got a text from my boss yesterday. “Please stop giving people discounts whenever. I feel like you want to give discounts more than you want to make money for me.”
As a european i sometimes forget furefkied are actually real and not american folklore/cryptids. Like you’ve got friendly little bugs that glow in the dark….. b r uh
in case europeans were worried: we love them very much! even tho they’re clumsy and slow and sometimes bump into you, no one swats fireflies here, or takes them for granted. even grownups sometimes reach out in the summer and gently catch a firefly for a minute before letting it go.
By “reach out” that’s meant quite literally–you just kinda. Stick your hand in their flight path and they land on you and will sit on your hand for a bit. Sometimes if you’re just walking or standing outside while they’re active you have to shoo them off you because they’ll just. Sit on you.
They’re harmless and very pretty and it’s always a treat to see because they’re out for a relatively short time each year.
June is the lightning-bug show month on Brokeass Mountain; the house is surrounded by hay-fields and woods, and on warm, humid nights, they’re everywhere (which makes warm, humid nights bearable), miniature, silent, drifting specks of horny magic. Sometimes grown-ups run around in an acre of alfalfa just to be part of it
People talk about the surprise albums from people like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé that drop with zero warning but I have just been existing in this world where every album I've ever heard in my life has been a surprise album because I didn't know that musicians had schedules that we could see
Remember how LiveJournal let you have several icons (or avatars or "pfps" as you might call them now)? And you'd carefully choose an icon to fit the subject matter, your tone, and the blog on which you were commenting or posting?
And it could make your argument look that much snarkier if you used a rude one? Or you could use it to add a multiplier to a joke?
And icons, alongside banners and wallpapers, were a whole genre of fanwork with its own design language, conventions, and norms, including carefully crediting people for them?
Congress passed bipartisan legislation to provide families that rely on subsidized school meals with help buying food over the summer. Nearl
The governor was firm: Nebraska would reject the new federal money for summer meals. The state already fed a small number of children when schools closed. He would not sign on to a program to provide all families that received free or cut-rate school meals with cards to buy groceries during the summer.
“I don’t believe in welfare,” the governor, Jim Pillen, a Republican, said in December.
A group of low-income youths, in a face-to-face meeting, urged him to reconsider. One told him she had eaten less when schools were out. Another criticized the meals at the existing feeding sites and held a crustless prepackaged sandwich to argue that electronic benefit cards from the new federal program would offer better food and more choice.
“Sometimes money isn’t the solution,” the governor replied.
.......
The new $2.5 billion program, known as Summer EBT, passed Congress with bipartisan support, and every Democratic governor will distribute the grocery cards this summer. But Republican governors are split, with 14 in, 13 out and no consensus on what constitutes conservative principle.
One red-state governor (Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas) hailed the cards as an answer to a disturbing problem. Another (Kim Reynolds of Iowa) warned that they might increase obesity. Some Republicans dismissed the program as obsolete pandemic aid. Some balked at the modest state matching costs. Others hinted they might join after taking more time to prepare.
The program will provide families about $40 a month for every child who receives free or reduced-price meals at school —$120 for the summer. The red-state refusals will keep aid from about 10 million children, about a third of those potentially eligible nationwide.
......
As with Medicaid, poor states are especially resistant, though the federal government bears most of the cost. Of the 10 states with the highest levels of children’s food insecurity, five rejected Summer EBT: Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas.
Like the school lunch program, it serves families up to 185 percent of the poverty line, meaning a family of three would qualify with an income of about $45,500 or less.
......
Some Republicans, in rejecting the aid, found critics in their own ranks. After Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina dismissed Summer EBT as a duplicative “entitlement,” State Senator Katrina Shealy, a fellow Republican, wrote a column with a Democratic colleague warning that “hunger does not stop during summer break.”
In an interview, Ms. Shealy said the state should not reject $65 million “just because Biden is president,” and perhaps just partly tongue-in-cheek wrapped her plea in Trumpian bunting: “Everyone wants to say, ‘America First’ — well, let’s feed our children first.”
Oklahoma initially said it rejected the program because federal officials had not finalized the rules. But responding to critics, Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, sharpened his attack, calling Summer EBT a duplicative “Biden administration program” that would “cause more bureaucracy for families.”
Tribal governments, which have influence over large parts of the state, stepped in. Already feuding with Mr. Stitt, they promised to distribute cards to all eligible families on their land, regardless of tribal status, while bearing the $3 million administrative cost. The five participating tribes will cover nearly 40 percent of Oklahoma’s eligible children, most of them not Native American.
“I remain dumbfounded that the governor of Oklahoma would turn down federal tax dollars to help feed low-income children,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
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some of the most stunning highlights of this story.
All I got to say is, let's feed the children? every single Democratic Governor took the money to feed the kids, every governor who rejected it, every single one, is a Republican. If you don't vote for Democrats you are STEALING food out of kids mouths.
I had a new "oh, my family were the weird ones" moment recently: it seems no one else's family celebrated Frog Night (the first warm rainy night of spring) by going down to the local vernal pool after dark to help the amphibians safely across the road and listening to the spring peepers. (We'd then go back in daytime later on to observe the egg masses, of course.)
Apparently "Frog Night" as a holiday is a thing my mother invented and not a widely-accepted idea, which is a shame because I've been referring to it as if it was for the past 30 years.
The first rain isn't for another month in my neck of the mountains but I heard peepers yesterday so I am celebrating today by hiking out to the local frog pond with my housemate to listen to the peepers and toads come out of hibernation.
so I took a break from work yesterday to have a smoke on the porch, and noticed that Lynn, who owns the florist’s at the other end of the porch, was doing the same. She was looking intently at her phone, and I could hear that she was playing a sample of doomy cello repeatedly. Then she switched to selection of drums, trying them a few times. Next, some barking dog sounds. Finally, she pulled up what sounded like a pissed-off voicemail from a guy, edited it, then mixed all the samples together (at least I thought that was what she was doing; I don’t know anything about this stuff) and played it through. It was grim; she was smiling.
“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” @louisethebaker on Twitter
#men undressing women: [drakeNO.jpg]#men assisting in dressing women: [drakeYES.jpg]#he’s really concentrating in getting those laces sitting right#what a good boy#anna karenina: vronsky’s story#gif harrietvane
On of the things that I learned in high school, which was just one of those facts that was just kind of like, “Yeah?” but is also one of those facts that you rarely see represented, that it does sort of startle into this idea of “wait, is that right.” Men absolutely helped their wives and lovers dress, especially in times when dress had become complicated enough that women could not get dressed alone (ties and buttons that had to fasten in the back for one reason or another, for example). If a woman didn’t have a servant to help her dress, and most women did not, it was the job of her husband once she was married.
This leads to the interesting trope of a husband discovering his wife’s lover’s handiwork, for example in this 1840 illustration from Paris le Soir. The caption reads: “That’s funny! This morning I made a knot in this lace, and tonight there’s a bow!“
We're gonna need to know if he was in a courtyard and whether three stars were visible before we can conclusively determine his toeses were ab initio not roses.
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