Encanto et al.

✨Encantober #1 ✨Caterpillar

An imitation of the childrens book “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!” by Mo Willems, with Osvaldo as the Driver, Bruno as the Pigeon and a Caterpillar bulldozer as the Bus. 🙃

(Listen, when I google-image-search 'caterpillar', I don't get 🐛, I get bulldozers!)

Mirabel is sometimes called “Mira,” which is Spanish for “look.” She’s also the only character with glasses, which usually in literature symbolizes special knowledge, insight, or the ability to see what others can’t.

Incidentally, Mirabel and Bruno both face difficulties in their family for seeing and exposing the uncomfortable truths and secrets everyone would rather bury or ignore.

Mirabel’s scene with Antonio at the start shows what makes her important; while others in the family are concerned about making Antonio’s night perfect, Mirabel makes him feel loved no matter if his night (or he) is perfect or not.

Mirabel uncovers her family members’ insecurities but accepts them at their worst and most vulnerable. They all need this, but it’s also uncomfortable after a lifetime of repression, and it’s what makes her the family villain through the middle of the movie—it’s easier to blame her for being at the center of it all than face the real problems in themselves and the family.

It’s probably no coincidence that the cracks in Casita grow right when Isabela is about to accept a proposal to a man she doesn’t want to marry, whom Dolores loves, which would have been a painful if not unbearable situation for both of them. Luisa is at the end of her rope as well. Mirabel sees the cracks and acts on them, but she’s clearly not the only factor in their existence.

Mirabel is a helper. She loves her family unconditionally and accepts their flaws. And so do the townpeople, who are such a good addition to the story. These are traits that don’t need a magical gift to exist.

The only person whom Mirabel doesn’t “see” in an uncritical light is Isabel, so obviously that’s the big hurdle for her to realize her full potential—she has to see Isabel as more than just “Miss Perfect,” as a person with her own struggles. Their hug is really meaningful as a turning point for Mirabel.

I really think Antonio is a secret agent in all of this—the bird follows Mirabel into Bruno’s cave and the rats are all there too, the animals put together the vision during the dinner scene, he shows up just when they need a room, and he’s always so chill…like that kid knows.

Bruno is in the background vibing during Dolores’s part of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” She’s the only one who knows he’s still around.

Everyone blames Mirabel for the botched proposal dinner, but Dolores totally didn’t need to do all that right then. Like, girl, shut up. You can clearly keep secrets. What the hell.

Camilo could 100% be removed from the movie without causing any meaningful differences, but also it’s fun to imagine what sort of pain he’s hiding—like he’s most “useful” when he’s somebody else. Yikes. Good thing he has a good sense of humor.

A spin-off series explore the characters of Encanto has the potential to be quite good if done sincerely and with love. But that’s a big ask for Disney if the quality of Moana 2 vs. Moana is anything to judge by.

All of the songs play such nice roles as exposition, characterization, foreshadowing, etc. Plus the repeated use of motifs like the doors and butterflies is great. It’s like an I Spy, noticing all the places the images repeat.

The flashback at the beginning when Abuela tells Mirabel about the encanto vs. the flashback at the end when the focus is more on her grief and loss…so good. In the first one, her sadness is overshadowed by the blessings of the miracle, and her expression is mild and palatable, but in the second, her expression is so much more real and raw. Good use of flashbacks not just as a means of providing exposition but as an exploration of memory, story, identity, character, etc.

Stay with me.

We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.

I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.

It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.

(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)

Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.

My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.

When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.

We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.

Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.

The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.

I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.

Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”

Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.

The plate must be clearly and openly displayed in a place of great prominence whenever it is in your possession. When it is not in your possession, the display piece must remain in place. This is where you would put your gay pirate plate, IF YOU HAD ONE.

No active steps may be taken to prevent the theft of the Gay Pirate Plate. That goes against the spirit of the game, as does attempting to hide it.

The plate MUST be stolen and cannot be gifted or removed with permission. Should you witness attempted theft of the Gay Pirate Plate you are required to intervene and return it to its place.

It talks some about various kinds of conjunctivitis. The descriptions are largely the same as what would be seen today, and the treatment only has a few differences. They recommend both steroid and antibiotic ointments for bacterial conjunctivitis. Antibiotic eye ointments are recommended today, even some of the older ones that would have been available in 1956. Steroids are more controversial today because they may slow healing and may not, as previously thought, decrease corneal scarring.

