not a religion-only blog

I don’t think enough people really understand yet exactly how horrific this fire was. This was a loss to our world and species.

This is the kind of fire we think of thousands of years later as the deepest of tragedy. On the scale of the Library of Alexandria. It’s worse than that really. The Library of Alexandria kept copies of books in other locations so historically very little was lost in individual fires over the centuries.

This? We lost so goddamn much in one night.

If you want to help… if you have ANY vacation photos, videos, anything documenting the contents of the museum: You may in fact be the sole owner of a slice of humanity’s soul. Please send a copy to: https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/1037066123869483008 Or:

fucking look at this shit though

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass.  They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that.  And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that.  One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking.  Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”

Pashtun/Afghan family treasures

Left: Handmade dress and a “lawang”-accessory (made of cloves). They were both made by my paternal grandmother 25+ years ago.