Further Awesomeness

One of my favorite things ever is reading up on a subject that isn't my area of expertise and rooting around in the bibliographies of a stack of papers to reverse engineer the contemporary consensus.

In literally the second line of the book, Tolkien implies that Bilbo Baggins wrote a story which was preserved alongside the in-universe version of the Mabinogion (aka the best-known collection of Welsh myths; I promise this is batshit). This is because The Hobbit has been preserved, in Tolkien's AU version of our world, in a "selection of the Red Book of Westmarch" (Prologue, Concerning Hobbits). If you're a medievalist and you see something called "The Red Book of" or "The Black Book of" etc it's a Thing. In this case, a cheeky reference to the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest). There are a few Red Books, but only Hergest has stories).

not a medieval thing but i did not expect one common theory among hobbits for the death of Frodo's parents to be A RUMORED MURDER-SUICIDE.

At the beginning of the book a few hobbits report seeing a moving elm tree up on the moors, heading west (thru or past the Shire). I mentioned this in another post, but another rule: if you see an elm tree, that's a Girl Tree. In Norse creation myth, the first people were carved from driftwood by the gods. Their names were Askr (Ash, as in the tree), the first man, and Embla (debated, but likely elm tree), the first woman. A lot of ppl have I think guessed that that was an ent-wife, but like. Literally that was a GIRL. TREE.

Medieval thing: I used to read the runes on the covers of The Hobbit and LOTR for fun when I worked in a bookshop. There's a mix of Old Norse (viking) and Old English runes in use, but all the ones I've noticed so far are real and readable if you know runes.

Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you once spent months of your life researching the early medieval art of galdor, which was the use of poems or songs to do a form of word-magic, often incorporating gibberish. If you think maybe Tolkien did not base the entirety of Fellowship so far around learning and using galdor and thus the power of words and stories, that is fine I cannot force you. He did personally translate "galdor" in Beowulf as "spell" (spell, amusingly, used to mean "story"). And also he named an elf Galdor. Like he very much did name an elf Galdor.

Tom Bombadil in fact does galdor from the moment we meet him. He arrives and fights the evil galdor (song) of the willow tree ("old gray willow-man, he's a mighty singer"), which is singing the hobbits to sleep and possibly eating them, with a galdor (song) of his own. Then he wanders off still singing, incorporating gibberish. I think it was at this point that I started clawing my face.

THEN Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you've read the description of the scop's songs in Beowulf (Beowulf again, but hey, Tolkien did famously a. translate it b. write a fanfiction about it called Sellic Spell where he gave Beowulf an arguably homoerotic Best Friend). The scop (pronounched shop) is a poet who sings about deeds on earth, but also by profession must know how to sing the song or tell the story of how the cosmos itself came to be. The wise-singer who knows the deep lore of the early universe is a standard trope in Old English literature, not just Beowulf! Anyway Tom Bombadil takes everyone home and tells them THE ENTIRE STORY OF ALL THE AGES OF THE EARTH BACKWARDS UNTIL JUST BEFORE THE MOMENT OF CREATION, THE BIG BANG ITSELF and then Frodo Baggins falls asleep.

Tom Bombadil knows about plate tectonics

This is sort of a lie, Tom Bombadil describes the oceans of old being in a different place, which works as a standard visual of Old English creation, which being Christian followed vaguely Genesis lines, and vaguely Christian Genesis involves a lot of water. TOLKIEN knew about plate tectonics though.

Actually I just checked whether Tolkien knew about plate tectonics because I know the advent of plate tectonics theory took forever bc people HATED it and Alfred Wegener suffered for like 50 years. So! actually while Tolkien was writing LOTR, the scientific community was literally still not sure plate tectonics existed. Tom Bombadil knew tho.

Remember that next time you (a geologist) are forced to look at the Middle Earth map.

I'm not even done with Tom Bombadil but I'm stopping here tonight. Plate tectonics got me. There's a great early (but almost high!) medieval treatise on cosmology and also volcanoes and i wonder if tolkien read it. oh my god. i'm going to bed.

The main thing I observe is that a lot of employees recommend makeup that is chemically incompatible. For example, if you ask them to recommend you a foundation and concealer, a lot of times they’ll pick two products that are chemically immiscible, so they’ll NEVER blend together successfully.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Operation Solomon • Jewish Museum London

Ethiopian Jews being airlifted from Addis Ababa to Israel on May 24, 1991, as part of Operation Solomon. This covert operation involved 34 jumbo jets of the Israeli air force, hundreds of soldiers and the evacuation of 14,200 Jews. It was prompted by the worsening political situation in Ethiopia under the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

A Jewish community was first established in Ethiopia sometime after the destruction of the First Temple in around 587 BCE. The origin of the Ethiopian Jews is unclear though most believe that they are the descendants of King Solomon and Queen Sheba. Throughout its history, the community has been referred to by numerous names like ‘’Falasha’’ which means ‘’stranger’’ which shows how their Christian neighbours viewed them as strangers in their land and ‘’Beta Israel’’ which literally means ‘’house of Israel’’. This name shows the community’s own deep connection to the Torah and their faith.

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It was a hillside, viewed across a gully. The recorder was on one ridge, looking out over the hills. It was late at night, and that mattered not at all, because the picture was ablaze with light. There was so much fire.

Fire's noisy, you know, if you haven't seen the recordings coming out in their hundreds from that nightmare. Fire roars, it screams as it devours all the oxygen it can get to and makes it into more of itself, so at first I couldn't hear the airplane. When it appeared, engine roaring, very low over the ridge, there was only a moment to understand what it even was before it dropped its payload of water on the burning hillside, and all at once the picture went out. The fire went out. The screaming brightness was replaced with gentler dark. In an instant.

The airplane was one of the Canadian Super Scoopers, piloted by a Canadian fire pilot of incredible skill--you know what kind of mastery it takes, to fly a plane that size, that low to the ground, at night, in a place where it's being buffeted by horrific and uneven fire-spawned updrafts and turbulence, carrying a payload of over fourteen thousand pounds of water, and then to dump that weight and still be able to fly straight instead of being suddenly slammed around by the weight change? And this was a person who with others like him had come to California to fight a fire that had nothing to do with them, for no reason other than human fucking decency.

When I saw the video the first time I burst into sobs. I have cried more than once thinking of it since, feeling again that incredible relief as the light went out. My home was on fire. I couldn't be there to do anything about it; it doesn't belong to me anymore. And here came brave strangers to save it.

Which leaves everyone else trying to explain that a) he could also be a chimera and therefore fertile, and b) Sterile does not mean not horny.

Humans did not get very involved with cat breeding for milennia in large part because being around a fully hormonal adult cat when the mood strikes them can just be miserable. That is an artist who must make art and their favourite medium is piss.

Our scout troopers and Jedi and Sith posed against the rock crags and forests and in dappled sunlight. We got great pictures.

And every once in a while someone would come around the bend and find something TRULY unexpected.

Most people scrambled backwards or ducked behind the nearest tree, apparently thinking they'd stumbled into a film shoot of some kind. A few took pictures from a distance.

Once we explained, all of them were delighted. How strange. How wonderous. Two little boys took pictures with every single costumer, a woman sat on a rock and just watched, one guy called home to FaceTime his brother.

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.