Amazing paintings by Simon Coster (@fizzy bicycle on Instagram)
This is the spoopy content you need on your dash
This is so precious I can’t even…
Everybody loves pumpkin enrichment!
These are great items because they’re fun for the herbivores to each, the carnivores to tear apart, and everybody to roll and throw around. They’re tactile, olfactory, and edible enrichment all in one!
I believe they’re acceptable on-exhibit enrichment for naturalistic facilities like Brookfield in Chicago, too.
I think of this time of year as Tumblr’s Annual Pumpkining of the Animals Post.
Have an Enriching Halloween!
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) dir. Peter Jackson
primavera-cerezos
it would take 2.3 million years for Jeff Bezos to earn his $183.3b net worth working 24 hours a day at New Mexico’s $9/hr minimum wage.
That’s 11.5 times longer than the human race has existed.
Not long enough.
What if we gave it a twist? Rather than earning that amount of money, what if it was to save that amount while still paying bills and feeding himself?
And since it IS hell, his car starts making a Noise about once a month.
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT BRITISH CLOWN DRAMA, TUMBLRS
Okay okay so as most of my followers know, my husband is a standup comedian, and the thing about comedians is that they’re bitches. They gossip and character assassinate to a degree I have never seen in any other industry, art form or demographic. They are, for the most part, fairly dreadful people, really, so it’s always nice when you find a Good One.
But, that also means Drama, my god, and it’s currently all kicking off.
So, there’s an English comedian called Andrew Lawrence, right. Now, he used to do a fair bit of TV work, Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats and all that jazz. But he’s a gross right-wing reactionary who can basically be summed up by this old post:
Basically, he decided to put himself on a platform as a freedom-of-speech shrieking edgelord, which of course meant no one wanted to book him except other freedom-of-speech shrieking edgelords, and then he started yelling that every other comic agrees with him really but they’re just too afraid to say it.
(Dara Ó Briain responded to that post with a tweet now long-deleted, incidentally, but the text of it is incredible:
“Ah Andrew, great to have you here. We were missing your bitter, self-delusional take on this. No-one cares if you have different politics but claiming we just pretend not to agree to get work? Stop kidding yourself. Still, I can understand you wouldn’t like to have to now actually justify your ridiculous assertions. Easier to post and run… I’ll send your best to the women and ethnics. You stay classy.”)
Anyway, boy’s an anus.
Now, you may all be aware that there was some football recently that was apparently relevant. Italy vs England went to penalties, which I believe means it was a draw and then some specific players got to try and kick the ball into the goal. What’s relevant to this story, though, is that out of the England squad, three of the players who went to kick the ball and try and make it be in the goal were POC.
So Andrew Lawrence, ever classy, decided to tweet “All I’m saying is, the white guys scored.” Followed by “Equality, diversity, shit penalties.”
Here’s a big sidenote, mind: one of the players in question was Marcus Rashford. He’s basically a national treasure even for those of us who know dick all about football and care even less, because during the pandemic and lockdowns last year Marcus Rashford used the considerable profile and wealth he’d accumulated as a national football man to force the fascist UK government to actually feed poor children. He’s a hero of the people, and so I suspect that the sorts of disenfranchised working class racists who normally would have been all over a cheap bargain-basement racist shot like mould on wet bread were actually not so enthusiastic.
In any event, the clap back was immense.
The next day, Andrew Lawrence tweets “I can see that this has offended a lot of people, and I’m sorry that black guys are bad at penalties.”
So far, so normal, really. This is the man’s bread and butter to be honest. None of this is new behaviour, although it’s admittedly a bit stronger and more blatant than he used to be, I think; most likely because he’s enjoying the fash. But, then something interesting happened.
Chesham’s Comedy Club is a fairly small club, nationally speaking; certainly not a kingmaker. But they tweeted to him “I know you won’t particularly care, but we at Chesham Comedy club will not tolerate racism in any form so please consider your booking with us cancelled.”
As I say, it’s an interesting stance given that they already knew he’s a racist, and performs racist material. But cool.
