Quoth the Rodent Queen, "Squeak."

It's Fossil Friday! Behold the dazzling colors of an iridescent ammonite (Placenticeras intercalare). A relative of today’s squids, this ammonite lived some 80 million years ago near what is now Alberta, Canada. This fossil’s spectacular coloration is the result of millions of years of high temperatures and pressures. As these forces acted on nacre in this ammonite’s shell, it was transformed into a gemstone known as an ammolite. Along with amber and pearl, ammolite is one of only a handful of gems made by living organisms. You can spot this rare specimen in the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Collections Core in the Museum’s Gilder Center.

They're gonna be so spoiled with fresh forage all summer & then so sad when winter hits. They got grass, plantain, dandelion, and raspberry leaves today.

Jack also added their first cage furnishings! Both boys are enjoying hiding under them & have climbed on top too! We have a couple other things planned to get, but won't be cluttering the cage up much since that can cause more fighting. They've been doing REALLY great, it's been at least 5-6 days since I've seen any bullying behavior.

White-nosed Coati (Nasua narica), family Procyonidae, Costa Rica

Source

MST3K is the show where they insult American colonialism and take the piss out of Donald Trump repeatedly in the first season in 1989 and then, do racist Asian accents for joke because they do accents for EVERY character so it takes seasons for them to realize that maybe that's not okay. Joel spends several seasons being kind of a hard-core feminist and then when Mike shows up, they do too many transphobic jokes even though Mike will dress in drag in the same episode.

Tom and Crow almost get married and Dr Forrester officiates while wearing rainbows and Mike ONLY disapproves because they jump into it too quickly but then they'll fetishize two women characters who do something queer coded. You have GPC, whose name in the first 12 seasons is literally a slur and is kind of a goofy female character for the sake of having "the girl" and then they slowly add Mary Jo Pehl to the cast of supporters and then have her play Pearl fcking Forrester - a fat, intelligent, devious, commanding badass evil scientist who I kind of want to be when I grow up. They use "Inuit" in a great joke and then in the second joke in the SAME EPISODE which is about how Indigenous culture is valuable, they use the e-slur. How?!

And yet, there's an episode with a movie that merges what is clearly actual stock footage of somewhere in Africa and white people in blackface dancing around and the writers and crew not only point out which is which, but carefully determine which is which so that they're careful not to make fun of the actual footage - just the racist caricatures. Like..??? In 1997???

MST3K is like this beautiful smorgasbord of political takes of the time, of flawed advocacy and allyship, a snapshot of a small group of people who - despite their shortcomings in some ideas - would be shunned as "woke" today by the jokes and criticisms they were making back in 89. And that's not including the changes still being made with Jonah and Emily - and who knows what else when Mike comes back.

Five Sunflowers, 1888