Congress will consider, and may pass, a bill officially designating the bald eagle the United States’ national bird.“Wait — what?” Americans will say. “Hasn’t the bald eagle been the national bird since, like, the 18th century?”Many think so, including Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources. But the bald eagle, although featured on the Great Seal of the United States and emblazoned on the country’s passports, currency, postage stamps and military uniforms, was never formally named the country’s avian representative.That could change thanks to the legislation, which was spearheaded by the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minn., an effort initiated by an avid Eagle Center supporter and collector who discovered the oversight and sought to make the bird’s role official.States have state birds (Minnesota’s is the loon, of course, since 1961). The United States has a national mammal, the bison, as well as a national flower, the rose, and tree, the oak. But no national bird.
"Feeling Good" (also known as "Feelin' Good") is a song written by English composers Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. It was first performed on stage in 1964 by Cy Grant on the UK tour.Nina Simone recorded "Feeling Good" for her 1965 album I Put a Spell on You. The song has also been covered by other famous artists [list at the link is extensive]... In 2022, American Songwriter ranked "Feeling Good" number one on their list of the 10 greatest Nina Simone songs.
"... word began spreading of a forthcoming three-drug combination from Vertex. In clinical trials, neither patients nor doctors are told who is on the placebo and who is on the experimental drug. But in this trial, everyone could tell. The triple combo made patients’ lung function jump by a shocking 10 percentage points. Overnight, they woke up smelling for the first time the distinctive scent of their home. They could even taste their sweat becoming less salty. This was Trikafta.In the fall of 2019, Trikafta was approved by the FDA... Jenny received her first box of Trikafta on November 17, 2019, at the end of yet another two-week hospital stay. She had gotten sick again in Nashville. Actually, she had been fighting off a cold before she left, and despite assiduously staying in her hotel room to keep up her treatment routine, she felt an infection settling into her lungs. At the conference, she heard a lot about Trikafta, but she didn’t expect to get it so quickly. CF centers were being inundated with calls from patients asking for the new drug.In the hospital in Utah, she recorded a video that she sent to her sister with CF, Teresa, who now lived in Ohio. She is sitting on her hospital bed. “My Trikafta is here,” she says, her voice shaking and her eyes tearing up. The miracle drug she had been promised her whole life was now in her hands.Teresa was also able to start the drug not long after. For her, Trikafta’s impact was immediate and unmistakable. The Purge [expectoration of voluminous amounts of sputum] started on the drive back from the doctor’s visit where she took the first dose. The mucus coming up was so thin that she was confused; it was nothing like the sticky gunk she’d had to work so hard to cough up. A month later, she went back for a sweat test, and her salt level was normal. Based on the results, you would not know she had cystic fibrosis.“I think of it like, ‘Oh, back when I used to have CF,’ ” Teresa said on a recent call with Jenny and me. “I don’t feel like I have CF. I feel completely normal.” She has been able to stop using her vest and inhaled medications, freeing up that time for her adopted children and the farm where she lives with her family. Before Trikafta, every small exertion was a negotiation with her lungs. Should she go upstairs? How many breaths would that take? Now she’s running around milking the goats, trimming their hooves, throwing 30 bales of hay into the barn..."
The Tre Cime di Lavaredo (Italian for 'Three Peaks of Lavaredo'), also called the Drei Zinnen (German for 'Three Merlons'), are three distinctive battlement-like peaks, in the Sexten Dolomites of northeastern Italy. They are one of the best-known mountain groups in the Alps.
It all felt a bit, as some social media users described, like apostrophe hell: Would it be Ms. Harris’s and Mr. Walz’s or Ms. Harris’ and Mr. Walz’s? The Harrises and the Walzes? The Harrises’ family home and the Walzes’ family dog? It was enough to see double, made worse by the fact that stylebooks, large news organizations and grammar geeks were all split or contradicted one another.
