imagine you coin a term for fun online, and then it blows up a little, and then a famous author picks up on it, it blows up further, and ends up nominated as word of the year, except the famous author insists he came up with it (and despite very visible evidence in respective posting histories to the contrary it’s not kind of thing people are interested in quibbling or defending, so the record stands the way the big guy put it). just a fun hypothetical to consider because it’s the kind of thing that would drive a typical person endowed with typical fairness instincts nutty, but also the kind of thing where you sounds insane if you complain about it too much or try to do anything about it. like you’d rather all this never have happened than that you made a mark in such a way. anyway
In 1975 Jim Jannard, a college dropout in his mid-20s, started a company in his garage. He named it after his dog. With an initial budget of $300, Jannard figured out how to mold unique motorcycle grips. He then began selling these Oakley grips at motocross events.
By the 1980s, Oakley had a line of motocross and BMX accessories, then branched out into goggles. Then ski goggles, then sunglasses.
By the mid-'90s, Jannard brought the company public, which brought in $230 million.
It was time for a new headquarters. Jannard, who was friends with Ridley Scott, wanted a building that evoked Blade Runner. Oakley's then-Director of Design was architect Colin Baden, who was tasked with the project along with architecture firm Langdon Wilson. The architectural metalwork was handled by the A. Zahner Company.
"The project features a blackened steel interior metalwork throughout, a spun aluminum architectural motif exterior, and a terne-coated stainless steel roof. The custom fabricated metal cladding was created from cold rolled steel plates and cast steel 'bolt heads'. The Zahner-applied blackened metal finish produced an artistic, aged steel appearance."
Located in Foothills Ranch, California, the headquarters was completed by 1998.
In the mid-2000s, Jannard went on to found the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, and sold Oakley to Luxottica. In 2019, Jannard retired a billionaire. He owns two islands in Fiji and a third in the San Juan Islands archipelago.
Colin Baden, who rose to become CEO of Oakley from 2009 to 2015, now runs his own design consultancy, One Icon Design.
Sounds presidential: During his trial, his lawyers defended him by calling their client too stupid to be held accountable.
A man who sued more than two dozen women for calling him “clingy” and “psycho” was just sentenced to a year in federal prison for tax fraud and generating mob-connected earnings from gambling machines. During his trial, his lawyers defended him by calling their client too stupid to be held accountable.
In January, 32-year-old Nikko D’Ambrosio sued 27 women, one man, 20 different parts of the Facebook corporation, Meta, Patreon, GoFundMe, and the website arewedatingthesame.com, claiming that he incurred damages after members of the Chicago “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook group called him “clingy” and “psycho.”
The judge for that case dismissed the complaint because the court did not have subject matter jurisdiction, but D’Ambrosio immediately refiled a class action lawsuit. D'Ambrosio's lawyers at Trent Law Firm were seeking others in Illinois who would come forward with claims that they’d been doxed, defamed, or had their photos posted in “Are We Dating The Same Guy” groups. “This group is a place for women to protect, support, and empower other women,” the Chicago group, and other official AWDTSG groups’ descriptions say. There are AWDTSG groups in many major cities around the U.S.
Women posted photos from D’Ambrosio’s social media, and in his complaint he claimed that one commenter wrote, “He’s been posted here before. The poster said he sent her a slew of texts calling her names because she didn’t want to spend the night with him.” Another wrote, according to screenshots in his complaint: “Flaunted money very awkwardly and kept talking about how I don’t want to see his bad side, especially when he was on business calls.”
No one ever tell me anything bad about the person who runs this account.
the person who runs this account, Katie Gouldin, is an evolutionary biologist who has an EXCELLENT podcast called Creature Feature which compares and contrasts the weird behaviors of man and beast! she is super cute and funny too!
oh thank GOD
just want to add i love how much she hates elon
yeah okay ill reblog that
She is also credited by the Audubon society with coining the word “birb”
Birds rights activist rules because it made this post that singlehandedly cured my relationship with food
What the fuck is this shit? I always assumed circus peanuts were actual peanuts. What am I looking at.
it’s sort of a hard foam that tastes like ground-up couch cushions from grandma’s house
These fucking things I swear to god.