But what’s really cool is that the nice folks at Chesham Comedy Club apparently were the innocent domino at the start of the world’s most elaborate domino chain, because every damn club in the country suddenly started cancelling his bookings. You can now play a real-time game of bingo with his tour dates as venues pull out. Clubs are falling over themselves to decry him, and thereby decry his shitty fucking views.
He took to twitter again, and made a tweet - I shit you not - about how MEAN people were being to him, and can’t we all just get along? There’s too much HATE in the world u guys uwu.
And then he deleted his twitter.
And then, less than 24 hours after his first tweet, his agent dropped him.
Now this is a super interesting canary, because agents don’t care about this stuff. The agent has known intimately for years that he’s a racist. Agents don’t care - they just care if it makes them money.
So if the agent is dropping him like a bag of dogshit into the nearest bin, it means Andrew Lawrence has, in one day, made himself into such a toxic property he’s functionally ended his career.
Anyway, the clowns are out in force and comedy twitter is currently fucking hilarious.
A window into anxiety.
I guess experience kinda fucked me up.
Big feels, oof.
Return from the Stars, by Stanislaw Lem, published 1961.
obi wan really died the second three skywalkers were within spitting distance of each other. he was all skywalker’d out. “sorry the maximum limit of this family’s bullshit has been reached. bye” iconic behavior
This might be the funniest reply I’ve ever seen in my life
I AM WHEEZING
*old man voice* back in my day tik tok was a ke$ha song
Thousands of premature infants were saved from certain death by being part of a Coney Island entertainment sideshow.
At the time premature babies were considered genetically inferior, and were simply left to fend for themselves and ultimately die.
Dr Martin Couney offered desperate parents a pioneering solution that was as expensive as it was experimental - and came up with a very unusual way of covering the costs.
It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators.
The brainchild of this exhibit was Dr. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s.
Behind the gaudy facade, premature babies were fighting for their lives, attended by a team of medical professionals.To see them, punters paid 25 cents.The public funding paid for the expensive care, which cost about $15 a day in 1903 (the equivalent of $405 today) per incubator.
Couney was in the lifesaving business, and he took it seriously. The exhibit was immaculate. When new children arrived, dropped off by panicked parents who knew Couney could help them where hospitals could not, they were immediately bathed, rubbed with alcohol and swaddled tight, then “placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest [were fed by] a funneled spoon. The smallest baby Couney handled is reported to have weighed a pound and a half.
His nurses all wore starched white uniforms and the facility was always spotlessly clean.
An early advocate of breast feeding, if he caught his wet nurses smoking or drinking they were sacked on the spot. He even employed a cook to make healthy meals for them.
The incubators themselves were a medical miracle, 40 years ahead of what was being developed in America at that time.
Each incubator was made of steel and glass and stood on legs, about 5ft tall. A water boiler on the outside supplied hot water to a pipe running underneath a bed of mesh, upon which the baby slept.
Race, economic class, and social status were never factors in his decision to treat and Couney never charged the parents for the babies care.The names were always kept anonymous, and in later years the doctor would stage reunions of his “graduates.
According to historian Jeffrey Baker, Couney’s exhibits “offered a standard of technological care not matched in any hospital of the time.”
Throughout his decades of saving babies, Couney understood there were better options. He tried to sell, or even donate, his incubators to hospitals, but they didn’t want them. He even offered all his incubators to the city of New York in 1940, but was turned down.
In a career spanning nearly half a century he claimed to have saved nearly 6,500 babies with a success rate of 85 per cent, according to the Coney Island History
In 1943, Cornell New York Hospital opened the city’s first dedicated premature infant station. As more hospitals began to adopt incubators and his techniques, Couney closed the show at Coney Island. He said his work was done.
Today, one in 10 babies born in the United States is premature, but their chance of survival is vastly improved—thanks to Couney and the carnival babies.
https://nypost.com/2018/07/23/how-fake-docs-carnival-sideshow-brought-baby-incubators-to-main-stage/
Book: The strange case of Dr. Couney
New York Post Photograph: Beth Allen
Original FB post by Liz Watkins Barton
The way I absolutely howled with laughter watching this...
