“For the Indians living inside the Rocky Mountain Range in the far North of Canada, the successful nutrition for nine months of the year was largely limited to wild game, chiefly moose and caribou. During the summer months the Indians were able to use growing plants. During the winter some use was made of bark and buds of trees. I found the Indians putting great emphasis upon the eating of the organs of the animals, including the wall of parts of the digestive tract. Much of the muscle meat of the animals was fed to the dogs. It is important that skeletons are rarely found where large game animals have been slaughtered by the Indians of the North. The skeletal remains are found as piles of finely broken bone chips or splinters that have been cracked up to obtain as much as possible of the marrow and nutritive qualities of the bones. These Indians obtain their fat-soluble vitamins and also most of their minerals from the organs of the animals. An important part of the nutrition of the children consisted in various preparations of bone marrow, both as a substitute for milk and as a special dietary ration.”

As reported in Weston A Price’s 1939 classic, Nutritional and Physical Degeneration (pp 232-233 of the 8^th edition)

It is surprising to me—to most of us, I suspect—that people who had successfully hunted big game such as moose and caribou would hand over the muscle to their dogs. We love our steaks a lot. Such people, Price’s book makes clear, knew something that we do not. Their healthy teeth, skulls and bodies demonstrate that fact. It is not that we should not be eating the muscle of animals, but that we should be eating all of their other parts as well.

Given that all of the large planets in our Solar System have rings, and that Mars has been suggested to have once had a ring, the question arises: did Earth ever have a ring?

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• Scientists are thrilled to discover that Doritos dye makes mice transparent! What could go wrong?

• Language evolved a long time ago; at least tens of thousands of years later we invented writing. Then the alphabet. But it took a long time after alphabets existed before alphabetical order occurred to anyone, and an even longer time before it took hold.

• How girls and boys respond differently to bad teaching. Related: School marms, Gwen Walz, and what women apparently don’t get about men.

Orange Food and Transparent Mice

There is a common food dye—known poetically as FD&C yellow 5, also as tartrazine—which is largely responsible for the orange color of Doritos.

There is also a desire, among researchers of a certain stripe, to observe the insides of research animals while they’re still alive. It’s less destructive that way, and certain scientific questions can’t be asked of dead animals, only of live ones. Trouble is, skin is opaque. (Although there are some neotropical frogs, known as glass frogs, for whom this is not the case. You can see right through their skin, into their organs.)

So a research team set about trying to figure out whether there might be a molecule that would alter how the tissues of animals—specifically of mice—interact with light. FD&C yellow 5—aka tartrazine—emerged as a likely candidate. Sure, it turns Doritos orange, but it turns lipid-and-fluid-rich-tissues transparent.

Paint it on mice, and their skin disappears. Wash them off, and their skin becomes opaque once again. What could go wrong?

In fact, this seems like a kind of ingenious if creepy revelation, but I was struck by the following line in Nature’s reporting on the research (which was published in Science).

“because tartrazine is a food dye, it is safe to use on living mice”

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1. Research out of the University of Michigan finds that it’s better for the environment for you to buy “conventionally” grown food than to grow it yourself. How very embarrassing for everyone involved.

2. Where did shoulders come from? (hint: nearly the same place as did jaws, and the middle ear bones of mammals! Ooh, we get to go back to comparative anatomy lab and think about skeletal evolution…); and

3. Insight from an author whom I disdained when forced to read her in high school, but about whom I have since come around: Edith Wharton.

Here we go:

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This was in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, the heyday of Publishers Clearing House. On a regular basis, they sent big envelopes that bulged with garish paper, stickers and  exclamation points, and offers too good to be true, to American households across the land. These mailings were like car crashes to me—horrifying, and I could not look away.

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“The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom. Hundreds and hundreds of years before Islam was even invented.”

– Melanie Phillips on Triggernometry

I have no special insight on this madness. I know what I see on-line, but I don’t how much of what I see is real. None of us do. I am concerned that it is not what it seems—that it is, somehow, even more than what it seems.

I wrote a long rambling piece about my personal relationship with Judaism, but it doesn’t belong here, not now. For now, I will just say this:

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We live in an age of utter nuttery:

• Journalist Róisín Michaux posted a picture, taken at the Free University of Brussels, of a sticker in a bathroom that reads “Real straight men fuck trans women.”

• The maternity and neonatal health providers at a hospital group in England’s National Health Service have decided that “vaginal birth” offends birthing women who don’t think they’re women. So as not to offend the deluded, “frontal birth” is the term the providers at NHS are now using. To me, this invites the question of what other kinds of birth are available. Has anyone tried an ass birth?

• At the shallow end of the pool, an actress who played Princess Diana in The Crown declared herself “non-binary” in 2021, and has now begun to show up places in her underwear (sort of—it doesn’t really look like underwear to me). Look at me! She is screaming to the world. Look at me! Oh, sorry: They is screaming to the world.

In pitch perfect response, onto the scene comes Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and host of the podcast “You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist.”

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No, I’m talking about the middle ground scramble1, where talking heads and power brokers and would-be intellectuals see vaguely that they have been wrong, and work to position themselves as if they hadn’t been wrong. It’s tricky, though, because they need to do so without stepping outside of the Overton Window, wherever it happens to be right now. You have to feel for these people. It’s a delicate game, figuring out how to be precisely current, saying everything up to but nothing beyond what you are allowed to say today. It’s an entirely social game, one with little if any reference to the reality of the topics being discussed. Time being zero-sum and all, it must cut into these people’s ability to get other things done—things like learning something about the reality of the topics being discussed.

This week in Things That Caught My Eye: higher ed’s half-assed embrace of scientific dissidents; Megan Rapinoe’s confused feminism; and some truly awesome parenting.

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I thought I might write about tribes this week. Or about (more) ways that cheating is becoming not just common, but celebrated (how to beat women in the 21^st century!). Or about the rules of the road, in the wake of almost being flattened by a pickup while riding my bike (spoiler: I was following the rules of the road, while the driver of the pickup most definitely was not). Perhaps next week. This week, I find myself unexpectedly not in a position to write about anything. The reasons are good. There is nothing wrong. I just won’t have the usual time that I do for writing, or the usual internet.

So—for paying subscribers only—here are some other things that have caught my eye recently, which I recommend. From medical hubris to Barack Obama to how to get a husband, here we go:

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