So long and thanks for all the belly laughs. Although he missed the Pinwheel of Death. (Brian Phillips in The Ringer, h/t Kottke)

Plus, further illness and death that won’t happen, brought to you by vaccines: Bangladesh just vaccinated 18.4 million children in an emergency measles-rubella campaign after an outbreak killed more than 600 people and exposed dangerous gaps in routine immunisation. In the DRC, health workers are using a combined measles-rubella and polio drive to find zero-dose children in 11 provinces, while Zambian researchers are preparing delivery strategies for the next generation of TB vaccines.–Fix the News

The best speech by an American politician in my lifetime. “It is in that point-four-percent that we go to work.”

Quote: “Political operatives at the NIH passed around lists of words that grants weren’t allowed to use—in either applications or existing, funded projects. Program managers across the NIH and the NSF were told to ask affected researchers whether they’d care to change the language in their research descriptions or risk losing their funding. Some researchers whose grants Norton managed at the NIDDKD called her to say they wanted to preemptively change the language in their grant applications—before they’d been dinged. Norton complained so much that she was placed on administrative leave, although she has since been reinstated.” (Scientific American)
Dana sez, You don’t have to watch a horror movie to have the shut scared out of you, just read this.

I don’t know where I got the idea that bowheads were smaller than humpbacks. Neato. (h/t Laughing Squid)

Quote for the day

Public pressure matters. That pressure has come over the last year and a half in many forms and from many places. But the pressure in January came especially from the streets of Minneapolis. Looking back on the long arc of the second Trump administration’s decline, one can tend to assume it all had to happen as it did, and to forget moments of choice, to smooth over particular inflection points. But Minneapolis was key.

All honor to the people of Minneapolis, who, with the Trump administration at the height of its power and presumption, stood up against Trump and his army of goons, and who stood with their neighbors, for our country, and in defense of its principles.–William Kristol

Outro…

Chatter Lagniappe Sunday knicks pinwheel of death science vaccines whales