SUPPORT June 2, 2020 The Our 26th Year of Publishing FREE SMALL (979) 849-5407 PLEASE TAKE Weekly © 2020 Bulletin BUSINESSES mybulletinnewspaper.com ONE LAKE JACKSON • CLUTE • RICHWOOD • FREEPORT • OYSTER CREEK • JONES CREEK • ANGLETON • DANBURY • ALVIN • WEST COLUMBIA • BRAZORIA • SWEENY Being an elevator INSIDE THIS ISSUE operator has its See how our Specialcommunity Section pulls ups and downs on Hurricane By Greg Schwem together during these Tribune Content Agency Several columns ago, I wrote toughpreparedness times. We’re about the need to, after 30 years, all in this together, toss my resume into the job pool to help you due to the COVID-19 pandemic. and we’ll pull out of While I have yet to receive any through the employment offers, I have identified it together, helping a new career path; one that requires eachseason other. only a mask, sterile gloves, and a willingness to stand for eight hours SEE PAGES 10-16 while enduring short bits of inane conversation. Need an elevator operator? I’m The dentist your guy. By John Toth As retail establishments slowly The Bulletin unlock their doors and ponder how A few days after the State of to attract customers while adhering Texas allowed dentists to reopen, to social distancing guidelines, my phone rang. industries synonymous with large “Mr. Toth, we’re calling to confirm crowds - travel and tourism come to your Wednesday morning appoint- mind - are facing complete over- ment,” said the pleasant voice on (Continued on Page 6) the other end of the line. “What appointment?” Visiting my eye “The one you made three months Hurricane season, virus put pressure on Dream Center ago - for your cleaning.” doctor during the By Ernie Williamson apparently too proud to ask for food flooding. And it appears another The Bulletin for himself, admitted he and his dog busy hurricane season has already Ramblings pandemic The disabled veteran called the were sharing pet food. started. That appointment. With all this Edward A. Forbes Brazoria County It’s been tough The Brazoria County Dream pandemic going around, I had lost The Bulletin Dream Center The View from My Seat times for Brazoria Center (BCDC) is trying to keep track of it. “O.K., I’ll be there.” It is that time of year again, time to seeking pet food County’s poorest pace with these mounting chal- Perfect timing, I’d say. I made the see my optometrist. My visit should for his service and most vulner- lenges. appointment pre-pandemic days, have occurred in March, but the dog. able populations. COVID-19 has What started in 2007 as a thrift just in time for the dentist lockdown pandemic quarantine and closures He was asked whether he, exacted a toll on residents still reel- store for basic necessities at the to end. I have one of these clean- forced me to postpone my appoint- too, needed food. The veteran, ing from Hurricane Harvey and river (Continued on Page 7) ings every three months and let the ment until May. I try to do a complete experts work on keeping my teeth exam when I make my annual visit. and gums healthy because doing so Most eye care professionals Anticipation keeps me on my toes these last few days is cheaper than a $30,000 implant - recommend that you have a compre- Stephanie Johnson not sure if it was the change in the and everything. We may have to get and a lot less painful. hensive eye exam every one to two The Bulletin atmospheric pressure, or the fact to the hospital by boat, but we’ll get They make it sound easy on years, depending on your age, risk A storm came through the that I was a little frightened, but a there, I thought. those TV commercials, how they factors and whether you currently other night, a bigger storm than couple of contractions had started. I I downloaded a contraction timer can do an entire mouthful of wear eyeglasses or contact lenses. usual. We were thought this was it. app on my phone. Yes, that’s how implants in one day. That’s got to be Children need regular eye exams pounded with I was sure of it. we do it these days. There is an a pretty tough day, though. I’ve had to detect vision problems that may rain, and the Future mommy diaries I didn’t sit in the app for everything. I timed each two tooth implants, and they were (Continued on Page 8) thunder was patio chair that contraction and the duration. You no cakewalks. There were some Like us on Facebook extra loud, sometimes shaking the led to our previous dilemma about can rate the pain of each contrac- serious surgical procedures done house. whether my water broke. It didn’t. tion and write notes. Some of these in my mouth. I was asleep, but I facebook.com/ The storm hit around the middle The chair was just wet. But