My baby sister had it so badly in the late nineties that her eyes blistered. She still has light scarring. Cannot work out why anyone would not want to avoid it.
research historian. vestigial degrees in medieval lit. got tombstone hands and a graveyard mind. stayed up reading too late last night.
55 followers 47 following 212 posts
view profile on Bluesky
My baby sister had it so badly in the late nineties that her eyes blistered. She still has light scarring. Cannot work out why anyone would not want to avoid it.
About time too! We got my eldest kid’s chickenpox shot when we flew to the US on holiday. My NCT mates were actually having chickenpox parties. I was so aghast.
Autumn Stream.
Half of my siblings went with ‘Mater’ to irritate our mother, the other half went with ‘Ma’ because ditto, she hates both.
My ancestor. I am descended from the child on her lap, who chose to pass as white. He didn’t go home when his mother was dying, and regretted it until the end.
Frogs telling each other the water still feels fine.
I met a Black homeschooler who was keeping her kids out of school to avoid institutional racism. Which is legitimately an issue where we are. Couldn’t really blame her for wanting to shield her littles from that.
There’s a pub in my Virginia county which happily claims it’s older than European settlement here. It was built in 1830.
My engineer grandfather who always ate the same exact foods for lunch, learned to read at three but didn’t speak until six, and could monologue on train timetables like nobody’s business was known as “an odd duck.” His grandchildren have autism.
I work in historical research and I still get physically nauseated by some of atrocities I come across. A nurse’s baby left to die so that the master’s child wouldn’t have to share her milk.
What about Ukraine’s stolen children? Prosecutions for rapes by Russian soldiers?
Literally what I was about to suggest. Bother.
“Say, are you a legacy? No? You better have a jump-shot then.”
There’s a man I have to read who writes letters home to his wife (1840s) reprimanding her for constantly having poor health and being melancholy. She had nine babies in ten years before a pregnancy finally killed her off. STFU, buddy.
I have one kid who genuinely had an alarming reaction to his first (and only) flu shot. So I hunt down the nasal spray for him every year. Even if you hate needles, there are options.
My dog once ate half a sleeve of Oreos, but the good news is that there’s not actually enough cocoa powder in them to kill off a dog. (As a European, I think they taste ashy and strange and barely chocolatey at all, so this tracks.)
In the ‘90s, I was generally optimistic that things would get better. Russia was a democracy—bit wobbly, but the Cold War was over! We’d fix our climate issues, because all the nations wouldn’t be dumb enough to let us all just cook. And only fringe idiots didn’t vaccinate.
I find that a lot of old-timers who’ve lived a long life can be surprisingly broad-minded. “That’s your Great-Aunt Mildred, she was Billy until she was six or so and told everyone she was really a girl. Now she had the best pie but she would NOT give that recipe to just anyone…”
Had a patron tell me excitedly how she couldn’t wait for AI to take over from archivists and just transcribe everything she wanted. Uh huh, I said, as I put the 1861 letters back in their sleeves, into their catalogued folders, and into the acid-free boxes so I could lug them back to their shelves.
Apps for parking. A different one for every city. Plus! Different healthcare portal apps for the GP, the dentist, the optometrist, the gastro, the psych, the ortho, the PT…
Someone in my neighborhood has dug up their entire lawn and turned it into flowers. The results are spectacular.
My nan’s priest used to whip through mass at a cracking pace on mornings when the cricket was on. If you’ve never heard a Catholic mass delivered at auctioneer speed, you’re missing out.
This is very bad. Although entirely predictable. Once more the humanities are being cut back to prop up STEM and, increasingly, AI investment (including at the expense of bench science). In the past, cuts to humanities were promoted on two separate logic streams that do not hold true: /1
Today I was showing a ninety year old patron archival photos from her school days, and she pointed at a photo of a girl in 1952 and told me: “Your hair looked much better like this! Why did you change it?” …meekly agreed that yes, it had looked better that way.
