Elderly lady mail clerk and young customer are chatting. Customer says, “oh! I’m wearing my boss’s coat right now, give me something weird to put in the pocket!” Others within earshot all start looking for something because, hey, important quest. Mail clerk finally reaches under counter, pulls out a large roll of labels, and tears one off.
Anyone interested in trail marker trees - especially those modified by Native Americans - should visit the comprehensive website of the Great Lakes Trail Marker Tree Society
Reposted from 2015 to add information that popped up on Facebook:
The mistake I've been carrying in my head for years was that the bent portion of a marker tree pointed which direction a trail went. In retrospect it's apparent that such a direction should be unnecessary because if you're on the trail you know which direction it goes (unless its very old and overgrown). On an active trail the bent portion of the tree would more logically point to local resources (water, shelter), as is obviously the case in this example.
Kudos to the family that documented this example before it was lost forever.
Addendum: Additional kudos to reader CHaggard, who found the current website for the Great Lakes Trail Marker Tree Society. Lots of information and excellent photos of some remarkable trees, and info re a relevant book.
Even Weird Al has had that™
experience with Tony Hawk
Tony Hawk IS Forrest Gump
So I looked up why and how this happened, and it turns out Weird Al hired a company called Birdhouse Skateboards to provide some “skate/punk” extras for the video. Birdhouse Skateboards is a company started by Tony Hawk, so not only did Weird Al end up putting Tony Hawk in his video without realizing it, he actually hired Tony Hawk’s company without realizing it! And then Tony Hawk just decided to go along as one of the extras himself.
BTW, he’d already won like 40 contests already, some of them international skateboarding contests. So it’s not like Weird Al cast some unknown skateboarder who ended up becoming World Famous Skateboarder, he was already well known and was running his own Skateboarding company.
Think of it this way. This wasn’t ‘Weird Al got Tony Hawk to be in his video’, this was ‘Tony Hawk found a way to be in a Weird Al Video.’
The chance that Tony Hawk has infiltrated your location or piece of media is low
Former Duluthian Ian Grant travels all over the world as host of the Emmy-award winning series Culture Quest, which looks at “life through the lens of the world’s artists, artisans and keepers of culture.” The latest episode is all about the place Grant spent his childhood in the 1970s and ’80s: Duluth. The show explores how Lake Superior influences the people, culture and stories of the city.
The kid next door (talking toddler age) is playing outside and just wiped out in his Fisher Price car, and I just heard the babysitter say, “oh no, your insurance premium is definitely going to go up!” And the kid who had only been mildly sniffling before made the most confused, but startled sound you’ve ever heard.
Just very clearly an attempt at saying, “my what?”
He straight up forgot about his scraped knee and is now worried about whatever the fuck an insurance premium is.
I think my buddies and I started baking stuff when we were around 7.... We'd occasionally make dumb mistakes like adding 1/2 cup of salt to some biscuit batter instead of 1/2 tsp (or whatever); they were hard as a rock
making the radical claim “11 year old children should be taught how to make extremely simple food” has resulted in people making arguments like “I wasnt allowed to plug in electronics until I was 16 and I think this is super normal actually” and “children dont know what ratios are so its unfair to expect them to be able to comprehend the idea of adding equal amounts rice and water to a rice cooker” and I gotta say originally I thought maybe I was being too judgy but now I feel very secure in my opinion because what the fuck
11 years old is old enough to make cereal, sandwiches (yes, even grilled cheese), pasta, and hotdogs.
It’s not too young to start learning how to make casserole, chicken & rice, curry, and similar things, either.
Maybe with limited supervision when using the stove, depending on the kid and their experience-level. I’d say an 11 year old is probably capable of followinf a chocolate-chip cookie recipe, though they’ll probably need reminding about cleaning up after themselves.
This is an important life skill, and 11 is a perfectly normal age to start getting serious about developing it.
It’s by no metric a good movie, but I will give them credit for going ulltra low budget “Mars Attacks” in their death ray and it’s impact.
Having just checked, “Mars Attacks” cards didn’t come out until 1962, so this might have inspired some of it
Me: MY GOD THEY HAVE RAYS THAT CAN TURN US INTO SKELETONS!!!!
My Girlfriend: No babe thats the skeleton inside them
Me: w h a t
Having looked it up on wikipedia, this film was so low budget they only had one skeleton prop, so technically, they have a ray gun that turns multiple different people into the SAME skeleton.
So what you’re saying is I was technically correct :D
THE BEST KIND OF CORRECT
And it inspired an entire genre of films deliberately stylized to look like that!
