This will affect the trout population

Moondance 40 x 40 inches, Oil, 2023 “In a way, it’s really science that’s been inspiring rituals all along. Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology. The changing of the seasons, the long summer days, the harvest, the endless winter nights, and the blossoming spring are all by-products of how the Earth orbits the sun. The phases of the moon, which have dictated the timing of rituals since the dawn of civilization, are the result of how the moon orbits us. Birth, puberty, reproduction, and death are the biological processes of being human. Throughout the history of our species, these have been the miracles, for lack of a better word, that have given us meaning. They are the real, tangible events upon which countless celebrations have been built, mirroring one another even among societies who had no contact.” - Sasha Sagan, For Small Creature Such as We

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

this is a leg off of Argentinosaurus and its already the size of a two story house like LOOK at the size of these fuckers