Your Father's Mustache

This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I've learned so many incredible things about Australia's past and it's been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.

It's actually super unethical to keep a peeve as a pet

trees are very 🥺 because sometimes i’ll stand under the shade of a tree and look up at it and it’ll sway its branches about in the wind and i’m like oh my God i’m alive and YOU’RE alive. we are alive together and made up of the same starry stuff and standing right next to each other in this moment on this earth. do u feel it when i reach out and press my hand to your trunk? can you hear me? i think you’re so neat. and then the sunlight filters through its leaves just so and that lovely green color leaves me dazzled. it’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing

“It’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing” I’m in love

also….who are we kidding when it comes to her ‘‘little brother’‘ Winthrop.

#let’s all be honest: marian and her mother left to “help out a cousin in Chicago” and then came back with a baby     #marian only ever referred to this baby as her brother. mrs. paroo only ever called him her son.     #but if you were the family doctor. or maybe someone who knows a little bit about gestational math and menopausal women.     #you might have some follow up questions.     #anyway stay tuned for other hot takes about this american musical from the 1960s.  

God I want like. A full body massage. A team of dermatologists acting like an f1 pit crew to destroy my bad skin issues. 3 days in a jacuzzi. Another full body massage. Put onto a medieval torture rack and stretched until it fixes me idk I feel like it'd do wonders for my hips

I’m not sure I knew the thy/thine distinction. Thanks for this!

i am a writer in the same way raccoons are chefs. i am just putting things together and screaming when it catches fire

Graced by Geckolepis typica from Madagascar. I love that they’re quite round creatures and then they have these dainty little toes. Also, their scales are full bone and both scale and skin come off when they get grabbed, which is…unpleasant. Consequently, catching these geckos for research without damaging them requires special techniques. 19th century researchers used bundles of cotton wool, but I imagine this wasn’t very effective, because cotton still has a lot of friction and the friction would pull the skin and scales off. In my (quite extensive) experience, the best technique is to carefully and quickly flick the geckos from their tree trunk or branch into an open dry plastic bag using a finger or stick.

Not only do they grow back, but they come back so well that we cannot even tell where they have ripped off before. This is very weird, because when a lizard loses its tail, it is very obvious where it has been lost and regrown. Not so these chaps. They seek out a humid place to hide, and within a few weeks, skin and scales have started to regrow. The fact that they can do this so well is the reason a team has just sequenced their genome. I believe it is hoped that the skin regeneration tech they have built into their cells could eventually be harnessed for human skin grafts.