By Lisa
Is baking lemon cake bright-siding? I’m not sure if this rant needs a trigger warning and I know some of our readers don’t have access to their own kitchen facilities so maybe it is unfair to print a recipe? I checked the UV style rules and there is no prohibition on recipes! As I remember it, there used to be a prohibition on slideshows and poetry at events (which probably means powerpoints are off the table too). But I have a really good lemon cake recipe (and its vegan) – this is the kind of cake that gets even better the next day and freezes beautifully (if you don’t think you will eat it all in a few days). I use a bundt cake pan my neighbor lent me that makes it easy to cut into pieces to wrap and … share with the neighbors. Everybody loves getting an unexpected lemon cake treat!
What has brought on this sudden need for lemony-fresh brightness? Perhaps because the doomsday clock ticking down to nuclear disaster is set at 90 seconds to midnight? They did take into account climate change, and the war in Ukraine surging around a nuclear reactor that is understaffed and volatile, and the war in Gaza. But that was more than a month ago (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ ), I would say the Bulletin needs to reassess in light of new developments like putin’s threats to put nuclear weapons in space.
Also upsetting me is that hideous Oppenheimer movie winning lots of awards. Don’t get me wrong, some of the acting was quite good but the story they told and more importantly didn’t tell is infuriating. Death and destruction in Japan gets about 15 seconds, uranium and plutonium are clean little marbles piling up in fishbowls while miners, millers, and communities are polluted with tailings and contamination from enrichment facilities, and local indigenous people’s land is bombed and polluted with fallout spewing from testing. In the movie, most women are just a prop for the ego of the lead character. Infuriating. To me the movie is even more dangerous because it asks us to believe that these “super-smart” white men are heroes, but it is clear they don’t even understand that waste doesn’t just disappear, humans are part of the environment, there are consequences for actions, and bells cannot be unrung.
Last month I also heard a presentation about a turtle shell found in a museum collection from a turtle that lived near Oak Ridge, Tennessee where the uranium enrichment plants (K-25 and Y-12) and the pilot plutonium production reactor (X-10 Graphite Reactor) were located. The turtle was “collected” in the 1960’s. Its shell had nuclear atoms it picked up in the contaminated water from the uranium enrichment and plutonium production dumped into nearby streams. And of course, not just that turtle was contaminated but the entire ecosystem including people.
Or maybe brightness is needed to counter the stack of handbaskets I found in a hoarder garage, like the one the world is going to hell in, along with old barbie dolls and broken tools? Another infuriating movie, I will spare you the diatribe, and it doesn’t seem to be winning many awards.
UltraViolet 