museum idea: old household appliance senior friend home

museum just full of blenders and toilet plungers and microwaves and vacuum cleaners that people have pack bonded with and can’t bring themselves to consign to a landfill

little placards written by the original owners explaining why and how they determined that this particular object had a soul

ALT

A thoughtful chubbin. 1956. Source.

European Skipper

Luther Marsh Wildlife Management Area, Grand Valley, Ontario, July 19, 2023

Me: [Wakes up in the Guinea Pig Dimension]

Elder Guinea Pig: You're awake... You were dreaming the whole time that you were a human, but you're actually a Guinea Pig

Me: How do you know that

Elder Guinea Pig: What

Me: How do you know what my dreams were

Elder Guinea Pig: Wheek wheek wheek

I've just re-read the short lived duel that Aeneas and Achilles have in Book 20 of the Iliad and it's actually the most hilarious fucking thing.

So it starts out with Apollo disguising himself as Lycaon, one of Priam's many sons, and telling to have a go at Achilles. Keep in mind that this is post-Patroclus Achilles. Aka: berserk Achilles. Aka: so fucking mad he would fight a literal river Achilles.

Aeneas, who is capable of critical thinking, says he doubts he can actually take him on. He also references a time when he was herding cattle on Mount Ida and Achilles ambushed him, adding that the only reason he survived then was because Zeus gave him enough strength to book it (cracking up the official times that he's been saved by a god from certain death to 3, you go dude!).

However, after a bit of back and forth and a ton of hyping up on Apollo's part, Aeneas decides to try anyway.

Like, what could possibly go wrong?

Achilles notices Aeneas charging at him and he begins to taunt him. It's something among the lines of: "I'm sorry, are you, background trojan character #61, actually gonna try and beat me? And then what? Do you think that Priam will reward you in some way? Maybe making you king after him? Well it's BULLSHIT, because Priam fucked so much that your chances of succeeding him are basically 0. Ahah. Loser."

Now, you'd think that maybe Aeneas got enraged at the comment and attacked him, or maybe he even got scared and backed down, but NOPE. What does Aeneas do?

Well, first of all, he insults Achilles' insults, comparing his bickering to that of a child. Literally, "I heard third graders do better than that." And then he decides to list his and Hector's entire fucking family tree.

You know that part of the Bible that's like "this guy sired this other guy, and this other guy sired yet another guy" and so on? It's basically that.

So after he's done with all that, Aeneas states that while he'd love to have a battle of insults with Achilles, because according to him he's actually very good at insulting people (his words, not mine), they should probably throw hands now. Achilles agrees.

The duel is shortlived and Aeneas gets his ass handed to him. Badly. As expected. And he's about die when ✨️POV shift✨️ we're not on Olympus where Poseidon, Hera and Athena are watching this absolute train wreck go down.

Poseidon, pitying Aeneas, suddenly goes on a rant. It's something among the lines of: "come on guys, look at him, he's just a little guy! He literally has no stakes in this war, he doesn't deserve to die here! He even gives us lots of gifts and sacrifices, he's literally such a nice guy. How can we do this to him!?

...oh and also he's part of some prophecy, Zeus would get mad if he died."

The fact that the way it's worded makes it sound like Aeneas being part of a literal prophecy is an afterthought to him absolutely floors me, Poseidon is literally just attached to a random dude that's fighting on the opposite side to his because he thinks he's nice.

After all that Hera is pretty unimpressed and states that she really doesn't care if our man lives or dies as neither her or Athena have ever saved a Trojan from death, she however adds that Poseidon is free to do whatever he wants.

The literal moment Hera stops talking, Poseidon lunges down from Olympus and onto the battlefield to look for the two combatants. When he does, he saves Aeneas like only he can do.

You know how when Diomedes first tries to kill Aeneas, Aphrodite gently folds her hands around him to shield him? There's none of that here. Poseidon just runs up to him and literally flings the motherfucker.

It literally says that he flies "high in the air". It's like a Looney Toons sketch.

So Aeneas lands and, while he's obviously a bit dazed, Poseidon proceeds to call him a madman and essentially tells him to never do something stupid like that again and just wait until Achilles is dead, then he'll be able to murder Achaeans to his heart's content. Aeneas is fine with that.

Achilles, who just saw his opponent just get yeeted into the fucking sky, just shrugs and goes "welp, guess that guy's off limits, I'm gonna go kill someone else now I guess lol".