A QUALITY GENRE :D
It’s not a great film, but the ending’s statement of “fascists are so stupid that they will mindlessly kill themself if they are ordered to” is pretty cathartic to me. Sometimes I rewatch the riff when the news is particularly bad.
I never guessed that in my adulthood, I’d be relating to Calvin’s parents as much as I do in this comic.
Because damn … Calvin’s dad was so right.
This is part of an arc where their house got broken into and they have to deal with the ensuing fallout.
Calvin and Hobbes was some real shit, my dude.
Reading Calvin and Hobbes as an adult is a VERY different experience than reading it as a kid.
I always liked this arc because they were out of town when the house was robbed (I think at a wedding?) but Calvin forgot Hobbes. So when they get home and realize they’ve been robbed, Calvin is super scared Hobbes might’ve been stolen. For some reason the last panel when the parents are happy that Calvin has his buddy again just always moved me.
went to miami to recover father sotirios. and made some new friends.
these animals… they are wise. I recruited them to avenge my dear brother. I was then escorted out of the sea world.
Better than the 1596 Marseille dolphin exorcism I suppose.
In 1596 dolphins were infesting the port of Marseille. Back in those days, y’see, dolphins didn’t have the cuddly image they enjoy today. They were pests and were causing damage.
So the cardinal of Avignon sent the bishop of Cavaillon to do something about them. In front of a huge crowd, the bishop sprinkled some holy water into the waters of the port and told the dolphins to begone. Whereupon the dolphins indeed turned tail in terror and fled, and were never seen again.
Still not as dramatic as Saint Bernard excommunicating the flies though.
What happened to the flies?
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux built a monastery in 1124, but it was plagued by flies. So the good saint promptly excommunicated them. By the next day the flied had died in such quantities that they had to be shoveled out.
Still not as nutty as the Basel rooster trial though.
*everyone in unison* um what rooster trial?
In 1474, a rooster in Basel did the heinous and unspeakable act of laying an egg. As everyone knows, an egg laid by a rooster will hatch into a basilisk (or cockatrice).
So to avoid the creation of a cockatrice (or basilisk), the rooster was tried, found guilty, and burned at the stake along with its egg. A huge crowd was present.
The “rooster” in this case was likely a hen that had developed male characteristics (it happens).
Still not as properly legal as the Savigny pig trial though.
Ok, clearly you want an excuse to talk about the pig thing, and I now DESPERATELY want to hear about the pig thing, so PLEASE tell us about the Pig Thing.
In 1457 a sow killed Jehan Martin, a five-year-old boy in Savigny. For that crime she was put on trial and judged guilty, and sentenced to be hanged from a tree.
Her piglets, however, were judged to have been innocent of the murder, and so were returned to the owner, with the caveat that he had to surrender them to the law if they were later found to have eaten any of the boy.
Not to be confused with a whole bunch of other, similar porcine trials.
I won’t mention the 1454 excommunication of eels in Lake Geneva then.
OK what did the eels do, and more pressingly why were they in communion with the church in the first place
Animals are expected to be part of the Church by default, that’s why they take excommunication so badly.
Felix Hemmerlin’s treatise on exorcism, cited by e.g. Wagner’s Historia Naturalis Helvetiae (1680), informs us that around 1221-1229, eels once infested Lake Geneva in huge numbers. So Saint William, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicated them and banned them from the lake, forcing them to live in only one part of it.
Plot twist: as far as we know, Saint William was never bishop of Lausanne.
There’s no way you have historical Christianity nonsense more silly than this to share
I’ve been trying to stay on brand and talk about animals only, but sure, few intersections of Christianity and the legal system get sillier than…
… the Cadaver Synod.
Pope Formosus (“Good-looking”) was pope from 891 to 896, and apparently accumulated a few enemies. After his successor Boniface VI enjoyed all of a 15-day papacy, the next pope elected was Stephen VI.
And he hated Formosus.
How much? He had the corpse of Formosus exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, and put on trial for his failings as a pope.
End result? Formosus was found guilty of papal fail. The corpse was stripped of its clothes, three fingers on its right hand were severed (no blessings for u), and it was tied to weights and dumped in the Tiber.
Needless to say Stephen VI came to a sticky end. An angry mob deposed him, he was strangled in prison, and Formosus’s corpse was fished up and reburied with honors. And the later popes passed edicts ensuring this kind of silliness would not happen again.
Tune in next time when I tell you about how a lawyer defended a city’s entire rat population.
Please, the rats, give us the rats, i beg….
The story of the rats of Autun is also the story of Barthelémy de Chasseneuz (or Chassenée, etc.), a highly original and highly talented defense lawyer. That’s him here.