For those unaware, circus peanuts are shaped like peanuts, colored orange, and taste like banana. Specifically, extinct banana flavoring. It’s a candy with an identity crisis.
The texture is between candy corn/mellowcreme and…I’ve never eaten it, but Floam? Is Floam still a thing? It’s dense, intense, and has little tiny air pockets that somehow make it *denser*.
–They were created in the 1800s, when everything was kind of terrible, and the recipe is “sugar, pork gelatin, corn syrup, food coloring, soy protein, artificial flavors, and pectin”
–They were one of the original penny candies, making them overpriced by a cent
–There are only a few companies still making them because they require very delicate temperature control for consistency…consistency
–The inventor of Circus Peanuts got away smoothly with their crime, unnamed and uncredited in history
–Lucky Charms was invented because General Mills employee John Holahan decided to “chop” Circus Peanuts into a bowl of Cheerios and “fell in love” with it, proving that 1) redemption arcs are real and 2) there are worse food crimes than putting fake crab on a waffle
[ID: Text-intensive Twitter thread from the Shapeshifters chest binders Twitter account in reply to a post by artist and author Ursula Vernon. Vernon says, A non-zero number of you apparently did not know that The Last Unicorn was a book before it was a movie. It is by Peter S. Beagle. It is made of spun glass and fairytales and iron knives and there are individual lines that I would give my lungs to have written. Shapechangers replies, I saw him every year at NYCC for several years straight, bought something at his table, asked him to sign it, and we spoke. He remembered me from year to year, no small feat at that con. He remembered which stories he’d told me. One year I came back with a different gender on. He squinted at me a bit and said thoughtfully, “I’ve seen you before in this place.” All I had to say was, “last year you told me the story about the inoshishi.” And his face cleared, and he leaned in with a grin and told me about a German guitarist who he traveled with, twice. Who transitioned between the first and second time, so he’d gotten to meet this person all over again on the second round. It was a wonderfully kind way to let me know that everything was fine. I was fresh out of the closet and I needed that, and maybe he could see it. The Last Unicorn is the best book in the world and I will defend it and its author til I die. the end. /end ID]
I don’t usually talk about celebrities; artists, when I do, and I’m keenly aware that one needn’t be a good person to be a hell of a heartwrenching artist. But Peter S. Beagle has written a few of my favorite things in the world, he’s an excellent singer and filker, and this Twitter thread was dreadfully important to me. I don’t want it going away as Twitter becomes Shitter, because it’s so often bad news, isn’t it? It’s important to me to share trans joy.
as a trans who used this book as a medium to help rationalise my feelings, this makes my heart so happy
Yeah… I think about The Last Unicorn prolly several times a week on average. At some point after my egg finally shattered in 2018 in my 30s, I started to worry, what with all the other folks who seem to need to opine and array against us, what that sweetheart of a man would think of me now. That’s when my wife pointed out this thread to me. I cried. Happy tears, you know how it is. I most often linked it to people on Discord, but decided it was time to put it somewhere I could find it when Xitter was done flushing. I am very very glad it’s been so important to people. It is important. But sometimes important things don’t get traction.
A golden memory.
I was thinking about this moment again today, trying to remember exactly what he said to me, in that noisy crowded artists’ alley on that hot October day.
It was something about how it was a gift, how he’d received the gift of learning and knowing his friend the guitarist more fully, this wonderful present of traveling with their true self. He spoke about it with gratitude, with a wellspring of warmth that showed how happy it had made him.
I think Peter Beagle might have been the first person to imply to me that my transition is a gift to others. That living my life fully and honestly is a way of gifting others with something precious and good, something that they can appreciate and remember for decades later.
