I like to think spidey started to flip it and teased it like “oh! Oh! You better stop me! No? *tips more* oh your coffee spilled oh nooo!!” And then set it down upside down right as the cop ran up. The car isn’t destroyed, but like… this is clearly a problem. And all of this would have been avoided if the cop wasn’t being a prick.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
The summer between the end of high school and the start of college, I wrote a ridiculous play about pirates and put on a staged reading with some friends at an amphitheatre at a local park before a small audience of friends and family. It was never published or staged again. But I just got a message from an old high school friend I haven’t seen in years. He accidentally quoted the play in a conversation with friends, was asked what he was quoting, he couldn’t remember either, and wracked his brain until he finally remembered it was that silly play reading that we did one day in the park over 10 years ago. It made me happy. (The line was, “Huzzah for mercantilism!” by the way.)
A very tiny percentage of creators go on to be famous, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t remember little things you did for years and years. Who came up with most of the world’s most famous jump rope rhymes? Who coined some of the famous idioms we use in daily speech? Who made up ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells?” Somehow, all of these things stuck and spread around.
When I was a small child, I saw a high school put on a production of the musical HONK. In one song, the mother duck describes various dangers that her baby should avoid in the water, including fishing line, which could strangle him. A member of the ensemble played the role of fishing line, doing a maniacal laugh and over-the-top strangling motions, and I found it hilarious– and to this day, that’s an example I often think of when talking about how ensemble members can still stand out in theatre. The guy who played the role might not even remember that he did that, but I do.
I took Suzuki violin lessons as a kid. The teacher made up lyrics to some of the songs, and she let her students make some up, too. Now whenever I hear the instrumental of one of those pieces, I always remember these ridiculous lyrics about a skunk that we sang in violin class. I don’t even know which student invented them!
In middle school, I found a video about atoms parodying Bill Nye made by some kids for a school product. It probably had less than 1,000 views, but I think of quotes from that video all the time. They had a parody of “We Will Rock You” with the chorus, “Protons, neutrons, electrons” that I think about a lot.
I just love that this is part of human life. Our memories don’t just pick up quotes from great art, literature, and music, but little things, too.
Way back before the international Olympic committee made Olympics of the Mind change their name to Odyssey of the Mind, there was a competition involving some theater and I don’t remember the assignment but I do remember the filk of flying purple people eater:
He was a one eyed muscle man hairy Grecian people eater….
Anyway I ended up marrying a guy who is so adept at this kind of word play that when we’d been married for about 17 years the rest of the world figured out how dang good at it he was and gave him a Pegasus award. He’s got a filk of 500 Miles that I will never get out of my head, about the Greek humanities, which has a chorus that goes “And I would launch 500 ships and I would launch 500 more” and the whole thing is just a goddamn delight.
harrow the ninth disco elysium au where harrow wakes up from her lobotomy with retrograde amnesia and twenty-four voices in her head, one of which is gideon nav, and another is the body.
My parents are in town and we went to see a friend of mine from college who is a rare books librarian and found a medieval xtian text bound in fragments of Talmud. With my parents we were able to identify the text and guess at some historical possibilities.
The Latin book is printed on paper, dated circa the 1480s, but the Hebrew text is handwritten on vellum and estimated at least 100 years earlier. By being used for scrap it may have escaped burning.
The text is this: https://www.sefaria.org/Yoma.68b.7
It's Talmud but formatted not how we learn that Talmud is formatted, because it's earlier than that convention.
My mother, whose Master's is on medieval Hebrew manuscripts, identified the writing as Ashkenazic. The printed book is from Ulm, so that makes sense, although she didn’t feel it would be unreasonable to find a Sephardic handwriting in that time and place. The only part I could read in the pictures my friend originally texted me was the mishnah, but in person my mother was able to read a lot more and we were able to follow the Talmud text as she was reading from the manuscript and I was reading on Sefaria.
I find the content of the fragment particularly touching, in this context. It's a description of the practices of Yom Kippur, but it's more than that:
In the Torah, the practices of Yom Kippur are laid out as they would be observed by a nomadic people with a centralized sacrificial system. In the Mishnah, they're recording the to-them-modern evolution of those practices as a people who settled in a certain location and built a large central temple in their biggest city to house the sacrificial system--but as they're writing it, the sacrificial system is coexisting with the system of verbal liturgical prayer, and they're encoding these practices in part to avoid losing them. That account would have been edited into cohesion in the 3rd century CE, at a time when they were facing the anxiety that their cultural practices might soon be lost.
