Sigh In A Storm

I don't have a ton of photos of this species: this sweet old man was the only one anywhere near me. He's since passed, so I wanted to get photos of him online. All he wanted to do the times I saw him was relax in the sun, so that's how we'll remember him.

The Animal Photo Reference Repository is an independent, permanently open-access project and funded entirely by donations. Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission to use all photos in the repository as references.

I know we’re completely out of aardwolves in the US and I think there’s only a couple places that have striped hyenas left. The two facilities I knew of who had them, including this guy, have both passed. EDIT: I have been reminded that there are a couple of aardwolves, Nashville was raising a couple babies although I don’t know where they are now.

So I'm not sure what happened to Nashville's pups, but as of ~May 2026, AZA zoos are apparently aardwolf-free.

“Stress in small particles.” Encyclopedia of X-rays and gamma rays. 1963. 

bonus/proof:

I was once told not to refer to myself as Polish because I am a Jew by someone I had met literally 15 minutes earlier. That was the moment I stopped telling people where my family LIVED, and just started saying I’m Jewish.

So they have to pivot to "well they're not indigenous Levantine either, they were always 'Arab Jews'!" (While at the same time, turning around to declare that Arabs are indigenous to Israel when they're Palestinian - but somehow not those "Arab Jews." Lol.)

Every single part of this rhetoric is inherently logically inconsistent and if it becomes politically inconvenient in one way, they will magically pivot to the thing they just claimed also wasn't true five minutes ago.

As though almost every single Arab country has not violently ethnically cleansed and/or murdered its Jewish population requiring them to go to Israel in the first place lol. Iraqi Jews weren't Arab enough when the Farhud happened but suddenly overnight they're magically Arabs again when it's inconvenient for the narrative that they still aren't European and you can't make them appear like they are.

It's all designed to deny Jewish indigeneity to Israel, they will do anything possible not to admit that Jews are from Israel. "Rootless cosmopolitan" for when Jews in Poland aren't European enough not to be murdered in pogroms but suddenly "Polish Jews" when the alternative is OK then, I'm indigenous Levantine from Israel.

No, no, not like that! You're nothing! Get it right! It is all intended to say that Jews have no home and no place to belong and the ultimate goal of that rhetoric is to create the permission structure which results in our murder and genocide of the Jewish people. (And no, this is not hyperbolic, since it literally happened in living history.)

And when you ask these people to name one (1) country that Jews are indigenous to (as every human being is indigenous to somewhere) that has not attempted to murder or violently expel them, they condescendingly reply "hey, hey, I ain't reading all that girliepoppppp!" and block you.

But when the Jew becomes an inconvenient neighbor to live with, he is abruptly accused of "dual loyalty," stripped of the protections from the racial category he had been assigned 5 minutes earlier, and ejected from his home.

The only exception was that a child from a “mixed marriage,” I kid you not, that was the term, could choose which parent’s nationality to put in their own passport. Unsurprisingly, only approximately 5% chose to put down Jewish instead of whatever country they were in because if you had a “Jewish” passport, it severely limited your access to universities, certain jobs (government jobs in particular), and your ability to travel abroad (that one always baffled me- they clearly did not want the Jews there.. why not let us leave?).

The fifth line was introduced in 1932, and was not removed until the late 1990s- 1997 in Russia; I don’t have exact years for the other FSU countries, but we had to get new passports when we left Ukraine in late 1995 and ours still had it.. (I think they were just starting to be phased out around then or shortly after so that the 1996 passports didn’t have the line anymore).

- sweet pastry for breakfast

- snack around 11-12 (also sweet most likely)

- quick, casual lunch (like a panino) in the mid to late afternoon

- multi-course feast circa 9 PM

- approximately 3 to 8 espresso shots spread throughout the day

We won, if anyone was wondering.

* A fax machine, kids, is what we would use to send documents before email. You feed the paper copy into the machine, and it scans it and sends it to another machine in the other person's office, which prints out a copy. Why anyone sends faxes anymore is a mystery because they are less reliable than email and less info-secure than your average wet paper bag but hotels and doctors' offices really fuckin' love them a fax.

This person is clearly either stubborn or stupid. Could be both! But letting it go to voicemail repeatedly didn't work, answering and yelling "If you can hear me this is not a fax machine!" didn't work (sometimes it does -- some combined phone-fax machines, if they call you, they broadcast any audible response to whoever is nearby), and calling them didn't work because *gestures* all I have is their fax number.

I might also be stupid because it took me a while to realized I can fax them.

Hello! Please be advised that the phone number [my work number] is not a fax machine. It is my work telephone number. You have been faxing an incorrect number. I cannot receive faxes at this number. If you are aware of anyone who is giving this number out as their fax number, you would be doing me a favor if you let them know! Thank you and good luck in your faxing endeavors.

(my summary/hook under cut:)

Two little girls playing gently with a daddy long legs.

Girl 1: can it die?