I didn’t listen to the parental advisory warning on American Idiot and now I’m gay and I hate the government
Ollie = They/them = Adult = Chronically ch(ill)
I reblogged a comic the other day about a doctor watching House, MD and diagnosing toxoplasmosis, tagging it with “you’re more likely to get toxoplasmosis from a salad than a cat”. There’s a story behind that.
I used to work in the kennel at a vet clinic. One day one of the vet techs came into the kennel in a tearing hurry, handed me two cat carriers, and said, “Find a cage for these two. Don’t know how long, but you can put them together.” And then she left.
This was not how that was supposed to happen. I had no cage cards–no names, no feeding instructions, no health information–they weren’t on the schedule, and techs didn’t usually intake boarders. Medical cases had a separate kennel, so a tech shouldn’t be bringing me an animal in during office visit hours. But I had a cage in the cat room, so I tucked them in–two adult females, very friendly, apparently healthy.
Half an hour later the tech came back–with cage cards–and said, “It’s okay, they’re staying overnight and going home tomorrow.” She slumped against the kennel wall and told the cats’ story.
They had been brought to the clinic to be euthanized, to die.
These healthy, friendly, beloved cats had been brought in to be killed, because a woman’s doctor, her obstetrician, had told her that they had killed her unborn baby. He told her if she ever wanted a child she had to get rid of the cats. He told her they should be euthanized before they killed any other woman’s unborn child.
He said, with no evidence, that they had toxoplasmosis. He said that toxoplasmosis caused her miscarriage.
The woman was distraught. She had just lost her baby, she was dealing with the hormonal changes of the pregnancy loss, and now she had to euthanize her beloved cats. Fortunately no vet I’ve ever worked for will euthanize healthy animals brought in by a sobbing client without asking why!
The vet spent almost an hour talking to the woman, educating her on toxoplasmosis, telling her all the reasons her doctor was wrong.
Not all cats have toxoplasmosis, and even when they do they only shed the oocytes in their feces–they’re only infectious–for the first few weeks. Most cats are infected as kittens and are no longer infectious as adults. According to Wikipedia, “Numerous studies have shown living in a household with a cat is not a significant risk factor for T. gondii infection,[61][63][64] though living with several kittens has some significance.[65]”
Most people get toxoplasmosis from raw vegetables, especially salad greens that grow close to the soil and are hard to clean. Raw or rare meat, raw seafood, and unpasteurized milk are also a risk.
Toxoplasmosis can be a soil-borne disease from feces in the soil. Gardening is a greater risk than cat cohabitation.
Toxoplasmosis infection is dangerous to the fetus in pregnancy, yes, causing birth defects and miscarriages. But only the first time the person is infected. If this this woman had lost her first pregnancy to toxoplasmosis–and the vet said it really didn’t fit the symptoms–she would be at low risk in a subsequent pregnancy.
So basically the vet told the woman that 1) her miscarriage probably wasn’t toxoplasmosis, 2) even if it was, she probably didn’t get it from her cats, 3) even if her cats had given her toxoplasmosis, they weren’t infectious anymore.
The woman kept her cats and got a new obstetrician.
Human doctors get a few lectures on zoonotic diseases–diseases transmitted from animals to humans or vice versa. Veterinarians get semesters. If a doctor ever tells you your animals have given you a disease, get a second opinion from your vet!
You’re also more likely to pick up toxoplasmosis by gardening.
If a human doctor wants to be become a vet, they have to do all 4 years of vet school, but a vet only has to do 3 of med school.
Project 2025 ain’t gonna roll out all at once. So what we’re gonna wanna do is make passing each individual part of it as difficult as possible, so there’s less to undo once we finally get this country back on the rails.
Resist every step and do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Distracting people with stupid bullshit is one of Trump’s favorite political techniques. We saw it all over the place in the first term.
Trump will say something like “You know the Hispanics actually punch kittens, it’s what they do.”
And the news will be like “TRUMP SAID HISPANIC PEOPLE PUNCH KITTENS” for three weeks.
And while they’re doing that the Republicans in Congress have quietly deleted healthcare.