This is really cool, since the book is from 1956 and the first measles vaccine became widely available in 1963. They discuss the standard course of the illness and its complications (including the fact that measles puts people at risk of a lot of other infections, which was recognized at the time), which are largely the same as they are today. They also discuss how it spreads through populations (an epidemic every 3rd or 4th spring, with smaller outbreaks in intervening years) which isn't seen today due to vaccination.

The big difference is the prevention section. This section focuses heavily on gamma globulin and passive immunity. Unlike active immunity where the body is induced (by natural infection or a vaccine) to produce its own antibodies, passive immunity is where a person is given someone else's antibodies to prevent an infection. This can happen naturally (breast milk contains a lot of antibodies that protect an infant in the first months of life) or antibodies can be collected from donated blood and injected into someone to confer a temporary immunity. These collected antibodies are called gamma globulin.

In the case of measles, the book recommends that anyone who has not had measles but is exposed to it get a dose of gamma globulin. It can be a very small dose, which would not prevent infection but would make it milder (so the person, usually a child, could get immunity to measles). Or, if the person is at risk for complications or is immunocompromised it can be a bigger dose, which would prevent infection altogether.

There are lots of different kinds of pneumonia and it would be a very long post if I were to talk about all of them. So I'm going to primarily talk about pneumococcal pneumonia, which is the most common community acquired pneumonia.

The description of pneumococcal pneumonia in 1956 is pretty much the same as it is today (by the 1950s we had good descriptions and usually pretty good explanations for diseases). Signs and symptoms include high fever, rigors (strong shivering), chest pain, productive cough, high heart and respiratory rates, malaise and fatigue, and GI symptoms.

Where things get interesting is treatment. The first thing is fluids. The book recommends 6-10 liters of fluid per day. Which is, like, a lot of fluid. Today studies suggest that while dehydration in pneumonia does lead to worse outcomes, 1.5 liters per day is generally sufficient to improve those outcomes. Not that 6-10 liters would have hurt the person (theres no evidence suggesting that more fluid worsens outcomes). It's just a lot, considering most of this probably would have been taken orally.

Oxygen is also recommended for patients with cyanosis. Cyanosis is a bluish coloration to the skin that occurs when blood oxygen concentration gets too low. Cyanosis usually occurs when SpO2 gets into the 80% range, but we had no way of accurately measuring this in the 1950s. Today we would start oxygen therapy when SpO2 reached the low 90's.

It's important to understand that at the time we'd had modern antibiotics for just over a decade, and there wasn't much in the way of antibiotic resistance yet (antibiotic resistance existed, but penicillin was still useful for most things). IM Penicillin G was the first line drug treatment for pneumococcal pneumonia, followed by tetracyclines.

Depending on where you are in the world today, resistance of pneumoccocal to penicillin is between 4% and 40%. In places where resistance is low, amoxicillin is usually first line today, but penicillin G is still a possible treatment. In places where resistance is high, or the infection is severe enough that any delay in treatment would be very detrimental, vancomycin is used.

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Through choices, friendship, and salad, he found his way to the path of the warrior. But he won't walk it alone.

Their path is just beginning, but this story is over.

Like sometimes they want to experiment with a bit of anal and instead of just buying a sex toy and some lube like a normal person, they instead shove random objects up their ass that inevitably get stuck and then they try to get them out by themselves which makes things worse and then they lie to doctors about it and like this all leads to all kinds of extra complications like internal damage, risk of infections, bleeding, the fall of Yugoslavia, etc.

The production value here is off the charts but this is also literally just what it feels like to play Uno.

Buuuut since we’re past that already, here are a couple of additional thoughts:

1 this IS the more humane alternative, which was invented to lower injury and death rates associated with previous techniques. When a better alternative is revealed it will probably replace this one. But this one is a pretty huge improvement over the other methods, one of which killed off something like 80% of the fish involved. A study of the above fish tube was conducted by Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in 2017 on the Columbia River and showed a much higher success rate. In that study, only one fish died (“due to a human error during the system setup”) and only 3 percent had signs of injury. So. The next best improvement might have to be “remove dam”

2 they are on their way to die. That is where we are helping them get to. That’s the end goal of the salmon’s migration. They on their way to mutate, start rotting alive, have an orgy, and die. That’s where the tube is taking them.