Went on a college tour there and was shown the counseling center (which most tours skip). Posters about mental health everywhere. I’d say they’re at least aware.
My mother used to make quince jelly..?
Where I grew up, it was “youse”. I prefer “y’all.”
Yep. You can tell because the one thing universally recognized as beneficial is having small class sizes with a good student:teacher ratio, and our public schools will do anything rather than fund that.
…what if your choice is not to expose your small children during an epidemic to unvaccinated children who may be carrying the measles? Or do you not get to make THAT choice?
Women’s rugby sevens was the most fun bit of the whole last Olympics.
I have the vascular kind of EDS. There’s nothing wrong with my heart, but the valves in my legs and abdomen don’t work the way they should.
This has been the de facto state of things for a while. You can watch my local megachurch’s pastor threatening his followers with hellfire if they don’t vote GOP on YouTube, videos going back for years. There have never been any penalties.
*Unless there’s some endangered species nesting there. Because the public will always be with us, but the piping plover may not.
Reading about an eighteenth century Quaker who got kicked out for “studying the stars.” Was he an astronomer, an astrologer or a poet, I wonder?
I was named after my mother’s favorite childhood book, set in early sixteenth century London. Read it again and it’s full of colonial fantasies about the excitement of discovering and conquering new countries, wheeeee.
I don’t know why folklore tends to have witches turning into hares rather than rabbits, but hares just have more of an eldritch look to them.
Good Morning ☀️ 🌵 Black-tailed Jackrabbit at daybreak
Well. It’s nice to see a reference to the Glorious Revolution on a Monday morning.
My spouse is the “can do it myself” which he CAN except he is always traveling for work and his free time is very precious and could we not just PAY someone to do it?!
I had a Canadian friend who was always asked: where are you FROM? And her parents and grandparents were born in Uganda, and before that, her family was born in a part of India which isn’t India anymore. What answer should she give, besides “Canada”?!
This is not a photo of the otter I saw this morning as I was too spellbound to take out my phone so you’ll have to settle for a photo of the otter’s buffet.
I do find it baffling that we get told now that boys can’t be expected to sit still and focus, as if all the schools and colleges which excluded girls for so long weren’t modeled just like that…
Soon after I moved to the US, a woman commented on how fat my baby was, and asked if he was bottle fed. When I said no, I was breastfeeding, she was suddenly wreathed in smiles. So fat baby thighs are only ok if you’re nursing them?!
Friends of mine still have the Crotch Crescent road sign.
But how can they copyright it..?
Unless you have that photo of JD Vance on your phone, I guess…
This doesn’t apply to ESTA, right..? My family are never going to visit again at this rate…
Considering how unhinged right wing voters usually are on the topic of trafficking, you’d think that they’d be more worried about strange masked men with no ID pulling women and minors off the street…
Can confirm. Have sister in Bristol suddenly interested in women’s rugby.
That said, am third-generation Liverpool fan who spent most of this past winter feeling pleasantly smug on Saturday afternoons.
I love the British commentators. They’re so much meaner than Americans in any sport. “Shocking performance here, they’ve just been dire in this first half.”
after the storm’s washed through
Come now, it’s very nice and peaceful in Ba Sing Se.
þyrel, n.n: hole. (THUE-rell / ˈθy-rɛl) Image: De natura rerum; E France, 9th century; Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc.Nat.1, f. 26v. #OldEnglish #WOTD
Ditch flowers
Yes! I change them out, spray my face with antibacterial spray before using them… it’s grim.
Brasenose had a bunch of editions in their archives at one time… all the Foxe you could want! I found a little went a very long way.
I wear them, but I wish I knew how not to get cystic acne when I do. It’s just so painful (although I guess it’s more motivation to wear the mask to hide the giant pustules, right?)
Military parades are for tinpot dictatorships. When you already HAVE the world’s most powerful military, it’s not necessary!
Just what I was thinking. Won’t be an original piece in the bunch.
