'Green Eggs And Ham': A Quick Political History

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President Obama, accompanied by first lady Michelle Obama, reads Green Eggs and Ham at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll in April 2010.

Charles Dharapak/AP

During the fifth hour of his televised marathon speech protesting Obamacare, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz caught the attention of Dr. Seuss fans everywhere by pulling out a copy of Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor to read as a bedtime story to his children.

He noted Tuesday that it was his favorite childhood book, and even pointed out that his father had invented his own version of green eggs and ham, the food Sam-I-Am famously encouraged the book's unnamed narrator to try.

Although he may have squeezed the most attention out of his dramatic Seuss reading, Cruz is far from the first politician to lean on the classic children's story to advance his cause.

Here are a few examples:

Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1991

The former Democratic presidential candidate and civil rights activist read the story on Saturday Night Live following the 1991 death of Theodore Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss). His serious yet comical reading was a big hit for the late-night sketch comedy show and remains popular two decades later.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, 2003

Pawlenty, a former two-term governor and GOP presidential candidate, acknowledged his taste for green eggs and ham not long after first taking office in 2003. He made the admission to a group of children after a playful line of questioning with Judy Schaubach, the president of the Education Minnesota union, at an event the governor hosted to promote Read Across America Day.

President Obama, 2010

The president attempted "to do the best rendition ever of Green Eggs and Ham" to a group of children at the 2010 White House Easter Egg Roll. With some help from the first lady, Obama gave an animated reading and encouraged the kids to try new things — even green beans and peas.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, 2011

The Oklahoma Republican read the book to a group of kindergarten students at the state Capitol as part of her early-childhood-education push. Afterward, Fallin even gave each child a copy of the book and encouraged their parents to read to them daily.

Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, 2012

Brown, a Democrat who's running for governor in 2014, hosted a Green Eggs and Ham-themed breakfast for 62 Annapolis-area elementary school students in March 2012. The Cat in the Hat, Thing 1 and Thing 2 — all famous Dr. Seuss characters — were in attendance and posed for pictures with Brown and the children.

Ancient Fish With Strong Jawline Could Rewrite History Of Faces

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A reconstruction of Entelognathus primordialis, with the fossil find highlighted above.

Nature

As faces go, Entelognathus primordialis isn't much to look at, even for a fish.

But consider that the 419 million-year-old, armor-plated fish is the earliest known creature to have what humans might recognize as a face, according to research published Wednesday in Nature. That's mostly due to its bony, modern jaw.

As USA Today reports:

"The first Entelognathus fossil was unearthed in China in 2010, but it was not until scientists had chipped away at the specimen in the lab that they realized they were onto something very weird. Their new fish looked like a placoderm, an ancient swimmer girded in homegrown armor made of bony plates. The fish, described in this week's issue of Nature, had small, almost immobile eyes and a flat forehead. And then there was its lower face: a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking bones a lot like humans. It's a homely ancient fish with a supermodel's bone structure."

The question of when fish first sported bony jaws — and therefore a mug that we can all recognize — is something scientists have spent time wondering about. And the latest findings may upend our understanding of how jawed vertebrates evolved.

Entelognathus belongs to the placoderm class of armored fish that Nature says existed some 430 million to 360 million years ago. Placoderms, it adds, "had a bony skull and jaw, but most of them had simple beak-like jaws built out of bone plates."

The recently unearthed fossil has scientists excited because, as Smithsonian.com points out, "it combines a series of characteristics from two different groups: placoderms ... and bony fish, a lineage that gave rise to all modern fish with jaws and bone skeletons. Previously, it was assumed that placoderms died out completely (and that the other, more recent types of fish with similar armor plating had independently re-evolved it much later), while a different, shark-like group of fish called acanthodians led to the bony fishes."

Smithsonian adds:

"This is significant because of what happened next: bony fish gave rise to all modern vertebrate fish, along with all amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, including ourselves. In other words, this fossil might mean that the placoderms didn't go extinct, but rather evolved into the tremendous diversity of animals that live on both land and sea — and that this ancient, strange-looking face belongs to one of your oldest ancestors."

Proposed Power Lines Tangle With Native American History

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Four humanlike figures were painted in a cave in Washington hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

Colin Fogarty/Northwest News Network

Imagine running power lines through a cathedral. That's how archaeologists describe what the Bonneville Power Administration proposes doing in the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state. The federal electricity provider is trying to string a new transmission line near a cave that contains ancient paintings, a site considered sacred by Native Americans.

The paintings are inside a tall cave on a rocky hillside in Wishram, Wash. Four humanlike figures were painted in red hundreds or even thousands of years ago. And that's not all.

"There's actually a very complex picture on this wall. You can see little elements of it over here in a different color," says Mike Taylor, an amateur archaeologist who helped write a book on Columbia River rock art. He says for generations, Northwest tribes have used this place for vision quests and other spiritual ceremonies. They still do. In fact, it's so sensitive, the nearby Yakama Nation declined to speak on tape about this cave. Taylor says it's rare to find one still intact.

"In the rest of the world, a lot of people know about the painted caves in France and Spain, which were painted 15,000 to 30,000 years ago. To us here, this is about as close as we get from an archaeological perspective to anything like that," he says.

The site lies along the path of transmission lines carrying electricity from vast wind turbine farms upriver to the Western electrical grid. The BPA proposes building a new 243-foot tower near here to carry even more cables across the Columbia River.

But not if Robert Zornes, the owner of the property, has anything to do with it.

"If we can stop Bonneville, it will send a message that these cultural sites are worth protecting," Zornes says.

Zornes is playing David to the BPA's Goliath. The agency has already done studies, gathered comments and begun construction elsewhere along the planned line. But progress stalled after Zornes invited archaeologists from the Yakama Nation to study the cave. They ended up filing a range of objections, and they are currently negotiating ways to protect not just the cave but the wider historical landscape. BPA spokesman Doug Johnson says his agency is committed to preserving culturally sensitive spots for tribes.

"And we're going to work through the issues that they have and then make sure that they're consistent with our goal to bolster our transmission system and do it. But we want to make sure we do it right," Johnson says.

Similar controversies have sprung up elsewhere. Last spring in the Mojave Desert, the discovery of ancient remains delayed a big solar energy development. And many tribes have been wary of the proposed Keystone pipeline out of concern it would disrupt cultural sites along its 1,700-mile route.

"It's the ongoing problem of trying to push through these energy projects quickly, at the same time protecting these cultural and natural resources," says Allyson Brooks, the state of Washington's chief preservationist.

The latest dispute over the BPA power project is whether the site where the tower would go is eligible as an official Lewis and Clark landmark. The explorers came through here in 1805. The BPA hopes to settle that and other conflicts soon so construction on the new transmission line can resume this fall.