Failure to befriend sheep

At long last: victory over funding agency

CC found a run-on sentence in the instructions of a funder to whom you have probably applied for money more than once, and if you are like me, have been rejected multiple times, despite spending hours of your and your loved one's time ensuring that your proposal contains no run-on sentences.

Cretinism

In the mid nineteenth century, so I read yesterday, European psychiatrists rushed to cure the dread condition "cretinism" and its attendant intellectual disability, stunted growth, and remarkable facial abnormalities.

But what caused it? Some were like: "hereditary degeneration." Other guys said: living in swampy areas, or soil conditions. They found it spreading in remote villages in the Swiss Alps, with some hamlets entirely populated by "cretins."
(Appenzell--likely former home of many Swiss cretins.)

So, perhaps like you, I am trained to think about culture and imagination, and I am thinking: is this (yet again) elite Europeans gazing at impoverished Europeans and seeing biological degeneration rather than the actual economic and political inequalities producing poverty? But why is this happening in the Swiss Alps, not in urban slums?

So, of course, being a trained historian, I google image searched "cretinism."


OK! And people: that is not just the bourgeois imagination. Indeed, it's hyperthyroidism, caused by iodine deficiency, and it was common in Alpine villages prior to better food distribution systems because the soil in those valleys lacks iodine.

But then the imagination comes back in force, because the theory of "degeneration" so popular in nineteenth century Europe (Morel)--decadent culture, the decline of the race, the madness of the crowd, etc.--began with a study of these Swiss villagers with hyperthyroid. Degeneration won out as the explanation for what ailed them, but actually, the guys who were for the 'bad soil' explanation were correct.

Bibliography
Pick, Faces of Degeneration
Wikipedia

Bananas

I truly love the heck out of bananas.
You know, it is not like they themselves are the tastiest food ever. It's more like, they just go great in everything. They make everything better! Pancakes, smoothies, frozen blueberries, snack-time when you have nothing else to eat!

You can freeze them and then mash them up with frozen blueberries: so delicious!