ESFAS

The perfect Monday cat

beardedmrbean

Amen to that little dude

lucasnator4

When food so good you see god

beardedmrbean

Transcendent in my tummy

I hope to enjoy things this much in the coming year.

tinyghosthands

Animal Fact!

She has 10 eggs omg how did her little body make so many eggs I’m going to cry

Her bird husband keeps bringing her little green worms to eat and every time she hears him outside she does these happy little chirps ahhhhh

croc-odette

she’s sleeping right now…

UPDATE: all ten eggs have hatched :)

UPDATE:

All ten babies are getting ready to fledge!!!

probablyasocialecologist

Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) who work at Kellogg’s ready to eat cereal plants in Battle Creek, Mich., Lancaster, Pa., Omaha, Neb. and Memphis, Tenn. have voted to accept the recommended collective bargaining agreement. Approval of the contract ends the BCTGM’s strike against Kellogg’s, which began on October 5, 2021.

In commenting on the ratification, BCTGM International President Anthony Shelton stated, “Our striking members at Kellogg’s ready-to-eat cereal production facilities courageously stood their ground and sacrificed so much in order to achieve a fair contract. This agreement makes gains and does not include any concessions,” Shelton notes.

Highlights of the new five-year collective bargaining agreement:

• No take aways; No concessions

• No permanent two-tier system

• A clear path to regular full-time employment

• Plant closing moratorium: No plant shut downs through October 2026

• A significant increase in the pension multiplier

• Maintenance of cost of living raises

“Our entire Union commends and thanks Kellogg’s members. From picket line to picket line, Kellogg’s union members stood strong and undeterred in this fight, inspiring generations of workers across the globe, who were energized by their tremendous show of bravery as they stood up to fight and never once backed down.

“The BCTGM is grateful to AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler for mobilizing the AFL-CIO and its affiliates in support of our striking Kellogg’s members. Once again, President Shuler has provided highly effective leadership in support of the BCTGM and our members.

“The BCTGM is grateful, as well, for the outpouring of fraternal support we received from across the labor movement for our striking members at Kellogg’s. Solidarity was critical to this great workers’ victory.”

Beautiful!

trashboat

i don’t expect this to be very widely known but here in vancouver we’ve had a barge stuck on shore since mid november

we’re going on day 25 of barge simpson not moving a damn inch and i for one hope it never moves

celepom

They put up a sign

hockeylvr42

WHAT

captain-naft

Ever Given fans reading this post like:

harukami

I think it’s really important, for non-Vancouverites, that you know some additional layers of the joke to this, because this shit’s got history:

One of our parks has an abstract statue in it of someone reclining.

In Nov 2012, an artist made a sign as a joke, “Dude Chilling Park”, which looked exactly like our official Parks Board signs (except for the official park boards seal).

The Vancouver Parks Board removed the sign but, after a whole lot of petitions, they put in an official one a year and a half later, also “Dude Chilling Park”, but now with the proper seal attached.

Fast forward 7 years later. We have horrible floods. A barge washes up on Sunset Beach and gets grounded there. It has yet to be removed.

The Vancouver Parks Board, unprompted, adds a “Barge Chilling Beach” sign.

…Also, they announced this by tweet:

I think it’s really important people know this.

everythingfox

(via)

I love the dog train and watch every video I see of it.

memewhore

rachel-sez

This is AMAZING

People have not changed a tiny bit. Culture, yes, but folks living their lives? Same same.

royalhandmaidens

good morning to everyone, especially the three muslims taking the fbi to court for illegal and discriminatory spying on our communities 🥰

royalhandmaidens

anyway, CAIR is taking the case, and for any muslim who may be unaware - they take cases pro bono - completely free

CAIR is a resource every american muslim should know about: they’re a group of muslim lawyers who provide free legal services for everything from consultations, education on your rights, and registering to vote, to taking your case on for free if you’ve become a victim of a hate crime, discrimination, or islamophobia

Building community, one win at a time!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️

I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.

Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.

Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailor’s assistant George Viccars died from plague.

Back then people didn’t fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.

So two religios leaders in the town, Thomas Stanley and William Mompesson, got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.

They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.

justanotherweirdarchaeologist

Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.

However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.

So I really like this story, because it’s a sad story, because it’s also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess it’s one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.

auroranibley

It gets better.

Here’s the thing. One third of the residents of Eyam died during their quarantine, but the Black Plague was known to have a NINETY PERCENT death rate. As high as the toll was, it wasn’t as high as it should have been. And a few hundred years later, some historians and doctors got to wondering why.

Fortunately, Eyam is one of those wonderful places that really hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Researchers, going to visit, found that many of the current residents were direct descendants of the plague survivors from the 1600s. By doing genetic testing, they learned that a high number of Eyam residents carried a gene that made them immune to the plague. And still do.

And it gets even better than that, because the gene that blocks the Black Plague? Also turns out to block AIDS, and was instrumental in helping to find effective medication for people who have HIV and AIDS in the 21st century.

Here is a lovely, well-produced documentary about Eyam and its disease resistance. It’s a little under an hour. Trigger warning for general disease and epidemic-type stuff, but also, maybe it will help you have some hope in these alarmly uncertain times.

jaubaius

Found in a 120 year old time capsule.

