Palaeontologist at Uppsala University. Early vertebrate enthusiast. Moderately effective gardener. Views my own.đžđȘđșđŠđšđŠđŹđ±
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For sure, but those files almost certainly contain many other senior GOP figures and business oligarchs in addition to Trump. They canât be used cleanly to just denounce T, the fallout would be huge. If Vance tries to release them he may well meet with a âtragic accidentâ.
Love it!đ
"So, tell me, little one, what do you do for a living?" "I'm a forest-floor predator." "Good, good! An EVIL forest-floor predator?" "Er, I guess; I squirt slime over my prey." "Excellent! And does this foul ichor drive them to madness before you eat them alive?" "Kind of..."
Succinctly put.
Their (terrified) silence will not avail them. One day soon he will, in fact, die. The Conqueror Worm will fasten on to him, and that will be that. All the biased editorial policies in the world cannot save him.
Lobopods are a subgroup of the Old Ones.
Nice to see Opabinia there. The Miaolingian stage of the Cambrian really should be renamed the Lovecraftian...
What about an adult who mainlines heroin and eats roadkill? How does he compare? In my experience he looks like an extra from a zombie movie and has dead meat-coloured eyes.
Iâm trying to imagine a European equivalent, but the titles just donât have the same ring. âEscape from Stuttgartâ âEscape from Birminghamâ Nah âEscape from Liverpoolâ sounds like a Beatles nostalgia movie.
This looks like Trump embracing global warming.
More random verbiage from a late-stage dementia sufferer.
"Nine out of nine Ringwraiths named Vezio Castle as their favorite holiday destination."
Aaaand blocked.
This will prove to be the fulcrum on which American history pivots. If not today then soon. The sorcererâs apprentice doesnât have his masterâs dark power. You will have a chance to wrest back control of your country, but can you seize it?
Interesting! So theyâre interacting between species as well?
Several species coexisting in the same area.
That would seem to be the aim. Unusual to have your own elected government actively trying to kill you.
Putin really is all tactics and no strategy when it comes to warfare. What did he think would happen if he bombed EU facilities in Kyiv? Twit.
Or again... Not so much "boy meets girl" as "boy works out what his hands are for". www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAt...
On which subject... www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxF...
He was incomparably better.
I think all of us want that. But as American democracy and rule of law have already failed, and there will clearly never be a trial, we are willing to settle for his death. Itâs your last chance to get your country back: his acolytes lack his evil charisma and MAY lose their grip.
StorÄland
The MAGA caps were a giveaway too.
There isn't a country in the Free World where Russia is not trying to corrupt the political process - sometimes by means of 'useful idiots', sometimes by using worse people than that. We have their messengers here too and they use exactly the same words. The aim is always to weaken and fracture us.
âNew international alliances based on peaceâ sounds very much like the usual Russian messaging. Be very careful with this guy.
"Diego, what the hell are you doing? That's not funny! DIEGO!!"
Surely that's "indigenous", not "immigrant"?
Me? A long way. My daughter? One generation.
Yes. It used overpowering stench as its defense; the spikes were just a warning.
I bet you say that to all the snails!
Have they gone completely off their trolley???
I think this is the most niche OP I have ever seen here - and my wife's from York. She used to live in the Ouse Lea estate on Shipton Road and played on the Ings as a kid, so definitely an Ouse girl I think.
There's something strangely moving to me about the way a science fiction novel written in 1818 still packs such a visceral punch today that film-makers return to it again and again. My God! Did Mary Shelley understand what she had achieved?
In Swedish politics it tends to be brought into play specifically for strategically important long-term questions like defense, energy policy or financing the national pension scheme. The idea is to avoid damaging to-and-fro changes in strategy with every change in government.
From a foreign perspective this focus on bipartisanship looks crazy. To be meaningful itâs absolutely dependent on shared underlying values like respect for democracy. Without that itâs simply suicidal.
One base to rule them all, one base to find them, One base to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Surely you mean "Ze powers of ze Presitent..."?
Same here. I ran into a bit of trouble here with a senior colleague at the University, when I told him that I regarded the AI technology he's so enthusiastic about as satanically evil.
Like FARAGE for example?
Vaccines work!!
They got there early and bagged all the sun loungers.
Incomparably: there 'somebody home' in an animal, but not in an AI. I'm pretty sure that applies in a modest way even to animals with quite simple nervous systems, like slugs or worms.
The view here is slightly further upstream than in the old photo. The now-demolished dam would be just off the left-hand edge of the photo. The place where the bridge crosses was, back in my childhood, a still deep pool upstream of the dam.
Now it looks like this: the dam is gone and the river flows freely over restored rapids.
Here's a concrete example, from Forsby on the river TesteboÄn near the city of GÀvle, where I spent my childhood summers. There used to be a small power station there with a dam that blocked all fish migration.
Here, public funds are starting to be spent making the arrow go from right to left. The results are generally very encouraging.
It reminds me of the Swedish so-called pacifist organisation, "Svenska Freds- och Skiljedomsföreningen", generally known as "Svenska Freds", which is so nakedly anti-West and pro-Russia that many people call it "Ryska Krigs".
These people always puzzle me. Are they genuinely that clueless, marinaded in a belief that their own little world will always be safe (in Norway?? With WWII still in living memory??), or are they paid traitors?
It does not belong to us; we belong to it. To paraphrase the great Doctor Frank'n'furter: it made us, and it can break us just as easily.
That original version is wonderful, but in my view Joe Cocker's cover is even better. One of the greatest covers ever, right up there with Hendrix doing All Along the Watchtower. But judge for yourselves: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUVE...
I figured that was not someone whoâd been married 47 years!
Oban is a really special place. Hard to put your finger on what it is, but we love the town - this was our second visit - and will definitely be back. It does feel like home.
