Doodles

I just saw Frankenweenie with my mom, as it is a dreary and miserable rainy day, plus a just had my boyfriend leave to go home. I'm a huge Tim Burton fan, and anyone else who enjoys his films will love this one! This is a movie that is 100% Tim Burton-esque. I love that it was shot in black and white, and I also really enjoyed the references to Mary Shelley's original 'Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus' as well as older versions of the story as well. You can read more about the trivia here if you've seen it already: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1142977/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv

Otherwise, I highly recommend it. It is a cute movie and is uplifting despite the 'death' of a beloved animal.

The modern ecosystem of icy Antarctica is some 33.6 million years old, new research finds, with a system dating back to the formation of the polar ice caps.

The date is revealed by fossilized remnants of plankton found inAntarctic sediments, which show how plankton diversity plummeted when a big chill came along at the end of the Eocene Epoch and the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. Before the transition, Earth was a toastier place, and a wide array of plankton survived even at the poles.

The study, published in the journal Science in April, focused on single-celled plankton called dinoflagellates, which contain materials that fossilize. Before the Eocene-Oligocene transition about 34 million years ago, Antarctic dinoflagellates were extremely diverse. When the ice pack formed, however, only plankton that could survive cold temperatures and a seasonal freeze-melt cycle remained.

Antarctica's ice pack is the floating sea ice that melts in the summer and freezes in the winter. At melt time, plankton in the Southern Ocean surrounding the continent get busy, chowing down on the nutrients freed up from the melting ice. The consequences are global, said study researcher Carlota Escutia of the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences in Spain.

"This phenomenon influences the dynamics of global primary productivity," Escutia said in a statement. Primary productivity is the basis of the food chain: Photosynthetic organisms such as plankton take sunlight and nutrients such as iron and nitrate and turn them into organic compounds. Larger organisms then eat the plankton and make use of those compounds to provide themselves with energy.

"The great change came when the [plankton] species simplified their form and found they were forced to adapt to the new climate conditions," Escutia said.

The icy ecosystem that formed after the Eocene is marked by high plankton numbers in the spring and summer, which sets off a short-lived feeding frenzy as plankton-eating species such as whales gorge themselves while they can.

"The explosion of dinoflagellates adapted to a temporary sea ice cover testifies to an in-depth reorganization of the food web in the Southern Ocean," study researcher Jörg Pross, a paleoclimatologist at Goethe University in Germany, said in a statement. "Our data suggest that this change may have promoted the evolution of modern baleen whales and penguins."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

North vs. South Poles: 10 Wild Differences

Image Gallery: Life at the South Pole

Antarctica: 100 Years of Exploration (Infographic)

Metamorphosis XI, 1

"About the first watch of the night, when as I had slept my first sleep, I awakened with sudden fear, and saw the moon shining bright as when she is at the full, and seemingly as though she leaped out of the sea. Then I thought with myself that this was the most secret time, when the goddess had the most puissance and force, considering that all human things be governed by her providence; and that not only all beasts private and tame, wild and savage, be made strong by the governance of her light and godhead, but also things inanimate and without life; and I considered that all the bodies in the heavens, the earth, and the seas be by her increasing motions increased, and by her diminishing motions diminished."

-Apuleius as he looks out on the sea and wonders at the might of the Universal Goddess of Isis.

Okay, so part of what I want to do with my blog is review books that I have read. My mom and I share books and I'm always reading, especially during the summer. My favorite genre is historical fiction, so get ready for that to be the majority of my book review topics. 

SO that caveat being stated, my mom and I both read Daisy Goodwin's The American Heiress. I am obsessed with Downton Abbey, and the front of this book promised to help those who are suffering from withdrawals while waiting for season 4 to come to the States. My mom finished it before I did, and she was very very unhappy with the ending. However, I like to give things a chance, so I kept reading it while keeping her opinion in mind.

Don't get me wrong...I liked the book a lot. I was a history major in college and I'm going into history for grad school in the fall. I thoroughly enjoyed the back of the book where Goodwin wrote about some research she did and things of that nature. That aspect was very interesting.

That being said, this book gave me anxiety. No, I'm serious. Any book lover will tell you that books invoke certain emotions. After all, isn't that why we read them? However, Daisy Goodwin's book gave me the sort of deep-rooted, penetrating feeling of unrest and dismay the further I got in the story. Obviously it is a love story set in a time period where love isn't so easy to come by, but The American Heiress is a deeper inquiry into the life of an American woman whose wealth allows her to go abroad and marry into a social standing that is not usually open to foreigners without a title. The storyline is very good, it kept me reading until 3am (seriously), however, I just became more and more frustrated and, to be honest, pissed off, as I continued. 

That's not to say that you shouldn't read her book! It was good! I swear!

But...don't expect something like...hmm...oh I don't know, Pride and Prejudice.

So, I made this recipe for my parents and I a few days ago, and they were extremely pleased with it! However, this is to be taken with a grain of salt (haha) because this was also the first meal I cooked at home since graduating college. Thus, my parents may or may not have been lying about how good it actually was. However, I personally found it to be very delicious, if only a little difficult to juggle everything. I'd watch out for splatters with the butter...I not only burned myself but I ruined one of my favorite shirts! Even with a splatter guard!! You can guess which one I was more upset about...

Either way, the fish was very good and a better cook than I would have an easier time deftly flipping the fish without incurring burns. The vegetables were actually my favorite part of the meal. The green beans were done to perfection, and I love cherry tomatoes any time. I added one of those wild rice packets that microwave in 90 minutes, and I felt that it was a perfect side to everything else. As you can see in the below picture, I forgot to document my meal triumph before eating some of it...sorry I'm not sorry?

 http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/tilapia-with-green-beans-recipe/index.html