And never wash your hands. “If you see something out of the ordinary, follow it,” chemist Bob Filler advises science students in the IIT newsletter Perspectives on the Professions (January 1991). “Those tangents are sometimes where the interesting science is.” Nutra-sweet, for instance, “was discovered in Skokie about fifteen years ago. A researcher went home and noticed that his food was sweet. His wife said, ‘I put nothing in it.’ He said, ‘Oh yes you did.’ It turned out that he hadn’t washed his hands completely when he left the lab. He went back and realized that he had discovered a non-caloric synthetic sweetener.”
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Jane Byrne redux. “Though she was a disastrous mayor…she was the victim of sexism at the hands and mouths of the ugliest men imaginable,” writes William J. Leahy in Leahy’s Corner (February 1991). “The press used every unflattering photo of her that they could. Those Washington supporters who claimed that they were the first to beat the Machine lied. She was the first. Widowhood forced her into domestic isolation, and when she took power she resorted to the only weapons that women are allowed to have by men: gossip, backbiting, shrieking, quick changes of mind, tantrums, and all the rest that we men force women into. Daley is too small a man to take her in from the cold. She could easily head his administration’s efforts on behalf of women or perhaps as an ambassador for tourism for Chicago.”
Swamped. George Bush’s “no net loss” policy on wetlands is not working, according to a Lake Michigan Federation study: “Of 1,995 permits granted between 1986 and 1989 to dredge and fill wetlands or navigable waters in the U.S. portion of the Great Lakes Basin, only 73 permits required wetlands to be mitigated….For every acre gained in the Basin through mitigation, 1.87 acres were permitted to be destroyed.”
“No one says of a person building his dream house, ‘Does he really need so many rooms?’ nor of an author, ‘There she goes publishing another novel. Can’t she just settle down and enjoy the two she’s already written?’ But a couple expecting their fourth or fifth baby is discussed all over town,” writes Jo McGowan in U.S. Catholic (March 1991). “People who write books or build houses or play musical instruments all have to achieve their goals with sacrifice. The point is that the goal should be worth it. In the case of children, there no longer seems to be a consensus on this question.”
