Gwen The Snake

This is a cranberry bog (unflooded) it’s how cranberries grow. Once they’re ripe, the blog is flooded and the cranberries harvested.

His farm was on the leading edge of kinda using organic/sustainable pest control methods, and one of the things that they did to keep insect damage down was that they encouraged wolf spiders to live in the cranberry field, to eat the bugs. 

This was all fine and good until they flooded the bog. Now, you don’t just like flood the bog and then go around it in a boat or whatever. No, you use hip waders to get in there and put the big floaty things where they go and get all the berries and such.

Well when you’re in the bog in hip waders, that makes you the tallest thing. Wolf spiders can swim a bit, but they don’t like it, so they’re, quite understandably, looking to climb out of the water onto a tall thing.

So yeah the first interview question he always asked potential cranberry bog harvester hires was “are you cool with spiders?”

this post is like 11 years old

hey

Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.

Some examples:

Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness. 

I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like, 

A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.

Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it. 

I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase. 

a lot of the current rhetoric around gender reminds me of that anecdote. a lot of people are willing to go "transgender people are oppressed for their gender presentation, therefore if you're not oppressed for your gender presentation, you're not trans." but i don't think we should be defining ourselves by our suffering and oppression. what will we do, in a few years, in a few decades, as there start to be, say, adults who were supported in their transition as children? what will we do when a stereotypical trans person can genuinely say they didn't suffer hardship for being trans?

i'm afraid i know the answer. i'm afraid that people are going to close ranks as they've already started closing ranks against intersex people, against nonbinary people, against double binary people, against closeted people. as some people have started closing ranks against people who transitioned in the opposite direction from them. as many people have closed ranks against people with edge case gender experiences. "i don't consider you to be oppressed, therefore you are not welcome to share in this community you might otherwise belong in."

So the writer of this book isn't actually.... wrong, per se. In an age before they had clean, sanitary, safe drinking water, you probably DID get at MINIMUM awful diarrhea pretty regularly after drinking water. This is why so many people drank small-beer (very low alcohol content, but the fermentation process (and by some preparations, boiling the water) killed the dangerous microbes and made it safe to drink). The popularization of tea actually really cut down on cholera outbreaks and other water-related digestive troubles as well! not only because you have to boil the water, but the tannins in tea also kill off (at least some) bacteria.

And in case you cannot comprehend the state of how breathtakingly "they didn't fucking know" -- If you were really poor in London in the first half of the 19th century, you were often literally dipping a bucket into the nearest gutter, letting it sit for a day for the solids to separate out, and drinking what was left. Even the well-to-do houses with fancy newfangled running water were at risk of waterborne illnesses, because a lot of those water supply companies had intake pipes stuck into the fucking Thames (you know. the famously polluted river that all the sewers dumped into) and were so negligent about filtering it that people sometimes got live eels coming out of their faucets.

So yeah, drinking many glasses of water IS a potentially injurious one and DOES weaken digestive power -- IF you are unfortunate enough to live in the 19th century before public health became a government concern.