Photographing wild animals has certain risks. But often, the potential hazards are worth it—something photographer Barbara Jensen Vorster
can attest to first hand. In July 2018, she was snapping pictures of a
lion pride in Botswana, until a local lioness stole Vorster’s Canon 7D
after she accidentally dropped it on the ground. (The “thud” piqued the
big cat’s interest.) Luckily, Vorster had another camera on hand and
captured what happened next.
Once the camera dropped, the lioness
mother growled and approached Voster’s group. They withdrew to their
vehicle and watched the drama unfold. “The camera fell with the lens
looking up,” Voster recalled,
“she gently flipped the camera on its side and picked it up by the
barrel of the lens.” The lioness then brought it to her cubs who started
to playfully pounce on it. “They dragged it through the dirt, chewed on
the lens hood and then, fortunately, like most kids, soon grew tired
with their new toy.”
Eventually, Voster was able to fetch her
abandoned camera. She found that it still functioned fine, but the
lioness left her signature. “There are two huge teeth marks on the
rubber focus rings of the lens and small teeth marks on the plastic lens
hood, both of which I decided not to replace.” She spent roughly £200
getting the camera fixed, but the cost was worth the photos she snapped
that day. Calling it a “priceless experience,” she also puts it into
perspective: “What photographer can boast that their lens had been in a
lion’s mouth?”
HSI/ICE vs. hungry Mexican restaurant customers - WHO YA GOT?
“Did you not realize what this would be, being f*cking Gestapo, being Nazis? You didn’t realize what this would be like. You should quit! Quit now, quit! Now, you Nazi f*ck. Quit your job. It’s gonna be like this every f*cking day you’re coming. Every day, anytime you try to kidnap people, we are gonna be here!” A rapid responder yelled at fleeing ICE agents in Kansas.
As ICE and HSI raided two El Toro Loco locations in Lenexa and Kansas City, Kansas on Wednesday, rapid responders mobilized to both locations. In Lenexa, they chased HSI out of the restaurant, documenting on video the agents’ faces, vehicles, failure to show a warrant, and more.
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He’d spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He’d seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn’t consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to “better” or “more important” things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he’d trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this… and it wasn’t just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
“When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?”
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
“This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you’ll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you’re going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i’m ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress.”
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he’d spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out… The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn’t stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn’t really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I’ve thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
Post on my dash about medical debt reminded me of the time tumblr saved me two grand. I don’t think I told y'all about it because I am out of the habit of posting everything I do on tumblr lol
So. Last December, I had a bad cavity filled, and about a week later, I woke up with half of my face paralyzed. Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, freaked me the fuck out. Fortunately I had some level-headed Discord friends who a) told me what Bell’s palsy was so I could look it up and b) reminded me to call my dentist for an emergency appointment. Dentist was also pretty sure it was Bell’s palsy, but urged me to go to the emergency room to get checked out, because one-sided facial paralysis is also a possible indicator of a stroke. And you don’t fuck around with strokes.
Bell’s palsy, if you, like me of 6 months ago, don’t know, is a harmless paralysis/muscle weakness on one side of the face that can be caused by a variety of things. It usually goes away on its own after a few weeks but also you can speed up the process with steroids.
I was pretty sure I was not having a stroke, because I’m Red Cross first aid certified and I know the symptoms of a stroke, and while one-sided facial paralysis is one of them, I didn’t have any of the others. Also, I had quit my shitty job in October, which meant I had a shiny new marketplace health insurance plan and hadn’t even touched my deductible. But I called my parents from the car and they urged me to get checked out and promised to help me pay off the emergency room bill if I needed it, because they’re good people and they love me even if they drive me crazy sometimes. So off I went to the nearest emergency room.
Emergency room staff also didn’t think I was having a stroke, because I waited ALL AFTERNOON, periodically having a new person come up to me and ask me to smile, hold both arms out to the side, press down on their hands, and tell them what month and year it was. (They don’t ask who the president is anymore. Hmm, I wonder why.) One guy had me drink a cup of water while he watched. I cannot stress enough that I did not have any medical tests other than a physical examination: no CT scans or MRIs, no IV drugs or blood draws, nothing.
