Multihistor

This s the obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who may have been over 100 years old when she died and protected hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide. 

She did it by pretending to have magic powers. 

Picture with me for a moment the sheer gall necessary to do this. An old woman, living alone, stuffs her tiny house with people running from militias. And when the militias show up at her door covers herself with irritating plants, so that when the militia try to manhandle her it ‘burns’ and proves her powers. 

In El Alto, Bolivia, a growing economy and a renewed sense of indigenous pride have led to the rise of a new style of architecture. This crop of extravagant and colorful “New Andean” buildings are called cholet, a portmanteau of “chalet” and “cholo”—a racial epithet uttered in some Latin American countries to identify the indigenous population. 

8/3 Today we picked the white apples. They have skins the color of old yellowed bones, and translucent flesh so that when you slice them open you can see the seeds through the flesh. Bone-and-glass apples, parchment apples, ghost apples.

They bruise easily, a purplish brown rather too similar to a bruise on human skin. If you pick one up, there’s a good chance the shapes of your fingertips will be marked on it the next day. I want to try writing words on them by pressing on them with a pencil eraser sometime.

They smell very faintly of perfume, maybe roses. They do not smell like apples. Apple maggots never infest them (probably because their growing time is too short to support the apple maggot fly life cycle. It’ll be another month or two before the rest of our apples are ripe).

They’re lovely. They are also disgusting. Mealy and soft, with no flavor whatsoever. They’re not sweet. They’re not even sour. It’s like a mouth full of wet cotton ball. I’m pretty sure I spit it out the first time I tried one.

I hope you all understand how weird this is: even the goats are reluctant to eat them. They’ll eat an apple or two, but then they lose interest (except in keeping the sheep from eating any, of course).

My best guess is that your tree is a chance seedling with a genetic mutation, given that it is both leucistic/albinoid and early-ripening. I’d hazard a guess it’s also polyploid.

Ah, yes, the great Banana Famine. Dark, dark days indeed. Gather round my children, I am going to tell you a story of great tragedy.

Eons back, in a strange far away land, in a world now long gone (circa 1950), the Gros Michel reigned supreme. It was the one Banana to rule All bananas. Gros Michel (literally Fat Michael in French, also known as “Big Mike”) was the main banana cultivar grown in Central America and sold around the globe. A noble specimen, it’s thick peel and dense bunches made it resilient, easy to ship, and yes also fat. Look. Look at it. This banana is thiiiiiiiicc

hard to find good photos. it would have also resembled the goldfinger banana. looooook et it, it so thicc

so thicc. 

Ahem.

And all was well and good and peaceful.

Everything changed when the Panama disease attacked.

Ah, the Panama disease. The great banana plague. The Banana Blight, if you will. Songs were written in elegy to the terrible destruction it wrought. Like, actually. Here’s the “Yes we have no bananas” song:

It was Chaos.

Vast tracts of plantation banana trees, noble warriors, slaughtered, cut down in their prime. Ah! the grief. Ah! the loss.

But, amid the havoc of what wikipedia and I refer to as the Gros Michel Devastation Era, an unlikely hero arose. You know it as simply a humble banana. But our hero has a name:

cavendish, it’s named cavendish. 

The Cavendish banana, a cultivar that had been mass produced since the turn of the century, but only just then got it’s Time to Shine. For whatever reason, Cavendish bananas grew just fine in the same Panama disease-ridden soil that destroyed Gros Michel trees. So yeah, we planted them, fought the blight, won the war, got bananas back. 

But every war has casualties. 

Never again were bananas so tasty. Never again, were bananas so thicc.

I warned you this was the story of a tragedy. A moment of silence for our fallen comrade, please. Raise your wands to our late, great hero, Gros Michel.

(You can still get em in some places tho. Or like hybrids? idk. ) 

And kiddies, that’s the story of the banana famine as i know it.

Other deets:

BANANAS HAD SEEDS HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THIS

LOOK AT IT

bananas were cultivated over time to be seedless. 

Bananas were deboned. dwell on that.

unnfff yeah

feels so wrong but so good

unnnfff

misc stuff 

cavendish bananas may or may not be dying. We may or may not see the dark days of plague descend again. idk, look it up.

There’s a story (not proven) that the reason artificial banana flavor tastes weird is b/c it was based on the flavor of the Gros Michel. If so, it might be cause Fat Mike had a stronger taste (due to higher levels of isoamyl acetate). idk.

the “Yes we have no bananas” song was written in 1922 during an earlier outbreak. src.  like any good plague, panama disease has a history of hovering over it’s fearful victims, sometimes for years, before striking the final blow.

sources are in the links above, also see the links on these wiki pages

i swear if i get hate mail on a banana post i don’t even know what i’ll do, probably stab a wall with a fork and eat it.

I want to share one more thing with you.

I saw this with my own two eyeballs. now you have too. we never speak of this again. we take this to our graves

shhit I’m tired. 

you guys owe me a reblog on this one. Honor system, don’t mooch.

A no-baked build (maybe).

stay strong everyone

–

My whole household is activists, including my 65 year old parents. Here are some things I’ve picked up from listening to and observing them all:

-Social change is like those Japanese bamboo fountain things, the ones that make the donk noise. It builds up over time, drip by drip, with no recognizable effect, and then it hits a tipping point and a lot happens all at once. Where you are in that process is influenced by a chaos theory level of factors beyond your or anyone else’s control. 

