Crafty Deeds

“Vestibular sense provides information about where the body is in relation to its surroundings. This is the sense that helps you understand balance, and it connects with all the other senses.

When the vestibular system does not develop properly all other senses will struggle to function properly. Without a strong vestibular sense, kids will have no choice but to fidget, get frustrated, experience more falls and aggression, get too close to people when talking, and struggle with focusing and listening. Because they literally cannot help it.”

“Here are a few ways to support your child’s vestibular sense:

Spinning in circles.

Using a Merry-Go-Round.

Rolling down a hill.

Spinning on a swing.

Going upside down.

Climbing trees.

Rocking.

Jumping rope.

Summersaults or cartwheels.

Using monkey bars.

Skating.

Going backwards.

Swimming.

Dancing.

Wheel-barrel walks.”

Yeeting kids, spinning them, flipping them upside down, tossing them in the air, and otherwise disrupting their balance temporarily, is Important For Their Development, specifically for their vestibular sense.

hey

did one a yall say dandelions

This is so wholesome. 

With Wall Street titans, tech moguls, and other members of the global financial and political elite set to gather in Davos, Switzerland this week for the annual World Economic Forum, a report published late Sunday found that the planet’s richest people saw their fortunes soar by $2.5 billion per day last year as the world’s poorest lost wealth.

Authorities in Saskatchewan conducted a sting operation on an Indigenous man who sold a tiny amount of fish to an undercover officer because apparently they have nothing better to do.

The amount of fish their multi-year undercover operation caught being sold? Ninety-one bucks.

Think about that amount of money, it’s not very much in regards to “illegal operations”—that’s less than one good karaoke night, which is how we judge money at VICE Canada. It’s not like this was a small, short-lived project either by conservation officers, no, this went on for years and it seemed like it took up some serious resources. In all honesty, the whole thing feels like a Kids in the Hall sketch.

The target of the sting was an Indigenous man named Donald Iron who lived in Canoe Lake, Saskatchewan. According to the court documentsfirst reported on by the CBC, the conservation officers began investigating Iron after they received numerous complaints, dating back to 1997, that he was selling Canoe Lake fish illegally.

The sting began in 2016 with a conservation officer going undercover—which is something I didn’t know conservation officers did—and heading to Iron’s home. The undercover officer said that he was a scientist and that he needed to plant some “air-quality monitoring equipment” on Iron’s lawn. Seems a lot for one man selling small amounts of fish out of his home, right? Well, it gets wilder.

“The undercover officer visited Mr. Iron’s home once or twice almost every month between June 2016 and October 2017,” reads the court documents. “When he was there he would “check” the sham air-quality monitoring equipment and change its filters. He always made sure to pay Mr. Iron the agreed monthly fee of $20.”

If you do the math, you’ll notice that it’s 17 months from June 2016 and October 2017 and that if he paid him 20 bones a month, and the 25 up front, the province paid out $365 to Iron just through this little portion of the scheme. This—and remember it’s not counting what the officers were paid and the sham equipment cost—run over four times more than what they would eventually get Iron for.

 Sask. conservation officers to get AR-type carbine rifles

go bump in the night

scratches at your door

alarming noises

“where are you, kitty?” looks under bed to see a pair of luminous eyes staring out of the gloom, unblinking. “oh there you are!”

you spot movement out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look you see nothing 

The photo above is the closest humanity has ever come to creating Medusa. If you were to look at this, you would die instantly. 

The image is of a reactor core lava formation in the basement of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It’s called the Elephant’s Foot and weighs hundreds of tons, but is only a couple meters across.

Yeah, this is a selfie. The guy set the timer on the camera and went and stood by it, and it produced this horrifying image that now haunts my dreams. The reason all the photos from Chernobyl are grainy and poor-quality, by the way, is due to radiation. The cameras were fine; radiation just… does that.

Anyway, that guy’s name is Artur Korneyev- and I use ‘is’ because he’s still alive! He helped to build the original sarcophagus which encased reactor 4 after the meltdown, and kept going back inside with reporters to be like ‘look how fuckin weird this is’. He helped plan the New Safe Confinement which now surrounds the sarcophagus, and would probably have helped build it too if they didn’t full-on ban him.

A quote:

‘Korneyev’s sense of humor remained intact, though. He seemed to have no regrets about his life’s work. “Soviet radiation,” he joked, “is the best radiation in the world.”‘

Possibly the coolest guy alive? I’m tempted to think so.

Honestly, I feel like Chernobyl has been shunted into this category of like, ‘a lot of innocent and naive people died horribly’, when in reality a lot of tough as fuck people saved everybody else. The oft-told story of the ‘suicide mission’ to dive into the reactor and open the valves of the pool? Yeah, all three of the men who dove lived. One died in 2005 of heart failure; the other two are still alive.

A total of 31 direct and 15 indirect deaths are thought to have occurred from the Chernobyl disaster. Long-term deaths are… difficult to measure. Oh, and there’s a few hundred people still living in the exclusion zone.

If you’re at all interested, I really recommend reading up about Chernobyl- and, in particular, what was done to contain it and deal with the radiation. This is a beautiful write-up, and the wiki page is also worth checking out.  A lot of people did absolutely incredible work and it goes unrecognised most of the time.

Extremely agreed! As a wheelchair user myself, it always bewilders me that disability advocacy is so invisible in the modern civil rights discussions. There is a ton of work that needs to be done!

Castle In The Sky (1986) Grave of the Fireflies (1988) My Neighbor Totoro (1988) Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) Only Yesterday (1991) Porco Rosso (1992) Pom Poko (1994) Whisper of the Heart (1995) Princess Mononoke (1997) My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) Spirited Away (2001) The Cat Returns (2002) Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Tales from Earthsea (2006) Ponyo On A Cliff From The Sea (2008) The Secret World of Arrietty/The Borrower Arrietty (2010) From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

If any of the links stop working, please let me know so I can fix it.

So I just told them to add the $20 something onto my bill, and I thought she was going to break down crying right there.

Another time, my dad gave 50 bucks to a guy who said he needed to buy medicine for his kids. I told my dad he was probably going to spend the money on alcohol or something, but my dad said that “whether he was lying or not says something about HIS character, but hearing someone in need and choosing not to help when I have the means to says something about mine”.