I’ve met charismatic people. Politicians, leaders, authors, musicians, people who could grab your attention with a few words and a warm gesture and a spark in their eyes. People who could suss out the right thing to say within minutes, people who could launch into an impromptu speech that lasted hours and captivated everyone around them. None of them hit me with that Ring of Keys moment like Peter Beagle, can you feel my heart / saying hi?, except maybe John Darnielle.
I hope someday I can touch people’s lives like that. I’ve been so fucking fortunate. I have to survive long enough to help someone else like he helped me.
Just wanted to say the theme song for the animated The Last Unicorn movie slaps and the chorus of “I’m alive!” gets me every time
This post got me to put the movie on. I hadn’t watched it in years.
Listen if the study of ancient humans doesn’t make you at least a little bit emotional idk what to say.
I started crying today at the museum because they had reconstructed the shoes of Otzi the iceman.
Either he or someone he knew who cared about him made these shoes out of grass and bear skin and twine and he was wearing them when he died over five thousand years ago.
And a Czech researcher and his students did reconstructions of these shoes and wore them to the same place where he died to test them out and they were like yep! These shoes are really cozy and comfy and didn’t give us blisters while hiking!
Is that not just the coolest shit ever????
(Quietly, with love) We will remember your bread, we will remember your dog, we will remember your shoes
(Quietly, with anger) We will remember your copper
“I think Christopher’s translations are generally adequate. But he made one mistake which is worth describing because it was deliberate and because it illustrates a fundamental difference in outlook between the translator and his author. “Polly Peachum’s Song” tells how Polly behaved to her suitors before she met the right one, Macheath. In each verse, a boat is mentioned. Polly and one of the suitors get into it. In the first two verses, the boat is cast loose from the shore, and Polly adds, “But that was as far as things could go.” In the third and last verse, however, the boat is “tied to the shore,” when she has got into it with Macheath.
Christopher found this incomprehensible, because he took it for granted that the proper poetic metaphor for sexual surrender would be the casting loose of the boat. So, quite arbitrarily, disregarding the meaning of the German text, he transposed the lines and had the boat tied up in the first two verses, only to be cast loose in the last verse when Polly is possessed by Macheath.
No one protested. The book appeared with Christopher’s version of the poem. It was only when Christopher met Brecht for the first time, in California about six years later, that he had his misunderstanding corrected. Brecht told him mildly, with the unemphatic bluntness which was so characteristic of him: ‘A boat has to be tied up before you can fuck in it’”
— Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind
I doubt I will ever read a funnier anecdote than this one.
Every year a female raccoon takes up residence in the hollow trunk of our white pine. This year is no different, and Rosie has returned. She will give birth real soon to her youngsters. Every night multiple times she visits my bird feeders (ssen via my trailcam), but thankfully the feeders are hung properly to protect them from Rosie. The raccoon just gets sloppy seconds from bird spillage!
I would still use my turn signals in the Mad Max Wasteland. They’d call me “Signal” because I’d hit my blinker before ramming the enemy hot rods into the side of a desert ravine. I’d use my turn signal every time. They would respect me for this.
It’s really a question of motivation. NASA wanted to fly a helicopter on Mars to do planetary research. But the Republicans in Texas truly don’t want to fix their broken grid.
They should all just live alone in the woods or on remote islands. Solve everyone’s problem.
Every little town has a hometown hero... Dick Bong was ours (our elementary school had a little museum and an actual P38 on display). He also leads to lots of good funny shit like Bong Park, etc
Maj. Richard Ira Bong with one of the P-38 fighter planes nicknamed "Marge" that he flew during World War II. (hoto by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
Richard Bong was the United States’ top ace pilot during the Second World War, scoring 40 aerial victories during his time in the war. Many of those kills happened behind the stick of a P-38 fighter plane nicknamed “Marge” after his then-girlfriend and later wife Marjorie Vattendahl. And now “Marge” the plane has been found after 80 years.
On Thursday, searchers announced that they had located what they believed to be the wreckage of Bong’s P-38. It was found in Papua New Guinea’s Madang Province.