[video description: a person walks nonchalantly through their house in silence with the text "Crowly, sauntering vaguely downward:". Then music from Montero (Call My By Your Name) ubruptly fades in, and the person blinks in surprise and looks up off screen. Their eyes quickly trace a path downward with the text "Lil Nas X:" as the music increases in volume then tapers off into silence, as if rapidly getting closer then fading off into the distance again. The person, once again labelled "Crowly:", blinks in slight confusion as if processing, then turns their head and sticks out their lower lip in an expression of acceptance and approval. /end description]
Someone said "Are you really so stupid to think that Africa has the same technological advances as us? If they did they would probably have clean water and not live in houses made of sticks and mud. Get over yourself and stop being so ignorant."..... Below is a tiny collection of images of the Africa they refuse to show you..
ches
I’m sorry you’ve been made to believe that the whole of Africa is poor, I really am..
Reblogging for those of you who think Africa is only what the media and movies portrays it to be
This fucks me up because it’s scary to think that we can be showed something all our lives and not even know it’s a lie
And that my friend is the power of propaganda, indoctrination, and media
the-collecting-turnip
Are these pictures of South Africa or of Africa as a whole?
@the-collecting-turnip From top to bottom:
1. Port Elizabeth (South Africa)
2. Unknown
3. Nairobi (Kenya)
4. Pretoria (South Africa)
5. Aburi Botanical Gardens (Ghana)
6. Cape Town (South Africa)
7. Pretoria (South Africa)
8. Harare (Zimbabwe)
9. Windhoek (Namibia)
10. Windhoek (Namibia)
To @kushandwizdom this is a rather unfair portrayal of Africa as a whole since half of these are literally just South Africa. So Instead to add to this post and better dispel the myth of Africa as the vast wasteland of poverty most people think, I found a much more mixed collection of pics from various countries.
Luanda, Angola
Agadir, Morocco
Lagos, Nigeria
Cairo, Egypt
Port Louis, Mauritius
Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire
Algiers, Algeria
Tripoli, Libya
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Tunis, Tunisia
So, there, a much better case demonstrating the various major cities around Africa showing it isn’t some technologically backwards continent, but actually pretty up-and-coming in the world of commerce.
I once was talking to my Ethiopian manager about ignorant people asking her dumb shit about her life before she moved to the states…
the worst story she told me about was when she told a fellow student (at a fairly prestigious university) about a concert she went to back home. The other student responded with “omg you have music there!?” 🤦🏾♀️
Rebloging, because we need to see these pictures.
As for stupid questions: “do you have grocery stores in Ecuador?”
These are great!
A redneck neighbor once asked my mom (in the 80s) if they had cars in Peru. Sigh.
This is the product of poor world history in school & little current affairs coverage outside Western Europe, except for catastrophes, so all we see are the war torn, poverty stricken, disaster-affected parts on the news. And racism, of course.
lettingitoutabit
I bet most Americans who think that African countries are just completely poverty stricken have no idea what the US looks like in its poorest areas, not everywhere in the US is nice suburbs or unrealistically large apartments on tv
Los Angeles, California
Hartford, Connecticut
New Orleans, Louisiana
Camden, New Jersey
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
McDowell County, West Virginia
Flint, Michigan
Washington, D.C.
Do you see the world as it is, or as someone told you it is?
Yo, don’t forget Salem, Oregon. If you go to downtown Salem, there’s a lot of homeless camps over there.
Salem, Oregon, near the river downtown.
The U.S. is just a third world country trying to cosplay a first world country.
Imagine if you didn’t grow up in the United States but every time it was portrayed on tv it was only the rural parts and all you saw was farmland and prairies and so you thinks that’s all that’s there…for some reason all the so is show the rural parts of sub Saharan Africa.
This post gets better every time it comes around.