Whatever.

Terry Pratchett, in a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, 22 November 1967

Thank you very much for your letter. The first one that I have received with regard to Smith of Wootton Major. You evidently feel about the story very much as I do myself. I can hardly say more.

(Obligatory disclaimer that I'm not qualified to give you medical advice, but these have helped me a lot with my muscle tension and pain)

If you're feeling significant discomfort or PAIN while stretching, back off. Don't force yourself. You can always dial these exercises back and stop at the point you need to because the last thing you want is to strain something.

TMJ syndrome (jaw pain)

- Open your mouth about 80% as wide as you can for 10 seconds, repeat 3x.

- Push your jaw forward, then open it as much as you can for 10 seconds, repeat 3x.

- Make a fist to rest your jaw on then open your mouth 10x. There should be some resistance as you're lifting the weight of your head.

Rhomboid (shoulders and upper back pain)

- Face the wall and place your arm against it in an L shape then rotate your body away from your arm to open your chest, hold for 30 seconds on both sides.

When you get more comfortable, you can extend your arm straight out behind you against the wall for a deeper stretch.

- Place one elbow on top and inside the other, hold your hands together, then lift your arms to open your shoulder blades. I can only hold this for about 10 seconds but do your best then repeat with the other arm on top.

- With your elbows bent, puff your chest out while squeezing your shoulder blades together, hold for about 10 seconds and repeat 3x.

Psoas release with pandiculation

Your psoas is a big son of a bitch muscle in the center of your body, and when it gets too tight it can affect everything from breathing to digestion. And cause a lot of pain. The exercises in this video helped me a ton. It doesn't LOOK like it does much, but it does.

This full exercise takes much longer than the others and I've found that once I did it for about a week or so, and started being aware of my posture to keep it from tightening back up, I haven't had to keep doing it all the time.

Lower back, piriformis, sciatic nerve

- Do a simple hamstring stretch with your legs straight out in front of you and feet flat against a wall to hold them at a 90* angle. Try not to bend your knees or hunch your back, just stretch as far as you're able and hold for 30 seconds.

Continue by dropping your chin to your chest so you can feel a stretch going down your spine.

- On all fours, rotate your upper body until you can feel a stretch going down the opposite side into your hips. Hold 30 seconds and repeat on the other side.

- Almost sitting cross-legged, stack your legs so that one ankle is on the other knee. Make sure both legs are parallel. Then, lean forward to feel a stretch in your piriformis (side of your ass). Hold for 30 seconds and repeat on other side.

Inner thigh

- Form a pinwheel shape with your legs, one in an L shape in front of you and the other to the side. Gently lean towards the side and press your thigh towards the floor to feel a stretch. Hold for 10-30 seconds and repeat other side.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).

Thanks to FreshDirect and Instacart, consuming meat no longer even requires coming into contact with a deli butcher or grocery clerk. With a few taps on a keyboard or the swipe of a screen, consumers can get as much beef, pork, and chicken as they want delivered to their doors, without ever having to think about where it comes from. And yet, as the popularity of bestselling books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals attests, a lot of Americans do think about this. In recent years, more and more consumers have begun to carefully scrutinize the labels on the packages of the meat and poultry they buy. The ranks of such consumers have grown exponentially, paralleling the rise of the “good food” movement, which promotes healthier eating habits and reform of the industrial food system.

Although the movement is, in Pollan’s words, a “big, lumpy tent,” composed of a broad coalition of advocacy organizations and citizens’ groups that sometimes push for competing agendas, one of its aims is to persuade consumers to become more conscientious shoppers and eaters. Among those who put this idea into practice are so-called locavores, who buy food directly from local farms, ideally from small family-run enterprises that embrace organic, sustainable practices: ranchers who raise grass-fed cows that never set foot in industrial feedlots; farmers who sell eggs that come from free-range chickens reared on a diet of seeds, plants, and insects rather than genetically engineered corn and antibiotics.

Locavores engage in what social scientists call “virtuous consumption,” using their purchasing power to buy food that aligns with their values. The movement appeals to the growing number of Americans who want to feel more connected to the food they eat and to the people who raise it, with whom locavores can interact directly at farmers markets or through community-supported agriculture programs. It is a captivating vision, and the benefits of eating locally grown food—which is likely to be more nutritious, to come from more humanely treated animals, and to be better for the environment—are manifold.

But locavores have some blind spots of their own, most notably when it comes to the experiences of workers on small family farms. As the political scientist Margaret Gray discovered when she set about interviewing farm laborers in New York’s Hudson Valley, the vast majority of these workers are undocumented immigrants or guest workers who toil under abysmal conditions, often working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks for dismal pay. “We live in the shadows,” one worker told her. “They treat us like nothing,” said another. In her book Labor and the Locavore, Gray asked the butcher on a small farm why so few of his customers seemed to notice this.

“They don’t eat the workers,” the farmer told her.