-Workaholism is the drug of choice for most activists, and it is counter productive as hell. It’s hard to resist, because what you are doing is important, time sensitive, and urgent. And the culture of activism is infected with this macho bullshit about pushing non stop. Well news flash m’dears, there will never come a time when there are not more important, urgent, time sensitive battles than any one person can address. Strategically, an activist can accomplish much more by insisting on a sustainable work-life balance and fighting on for decades than by burning themself out all at once. Rest. Play. Relax. Self-care, y’all. *Do it.*

-Trying to make your organization or movement completely ideologically pure makes you smaller, more isolated, and less effective.

-When you start organizing a group of people, the first ones to jump at the chance for leadership are not usually good leaders. What you want are the people who wait a little, think it through, see where it’s going. Also the people who already have the respect of their peers on account of being solid folks.

-Maintaining ethics and integrity can be a pain in the ass, especially when struggling against those who have neither, but it is *vital*. Any short term advantage you can gain through skeezy tactics is overshadowed by the trust and respect you lose, among your allies as well as your opponents.

-People’s politics and their personal decency don’t always match up in a logical way. You will meet people whose politics are straight fucked up, but who somehow still treat everyone they interact with directly well. You will also meet people who say and seem to believe all the right things, and are *assholes*. Handled right, the former can be hugely tactically useful as points of contact, and potentially teachable. The latter will join your organizations and proceed to shit right in the bed.

-The best way to support intense struggles against oppression far away in from a position of solidarity, with your feet firmly planted in struggles close to home. Ignoring local oppression because other people have it worse doesn’t help anybody. It’s a win for Team Oppression.

-Guilt, fear, and worry are not useful. Don’t beat yourself up for having these feelings, but know you are not in any way *obliged* to feel them. Acknowledge them, then let them go. Calm thinking and reasonable self confidence make you more effective.

-Don’t cut out people who are only capable of making smaller efforts and commitments in the struggle. That’s just throwing away resource. The idea that low effort contributions siphon away energy and make people less likely to be active is a myth. Low effort contributions make people feel involved, and more, not less, likely to participate in other ways.

-Running organizations in a democratic way is a giant pain in the ass. There will be drama and delays. There will be dumb decisions. Still 100% worth it.

-Organizing and activism are learned skills. There is a lot of history and a lot to be learned from it, there are people who have been doing this shit for ages and know how to make it work. Seek out good information. There’s no need to slow yourself down by reinventing the wheel.

Okay, so my friend Chloe just pointed this out, and it’s amazingly accurate:

“Because of the scarcity of Dwarf-women, their secrecy and similarity in appearance to males, and their lack of mention, many Men failed to recognize their existence.”

Okay, so?

Well, Tolkien was a philologist, and a Norsist, and that means he knew Völuspá well enough to pull the names of every dwarf from Dvergatal and he had a pretty firm grasp Old Norse grammar.

In fact, he grasped it well enough that he knew if you dropped an n from a name ending in -inn, it changes from the masculine definite enclitic to the feminine.

Well, what the hell does any of this mean?

Well, I give you the names of the Dwarves from the Hobbit, as they appear in Dvergatal (stanzas 14-16) and in the order they appear:

Dvalins,* Dáinn, Bívurr, Bávurr, Bömburr, Nóri, Óinn, Þorinn, Þráinn, Fíli, Kíli,  Glóinn, Dóri, Óri

Now, in the Hobbit, they’re named as follows:

Dwalin, Dáin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Óin, Thorin, Thráin, Fíli, Kíli, Glóin, Dori, Ori.

Now, you notice something with the way those names got changed? That’s right, he changed the masculine -inn definite suffix to -in, which is feminine.**

That means that, at least grammatically, Dwalin, Dáin, Thorin, Thráin, and Glóin are female Dwarves.

Since we know Tolkien was meticulous about his grammar, this was done most likely as an in-joke (lol we’re so learnèd about Norse grammar that my comment on Dwarf women being indistinguishable from men is hilarious because of this grammatical funniness)

But there’s a not-inconceivable chance that the Dwarves were using the masculine pronouns in Westron because that’s what the Men who met them used, despite the fact that a third of the company was female, and hey, it’s kinda neat to think he wrote a bunch of Dwarf-ladies going on an adventure.

*-ins is the masculine Genitive definite article suffix in Old Norse

One of the world’s best-loved operas has been given a radically different ending in Italy, with the heroine killing her tormentor rather than being killed herself, in a stand against violence to women.

In Bizet’s original story, Don José is a naïve soldier who is lured away from his military duties and his childhood sweetheart by Carmen. But she then falls for the handsome bull-fighter Escamillo, driving Don Jose wild with jealousy. The last act of the opera is set outside the bullring in Seville, where Carmen is stabbed to death by Don José.

In what is believed to be a world first, a production of Bizet’s Carmen will see Carmen shoot her thwarted admirer Don José with a pistol that she grabs off him, rather than being stabbed to death by him.

The dramatic departure from operatic orthodoxy is an attempt to shine the spotlight on the modern-day abuse and mistreatment of women, an issue given added resonance by the outrage over the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump.

The new version of Carmen will open at Florence’s opera house this weekend, with the first few nights already sold out.

“As far as we know it is the first time that the ending to Carmen has been changed,” the opera house’s Paolo Klun told The Telegraph.

The producers said they had changed the denouement of the story in part to protest at the large number of Italian women who are killed each year by jealous husbands, boyfriends and lovers.

Sociologists and campaigners say it is driven by men feeling threatened by the greater freedoms and enhanced economic independence that many Italian women now enjoy after decades of being seen as pliable possessions.

With horrific cases of domestic violence coming to light almost every month, the directors of the work said they were uncomfortable with the idea of audiences applauding the final scene, in which Carmen is stabbed to death and lies motionless on the stage.