breaking and entering. just like riding a bike.

now for something pretty funny: the famous Winston Churchill photo taken by Yousuf Karsh, hanging in the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, is missing. some highlights from this CBC article:

- the people who pulled off the heist planned this well, because they replaced the original with a copy

- they don't even know how long it's been missing. only that the original was definitely seen as recently as 2019 and from thereon it's a mystery

- the only reason it came to attention is because a staff member noticed the photo was hanging askew, and the frame didn't match those of other Karsh photos in the same lounge

The thief/forger was also anonymized for what I'm sure are legal reasons surrounding him being innocent until proven guilty, but in May 2025 he was sentenced, so his name IS reported in his sentencing article.

when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"

yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.

autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.

one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling afterward because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. no one should have to experience their classmate being hauled off in an ambulance, but it happens. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.

especially for the comfort of "well behaved" ID/DD people

the time when i was young and a girl came up to me and started playing with my hair so i started crying and all the abled adults went quiet and started acting like she was a bomb they had to defuse and eventually literally swept her up like she was a load of laundry and carried her out

i've seen 2 disabled people manhandled out of a room for "misbehaving", and been the one manhandled out myself too

there's a part in the ugly laws: disability in public by susan schweik about seizures which makes a point i want to add onto:

"consider this account, written by charles henderson in 1906, of what happens if a member of the public sees an epileptic seizure:

(quote:) in sociable intercourse the epileptic is an object of dread, and no one who has witnessed the person in a convulsion can quite escape from the haunting memory of the spectacle and entirely free his mind from terror or disgust. hence there cannot be that free, unconstrained, and natural converse which gives pleasure to society. (end quote)

[...]

this kind of thinking, to which the ugly laws have obvious links, often goes along with a certain kind of understanding of the public sphere. public space, in this model, is pedagogic space; what you allow in public is what children learn is allowed in public. if you allow unsightliness a foothold, the next generation will be even uglier. to display something publicly is to spread it."

And then 40 years later, Andrew Lloyd Webber found a lost cat poem that T.S. Eliot had cut from the cat book for being too sad for children, and ALW was like “woahhh. A cat….that’s sad. That’s deep, man. I wanna make a musical out of this”

So the producer assigned to the project was like “okay, I guess you could maybe read these cat poems as a satire of 1930s British society? We could probably do something sort of interesting with that, I’m thinking a cast of about 5 and–”

And ALW was like “no. Forget the satire. Also I want a cast of dozens and the most advanced special effects technology ever seen on stage. I’ve taken out a second mortgage on my house to fund this”

And the producer was like “wh– you– wh– do you even have. a plot”

So ALW got a bunch of actors and writers and artists together and they holed up and did cocaine workshopped for 5 weeks, and at the end of it they emerged and said “the plot is that a bunch of cats are having a dance contest for the right to take a ufo to cat heaven :)”

Right as I wake up there’s a nurse there who hustles over and says he’s glad he saw me wake up and tells me he’s giving me some pain meds and then he gives me IV Fentanyl and so I go from like “Ow ow ow ow awake awake awake” to “ooooooh fuck I’m floating on clouds made of rainbows” in like 6 seconds and so I was pretty out of it. The hospital had all the recently-post op patients all in one big-ass room, and they see patients for ALL sorts of surgeries, so I was next to an old guy who got his knee replaced on one side and some young 30-something dude with some kind of mechanism on his leg. So I asked him what happened since I was high as fuck and feeling kind as a result, and he said he broke his leg hiking off-trail when his leg went down a literal rabbit hole and snapped his shinbone. I say something like “damn dude that blowssssss” while giggling because I’m high as FUCK on actual fentanyl and he’s like “Yeah, for real, I’m feeling great right now though! What about you? What are you in here for?”

And I fully was not thinking like a person, I was thinking like a fentanyl-addled tgirl so I just go “Oh, haha, they cut my dick off!”