Do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Trump is a dancing monkey whose greatest asset is the ability to yank the spotlight off of everyone else. Keep your eyes on Congress.
using “what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament” to mean “yeah i made an embarrassing reference but you understood it which is also embarrassing” is very funny to me
my favorite part is that absolutely nobody says this except here. so if you use it in public, it’s a dead giveaway that you spent the last ten years on tumblr. but then again, they recognized it, which means they were at the devil’s sacrament
hey let’s start spreading the reminder now that you cannot safely self-manage an abortion with herbal medicine or essential oils. natural abortifacients function by poisoning you; you wait for your body to realize you’re dying and reject the pregnancy in order to conserve resources, and hope that happens before the rest of your organs shut down.
i think there will be an upsurge soon of unscrupulous and/or malicious actors preying on desperate pregnant people; do not help them kill people. don’t spread recipes for herbal medicines or ingestible essential oil mixtures that purport to cause a pregnancy termination.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the prices of goods and exploitation of workers. And how bc nobody is really getting paid fairly most of us can’t *afford* handmade things that actually cost what they’re worth so it just keeps perpetuating itself … like if you’re getting usamerican minimum wage, odds are you’re buying mass produced shit made by people being paid *even less than you are* overseas. They keep the prices low by just not fucking paying the people doing the actual work
And this gets another wrinkle in it when you take into account indie artists using third party manufacturers to, get this, order shit in bulk for cheap using their design without doing the work of Making it. Like redbubble shirts and youtuber plushies and shit. Yknow …
Don’t forget: even if something can be made with machinery – and not everything can be (i.e. crochet) – someone is still operating it. Fiber arts especially are more, like… someone using a sewing machine, than a robot just doing that on its own. This is why the term “handmade” can be tricky; a lot of mass produced things are made by hand, just someone else’s anonymously for a few cents an hour
Anyway. Going back to the first point about this being cyclical, I really don’t have a good solution other than just buying less cheap shit you don’t need & shopping more ethically if you have the money to pay for it
And competing with sweatshop prices leads to a lot of independent makers (like. People actually making things themselves and not outsourcing labor to the global south) Vastly undervaluing their work, which in turn makes it harder for other indie makers to compete with *them*. The average Consumer doesn’t know about all of this, they’re just walking around at a convention wondering why Your little crocheted flowers cost $50 when the booth across from you using the same pattern is selling for $20
The answer is exploitation of labor whether it’s their own or someone else’s
I actually really like the thing when you’re starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn’t natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me “every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week.” And I understood.
I don’t think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words “humidity” or “stress”, I managed to string together: “This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me.” And she understood.
And sometimes you just say things weird, but it’s better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn’t know the spanish word for “hurry”, but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english “I have all the time in the world.”
The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn’t expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.
I’ve mostly learned Chinese in school, so I know a lot of academic vocabulary while having the language skills of a toddler in some basic areas. Once, I forgot the word for sad, which is a really dumb thing to forget. A bunch of the ways to say sad in Chinese are literally just “not happy”, but I also momentarily forgot how to say happy. So instead I said “there is an economic downturn inside my brain”.
When my wife and I were in Japan we went to an izakaya on our first full night in the country, and when it was time to pay we weren’t sure where to do it, at the table or at the counter up front? Our waitress didn’t speak much English, so I threw myself on that conversational grenade with, “Okane ga koko desu ka? Okane ga asoko desu ka?” Literally translated that’s, “Money is/goes/should be here? Money is/goes/should be over there?”
She very gratefully confirmed that “Money goes over there,” and we paid and left.
This is exactly what I was taught to do when I took Spanish (and I took a decades’ worth, and my main teacher was amazing). He always tried to get us to tell him what we wanted or needed or was trying to say in the best way we knew how, because that is how people actually use language. Rather than have it be a barrier, he taught us above all to keep communicating. He never really told us why, or how valuable a skill it would be, he would just pretend he couldn’t understand us anyway when we asked for a word we didn’t know, and basically forced us to do exactly that. So it became completely normal to just…do that when we didn’t know something.
