Of Myths and Nuts

NUTTY:  It's the time of year when chestnuts aren't yet roasting on an open fire, but they are falling all over the streets and sidewalks of Seattle.


For CJ and I on a walk today (while Annabelle was in art class), the chestnuts presented a learning opportunity. 

I pointed out to him that the chestnuts on the track in the southeast corner looked *very* different than the ones in the northwest corner. 

One type was edible and is coveted. The others, the squirrels won't even touch.

So, we collected some specimens and compared and contrasted the chestnuts.

The ones on the left are the 'horse' chestnuts (Aesculus hippocastanum). They grow in a green, somewhat spiky pod that looks almost like it's made of plastic or vinyl. The  leaves are large, and relatively smooth along the edge. One end is wider than the other, which tapers. It's a bit of a teardrop shape. And the nuts are big! But even the critters leave them alone.  

The other chestnuts (in the beech family Fagaceae, native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere.) are in very spiky coverings that are light wheat colored and oh so sharp when mature. ALL of the nuts were gone from the many, many pods we found along the track. We did find one green pod, and dug the underdeveloped nut out of it. But even if it had been full size, it would have been considerably smaller than the 'horse' chestnut.

We talked about how closely the two types of trees might be related (as it turns out, it's only distantly), and why and how the two different types had come to be.

CJ kicked a horse chestnut for a quarter mile today, all the way around the track. Turns out the nuts, also called 'conkers' are used in a game of the same name played by British children.  Interestingly, horse chestnuts are poisonous to equine, but deer are able to digest them. Perhaps the most famous horse chestnut tree is one Anne Frank wrote about in her diary. Interestingly, horse chestnuts have some medicinal value, including in treating chronic venous insufficiency, according to the National Institute of Health.

IT'S ALL GREEK: CJ began taking a weekly drama class recently. It was announced that the group would be staging the play "Ariadne's Thread," which he was told was a story based on the ancient Greek myths of Theseus and the Minotaur. 

CJ will explain a bit more about the story of Theseus and the Minotaur ... 

Every year, King Minos, ruler of Greece, decides to make human sacrifices every seven years to feed the Minotaur, a beast hiding in the center of the Labyrinth. Apparently, the people forcefully sent on board the ship were, according to Wikipedia, "the seven most courageous youths and the seven most beautiful maidens", one of which was Ariadne, one of King Minos' daughters. Theseus, feeling that this is wrong, decides to go with the people on board the suicide ship to Crete, where the Labyrinth was, hoping to able to slay the Minotaur. On the boat, Ariadne falls in love with Theseus, and gives him a ball of thread so he could trace his way out of the Labyrinth.

The rest of the story can be read in multiple places, and there are several variations on the story. I look forward to taking part in our school's production.

Sounds like a delightful story, doesn't it? ;)

We have requested a copy of a book from the public library with the myth in it, but in the meantime, we turned to YouTube to see if there were any versions of it to be found. There most certainly were.

We first watched a short (3-minute-ish) animation done in ink about the story. It was interesting. 


We also found a gem of a retelling, a nearly half-hour episode from what apparently is a series, "Mythic Warriors: Guardians of the Legend," a Canadian-produced animated television series that , according to a post on YouTube was "a fixture of CBS' Saturday-morning cartoon lineup. The show featured retelling of popular Greek myths that were altered so as to be appropriate for younger audiences".

We watched Episode 12 from season 1, "Theseus and the Minotaur."

• https://youtu.be/c5TK0PnXMz4
  

CJ would like you to know that 'despite the fact that (the animation above) reeks of the '80s, it was actually done in 1998.

EARTH SCIENCE WEEK:  The first week of October, we always spend time on Earth Sciences thanks, in large part, to this amazing packet of materials we get in the mail like magic on an annual basis.

I *think* it's from signing up on the Earth Science Week Web site years ago: http://www.earthsciweek.org/materials

We took a good look at this great poster about The Anthropocene today. 

Annabelle summarizes s few of the things she learned from it ...

I recently read an educational poster by HHMI Biointeractive called “The Anthropocene: Human Impact on the Environment”. The poster included multiple facts about how humans are changing the environment. Humans are doing things like overfishing, which can take vital parts of the food chain away, leading to other fish or birds going hungry. Humans also shape the land for their needs, such as cutting down trees to make room for houses or farms. The population on Earth has been rapidly increasing, so even more are needed just so everyone can survive. With a growing population, even more people are traveling, which leads to invasive species being let into places they shouldn’t be.

SMILE TIME: Rather than ending the blog post on a downer (above), why not end with a smile? 

Specifically, an edible goofy grin. 

The kids had a little get together with some peers today, and we decided to take some smiles along.

We'd seen lots of pictures on Pinterest, etc. Basically, it meant taking two apple slices for lips, and using mini marshmallows for teeth. The recipes we read called for using peanut butter to stick it all together. That would have worked well and tasted good, but I was afraid some of the kids might have peanut allergies. So, we decided to try marshmallow creme.

 We tinted it pink and tried putting it on the apple slices (after drying them off). It didn't work. It just slid all over the place. Bummer.

So, I whipped up some stiff buttercream frosting as an alternative. That did the trick.

Not our best work, but the kids seemed to like them.