RenoVous

It's going to be a weird one, with celebrations being cancelled and bars being asked to close....but I still gotta be festive!  We'll just "Green and Beer It!" Today is also my mom's birthday as well as our Chewber's birthday.  He's 9 years old today. So have at it, post about St. Paddy's Day or Coronavirus cancellations, or whatever!! Cheers, and be safe!!

Keira Knightley Gugu Mbatha-Raw Aidy Bryant Talia Ryder Rosamund Pike Eiza Gonzalez Celine Dion Chloe Sevigny Meghan Markle Liu Yifei Vogue

We're dropping the "Fun" this week since we're going to look at the very serious situation of the Coronavirus. Locations with confirmed cases. At this time in the United States, there have been 1,629 reported cases and 41 deaths. Washington alone has 457 cases, the highest in the country. There's a lot of information flying around the internet so I'm only sourcing from the CDC and WHO. Coronavirus itself is not new, but we are currently experiencing a new strain which has been named SARS-CoV-2.  COVID-19 is an abbreviation for Coronavirus 2019.  This, and other so called "betacoronaviruses" originate in bats and it is believed that this new emergence came from an animal reservoir in the Wuhan region of China.  This is the first pandemic of a coronavirus, so there was little research on hand - previous pandemics have been novel influenza viruses. From the National Institute of Health COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, and symp...

Obvious State Come, divine lyre, speak to me and become a voice. Sappho was born around 620 BC on the island of Lesbos in Greece.  Her poetry was lyrical and she was nicknamed the Tenth Muse.  It is believed that she composed more than 10,000 lines of poetry in her time. Many of her poems are only in fragments now, the full volumes having been lost to history. I like this fragment most, I think. The stars around the beautiful moon Hiding their glittering forms Whenever she shines full on earth Silver... One of a few poems that survived in full is her "Ode to Aphrodite." There are no reliable images of Sappho, but in one poem she referred to her hair as "now white but formerly black," and there is this representation of her from 470 BC. Wikipedia Poetry

Sierra Arts Well, this is my first time hearing of this day, and how clever it is! Mario debuted as Mr. Jumpman (a carpenter) in Nintendo's 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game.  In 1983, Nintendo released Mario Bros, in which Mario and his brother Luigi are plumbers, battling creatures that are coming up from the sewer.  In 1987, Super Mario Bros launched on the Nintendo Entertainment System and is now considered one of the greatest video games of all time - also one of the bestselling games of all time. I didn't have NES growing up, but I did get a Gameboy - I played and beat the game a number of times in my childhood.  And then we got the Nintendo 64.  I remember the first time I played, how crazy it was to move in all directions!! Now this one I never did beat, but I got to the end a number of times.... Days of the Year Wikipedia

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The finding is just over a year old, but I only recently saw the article, so hopefully this is new to you too! A recent study suggests that plants, such as the evening primrose, can hear buzzing bees and they sweeten up their nectar in response. Ears, as we understand them, are not necessary to detect the presence of sound waves.  Scientists found that the petals "hear" for the plant, and are tuned to the low frequency of a bee's hum.  This makes sense when we consider the shape of many flower's petals - conical or cupped, like the dahlia. The team exposed the flowers to five settings: silence, the buzz of a bee from 4 inches away, as well as low, intermediate, and high pitched sounds produced by a computer. Blossoms exposed to silence and intermediate to high frequencies waves produced baseline sugar.  The blossoms exposed to the bee's buzz and low frequencies increased their sugar content 12-20 percent within 3 minutes. To confirm th...