just some stuff

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Life works so much better when you only engage with others based on their words or actions and refrain from any additional analysis.

Someone didn't text back? Okay so you're not making plans with them. Someone consistently ignores your attempts to contact them? Okay, so you're not gonna be interacting with them now. You can move on with no additional drama. It doesn't need to be a big judgment on them or a big judgment on yourself.

Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

And weirdly enough you’re really good at this: making pizzas and dealing with shitty customers and breaking up fights in the parking lot and pretending to be Duncan’s cousin on the phone so the utility company doesn’t cut off the power. But running a store is a lot of work for two dumb kids, so slowly you start accumulating a bunch of competent weirdos to help out, like the nun who left her convent because god told her to help you make pizzas, and the elderly school teacher who just survived a mass shooting, and the guy the papa johns down the street hired to run you over. And really there’s no way any of this should be working as well as it is - you’re absolutely committing fraud of some kind here - but you’ve managed to dodge the landlord every time he’s stopped by, and the health inspector never shows up to tell you to stop letting your dog hang out behind the counter and you’re all still kinda looking at each other and asking ‘are we allowed to just do this?’ before shrugging again and continuing to make pizzas, until somehow, through a series of unlikely technicalities, your doofus coworker ends up on the ballot for governor.

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.