Saw this on FB and tried to find the original, which I haven't, but the point is so solid.
Not today Justin

★
i don't do bad sauce passes
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@technologistramblings
Saw this on FB and tried to find the original, which I haven't, but the point is so solid.
how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)
I wrote a eulogy
"I wrote a eulogy for my best friend last week. Then I read it to him. At the pub. On a Tuesday."
He was alive, holding a pint, looking at me like I'd lost my mind. Maybe I have.
I'm Mick. I'm 70. The man across the table was Barry. Seventy-two. Best mate for 46 years. Met on a building site in 1979. He dropped a plank on my foot. I called him something unrepeatable. He bought me a pint after the shift. Haven't gone a week without talking since.
Three months ago we went to a funeral. Bloke we'd worked with. Cancer. The eulogies were beautiful - people saying what he meant to them, things they'd clearly never said to his face. And all I could think was, he can't hear any of this.
Every beautiful sentence. Every "he changed my life." Said to a room of crying people and a box of wood.
I turned to Barry. Whispered, "What a waste."
Drove home. Couldn't sleep. Because I realised, if Barry died tomorrow, I'd stand up and say extraordinary things about this man. Things I've never said in 46 years. And he'd be in the box, missing all of it.
So I wrote them down. Took a week. Harder than expected - not finding the words, but admitting I had them.
Rang him. "Tuesday. The Crown. Need to read you something."
"Have you joined a book club?"
"Just come."
Same corner table. Pint of bitter. Crisps. I pulled out the paper. He saw my hands shake.
"Mick. What's this?"
"Your eulogy. I'm reading it now because I'm not wasting it on a day you can't hear it."
"Have you gone mad?"
"Probably. Shut up and listen."
I read it. In a pub. To a man very much alive and very much uncomfortable.
I told him about the plank and how it was the best injury of my life. About the night he drove forty minutes in rain to help change a tyre. About how he rang every day for three months after my divorce and never once asked "Are you alright?" - just talked about football and weather, because he knew I didn't need a question. I needed a voice.
I told him he was the funniest man I'd ever known and his jokes were terrible and both things were true. That he'd been a better father than he thinks. That his wife's a saint and he knows it. That I'd have been a worse man without him.
He didn't look at me. Stared at his pint. Jaw tight. Doing that thing men do when the feelings arrive and they'd rather swallow glass than show it.
When I finished, long silence. Then he picked up his pint, took a sip, and said,
"You're paying for the next round. And the one after."
That was his answer. Perfect. Because Barry doesn't say "I love you too." He says "you're buying."
But in the car park, he hugged me. Not the quick back-pat. A real one. Thirty seconds. Neither let go first.
And he said quietly into my shoulder, "Don't read that again at the real one. I want new material."
Who would you write a eulogy for - while they're still here?
Don't wait. The flowers can't hear. The box doesn't laugh. Say it now. At the pub. Over a bad cup of tea. You'll feel ridiculous.
They'll look uncomfortable. It'll be the most important thing you've ever done.
Read them the speech while they can still hug you in the car park.”
.
Recently managed to activate the most amazing infodump trap card.
I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."
As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.
Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.
A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.
As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"
Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.
You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.
It was not.
It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.
And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.
This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.
After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.
None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.
With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.
Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.
"Phyllis," said he.
The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.
"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"
Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.
Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.
Secondly, Sister Lucy always said when she died she wanted to come back as one of Phyllis's dogs because "mom treated the dogs better than us."
(No source for this edit because KYM is down and I had to drag it out of screenshot hell)
idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country resident that yall have many names and types of apples???? what do you mean its not just red yellow or green??? why is it so complicated??? who is granny smith????
'whats your favorite apple' 'red' 'no i mean like what type' '??????' actual conversatiom i've had with a mutual from usa
THIRTY TWO??????
Listen that doesn’t even account for all the weird shit local farmers are getting up to.
May I present the best apple:
the world is so big and beautiful
We need to conquer space travel for the only reason that zero-g would allow for new never before seen pastries, you know how the top of the muffin is the best part? Well that is because it is exposed to air so it changes the chemistry, in normal earth gravity it is impossible to make a muffin that is all top part because it needs to be placed somewhere which would restrict air flow, however in zero g it would be possible to make a bubble out of muffin dough which gets optimal airflow and becomes an all-top part muffin... This is the dream...
jeez. sorry you didn't like it.
Congratulations on the cat
So many political posts I hate boil down to "I don't want to organize and work with people I hate and fight for small, incremental victories, I just want to start a revolution where everyone magically becomes an automaton who acts exactly the way I think they should act"
Like damn man, I want that too. Unfortunately I live in reality though so we're stuck with the first thing.
went to a new optometrist today wearing my squid facts ‘save our freaks’ shirt from @sarahmackattack that has a strawberry squid on it. and i wasn’t even thinking about it but the optometrist walked in and he was like ‘oh what does your shirt say’ so i showed him and he was like ‘oh that’s neat!’ and then i thought he might like to know about strawberry squid eyes since they have weird eyes and he is an optometrist and all. so i was like ‘yeah it’s actually a real kind of squid called a strawberry squid, their eyes are really cool because they have one big yellow-green one and one small blue one’ and he kind of gasped and went ‘oh my god that’s so interesting i wonder why they have that. do you know what their retina composition is like?’ and i watched as he minimized my chart on the computer and started looking up images of strawberry squid and then he googled ‘strawberry squid retina composition’ and he was like ‘sorry we’ll get to your eye exam in a moment i just really want to find out’ LMAO 10/10 optometrist experience will be returning
Hell yeah
it is very interesting to see the language of contemporary book criticism co-opted by Christian Nationalists to remove books from English classroom and libraries.
One recent example: My novel Turtles All the Way Down was banned from being taught in English classes because one school board member claimed it "romanticizes mental illness."
(It does no such thing, of course. TAtWD makes mental illness seem really unpleasant and not at all either lowercase-r or capital-r romantic. To acknowledge something's existence is not to romanticize that thing. But part of co-opting this language is misusing it for the end of removing books thematically centered on mental illness, or physical illness, or sex, or anything else that might be deemed insufficiently inocuous for Educational Literature.)
But the question of when writing about something veers into romanticizing it IS actually a very important question for contemporary literary criticism, and one that's been explored a lot (sometimes with generosity and care, sometimes not) in book discourse online. So the Christian Nationalist Right is using the language of analysis that we are using in ways that are at best misguided and at worst disingenuous.
It's really discouraging--I mean, on a personal level obviously but also just as an American who believes teachers should be allowed to teach--to see such widespread book bans in American high schools and libraries. But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order.
On that front, the Christian Nationalists are right to worry. Books can be a path into loving one's neighbor as one's self, and seeing the full light of the sacred in the experiences of the marginalized. God forbid.