Pine martens are an option!

I went pine marten, as I've been involved in helping their reintroduction to Wales, and then I wrestled with myself for an Age before finally going hedgehog.

Birds: puffins were the easiest choice. The UK - and Pembrokeshire Coast National Park in west Wales specifically - has a significant portion of the global breeding population of puffins, thanks to Skomer and Grassholm islands. In a country with the biodiversity depletion we have (bottom 10% of countries globally for biodiversity), the islands of Pembrokeshire are almost obscene in how high their biodiversity is, and it's for breeding specifically. We can be justly proud of those. Plus, puffins are fun clowns.

And then I agonised about the others until I finally went for the Great Spotted Woodpecker, a bird I do periodically see and get excited about every time

The Lumped-Together-Others: the bumblebee, you have to. I adore bumblebees.

And then I went for the marsh fritillary, because it's super endangered and I'm an environmentalist with a specialism in habitat management and ecology, and therefore spend a non-trivial amount of my time explaining how to manage for the little assholes.

"Now I've shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat." (From his Wikipedia article).

Neil Munro "Bunny" Roger

June 9, 1911-April 27, 1997.

Bunny Roger killed a bunch of Nazis and then invented Capri pants.

He was expelled from Oxford for his indiscrete gayness (discrete gayness being perfectly fine at Oxford and part of the curriculum until...today probably, at least like 1992?). Then, having been sent down to London, he started his own fashion business, and his first client was Vivien Leigh.

Bunny served in WWII, killing fascists in North Africa and Italy, and often wearing a mauve scarf in the field. Roger claimed that he had gone into a battle brandishing a rolled-up copy of VOGUE and commanding: "When in doubt, powder heavily!"

Roger was known in high society for his themed soirées; Diamond, Amethyst, and Flame Balls were held to celebrate his 60th, 70th, and 80th birthdays. He wore a curious plum colored catsuit with a feathered headdress at his 70th birthday ball in 1981. At his 80th, he made his entrance in a catsuit of scarlet sequins with a cape of orange organza, greeting his guests from behind a wall of fire. His parties were covered by the newspapers, including a New Year's Eve Fetish Ball where the proper upper class mixed with young guests in rubber S/M gear.

From an obituary: "Beneath his mauve mannerisms, Bunny was stalwart, frank, dependable and undeceived; to onlookers a passing peacock, to intimates, a life enhancer and exemplary friend."

From another obituary:

And this in-memoriam piece.

It's... pretty much what it says on the tin. Some car manufacturers are phasing out AM Radio from their cars so they can replace them with their own streaming services - this bill seeks to make them a mandatory feature.

As somebody whose day job is in radio, I totally agree that the amount of ads and the quality of the ads is ridiculous. Personally, I don't find radio to be an amazing source of political news broadcasting.

But do you know what it is really good at? Providing emergency broadcasts during extreme weather events.

When power and internet is down, radio can be one of the only sources of information, and it's helped provide lifesaving information during these times.

(Plus, at least in my area of the country, emergency weather alerts override and interrupt programming when broadcast - even during pesky ads!)

So if you want to toss your signature in support, you can head on over here.

The hoodie as a veil. 

Weisman cigarettes

Each of them is haloed by an advertisement sticker. 

No Vacancy sign on the motel. 

Dove sticker over Maria’s head. 

Neon sign with a star symbol also over Maria’s head. 

The crown over the ‘Dave’s City Motel’ sign. “New Manger.”

The sign behind Jose’s elbow likely says ‘Herod.’

The wee little plant growing through the cracks at their feet. 

It’s like a New Testament ‘I Spy.’ I love it!

Ugh.

Maria sitting on a donkey

Shepherd Watches advertisement in the newspaper

An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1. The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.

“The widely circulated timeline created by @Zerflin does a great job in showing how recently slavery & segregation occurred & that they lasted longer than the modern era. 

“I'd like to offer this timeline as another way of viewing the same period of history to show the constancy of both Black resistance in US & efforts of the white power structure to maintain racial caste since 1619.”

The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."

The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.

In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.

I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!

ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.

I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output

For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".

I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.

To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.

What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-

He’s her best friend, and she doesn’t even know it. They’re so close, that in the book, people think they’re sleeping together, and poor Grace is so confused because he thought that was his platonic work wife, wdym people think we’re sleeping together, that’s my person that I crack jokes with and then she glares at me because they’re not funny.

She’s softer with him than anybody else and is only ever vulnerable around him. We see in the movie, he’s the only one who ever gets her to smile, and sometimes even laugh, and then she serenades all of them, but mainly him, and he stares at her with those big, shiny eyes so lovingly, and she points at him when she sings, “everything’s gonna be alright”, and then she gives him those eyes, so loving.

And then she’s trying to stop herself from crying when she’s sending him away because, against her will, he’s become her person, and somewhere along the way, she’s become his, and they will have forever ended this relationship on bad terms, and nothing can fix that.

It’s a platonic tragedy. It’s a platonic love story. This is something we don’t get often, or, like, ever, and it’s deep and it’s tragic and it’s sad.

But even after, Eva’s still taking care of him. Packing clothes she knew would bring him comfort. Programming the ship to know how he likes his coffee. And Grace is still watching out for her, speaking to her directly in his video logs, with that same lopsided smile he used to throw her way.

He uses Rocky’s sign for goodbye, and she uses it back, and how did this book and movie give us such a deep platonic friendship because, guys, this NEVER HAPPENS.