Posts by slthomson@earthlink.net

Wood Frog

Posted by on Oct 19, 2023 in Animals | 0 comments

Photo courtesy of the National Park Service

I’ve been preparing a presentation for a school about nonfiction writing, based on Save the…Frogs! and it occurred to me that I have not yet posted about the wood frog.

Such a simple name, such an unassuming appearance–but this frog is amazing. It lives north of the Arctic circle and in the winter it freezes. It’s a frog-shaped lump of ice. In the spring it thaws out and hops back to a perfectly normal form of life.

How can it survive being frozen? Turns out one reason freezing is so deadly is that ice expands. Freezing a living being means that when water inside the cells freezes, it ruptures the cell’s membranes.

But the wood frog can replace most of its internal water with glucose. Glucose does not expand when frozen. So the frog freezes, thaws, and lives.

Frogs really are incredible.

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A Sad Week

Posted by on Oct 12, 2023 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Gratitude to Kranich17 at Pixabay for this image.

It’s hard to post today; when I lift my head from the work I’m doing, I’m overwhelmed with sadness and fear and a sense of the worst moments of our history repeating in front of our eyes.

I’m grateful in this moment for the books I read as I was growing up and in my adulthood that helped open my eyes and heart. Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye. And many more. If more of us read books like this, would the world be better, kinder, safer? I hope so.

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Banned Books Week

Posted by on Oct 5, 2023 in Politics | 0 comments

Alyssa Roseberg and Greg Sargent have an excellent piece in the Washington Post called “It’s Banned Books Week. Here’s How To Fight for Libraries.”

Read it.

One huge takeaway–those who want books banned are a vocal but tiny minority. Sixty percent of all book challenges in the US in 2020-2021 were filed by 11 people.

Eleven people. Fewer than a dozen. Eleven people in a country of 335 million deciding who should can have access to Stamped and George and Genderqueer and The Hill We Climb and It’s Perfectly Normal. Eleven people who think they get to decide not what they are going to read, but what we all should get to read.

Folks, that is not majority rule. That is not democracy. That is not freedom of speech, knowledge, or information.

That is not right.

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Vegetable Lambs

Posted by on Sep 28, 2023 in BOOK: Griffin's Boy, Fantasy | 0 comments

From an 1887 book called The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary…copied from Johann Zahn’s Specula Physico-Mathematico-Historica Notabilium ac Mirabilium Sciendorum

Another delightful creature to be featured in The Griffin’s Boy: the vegetable lamb. According to legend, these lambs grew on stalks, rather like fruits, but would die if plucked–or starve if they grazed alway all the foliage in reach.

Either way, a short and difficult life for the poor little thing. Its wool was said to be exceptionally fine.

It’s possible the vegetable lamb is based on the cotton plant–which does, to be fair, produce a wooly substance that can be made into a very nice fabric.

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