To be determined

I think that the prevalence of charming side characters points to something that Dracula adaptations often miss: This is ultimately a story about humanity being good. 

The book is absolutely chock full of examples of people being good to each other: from the Romanian woman who gave Jonathan - a complete stranger - a rosary to keep him safe, to the suitors being good friends even after they realize they all proposed to the same woman, to the unnamed second mate taking watch when everyone is exhausted, to Mina talking to a lonely old man, to the people of Whitby preparing a funeral for the unnamed Captain of the Demeter and trying to befriend the dog.

When it comes down to it, this is about people banding together and helping each other. I find that adaptations often go very light on that aspect in favor of focusing on the charisma of the monster or the push and pull between Van Helsing and the Count. But the background of people caring about each other is very necessary to the story of the monster who feeds on them.

I should read those low fantasy Byzantine girlboss books. Half a dozen zillennial Catholic feminist mutuals of mine can't all be wrong.

.😏.

Pre-revision Exsultet, aka my favorite chant in the world.

Scheduling this from the midst of COVID-19 quarantine in the third week of Lent, because even if—as looks likely—we’re still alone in our homes come Easter, I am looking forward with confidence to the day when we’re together again, pushing back the dark with the paschal flame, and this verse from the revised translation has new resonance:

Sunsets! Some more daily landscape paintings.

The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Brian Davies (via newlyorange)

Winter sun Setting, Boston  -   Sam Vokey

American, b. 1963 -

Oil on canvas , 21 x 24 in.

Her name is Katalin Karikó. Hungarian. Daughter of a butcher. Her thesis work became the basis of the mRNA vaccine technology. Read the article here.

My favorite bits from the article include how Dr. Kariko celebrated the fact that the vaccines that used her mRNA research worked

“On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works,” she said. “I thought so.”

To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself.”

I cried at work yesterday because I spent my whole shift imaging lichens from the collection of this one particular German botanist from the 1880s, and at some point in the middle of it the “quiet handing of the baton” nature of it all got to me. 140 years ago, another person across the Atlantic ocean gathered and labeled all these specimens in the name of the great, ongoing story of science, and there I was, using a machine they never could have dreamed of to photograph and file away their work in the latest step to immortalize it for the scientists who come long after both of us as best I could.

I don’t even know their first name, and they died long before I was even born, and yet there we were, two people united in quiet contribution to the same work despite our distance from each other in space and time – with every chance that someday, another person may look at the pictures I took long after I’m gone, too, and add their own chapter, ad infinitum.

Also, you know, some of them were pretty cool lichens.

“What, so just because there’s a crisis we’re not calling shit like we see it?”

When we lose our respect for aesthetics, the Klingons win.

Middle Earth Travel Posters - Created by Beverly Arce

Prints available at Gallery Nucleus. You can follow the artist on Instagram.