every prehistoric human reconstruction has me thinking “I want to smoke weed with this bitch”
she looks like she would have been an awesome neighbor, like she would have loved menthols and called me baby
“a Cheeto could have killed a Victorian child” but the opposite. Neanderthals would have loved to go to Hardee’s and get a burger with me.
neanderthals would have walked hand in hand with me into hell (buccees opening day)
When I saw this article two years ago and found out Neanderthals were seasoning their food 70,000 years ago, I teared up thinking about how they never got to try things like beef jerky and Doritos.
Corn was domesticated around 9,000 years ago and cheese was invented around 7,000 years ago. Her entire species went extinct before the basic ingredients to create cheese flavored corn snacks were a twinkle in humanity’s eye. That’s part of the reason finding out Neanderthals and early modern humans were creating complex dishes to maximize flavor and texture 70,000 years ago is so wild to me. 
They were definitely making jerky. They might not have had domesticated cows yet but a lot of animals were being turned into jerky.
I like this kid. Mister Rogers of simple exercise (geared towards all abilities)
Feeling tired or exhausted all the time?
I think sometimes we get so bogged in exhaustion and misery that we lose sight of a better life.
I’ve been in similar places, and I’m really glad I continued taking steps to try to get to a better spot.
I know it’s not simple for everyone, but I’ve found that maintaining this pursuit keeps a bit of hope in my life - which already makes it more enjoyable.
Bitch you are a piece of fruit why does it look like I murdered you. Why do you leave my fingertips red and stained. Why do you run down my hands to my elbows when I tear you apart. Why must I rip your body into bloodied chunks to get what’s inside of you. Why do you sound so lovely when I crack you open. Why must I eat you with a knife and my bare hands. Why is there so much of you and why is there never enough.
LEONARD NIMOY (Vladeck) and WILLIAM SHATNER (Michael Donfield) appearing together for the first time in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode “The Project Strigas Affair” (1964), directed by Joseph Sargent
I literally just learned that male carpenter bees are usually the ones tasked with protecting the nest from predators. They have that little yellow bald spot on their heads, and they’re usually the ones buzzing and hovering near you, just kinda looking at you. However, the reason they hover near you is actually because they think they’re being intimidating, and they’re trying to scare you off. If that doesn’t work, well, male carpenter bees don’t have stingers, and they don’t bite, so they’re only defense mechanism to scare humans off is to bump into us over and over. Literally just fly full speed into us, head first, and hope it’s enough to scare us away. I love carpenter bees so much. 🥺 Truly the himbos of the insect world.
As I gaze at the structural column in Copley Station, cracked nearly in two and held together with zip ties that have been carefully painted over to match the column underneath, I feel my soul intertwined with that of a small Italian boy of days gone by, who also stopped to look up at a large, groaning, newly painted tank full of molasses
I feel that some non-Boston people think I may have been exaggerating this. While I did not snap a photo as I was on the train, someone else did several months ago. I do want to stress that this column is now freshly painted and therefore completely structurally sound and in absolutely no danger of causing the entire tunnel to collapse. And yes, it did in fact never cross my mind that the original post was nearly 105 years to the day of the Molassacre
This is so safe this is the safest I’ve ever felt good job mbta gold star
Fun fact: Copley station was built 5 years after the molasses flood so we’re in good hands
I love that the turtle is explicitly bothering the cat, rather than just zooming aimlessly around.
“Mom it’s not supposed to BE that fast!”
This just in: Turtle gains speed and immediately becomes a menace to local cat. “Why is he chasing me? Why not explore the house?” Cat comments. More on this in the evening.
For those curious, this was taken at the Oceti Sakowin camp during the No DAPL protests in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The photograph is titled “Defend the Sacred” by Ryan Vizzions. I did not find the name of the subject on horseback.
Her name was
Marissa Blacklance. #Dakota38 rider, & front line water protector at Standing Rock. She was killed by a drunk driver in January of 2018. Her mother is using this tragedy to make changes benefitting our community with the Yellow Scarf tribute.
Amusing too that even though some parts of Brook’s movies have aged (as all comedy does), it still hasn’t aged as badly as that comment saying that they should aspire to be more like Woody Allen.
All art is subjective and everyone has their own likes and dislikes
And if people don’t like Blazing Saddles that’s their call
That said
Anyone who thinks that anything Woody Allen has done in his entire career is better than even the worst film Mel Brooks has ever made is an appalling buffoon who has no fucking business being a film critic ._.
Today we celebrate the life and works of Terry Pratchett who would have been 76 years old today
Having spent many times in his company over the years, we would like to hear your stories of “Time with Terry”, be it at conventions, book signings or elsewhere !
Let us know your Time with Terry moment in the comments.
in guarani there’s a standard greeting that literally translates to “are you happy” (ndevy'apa) and the natural reply is “i’m happy” (avy'a) and as americans learning the language we were so distressed like “but what if we’re not happy…..” and our teachers were like “that’s so not the fucking point”
we kept trying to think of any other way to reply but our teachers kept trying to get it into our brains that it’s an idiomatic greeting, it literally is not the time or place to traumadump, and as usamerican english speakers we are not some special exception for saying “what’s up” with the reply being “not much” instead of “the ceiling”
but anyway while i was working in paraguay – the country with the largest population of guarani speakers – i got sent an article by some friends back home like “look! they’re saying that paraguay is the happiest country in the world!”
and the methodology was “we went around and asked paraguayans if they’re happy and recorded their responses” and i was like. oh. of course you did. and of course you got a 100% positive response rate.
wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?
ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.
