It’s easy to look at these and assume “well, high crime cities need more police,” but i think that’s putting the cart before the horse.
Police make crime worse.
Police take fiscal oxygen out of the room, away from actual social support programs. The money spent on policing could go to housing, nutritional services, healthcare, civil rights, building inspections, labor rights enforcement, street maintenance, public transportation. But it goes to paying guys to sit around idling Ford Explorers all day and hitting poor people with sticks.
Crime follows poverty in absolutely every single case. Every single “high crime city” is because of the fucking poverty.
I recently learned about a kind of embroidery called bobbinwork where you put a really thick thread in the machine bobbin and sew from the back side and it’s so fun! I’ve tried doing a bunch of sample lines and shapes and squiggles, but most importantly I have made a beautiful garlic. I’m doing it mainly with the regular sewing foot and a lot of pivoting, because when I try it with the free motion foot it skips a lot of stitches.
well thats neat as hell :o also, woah, vintage embroidery machine?? sweet
no no not an embroidery machine, it’s an ordinary Singer 15-91! Just a basic domestic machine that does straight stitch forwards and backwards and that’s it. But there’s a lot of embroidery you can do without a special machine! I’ve just come across a very intriguing 1911 book on the subject which I’m excited to read.
And there is a lot of fascinating stuff in the 1997 video that I posted about a while ago. She’s also using a domestic machine without any fancy embroidery settings or attachments (beyond a darning foot and a hoop), but being newer it has zig zag, which has even more possibilities.
“I have a retainer and a night guard” is something that a 17th century daimyo would say, but a trip to the dentist can leave you uttering the same sentiment…another testament to the kuge(公家)-like existence of jobs that supply dental plans….
I was going to post some Choice Horrifying Quotes from the article, but turns out the whole thing is a horror story and i’m just.
the fact that they got trapped and pulled in and thought they might die three times and were still like “hey what if we do one more” and only didn’t die because they decided to have a meal first??
yeah you wouldn’t need to change anything for this to be a TMA episode i absolutely agree, the damn thing already tried to kill them three times
okay guys u gotta read it. I was making highlights but it turned into a summary. still. read it. so worth it.
Ok so two people sink down to look around. Jill and her partner. First glimpse of horror (lots and lots of sea creatures) happens. But everything is pretty and they continue on
That’s the sound of their way in collapsing btw.
They find a way out. And then proceed to dive in again
they get out again.
The photos are sublime. So next day, Wes decided, hey, i want to go with you. Remember the camera i tested? We’re going to take even better pictures with it.
so they dive
and the current picks up again
Dude.
They got sucked in, obv. Water pouring down, the three try to get out. Fail. There’s no way up.
And then Jill decides to show human determination and ingenuity. Holy shit.
They get out. They see the boat with the science team, reaching for them. They’re late for two hours, but alive.
i did not manage to find the iceberg photos, but her other stuff is breathtaking
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red
one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the
number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War,
and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on
the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in
December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a
small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His
children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was
annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then,
Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized
that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him,
ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your
mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper
yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad
looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had
children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the
phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You
know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering
Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and
Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam
says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was
a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,”
Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re
sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’
Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called
the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat
Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks
like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour
and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people
saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor.
And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a
briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she
says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s
known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
This video depicts a moment that is nearly impossible to observe: a sperm whale surfacing with a giant squid clenched between its teeth. These predators hunt at depths exceeding 800 meters, where light does not penetrate, and only biosonar directs the pursuit. Consequently, clear surface images are exceedingly rare.
This is, factually, the first footage of this that we have ever gotten. This has never been observed by a human being before in recorded history. The only reason we knew these whales ate those squids before was the beaks of the squids found in the stomachs of dead whales, and the battle scars on whales consistent with fighting giant squids.
My favorite thing about this clip is that, in the original uncropped footage, you can see her calf is right beside her, ascending from the depths along with her. Whale calves don’t dive until they’re taught by their mothers. It is very likely that this footage is of a mother whale teaching her calf to hunt on one of its very first dives.
When I saw this footage for the first time, I cried a little tbh.
Arising from the inky depths with a delicious giant squid snack… with mama.
MULTIPLE people I am following are asking what these are, why we call them holy when only one has a hole. If they are made by the same company, and what is with us praising these.
I weep for you people, from other countries. WEEP.
Aussies may have Tim Tams.
EU may have Kinder and All sorts of fantastic biscuits.
USA? Has GIRL SCOUT COOKIES.