The plane went down on March 24, 1944, not in combat but from a mechanical issue. The plane suffered an engine failure and with nothing to do, the pilot bailed out and the plane crashed in the jungles of what is now Papua New Guinea. But Major Dick Bong wasn’t actually piloting Marge that day. Instead, it was Lt. Thomas Malone was in the cockpit, using the plane for a reconnaissance flight.
In March, historical research group Pacific Wrecks and the Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center located in Superior, Wisconsin announced they were teaming up in a search for the wreckage of Marge.
Explorers with Pacific Wrecks said that they found the wreck of the plane on May 15. The plane had apparently crashed nose-first in the bottom of the ravine. Despite years exposed to the elements, much of the plane was still identifiable. They shared several pieces of information identifying the wreck as Bong’s. Several pieces of metal identify it both as a P-38 and contain serial numbers matching that of Bong’s Marge. Pacific Wrecks Director Justin Taylan, during a press conference on Thursday, May 23 said that proves it is Marge “beyond a doubt.”
“I think it’s safe to say mission accomplished,” Taylan added.
Bong, born Sept. 24, 1920 in Superior, Wisconsin, joined the military in May 1941. After the U.S. entered World War II, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces, serving multiple tours in the Pacific Theater. In early 1944 he put a painting of Marge on the nose of his P-38, officially naming it after his partner.
After Malone bailed out of the P-38 and Marge crashed in the jungle, Bong was emotionally hurt by the loss of his beloved plane, but not deterred from the war. He was back in the sky less than two weeks later, piloting another P-38 he also named “Marge” and scoring his 25th aerial victory. He would keep flying P-38s throughout the rest of the war. Later in 1944 he was awarded the Medal of Honor for “voluntarily and at his own urgent request engag[ing] in repeated combat missions, including unusually hazardous sorties over Balikpapan, Borneo, and in the Leyte area of the Philippines” despite not being assigned as a combat pilot at the time.
Dick Bong was sent home in January 1945, his time in combat over. He then became a test pilot, flying P-80s in Burbank, California. On Aug. 6 while in the air, his plane suffered a fuel pump malfunction. Bong ejected but was so low in altitude that his parachute did not deploy and he died. By the time of his death Bong had downed 40 enemy planes, the most of any American pilot during the war.
The latest on Task & Purpose
F-15E pilot, in a jet called ‘Mullet,’ packs Zyn and kills drones
my coworker put his two weeks in and then decided to weld his name into our work table. i should add that when confronted about it he claimed he didn’t even know how to weld despite having and being paid for having a welding license
404 MediaSamantha Cole
![[ID: Text-intensive Twitter thread from the Shapeshifters chest binders Twitter account in reply to a post by artist and author Ursula Vernon. Vernon says, A non-zero number of you apparently did not know that The Last Unicorn was a book before it was a movie. It is by Peter S. Beagle. It is made of spun glass and fairytales and iron knives and there are individual lines that I would give my lungs to have written. Shapechangers replies, I saw him every year at NYCC for several years straight, bought something at his table, asked him to sign it, and we spoke. He remembered me from year to year, no small feat at that con. He remembered which stories he'd told me. One year I came back with a different gender on. He squinted at me a bit and said thoughtfully, "I've seen you before in this place." All I had to say was, "last year you told me the story about the inoshishi." And his face cleared, and he leaned in with a grin and told me about a German guitarist who he traveled with, twice. Who transitioned between the first and second time, so he'd gotten to meet this person all over again on the second round. It was a wonderfully kind way to let me know that everything was fine. I was fresh out of the closet and I needed that, and maybe he could see it. The Last Unicorn is the best book in the world and I will defend it and its author til I die. the end. /end ID]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/5438fd87360e322d7dc92bbc5db405ed/dc5d4315c0286893-f0/s640x960/f9444883682f0cddafe3e68d20a9506daad781b8.png)
ALT
