Ficus elastica

All the episodes of Galavant are on the Internet Archive!

Abdul El-Sayed was the victim of the most extreme racism I have ever seen in any political campaign in my entire adult life, calculated racist attacks that make Willie Horton look subtle. This is a man who is an example of the kind of squeaky clean midwestern ambition previously seen in Pete Buttigieg, married to his college sweetheart, valedictorian, Rhodes Scholar,etc. He was consistently framed as a sexual menace to women and a violent menace to Jewish people based on absolutely nothing in his own life but designed to align with orientalist porn about lewd sheiks preying on white woman. It was disgusting and shameful! I am ashamed at the racism that I would have, a year ago, naively said was not something Michiganders feel towards our fellow Michiganders and that revelation has sucked.

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.”

Me: I am literally just doing my job. Everyone else is slacking off.

invisible

never explained

always a different size

you have to guess the size

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

Curiosity celebrates her 14th Martian birthday this week and she’s still trucking along in Gale Crater where she’s sampling Martian soil to learn about the geology and climate and teach us all about the ancient lakes that used to cover our nearest neighbor!

Thank you to everyone who keeps this post queued up so I never forget her special day. I love how much love this post gets every year.

If you would like to see what Tumblr’s favourite Rover has been up to recently you can read about her latest mission updates here and you can see her live position in Gale Crater on this map here. (You can also see the great photos she takes!)

That literary translator talking about the thematic and character decisions in the adaptation, which is her area of expertise, and not the cinematography, which is not, does not mean the review has nothing insightful to say about the film.

That literary translator pointing out that, while the director likes to associate her name with his work - to the point that people think he is adapting her translation specifically - he is not actually engaging with any of the themes she cares about, is not "emotional and defensive".

There is no such thing as a perfect or complete review. They are opinion pieces. Each reviewer focuses on different things. This is fine and good and part of a healthy ecosystem of cultural journalism. Saying you think her review is stupid because you're "just a lowly film watcher, not a poem reader" and feel judged is... Wild? She's comparing the film to the poem in a magazine for which she covers ancient poetry! You are not the audience for this review if you don't care about its relationship to the poem.