“He went on to explain that, in his experience, his consumers’ primary concern is with what they put in their bodies,” Gray wrote, “and so the labor standards of farmworkers simply do not register as a priority.”]

yes!!! i work in a small poultry slaughterhouse and it's such a small operation that i also sometimes work directly at the farmer's market. i usually do eviscerating on the production line for the slaughterhouse, and then i often also am doing the direct-to-consumer marketing. and i try, and try, to bring up this fact to customers, i tell them about the slaughterhouse conditions, and who the workers are.

nobody asks. nobody wants to know. if i bring it up they're disinterested, think it distasteful. they want to know about conditions for the poultry. they want to know if they're humanely treated. they are! they are, and we have photos up on the website, in the newsletter, some displayed in the farm store or at the stand at the farmer's market, of the conditions the poultry is raised in, the pasture, the pasture units, how they're moved.

i take pictures in the slaughterhouse sometimes. because i think that, that is what we're doing that's really different. (I've learned if I share one that has blood in it, make it black and white first.) we're the only state-inspected facility in our entire county, and we only do our own birds. the crew is made up of a mix of community members; paid full-time employees from the farm crew, a bunch of paid part-time employees, family (me!), and a whole bunch of occasional workers, mostly overqualified underemployed parents of young children who can get a Tuesday morning off every couple of weeks or over the summer, who are mostly paid in-kind for their work (which is legal and aboveboard in our state).

I don't know any other operation that does it like us. (I've helped at another one but it's over state lines, in MA, and their laws are different, and that farm has had to switch over to sending their birds to a federally-inspected USDA plant because MA's laws were so onerous it was not possible for them to have a boutique abbatoir like we do. most of our profits come from selling cut-up parts, and that is just straight illegal in MA, only USDA slaughterhouses can sell parted birds, and there was no path for this farm to legally do that.)

(our quadrupeds, meanwhile, can't be processed by us at all under NY state law. we have to either sell whole/half/quarter animals by custom butchery, which we hire a guy to come do on-site, or we have to have them transported to a USDA slaughterhouse. the one we use recently had almost its entire workforce quit at once, for reasons we totally understood. my BIL has been trying to quietly get them to unionize. then the boss tried to sell the operation to him. BIL escaped, but is aware, somebody needs to fill that niche. COVID fucked them up, but also the guy who owns the place is a total dick. our custom butchery guy isn't much better, and he pays all his guys under the table, and on the one hand yay no taxes, but on the other hand, whoo no worker's comp either guys, you sure about this???)

But. nobody cares. customers straight Do Not care. people talk about the ethical treatment of the animals. i cannot get anyone to be interested in the slaughterhouse workers. it is filthy, disgusting work and you could not pay me enough to do it, though i don't mind it; i do it for love, and because somebody's got to.

yeah the chicken is $6.50/lb for a whole bird. yeah it is. it should probably be more. but not because the birds get to eat grass and experience sunshine. it's because the nice (mostly) white (mostly) ladies pulling their guts out can take a bathroom break whenever they want to, and I decorated the wall with a sign that says "soap scrub rinse bleach" in the Live Laugh Love font, and my mom makes us a coffee cake for break every time.

Scenario: you see someone in a wheelchair fall out of their chair, and you have the ability to help.

1. Approach and ask "are you okay?"*

2. Next question if they say no, are vague, or open to continuing conversation** is, "is there anything I can do to help?" Or "what can I do?"

If they say no to help, then that's the end, just leave and go do whatever you were doing!

If they ask for help or say they are mildly injured, ask "what would you like me to do?" And wait for an answer before doing anything! If they seem dazed or confused, they might have hit their head or had another medical event*, or they might just be like that due to regular disability. Be patient.

Do not touch the person unless they say to, or they are like, unconcious in the middle of the road, ya know?? Wheelchair users usually have conditions that mean being handled improperly can severely injure us, you could cause much more damage than the fall.

Some things they might need you to do:

Bring their wheelchair closer (mine went about 5 feet away after it dumped me)

engage the brakes of the wheelchair

hold wheelchair steady if it's an unsteady surface (mud, hill, ramp, wet, etc)

offer an arm for them to hold onto to get up (them grabbing you, not you grabbing them) or move another solid item closer for them to use (i.e. a chair) [only do this if you physically have the ability to!]

If the terrain is rough (i.e. a parking lot), they *might* ask you to push their chair to a more stable area once they are back in their chair

nothing

Something else

Do what they ask, NOT what you think would be helpful. If for some reason you have to do something (i.e. you can't stop oncoming traffic and need to get them out) ASAP, tell them what you plan to do

Keep in mind they might also be D/deaf, have a communication disability, be stunned after the fall, have a head injury, not trust other people, etc. Be patient and treat them as a person with autonomy and agency! They might need to just sit on the ground for a few minutes to recover before trying to get back in their chair. They might want everyone to leave them alone. They might ask you to call someone specific. Their chair might have broken and that can be extremely distressing. All of this is like if your legs spontaneously stop working when you're out and about!

A lot of wheelchair users (NOT ALL) have ways to get into their chair on their own once the chair is close enough and brakes engaged (but it's hard from the ground!). Here's what brakes look like on a lot of manual wheelchairs, in case they ask you to lock the brakes. They're levers on each side and pushing the lever pushes a bar against the wheel to hold it still.

ID: A manual wheelchair with the brake levels circled in red and labeled "user brake levers"

*There is also the possibility of course that a person fell out of their chair due to a seizure or other medical event, so that is why it is important to ask if they are okay. If you saw them hit their head, tell them so. If they had a medical event, follow protocol for that, I'm not gonna get into it here (thought I could).

**sometimes a person will be clear after the first question i.e. "I'm all good thanks" clearly means they do not need you to ask another question, you can just leave them alone. Keep walking and don't stare. A lot of the time people will be a bit banged up but be totally fine and able to manage on their own.

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.