Help Select Rice Salad Photo

I have a rice salad recipe that I am planning to post. I created two versions of the photo of the rice salad. Which rice salad photo do you prefer? (top or bottom)

Thank you!

Magnolia, Cherry Blossoms of Spring

This post is all spring blossoms. Enjoy these magnolia buds.

If you walk down North Eighth Avenue in Highland Park, you can see trees in bloom – magnolia trees.

Cherry blossoms are also beautiful.

I love seeing magnolia flowers on the ground with dandelions. The blossoms don’t last – maybe you can see them for two weeks each spring?

Periwinkle with dandelions – this is a different version of the photo I posted yesterday. That post had reflections on recent events; today, I just want to relax among spring blossoms.

What blossoms of spring appear in your neighborhood?

For more Nature Notes:

Notes on Lecture with Dandelion and Periwinkle

I have hopes to write a Nature Notes post this week and maybe a recipe for rice salad. If not, they will show up next week. Meanwhile, a few notes of interest:

• I had the opportunity to attend a lecture at Rutgers by Professor Maud Mandel on
  Muslims and Jews in France: Genealogy of a Conflict. In a tiny nutshell, her premise was to “question past monocausal explanations” (I believe she meant she was suggesting more than one cause). Her book is coming out in January 2014; here are a few of the causes she mentioned:
  1. Jews from Algeria made citizens of France; Muslims were not. (1870)
  2. North African Jews had welcome from established Jewish community; Muslims had no one, initially.
  3. In 1968, Maoists (a group of Leftists) tried to convince Algerian Muslims to side with Palestine. The Maoists equated Palestine with Vietnam. At first, it didn’t work, but later it caught on.
  4. For two years Muslims and Jews worked together on racism (SOS Racisme), but then that fell apart. (1984)

  Rutgers Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life hosts free lectures like this one in the spring and fall; see Public Events.

• On The Prosen People blog of Jewish Book Council you can read the April Jewish Book Carnival.
• I published an interview with marketing director David Rekuc: Blog Interview on Marketing, eCommerce and Edison, NJ. Looking to interview other central New Jersey business people, especially those who make good use of social media, websites and/or blogs.

Note about the photo: I love the combination of dandelions with all the purples of this season. I purposely left a few in my front yard, to complement the grape hyacinths, creeping phlox and purple deadnettle. The periwinkle/dandelion photo is actually in a yard a block from my home.

Birds at Philadelphia Zoo and Bird Migration, Too

On the way he meets a lady oriole – she warns him not to fly down into what we know is a big city. Maybe the big city is in Texas. Otis is tempted by all the shiny lights. Bang! He flies right into a shiny, reflective tall building. He also finds out there is little food in this shiny, bright city.

It all ends happily – he makes it down to South America, finds the lady oriole, and at the movie’s end, they are building a nest together back in the north.

At the avian center there is a section of African Savannah birds – this is an African Starling. Doesn’t look like the starlings we see in North America, does it?

Another African Savannah bird: here is an Egyptian plover. An Egyptian plover has a black crown and underparts of pale orange. It was quite warm in this part of the avian center – I suppose all these African Savannah birds would prefer a climate warmer than that of Philadelphia.

The black birds above were not part of any exhibit of birds at Philadelphia Zoo, but they were not afraid of the crowd at the zoo.

If you don’t watch where you are going at the zoo, you might run into a peacock.

Should I count this upside-down bird on the carousel as one of the birds at Philadelphia Zoo?

I learned at the bird migration movie that cardinals, unlike orioles, do not migrate. So if I keep feeding the cardinals in my backyard, maybe they will stick around all summer.

• • •

What do the birds in your area do? Do they hang around all winter or do they migrate? Do you know? How could you find out?

For more Nature Notes:

Review at the Zoo with Giraffes

On My Blog

• Families of the Holocaust: Too Many Tragedies
• Book Review: Ester and Ruzya

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

• Michelle is recovering from breast cancer surgery, and she is blogging about … taking care of herself by resting.
• Lorri has been reading and reviewing books. I hope to read this book called Triumph and Tragedy about life in Poland and its Jewish communities.
• Stuck on what to blog about? Jeri has an exercise that might help.
• Just because you read a study in a well-known newspaper does not mean it is a well-done study: Chris Kesser talks about confounding factors in this article on Red Meat and TMAO. “The healthy user bias is one of the main reasons it’s so difficult to infer causality from epidemiological relationships. For example, say a study shows that eating processed meats like bacon and hot dogs increases your risk of heart disease. Let’s also say, as the healthy user bias predicts, that those who eat more bacon and hot dogs also eat a lot more refined flour (hot dog and hamburger buns), sugar and industrial seed oils, and a lot less fresh fruits, vegetables and soluble fiber. They also drink and smoke more, exercise less and generally do not take care of themselves very well. How do we know, then, that it’s the processed meat that is increasing the risk of heart disease rather than these other things—or perhaps some combination of these other things and the processed meat?”