Polymita picta, common name the Cuban land snail or the painted snail, is a species of large, air-breathing land snail. Shells of Polymita picta can reach a length of about 20 millimeters (0.79 in). These large shells are shiny and very brightly colored. Normally they show a bright yellow color with a white stripe, but the species is well known for its colorful shell polymorphism, with numerous color varieties. These shells are sought after by poachers and used to make jewelry and trinkets. As a result, the species has become endangered.
I actually remember “The Blonde Vegan” pissing me off with her potentially deadly pseudoscience. I had no idea she ACTUALLY started slowly dying from this shit, tried to tell her audience, and got mostly death threats and body shaming from them in return.
The entire nebulous movement of Unprocessed Organic Food Hippie movement is so fucking evil. They should just be held down and forced to subsist on nothing but McNuggets .
I feel like it’s worth noting that her specific “clean eating” diet wasn’t just “no processed food”, but also no meat, no grain, no oil, no legumes.
This wasn’t something like the paleo or keto diet or even most vegan diets (which can be flawed but also practiced health and be substained and fine for many people with the right resources and information), but one that basically cut out a large majorly of calorie (and often nutrient) dense foods that most would consider healthy and alright in a standard diets.
Not that this thing wasn’t the result of how dangerous *diet culture* gets when mixed with notions of purity and body shaming and really bad science, but this was very much also a case of all that stuff mixed in likely serious eating disorders and becoming a community
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana..
This is one of my all-time favorite things in the English language.
Oh my god.
Listen.
I always kind of was like “I mean a banana is a fruit and fruit doesn’t fly and neither does a banana so yeah legit.”
ITS ABOUT FRUIT FLIES. ITS ABOUT THE TINY BUGS THAT LIKE FRUIT.
OMFG I AM 31 FUCKING YEARS OLD AND I HAVE KNOWN THIS QUOTE FOR AT LEAST 15 YEARS.
Did I ever tell you about “The entire world is a very strange carrot”?
n… no?
OKAY SO
A little background: when I first got into fandom, one of the things that delighted me tremendously was Nancy Lebovitz’s buttons: hand-calligraphed slogans, serious or frivolous or fannish reference or all of the above. More or less everybody wore at least a few; some people covered an entire vest with them. I gleefully bought several, and took home the paper catalog.
What reminded me of this, you ask? Well, I’m fairly sure “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana” was in that catalog.
Now the thing is, there were a lot of button slogans I didn’t get, especially in categories like “Silliness”. Generally I assumed that they were either references I didn’t recognize or just deliberate nonsequiturishness, so I didn’t particularly try to puzzle out the meaning of “The entire world is a very strange carrot, and the farmer is not worried at all” – any more than I did, for instance, “Heaven and earth regard the ten thousand things as straw dogs, and I feel fine.” (I have since googled that one, and by “since” I mean “just now”; the first part is apparently a reference to the Tao, but I still don’t get the whole of it.)
So a couple of years later (and this was maybe nineteen or twenty years ago now, sheesh) I was at a friend’s place one Shabbat afternoon, and we were sitting about singing, as we often did. And somebody started this song, and we all joined in.
Except that somebody sang gezer, instead of gesher.
And I said “No, it’s gesher. For bridge, like how the English version goes the whole wide world is a very narrow bridge. If you sing it gezer, then it would mean oh my GOD.”
And they all stared at me a little.
“The entire world is a very strange carrot!” I shouted, clapping a hand to my forehead in the classic eureka! gesture.
… aaaand they all carried on staring at me.
“But the farmer is not worried at all!” I explained.
…. and then I backtracked a little and told them where that had come from, and how I had just had the epiphany that it was a faithful translation of a garbled version of the song we had just been singing with just a few consonants being altered, and the upshot of it all is that I can never sing that song again without thinking of this, so you may have got off easy with the fruit flies thing is what I’m saying here.
Went to a beach after the recent storms in hopes of finding some neat stuff washed up. Turns out the 80ft tall blue clay cliffs don’t hold up well in 25mph winds and weeks of heavy rain.
We sat around and watched them essentially crumble. Its hard to tell but those muddy boulders are massive. As we walked along the stretch we could occasionally hear cracking and rumbling and would turn around and see huge sections of the cliffs collapse.
I didnt want to get close to the cliffs for obvious reasons, but stupid me did eventually approach the rubble and OH BOY am I glad I did!!
The cliffs are full of fossils!! Got a lot of these digging through the rubble.
Echioceras Ammonites and
Cylindroteuthis
belemnite I THINK. Which puts them around the Jurassic to late Cretaceous?? So thats like 50 to 150 million years old.