This entire scene is pure fucking gold and the fact that I've literally never seen anyone talk about it just breaks my heart.

it’s crazy how much diversity there can be in one species…these are all pictures of the same bird species (red-tailed hawk)

what they all have in common:

manager i cant come to work today i forgot how to mimic the behavior of a human. being

oh! I have to tell you guys a great story one of my professors told me. So he has a friend who is involved in these Shakespeare outreach programs where they try to bring Shakespeare and live theatre to poor and underprivileged groups and teach them about English literature and performing arts and such. On one of their tours they stopped at a young offenders institute for women and they put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet for a group of 16-17 year old girls. It was all going really well and the girls were enjoying and laughing through the first half - because really, the first half is pretty much a comedy - but as the play went on, things started to get quiet. Real quiet. Then it got up to the suicide scene and mutterings broke out and all the girls were nudging each other and looking distressed, and as this teacher observed them, he realised - they didn’t know how the play ended. These girls had never been exposed to the story of Romeo and Juliet before, something which he thought was impossible given how ubiquitous it is in our culture. I mean, the prologue even gives the ending away, but of course it doesn’t specify exactly how the whole “take their life” thing goes down, so these poor girls had no idea what to expect and were sitting there clinging to hope that Romeo would maybe sit down for a damn minute instead of murdering Paris and chugging poison - but BAM he died and they all cried out - and then Juliet WOKE UP and they SCREAMED and by the end of the play they were so upset that a brawl nearly broke out, and that’s the story of how Shakespeare nearly started a riot at a juvenile detention centre

Apparently something similar happened during a production of Much Ado at Rikers Island because a bunch of inmates wanted to beat the shit out of Claudio, which is more than fair tbh

honestly Shakespeare would be so pleased to know his plays were nearly starting brawls centuries into the future

I played Claudio once and I fully support this

“When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side…there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.” And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period.”

Oskar Eustis

dear god please let our new baby octopus feel confident enough to move out of her corner hiding spot today while i’m on exhibits so i can see her properly for the first time amen

she stuck out a single arm before changing her mind and deciding the rest of the tank is too scary, far too scary by far she is scared

meagahan

Okay, let me tell you a story:

Once upon a time, there was a prose translation of the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was wonderfully charming and lyrical and perfect for use in a high school, and so a clever English teacher (as one did in the 70s) made a scan of the book for her students, saved it as a pdf, and printed copies off for her students every year. In true teacher tradition, she shared the file with her colleagues, and so for many years the students of the high school all studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the same (very badly scanned) version of this wonderful prose translation.

In time, a new teacher became head of the English Department, and while he agreed that the prose translation was very wonderful he felt that the quality of the scan was much less so. Also in true teacher tradition, he then spent hours typing up the scan into a word processor, with a few typos here and there and a few places where he was genuinely just guessing wildly at what the scan actually said. This completed word document was much cleaner and easier for the students to read, and so of course he shared it with his colleagues, including his very new wide-eyed faculty member who was teaching British Literature for the first time (this was me).

As teachers sometimes do, he moved on for greener (ie, better paying) pastures, leaving behind the word document, but not the original pdf scan. This of course meant that as I was attempting to verify whether a weird word was a typo or a genuine artifact of the original translation, I had no other version to compare it to. Being a good card-holding gen zillenial I of course turned to google, making good use of the super secret plagiarism-checking teacher technique “Quotation Marks”, with an astonishing result:

By which I mean literally one result.

For my purposes, this was precisely what I needed: a very clean and crisp scan that allowed me to make corrections to my typed edition: a happily ever after, amen.

But beware, for deep within my soul a terrible Monster was stirring. Bane of procrastinators everywhere, my Curiosity had found a likely looking rabbit hole. See, this wonderfully clear and crisp scan was lacking in two rather important pieces of identifying information: the title of the book from which the scan was taken, and the name of the translator. The only identifying features were the section title “Precursors” (and no, that is not the title of the book, believe me I looked) and this little leaf-like motif by the page numbers:

(Remember the leaf. This will be important later.)

We shall not dwell at length on the hours of internet research that ensued—how the sun slowly dipped behind the horizon, grading abandoned in shadows half-lit by the the blue glow of the computer screen—how google search after search racked up, until an email warning of “unusual activity on your account” flashed into momentary existence before being consigned immediately and with some prejudice to the digital void—how one third of the way through a “comprehensive but not exhaustive” list of Sir Gawain translators despair crept in until I was left in utter darkness, screen black and eyes staring dully at the wall.

Above all, let us not admit to the fact that such an afternoon occurred not once, not twice, but three times.

Suffice to say, many hours had been spent in fruitless pursuit before a new thought crept in: if this book was so mysterious, so obscure as to defeat the modern search engine, perhaps the answer lay not in the technologies of today, but the wisdom of the past. Fingers trembling, I pulled up the last blast email that had been sent to current and former faculty and staff, and began to compose an email to the timeless and indomitable woman who had taught English to me when I was a student, and who had, after nearly fifty years, retired from teaching just before I returned to my alma mater.

After staring at the email for approximately five or so minutes, I winced, pressed send, and let my plea sail out into the void. I cannot adequately describe for you the instinctive reverence I possess towards this teacher; suffice to say that Ms English was and is a woman of remarkable character, as much a legend as an institution as a woman of flesh and blood whose enduring influence inspired countless students. There is not a student taught by Ms. English who does not have a story to tell about her, and her decline in her last years of teaching and eventual retirement in the face of COVID was the end of an era. She still remembers me, and every couple months one of her contemporaries and dear friends who still works as a guidance counsellor stops me in the hall to tell me that Ms. English says hello and that she is thrilled that I am teaching here—thrilled that I am teaching honors students—thrilled that I am now teaching the AP students. “Tell her I said hello back,” I always say, and smile.

