the spoilsport that is spell check.) The episode that changed my mind the most was the one about “Supersize Me” (it was anti-“Supersize Me,” and even after Morgan Spurlock had his “me too” moment, I didn’t realized how problematic this film was; it was so important to Young Activist Sophie). The one I found most fascinating was the one about calories.
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