Stay home and watch TV

If you missed last night's NOVA, First Flower, you get another chance in our area Thursday evening. Thursday night, WLIW 21 will rerun the episode at 8 (and The Office is a repeat, so you can miss it). NOVA follows a plant hunter into the wilds of China looking for evidence of the oldest known flowering plant. According to Slate, the story really follows two paths: a human one and botanical one.

The human story begins with Chinese paleontologist Sun Ge who, after 10 years of slicing rocks out of limestone and volcanic ash layers in northern China, found the fossil of what he thought might be a flowering plant.

Sun brought the fossil to University of Florida paleobotanist David Dilcher, who'd been looking for traces of the earliest flower for some 35 years. Professor Dilcher assured Sun that what they came to call archaefructus (old fruit) was indeed a flowering plant and that it was probably 142 million years old—thus it could be called the first flower.

And at 10, WLIW is showing a Globe Trekker which looks at Cuba and Haiti. I saw a few minutes of the Haiti segment and couldn't help but change the way I think about that island.