It is that time of year … Sunflower Time! I arrived at the humble sunflower field not long after sunrise. For the next 30 minutes I enjoyed walking in the midst of the sunflowers. My location was Matten Road in Wrenshall … a delight for the senses. Here is the Google Maps link. I was visiting MK3 Hardwood Farm (Facebook page). While the sunflowers are in their glory right now, birding will become better as some flowers begin to go to seed.
I also decided to take this image pointed directly into the sun. The sunflowers are all facing the rising golden orb.
The farm is well worth a visit. Wrenshall is very near Duluth. You can not help but be in a good mood after starting your morning walking amongst the sunflowers. It’s kind of humorous … my prior post two days ago featured the dark and Northern Lights, and now I am focused upon dawn and sunflowers. God fills our world with amazing colors.
If you are interested in the photography angle of the first two images, both photographs were taken using aperture priority. In the first image I have used settings to blur the background sunflowers, whereas in the second photo I have used settings to bring the foreground flowers into focus. Neither approach is right, or wrong … just different.
glorious, glorious, admirable, this is the ultimate game show prize, I need an article of furniture dedicated to upholding and giving me access to the staccess
There really is something about knowing you could lie on the floor of your living room, look up, and see a stack of electronics looming over you like a Cyberpunk megastructure. It was the 80’s/early 90’s, and we still thought the future was going to save us, and god dammit LED readouts everywhere was a harbinger of The Future.
I just keep two spray bottles in my pocket; one with bleach; one with ammonia... When I think I might have been exposed to covid, I just snort a shot of each up my nostrils
Ad agencies with the Chlorine Gas account in the post-WWI era had to hustle
I was going through the notes to try to avoid making a repeated joke (for anyone curious, yes “chlorine gas george” and “can’t have a cold if you’re dead” have been made plenty of times), and instead stumbled into a rabbit hole of chlorine gas based wellness, too much to pick just one to share. But it’s really interesting if you pop in there.
wore my thigh high boots on a walk today and we had to take a path through some long grass and while everyone else was rolling their pants into their socks and putting on jackets to protect themselves from ticks i was standing there smug as hell in my thigh high leather boots.
okay so what I’m getting from the notes is that a lot of people had NO IDEA that manatees are more anatomically similar to whales and dolphins than seals! they also did that thing where they just yeeted the entire pelvis and grew a fin- their tail is, in fact, a tail c:
it’s even more obvious with their dugong relatives, who just have a full-on fluke back there!
complete with a little smirk to go with it.
Mammals love returning to the ocean. We’ve done it three separate times! Whales and dolphins are related to cows and hippos. Manatees and dugongs are related to elephants. Seals and walruses are related to dogs and raccoons.
four! four times.
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these things sprang forth from either odd-toed ungulates or a DIFFERENT elephant relative, scientists still aren’t sure which. either way though, RIP.
aren’t we forgetting someone?!
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FIVE!!!
SIX
(Thalassocnus, a Pliocene sloth that fed on seagrass and kelp)
SIX(Thalassocnus,
a Pliocene sloth that fed
on seagrass and kelp)
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
sorry, it's still five. Thalassocnus was most likely a semi-aquatic mammal that lived most of its life on land and dived only to feed on seagrass, rather than a fully-aquatic marine mammal like the rest of the animals on the list.
damn shame they all died out before they could finish evolving down that path though, I'd love to see what a fully-aquatic sloth would have looked like!
maybe if the damn whales would have stopped eating them for five fucking minutes. maybe.
yeah, the yapok! it's native to mexico and central america, and it's the result of the north american branch of opossums trying to make an otter and mostly succeeding :)
there are many many MANY partially-aquatic mammals out there, but only a few totally-aquatic marine mammals.
oh yapoks are also notable for evolving a second "thumb" out of a wrist bone, so I think they're currently the only mammal with six digits. love them for it
count them! 1-2-3-4-5-6!
Hold the fuck up! I was told my entire life that the opossum is the only marsupial that exists outside Australia! Now I find out this little semi aquatic fucker has existed the whole time??!