Is your profile photo actually you? Because if it is, you look very plausibly Scottish. âAuntie Morag in her younger daysâ kind of thingâŠ
We lived just along from the Chocolate Factory (in Esplanade Court) but never actually went there. Will have to do so next time, because we are certainly returning!
It was 100% for us, we just didnât bother with anything else until our stay ended and we travelled on to Edinburgh.
Yes, I see you were by the green hut close to the railway station! We bought mussels there the last evening and they were amazing. Nories is also very good. For 'posh' restaurants we tried Ee-usk, the Waterfront Fishouse Restaurant and the Olive Garden: all excellent, each with its own style.
I spent a week in Oban at the beginning of the month. Highly recommended, including the seafood! And I agree about the Scots.
Death stalks him. Already he feels the ice-cold bony hand on his shoulder.
concerns of the non-cis-hetero community, who can be genuinely in danger in the wrong environment, but for what itâs worth: I have never felt unsafe in a ârainbow environmentâ, but I HAVE felt threatened - more than once - in aggressively male cis-hetero environments.
See, hereâs the thing: Iâm a cis hetero man, but I would say exactly the same. A rainbow flag (or trans flag, or some combo) immediately says âcivilized neighborhood with good human-friendly valuesâ. Itâs exactly the sort of place where I want to hang out. Of course this is minor compared to the
Me too.
Lovely! But this was earlier in the summer, surely? I imagine they have left by now. There were hardly any left in the Inner Hebrides when I was there three weeks ago.
I think you're right, especially about the former. There's a distinct "dung-eating peasant" look that feels like it originates in Terry Gilliam's work - also seen in "Jabberwocky" for example.
"Helena Handcart" đ€Ł
What IS it with the "barbarians covered in shit" look?? It drives me nuts, especially as it's always coupled with dirty, tangled, nitty hair. Why do they think people kept receiving these strange objects as grave goods?
Naturally, given that they never actually solve the problems they were supposed to solve.
I am fortunate in that this year the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) conference, the biggest in the world in my discipline, is happening in Birmingham (UK) rather than in the US as usual. Unless there is a regime change I will likely never visit the US again.
YES
Look, if you were actually the corpse of Josef Goebbels, dug up from its unhallowed grave and reanimated by evil necromancy, you wouldn't look great either. So cut Steve some slack.
Perhaps he will emulate that other great tyrant, Herod, who is said to have died of âputrescent stomach, corpse-like breath, maggots breeding in the privy member, and a constant watery flow from the bowels causing inflamed madness.â
The Italian cookbook thing honestly doesnât sound plausible. The Italians have been eating pasta for many centuries. The dominance of the tomato in their cuisine must be more recent, however, as itâs an introduction from the Americas that only started catching on about 200 years ago.
âŠdoes it strike anyone else that Tomâs original post is a pretty good example of one? Devaluing and âotheringâ a bunch of concepts (and by extension the people they relate to) under the guise of âjust being reasonableâ.
Itâs weird, isnât it? With one or two of the terms one might argue whether an older word isnât just as good - is âunhousedâ really better than âhomelessâ? - but all of them flag important issues. Food insecurity IS A THING! A thing with severe lifetime impacts. As for microaggressionsâŠ
Good slogan!
And when the clown in question is PennywiseâŠ
Oh, I didn't know that.
...but a damn fine set of gills and an impressive siphon!
Here's a thing. Humans have three species of lice: head lice, clothes lice, and crabs. Head lice and clothes lice are 'our own', and closely related to each other; the two species probably diverged when we started wearing clothes. Crabs, on the other hand, were picked up from gorillas. Ahem.
Yep. They have always been that, for ordinary colds before the days of Covid. I caught Covid for the first time at ISELV in Valencia in 2022, thankfully after I had had my vaccinations.
Shock Study: Evil Assholes Support Evil Asshole President...
I don't know yet when I'm being scheduled. It will probably be in an Early Vertebrates session with an audience of 8 people, while the other 992 attendees are listening to dinosaur & mammal talks...
I know, I passed through in late June. Mind you, it rained in Alston.
Because it rains all the time?
"Nostalgic nationalism" is probably the single most hopelessly inappropriate ideology on which to base policies for taking your country safely into the future.
It sounds better in German.
White "Christian" nationalists tend to forget that Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian countries in the world - alongside Armenia.
And here, from 1489, is a Swedish version in Storkyrkan (Stockholm Cathedral), celebrating a victory over the Danes in 1471. The sculptor was probably Berndt Notke from LĂŒbeck.
AI fake! Please take this down.
And probably the most internationally revered of all martial saints. Here's an ancient rock-cut church dedicated to him in that epicenter of Anglo-Saxon racial purity, Ethiopia:
I find them useful for adding an edge to plum jam. Garden plums like Victorias or whatever, tasty in the raw state, tend to make slightly insipid jam. But if you cook sloes down to a pulp (straining off the stones) and add a little of that to the jam, it adds sharpness and the result is wonderful.
Is this Kamil Galeevâs work? Heâs written some insightful stuff about this in relation to the Russian economy and how it consistently fails to develop beyond the extractive level. Used to post about it at the bird place.
A postage stamp-sized piece of paper, cut from a page, with the word âTheâ on it.
Sepia-toned monochrome, very low viewpoint...this is "as seen by a Cretaceous mammal", isn't it?
Round and round we go.
"New life in a new land [that actually already belonged to someone else]"
Well, quite. The country that created the Antonov AN-225 Mriya wasn't going to just stand there and wait for help, was it? I've been amazed, and frustrated, by how often the discussion in the West completely overlooks / denies Ukrainian agency.
In my mind's eye I see it in German, in Gothic script.
Alas, that's true for almost every country you could name. Maybe Bhutan or Andorra would get a pass...