Slightly Dryad 🌿

Curating a digital commonplace to help me live life lovingly. Adoring the Beautiful, adorning the dark. “What is all this juice and all this joy?”

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

Two poems from Ursula K. Le Guin:

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

Fantastic

[𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀 @Old_But_Gold50s]

The transitions between each section are incredibly smooth. It’s so good that I got completely absorbed in this arrangement and almost forgot about the original soundtrack.

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

@NatureUnedited Okay, may require Totoro squirrel

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

Few can write as hilariously and humanely as Dickens. One minute you’re tearing up at all the pathos of Dan Peggotty, and then gasping for breath at Wilkins Micawber’s flourishes. So, so good.

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

@Briellefine The 7th circle of Hell

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

“ALSO…”

[Spencer A. Klavan @SpencerKlavan]

You didn’t know that you need to hear Olivia Colman reading this 1618 list of gentle demands from a lady to her husband. But you do.

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

I can’t take this seriously (the apple!) and I don’t really like full cast audiobooks, but 𝘋𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢 is a perfect October book, and the Greg Wise audiobook is quite good.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First clip of Jonathan Bailey and Ella Purnell recording lines for Audible's audiobook adaptation of ‘DRACULA’.

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

Inferno within, inferno without

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

@interesting_aIl Roy Kent penguin

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

🤩

[Jessica Meir @Astro_Jessica]

Milky Way with a Moonlit Earth. Compare this to my previous Milky Way view and behold the power of our Moon! The Earth is so awash in Moonglow it looks like daytime, complete with blue oceans and continental outlines. The Moon just keeps on giving - even more motivation to return there with the @NASAArtemis program!

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

Please, please read myths and fairytales to your children. Today my students had not the slightest idea who King Arthur was, and it made me very sad.

[Letters of Note @LettersOfNote]

Happy 70th birthday to the perfect excuse.

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

Prepping a Dante class right now, and thought it would be fun to do a comparison with Scrooge’s own descent into hell in A Christmas Carol

[Paul Krause @paul_jkrause]

Getting ready to start teaching Dickens next week. If you had your choice of one novel of his to teach, which would it be? Teaching Great Expectations...

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

“Quick now, here, now, always —”

[CoffeeWithTheClassics @CoffeewClassics]

It’s TS Eliot’s 138th birthday.

Drop your favorite Eliot verses in the replies. I’ll go first.

[Eleanor Parker @ClerkofOxford]

Tonight's harvest moon, the first full moon after the autumnal equinox, has a special history. This is what Sir Gawain and the Green Knight calls the 'Michaelmas moon', and in the old Anglo-Saxon calendar it was the herald of winter.

https://t.co/DdyeO5MGCW

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

@AbigailFalanga Decide what to do with the time that is given to us

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

We had the six VHS set and watched it so much that my siblings, cousin, and I had vast swathes memorized, & it was the core of all our jokes and references for years. When I was 12, we filmed our own 45 minute parody version over about 6 months. Truly formational in many ways.

[pride and prejudice archive @pandparchive]

31 years ago, the beloved bbc series adaptation of pride and prejudice aired its first episode today.

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

Trying to imagine how scientists first found this out, I’m thinking giant Q-tips

[Encyclopaedia Britannica @Britannica]

Scientists are able to determine the age of a blue whale by studying its earwax, which becomes dark during migration.

Each pair of dark and light earwax layers represents one year of life.

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

“When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.” - Mary Oliver

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in rooms that looked out on trees went home after 7.96 days on average. Matched patients whose window faced a brown brick wall stayed 8.70 days. The tree-view group also needed far fewer strong painkillers.

Roger Ulrich went through the records of a suburban Pennsylvania hospital for operations between 1972 and 1981. He used only surgeries from May to October, when the trees had leaves. The rooms were nearly identical in size, window and furniture. Patients were put in whichever room came free. Science published the two-page paper in 1984.

Each tree-view patient was paired with a wall-view patient of the same sex, similar age, smoking status, weight category and floor. That gave 23 pairs. A nurse who did not know which view each patient had pulled the data from the files.

Nurses wrote 3.96 negative notes per wall-view patient, such as "upset and crying" or "needs much encouragement." Tree-view patients got 1.13. On days two to five after surgery, wall-view patients took 2.48 strong painkiller doses each and the tree-view patients took 0.96. The tree group took more weak doses, drugs like aspirin and acetaminophen. On the day of surgery and the day after, and again on days six and seven, the groups did not differ.

Forty-six patients in one hospital is a small sample, and this was a look back through old records, with no random assignment to rooms. The nurses' stations sat slightly closer to the wall-view rooms. Ulrich himself warned that the wall was dull and largely featureless. For long-stay patients suffering from boredom, he wrote, a lively city street might do more good than many natural views.

Both groups had the same window, 1.83 metres high and 1.22 metres wide. The main difference was what lay beyond the glass. Ulrich concluded that decisions on how hospitals are designed and where they are built should take the quality of that view into account. https://t.co/BBxszzK6CC

[Slightly Dryad 🌿 @SlightlyDryad]

@seraphinenicole @moniza_hossain @SketchesbyBoze I’ll be sure to tell the quarter Chinese portion of myself that unfortunately, loving and learning from Jane Austen all these years is only for the other three quarters!