Houston's Weekend Planning Sunday Fourth of July events and Weekend Reads and events: The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped #Covid Kill

City Centre is hosting an Independence Day celebration featuring live music, mostly pop and country, and ending with a 15-minute fireworks show.

Parking will be $10, cash only, in all CITYCENTRE garages beginning at 4 p.m. Parking will be $10, cash only, in all CITYCENTRE garages beginning at 4 PM. Please allow extra time for parking before and after the event due to large attendance; carpooling and ride-sharing such as Uber are highly encouraged. We will have a designated area for rideshare pick up and drop off centrally located so that guests can have the most accessible experience.

Independence Day Parade & Fireworks Celebration starts in Galveston with a Fourth of July parade and ends with a fireworks show.

The City of Galveston said the parade, sponsored by Marine Corps League, will begin on Seawall Boulevard at 59th Street and proceed east to 27th Street. Fireworks will follow at 37th Street and Seawall, officials said. July 4, 7 p.m. Seawall Boulevard between 59th Street and 27th Street

Kemah Boardwalk will be celebrating Independence Day with an evening of live music and a patriotic fireworks show over Galveston Bay. (Fireworks begin at 9:30 p.m.)

July 4th Sale! Up to 60% Off + Extra 20% off Select Sale Items with code FOURTH! Shop now at Macys.com! Valid 6/28-7/5

“The Wendy Williams Show,” taped live in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, is in its twelfth season, an eternity in daytime years. It averages more than a million live viewers a day, with hundreds of thousands more catching up online. Its audience—“Wendy watchers,” in the show’s parlance—regards the fifty-six-year-old hostess as an ultra-fabulous, in-the-know gal pal. Williams came to prominence as a radio jock, and she has a talent for talking to millions of people (her viewership is mostly female, but she also has a big gay following) and making them feel like they’re on a dishy phone call with a friend. “Traditionally, for women at home, watching a daytime-TV show is ‘me time,’ ” Alexandra Jewett, a programming executive at Debmar-Mercury, the show’s production company, told me. “It’s a very intimate experience.”
. . . more @New Yorker.com

Early one morning, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.

Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person. The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks? Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day.

. . .read more @WIRED.com

In the late 1700s, a large percentage of Europeans feared the tomato.

A nickname for the fruit was the “poison apple” because it was thought that aristocrats got sick and died after eating them, but the truth of the matter was that wealthy Europeans used pewter plates, which were high in lead content. Because tomatoes are so high in acidity, when placed on this particular tableware, the fruit would leach lead from the plate, resulting in many deaths from lead poisoning. No one made this connection between plate and poison at the time; the tomato was picked as the culprit.

Around 1880, with the invention of the pizza in Naples, the tomato grew widespread in popularity in Europe. But there’s a little more to the story behind the misunderstood fruit’s stint of unpopularity in England and America, as Andrew F. Smith details in his The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery. The tomato didn’t get blamed just for what was really lead poisoning. Before the fruit made its way to the table in North America, it was classified as a deadly nightshade, a poisonous family of Solanaceae plants that contain toxins called tropane alkaloids.

One of the earliest-known European references to the food was made by the Italian herbalist, Pietro Andrae Matthioli, who first classified the “golden apple” as a nightshade and a mandrake—a category of food known as an aphrodisiac. The mandrake has a history that dates back to the Old Testament; it is referenced twice as the Hebrew word dudaim, which roughly translates to “love apple.”

. . . more @Smithsonian.com

Charles Darwin was an introvert. Granted, he spent almost five years traveling the world on the Beagle recording observations that produced some of the most important scientific insights ever made. But he was in his twenties then, embarking on a privileged, 19th-century naturalist’s version of backpacking around Europe during a gap year. After returning home in 1836, he never again stepped foot outside the British Isles.

He avoided conferences, parties, and large gatherings. They made him anxious and exacerbated an illness that plagued much of his adult life. Instead, he passed his days at Down House, his quiet home almost twenty miles southeast of London, doing most of his writing in the study. He occasionally entertained a visitor or two but preferred to correspond with the world by letter. He installed a mirror in his study so he could glance up from his work to see the mailman coming up the road—the 19th-century version of hitting the refresh button on email.

.. . more @Literary Hub.com

Houston's Weekend Planning Guide

Sunday July 4, 2021

July 4th, 2021 Events in Greater Houston

Weekend Sunday Reads

Wendy Williams
Dishes the Dirt

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill

Why the Tomato Was Feared in Europe for More Than 200 Years
How the fruit got a bad rap from the beginning.

On the Link Between Great Thinking
and Obsessive Walking
From Charles Darwin to Toni Morrison, Jeremy DeSilva Looks at
Our Need to Move

Nicole Krauss’s Beautiful Letter to Van Gogh on How to Break the Loop of Our Destructive Patterns

"But as our terror of losing control compels us to grasp for order and certainty, we all too often end up creating patterns that ultimately don’t serve us, then repeat those patterns under the illusion of control."

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