I love this image of the Rice band rehearsing under the trees in 1938. I’m not certain about exactly where on campus they are (I suspect the photographer is pointed towards Main Street) but I’m confident that’s Kit Reid leading them:

See how this works? Two weeks ago I’d never heard of Kit Reid, then I talked with a gentleman in the eyeglass shop, and now I can recognize Kit Reid when I see him in an 80-year-old photograph. If I can keep this up for a while longer eventually I’ll get somewhere.

As I was walking on campus this morning I came upon an arresting sight–a small band of people under a different group of trees. They were wandering around among the oaks along the back of Herring Hall, all focused intently on something up in the trees:

They turn out to be biologist Scott Egan and his crew studying speciation in gall wasps and this is what they were looking for:

Bonus: The cold snap got a bunch of stuff in the garden by the South Servery but there are now heads on these plants, which I think are called romanesco or something like that. Weird, psychedelic spirals within spirals: