Ugly Duckling

From the Thicket – a sort of extended Editor’s note:

The big news in Boggy Thicket land this morning is

1. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan ( actually moved Japan about eight feet and shifted the earth’s tilt on its axis by a couple inches!)
2. The Grand Champion Steer was named at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

I  didn’t want to write about either one.  I may talk about the steer tomorrow after the auction, but I’m really more interested in the heifer show – my neighbor Wilson Graff will be moving Joleen to the show on Tuesday.

Sooo, I pulled an article that I had saved for a slow day.

Normally, I would just publish the article and attribute it to its author, but this one was so poorly written that I essentially rewrote it myself.

The author of the original piece was trying so hard to be clever that the article became more about her than the subject.  In my opinion, which is really the only one that counts since it is My Blog, her effort wouldn’t have earned more than a D+ in a high school journalism class.

If you really want to read the original, you can find it here.

The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the very best aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old
contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a
leading role.

This year, Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her
performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among
the lesser-known but nonetheless  impressive details in Ms. Portman’s  career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.
For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the
achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.
Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts,
Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore.  She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.