Country Life and Christian Surrogacy
And bilateral gynandromorph birds
The beautiful and idyllic rural Chinese farm life of Liziqi
I saw popular Chinese vlogger Liziqi (李子柒) for the first time this week. She makes beautiful, almost hypnotic videos in which she lives on a farm in rural China and, for instance, shows you the entire process of growing sweet potatoes and then turning them eventually into noodles.
This is not a sufficient description, and many of her videos are 15 and 20 minutes long (for instance, when she shows you the entire year-long process of creating silk from silk worms).
They are incredibly sweet, beautiful, and soothing. I’m completely addicted to them.
Apparently there has been some recent legal issues — she felt her partners were trying to overcommerialize her content — so she hasn’t made videos for a bit. But the rumor is that she’ll be returning soon, to the delight of her eighteen million subscribers on YouTube and at least twice that on Chinese sites!
She’s a really fascinating person. Orphaned at a young age, she moved in with her grandparents. She took various jobs to care for her grandmother when her grandfather passed away before discovering that her videos about crafts and making food could make enough money to support them. She’s said she “just wants people to know where their food comes from.”
If you’ve never thought to yourself, “I’d like to move to Szechuan province and live on a farm,” get ready. Watch a few of these videos and you’ll be ready to go!
Bruce Reyes-Chow invited me and Kathy to talk on BRC & Friends
Another podcast talking about LOVING DISAGREEMENT! Really enjoyed our time with Bruce!
My Body, Their Baby
This week on the Fascinating Podcast we had the honor of talking with Dr. Grace Kao about her book My Body, Their Baby, and about her time as a surrogate mother and the many, many theological and ethical and practical questions that come out of surrogacy. It was an incredibly interesting conversation!
Hey, it’s a bilateral gynandromorph!
The bird you see above is called a honeycreeper. The male honeycreeper is blue, and the female is green.
You might look at the honeycreeper in the photos above and think, “Huh, that bird is both blue and green” and you would be exactly right. You might wonder whether the bird above is male or female and the answer is “yes.”
Here’s how it works.
A female bird has a malformed egg (one that doesn’t split into two, basically), and it gets fertilized on both sides. The bird that is born from this is born half male and half female. Birds have W and Z chromosomes, so if you took a genetic sample on on side of this bird it would be ZW and on the other side it would be ZZ.
This is (comparatively) common in certain types of animals like reptiles or insects, and sometimes obviously it happens with birds, too.
For instance, you know I’m sure that male cardinals are red, and female cardinals are more taupe colored.
So you probably know what’s happening here:
More on that amazing honeycreeper here.
And more thoughts about the gynandromorph cardinal here1.
Isn’t Nature amazing?!
Merry Christmas from Bruce and all of us
It’s pretty great having a rabbit as part of the family. And in the winter Bruce starts getting more cozy. He likes to sit in our laps (he never does this during the summer) and LOVES to get on the ottoman and get pets.
Sure, he might occasionally bite through your Christmas lights, completely blacking out your tree and forcing you to put the “lowest” lights two feet from the floor, but on the other hand Christmas trees are delicious and it’s hard to see those green cords, so no one is suggesting he’s biting through the lights on purpose.
What’s great is that while a rabbit snacks on a Christmas tree, there’s also plenty of cover from hawks or other birds of prey that might see you through a window or something.
And it makes a pretty great place for a nap when your snacking is all done.
Merry Christmas from Bruce. If you’re a rabbit, he hopes you get some applewood sticks like these. If you’re not a rabbit, Bruce really doesn’t think it’s appropriate for you to have a stick and he WILL snatch it from your hand and fling it around.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Peace and joy to you and yours, and may the new year bring new experiences of joy and happiness.
— Matt
If you were in my “word clues” English class in high school, you’d probably see that the word gynandromorph tells you exactly what its definition is: gyn/female, andro/male, morph/shape.