Friday Five: March 14, 2025
It's almost (but not) spring!
This time next week, we’ll be celebrating Norooz, otherwise known as Iranian New Year, also known as the Vernal Equinox, more colloquially known as the first day of spring. This means that it’s time to clean every corner of your home, take a look at your belongings and see if it’s time to give anything a new home, and start fresh for the start of the spring. Spring cleaning in Farsi literally translates to ‘shaking the house’ and I can’t think of a better way to put it: if I could shake my apartment upside down to get rid of dust and things I no longer needed, I would. But now, there’s no apartment, just an airbnb for a few weeks (until the next one!) and a bunch of suitcases. My house shaking came early this year.
Now, let’s get into it, your Friday Five is here, packed with joy, weirdness, and fun from across the digital universe.
Music to Groove to: This half-hour setlist from an effortlessly cool Japanese DJ is full of incredible soul music. This is what you should start your weekend with, whether you’re getting ready for work or staying at home. It’s sunny and springy, a reminder that warmer and longer days are on the horizon.
News: I’m adjusting to a slightly different news cycle in my new home, which has included a hawk that’s gone rogue, stealing hats from tall men. This lovely 91 year old man, Glyn Parry, has lost two hats to the hawk, so much so that he’s turned an old shoelace into a chinstrap for protection (see below). The police statement might be my favorite bit: “Officers are aware of this bird, but there is nothing further for police at this time. However, the public are urged not to feed the bird and we are working with local experts to try and safely deal with the situation.” I listened to Glyn and his daughter on the radio sharing stories about his hat collection, lamenting the loss of these hats, and then someone else in the town called in to suggest the hawk be given keys to the city. What a divisive issue.
Poem: Since we still haven’t fully entered warmer weather and sunshiney days and it also seems the world is on fire both literally and metaphorically, here’s a cathartic poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that feels right for the moment. She wrote this poem in 1921! One hundred and four years later, it still hits. Sometimes, arguably most of the time, beauty is not enough and neither is the month of April!
Seasonal Produce: Rhubarb (botanically, a vegetable and a member of the buckwheat family - surprise!) is one of my favorite vegetables. Iranians seldom make it sweet - we eat it raw with salt, puckering at the tartness and going back for more. We also cook it into stews! Currently in the UK, it’s forced rhubarb season. Forced rhubarb is grown in dark sheds by candlelight - this makes the plant sweeter, tastier, and a much more vibrant shade of pink. Why did they force rhubarb out of its natural habit and season? The answer is unsurprising: war. Fruit was hard to come by, and rhubarb was mixed into jams as a ‘filler’ - so strawberry jam could’ve been 30% strawberries and 70% rhubarb. There’s more I want say about this so we might have to reserve that for a forced rhubarb edition of Consumed… but isn’t that fascinating?
Joyful Internet Content:
Will Lisa play tennis tomorrow?
Roya
❤️👏👏