Marginal Hybrid

elephant trunk snakes are completely aquatic and covered with tiny, velvety scales and baggy skin that make it almost impossible for adults to move around on land!

that's okay though, because wild elephant trunk snakes tend to pick up a thick covering of algae on those weird scales that gives them extra camouflage in the water and makes them all look like they're sporting punk-rock hairdos.

Interviewer: What do you think about starting an initiative on campus here at UK, to be more inclusive to women who have penises? So we can put urinals in the womens restroom for them.

Student: Sounds fantastic.

Interviewer: Oh, does it?

Student: Yeah.

Interviewer: What about- Let’s take it one step closer, y'know more- for inclusivity here on campus, but free tampons and pads in the mens restroom for men who have periods?

Student: Sounds great.

Interviewer: Ok- You dont see anything wrong with those statements?

Student: No.

Interviewer: What men do you know with periods?

Student: I generally use- ones like in Willy T* have pads, I use them pretty often.

bennett: so do you think we should put tampons and pads in the men’s restroom? dude: sure, I mean, I don’t really care. if a dude needs a tampon, he can have one. bennett: but would he need one? like, what would he use it for? dude, thoroughly unimpressed: I don’t know, that’s his problem.

“STEM majors are only paid/valued more because their knowledge is more useful to the military industrial complex and other capitalist and/or imperial enterprises. Ceramics majors would earn 6 figures straight out of college too if you could make a drone out of clay– but you can’t.”

At the nursery I volunteer at, any person can participate. We have people who do not know the alphabet of their native language well who are still nonetheless able to perform work that is valuable to society.

Writer: Air shot between the toes, it’ll look like a heart attack.

Serial killer: anywhere from 2 to 30 minutes

Now fast forward a bit and the author has managed to get their first book published, with loving support from the serial killer who helped them fine tune all the murder scenes, and it’s a big hit. Enough so that a detective with the local police department has noticed some disturbing similarities to several active cases, including details that were never released to the press. Obviously he brings this up to his superior and convinces him that there’s something to the theory, but it’s all circumstantial right now. He stakes out the author’s home and is super convinced that the author is the murderer, but they don’t seem to do anything??? Like they literally are at the house all day, that’s it. Most they do is leave for groceries.

“You need to stop seeing them. I think they are a serial killer.”

If you keep a book, it auto renews two times. Then it comes up as overdue. If your overdue items exceed a certain amount, your account freezes. You can’t use any of the local libraries anymore until you return the items or claim them lost and pay for them. If someone else is waiting for the book, you can’t renew. Its that simple.

And guess what. Not only did we save money, but we /got more materials back/. More materials were turned in than declared lost as compared to before. There was no stigma to it. If you had already paid for the item, the money was credited back to you.

Because the people late fees actually affected were children and elderly adults - people unable to regularly get to the library. And the stigma of late items was dropped. Attitude and mindset are important.

we still have no late fees. And we are considered to be one of the top public systems in our state. People from out of state PAY to get library cards for a year because our online Overdrive system is amazing, and we have a ton of partnerships and interlibrary loan systems in place. AND we suffer less losses of both materials and patrons due to our “no late fee” policy.

Her: I want a dog

Her mom and dad: Yeah sweetie, do well at the Olympics and we'll see

Alina Zagitova: Ok

Mount Everest is about as physically high as a mountain is capable of getting on our planet!

this damn thing sticks a little more than 29,000 feet up into the air, and is getting a couple of inches taller every year thanks to the two tectonic plates violently smushing their faces together right beneath it, but it won't ever get significantly higher up than it is now.

(which is still Too Damn High in my opinion)

"but buuuuuunjy," you wail dolefully, "mountains get higher than that on other planets! why can't WE have a 16-mile high volcano. buuuunjy. answer me." which is technically true! but it can't happen here, for one reason:

it's because of gravity.

see, it's kind of weird to think about because it's literally your house, but Earth is actually the largest rocky planet in the solar system by a WIDE margin!

sure, Mars can have a 16-mile-tall volcano, but Mars is about HALF the size of our dear old mama Gaia and its gravity is scaled to match. less gravity means that mountains have less downward pressure on them and so they can grow to much greater heights!

Olympus Mons is only as big as it is, because of WHERE it is.

which brings us back to our earthly neighbor, Everest!

unlike Mons up there, Mount Everest is fighting a brutal and ongoing war against the oppressive forces of Earth's gravitational pull, made even more complicated by those tectonic plates I mentioned way back at the beginning of this whole mess.

basically the breakdown of this three-way offensive is that the Indian-Australian tectonic plate is having a very slow head-on collision with the Eurasian tectonic place, shoving the Himalaya mountains (and our good ol' pal Everest) UP! but gravity is also shoving DOWN on the whole range, and past a certain point the mountains get too tall and the entire affair is just too big and heavy for the tectonic plate underneath it to hold it upright, and then the bottom of the plate starts to sink downward into the molten rock of Earth's Mantle!

think of it like stacking dogs on one of those floating pool lounge thingies- you can stack as many dogs on there as you like, but the float will just sink deeper and deeper in the water and your dog stack won't really get any higher.

though obviously, they are still all good boys.

it's like that!

so basically, Everest is about at the point where the tectonic plate beneath it is sinking at roughly the same rate the mountain is growing, so the whole thing is locked into equilibrium and will never get too much higher than it is now.

anticipation

pure joy

theres 3 of us and 1 of england