When the town of Autun was infested by rats in the early 1500s, they were accused of eating the province’s barley crop and were duly summoned to be judged in an ecclesiastical court of law. Chasseneuz was the defense attorney.
How do you defend an entire swarm of rats? You don’t, is the answer. You delay. Chasseneuz’s original defense was “my clients live all over the place, one summons won’t be enough”. So he got a court summons to be posted in all the infested parishes.
When the rats didn’t show up after the elapsed time delay, Chasseneuz proceeded to explain at length why. The rats didn’t come to court, he said, because of their enemies the cats, which are everywhere and always vigilant and hungry. “You cannot expect my clients to undertake a journey which would put them in mortal danger”, he argued in complete seriousness. “Thus they have the legal right to turn down a summons that endangers them”.
As far as we know, the rats never did appear in court, and remained unprosecuted.
Chasseneuz went on to have a distinguished career as a lawyer and was allegedly killed by a poisoned bouquet of flowers.
Anyone else picturing @a-book-of-creatures sitting in a tavern, significantly tapping their glass every time someone begs for a story, noting that telling stories sure is thirsty work…
Whuh? Hrm… that one Roman guy who fed people to his pet eels…
Tell us! Tell us pray!
His name was Vedius Pollio and he was by all accounts (namely Pliny and Seneca) a nasty piece of work.
He had a pool full of eels. Slaves who displeased him would get tossed into it for his general entertainment. The eels would rip them to shreds, then Pollio would go on to eat the eels because why not go the whole hog and be cartoonishly evil? As fate would have it a slave broke a crystal cup while Augustus was around, and threw himself at Augustus’ feet to beg for mercy. Augustus recognized Pollio’s sadism and had the slave freed, the fishpond filled in, and every cup in the place smashed.
That’s the eel story anyhow. But what kind of eels were they? They’re commonly translated as “lampreys” in English sources, but it seems hard to imagine lampreys tearing someone apart piranha-style. Moray eels are more likely given their reputation for bitiness. At any rate the original text uses the word muraena, which is currently… the scientific name of the Mediterranean moray.
Vedius and his moray eels made a guest appearance in one of the Alix stories, where our hero almost gets to be fish food.
Reblogging again to say fuck Bernard of Clairvaux, but not for this in particular. I’m with him on this one.
Here is Fanny Huggatha, the facehugger custom to go as a companion doll for my Xenomorph Skullector doll. Since the facehugger is an 8 legged design, I really wanted to revisit the idea of a 6 armed doll, and this was a good way of using up my Viperine bait bodies I had piling up.
Her dress is completely handmade as her arm placement take up a lot of space of her sides and back, and the pre crimped fabric was kind of finnicky. But I really wanted my facehugger doll to look like she could be going to the same event as my Xenomorph doll so I wanted her to also look formal.
I knew I wanted the dress to look as phallic as possible so it’s why I tried making the body of her dress look as wrinkled as possible and her bust area to be as mushroom shaped as well.
I debated what to do with her hip things as I toyed with the idea of cutting up facehugger figures to act like a cage skirt, but nothing quite worked, and I figured to again lean into my fashion doll roots and make her outfit mainly textile based rather than trying to custom sculpt everything. I settled for these big skirt puffs, and echoed with a big bow on her back, I think it echoes the shape of a facehugger without it being too literal.
As for her shoes, I did debate on 3d printing a pair, but I tried these EAH Maddie hatter shoes on her and I really liked the abstract shapes to them that echo the alien nature of her.
Overall, I’m really satisfied with how she turned out because I envisioned her pretty close to how she turned out to the idea in my head.
Eventually I would like to get some custom accessories to elevate her but I’m just happy that she’s done.
Naryciodes Caterpillars: these caterpillars have gummy-like bodies with features that mimic the appearance of a snail; they even have appendages that resemble eyestalks, but they’re actually located on the caterpillar’s rump
The scientific name of this species is Naryciodes posticalis. It belongs to the Limacodidae family of moths, which are commonly known as slug moths, thanks to the gelatinous, slug-like appearance of their larvae. That name seems a little ironic in this case, because Naryciodes posticalis actually mimics a snail.
Above:Naryciodes posticalis caterpillar
The caterpillar has a bulge in the center of its body, with colorful markings that form three concentric layers. These features mimic the appearance of a snail’s shell, which may help to deter predators. It also has a pair of short, stubby appendages that resemble eyestalks, but they’re located at the back of the caterpillar’s body.
Above: this photo shows the underside of the caterpillar’s body, with its mouth slightly visible on the right
This species is found only in Japan.
