Thob: To express ones opinions and ideas.

“Yes good”

“AND EAT THE BAD ONES”

“Wait no”

“EAT THEM”

You better watch out

You better watch out

It’s not unconstitutional to refuse a double-lung transplant to a woman who refuses to get the COVID-19 vaccine, an Edmonton judge has ruled.

Annette Lewis went to court seeking to preserve her spot on the Edmonton Lung Transplant Program’s wait-list after doctors told her she would not be eligible because she is not immunized against COVID-19.

In a decision filed Tuesday, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Paul Belzil dismissed Lewis’s argument that her Charter rights had been violated.

He ruled the Charter has no application to clinical treatment decisions and, in particular, has no application to doctors establishing criteria for lung transplantation.

[…]

Once the COVID-19 vaccine became available, respirologists with the transplant program determined it was in the best interest of pre-transplant candidates to be vaccinated because of the significant risk COVID-19 presents to highly immunocompromised transplant recipients.

Court heard that during the fourth wave of the pandemic between September and November 2021, nearly 40 per cent of Edmonton lung transplant recipients infected with COVID-19 ended up dying.

Continue Reading.

Raven getting wrapped up

The media seems to gloss over the fact that fifteen victims were hospitalized, as if the fact that they survived is some kind of exhale, a happy ending.

My brother survived and has lived with a bullet in his brain since he was shot at seven years old. He can’t hold a job, can’t leave the house, suffers from severe PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

My best friend Dani survived and lives with PTSD and a body full of shrapnel from being shot five times at close range with hollow point bullets.

I have two friends who survived Columbine and now are confined to wheelchairs for the rest of their lives, dealing with the many medical complications that come from living with paralysis. They are also plagued by pyscho Columbine killer fans who stalk them, and gun nuts who accuse them of being crisis actors.

Pat, a boy I dated in high school, was an EMT who airlifted kids out of Columbine. The trauma from that day destroyed him. He suffered terrible PTSD and lost his career. He was in a tailspin for years.

We often hear about the 45,000 Americans killed by guns every year, but rarely do we hear about the more than 100,000 gunshot victims who survive, and the family members whose lives are shattered.

We don’t hear about the grueling trials, medical bills, the lifelong physical and emotional complications, the inability to work.

We don’t hear about those who survive the loss of a loved one; the grieving parents, widows, and children left behind.

The media rarely reports on the trauma experienced by the witnesses, the EMTs, the police, the people who clean up the blood and the mess.

We don’t hear about the marriages that crumble in the aftermath, the parents who die of heart attack or cancer, or suicide, after the loss of a child.

We don’t hear about the mothers who give up their own lives and lose their careers so they can care for an incapacitated child, or the community members whose sense of safety and justice has been forever shattered.

The victims of Uvalde are countless. Think of the children and teachers who witnessed the deaths, the ones who attended the dying, who attempted and failed to save lives. Most, if not all of them, will live with PTSD, nightmares, and depression. Most of them will likely never feel safe in school or at any public event again. It will affect their work lives, their relationships, the way they raise their children.

Gun violence is a monster with vile tentacles that reach far and wide. It is a public health crisis of epic proportion to which our nation’s GOP legislators have turned a blind eye, while offering nothing but hollow “thoughts and prayers.”

So what can you do?

I am begging you to VOTE in every election. Every single one.

To SPEAK UP against this sick gun culture, even when it’s uncomfortable.

To hound your Senators to pass sensible gun reform.

Put this number for Congress in your cell phone (202) 224-3121. Use it often. You will be able to reach your two Senators and your member of Congress. Tell them to pass Universal Background Checks. To ban assault weapons (we did it before, we can do it again). To pass Ethan’s Law (Safe Storage).

And lastly, do not give up hope. We fought the tobacco lobby and eventually overcame. We fought the religious lobby and eventually passed marriage equality.

We can topple the gun lobby, but it will take all of us. We can’t afford for anyone to sit on the sidelines.

At the scene of every mass shooting, witnesses say, “I never thought it could happen here.”

It can.

It will.

You can dance if you want to

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

al aqsa mosque this morning, one of the holiest sites of islam, and during the holiest month

western news sources are calling what took place here “clashes”

tell me - do you see a clash of equal forces? or do you see israeli soldiers pushing elderly grandparents down stairs, beating women unprovoked, firing live ammunition and grenades inside a place of worship, and worshippers ducking for cover as soldiers indiscriminately fire at them?

I think I realized this when I had went to see my dad and stepmom one day and asked if I could place my hawk’s food. (A rabbit leg) in the freezer. My step mom was disgusted by the idea that a leg from an animal was in the freezer meanwhile an entire chicken was sitting in the fridge.

Your rotisserie chicken is an entire chicken.

Your pork chop is a hunk of pig.

Your rack of ribs are from a cow’s rib cage.

It’s like Americans view meat as colorful red and pink hued shapes that just exist and come into the world packaged.

You see so many people getting harassed or even having their content flagged for showing how to process or field dress meat when it’s at it’s freshest. Right after culling. For some reason this is considered “gore” by many folks when in reality it’s no more different from plucking a processed chicken after cull.

You also notice that Americans have an idea of what’s normal meat and what isn’t normal meat and there’s racist undertones that I’ve noticed in a lot of these comments left on foreign cooking videos

You have people that claim a video of a man in a different country preparing something like this is “eating a dog.” Meanwhile this is roasted goat.

You have people who’s only perception of an edible fish is in fillet or fish stick form and they call something like this nasty because “Eww there’s a head!” Yeah.. most animals have heads..

Worth a try