The Blaisdell Blog

Have you ever wondered why pictures of the coronavirus look like the kind of ball you might throw to your dog?   Photos of the virus show a sphere with raised, tricorned knobs spaced all over it, each about 30 degrees of arc apart.   The virus, of course is extremely small.   It is 50-90 nm’s in size.   A nanometer is 1 billionth (0.000000001) of a meter which means that 20,000 could easily fit on the dot above this “i.”     So why the knobs?               Those knobs are what attach to your cells.   They act like a key to unlock the protective protein barrier around your cells.   Knobs that do not fit the key will not unlock the cell, protecting the cell from invasion.   Knobs that do fit your cells fool it into thinking that this virus is something that the cell should want or could use.   It absorbs the virus and then becomes its host.   Viruses are shameless guests. ...

  On September 17, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met for the last time to sign the document they had created.   The Constitution, even more than the Declaration of Independence, makes us the finest country in the world.   Many of these names are familiar to us (George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin…) others are unknown (George Read, Jared Ingersoll…), but they all get the credit for this amazing document. The Constitution is our anchor of stability in a turbulent world.   We can withstand a bad President and a petulant Congress (for the short term, at least) because our Constitution both guides and limits.   If someone asked me to provide proof of a loving God I would simply ask them how so many geniuses in the matter of human governance could have been clustered together in the right time and place to create both our country and the means to govern it.    Our founding fathers had the vision to not only gov...

On a September morning, the fifth year I taught school, I entered the office the morning of “picture” day, got the mail and notices out of my “cubby” and said hello to any and all gathered around the counter.   Absolutely nothing new or strange about that.   So why were the secretary and several teachers looking at me and laughing?   No need to wonder; they couldn’t wait to share the source of their mirth.   They had been looking through the school album of photos and someone had pointed out that I was wearing the same dress for my school photo year after year.   Yes, it was the same outfit I was wearing that day.              I loved that dress.   It was two tone brown with a drop waist and cute little belt around the hips.   I wore it for years, but I didn’t wear it for another picture day.   I also noticed, when I went home that night, that almost every garment in my closet was some sha...