The umbrella is paramount

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss’s calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.

some quilts by Jonathan Shannon (1938–2016) photographed at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles

Canciones de Mi Padre, 1989

From My Garden of Earthly Delights, 1992

Amigos Muertos, 1994. Rejected from the American Quilter's Society show due to the inclusion of Shannon's red AIDS ribbon (left skeleton). Shannon had won Best in Show the year before. Shannon organized protest letters as a result and made some impact on the issue of censorship in quilting.

Pond skater manhole cover

Okay good. Now go outside and try to garden. I need you to become rapidly disillusioned with it. Like you just don't find it enjoyable at all. The sun is too hot, or it's too cold, It takes consistency you don't really have time for, you're hungry, you don't have time to shower and make it to work, you --yeah I know gardening is hard and it's hard to do it. That needs to be your main takeaway! A sense of a nonspecific wound-- oh shit sorry, yeah I'll cover my mouth when I cough where are the fucking napkins.

But the key point here: from what I can tell, cyanide has been the main method of getting gold out of the ground for the last 120 years. (Yes, this process is still used today.) Before this technology came along, instead a thin coating of mercury was spread onto a copper plate, and the ore was allowed to wash over it. The gold stuck to the mercury, creating an amalgam, and then the amalgam was scraped off the plate and the mercury was boiled off (urk) to leave the gold behind.

And when processing mills shut down historically, why bother to dispose of your leftover deadly chemicals properly, when you can just bury them in your local tailings pile, which is already contaminated with mercury and arsenic? The known case of this happening in my local area was revealed through a bloom of “Prussian Blue” (ferro cyanide) on the surface of the tailings. Luckily, this is a fairly stable form of cyanide. Unluckily, geologists are crazier than archaeologists and they went ahead and dug a sample test unit right next to it, even knowing what it was, because science.

Since I’m seeing a few people tagging or commenting with the assumption that this post is about US history: this is a Canadian blog, based on my experiences in Canada, and this mine waste phenomenon is, unfortunately, a problem in much of the world. Nova Scotia, for example, had three separate “gold rush” phases from the 1860s to the 1930s.

Also, bonus content for those who are startled/fascinated by the arsenic concentrations, here’s a sample page from the Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) report by Mike Parsons et al., showing arsenic concentrations at Mooseland, which isn’t a site I’ve worked on, but is noteworthy because one soil sample was over one-quarter arsenic. The site I worked at with a “tablespoon of soil to kill six people” calculation was less than half of that.

And for added context, the “acceptable and safe” concentration of arsenic in the soil on an industrial site, if I remember right, is 31mg/kg in Nova Scotia. The lowest sample shown here is over 6,000mg/kg.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).