Later, when I was in college and/or in the real world and I didn’t know a word or couldn’t remember or didn’t have the words for a concept, I would I automatically do what I always did, what had become normalised: I would talk around it, which is what my teacher always called it. I even had one of my professors compliment me on getting what I needed that way, and she said that she’d never had another student do that and how helpful it was for her to be able to help me. I know that when I encountered others in my job with whom I had to speak in Spanish, and I couldn’t communicate with them in the “proper” way, I could still get what I needed, or they needed, and there was always a sense of delight that even though my grammar was far from perfect, and I didn’t always use the right words, that we all accomplished what we were there for. Most people don’t care if you get it “right.” They just want to be able to communicate effectively. (Can’t speak for the French, though. 😉)
I also highly recommend doing this in your native language if you forget a word or blank on something. When I have conversations with people and they tell me they’re blanking or can’t think of something, I always, always ask them to describe it. Most people don’t because they think it’s weird and so either they don’t get their point across or the conversation simply stops. But if they were more willing to keep communicating, we might get there. So I’m subtly trying to train everyone around me to do the same thing.
it’s so much less frustrating and more funny when you can forget the word for windows and just say ‘the doors for light to come in the wall’ and if you forget the word for noodles you say 'you know the bread worms? from soup?’ and if you forget the word for tiger you say 'those big assholes in the jungle, with stripes, they’re orange.’
genuinely people love it when you do this. it makes the rest of the conversation so much more fun.
Going to see children and adolescents dance badly, play ball badly, sing badly, play recorder badly because they are young: YES! YOU ARE LEARNING! INCREDIBLE!
People are so rude about going to watch the children in their lives do stuff shittily. “Ugh toddler dance recital,” “ugh tee-ball weekend again,” “ugh nativity play.”
That guy learned what skipping is this year and now he’s playing the piano the worst I’ve ever seen but the best he’s ever done! AREN’T YOU CAPTIVATED BY THEIR ABILITY TO DO A LITTLE BIT WHEN PREVIOUSLY THEY COULD DO NOTHING? Be filled with wonder and joy!
This but for everyone.
You don’t have to be perfect to perform.
The thing here isn’t so much the youth, it’s that the person had the bravery to not only pick up a new thing, but to show people their current skills on the new thing they picked up!
People need to be less critical of amateurishness.
Little girl was part of a county fair agro-educational program where they raise an animal for a few months and at the end it’s slaughtered. Supposed to teach them about the economics of farming and stuff.
But the little girl loved her goat so much she was crying on the day her goat was supposed to be taken away, so her mom sent the county fair people an email saying “I’ll pay for the goat and any expenses. We’ve had several deaths in the family in the past year, I don’t wanna take away one more thing my little girl loves.” Technically the goat had already been sold at auction, so the mom was on the hook for about $1000, only about $70 of which would have been profit for the county fair.
The county fair people were irate and got law enforcement involved, over this “breach of contract”. They literally got a fucking judge to sign a search warrant, authorizing them to go to this little girl’s house and search every room and every cabinet or box “large enough to contain a small goat”. The sheriff’s deputies seized the goat, and whoever they gave it to immediately slaughtered it, though they were supposed to wait until some kind of agreement had been worked out.
In the county fair’s initial email correspondence with the girl’s mother, they made it clear that they were pissed off because the story of the little girl who loved her goat was circulating on social media making them look bad, and they felt the girl needed to be taught a lesson about keeping your promises or whatever. So they refused the mother’s offer to pay for it, and insisted they get the goat. Even if it meant sending the fucking cops into her house lmao.
the congressman who bought the goat didn’t have any objections to the family saving the goat from slaughter either! it’s fucking insane that the cops were so eager to play act their swat commando fantasies that they played stooge to the benefit of no one except some self important local organizers!
Alternate link, LAtimes locks their stuff behind paywalls sometimes
Don’t forget the part where the goat wasn’t where they had a warrant to search, so they drove 500 miles, leaving the area they have legal jurisdiction in, then searched a farm they didn’t have a warrant for ans seized the goat. The fair then had the goat slaughtered, even though a court had ordered them to keep it alive until ownership was resolved and despite the fact that both potential owners of the goat had decided to keep it alive.
They broke multiple laws in order to “teach” a little girl the “lesson” that “everybody has to follow the rules”.
I sure hope all of the complaints sent to Shasta District Fair CEO Melanie Silva, whose decisions these were and continues to defend her actions, are polite and don’t waste too much ink. I’m certain nobody would take advantage of the fact that the Sasha District Fair and Event Center’s contact page lists their phone and fax numbers, not to mention the email form below that.