I get diagnosed with Bell’s palsy and given a prescription for Prednisone. And then they give me a phone number and tell me to talk to this person about administrative stuff. So I call, and the dude on the phone verifies my name and date of birth and insurance information, and then he says, “It looks like your copay today is going to be $2400. How would you like to pay?”
I am, to this day, kind of impressed that he didn’t even stutter over that number, but I assume working in a medical call center drains your entire soul. At this point, it’s about 7pm, and I’ve been in the hospital since 2pm, and I’m stressed because half my face doesn’t work, and I know that I can’t afford $2400 because I quit my shitty job with nothing lined up back in October. But, I still remember every tumblr post I’ve ever read about health insurance and the medical system and how you can negotiate down a bill. I am not looking forward to this process, it sounds like a pain in the ass, but the alternative is paying $2400, so I say the magic words: “Send me an itemized bill.”
I kinda expected the guy to try and get me to pay up front, but he just says “Ok” and finishes up the process. I get discharged, go to the only open pharmacy at that time of night to get my Prednisone, have the pharmacist tell me the prescription isn’t written right and he can’t fill it, go home, and have a screaming sobbing meltdown because I have used up every single milligram of cope in my entire body. (I got my steroids eventually, and the Bell’s palsy cleared up in a couple weeks.)
A few weeks later, I get the bill in the mail. I brace myself and open it…
$300.
Turns out, after going through insurance and processing and everything, they couldn’t actually find $2400 worth of stuff to charge me for. Shocking! Who could have predicted!
I might have been able to argue it down even more, but I was fed up with entire thing, so I paid the $300 just to be fucking done with it. Sometimes the cheapest way to pay is with money.
What if I had paid that $2400 up front? Do I think they would have been like, “Oh, oops!” and refunded me $2k? Well, possibly, but I am not optimistic.
So, thank you to everyone who has ever posted about navigating the US healthcare system on tumblr. Because of you, I knew how to handle this situation even when I was tired and stressed.
for those who are (rightfully!) concerned about animal welfare in tik toks: Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary is a true sanctuary and this animal is safe and happy!
Wildcat Ridge is not only an accredited sanctuary, they have a policy of not displaying their residents to the public. It is a retirement home for cats that should never have been pets or attractions. There is no pressure on the animals to be in front of people, they interact as they choose with the sanctuary staff and vets and that’s it.
well yeah i have a pet hydra and it only has one head. i’m not going to cut its head off just to make it look cooler, you asshole. that’s seriously unethical. and i’m not letting you cut its head off either. if you really want a hydra with multiple heads, you should go for a rescue- but if you want your pet to look cooler at the cost of its physical health, maybe you shouldn’t get any kind of pet at all. no, the hydra’s not for guarding my evil tower, it’s my pet. have you ever heard of a pet? like a puppy or a kitty? you think i can’t defend my evil tower by my self?
it's the largest freshwater lake on the planet by surface area, you could lose a couple of smaller countries in there and not even notice. (vs Europe)
on top of that, it's a Northern lake, so the water never really gets warmer than 50 F (10 C) even in the heat of summer, and it's famous for sudden violent storms that destroy ships and buildings alike. this thing has a MASSIVE body count because it's also a major shipping thoroughfare.
She is also over 1,300ft/400m deep at her deepest. Once she has eaten you, she will not give you back. Lake Superior doesn't give up her dead.
And when Bunjy says "the largest by surface are" what that means is: Lake Superior is a whopping 31,700 square miles (82,103 square km) of water. The only reason she is not an inland sea is because she is freshwater.
She has tides. She has rip currents, like an ocean does. You don't even have to go out on a boat to get got by her, all you have to do is step into her icy waters in the wrong spot. She has ice formations that aren't "icebergs" on the technicality that they didn't calve from glaciers, even though they look and act the same.
(photo by Paul Berger)
She LOOKS like an ocean when you are at her shores. This is from a location on the Minnesota side shore.