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find any other information about these strange little creatures, and I get the sense that the entire genus is poorly studied.
Saw this as a comment when I looked up the film: It's probably a little dumber than you might think, it's very likely funnier than you'd expect, it's almost certainly weirder than you'd anticipate, but it's way hornier than you could predict!
It’s a good sign to me when the ultra low budget movie has really obviously pulled acting talent from somewhere in the sex work pool, because it means you know at least someone working on this thing is a professional.
There’s a lot going on for a movie called Graveyard Shark
“They’re not even listening to us! I made the monster sound and everything.”
“Yeah… It would be better if you didn’t do that.”
“There’s something fishy here.”
“Wait! Bears like to eat fish. Maybe there’s something connected here!”
“Oh, knock it the fuck off Greg.”
I’m trying not to give everything away but there is a lengthy discussion of / flashback to mermaid sex which is kind of spectacular. You’re going to want to watch this, but you’ll want at least two additional people because when the suave, romantic R&B song about fucking mermaids kicks in you’ll need to share the experience pretty much immediately.
Graphically illustrating the mermaid sex by fingering a tub of macaroni salad.
Times like these I remember that Malcolm X quote about healing and how it requires acknowledging the knife is there. Things like “this isn’t who we are” and “this is un-American” and “what are we? [insert another country]??” reveal a deep seated denial of American history and state-sponsored domestic terror that I’m just not gonna entertain anymore from leftists over the age of twenty.
“If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and they haven’t even begun to pull out the knife. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
When I was a very small child, my mom used to bury coins in my sandbox, leave huge boot prints in the sand, and tell me pirates had come in the night and buried treasure. I would be out there happily for hours, with my little sieve, and my mom got a quiet morning to herself for the price of a handful of pennies.
I was always kind of skeptical about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, because visiting every kid in the world did not seem reasonable. But the pirates only visited me, so they were probably real.
So that’s the story of how I ended up being an archaeologist. How about you?
Went out on a boat (on a whim after a birthday lunch) and got a great show from an adolescent humpback; it just kept breeching. Not sure how many total, but it was probably more than 10. Mom didn't join in, but she did get "playful" with some tail slapping action.
Humpback whales breaching: gorgeous, majestic, graceful, embodies all the strength and beauty of the ocean
Minke whales breaching: I will launch myself out of this ocean like a f***ing surface-to-air missile to seek and destroy my enemies
I remember an interview with a guy that did the camera work for nature documentaries and he said that baleen whales like these guys were the scariest things to shoot because “They’re the size of a train, they can suddenly appear out of nowhere in dark or murky water and they don’t make a goddamn sound. I was absolutely sure that one of them was going to hit me and well, ‘that’s all folks!’. Gave me a lot of perspective on how I handle myself when filming smaller animals now.”
Fin whales breaching: sea serpent
levitating minke whale
Sperm whale breaching: wjaht the fuck
I have a feeling I have already shared this, but please, take the contribution of the northern right whale dolphin.
The humble eyebrow
I know they’re not a whale but I just want to appreciate the Great White’s breaching
Great job sweetie 🥰
Spinner dolphin: I’m gonna stab this ocean
They do actually spin when they jump, better in video than still
There was this one time I scratched up my cornea real bad and had to go to the hospital. Dealing with medical bureaucracy is always very frustrating to me, and that combined with the pain had me in a very bad mood. I was even crying.
I had to wait quite a while for the doctor to see me, but fortunately the nurse who was helping me had an excellent bedside manner and went out of her way to distract me. She expertly did this by getting me talking about books I’d read recently.
I went all in on criticizing the last book I’d read. I don’t remember what it was, but I really hadn’t liked it, and I denigrated it as “Misery Porn”. And she was like “Hmm, that sounds interesting, tell me more”. So I gave a general plot synopsis. As I was telling her that most of the characters were immigrant miners, she interrupted me to say “That’s interesting, I didn’t realize that there were mines in Missouri”.
And at that moment time stopped for me and I realized that the entire time I’d been talking about the book, she’d been assuming I was talking about porn set in Missouri. I had just assumed that she had understood from context that when I said “Misery Porn”, I meant “A story that is gratuitously depressing so that readers will think it’s deeper than it really is”.
Rather than being disappointed in our miscommunication, I was instead impressed with the level on non judgement she was showing me. Having a whole ass cheerful conversation about Missouri themed porn just to help a patient. I think about her all the time.
There have now been many responses to this post, but they almost all boil down to just 3 categories.
Nerds (affectionate): Actually, Missouri has many lead mines.
Health care professionals: This is just what working with patients is like.
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