Would be a shame if that information was to circulate far an wide, and ruin that despicable woman’s easter holidays
I found the lawsuit filing. It is a work of art, brief and to the point. If you read nothing else, check out page 2, the section headed Nature of the Action. Magnificent.
One of the things that bugs me in the notes is a bunch of people being like ‘it’s a livestock animal, it’s her fault for getting attached’ and.
My dudes, I cannot emphasize enough that the little girl’s emotional attachment to the goat is in fact the least of the issues with this story. The main issue in this story is the fact that a bunch of cops broke multiple laws, including the unlawful entry to the property the goat was being held, the unlawful seizure and destruction of said goat, and the unlawful use of a criminal search warrant in a civil dispute case, just to start with.
The little girl owned the goat. At no point in the proceedings - and indeed at no point in the proceedings in the course of the normal auction-purchase-slaughter of a livestock animal in this program - did the fair own the goat. At no point in the proceedings did the person who successfully bid on the goat actually own it - he had made the winning bid to purchase rights to the meat. He hadn’t even done that yet! The goat legally and incontrovertibly belonged to the little girl. The very worst that should have happened in this story is a brief property ownership dispute in a civil court.
The fair CEO decided to unlawfully force the auction of the goat, and, when the girl’s mother began to dispute her actions, to make a false claim of theft, with precisely ZERO legal basis, calling the cops on an already emotionally fragile child, and then had the temerity to be angry with the child’s mother because the story was making them look bad on social media.
Regardless of your opinion on the meat industry, livestock slaughter, or 4H, 'cops drive 500 miles, perform an illegal search, seizure and destruction of an American citizen’s property, on the word of a biased 3rd party with zero legal rights to the property in question’ should make you angry. Because it is a violation of civil rights, and also had no motive besides needless cruelty to an already grieving child.
News to know: The next court update on this is sometime in October 2024. I’m watching this case because it covers a lot of different facets of how contracts work, minors rights, property rights in the face of law enforcement seizures and searches, and how does one county fair have so much brutality to wield against a then-nine-year-old.
I would not be surprised if this gets bogged down again with more counter-suits. It’s absolutely ghoulish that they’re doing all this over less than 1000$ of goat and one little girls grief. I hope that the judge who sees this case knows just how dangerous it is to dismiss, since this is a matter of third-party property rights infringement using law enforcement agents as bludgeons. The Sheriffs *cannot* be allowed to maintain extrajudicial authority.
Canvassers for Elon Musk‘s America PAC say that they were flown to Michigan and told they had to meet unattainable quotas or risk paying for their own accommodations and travel home. Then they were unceremoniously fired after some of them spoke to the press.
The workers — many of whom are Black — told Wired that Blitz Canvassing, a subcontractor for Musk’s PAC, had them sign non-disclosure agreements and transported them to Michigan neighborhoods in the back of a U-Haul without seats or seatbelts. After Wired ran an initial story about their working conditions, the magazine reported that the subcontractor fired more than a dozen canvassers, leaving some without full compensation or transportation home.
One door-knocker told the magazinethey did not know what they were signing up for. “I knew nothing of the job, or much of the job description, other than going door to door and asking the voters who are they voting for,” the unidentified worker said. “Then, after I signed over an NDA, is when I found out we are for Republicans and with Trump.”
The worker also said they were not aware of the billionaire’s involvement until they “overheard my supervisor and a few others mention Elon Musk.”
THANK YOU. People need to stop screenshoting a link to a article and just post the article.
they planted berries, root vegetables, leafy greens, herbs, all sorts. they label each plant and the sign said “free to take, leave some for others to enjoy!”
and people did. they took a bit, but left some for others.
it also fed the homeless people living around there.
bearing in mind this is a tourist town, so i half expected to see the plants gone. but nope, there’s always some left.
people aren’t naturally selfish, and they will share. the initiative works
And honestly? Most people who don’t need it won’t bother to stop and pick fruit. It’s only people who actually need it who will devote the time. People with money still have grocery stores.
[Image description: tweet by Black Botanist @CreativeTiana: transcript follows]
I was talking to someone about planting food and fruit trees in public spaces and they were like “Why so everyone can steal the food?”
And I was like “See, that’s the problem right there. Why should taking food off a public tree be stealing?”
“Urban food forest” is something I’m hearing more and more. Do some poking around, there may be an opportunity to help with or start something like this near you.
ALT