The Erfurt latrine disaster occurred on 26 July 1184, when Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held a Hoftag (informal assembly) at the cathedral provostry in Erfurt. The combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement. This event is called the Erfurter Latrinensturz (lit. 'Erfurt latrine fall’) in several German sources.
A house is abandoned, and trees grow through the floor. A ship sinks, and is encrusted in sea life. Grass grows where there was once a railway, dirt seeps into the palace, rollercoasters rust and collapse, the sun breaks through the broken roof of the church. Something has died and gone, but life continues. Devours. Recycles.
An abandoned space station? It just stops. Perhaps the remains of life will continue for a little while, leave their stains, but then that stops too. Life eats itself and then extinguishes itself, leaving only the ghosts. No soil, no bacteria, no air, no heat, no change. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.
The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.
But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.
It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.
(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)
It’s so easy to underestimate the significance of the fact that all of Johnny’s songs are classic folk-americana tunes, honestly! Like, of course thematically what matters is meeting “technically challenging but obnoxious” with “genuinely skilled and beautiful, you just didn’t expect him to be good because he’s poor,” but the music choices are significant for another reason.
Bluntly: Standards.
Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate….but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.
But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.
All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap.
Johnny had more heart, of course–that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.
(Also he didn’t summon an entire goddamn backup band to do the heavy lifting for him, but like. Of course this is the American folklore Devil, the trickster-spirit archetype figure who is really more akin to the Fae and not the actual Christian concept of Satan, but “the Devil cheated” still isn’t exactly an instant disqualification. That’s kind of a given. He is, after all, the Devil.)
I would like to note my mother got to see Charlie Daniels play this live, and there’s one more reason the Devil lost:
Care.
See, apparently Charlie Daniels actually kept extra fiddles on the stage for this song, because playing the Devil’s part WILL snap the fiddle strings. Yes, both Johnny and the Devil have longer solos in the live version because this song is really just Charlie Daniels showing off (earned, though, lbr), but my mom said his fiddle strings were literally SMOKING long before he got into the extended part. And so by necessity, when one set of strings snapped he’d drop the fiddle and pick up another.
The Devil is using his fiddle the same way he uses people: he’s abusing it, treating it as something worth nothing but disdain. I want to pause here briefly and note that when this song was originally written, the best violins in the world were considered to be the Stradivarius violins; there are now modern violins that match or beat their sound, but that’s an EXTREMELY new innovation. This means the Devil is likely playing on a violin worth tens of thousands of dollars; even if he’s conjured an infernal violin for himself, the contempt he shows for Johnny’s (implied) poverty and simplicity says it doesn’t look like just any old violin. And yet, he treats it like garbage—and that’s exactly what comes out of it.
(If you’re wondering where the violin comes into this, a fiddle is a violin played differently, and this is one great way to show the difference between “high” and “low” art is spelled B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.)
Meanwhile, Johnny is some backwoods hick who’s probably never even heard the word Stradivarius, wouldn’t know what to do with one if he had one, and likely plays an absolute shitkicker that looks like hell and cost him fifteen bucks at the pawnshop.
But Johnny VALUES his fiddle. He doesn’t so much play it as make love to it. What we hear is beautiful because he understands he’s not the only one with a soul; instruments have souls, too. He’ll take that solid gold fiddle because he can use the money, but he’ll go right on playing his cheap beat-up old thing until the day he dies. He loves it like he loves his home and his music, and that love makes magic.
The Devil loses because he doesn’t understand the concept that love will beat out greed every time. Johnny wins because he values and respects what he has.
[Image description: screen shot of a social media post from Brendan Frasier Crane (@bf_crane): “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” is the most American of songs, because it’s set up like a cautionary tale about pride leading to a fall but it turns out the fiddler actually is the best and his vanity is justified. 9:23 PM. 05 Jul 23. 137K Views. Description ends.]
Also, the Devil values his fiddle because it’s made of gold. But and actual golden fiddle would sound terrible – not like a handcrafted instrument carved from wood. Like other Capitalists, the only value the Devil can understand is monetary value.
BTW, for those interested, here are the fiddle tunes referenced in Charlie Daniel’s song:
Fire on the Mountain, run, Boy, run. Devil’s in the House of the Rising Sun. Chicken’s in the bread pan, pickin’ out dough. Granny, Will Your Dog Bite? No, child, no.
I’ll never forget the time I was sitting with this guy, nice kid, didn’t know him well, I think we must have had a bottle of wine or some questionable hashish or something, and in response to an awkward silence I just started talking and ended up going on a long meandering rant about how ugly American robins are. I’m talking a full monologue. I had an intro and conclusion. It was pointlessly vehement. I have never been so mean or loquacious about anything in my life.
Consider my horror when this perfectly nice guy wordlessly lifted his shirt to reveal a full-torso prismacolor tattoo of his spiritual soul animal, the American robin.
Their scientific name sounds like “Migrating Turd” but otherwise I find them charming if fairly derpy and mundane. I don’t know if I’d get a tattoo of one though. They’re like the potato of American birds.
I have no actual animosity towards them. They’re fine. I like them. They remind me if my college roommate and beloved friend. I don’t know why I said any of that—I was grasping at straws for something kind of provocative to say and failed so catastrophically that I was catapulted into a Seinfeld skit.
eerily similar to the time in college someone tried to make conversation by making fun of a silly book a former high school teacher of theirs had written only for me to just pull out a physical copy of the exact book because i’d realized he was talking about my dad
the foot seeks the mouth like leaves seek the sun
yesterday was the ten year anniversary of my insensitive American Robin comment and my tattooed friend messaged me to celebrate the “funniest thing that had ever happened to him” so sometimes critically failing a charisma check leads to a whole decade of joy for someone else