What other marsupials have I been lied to about?
he :)
Opossums are almost the only marsupials outside of Australia. The thing you probably didn't know is that opossums are an entire ORDER, Didelphimorphia, with something like 125 species in it. The Virginia opossum we're mostly familiar with is the only one in North America, so that's where the misconception probably comes from. But down in Central and South America you've got the water opossum, tiny little mouse opossums, short-tailed opossums that look a little like shrews, four-eyed opossums (they don't actually have four eyes, just spots above the eyes), fat-tailed opossums - all sorts of adorable little freaks.
(There are also the shrew opossums, which are called opossums but get their own order because they're bizarre little throwbacks and might've diverged off the marsupial tree before any of the others. It's ok if you haven't heard of them, not many people have, and they like it that way.)
The other branch of marsupials is Australidelphia, which has all the, well, Australian ones. EXCEPT! There used to be australidelphians in the Americas too. They've all died out, leaving only fossils... except for one: the monito del monte, the little thing Bunjy posted above. It's what we call a relict species, because it's the only member of its lineage in the region (in this case, the entire continent) and its nearest relatives are 15,000 km away in Oceania. Extinction came calling and this guy just didn't pick up the phone. (It was probably napping. Monito del monte is nocturnal and does not answer the phone during business hours.)
I sat with a crying second grader today. (The age range is outside my wheelhouse but I was the most convenient adult.) He was crying, the other adults said, because his brother took a phone he was playing on. “Phone addicted,” everybody said. “If he would get up and play games with the other kids he wouldn’t be crying.”
He told me everyone lets his brother take things from him because his brother is younger, and doesn’t know better. He told me he doesn’t want to play because he’s tired, he has too many extracurriculars this summer and can’t get good sleep because “everyone in my camper is so loud when I’m trying to sleep.” He’s exhausted and only eight. His mom’s an acquaintance and told me she and the kid’s father are going through a separation — mom and four kids left the house to stay in a camper.
But people will seriously not listen to kids crying over seemingly minor things because on the surface it looks like a tantrum. If kids are given the space to articulate themselves they often will.
I’ve found that if a child is capable of having a conversation (that is, old enough to speak and express themselves, not injured or upset so badly that they literally cannot stop crying, and not behaving violently), then 90% of the time their reason for being upset is legitimate, or at least understandable.
Please remember that this also applies to teenagers and preteens, they might be acting like a knowitall who doesn’t give a shit, or a first class jerk, but chances are fair they feel like shit for one reason or another and adults just chalk it up to teenage angst instead
one of the cutest little animals especially if you see one alive puttering around with its fat little feet and looking with its big round head yet they are consistently cited as absolutely terrifying to people
The same 1931 dracula movie with the armadillo in it also had one of these with its own little coffin but people are always mistaking it for a “bee”
I’m really not sure it was meant to be a tiny coffin and not the illusion of a big giant cricket? A vampire in cricket form???
She has a whole list of things she does and doesn’t do -
so like she won’t ‘write you up’ for a 'bad’ costume, so even first time cosplayers and people who have made mistakes / cheaper costumes she’ll write up for 'lack of faith’ or 'missing the target’ but nothing about what you look like?
if you are like DeadpoolRen, then she’ll comment on the costume in a fun way that is clearly what the cosplayer was going for.
You can also join her human resources team!
you just have to follow her rules of have fun and be kind.
do you guys ever like forget you’re interested in something until you start engaging with it again and you go “oh wait i’m like crazy crazy about this yeah”
![Desmostylians were large, fully aquatic quadrupeds with massive limbs and short tails.[2] The smallest is Ashoroa laticosta, a relatively large animal at a body length of 168 centimetres or 5 feet 6 inches, while the largest species reached sizes comparable to Steller's sea cow.[6]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/01778653f2a200b0f3aa895c23205570/ed85b56209559134-66/s540x810/9ef91eac11e3fb99f79937265eb3e1ba0e4caaa1.png)
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