(photo by George Ilstrup)
She is huge, icy, and hungry. This makes her very dangerous. Not to be fucked around with, because you WILL find out.
That's an impressive amount of sticks to surround a dainty lil grass nest
In other nesting news, Wrennifer has now settled and laid three eggs as of this morning. Her guy was hard at work for a whole month until she finally decided to go for it and added her embellishments. I call the House Wrens puppies because they are so obsessed with sticks 😆 I hope the weather remains friendly so that they have a safe brood.
(Music is called “Gradually build up and calm down. live piano(1379082)”.)
people who are just finding out about internet tracking and data mining in the year 2025 and that your special robot friend does not respect your privacy lol
It’s crazy that countries on the edge of the Sahara desert are reversing desertification by just digging half circles
The ground in these places is too compact for water to soak in during wet season which leads to flooding but digging these holes gives the water a place to stop and soak in. And they’re pushing back the desert with this. By just digging holes.
The new plants also help even more water soak into the ground which reduces flooding even more.
These places also give people places to grow food and graze animals like people are turning completely dry compact desert into a refuge for wildlife and plants and solving regional food insecurity just by digging holes.
The half-circles are called zaï! They’re a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.
He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.
Immensely cool dude. He’s been a personal hero since I learned about him.
Die Mimik der Tethys (The Expressions of Tethys) is a high sea buoy (last was in Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, 2024), that is suspended in space and moves synchronously to another buoy in the Atlantic Ocean near Nantes. Continuously transmitting motion data via satellite to its relocated double, the information guides eight electric motors and cable winches, which precisely reproduce the buoy’s movement in the ocean. The buoy functions as a hypnotising machine that inevitably leads to the idea of waves lapping around inside the exhibition space, creating an ocean in the minds of people.
Found throughout western North America, this species is solitary and each female builds its own nest, though often ideal nest sites have dozens or hundreds of individual nests. The purpose of the chimney entrance is still debated.
When censoring information out of pictures, do NOT use the marker tool. Block it out with a full filled in square, or use a mosiac filter. Marker tools are not fully opaque and are slightly off from black, which makes it possible to alter the levels and reveal the information underneath.
prev this is way too genius to leave in the tags
& we have been able to do this since 1985 in Paint.
Things two hungarian poets from the 1840s said to each other in their letters that make me crazy:
If my soul touches you and it happens to burn you I’m not to blame… it was you who lit it on fire
I swear to you on cottage cheese and tobacco
If the people rule in poetry, so will they rule in politics and that’s the goal of the century! To hell with the aristocracy!
My dear buddy,
My soul, my bastard,
My golden mouthed saintly friend,
My rowdy brother,
My lovable dummy,
If you want to see a dead Pegasus, look no further than me
I am trying to learn to smile nicely ( he did not succeed)
My dear friend, you better side of my soul
I will never forgive you for NOT writing the address on the envelope yourself. A woman’s handwriting… and a black seal… dear god, the devil took him! he worked himself to death writing poems, he died! … and then i opened your letter… Never do this again. Only use black seal vax on your death, and even then, still write the address yourself!
I’m reading (your work) for the sixth time. It’s really a horrible thing. I’ll need to read it again to understand just how awful it is!
Sincerely, your friend whose balls are itching
It’s really good that your sore throat is gone, I can finally strangle you
Leave the dedication! Veselényi is a great man but he’s still a Lord, and a poet should never dedicate ANYTHING to a Lord
I’m hugging you a 1000000000000 times!
Nem tudom, most hogyan tanítják ezt (ha egyáltalán…), de nekünk kibaszott röhejesek voltak az irodalomtanáraink, ahogyan próbálták megmagyarázni, hogy “jaj dehogy voltak azok, hogy mondhatsz ilyet, csak hát abban az időben még máshogyan működtek a barátságok”, “nem egyáltalán nem úgy értette, csak nagyon jó barátok voltak”, “régen nem volt furcsa olyat mondani egy másik férfinak, hogy forrón csókollak”.
