Year: 2018

For December 26, 2018         Hi WN@TL Fans,   A reminder:  WN@TL goes dark tonight as we take a break, a respite, a hiatus, a breather.   It’s Peanut Butter & Jelly Time, as the Sergeant would call out every hour.   We join Janus in looking back and looking ahead, with some retrospection …

or December 19, 2018         Hi WN@TL Fans,   It’s a long, long way from the 5th Century to the 15th. Entire centuries can stretch between milestone years in western European history: 410, 732, 1066, 1215, 1347, 1453.    When I was a kid the era was routinely called The Dark Ages. The moniker …

For December 12, 2018        Hi WN@TL Fans,   Humans seem to admire bees.  Humans stick bees with multiple analogies.  They are anthropomorphic metaphors, mostly favorable. Bees have queens and workers and drones.  Bees live in colonies, they build combs, upon which they wax on.  A select few dine on royal jelly.  Bees dance, …

For December 5, 2018         Hi WN@TL Fans,   The motorcycle is a surprisingly pervasive player in the movies, music and mindset of America. The movies go back at least to Charlie Chaplin in Mabel at the Wheel in 1914, and to Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. in 1924. Here in Wisconsin, UW Cooperative Extension is still mighty proud of the photo from 1912 …

For November 28, 2018         Hi WN@TL Fans,   Mr. Magoo’s superb rendition of Scrooge from 1962 wrecked me for all other versions of Dickens’ most enduring character.  His impact was matched in fearsome factor by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Be in its deathly hood and wretched crooked finger pointing, pointing, pointing at the …

For November 21, 2018         Hi WN@TL Fans and UW Science Alliance,   WN@TL goes dark tonight.  This afternoon is an apt time for some affirmative appreciation of the good people, places and programs in science outreach that help make WN@TL possible and that enrich the constellation of science outreach opportunities all across UW–Madison.   WN@TL is possible because …

For November 14, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, Well, that was a weekend of astonishing images to commemorate the end of The Great War.  Growing up, I didn’t know much about it. My Grandpa Zinnen was in the Army in 1918 and I think he fought the battle of Camp Funston, the one in …

For November 7, 2018         Hi WN@TL Fans,   Elections have consequences, as the saying goes.  Sometimes, the drivers of elections seem to spiral along in a repeating helix of history.  In 1916 Woodrow Wilson was re-elected President after running on a promise to keep the US out of the European War.  In …

For October 31, 2018         Hi WN@TL Fans, I was cued up last week to cite my two favorite trees, the key ones in the Garden of Eden—The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil—and then came on Saturday the news of the slaughter of 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of …

For October 24, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, Corn is astonishing, corn is astounding, corn is amazing. Corn has separate flowers, male and female, with the golden tassel on top and the silky ear on the side.  Separate flowers make it possible to easily produce hybrid seed through detasseling. Corn is the USA’s most …