1. Happy birthday to Sir William Gilbert, half of Gilbert and Sullivan and the librettist responsible for “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.“
2. Science may be inching ever closer to giving us lab-grown meat. It reminds me of all sorts of science fiction.
3. Here’s something to ponder from Ed Abbey, whom I always thought of as curmudgeonly. But maybe he wasn’t as hard as I thought:
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.