Bēda Venerābilis

oh to be a happy orange kitty drawing in felt tip pen

Are you proud of yourself? Are you happy you made this?

Oh you have no idea.

@userdramas get to know me bingo: Free Choice

Extremely Important Update: in April 2023 the World Bird Sanctuary had an orphaned eagle chick in need of care, so they decided to see if Murphy could live up to his parental ambitions.

He successfully raised the chick, which is now thriving with the other juvenile eaglets!

Congrats Murphy, you made it happen through sheer determination.

(Pictures are from the Facebook page of the World Bird Sanctuary; I can’t link them directly because I don’t have a FB account and the site is a nightmare to interact with if you’re not logged in, constantly resetting and kicking you to registration pages.)

Update: Murphy’s foster chick has now been released back in the wild!

dude.

i knew a surgeon and he once told me “nobodys insides look like how the textbooks say they will. you never know what you’re going to find in there once you open them up” and that was easily the most ominous thing anyone’s ever said to me

when i was taking my first year anatomy lab, we’d occasionally find a cadaver where things would branch off or attach in the wrong order, and when we’d ask our prof about it, he’d just shrug and say “they must not have read the book”

When my friend was in med school one of the cadavers donated for them to autopsy didn't have a belly button, just smooth skin.

In the past 10 years of teaching in an anatomy lab, I have seen:

- A donor with a scrotum the size of my head. When we opened it up, we discovered it was a MASSIVE inguinal hernia and a good 1.5 ft of intestine were trapped down there.

- A donor with situs inversus totalis, whose organs were a mirror image of what we normally see (ie their heart pointed right and their liver was on the left, just for starters)

- A donor whose right common carotid artery branched off the aorta waaay over on the left hand side of the body and crossed alllll the way back across the thorax to get where it needed to be.

- A donor with 4 lobes for their right lung (should only be 3). We named the 4th lobe the Lisa Loeb, but all of the students were too young to appreciate our sparkling wit.

- A shocking variety of penile and breast implants. Y'all would not believe the number of different ways science has come up to counteract gravity.

- A couple of cases of ectopic kidneys, where a kidney didn't rise to its typical position just deep to the lowest ribs and instead stayed in the pelvis.

There is probably some other stuff that I am forgetting. Take home point is: the human body is weird and wonderful and you should learn more about yours!

....duuude.

Spleens Georg

14???????

My contribution: client co pinched nerve in L side of neck. I asked about health hx; she said, “I've got some extra ribs on that side.”

me: “some?” (!!!!!??!?!??!???)

Some was 2, but that’s crazy enough.

Yeah, I don't discover the anatomical weirdness but I've had clients come in with extra ribs, missing ribs, extra vertebra, accessory muscles (that's when you have duplicates - sometimes fine, sometimes not), bones connected where they shouldn't be (spoiler: if your lumbar spine is connected to your hip, it Causes Problems), all sorts of stuff. Bodies are weird!

There are 11 spots on the genome where scientists have recorded mutations that affect the way that the body lays down the intercellular collagen matrix. Since Collagen is the overwhelmingly dominant structural protein in the body, this has some profound effects on gross morphology. Hypermobility, the ability of some people’s joints to extend beyond their usual range, often deleterously, which has been known since antiquity, is one such expression of this mutation suite. “Rolling” veins which seem to scoot sideways when you try to get an IV going are an indicator that the collagen is laid down in sheets rather than a grid, and is another expression of this mutation suite. Atypically presenting blood pressure, abnormal bone density; many cryptic symptoms of something which is not pathogenic per se, its just a different way of arranging the fibers.

These folks are just woven different.

Gross morphology is emergent from some wonky biomechanical hacks; should it really be so surprising that the products aren’t standardized?

Thomas the ship's cat of HMS Shropshire, 20th century

Sorry I'm late, I got added to the Wild Hunt last night and ran and reveled with them for what felt like 100 years plus a day until I landed the killing blow on a stag with bronze antlers then suddenly woke in my bed, willow leaves in my hair, a nameless song echoing in my ears, and my hands still bloody, so yeah, totally missed my alarm and stuff.

Crying over these lesbian cats

crochet sampler book, late 19th century

I love when good people realize they deserve the entire world and stop settling for bullshit

silly

goofy

Ceremonial cloth with mata hari (‘eye of the day’) design, 18th or 19th century, Coromandel Coast, India, dyes and mordants on cotton.

270 x 240 cm

Apollo Magazine / Collection of Karun Thakar

idea: scene with two characters eagerly stripping each other clearly about to bone, but they keep getting interrupted by finding carefully concealed weapons in each other’s clothing, so they keep just unholstering, revealing and unstrapping increasingly ludicrous amounts of hidden guns and knives as the clothes come off, and it’s lowkey killing the mood a little

Alternatively: it's not killing the mood at all but it's totally making both of them giggle like they're twelve and possibly get lowkey competitive in a subconscious way about who has the most to drop.

The more that I think of it the more I'm seeing the incredible intimacy of letting someone know where you keep your backup knife.

Like my god, the trust involved in letting someone undress you and learn your secrets instead of popping into the bathroom to change where they can't see and hiding all your weapons under the sink

...Oh

second alternative: you go to hide all your weapons under the sink but there’s already a bunch of weapons hidden underneath the sink.

awkward

It’s not that there’s already a bunch of weapons hidden underneath the sink that makes it awkward so much as that there’s so many weapons hidden underneath the sink that they fall out of the cabinet with the unmistakable sound of a knife-alanche, and then the other person comes in like “I can explain!” and you’re just dead-ass standing there with your own armload of weapons like “I can also explain.”

Married version is shoving your hand in your partner’s clothes when you’re out of weapons because you KNOW where their spare is.  Or wearing a weapon in a spot you can’t draw from yourself because its now spare storage for your spouse’s weapons.

Every single one of you is a genius

i hope aar destroy all ai fuckers

blocked

one of my favorite books as a kid was this one on speculative zoology/evolution that I loved so much I borrowed it to the point my school had to chase me up on returning it several times. it influenced my early creature art and design and pushed me to delve into my own specbio (on dragons. no surprises there). I loved the informatic entries, all their little lore bits and ecological adaptations; the wild color palettes, their weird little shapes. it was called The New Dinosaurs, by Dougal Dixon.

there were two more books in the series that my school didn’t have, which is either a blessing or a curse, because the third book in the set is called Man After Man.

which contains this.