Ms. English is a legend, and one does not expect legends to respond to you immediately. Who knows when a woman of her generation would next think to check her email? Who knows if she would remember?

The day after I sent the email I got this response:

My friends, I was shaken. I was stunned. Imagine asking God a question and he turns to you and says, “Hold on one moment, let me check with my predecessor.”

The idea that even Ms. English had inherited this mysterious translation had never even occurred to me as a possibility, not when Ms. English had been a faculty member since the early days of the school. How wonderful, I thought to myself. What a great thing, that this translation is so obscure and mysterious that it defeats even Ms. English.

A few days later, Ms. English emailed me again:

(I had, in fact searched through both the English office and the Annex—a dark, weirdly shaped concrete storage area containing a great deal of dust and many aging copies of various books—a few days prior. I had no luck, sadly.)

At last, though, I had a title and a description! I returned to my internet search, only to find to my dismay that there was no book that exactly matched the title. I found THE BRITISH TRADITION: POETRY, PROSE, AND DRAMA (which was not black and the table of contents I found did not include Sir Gawain) and THE ENGLISH TRADITION, a super early edition of the Prentice Hall textbooks we use today, which did have a black cover but there were absolutely zero images I could find of the table of contents or the interior and so I had no way of determining if it was the correct book short of laying out an unfortunate amount of cold hard cash for a potential dead end.

So I sighed, and relinquished my dreams of solving the mystery. Perhaps someday 30 years from now, I thought, I’ll be wandering through one of those mysterious bookshops filled with out of print books and I’ll pick up a book and there will be the translation, found out last!

So I sighed, and told the whole story to my colleagues for a laugh. I sent screenshots of Ms. English’s emails to my siblings who were also taught by her. I told the story to my Dad over dinner as my Great Adventure of the Week.

…my friends. I come by my rabbit-hole curiosity honestly, but my Dad is of a different generation of computer literacy and knows a few Deep Secrets that I have never learned. He asked me the title that Ms. English gave me, pulled up some mysterious catalogue site, and within ten minutes found a title card. There are apparently two copies available in libraries worldwide, one in Philadelphia and the other in British Columbia. I said, “sure, Dad,” and went upstairs. He texted me a link. Rolling my eyes, I opened it and looked at the description.

Huh, I thought. Four volumes, just like Ms. English said. I wonder…

Armed with a slightly different title and a publisher, I looked up “The English Tradition: Fiction macmillan” and the first entry is an eBay sale that had picture of the interior and LO AND BEHOLD:

THE LEAF. LOOK AT THE LEAF.

My dad found it! He found the book!!

Except for one teensy tiny problem which is that the cover of the book is uh a very bright green and not at all black like Ms. English said. Alas, it was a case of mistaken identity, because The English Tradition: Poetry does have a black cover, although it is the fiction volume which contains Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

And so having found the book at last, I have decided to purchase it for the sum of $8, that ever after the origins of this translation may once more be known.

In this year of 2022 this adventure took place, as this post bears witness, the end, amen.

The English Teacher and the Mysterious Translation: A Coda

It was Christmas.

An English Literature teacher had fallen down a rabbit-hole of curiosity, and with the aid of several different persons and resources, discovered after much effort the origin of a long-beloved translation of the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in determination to know at last the name of the translator, purchased a copy from an online vendor, settling in to wait in eager expectation.

As the days went by, I was kept busy with the ever present exigencies of lesson prep, grading, and teaching, but eventually I noticed that it was several days past when the package was due to arrive, and resolved to check the tracking number.

Keep reading

I love the term “loanwords” because it implies that you intend to give them back.

*dumps a box full of words on French’s front porch* You never came back for your shit.

Loanwords, loaned to the British Museum so

Would everyone like to know the best thing??? There are two types of borrowed word - loan words and calques. Loan words are words taken directly from the language i.e. tattoo, sushi, guillotine. Calques are words literally translated from the language before being borrowed i.e. beer garden, scapegoat, killer whale (incorrectly calqued, the original actually means whale killer which is a whole other post).

Did anyone notice the fun thing?

Loan word is a calque (German lehnwort lit. Loan+word) and calque is a loan word (French calque - tracing or imitation). Have a good day!

With Chrysina limbata around, you won’t need a mirror! This species has an especially shiny exoskeleton, reflecting up to 97% of the light that hits it. In the wild, the mirror-like reflective surface may fool potential predators into thinking the beetle is just a drop of water- effectively serving as conspicuous camouflage.

(Image: Close-ups of Chrysina limbata by Michael Farmer)

If you like what I do, consider leaving a tip or buying me a ko-fi!

the ideas that “libido and attraction can be separate and for many aces they are”, “aces who have and enjoy sex are still ace” and “aces who do not have sex and don’t want to shouldn’t be pressured” and “you should accept aces regardless of their sexual behavior” can and should coexist