Please Sir, can I have some human rights?

unfortunately, because she is also a ~100yr old green sea turtle, i legally cannot touch her. she’s a protected species, and a fairly prominent individual at that, and im not one of the aquarists who dives into that tank NOR am i a vet, so i’m not among the handful of people who are ALLOWED to give her scratchies. she knows all of the divers personally, and knows that i am not one of them. she doesn’t care. she wants attention and because she’s the specialest princess in the entire universe she will do anything in her power to get it.

she also throws a big ol tantrum when i end up not petting her. she’ll stick up her head to snort water at me, slap at the platform and ladder with her fins, and then swim under the dive platform and bump her shell against the bottom — she’s a 500lb turtle, which is a lot of weight for her to be throwing around. i usually have to move pretty quick to get off the platform and onto solid ground cuz there have been times where i’ve genuinely felt like i was about to lose my balance and REALLY didn’t want to end up falling into the tank.

How to Defend Books and Why

Danny Caine

Listen on Audiobook

You're invited to the book revolution!

Fight back against censorship and empower your community with this close look at the book banning movement.

In a moving, compulsively readable call to arms for readers everywhere, Danny Caine, bestselling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why, offers an expertly-crafted confrontation of far-right, Christian nationalist attempts to reshape American culture through ban campaigns targeting schools, libraries, bookstores, and prisons, with the aim to silence marginalized identities in life and in literature.

From the first-ever banned books display at San Francisco's City Lights in the 1950s to the rapid rise of so-called Moms For Liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic to attempts to silence Palestinian authors, Caine charts the course of repressive censorship campaigns, along with the creative and sometimes unlikely activists who've stood up against them.

Each chapter is based on a particular book banning episode, bolstered by research and legal precedent, and concludes with helpful takeaways for further reading or resistance.

Throughout, Caine approaches these heated issues with gentle openness harkening back to his work as a public school teacher and a bookseller.

He emphasizes our collective responsibility towards art, free speech, and each other.

Do you gender trans people correctly even when they're being absolutely terrible people? Do you refuse to use the r-slur against someone who suicide baited you but is neurodivergent? Do you refuse to snark at a mentally ill person who is being genuinely unpleasant, "go take your meds!"

Do you allow members of marginalized groups to be terrible people without judging their entire demographic for it? One of the most invisible yet vital forms of privilege is the right to be terrible people as an individual rather than as a group. Do you acknowledge that there are bad people in every group, that it doesn't make their group less worth fighting for? Or do you shake your head if you happen to get mistreated by some who belong to a group and insist the entire group is awful and not worth your allyship?

It has come to my attention that some of you have never seen what I firmly believe to be the greatest music video of all time: Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. It is the perfect marriage of a galactically bombastic power ballad and a writhing mass of 1980s video clichés, thrown into the path of a wind machine and blasted down a moodily lit corridor into the realm of legend.

In case you’re wondering what the heck they were thinking of when they made it, I remember Bonnie once explaining on TV that it’s about the dreams of a headmaster’s daughter, hence all the boys in (and out of) uniform. In retrospect, the whole shebang is quite fascinatingly female gaze-y, and I’m pretty sure it was a major formative influence on my pubescent imagination.

Steinman told Playbill in a 2002 interview that he wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as a vampire love story. He said its original title was “Vampires in Love.”