Mint City

farmhands: dip ur hands and equipment in Milk™️ before touching them

scientists: ????wait how does that work

farmhands: 

02/14/19

13 Same-Sex Couples In Japan Sue For Equal Marital Rights On Valentine’s Day

In a society where pressure for conformity is strong, many gay people hide their sexuality, fearing prejudice at home, school or work. The obstacles are even higher for transgender people in the highly gender-specific society.

Catherine O'Donnell

The Liberal government spent $500,000 on outside advisers to come up with a logo, name and branding for a new agency that promises to alleviate poverty in developing countries, internal documents reveal.

Its 2017 budget announced $300-million toward developing an institution that would support sustainable development and poverty reduction in developing countries by aiming to attract private investors – such as pension funds – as investment partners in private projects that serve a public good.

The organization was placed inside Export Development Canada and given the legal name Development Finance Institution Canada. But officials decided something catchier was in order. After weeks of internal debate, the new name emerged: FinDev Canada.

First, you had a lot of commercially prepared products like Jello and Spam (Spam, Spam, Spam …) and things like that being available to the general public for the first time.  A lot of these recipes come from ads for processed foods; they’re “serving suggestions” writ fancy.

Second, the Jello molds in particular are a democratization of an old-fashioned and very upper-class way of preserving perishable foods, which was to encase them in a meat jelly called aspic.  The aspic would preserve the food by preventing bacteria from getting at it.  It took time and effort to make an aspic, so it was rich-people food, prepared by cooks in big houses.  Jello (in its more savory flavors) could do the exact same thing, except that one lone housewife could make a Jello mold cheaply and easily.  I’m not saying that aspic was necessarily the most appealing food out there, but it was high-status because it was associated with Fancy European Aristocrats.

Third, more people had refrigerators, not just iceboxes.  A lot of these dishes need to be chilled, so here’s a way to use one of your fancy new kitchen appliances.

Fourth, this is not everyday food, for which we are all grateful.  It’s Fancy Food, meant to show off.  You’d serve it at a party (and then, presumably, your friends would retaliate by holding another party and serving something else equally revolting).  So this is food that takes careful preparation, lots of time, and lots of effort.  You, as the Middle-Class Fifties Housewife, are showing off your new postwar prosperity.  You have the skill to make food look … um, “attractive,” you have the money to buy all these ingredients, you have the kitchen equipment and appliances to prepare them, and because your husband works a comfortable middle-class job, you have the time to stay at home all day and construct something like this.  This kind of food is the physical manifestation of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of Conspicuous Consumption.

Fifth, if you’re a housewife making this in the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s, there’s a good chance that you were born in the 20s or 30s, and that you grew up during the Depression and WWII.  You might have grown up poor, not having access to a wide variety of food, or not having time or a place to prepare it.  You might have seen fancy food in magazines, but not a chance that that kind of eating would ever trickle down to you!  And then … voila, it did!  I think a lot of this sort of thing is just a grownup way to play with food, to experiment with all the neat new things that technology, processing, and a new tax bracket could bring you.  These are adult mud pies; who cares how it tastes?  We can make it look Really Cool!  We don’t care all that much about specific nutritional value; we’re just so happy to have all this food, and sufficient calories, that we’ll just play with it and try it in weird combinations and enjoy it.  (Or, I suspect, “enjoy” it.)

The banana used in the 50′s is a different version of the banana we have today that went extinct. By all accounts the previous banana tasted more like the fake ‘banana flavor’ you get in candy.

Two Vancouver men are facing charges of theft after RCMP in Coquitlam, B.C., say they arrested the pair for allegedly stealing a shopping cart loaded with $1,400 worth of butter.

Police say the men, aged 23 and 25, were arrested outside a supermarket on Wednesday.

Cpl. Michael McLaughlin says while the theft of a large amount of butter is a little unusual, police do see these sort of thefts with other food products like meat, cheese and baby formula that is easily sold on black markets.

Police say the 23-year-old man is also a suspect in at least three other butter thefts around Metro Vancouver in recent months.

The photo above is the closest humanity has ever come to creating Medusa. If you were to look at this, you would die instantly. 

The image is of a reactor core lava formation in the basement of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It’s called the Elephant’s Foot and weighs hundreds of tons, but is only a couple meters across.

Yeah, this is a selfie. The guy set the timer on the camera and went and stood by it, and it produced this horrifying image that now haunts my dreams. The reason all the photos from Chernobyl are grainy and poor-quality, by the way, is due to radiation. The cameras were fine; radiation just… does that.

Anyway, that guy’s name is Artur Korneyev- and I use ‘is’ because he’s still alive! He helped to build the original sarcophagus which encased reactor 4 after the meltdown, and kept going back inside with reporters to be like ‘look how fuckin weird this is’. He helped plan the New Safe Confinement which now surrounds the sarcophagus, and would probably have helped build it too if they didn’t full-on ban him.

A quote:

‘Korneyev’s sense of humor remained intact, though. He seemed to have no regrets about his life’s work. “Soviet radiation,” he joked, “is the best radiation in the world.”‘

Possibly the coolest guy alive? I’m tempted to think so.

Honestly, I feel like Chernobyl has been shunted into this category of like, ‘a lot of innocent and naive people died horribly’, when in reality a lot of tough as fuck people saved everybody else. The oft-told story of the ‘suicide mission’ to dive into the reactor and open the valves of the pool? Yeah, all three of the men who dove lived. One died in 2005 of heart failure; the other two are still alive.

A total of 31 direct and 15 indirect deaths are thought to have occurred from the Chernobyl disaster. Long-term deaths are… difficult to measure. Oh, and there’s a few hundred people still living in the exclusion zone.

If you’re at all interested, I really recommend reading up about Chernobyl- and, in particular, what was done to contain it and deal with the radiation. This is a beautiful write-up, and the wiki page is also worth checking out.  A lot of people did absolutely incredible work and it goes unrecognised most of the time.

“he’s clearly in the background of this golf photo! that proves he wasn’t at the crime scene!!”

as opposed to, like

“this guy in prison sent us his cool golf fanart but we didn’t want to promo a serial killer, so we looked into his case and thought it looked pretty flimsy and probably racially motivated”