Who Knows

bardown Noa Ta'Amu has become the first player of Samoan descent to be drafted to the NHL! // He's also the son of former NFL player Ed Ta'amu!

Metal Detectorist Discovers Medieval Wedding Ring  

Every metal detectorist dreams of unearthing something valuable. For one man the English countryside yielded an incredible find when he stumbled upon a medieval diamond wedding ring in “almost perfect condition” near Thorncombe, in the South West of the country.

Now the item is expected to fetch between £30,000 and £40,000 (Sold For: £38,000) when it goes on auction later this month.

David Board, 69, found the “stunning” ring on his second attempt at becoming a metal detectorist after a stint in the 1970s in which he scoured local beaches but found nothing of much consequence, a press release from auction house Noonans said earlier this week.

Board called the ring “a once-in-a-lifetime” find.

During a recent interview, he said: “There will probably never be another one like it. Back then, each ring was individual and unique, not mass produced like today. It’s stunning.”

Board took up metal detecting again in 2019. During the second day of a field search, he had almost given up when he got a signal on his metal detector by a footpath.

Initially, the culprit looked like a sweet wrapper but Board soon realized that it was a gold ring.

When he dug it up all covered in mud, Board said he thought it was just “scrap metal” and popped it into his pocket.

“It was once I got home and washed it off that we realized it was a lot better than we thought,” he explained.

The ring is in “almost perfect condition,” Nigel Mills, a consultant in coins and antiquities at Noonans, said in the release. The jewelery has a golden hoop of two entwined bands to symbolize marital union and an inverted diamond set into it.

Inside the band is a medieval French inscription that reads, “Ieo vos tien foi tenes le moy,” translating as, “I hold your faith, hold mine,” according to the auction house.

Due to the location of the find and the quality of the ring, Noonans’ experts surmised that it’s the wedding ring of Joan Brook, given to her by her husband, Thomas Brook.

Their marriage in 1388 brought great wealth to the Brook family, the release said, as Joan was the widow of Robert Cheddar, a wealthy cloth merchant and twice mayor of Bristol – a city in western England.

It was at a time when medieval notions of chivalry and courtly love were at their zenith, concepts which the ring reflects, Noonans said.

Now known as The Lady Brook Medieval diamond ring, the item will be auctioned on November 29.

Board goes out three times a week, weather permitting, in hope of uncovering another great relic among the musket balls and King George I coins. “It will be amazing if I did,” he responded, adding “you never know what the next signal is going to bring.”

The discovery adds to a list of incredible finds by detectorists in the UK.

One amateur uncovered a haul of Bronze Age objects in a Scottish field in 2020, in what experts at the time called a “nationally significant” discovery.

And last year it was reported that a huge hoard of Iron Age gold artifacts had been found by a rookie detectorist in Denmark.

This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:

ActionAid India

SEEDS India

GlobalGiving

that water is not doing jack shit to your stomach lining, your body is simply too much of a thermal reservoir. the water is already increased significantly in temperature by the time it reaches your stomach.

in order to actually freeze anything inside your body you have to be drinking liquid nitrogen. ice water is fine!

Yes it's only the richest people with money to burn having a great time, yes our administration is still doing awful police state immigration shit to the visiting teams let alone the fans, yes this place is still a nightmare for everyone else

but there is still joy to be had and while that doesn't erase the bad, the bad does not erase the joy

everything you do matters! what you do counts! you won't be the only person doing it and you won't be the only person who cares!

there are things you can do big and small but also advocacy and having the conversation is necessary too. something like 89% of people are at least somewhat worried about climate change and want more to be done about it but since people aren't talking about it regularly, they think they are the only ones who care.

and the world is actually doing a lot. so far, we've avoided the worst projections (although current projections are still pretty catastrophic) due to changes that have been taking place.

the united states is the biggest holdout right now but most of the rest of the world is—to varying degrees—trying to transition away from fossil fuels, which is like the main thing we have to do. and actually, even the u.s. is moving towards renewable energy despite the current administration's backwards bloviating idiocy (for example, texas generated more power last year through solar energy than coal for the first time ever. turns out renewable energy is just economically more stable and worth investing in and these constant energy shocks from pointless wars aren't helping the case to continue burning fossil fuels for energy.)

i just really want to hammer home to everybody that the doomerist message that there is nothing we can do is literally how oil and gas companies want everyone to feel. they want you to feel there is no solution, that you are powerless, that the changes are too hard or will interrupt your comfort and convenience, that the changes are too expensive, that your choices don't matter at all, so that the changes that need to happen don't happen. but they are happening! right now.

(btw, this is an area where it really does matter who you vote for, locally and nationally.)

over the next little while, i'm going to try and post more content about what the world is doing and where we are succeeding in this.

because this content is not reaching the people who need it. the mainstream news sucks. social media algorithms suck. nothing viral or popular on any algorithm-driven social media platforms is reaching your eyes organically—and its been that way for close to a decade. the entertainment outlets are filling our brains with disaster movies and stories where things go wrong and too much of the time the only solution is some hero or return to the status quo or whatever. we've destroyed the sense of community that helps people feel like what they do matters and realize that other people care about the same things they do and are willing to work towards similar goals. our myths and media are fucked and they've seriously fucked up our brains.

where we are at now: the climate is already changing. we're too late to stop that from happening at all. it's been happening for some time and we knew about it and we had solutions but the world has been stupid drunk on oil and gas and capitalism incentivizes the worst anti-social behaviour and organizing society around private profit turns out to produce terrible and stupid results.

now we have really good efficient solutions and they are (in many cases, still too slowly) being implemented. it is not too late to stop making the climate worse, to move the direction to a habitable future, and to adapt society to the new world we are coming into.

—

Trump’s New Leak in the Back Reflecting Pool Legend 

This is one of the truly insidious, deadly, and dangerous aspects of AI use in search results, and it’s entirely by design.

The oligarchs and tech fascists want to manipulate reality (or at least the public perception of reality) by substituting their ideological lies and false bullshit for actual facts. They tell the AI to ignore sources they don’t like, and to privilege those that they do, and this is what we get.

It’s *vital* that we teach kids (and reeducate adults, if necessary) to never use AI for this sort of information gathering. It’s so dangerous to let this happen without any pushback.