I was talking to my husband the other day and, as a random example of a boring topic that nobody at a party would want to hear about, I happened to come up with, “The history of wheelbarrows.”
But then my husband and I got curious and decided to look up the history of wheelbarrows, and we both thought it was surprisingly interesting.
The very next day, we were visiting a thrift store with family and my sister spotted a toy wheelbarrow for her son, and my husband said, “Did you know that Jesus was older than wheelbarrows? They weren’t invented until around 100 CE.”
This is why curious people are my favorite type of people. No topic is really that boring when you look into it. And everything is more interesting when you talk about it with someone you love.
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“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”
If you notice it looks more scuffed than my usual art that's bc I did this during the Ipad-less period. As in I sucked it up and did some fingerpainting on my laptop :,)
They're the largest lizards in the world and in the wild they only come from Indonesia and they have a venomous bite that inhibits blood clotting and they have serrated teeth and though they mostly do sexual reproduction some of them do a parthenogenesis and they're endangered I didn't say a name but you thought of them didn't you
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It has a huge variety of historical recipes from different regions, taken from manuscripts, transcribed and translated, and a whole section of notes about the context for the recipe. It's really fun and I AM going to try a couple of these recipes.
Look at how this lamb recipe is presented:
This is just such a fun way to learn more about historical foodways and discover traditional cuisine.
Look at all the filters you can use:
Maybe if I can forage some good blackberries this year, I can make a 300 year old recipe for blackberry wine!
My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.
Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.
it's such bs that the whole guilt-ridden stoic self-sacrificing martyr thing doesn't work outside of fiction. repressing all your emotions and neglecting your physical wellbeing should make you god's most tragically beautiful morally unassailable little soldier of righteousness but all it does is give you bad skin and gastrointestinal problems
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If you’re reading this… congratulations, you survived Ray Bradbury’s doomsday!
“‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling…”
-Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains”
Today is August 4th, 2026–the day that Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” is based on. I have included the short story below for anyone desiring to read it. Please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments! Happy doomsday;)
Art credits: “House Fire” by beccastadtlander (Etsy)
Just FYI, one of my favorite things I learned as an Ancient Greek major in undergrad was that a lot of city-states who had contact with Egypt considered the Nubians to be the absolute peak of beauty, and adjusted their societal standards accordingly.
So Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen is quite possibly the most historically accurate thing in that entire film.
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This is the sequel to the Trojan War Adaptation Bingo post.
Square #1: Odysseus will have only one ship for the entire movie. Where his other 11 ships went will never be addressed.
Square #2: The Laestrygonians don't exist because we already got rid of all but one of Odysseus' ships, and the Cyclops exhausted our adaptational willingness to show cannibal giants.
Square #3: The Lotus-Eaters also don't exist, and the Lotus flowers become a tool of Circe and/or Calypso.
Square #4: The Cicones don't exist because opening the movie with what looks like a pirate raid will make the audience question Odysseus.
#5: Either Aelous or the sun cows will be cut, thus reducing the amount of crew stupidity by at least one incident.
#6: Odysseus and crew either leave Circe's island immediately after she gives them the Underworld information, with no year-long vacation, or they get trapped there for years, instead of a voluntary one-year stay.
#7: At least half of the people Odysseus talks to in the Underworld are cut. Usually it's the "Tiresias and one other person" show, and the other person is weirdly never Achilles.
#8: The Phaeacians are cut entirely.
#9: Poseidon shows up to express his displeasure with Odysseus in person.
#10: Odysseus somehow physically overpowers Poseidon, regardless of how nonsensical this is.
#11: Scylla and Charybdis are inexplicably not directly across from each other.
#12: Nestor doesn't exist.
#13: Telemachus' journey is entirely offscreen.
#14: Alternatively, Menelaus shows up to go "nope, no idea where your dad is", even though in the poem he DOES know where Odysseus is because he wrestled the information out of Proteus.
#15: Helen has hardly any lines, or doesn't exist.
#16: Somehow the Cyclops scene will be changed in a confusing way. Sometimes Odysseus idiotically tells the Cyclops his real name before they've escaped. Sometimes Odysseus doesn't reveal his identity at all, thereby making it unclear how Poseidon ever learned he was responsible. Sometimes they have him anger Poseidon before he meets Polyphemus, thereby making him look stupid when he reveals his identity to the guy who just said he was Poseidon's son. The "Nobody" trick is removed with surprising frequency.
#17: The sirens are mermaids. Or cut. Also if they do exist their song is likely to disappoint.
