They feed him hungry behind their fires... @nic-mharta - Tumblr Blog

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missjoolee

Guys, I think this might be more upsetting than chocolate guy.😭

andmaybegayer

idiomsir

Miracle On St David’s Day

All you need to know about this poem is that it is a true story. It happened in the ’70s, and it took me years to find a way to write the poem.

‘They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude’ (from ‘The Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth)

An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed with daffodils. The sun treads the path among cedars and enormous oaks. It might be a country house, guests strolling, the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs.

I am reading poetry to the insane. An old woman, interrupting, offers as many buckets of coal as I need. A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic

on a good day, they tell me later. In a cage of first March sun a woman sits not listening, not feeling. In her neat clothes the woman is absent. A big, mild man is tenderly led

to his chair. He has never spoken. His labourer’s hands on his knees, he rocks gently to the rhythms of the poems. I read to their presences, absences, to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.

He is suddenly standing, silently, huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow movement of spring water or the first bird of the year in the breaking darkness, the labourer’s voice recites ‘The Daffodils’.

The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect. Outside the daffodils are still as wax, a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables unspoken, their creams and yellows still.

Forty years ago, in a Valleys school, the class recited poetry by rote. Since the dumbness of misery fell he has remembered there was a music of speech and that once he had something to say.

When he’s done, before the applause, we observe the flowers’ silence. A thrush sings and the daffodils are flame.

Gillian Clarke (source)

religion-is-a-mental-illness

Stephen Hawking’s life, as told by @TheScientist_SH.

1942-2018.

tomloftis

Man, the end of this five-year mission is kind of a bummer…

Original from @ featherleafern on twitter

nic-mharta

#I read this as “complete Koh-I-noor” and spiraled into nostalgic googling of obscure vintage drafting instruments.

tutorial-bernafas

if youre into watching lost media stuff it gets very very clear how 90% of modern lost media are caused by the existence of intellectual property laws. like, small obscure work forever lost to time because the original creator lost the rights and the master copy to a corporation that prefers to keep it locked up in a vault is all too common of a reason why a media is forever lost lol.

nic-mharta

The first article of the Betan Constitution is (IIRC):

Access to information shall not be abridged.

Freedom of, and dispersal of, information, and more importantly of Knowledge, should be a radical value held by all professionals. Every right comes with attendant responsibilities. Some foolish U.S. justices decided "corporate persons" are entitled to the same rights as natural persons. Well then, those corporations must also shoulder the basic responsibilities of natural persons: to care for their neighbour who is in need; to nurture children and protect the week. When corporations hoard what people need -- in this case knowledge and data -- those corporations demonstrate their irresponsibility. Someone has to do something about the immorality of such corporations. I'm not in favour of bringing back the guillotine: trade unions and popular organizing are far less messy (an important consideration in the age of blood-borne pathogens). And I CERTAINLY am "not" promoting the idea of disseminating CORPORATION's intellectual property any time that can be done with impunity.

fashion-runways

TEUTA MATOSHI Couture 2025 if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

theprofessional-amateur

Oh hey, do you know what time it is? It is highly specific resource time!

Today we have the Royal School of Needlework Stitch Bank! There are HUNDREDS of stitch types in the RSN Stitch Bank.

And more added regularly, let’s look at a recent addition

I picked the first one in the 25 recently added Elizabethan stitches, the Elizabethan French Stitch

The stitch bank provides written and photo tutorials as well as a video option to learn to do it yourself. There are examples of the stitch in use, resources, references, everything but a needle and thread!

RSN Stitchbank

rsnstitchbank.org

zero1infinity

idiomsir

Miracle On St David’s Day

All you need to know about this poem is that it is a true story. It happened in the ’70s, and it took me years to find a way to write the poem.

‘They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude’ (from ‘The Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth)

I am reading poetry to the insane. An old woman, interrupting, offers as many buckets of coal as I need. A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic

on a good day, they tell me later. In a cage of first March sun a woman sits not listening, not feeling. In her neat clothes the woman is absent. A big, mild man is tenderly led

to his chair. He has never spoken. His labourer’s hands on his knees, he rocks gently to the rhythms of the poems. I read to their presences, absences, to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.

Forty years ago, in a Valleys school, the class recited poetry by rote. Since the dumbness of misery fell he has remembered there was a music of speech and that once he had something to say.

When he’s done, before the applause, we observe the flowers’ silence. A thrush sings and the daffodils are flame.

Gillian Clarke (source)

religion-is-a-mental-illness

Stephen Hawking’s life, as told by @TheScientist_SH.

1942-2018.

werewolf-transgenderism

new year new mountain goats

lets-play-gwent

thank you to every single fucking person on this god forsaken site that has ever posted your own art or writing. You really put a vulnerable, important part of yourself out in the open on the hellscape that is the internet and if that isnt an act of bravery and a labor of love I dont know what one is

nic-mharta

Voices silenced. If we cannot hear their voices, at least let us hear their names.

