ARE THEY BERRIES?
People eat over 100 billion bananas every year. The fruit is a worldwide food staple and is one of the top-selling items in supermarkets. The use of bananas dates back thousands of years. They were introduced to the Western world in 327 BC when Alexander the Great invaded India. As a result, banana plants (Musa acuminata) play an essential role in the world’s diet.
The banana plant is called a “banana tree,” but it’s technically a herbaceous plant. It looks like a tree, but it has no woody tissue. Instead, the trunk consists of tightly packed layers of leaf sheaths emerging from partially buried corms. When the plant matures, it stops producing new leaves and forms a flower spike. The bananas grow from the flower spike, also called the “banana heart.” Many varieties of bananas vary in taste and usage, with some eaten raw and others cooked. Depending on the variety, bananas may be green, yellow, red, purple, or brown when ripe. The most common and popular in global commerce are the yellow Cavendish bananas.
Banana plants benefit their ecosystem as a habitat for small animals and as a food source. Many creatures rely on banana plants for shelter. Bananas also provide an essential component of the diet of animals such as monkeys and fruit bats. If those animals don’t have enough food, the impact will be apparent throughout the food chain. In this way, banana plants can influence apex predators such as jaguars or pythons.
We should be thankful for banana plants because their fruit gives many health benefits. Bananas are rich in fiber, vitamin C, potassium, essential amino acids, iron, magnesium, and antioxidants. In addition, eating bananas can help with weight loss, intestinal disorders, and boosting metabolism.
You probably didn’t realize that bananas are technically berries. Botanists define berries as fleshy fruits without a stone and growing from a single flower with one ovary. By that definition, bananas, cucumbers, and tomatoes are berries, but raspberries and strawberries are not. Whatever you call them, banana plants provide a tasty addition to the vast web of life.
WW2. A Shoebill that survived the bombing of the Berlin Zoo is housed and cared for by its keeper in her bathroom. Ca. 1943/44.
Photo: Scherf, Zoo Archive
Sultan the Pit Pony Caerphilly, Wales
There is huge sculpture built as a tribute to the pit ponies of Wales you might never have noticed. Sultan the pit pony is made from thousands of tons of waste material left behind when Penallta Colliery closed in the 1990s.
At 200 metres from hoof to muzzle, a galloping pony frozen in time is an imposing monument to the industry which drove Britain through the industrial revolution and put Wales at the centre of world shipping and trade.
Sultan the Pit Pony sits on the site of the Penallta Colliery, which is now a country park popular with dog walkers and families, a few miles north of Caerphilly. Its magnificent mane, hooves and slender body are shaped from the tons of waste coal shale rock that was left on the site when the colliery closed in 1991.
From ground level, the giant pony looks like an unremarkable set of small hills that you might walk right over without knowing what is right under your feet. However, with the recent growth in the use of drones, the true scale of the great sculpture is much easier to see, having remained difficult to view in its entirety since it was created in the 1990s. Designed by Welsh sculptor Mike Petts, it took three years to complete the earthworks between 1996 and 1999.
Sultan was designed to serve a dual purpose. As well as a path for walkers trailing along Sultan's spine, a seating area in its giant nostril and a bench in its ear, the imposing mass of the sculpture acts as a wind break to protect the Parc Penallta events area adjacent to it. Giant hoof prints are scattered around the field above Sultan's head. In rainy periods, these fill with water and become pools to attract wildlife to the park.
Sultan's body is covered in grass, but the black coal shale it is made of is exposed at points to give definition to the hooves, tail, mane and eyes.
The name Sultan comes from one of the last pit ponies in Wales. When the sculptor of the Penallta pony designed the earthwork, the now-retired Sultan was still alive and a well-loved reminder of the lost coal industry. The sculpture was soon christened Sultan by people locally.
In total, 60,000 tons of coal shale rock were used to bring Sultan to life and be enjoyed by the descendants of the miners who hauled the coal out of the earth at Penallta to power steam engines in trains and ships. Great earth mounds made from millions of tons of waste material dragged out of the mines by men and ponies became massive slag heaps in the valleys of Wales and still dot the landscape to this day. Many have been incorporated into the scenery or planted with trees to keep them stable and less of a mark on the lush green hillsides of the valleys. They are a lasting reminder of the long-closed deep mines of Wales and the people and animals who worked in them.
The Penallta pony sculpture is perhaps the most imaginative use of a slag heap in Wales and is the largest earth sculpture in the UK. It is a fitting tribute to the thousands of hardy ponies that pulled millions of tons of black gold out of the bowels of the earth in the hot and dangerous work of coal mining in Wales during the 19th and 20th centuries. Pit ponies were used into the 1990's.
Coal mining was the driving force of the Welsh economy for decades, with thousands of miners working the country's deep coal mines until the last one closed in 2008. The industry left its mark on the cultural as well as geographical fabric of Wales, with over a million people in Wales working in coal in the 1920's. Today, the figure stands at just 5,000.