#18: Odysseus' crew don't get names.
Square #19: The crew are killed by something other than Zeus' wrath (because we cut the sun cows).
#20: The sack of Troy is in the movie, despite the Odyssey's flashbacks mostly cutting off in the horse.
#21: In order to accomplish the above, the movie briefly becomes an adaptation of the Aeneid.
#22: In spite of being described in the Odyssey, Helen recognizing Odysseus when he infiltrates Troy in disguise, and later mimicking the wives of the Greeks inside the horse, are NOT in the movie. Even though the Aeneid is.
Square #23: Ten percent of the movie is a speed run of the Iliad.
Square #24: This gives us a mostly incomprehensible Achilles, a one-dimensional supervillain Agamemnon, and Meneluas being...there.
#25: Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon is either never mentioned or folded into Agamemnon being a supervillain.
#26: Ithaca is delayed until Penelope and Telemachus are almost required to be underdeveloped.
#27: Telemachus comes across as naive, whiny, and/or useless because all his important scenes get cut.
#28: Penelope becomes "sad woman waiting".
#29: The bed test is cut.
#30: The situation with the suitors isn't properly explained, so the audience is left to be bewildered by the fact that Penelope and Telemachus don't tell what appear to be obnoxious frat boys to just leave.
#31: The suitors become so incompetent they're not a threat or so overtly murderous that they might as well just kill Penelope and Telemachus. Once they reach the point of murdering commoners--and each other-- every other scene it becomes somewhat unclear as to why they're still bothering to pretend legitimacy. At that point just declare yourself the new ruler and be done with it.
#32: Melanthius and Philoetius keep getting their job descriptions switched around. Eumaeus keeps his because...I guess he has more lines.
#33: Only one named suitor can exist. And it's almost always Antinous, but with Eurymachus' ability to pretend not to be a violent parasite for more than 5 minutes.
#34: Melantho is the only maid to be treacherous or die. And she and Melanthius always die differently from how they did in the poem.
At least I understand why this change happens. Because no modern viewer would watch that and not probably conclude "Odysseus is sadistic".
#35: Athena becomes the only Olympian to do things (except Poseidon).
#36: The movie forgets that Circe and/or Calypso are in fact immortal.
#37: The suitors show up either too early (they're apparently there like as soon as the Trojan War ends) or too late (only like a year before Odysseus returns). It's more usually "the suitors have been here forever apparently", I suspect because people sort of mentally merge the amount of time Odysseus has been gone with the amount of time the suitors have been eating all the food. The implausibly early version also implies that Ithaca somehow has unlimited resources.
#38: Athena doesn't disguise Odysseus, so 20 years of aging and different clothes are doing all the work to sell the beggar disguise. Not inherently impossible, but less seamless.
#39: Antinous at some point directly assaults Telemachus and beats him half to death. IN THE PALACE.
#40: In spite of the above, Antinous chucking the stool at beggar Odysseus gets cut. Partially because most of Odysseus begging also gets cut.
It also implies that Penelope is shockingly oblivious and Antinous is shockingly bad at realizing he's basically in charge of Ithaca already and thus shouldn't need to keep waiting.
Antinous: I am effectively the king, and obviously a horrible person. But instead of just declaring myself king, I will continue to wait for Penelope to marry me.
#41: There are maybe 30 suitors instead of 108 because filming Odysseus murdering 108 guys in a hall would be difficult.
#42: Either Laertes or Anticlea exists, but for some reason never both.
#43: Odysseus, the man who never shuts up, becomes Odysseus, stoic action hero. Because PTSD can only be portrayed in one way, apparently. His habitual use of deception is also considerably downplayed. And he never smiles.
#43a: Odysseus' downplayed use of deception is a constant even in adaptations that want him to be morally ambitious, like EPIC the Musical, The Return (2024), or, to a lesser extent, Nolan's recent take. You would think that would be an obvious angle, but apparently not.
#44: Odysseus never gets to use his five-page Cretan prince backstory.
#45: Odysseus is frequently treated as the only Greek leader to have any moral scruples.
#46: Even though the movie shows Odysseus leaving for war, it cuts out his attempt to pretend madness. And also the fact that he proposed the Oath of Tyndareus.
Languages tend to peak at their word for butterfly. Never seen 2 that are the same, either. Papillon. Mariposa. Borboleta. Fluture. Vlinder. Schmetterling. Pillangó. Babochka. Farfalla. Sommerfugl. Perhonen. Farasha. Titali. Chōchō. Nabi. Húdié. Buom buom. Great job guys, i really mean it.
