You got me

Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians - Egyptian Cream (1985)

Classic Robyn Hitchcock gender-bending strangeness

The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe made this card for their citizens to present to ICE.

If you are in a different federally recognized tribe in Washington State:

“I am a member of the (insert tribe here) Tribal Nation, which is Tribal Nation federally recognized by the United States.

This means I am also a United States citizen according to the U.S. Citizenship Act of 1924, 8 USC Section 1401.

Our tribe’s enrollment office number is (insert phone number here).

From the Navajo Nation:

Navajo Nation Press Release from January 2026

Navajo Tribal members:

Did your tribal ID expire? Get a new one:

Here are some articles and resources:

When he refused to leave the Nashville public park where he has lived for the past several years, Williams became one of a handful of homeless people in the country to be arrested and charged with a felony for camping on public property. Eleven states have passed homeless camping bans over the last four years, according to the National Homelessness Law Center. In the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public, more than 300 municipalities have joined them. Supporters of these laws say they enable public officials to enforce rules that already exist and provide incentive for unhoused people to seek shelter. But opponents call the laws cruel and say that an arrest record only makes it harder for those experiencing homelessness to secure a job or a home. The maximum penalty for felony camping in Tennessee is six years in prison. Williams pled to a lesser charge and was released from jail after nine days. "The slickest thing was asking me if I knew what I was pleading to," Williams said. "I'm just trying to plead to get out of here." [...] Williams was one of two people arrested in the park on June 28 and charged under Tennessee's no-camping law — the only one in the country to make sleeping on public property a felony. Though the law was passed in 2022, advocates for the unhoused say they have never before seen it used like this. [...]

Homelessness in Nashville has been on the rise, according to the city's Homelessness Planning Council, which in December 2025 estimated that roughly 4,300 people experience homelessness in the city, an uptick of more than 30% in less than a year. Nationally, homelessness has dipped slightly after reaching record levels in 2024. But chronic homelessness has grown, according to 2025 data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD's most recent tally of chronically homeless people in the U.S. found more than 155,000. Camping bans differ from state to state — some enable the state to level penalties against cities that refuse to enforce the ban; others make it easier for law enforcement to involuntarily commit people experiencing homelessness — but the broad strokes are the same. No camping, or sleeping, on public property. Many state legislatorshave taken inspiration, or even borrowed legislative language, from the Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank founded by tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Lonsdale is a co-founder of Palantir, whose data mining software has been used by local and federal law enforcement, including the CIA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). [...] Devon Kurtz, who oversees Cicero's homelessness and public safety policy efforts, has been a vocal critic of the longstanding program model known as Housing First, saying it is ineffective. Housing First, which has long been promoted by experts and homeless outreach workers, aims to get unhoused people into stable housing before attempting to address any other needs, such as mental illness and drug or alcohol addiction. [...]

"My hope is that no one is ever convicted under any of these camping bans," Kurtz said. "The intention is not to jail people. I've also said, however, that sometimes, at the margins, it is essential that law enforcement has the ability to jail them because it can save lives." Nashville's oldest homeless enclave, Old Tent City, was disbanded last year. The area along the Cumberland River where more than 100 people once lived is now encircled by fences and no-trespassing signs. Krinks said the encampment had been there since the 1980s. Krinks has seen more security cameras installed around public parks and benches ripped out of the ground in downtown Nashville. The no-camping felony, she said, only makes things more dire for the city's homeless community. "Punishing people and using police to address homelessness only makes the crisis worse, and it prolongs people's experience of homelessness," said Krinks, who also helped start the statewide coalition Housing for All Tennessee. "Most people I know experiencing homelessness are so hungry for freedom, for agency, for their dignity to be seen and recognized and understood. Jail erodes every aspect of a person's agency." If you ask Williams how long he's been living in the park, he'll say he doesn't think of it that way. It's not living, he says. It's a place he goes to stay because he doesn't feel like he has anywhere else. Williams has been offered a bed at a Nashville shelter. He's been approached by service providers over the years. But he doesn't trust those organizations, and doesn't want to leave the neighborhood he considers his own. Instead, he sleeps sprawled across the wooden picnic tables, heats his food up in the sun and does pullups on the monkey bars at the playground. But the park is not home. Home is the aging public housing complex just up the hill; that's where he grew up. Williams can see it from the picnic benches. No one lives there now. [...]

Last month, prosecutors charged Williams with two felony counts of camping and one misdemeanor charge of evading arrest. According to charging documents, Williams attempted to flee after police officers told him they had a warrant for his arrest. That's when he was tased. Alissa Heydari, a court-appointed attorney who represented Williams in the camping case, said the arrest "makes what is already a very difficult life situation for Mr. Williams harder and worse." Williams pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to time served. Prosecutors dropped the two felony counts on the condition of his plea, Heydari said. He was released from custody on July 6, nine days after his arrest. As far as Cicero is concerned, this is the law working as it should.

2003-04-09 at Will's Pub, Orlando FL

I don't have a ton to say about this one - but it's a shockingly solid quality tape from almost 22 years ago! I'm really partial to Onions generally, but this performance of it is especially lovely. This show also features Linda Blair Was Born Innocent, a month before WSABH was even recorded, which is really neat!

ETA: You may have to use the webamp player in order to stream this show - there appears to be an issue with this show in the regular player!

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Indigenous Australian: artist unknown

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A focus on linear, abstract, declarative knowledge alone not only fails to create complex connectivity but damages the mind. We are biologically punished for this destructive behavior with a neurochemical rush of lethargy and discomfort that most people call boredom. Extended periods of this affect a person’s mental health, resulting in bouts of rage, depression, and worse. In centralized knowledge institutions today, this illness is called misbehavior or misconduct. Without the spark of creation in your neural system, the mind-body system stagnates and falls apart, affecting not only your ability to learn but your health and relationships as well, leading to increasingly destructive behaviors.

If you are an Aboriginal person living in Australia, this will almost certainly lead to incarceration and/or a decreased life span. The creative spark is a process that allows us to solve seemingly impossible problems. It involves representing real-life elements with metaphors, which transform tangible things into spirit, images in an abstract space. That is the action of the line at the top of the symbol. In that Dreaming space, the abstract entities can be manipulated and reorganized to find solutions to real-life problems. This is how the thought experiments in this book have been conducted. For a simple example of this Turnaround process, consider the way four apples and two hungry people can be translated into the abstract symbols of 4/2. The solution (=2) may then be found in the abstract space, transferred back to reality and applied to share the apples equally. If one person has more nutritional requirements than the other, then the abstract of 3:1 might be applied.

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

by cyril vouilloz (aka rylsee)