Sultan the Pit Pony will at least keep the memory of the pit ponies of Wales, and the miners who led them, alive, as an impressive and lasting tribute to their sacrifice.
Source: Wales Online Image: Sultan the pit pony one meter long
The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation.
The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world.
The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence.
The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.
There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance. ~Alain de Botton
(Book: The School of Life https://amzn.to/3Z3voA9)
(Art: Photograph of Paul Newman and wife Joanne Woodward)
💯
Today in 1431, Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake at the Old Marketplace in Rouen, at the age of just 19. Captured in battle and ransomed to the English, she had been put on trial for a host of crimes, from heresy to cross-dressing. It would be her refusal to give up the latter that would eventually see her condemned to death.
Read more here: https://www.historyhit.com/1412-joan-arc-born-france
Isaac Granger Jefferson (1775-c. 1850) was an enslaved tinsmith and blacksmith at Monticello. His brief memoir, written down by an interviewer in 1847, provides important, fascinating information about Monticello and its people.
Isaac was the third son of two very important members of the enslaved labor force at Monticello.
His father, Great George Granger, rose from foreman of labor to become, in 1797, overseer of Monticello — the only enslaved individual to reach that position — and received an annual wage of £20. Isaac's mother, Ursula Granger, was a particularly trusted enslaved domestic servant whom Thomas Jefferson had purchased in 1773. Ursula was a pastry cook and laundress; her duties included the preservation of meat and bottling of cider.
Isaac Granger Jefferson:
Isaac Granger, thus, spent his childhood on the mountaintop near his mother and from a very young age, he would have performed light chores in and around the house. He himself speaks of lighting fires, carrying fuel, and opening gates.
Because he and his parents accompanied the Jefferson family to Williamsburg and Richmond when Jefferson was governor, the young Isaac was witness to dramatic events in the Revolution. In his reminiscences he recounted his vivid memories of 1781, including Benedict Arnold's raid on Richmond and the internment camp for captured slaves at Yorktown.
Probably about 1790, Isaac Granger began his training in the metalworking trades. Jefferson took him to Philadelphia, where he was apprenticed for several years to a tinsmith. His own account is the only source of our knowledge of this aspect of his working life. He learned to make graters and pepper boxes and finally tin cups, four dozen a day. A tin shop was set up at Monticello on his return, but he recalled that it did not succeed. He also trained as a blacksmith under his older brother "Little George" and, sometime after 1794, became a nailer as well, dividing his time between nailmaking and smith's work.
By 1796, Granger had a wife, Iris, and a son, Joyce. At this time he worked extra hours in the blacksmith shop, making chain traces for which Jefferson gave him threepence a pair. Also in 1796, according to Jefferson's records, Isaac Granger was the most efficient nailer. In the first three months of that year he made 507 pounds of nails in 47 days, wasting the least amount of nail rod in the process and earning for his master the highest daily return — the equivalent of eighty-five cents a day.
In October 1797, Jefferson gave Isaac and Iris Granger, and their sons Squire and Joyce, to Maria and John Wayles Eppes as part of their marriage settlement.7 Thomas Mann Randolph was in need of a blacksmith at the time, so he hired Isaac from Eppes.
though records are fragmentary and inconclusive on this point. Isaac and his family moved to Randolph's Edgehill plantation in 1798. A daughter, Maria, was apparently born soon after.
As some of Granger's memories indicate his presence at Monticello in Jefferson's retirement years, he may have accompanied the Randolphs to reside there in 1809.
Tragedy stuck in 1799 and 1800, when Isaac's parents and brother Little George all died within a few months of each other. The persistence of an African heritage at Monticello is indicated by the fact that, in their illness, the members of this family consulted a black conjurer living near Randolph Jefferson in Buckingham County.10 Shortly after Great George Granger's death, Jefferson gave Isaac $11, the value of "his moiety of a colt left him by his father."
In 1812 an Isaac belonging to Thomas Mann Randolph ran away and was caught and imprisoned in Bath County.
We have as yet no way of knowing if this was Isaac the blacksmith. Randolph owned at least one other Isaac in this period.
How Isaac Granger gained his freedom is also unknown. He reported that he left Albemarle County about four years before Thomas Jefferson's death. He met and talked with the Marquis de Lafayette in Richmond in 1824. In 1847, he was a free man in Petersburg, still practicing his blacksmithing trade at the age of seventy-two.
His reminiscences, taken down by the Reverend Charles Campbell in that year, do not reveal whether he took the surname Jefferson by choice or whether it was imposed on him by a white official, as was the case with Israel Gillette Jefferson, his fellow member of the enslaved community.
The fates of Iris, Squire, and Joyce Granger are unknown. Isaac had a wife, apparently not Iris, in 1847. Campbell wrote that Isaac Jefferson died "a few years after these his recollections were taken down. He bore a good character."
Further Sources Jefferson, Isaac. Memoirs of a Monticello Slave. Edited by Rayford W. Logan. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1951