this apps’ extra functions are not all read all about them when I got my brazoriacountybulletin of the night to early morning. I am could be the big event - contractions (Continued on Page 5) (Continued on Page 4) Page 2 THE BULLETIN June 2, 2020 (979) 849-5407 www.mybulletinnewspaper.com What is a sunshower? A sunshower or sun shower is a meteorological phenomenon in which rain falls while the sun is shining. A sunshower is usually the result of accompanying winds associated with a rain storm sometimes miles away, blowing the airborne raindrops into an area where there are no clouds, therefore causing a sunshower. Sometimes a sunshower is created when a single rain shower cloud passes overhead, and the Sun’s angle keeps the sunlight from being obstructed by overhead clouds. Over the Rainbow... A rainbow is caused by reflec- tion, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky. It takes the form of a multi- coloured circular arc. Rainbows caused by sunlight always appear in the section of sky directly oppo- site the sun. Rainbows can be full circles. However, the observer normally sees only an arc formed by illumi- nated droplets above the ground, and centered on a line from the sun to the observer’s eye. In a primary rainbow, the arc shows red on the outer part and violet on the inner side. This rainbow is caused by light being refracted when entering a droplet of water, then reflected inside on the back of the droplet and refracted again when leaving it. www.mybulletinnewspaper.com (979) 849-5407 June 2, 2020 THE BULLETIN Page 3 Strange but True By Bill Sones Now, more than a decade later, in Greek mythology. And credit and Rich Sones, Ph.D. even with “smarter” computers, Charles Dickens for creating Rev. Galaxy Zoo Lintott believes that citizen scien- Mr. Chadband, a greedy preacher, Q. With astrophysicist Chris tists can still make contributions, in his 1853 novel “Bleak House”; Lintott, let us praise those citizen especially noticing things rare or hence, a chadband is an oily, hypo- scientists who answered the call to unusual. critical person. join Galaxy Zoo in 2007. What vital For example, in 2007, Hanny Then, “vandal” is coined after function did they perform? van Arkel of the Netherlands found Vandals, a Germanic tribe that A. In the mid-2000s, Lintott a strange blob in an image and overran Gaul, Spain and northern needed to sort through images of implored scientists to investigate. Africa, and in 455 C.E. sacked hundreds of thousands of galaxies “Dubbed Hanny’s Voorwerp (Dutch Rome. Commonly used today, a to gather samples for his envi- for ‘object’), the blob is now known vandal is “one who willfully dam- sioned study, but such a task would to be a large gas cloud still glowing ages another’s property.” Finally, take many months or more for after being hit by a jet of radiation “to behave like a tyrant” is to one person to do, and computers from a nearby galaxy’s black hole,” “nimrodize,” named after Nimrod, weren’t up to the challenge, says a likely indication that a now-quiet the Biblical Noah’s great-grandson, Erin Wayman in “Science News” galaxy was active not too long ago. a hunter and evil tyrannical king. magazine, drawing on Lintott’s book Coining words after As Christopher Brooke wrote in his “The Crowd and the Cosmos.” people’s names 1872 poem: “And for a crowne who Lintott and his colleagues turned Q. What’s in a person’s name? would not Nimrodize.” to the public for help, asking volun- More than a unique individual if Trees make good historians teers to classify galaxies by shape - that person had a word coined Q. These woody, perennial spiral or elliptical. On the first day of after them - an “eponym.” Do you members of the plant kingdom, with launching Galaxy Zoo, the website know what these eponyms mean: their capacity to reduce atmospheric was so overwhelmed that the server “Mae West,” “Adonic,” “Chadband,” carbon, were vital to the evolution of hosting the images crashed. Soon, “vandal” and “nimrodize”? life on Earth. Much is known about though, more than 70,000 image A. Buxom beauty Mae West - trees, but are you familiar with fossil classifications were coming in every actress, singer and playwright - has forests, trees as historians and hour. an inflatable life jacket named after ghost trees? Following this success, her, perhaps “from the apparent A. The earliest forest in the fossil Zooniverse was born, letting anyone resemblance of an inflated vest to record is roughly 385 million years participate in real science: digitizing her large bust,” says Anu Garg on old, with primitive, fernlike clades of handwritten records from research his “A.Word.A.Day” website.