THE GODZILLA POWER HOUR

mutuals check your slime level

Cats Stealing Food in Paintings

Via James Lucas on X/Twitter

The Childhood of St. Cecilia, 1883 by Marie Spartali Stillman (English, 1844-1927)

Yellow and pink moth, Alypophanes iridocosma, Noctuidae

Photographed in Mandalay Rainforest, Airlie Beach, Queensland, Australia

by Steve & Alison1 // Shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!

Houseboat: Reflections of North America's Floating Homes... History architecture, and Lifestyles (1977)

Ben Dennis and Betsy Case

You know how canaries were historically brought into coal mines, because if the mine was full of carbon monoxide the canary would die first and the miners would be able to escape before they died too?

I just found the greatest thing.

This is a canary resuscitator.

When the miners notice the canary getting sick with carbon monoxide poisoning, they can close that circular hatch so no more gas gets into the canary cage, and open the valve on that oxygen tank to keep the canary breathing. In other words, they made a spacesuit for birds.

By immediately giving the canary access to clean air, the miners can save it from the poison. The bird lives. To be clear, this is not for economic purposes, this was specifically created because the miners felt bad and wanted to save the bird.

Isn’t that just the perfect demonstration of what humans are like? We started sacrificing small creatures to save ourselves, and then felt bad and spent our valuable resources on saving the critters too. Because yeah the canary was the only way to test for CO, but it’s a living creature too, dammit!

Union watches out for its members.

If you're using gen AI because "you want to make art but don't know how/can't learn/it's easier/whatever"

You don't want to make art.

You want someone to make art for you, but you don't want to pay or exchange anything of equal value for it, and also you want it right now, in whatever style you fancy that moment, and in whatever quantity you want. You're greedy and entitled and it is just that simple. You don't want to make anything.

miffy traffic light🚦

losing my mind at this

like. something not soooo fun was happening in brazil in the late 60s

I can't… Christ. I'm just going to say this: when you're a Brazilian kid learning about tropicália, when you first come into contact with the art, and you listen to the music and learn the history behind it all - all your world is grief and rage. The Brazilian art of that time are well disguised screams of agony, and when you live here and you know the history, you can feel it under your skin. The "fun" and "nonsensical" aspects were a shield against censorship, and they became so strongly related to the military repression and violence of the time that they're almost synonymous with grief for loved ones, lost to the dictatorship without closure. The art wasn't fun because artists' lives were, but because they couldn't survive it being anything else. That's what tropicália was; being forced to grieve with a smile on your face.

Fun time to be an artist in Brazil :)

"For most people, a rat is at best an unwelcome guest, and at worst, the target of immediate extermination. But in a field clinic in Tanzania, rats are colleagues—heroes even.

Far from a trash bin-dwelling NYC street rat, the African giant pouched rat is docile, intelligent, easier to train than some dogs, and for East Africans, the performer of lifesaving tuberculosis diagnoses every day.

400,000 new cases of tuberculosis (TB) were estimated to have been prevented by these rats, whose sense of smell would make a bloodhound take notice. As [TB is] the number-one killer among infectious diseases worldwide, many of those 400,000 can be translated into lives saved.

“Not only are we saving people’s lives, but we’re also changing these perspectives and raising awareness and appreciation for something as lowly as a rat,” said Cindy Fast, a behavioral neuroscientist who coaches the rodents for the nonprofit APOPO.

“Because our rats are our colleagues, and we really do see them as heroes.”

APOPO uses giant pouched rats to sniff out traces of TB in the saliva of patients. In parts of Tanzania, a saliva smear test under a microscope by a human may only be 20-40% effective at detecting TB.

By contrast, a giant pouched rat like Ms. Carolina, a now-retired service rat who worked for APOPO for 7 years, raised the rates of detection on TB samples by 40% in the clinic where she worked.

Pictured: An APOPO employee with one of their trained rats

It would take 4 days for scientists to analyze the number of samples that Carolina could screen in 20 minutes. For that reason, when Carolina retired last November, a party was thrown at the clinic in her honor, and she was given a cake.

TB is sometimes thought of as a thing of the past—a disease for which doctors used to prescribe “dry air,” leading a modern sense of humor to muse at the antiquated, pre-antibiotic medical advice.

But it remains the number-one cause of death globally from a single infectious pathogen, and Tefera Agizew, a physician and APOPO’s head of tuberculosis, told National Geographic that once people see what the nonprofit’s rodents can do to slow the spread, they “fall in love with them.”

3,000 times in her career did Carolina detect one of the six volatile compounds that can be used to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and she got a hero’s send-off to a special compound to live out the rest of her days with her closet friend and sniffer colleague Gilbert, in a shaded enclosure dubbed “Rat Florida.”

“We’ve made special little rat-friendly carrot cakes with little peanuts and things on it that the rat would enjoy,” Fast said. “Then we all stand around and we clap, and we give three cheers, hip hip hooray for the hero, and celebrate together. It’s really a touching moment.”

APOPO has made headlines for its use of these rats in other lifesaving tasks as well: landmine clearance.

One of the world’s great underreported scourges (a lot like TB, coincidentally) is landmine contamination. There are 110 million landmines or unexploded bombs in the ground right now in about 67 countries, covering thousands of square miles in potential danger. Thousands of civilians are killed or injured by these weapons every year.

GNN reported on APOPO’s demining efforts using pouched rats back in 2020. One rat named Magawa alone identified 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance across an area the size of 20 football fields.

If at the start of this story you didn’t like rats, maybe Magawa and Carolina will have changed your mind."

-via Good News Network, March 31, 2025

how expensive it is to be anything at all

''Trouser Press'', Vol 11, #2, 1984, 10th Anniversary Issue

Paul Thumann (1834-1908), ''Für Mutter und Kind'', 1899

Howard Elcock (1886-1952), 'Plane of Fancy', ''The Tatler'', Vol. 108, #1405, 1928

The Rose of Versailles