Airy, Airy, Au Contraire

As an alternative to 'sugar, spice, and everything nice'

I present: 'salt, vinegar, and everything sinister'

He IS the army

Baby and Mama, Yellowstone National Park

Fun fact : baby bison are that orangey red colour for the first two or so months of their lives, after which they get their adult chocolate colour. The orange is in fact camouflage. Most baby bison are born within a few weeks in the spring - something called “predator flooding” where a herd will have a whole bunch of near identical babies making it hard for one to stick out to a hungry wolf pack, or for one to be much slower than the rest. But since they’re all born in early spring, the grasses are still dead. When baby bison lien down in that dead grass, they are much more difficult to spot when bright orange.

Mend a hole in your sweater with a crochet hook

Actor Richard Chamberlain died this week. He had a long and successful career, mostly on TV. Articles about his death provide a summary of his acting roles. Here instead, I will include some excerpts from a 2007 interview where he discussed his sexuality.

(Early life)

“I was born in 1934. Back then, in the 40s and 50s, being gay in America was much worse than being a crook or an assassin. I was scared… being gay was the deepest, darkest secret you could possibly have, and I made a pact with myself never to tell anyone."

(Father)

“Things were not easy in my family. My father drank and was psychologically very abusive: he used to tell my brother and me that we weren't good for anything. It is not a coincidence that I grew up being very shy."

(Straight relationships)

"I had my first quasi-sexual experience with the sweetest Japanese waitress. At college, I had two great girlfriends. I did all what other young people used to do back then: hold hands, kiss on the back seat of the car.... I love women but not up to the point of wanting to marry one."

(Meeting his long term partner Martin Rabbett)

"We met (in 1977). We were acting in a Tennessee Williams play… Martin is much younger; he never hid his homosexuality. For his generation, homosexuality was not something one would hide. It is true that things were not easy for him. Our life was like the life of a dog who has an injured leg and continues running on three legs: this is what it means to hide oneself…

I was not ready (to come out), and he understood. I was scared to draw attention to me. Of course, our friends knew.

My heterosexual friends, who are almost all separated or divorced, always ask me what our secret is. We have grown together, learned from one another.”

(Coming Out in his 2003 autobiography)

"Only at 68 was I able to say the truth, when I no longer could be a romantic hero on the screen…When I wrote the word "gay" in the book, I felt as if an angel had touched my head, freeing me from fear. Finally, I felt free."

(Martin announcing Richard’s death)

“Our beloved Richard is with the angels now. He is free and soaring to those loved ones before us. How blessed were we to have known such an amazing and loving soul… Love never dies. And our love is under his wings lifting him to his next great adventure.” 

Anon submission

Propaganda: “Honestly what HASN'T this man gone through. He's in a weird situation ship with a younger British twink as an Irishman. His daughter once aged 10 years and became a feral little Creature. His wife got possessed by some eldritch God that tried to kill her while she was pregnant. He experienced 20 years of imprisonment in 20 minutes due to a mind trick and came back all disoriented and nearly killed himself because of it. He fought in a war. He even had to deal with Q”

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

tell me my prof didn’t upload the reading by photocopying his kindle reader page by page

bruh

im getting sick of people thinking they just awawa and scream

currently cackling & wheezing after imagining a video game titled Penn & Teller’s Shithead Basketball

I feel like people are missing the Very Important reference picture and that's just criminal. Clearly if you look at the dog that inspired the piece, you would understand the inherent validity of the voters' choice.

Thank you for that addition but I assure you we all already understood the the validity of the voters choice

Kallista actually trying to do murder

— The Alexiad, written by Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1148.

Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now

He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.

For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.

Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.

He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor

Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going

For those of you wondering what he’s been talking about this whole time, his staff wrote down a bunch of stuff for him to read like stories from people across the political spectrum opposed to what the administration is doing. He’s also been telling personal anecdotes about meeting important civil rights leaders and other democratic senators have been pausing him for “questions” but the questions have been as long as a small speech and have both served the purpose of giving him a second to sit down and updating him on the news that he’s been missing while he’s been talking.

He has yielded the floor at 25 hrs and 4 mins. His eyes are so wide they look like they’re going to bug out of his skull so I don’t blame him for stopping. He said to go out and get in some good trouble.

Addition for those unaware: Cory Booker is black. Strom Thurmond set the previous record about 70 years ago in protest of civil rights. Booker spent much of the time I was watching talking about the importance of working together for the people and the idea that it's not "left versus right but right versus wrong."

The new record speech is on the right side of history.

Minor correction: the questions from other Democrats did not allow him to sit down as he must remain standing and at his desk in order to retain the floor. Additionally, I believe the final time was 25 hours and 7 minutes.

Self correction: final time 25 hours 5 minutes.

Apparently at like 3 am he was reading out emails coming in from people who were watching the livestreams.

A new American hero who will go down in history books (this regime's attempt to stifle the history books notwithstanding)

Toward the end he was going for a notecard every time, to make sure he got the magic words right.

To me, that drove home what an incredible feat of endurance this was.

That, and when his voice would start to shake, and one of the other Democrats would pop up with a question, and sometimes he'd keep talking for a bit before he took their question, speaking truth to power while his voice shook.

Given that Trump imposed tariffs on several uninhabited islands and oceanic territories, I think they had an intern look up the Wikipedia list of countries and make a spreadsheet.