People can easily pronounce the plural or possessive of Harris or Walz, both of which contain epenthetic schwas, Ms. Holliday said. When a word ends in an S or Z sound, we insert a schwa — the “uh”-like sound that can be represented by any vowel in the English alphabet — to break up a block of consonants.
I've set it to start after the first minute of silliness. For the TLDV crowd, if 18 minutes is too long, just use the slider to hear the 11:28 - 13:00 segment. I'll close comments for this; I don't have time today to be curating arguments.
“I feel like us US Swifties should mass organize and help campaign for Kamala Harris and spread how horrendous Project 2025 would be to help get people’s butts down to the polls in November,” the 22-year-old posted to his 70,000 followers. He added a sobbing emoji. “Like if we don’t want democracy to end we really need to move and push blue votes.”Fourteen thousand likes later, the coalition Swifties4Kamala was born. Dozens of people signed up to help and run accounts on X, Instagram and TikTok, as well as strategize activities and communications. Within three weeks, Swifties4Kamala amassed more than 180,000 followers across its social media platforms...Long dismissed as unserious, in part because it has long been thought of as the domain of women and young people, fandom is now a potent political force in the 2024 elections – an election in which young women and LGBTQ+ people are expected to vote, rally and otherwise participate in politics at historic levels...Memorably, the first fandom to seize on Harris’s candidacy was not the Swifties, but the Angels, fans of the singer Charli xcx. Hours after Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, Charli xcx tweeted: “kamala IS brat,” a reference to her album Brat and its brash party-girl aesthetic. The internet was immediately awash with green-tinted supercuts of Harris – the Brat album’s signature color – while CNN reporters tried to decode the meaning of “brat” for less online audiences at home...In 2022, after Swift urged her millions of Instagram followers to vote, Vote.org recorded more than 35,000 voter registrations. Ticketmaster’s botched rollout of the Eras tour led to a 2023 Senate hearing. Swift’s endorsement is one of the coveted prizes in the 2024 election; although she has not said anything about this year, the odds are not looking good for Donald Trump and JD Vance. Not only did Swift endorse Democrats in 2018 and 2020, but she is also probably the world’s most famous “childless cat lady”...
Podium worship by Elsa Garrison (400mm, 1/250th sec, f/3.5, iso 2500)
“To me what makes this picture special is that it embodies the Olympic spirit: athletes supporting and celebrating each other. Throughout the week I had been following Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, the American gymnasts, on social media and in their interviews. They had been singing the praises of the Brazilian gymnast, Rebeca Andrade, so I had a feeling that if Andrade were on the podium they would do something special. My colleagues were photographing the ceremony down on the ‘field of play’, so I went up to the lower bowl and found a spot that was as close to head-on as possible. I chose the lower bowl so that I could still see their faces, but I was also high enough to get a clean background.”
"Hannah Huckabay regularly combs livestock auctions online for horses she can rehabilitate and train at her Colorado ranch. But when she saw a video in February of a mule for sale in Kansas, she could hardly believe what she was seeing.The stocky animal’s short black mane shot straight up like a mohawk, and its white belly stood out against its tan coat. As it nervously paced in its corral, Huckabay said it bore a striking resemblance to Przewalski’s horse, a critically endangered species she’d learned about while studying equine science.“I was like, ‘There is no way. That is not a mule,’” Huckabay recalled thinking. “That’s a purebred Przewalski.”Such a find would be incredibly rare. Once extinct in the wild, around 2,500 Przewalski’s horses remained worldwide as of 2022. They’re native to Mongolia and in June, seven were reintroduced to nearby Kazakhstan as part of an effort to return them to their natural habitats. They are the only truly wild horse remaining (mustangs are feral horses).But scientists say Huckabay’s hunch appears to be correct. Hair samples from the animal Huckabay purchased — along with a second horse recently surrendered at a Utah sanctuary — were sent to Texas A&M University’s animal genetics lab. Both appear to be Przewalski’s horses, said Rytis Juras, the genetics lab’s director who tested both samples..."
