LEDbiantastic

They got tired of it, sued, won, and the nps had to pay back YEARS of back wages for stand by time. Now they are all scheduled and if* you get called out its time and a half.

They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.

Good News: Devils Hole Pupfish are Rebounding After a Dramatic Decline.

In response to earthquakes which caused limited food and a sharp population decline in 2025, the multiagency team, made up of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and Nevada Department of Wildlife biologists, acted quickly and released a number of captive reared Devils Hole pupfish back to the wild. This action was instrumental in ensuring the wild population’s survival and was the first time that captive Devils Hole pupfish have been returned to the wild. Currently, the wild population is around 70, nearly double the numbers seen in 2025. Did you know: The Devils Hole pupfish is believed to have the smallest geographic distribution of any known vertebrate species? It exists in a single submerged cave system, Devils Hole, within Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada. The depth of Devils Hole is unknown. Professional scuba divers from the National Park Service have mapped Devils Hole’s depth to nearly 500 feet, but the bottom has never been found.

Only to have it cross your dash a week later and find out that like 12,000 people think you're lying.

Some of the greatest hits include:

-Was taken to the military funeral of a total stranger in the swamp lands of Louisiana by another total stranger when I thought I was going to a work meeting. (A funeral that ended with the words 'Sombitch y'all done shot MeeMaw!')

-Asked Zac Efron to take a photo with me in 2008 and then getting so flustered that I asked 'Do you want to use my camera or yours?' (he was very nice and said 'Why don't we use yours.')

-Was dressed exactly the same as every single person in my company (not in a company uniform, we were all dressed like our IT guy) when we were raided by the FBI.

-Got asked out at my mother's funeral.

-Signed an autograph as Kat Dennings to a VERY drunk man at the Nashville Airport just to get him to leave me alone.

-Attended my husband's 15th high school reunion alone and entirely by accident.

-Had a man come into my cafe and harass my employees and when I told him to leave he got up in my face and said 'I can gut you like a fucking fish.' And with my utter lack of will to live, I said, without blinking or moving, 'You can try.'

-Acted as maid of honor and gave a wedding toast for a couple I did not know because the bride was desperate to not have her awful sister have the microphone and ruin everything.

...

Back in 2018, I started working for a whole body donation center. If you don't know what that is, it's when someone decides to donate their bodies to science, we're like 'Yeah, hi, we'll take it.'

This company was very much on the up-and-up. We had pristine medical facilities, quarterly state inspections, all the right certifications, the whole nine. HOWEVER that's not the case for every whole body donation center in the country.

(If you're considering donation, it's a wonderful gift, but PLEASE research the company you're planning to use.)

And then you walk into the facility and it's perfectly clean. Everything in order, paperwork filed, nothing amiss.

Except every single fucking person in the entire building is wearing the exact same outfit, from their beanies down to their shoes. Like you walked into a movie theater which you knew was either going to be playing The Human Centipede or Gray's Anatomy, and it's playing Gray's Anatomy but also every single seat is occupied by a mannequin with its head turned towards the entrance.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.