¯\_(ツ)_/¯

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

And you know what is "visual shorthand" for evil and ugliness, for entirely racist and VERY antisemitic reasons?

my face.

Only at specific points in the last few centuries of history, in specific places, am I allowed to be Beautiful.

in almost all of the last century and ALL of this one, my face is "striking" at best. If they've never seen European paintings from the 1800s or the works of Charles Dana Gibson, they'll just think I look Odd. But I don't get to be Beautiful, and neither does anyone who "doesn't Fit" the tiny narrow white-centric antisemitic bigoted eugenic standards of what makes someone Look Evil or Look Ugly or Look Pretty or Look Moral/Righteous.

I know an artist who does a lot of religious work. He did a nativity scene with a hundred angels in it. Every last one was some shade of White. You could tell he never even questioned it. not once.

"Good"

"Bad"

Ehrlich was a Polish Jew born in 1882, and an avid socialist (as were many European Jews at the time). He was a member of the Bund (the Jewish labour party) and ran against Zionist Yitshak Schipper in the Warsaw Kehilla.

On October 4, 1939 he was arrested by the NKVD (the Sovyet secret police) and subjected to interrogation for 10 months. On August 2, 1940 he was brought before a tribunal and accused of spying for the Nazis. He denied the charges, but the tribunal sentenced him to death. While he awaited execution, the sentence was commuted to 10 years in gulag. He wasn't released until a year later as part of the Sikorski-Mayski agreement between the Sovyet Union and Poland.

Upon his release he was asked to join the newly-formed Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which he formed with Viktor Alter under Stalin's blessing. The JAC was chaired by Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow Jewish Theater.

On December 4, 1941, just 10 months after the JAC's formation, Ehrlich and Alter were arrested in Kuybyshev by the NKVD. No reason was given for their arrest. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, both prominent social activists, petitioned Stalin to release Ehrlich and Alter, but were ignored.

On February 23, 1943 following the Sovyet victory in Stalingrad, Sovyet ambassador Maxim Litvinov wrote to William Green to tell him that Ehrlich and Alter had been executed on Stalin's orders.

Despite this, the JAC was fiercely pro-Sovyet. They led campaigns to fund the Red Army, and broadcast statements about the lack of antisemitism in the CCCP. In July 1943, Mikhoels and Itsik Feffer led the largest American pro-Sovyet rally in history, where over 40,000 people listened to him praise Stalin's efforts against the Nazis.

In January 1948, Mikhoels was killed by the MGB (the other Sovyet secret police) in a staged car accident.

Sovyet persecution of Jewish anti-fascists continued until 1952, when most of the prominent members of the JAC were arrested and executed. 7 months later in August, at least 13 prominent Jewish poets, including Feffer, were rounded up, brought to the basement of Lubyanka prison, and executed as part of Stalin's "Great Purge".

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

Celebrating the eleventy-first birth anniversary (jayanti) of Aruna Asaf Ali (1909 - 1996) - Queen of the Indian Independence Revolution.

These bottles were created and used as unguentaria (otherwise known as balsamaria) which are ancient vessels that were typically filled with scented oils, cosmetic powders, balms, or ointments. Unguentaria could be crafted from ceramic, glass, or stone, and they came in various shapes and sizes, but dove-shaped vessels made of glass were especially popular during the second half of the 1st century CE, when they were produced and distributed throughout the Roman Empire.

Above: a dove-shaped unguentarium with residue from the original contents still visible inside

Each bottle was crafted from blown-glass that was carefully modeled into the shape of a bird; the inner cavity was then filled with perfume or cosmetic powder, and the tip of the tail was reheated and compressed, effectively sealing the vessel.

Above: dove-shaped vessels that were opened and emptied long ago, c.50-100 CE

As this article explains:

The vessels were produced with glass blowing pipes by so-called "free blowing," and are for this reason extremely thin-walled, with body thicknesses significantly below 0.1 cm.

After the containers had been filled, the tail feathers were sealed airtight by reheating to protect the contents from moisture. Parts of the containers, such as the head or tail feathers, had to be broken off in order to access the contents of the vessels, which means that they were disposable packaging.

Above: vessels with the tips of their tails broken off

Most of these bottles were made from clear or pale blue Roman glass, but some were crafted with a dark blue, green, purple, or yellow appearance instead:

As cheap, mass-produced goods, the packaging consisted mainly of the conventional thin-walled and transparent Roman glass with an unintentional light blue colouring. Specimens made of intentionally coloured transparent glass (e.g. dark blue, dark green, violet or yellow) are less common. This may also have to do with the fact that the pink or white contents could be visually better distinguished and marketed if the vessels were made of the conventional Roman glass, which offered more transparency to the beholder than the intentionally coloured glass.

Above: a sealed unguentarium that likely contains scented oils and cosmetic residue, from Rovesenda, Italy, c.50 CE

Research suggests that many of these bottles were filled with powder, including pink substances that have been described as "blush" or "rouge," while others were filled with liquid.

Above: more dove-shaped unguentaria from the Roman Empire

Vessels with this design (which is also known as Isings form 11) have been unearthed at Roman-era sites located throughout Europe:

Evidence shows that these glass containers were widely marketed in the Roman Empire. The main areas of distribution are the central and northern Italian regions of Campania et Latium, Venetia et Histria, and Transpadana, along with the northwestern provinces of Gallia Belgica, Gallia Lugdunensis, Germania inferior and Germania superior [in what is now Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands].

There is also evidence from the Balkan and Danube region in the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia, and also from the eastern Mediterranean in the provinces of Achaea, Creta et Cyrenae and Macedonia. The distribution in the western Mediterranean seems to be limited to Hispania Tarraconensis.

Above: the severed heads of two bird-shaped unguentaria

Sources & More Info:

Glassware and Glassworking in Thessaloniki: 1st Century BC-6th Century AD: Bird-Shaped Inguentaria (Isings Form 11)

The Austrian Archaeological Institute: New Finds of Bird-Shaped Glass Vessels with Residues of their Former Content

The British Museum: Roman Perfume Bottle in the Shape of a Bird

Società Friulana di Archeologia: Glass Doves and Globes from Thessaloniki: North Italian Imports or Local Products?

Analytical Chemistry for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage: Compositional Analysis of Greco-Roman Unguentaria Residues

"should not be allowed to leave"

holy shit can you try to sound any more ominous