Geneviève Bergeron 1968-1989, civil engineering student

Hélène Colgan 1966-1989, mechanical engineering student

Nathalie Croteau 1966-1989, mechanical engineering student

Barbara Daigneault 1967-1989, mechanical engineering student

Anne-Marie Edward 1968-1989, chemical engineering student

Maud Haviernick 1960-1989, materials engineering student

Maryse Laganière 1964-1989, budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department

Maryse Leclair 1966-1989, materials engineering student

Anne-Marie Lemay 1967-1989, mechanical engineering student

Sonia Pelletier 1961-1989, mechanical engineering student

Michèle Richard 1968-1989, materials engineering student

Annie St-Arneault 1966-1989, mechanical engineering student

Annie Turcotte 1969-1989, materials engineering student

Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz 1958-1989, nursing student

rocketbirdie

anyone gonna tell them

byjove

There was a TikTok post about an advertisement for “blood-making pills for weak women” someone found in a newspaper from the 1890s and everybody seemed to think it was just an example of the weird misogyny of the day and age but no. Anemia was a massive public health concern. It always has been through history but part of the reason we have this idea of old timey women thought history being physical weak, chronically cold and pale and fainting is because they often they were. Anemia was also a massive problem for men in that day but even now it disproportionally affects people who menstruate. So tonics full of stimulants and “healthful vitamins” were marketed at young women in pages upon pages of advertisements in every newspaper. People generally felt like shit all the time back then.

judiops

I've seen old folk remedies for anemia, particularly cooking with cast iron and putting rusty nails in an apple, leaving them in overnight, then removing the nails and eating the rust-infused apple.

It was A Whole Thing.

byjove

What’s interesting is that that would have worked better than a lot of the ‘medicines’ being hawked during that time. To this day, adding a small chunk of iron to a cooking pot with a mild acid is being used to prevent iron deficient anemia.

byjove

Yep! Absolutely. It was a much more pervasive and deadly problem throughout history because of a lack of dietary variety and medical science not completely understanding the needs of the human body. Now it is less common because many foods are fortified with additional minerals and multivitamins are inexpensive and widely available.

kick-a-long

people forget but before enriched flour people DIED like all the time of pellagra. a literal vitamin deficiency. people also died of tooth decay... until antibiotics and floriated water. people died and were paralyzed for life because they swam in the summer, or just drank water, or ate out at a restaurant of polio and cholera and typhoid until vaccines and effective health codes. it was expected that like a third of all kids born would die from things the MMR vaccine prevents.

learning about the history of public health is SO important to understanding why scary chemicals are WAY less scary than life without them.

aetherograph

this is also why vaccines are so important. 'well what did people do before then' I have heard a lot of that sort of sentiment from anti-vax folks and like... martha, they DIED. Babies DIED. In the thousands. Go to an old cemetery and look at the graves. Look at the ages. I have seen so many graves for children under the age of 3. For infants that hadn't been alive long enough to have a name.

Measles, mumps, rubella, and the seasonal--SEASONAL--plagues of water-bourne diseases (polio, cholera, dysentery) that diarrhea you to death killed thousands of children every year. Every fucking year. Vaccines can prevent the first three, can prevent chicken pox/shingles, can prevent, these days, even hepatitis. But there is no vaccine for dysentery, for typhoid, for a surprising number of the Old Plagues, because we eliminated them using a completely different method: Public Health and Sanitation, which kills them at the source.

In 1949, the government actually commissioned Warner Bros' animation department to put together a video explaining to people the importance of paying tax to fund the public health system--and it still explains the basics pretty well:

On the other side of the pond, there's a reason London celebrated Joseph Bazalgette's design and building of the first sanitary sewer. He saved lives.

Sometimes I think Present-Day America's utter squeamishness; and inability to talk seriously about things that have to do with bodies and bodily functions, is actually what is costing us critical health infrastructure. We already cannot get public toilets off the ground in this country bc the minute you mention 'toilet' people lose their fucking minds, and are so uncomfortable with the fact that Everyone Poops that they can't stop babbling jokes, and nothing can get done. But public toilets are a public health issue. People need to piss and shit, and if you don't give them enough places to do it in a safe sanitary way, they will still need to do it and will go and do it in an alley or on a building or what-have-you, and that's a public health issue!

Public Health is so often derided, indeed it's even dismantled because people don't like to acknowledge its worth or just plain never learn about it as anything but a joke. Oregon doesn't have fluoridated water anymore, did you know that? They literally rolled back a public health measure for not goddamn reason other than an acute breakout of hysterical ignorance. If you're out and about in just about any city in this country—and even in Canada and the UK as well—you're still on a Bladder Leash, because there are just about ZERO bathrooms accessible to the public. That's a public health issue!

If you live in NYC, you get the importance of sanitation workers shoved up your nose every time you go outside. They used to have metal trashcans, but that was rolled back and now the bags just pile up on the sidewalks. That's a public health issue!

My small town has inadequate waste collection, meaning trash that doesn't fit the exacting rules and tiny single trash bin piles up in our home. There is no government sanitation, it's outsourced to a private company based out of state. That's ludicrous, and I imagine we aren't the only small town with this public health issue!

Children and adults aren't required to be vaccinated before going to school and work, where they could spread or start epidemics. Children and adults aren't required to mask in public places anymore, even when showing signs of communicable disease. Children an adults aren't required to stay home if showing signs of illness. That's also a fucking public health issue!

Eating out, swimming in public pools, going to water parks, concerts, conventions, parties, theme/amusement parks, theatres, rallies, and parades are all possible to do safely because of public health departments and public health measures. The fact that so many have been dismantled, made voluntary rather than mandated, and generally gutted is genuinely worrying. We have the technology to live without diseases, and to eradicate new ones within months, and the Western world just doesn't, because we fed so many generations the lie that we aren't part of a larger community and have no responsibility to other people.

That's so, so incredibly wrong, and Miss Rona pointed that out sharply.

elfwreck

Those aren't percentages on the left; that's deaths per 1000 live births.

But you can see how general health knowledge and the resources we now think of as "basic" have made a huge difference, but especially to working-class people.

...Enough that people forgot how we got where we are, and that the assumption that most children would live to adulthood is NEW. Is something we had to FIGHT for. And it started with acknowledging that disease is not an individual problem or choice - it's a matter that affects the entire community, and you need community-wide processes to prevent diseases.