The Talmud then takes the Mishnah and seeks to explain it, meaning that by the 5th-6th century they were again worried that comprehension of the Mishnah, where they recorded their interpretations of the earlier practices, might now be lost. In the Talmud they take the Mishnah line by line and discourse about it, and record the conversations they had including not only how to-them-modern people should be observing Yom Kippur, now in the full absence of any centralized system OR sacrificial worship at all, but also filling in the blanks of what the Mishnaic rabbis might have taken for granted about the worship they described, lest that information might soon be lost.
The medieval scribe who wrote the fragment we saw today might have been writing at a time when the most honored commentators on Torah and Talmud had living grandchildren. That scribe wrote out the text of the Talmud by hand, first the Mishnaic account of their soon-to-be-lost evolution of the lost Biblical practices, then the Talmudic description of their then-current practices and attempts to understand the lost Mishnaic practices, but already the commentaries of Rashi had been written, in 12th-century France, in which Rashi attempted to understand the Talmudic and Mishnaic and biblical descriptions, and filled in the blanks as he understood them, so that his readers would be able to envision the lost Talmudic practices. He wrote in Hebrew, because he was distributing his commentaries not just within France but around the Jewish world: there's evidence of Rashi's work being read in Yemen within the 12th century.
When the printing press was developed, the layout of a Talmud page that we take for granted today was encoded. It was developed so as to protect the texts on the page from water damage in order of priority: the Talmudic text in the center of the page, Rashi's commentaries next to the binding, his grandchildren's and later medieval commentators on the outside of the page, at greatest risk. This is in order of perceived sacredness: Rashi's commentary was by that point accepted as having a degree of importance that set it apart from other commentary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud#/media/File:Labeled_talmud.png Here's an annotated page of Talmud identifying the parts of the page that's understood as standard to this day. Many publications of this also include more recent commentary of a variety of eras and nationalities.
And this past September, this book came out, after more than a decade in progress. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-annotated-mishnah-9780192846143?cc=us&lang=en&#
They only covered the Mishnah, not the entire Talmud, in that time, despite having three editors and several other translators and commentators involved.
Looked at from where I stood this afternoon, touching that sliced-up fragment of vellum, and realizing that the function of this new translation is to make the same text--the same text--understandable to us, now, lest comprehension be lost, or looked at otherwise, because turning it and turning it, turning it over and over to look at more facets and turning it over to the next generation and the next, that's what we do, that's what we're for, that's what this living culture is. And there's a tremendous sense of holiness, then, to witness that fragment, cut up and bound into the flyleaves of a Christian text but still legible to someone who knows how to read it.
And yet.
I'm generally comfortable reading texts in Hebrew writing on parchment but I struggled with the handwriting. My mother could read it, with difficulty, because she got a Master's in it; my friend asked her how long ago and she pointed at me and said "that long ago." I'm almost 40.
The knowledge ebbs and flows in and out of any of us.
It's no rarity to see older books cut up and reused to bind others in the 14th century, when the Xtian book of sermon ideas was printed. But for a Talmud text from that time to survive is rare indeed. And it's rare to me to have a friend reach out with questions just the weekend before my parents happen to be visiting and when we have the time to drive over and look at it in person and read from it out loud and translate it with the help of the same text, preserved, in an app on my phone.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Wunmi Mosaku, a graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, has done her share of memorizing pages and pages of scripts.
The ‘Sinners’ Oscar nominee tells Katey Rich about her unique memorization technique: using blue paper, which allowed Mosaku to cope with the dyslexia diagnosis she received as a teenager.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
You know what? Fuck it I'm adding more context. Sesame Street has talked about the topic of death more than once and it's done with such gentle carefulness without watering down or censoring the heaviness of the situations. It treats heavy subject matter with respect and dignity and has been for DECADES.
From the early 1980s:
To 2025:
Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.
They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.
Whenever I see people censoring words because it "might offend" someone or the big ad companies that are currently trying to run everything? I just want to say to them: "What? Is Sesame Street too mature for you?" Because really...what the hell are we doing.
I'm back with even more examples! Sesame Street once again to this day is out here handling extremely difficult subject matter with incredible care and respect. "We can't let kids learn about uncomfortable things!" Oh, really now? Even though they're things that happen in everyday life that they'll face one day at some point anyway? Interesting. Let's see what else this show has covered that people (for some reason) think should be avoided and hidden. Here's more on death of loved ones and greif:
Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?
Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?
Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!
Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!
They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.
Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.
There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.
It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)
When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.
Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.
Don't fall for it, always side with Sesame Street.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
