that's showbiz, baby!

The kid has grown up in this "church" her whole life and she feels the full weight of betrayal and confusion come her 10th birthday when her parents reveal their firstborn's "ultimate destiny." She has to be held down kicking and screaming to be fed the substance only known as "the miracle".

Over time the kid starts showing symptoms of "the miracle" and is lying on the floor in a fetal position and begging her parents to help her while they all gather around and pray that their god kills him. Her younger siblings clap and chant and bounce around with glee, not understanding what's happening because they're young. Nobody will help her. Her death is a miracle to them but she is terrified and wants to live.

When she finally escapes the house and goes to the doctors the doctors almost immediately call the kid's parents and then gaslights her that her symptoms are "just a tummy ache" when previously the doctors and nurses showed intense concern that she's vomiting blood and black goo. They know it's bad but they don't want to deal with the lawsuit.

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

apropos of nothing please check out this boar cutting board (cutting boar) that my grandfather made for his mom back in the 1920s (he would have been around 8 years old). it's one of my favorite things in the world and i thought you might get a kick out of it!

Highlights include:

For your first two years (when you were small) you lived in a foster home with people who raised you into a very polite young man. Two is like you plus me, that's what two is.

Some people adopted you before me and they called you Timmy (which is a stupid name) and they returned your ass almost immediately because you were so annoying at that age.

Like think about how annoying you are right now at seven years old, but way worse.

I'm better than them though, I don't call you Timmy and I wore earplugs to bed for three years because you love to scream at bedtime. Earplugs are like when I roll over and go back to sleep even when you are yelling so so so loud.

I got you at a time in my life when I was really sick (being sick is like when I'm up late because I'm throwing up and you are a very handsome good boy who sits with me) and they had to put me asleep for a procedure. A procedure is like what happened to you when they put you asleep and took your balls away.

The founders of Jane, an underground network in Chicago, US that assisted people in getting abortions. From the left moving right: Martha Scott, Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, Abby Parisers, Sheila Smith and Madeline Schwenk.

Martha Scott was 19 in 1965, when her friend's sister became pregnant and Scott helped her find a doctor to perform an abortion. The group connected individuals seeking abortions with doctors, and later, performed abortions themselves. Their clients were informed they were not doctors, but doing abortions themselves allowed them to keep costs low. They made people aware of the services through signs with slogans like "'Pregnant? Don't Want to Be? Call Jane." The group operated for seven years and performed an estimated 11,000 abortions; no deaths were ever reported.

Quote from Scott: "You're messing around inside somebody else's body. It's not necessarily given that you won't do harm. It wasn't perfect, by any means. But we were dealing with women who really didn't have other options."

Quote from Galatzer-Levy: "I hadn't had so much as a speeding ticket [when I joined]. But abortion really was the front line, it was where women were dying."

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

So, did they save lives? No. Did they make the world a safer place? Not so much. Did they grow the economy? Not at all. Did they modernize the Federal government? Nope. But did they at least save money? Nah.

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

obviously, OBVIOUSLY, the Dropout comedian who would be most compelling on Taskmaster is Grant Anthony O’Brien

do I think he would be best at or even particularly unusual in how he completed the tasks? I do not

do I want to see what happens to Greg Davies when he has to spend 5 days with a horny bisexual libertine who is—and this is important—two inches taller than him?

good god, yes