And I’ve never heard of this before but these ones are made of pyrite!!!! They are heavy like metal and shiny. Pictures just dont do them justice. They are like polished metal. They also smell really bad which is weird.
The one in the middle is about 2 inches long for scale.
I knew fossils could be made of material other than rock but I didnt think it was common???
We also pulled a “dino egg” out of the mud and cracked it open. Didnt expect whatever this is.
Some orange/brown crystals? I didn’t take the geode because it was bigger than my head.
hatred of disabled people doesn’t have to be blatant:
complaining about “people who walk slowly”
calling people with specific dietary restrictions needy/fakers/high-maintenance/etc.
insinuating someone isn’t responsible if they’re “living in their parents’ basement”/some variation thereof
insinuating that students with disabilities are actually “cashing in on special treatment”
praising what are basically snuff films about disabled characters
defending the casting of abled people for disabled roles
defending paying us lower wages
*swoons at the accuracy*
i used to complain about slow walkers because i was a selfish prick, now i walk with a cane and i’m on the receiving end of that shit
*raises hand* I used to complain about people who took the elevator to the second floor when I had to get to the 9th, now I’ve learned to consider it’s definitely a lot faster to run up to the 2nd floor, if someone is using the elevator to the second floor, it is probably because they need to.
And omg your slow walker story reminds me of how I used to zig zag at high speeds to get through crowds pre-disability, as well as reminds me how shitty it feels when I’m in my chair and trying to push myself towards the elevator and even though I’m closer, someone runs past me, into the elevator and closes it because I’m “too slow”. Yup, its happened a couple of times.
I will press the automatic door button for myself, and so many abled folk will rush in front of me because I’m slow that it’ll be closing as I go through. This happens at my university campus where there are literally four doors in a row, they could go through any of the three, but the fact that it is open (BY ME, FOR ME) makes that the quickest path, even though them darting through means I can’t get through any door lmao god damn
That’s another great situation to bring up! Prior to my experience with disability, I thought it seemed silly when I saw someone who appeared to be able bodied, push the automatic door button, now I know more about invisible disabilities, many people risk dislocation trying to pull those doors open, they NEED the automatic door or they need assistance. When my arm joints flare up, I can’t pull doors open either, at that point, I can barely pick up my phone or cut my own food
Also! People always talk about “manspreading,” but able-bodied people take up SO MUCH space. As far as I’ve experienced, this phenomenon isn’t limited to masculinity, it has so much to do with people subconsciously feeling that they have physical power over me. Able-bodied women may feel invaded and humiliated because people expect them to move out of the way; but as a disabled person, this has an impact on my everyday ability to get around. Able-bodied people move like fucking bulldozers.
When I see someone heading straight toward me, I can’t just step off the sidewalk to get out of the way. I’m trapped. If I’m in my wheelchair, sometimes people will literally grab my chair and move me without my consent. I have to constantly stop in the middle of the path and hope I don’t get run over. On multiple occasions I’ve been walking around with crutches and people have crashed into me, and they always keep walking without bothering to help me off the ground. When I try to get onto public transit, people never make space for me even if there’s a designated area for wheelchairs. Don’t even get me started on moving through crowdeds (hint: I can’t). Trying to join a conversation is difficult because people will stand in these little huddles and never think to scoot over, expecting me to peek into the group between their elbows.
It makes me feel like I’m completely invisible. People who limp or use mobility aids can’t move around the same way as everyone else not only because of our conditions but because we’re perceived as small, weak, and insignificant.
“not only because of our conditions but because we’re perceived as small, weak, and insignificant” ^^^^ yes. I am more disabled from doing thing by other people making actions inaccessible than I am by my own body impairing me from performing certain tasks.
My stubborn ass has had multiple injuries because I refuse to alter my path when able bodied come barreling through. They don’t give a single fuck.
My favourite is when I’m moving through a moderate crowd and people kick my walking stick from out under me. I’m just wobbling there like “Oh yeah, that’s cool. It’s not like I needed that to be upright anyway.” Or when they expect me to move over so far that my walking stick is off the kerb and is therefore useless. Seriously, sometimes I just want to be like…
… just so people realise that mobility aids are fucking important.
I have purposely stuck to using a folding aluminum cane, instead of getting something sturdier. Because I’m that much less likely to do some shovy asshole serious damage with it if I do snap one of these days. Know thyself 😒
Maybe my favorite so far was this one older woman maybe half my size who I swear brought both her hands up to push me right in the chest, so she could get on an already crowded bus before me. Almost fell over that time, it was so unexpected. There were also a bunch of people waiting who couldn’t have missed it, and nobody said a word.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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