Not only are these things SINFULLY good, they are only sold for a bit over 1 month of the year, depending on region, that month of the year changes.
That middle one is Chocolate, Caramel Coconut. The left one is Peanut Butter, chocolate and sex on a stick aka crumbly cookie/biscuit.
You can eat em straight from the box, but pros? Pros eat these bad boys frozen.
And thin mints, man. that right one? THIN MINTS. You may have heard of these. Chocolate biscuit infused with mint essence coated in dark chocolate.
Yeah.
Those thin mints.
The Thin Mints for which every grown ass American on a Medical Diet cries for when they see a girlscout.
The Thin Mints with 1000 copycats, and not a one of them successful.
Girl Scouts, regularly boycotted by Fundies and Anti-choice nutters, not only taste amazing, but you get the joy of giving money to a good cause, while subtly flipping the bird at overly wound up fundie groups.
It’s like donating to Planned Parenthood and getting a box of double dark chocolate with fudge filling tim-tams especially made for them.
The reason we eat them frozen is that we buy as many boxes of thin mints as we possibly can during that short sale period, and then store them for the dark months, like proud American squirrels.
Every word of this is true.
It’s the MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR 🍪 🍫😁
The Girl Scouts by the Washinton Convention Center at Comic Con fucking cleaned up. As they always do. I love them.
You can get knockoffs during most of the rest of the year, but they’re not quite the same.
One thing in Japan that I miss, no GS cookies. At all.
TV shows will take every opportunity to parody Girl Scout Cookies and our overall obsession, as they should.
And don’t forget that there’s actually two different Girl Scout cookie bakeries, and while the Thin Mints are very similar between the two, samoas and the peanut butter cookies are quite different between the other two. That’s also a regional thing, and now that you can order cookies by mail through the internet it’s very fun to order both bakeries and figure out which one you like best. There are maps that show you which one you’ll get.
the fact there were porn games for the atari is perhaps the truest example of indomitable human spirit. imagine spending 40 dollars in 1983 to jack off to this
WILCOX, J. (2023). Metrical Mirth: Sonorous Sounds and Rambunctious Rhymes. In Humour in Old English Literature: Communities of Laughter in Early Medieval England (pp. 93–118). University of Toronto Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/jj.7514496.9
Aquarium of the Pacific Partners with ReShark to Help Restore Endangered Zebra Sharks in the Wild
The Aquarium of the Pacific has partnered with ReShark to help to recover populations of endangered zebra sharks in Indonesia. The Aquarium is sending fertilized zebra shark eggs to support ReShark’s Stegostoma tigrinum Augmentation and Recovery Project (StAR Project), which is a global effort to restore endangered zebra sharks in regions where this species has disappeared or declined. The goal is for the zebra sharks to be tagged and released in a marine protected area in Raja Ampat once they have matured. Then they will be monitored to help ensure they adapt to their new environment.
When the Aquarium’s zebra sharks lay eggs, veterinary staff monitor the developing embryos inside via ultrasound. Once they are deemed healthy and ready for travel, eggs are sent to the Seattle Aquarium, a founding partner of ReShark. Seattle Aquarium prepares the eggs from partner facilities for transport to the zebra shark nurseries in Indonesia. The egg deliveries are timed so they hatch one month after they arrive at the nursery in Raja Ampat, where they are cared for by local aquarists who are part of this international conservation program.
“The Aquarium is thrilled to be part of this program to re-establish zebra shark populations in regions of the world where they are locally endangered and could face extinction. We’ve been working many years, including developing methods of artificial insemination, to produce more zebra shark offspring to help support these important conservation programs,” said Dr. Lance Adams, Aquarium of the Pacific veterinarian, who is part of the StAR Project Veterinary Working Group.
The Aquarium’s new role as a zebra shark egg breeding institution comes after several years of groundbreaking research done by its veterinary and animal care staff to support the global project. In 2013 the Aquarium became the first public aquarium to successfully reproduce zebra sharks through artificial insemination.
According to ReShark, “every shark selected for breeding undergoes rigorous screening for genetic provenance and reproductive viability to ensure the long-term health and sustainability of wild populations.” “We are very excited to welcome the Aquarium of the Pacific to our breeder roster. I’ve been following their team’s effort to have their broodstock produce viable eggs for StAR Project Indonesia for a few years now,” said Nesha Ichida, Project Manager of StAR Indonesia and Co-Chair of StAR Steering Committee.
Sharks serve an important role in their ecosystems. Zebra sharks are currently listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List mainly due to habitat degradation and human impact such as overfishing.
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