Full VDO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoDj4mXdqmc

Worth it.

whitebookposts

I’m sorry I might sound like a madwoman for going on a rant about this but man, it’s… I don’t know how to express it but just the thought of some person, 120 years ago, taking a photo of their cat, which back then wasn’t easy - they didn’t have phones with cameras, each photo required a lot of time and dedication, so not only the person “wasted” a whole photo on their cat, they also did their fricking best to save this photo and carefully put it into an envelope to preserve it so that people in the future will know that there was this cat and it looked like this and it’s owner thought the cat looked lovely that day so much that they decided to take a photo of it and then they loved the photo so much that they went out of their way to preserve it for future generations like “hello people from the future! this is what my cat loos like!” because they loved their cat so much they wanted people from the future to know about it is… crazy to me… and here we are, 120 years later, long after the cat and it’s owners passed away, looking at an old photo of a cat and gushing about it. The cat died so long ago and wouldn’t even know it existed if not for the owner that loved their cat so much that they decided this photo was worth preserving and put it into a time capsule. and seeing now how people dedicate whole blogs to their cats and take countless pictures of them just to show to other people really hits because you realize that in the end, people from today aren’t that much different from people that were 120 years ago. We all just love our cats and want people to look at them.

null-is-sparing-you

I bet this woman was imagining the photo may be seen by like… a family some day. But no. It survived till the age of the internet. It has now transcended the original media. It is now being seen by far more eyes in far more places than the media she chose would normally allow. I hope the taker of this 120 year old photo is PROUD.

prokopetz

I feel it’s worth pointing out that the thing in the time capsule isn’t a photograph – it’s a glass-plate negative.

For those unfamiliar with non-digital photography, how it works is when you take a photo, what you’re doing is exposing a transparent medium that’s been treated with a light-sensitive chemical that darkens when exposed to light. This results in a negative image of whatever you’re photographing: dark where the light was bright, and transparent where the light was dim. The negative is then treated with a fixative chemical that renders it insensitive to further light exposure, and the actual photograph is produced by shining a bright light through the fixed negative and onto a sheet of paper treated with the same light-sensitive chemical. In this way, a single negative can be used to produce many copies of the same photograph. This is the process shown in the video.

In other words, the person who stored the time capsule away didn’t preserve a photo of their cat: they preserved the tools necessary to mass produce photos of their cat. It’s not unreasonable to suppose they did, in fact, hope that many copies of it would be made – though they probably did not anticipate exactly how many there would be!

klinger4yossarian-deactivated20

But guys, look at that cat! It DESERVES to have its photo mass produced and be seen by the entire cat-loving internet. What a fine cat!

mindblowingscience

Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness that is becoming more common in many countries, could be eradicated using a drug that kills the disease-causing bacterium

The discovery that a chemical is deadly to the bacterium that causes Lyme disease but harmless to animals might allow the disease to be eradicated in the wild.

“Lyme disease is well-positioned to be eradicated,” says Kim Lewis at Northeastern University in Boston. “We are gearing up, the first field trial will be next summer.”

Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi that lurks in wild mice. Ticks that feed on the mice become infected and can infect other animals, including people.

The disease is a growing problem in North America, Europe and Asia. It initially causes a characteristic “bullseye” rash and a flu-like illness. If untreated, it can lead to serious long-term problems, such as Lyme arthritis.

sovereignsolace

Best news I’ve heard all day!

!!!

Link goes to New Scientist which I think is reputable? And links to the original publication in Cell, which is one of the major peer reviewed journals in biology and does not appear to be behind a paywall even though it’s an Elsevier journal (fuck Elsevier)

This would be a real game changer! Fingers crossed!

catasters

googlemenot-deactivated20230921

If we were all this good to each other I would need IV fluids because of how many happy tears I would cry. Bring on the dehydration head aches, I say!

Getting a start on Christmas baking early! Meat pies, gingerbread, and shortbread tart shells for lemon tarts! It took 3 or us 5 hours and we each got a giant pile of treats to take home and freeze in anticipation of Christmas. If you need a good gingerbread recipe that my family has been making steadily since 1917, send me a message :D

You can be perfect and still make mistakes. See exhibit A above.

english-history-trip

Usually it's women who buy from the feather shop, sometimes accompanied by tolerant men schlepping backpacks. But every so often a guy comes in, usually to buy a present, and as someone who's never really experienced guys shopping before, their efficiency in impressive. Guy comes in, I'll take that one, guy goes out.

The other day we had this massive bearded dude, 6'3 linebacker style, walk right in and declare in a gruff baritone "My fairy wings didn't arrive in time. I need some backup wings." We offered a massive pair of feathered green wings; he tried them on (tiny) and said "A little high in the back, but I'll take 'em." On his way out, by way of clarification, he said "I'm Tankerbelle."

I love the goths, I love the middle-aged street-clothes ladies trying something different, I LOVE the little kids, but Tankerbelle will always hold a special place in my heart.

(I spotted him a few weeks later and got the pic; pleased to see he was still rocking our wings rather than what he'd ordered earlier!)