Not usually a flag person, but have decided to put up our state flag because it strongly suggests that if we ever get a monarchical ruler, some breastfeeding mom will sigh, put the baby down, and stomp on his head.
Also: Viking history and the Crusades.
For those of us on green cards or student visas, the risks are a lot higher.
Free antenatal and postnatal care for mothers, free deliveries, paid parental leave, better employment protections for mothers, subsidized daycare… right?! No?
Think most of my old rowing team would have had to present ID. Going to be real fun for everyone who doesn’t fit precisely into their circumscribed definition of ‘woman’.
Me too. She had such detailed plans to fund her policies, and I liked that she clearly understood how capitalism needs guard rails so everyone can flourish. But it turns out that just like in high school, nobody wants to vote for the girl who does all the homework.
Seriously, why are we still hearing about Sleepy Biden when the current guy is repeatedly napping in public?!
My thoughts too. If they’re peeling a mother away from her baby and she’s fighting to hang on to her baby, does that count as ICE officers being ‘assaulted’?
My husband’s grandpa was at Normandy. He was born in the US to two Italian-speaking immigrants, and had birthright citizenship.
Gee, what are Libya’s support systems for child amputees like? Well-funded, right? Because there are currently more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world.
Right there with you. I work in antebellum history, and I think it’s important to preserve sites like Franklin & Armfield Office. But you don’t get MARRIED there.
Hasn’t this been a thing since the Homeland Security Act..? That allowed for the suspension of review in the case of immigrants suspected of terrorism offences. They COULD just lock you up on their suspicion.
Is AI a good thing?
Little feet.
Funnily enough, this was the book that made kid-me totally comfortable with death. Still hope it’ll be like Hazel discovering he didn’t need his body any more.
I loved Lysander too. But I googled it with our surname, and found a serial rapist by that name. Rather put me off.
Anyone in favor of banning politicians from trading stocks while in office would get my vote. Seems like an easy litmus test for sorting corrupt Dems from the rest.
And they wonder why people aren’t having more children. What kind of world will they inherit..? Who wants their kids to ride chrome and shiny?
Somehow, they’re going to be the “Biden tariffs.”
lost potential
I went and it was covered with junk from American fans (sorry).
Not mine. There was reverent quaffing in front of the portrait of a 17th century giant, but the quaffing vessel was v normal.
A small detail, but I notice that in these demands, Harvard students are to be forbidden from wearing masks (including those with immunological conditions, I suppose) but ICE can be masked up…
“They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (April 10, 1925).
I have a junior looking at colleges now, and he’s cutting some off his list for their failures to protect their students and their staff. And I bet he’s not the only one.
“National Parks: A Danger To American Children!” I can see the Fox ticker now.
After the wildfire summer, I have only seen one or two on my milkweed. Few eggs. No caterpillars. It is heartbreaking.
This. US colleges have been steadily underfunded since Reagan, and they’ve made up the funding shortfall with foreign students. Project 2025 is attacking college $$$ on several fronts.
I’ve noticed a whoooole lotta talk about how great the trades are if college is too pricey. For YOUR kids, that is. Not THEIRS. Theirs are going to Penn.
Good. Universities should protect their students.
What Kind of Times Are These - Adrienne Rich
But not a single student was planning to major in History. Not one. And if you don’t know where you’ve been as a country, you cannot know if you are moving forward.
(Got to say, I was wondering if the job industry really needed so many Criminal Justice majors…)
In 2020, I was so desperate for distraction that I watched three local high school graduation slides (all virtual). So many kids planning to do Business Studies. Engineering. Marketing. Criminal Justice.
I just hope that some of the kids disappointed by this get fired up to study history in college.
So deep down I never really believed I’d ever get to use my 401k, so I’m considerably less upset about it than most of my peers are right now. Oh, you really thought our generation would get to retire..? Bless.
Well, he tried to dump his wife and the mother of his children in favour of his teenage mistress…
My beloved firstborn, solemnly listing his “duel enrollment classes” on a job application.
