“Omg look at this fucking shit, gluten free mascara, ahaha, people need to be fucking stopped.”
Yes, I’m sure the person with a wheat allergy wanting to avoid putting wheat containing things near their eyeballs is truly the reason society is failing.
Also if anyone does actually need gluten free mascara, Zuzu Luxe is one of the best I’ve been able to find. Hardly clumps and doesn’t flake off like a lot of the others. Their other products can be a little hit or miss texture wise, but the mascara is great.
I once saw a person point out that common allergens are in so many things, and it even has to do with “this facility uses it in another product but it’s still the same facility” and I stopped laughing. And then I felt bad. I was ignorant, but I didn’t think about like. My corn tortillas better not have gluten! They’re corn! And then I realized….same facility. Airborne particulates. Someone working on one line, accidentally dropping particulates in another line just by walking past.
Cause there are people who are *that* sensitive. And they deserve to be protected and have safe products.
I specifically do not take issue with people just not knowing things. Cause why the heck would anyone know things like that unless they ever had to? Why would you know wheat is a common ingredient in things like mascara or shampoo? I sure as shit didn’t till I started to piece together why my body went into meltdown every time I washed my hair.
What does get to me is how inherently shitty some people are about it. Like why is the first go to for things like this mockery? Why? I mean I know the answer is “society is inherently abelist even if people don’t realize they are doing it” but I’m still allowed to be frustrated by it. (It’s the same with infomercials. Those products are not lazy or worthless, they are designed for people with disabilities!)
And I know this seems like such an over reaction to something like someone in Walgreens being shitty over gluten free mascara haha. But it’s so much more than that.
So much of my daily life is emotional and mental labor just trying to spoon feed people how not to be unthinkingly meanall the time. And
it’s not like I can ever stop because this is my life. I am living in a
world not designed or meant to include me, so constant emotional and
mental labor is required to justify both myself and the things that make
my life easier.
And I wish people would just think with a little more kindness sometimes. That’s all.
Hey uh so, full disclosure here, my dad is gluten intolerant/has celiac disease, and I didn’t know that having non-food gluten-free products was important too… I thought it only affected you if you ate the thing.
So then I think the problem is that people don’t know enough about gluten-free and think it’s some fad, because if you’re not gluten intolerant/cursed with celiac disease, then going gluten-free has no benefits, right? (not knowing these things still doesn’t excuse people mocking others’ needs, though.)
The thing is neither do a lot of people with celiac disease. It’s not something all doctors mention to their patients as a possible source for issue or contamination (why? usually because the doctor diagnosing it will be a GI doctor and not always an immunologist, and that’s a problem cause celiac is an auto-immune disease), so a lot of us wind up wondering why we are still presenting with flare ups and other issues when our diet is so strict and we do everything we can to control symptoms through diet.
The latest trend of using wheat by-product to make compostable paper plates and cups has me on edge too, cause I’ve been handed a cup of water in one of those cups at a venue before and not realized until I’ve drank most of it and felt my throat start to constrict and realized that I am in Danger. And I’d have never known Why if the person hadn’t started talking about their cool hippy biodegradable cups which I thought were paper, but were paper spliced with wheat-by-product.
And the thing is, those things are marketed as “allergen safe” cause in theory the protein has been processed to death, but as anyone with severe allergies or celiac will tell you, even the smallest, tiniest amount can be enough to trigger a reaction.
So you’re right, not enough people understand what it is, or how severe it can be. And you could argue that part of this is because people treat it like a fad diet and a thing to be mocked vs say, a peanut allergy where people (though not everyone) respects the severity of what that can entail. But honestly, given how prevalent wheat allergy has become in the last couple of decades, it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people, even those without actual celiac, have found some sort of relief through cutting out wheat products (ie their issue is not necessarily gluten but wheat) so in all honesty, who gives a shit. Allergies, diseases and yes, even food preferences need to be fucking respected. Which they currently are not.
“Why would you know wheat is a common ingredient in things like mascara or shampoo?”
Well fuck me sideways, I never would have guessed and I have a wheat allergy.
YIKES. i did not know this. i have no idea whether the bath products i buy for my family have wheat in them, because it never occurred to me that such a thing was possible, so i never checked. i hope i haven’t been making nick sick with shampoo!
i used to laugh at things being labeled gluten-free that i thought would be without wheat by default, and i assumed it meant the manufacturer was jumping on a fad diet bandwagon. i wasn’t being ableist, i just had no idea that celiac was more like a peanut allergy than like lactose intolerance. so when i saw ‘gluten free’ on an item that had never had wheat in it to begin with – gluten free cheese or whatever – i would kinda sneer at it and go “ugh, they’re making it into a fad so they can jack up the prices, like they did with ‘organic’ ten years ago.”
there IS a fad, though, and it sucks. because it means things are getting called gluten free that aren’t, on the assumption that the kale smoothie brigade won’t know the difference, since they don’t actually have celiac and all their Amazing Results are just placebo effect. then nick eats it and gets sick and the whole family has steam coming out of our ears because the idiot who put that label on there is too far away to hit with a frying pan.
Everybody talks about Anastasia, which is a shame, because it’s a far less interesting example of Russian fake heir drama than that whole business with the False Dmitries.
Okay, so Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son,
Dmitry, was assassinated in 1591 at the age of 8. Fast-forward nine years, and there’s a guy going about Eastern Europe claiming that he is Dmitry, having secretly escaped the assassination attempt and lived in hiding under a false identity ever since. This sort of business isn’t too unusual, but this guy actually pulls it off, managing to gain the Russian throne and rule for nearly eleven months before being dragged from the palace and publicly executed in early 1606. He’d subsequently go down in history as False Dmitry I.
Here’s where it gets interesting. In mid 1607, a second impostor declares himself. Bizarrely, this one doesn’t dispute the first impostor’s legitimacy; instead, he claims to be the same guy, having miraculously survived his apparent execution the year before. He somehow wins the political support of False Dmitry I’s widow, and with her vouching for his identity, he gains the allegiance of the Cossacks, rallies an army over 100 000 strong, and tries to “take back” the throne. Though his march on Moscow ultimately failed, he successfully conquered most of Southeastern Russia, which he would rule until his untimely death in December of 1610, when he was beheaded in a drunken altercation with a Tartar prince. The history books know him as False Dmitry II.
Now jump ahead three months to March of 1611, when a third fucking impostor pops up. Dude apparently just magically appeared from behind a waterfall in goddamn Ivangorod and declared himself Tsar. Following the lead of False Dmitry II, he doesn’t dispute either of the two previous impostors, instead claiming some sort of spiritual reincarnation and/or magical resurrection – it’s not entirely clear which – to establish himself as the same guy. He must have talked a good game, because he managed to win the support of the same fucking Cossacks who supported False Dmitry II’s claim. Unfortunately, he was a far less able commander, being forced to flee his stronghold only a year later, whereupon he was spirited away to Moscow and secretly executed. Though he never managed to actually rule anything, historians decided to stick to the theme and dubbed him False Dmitry III.
At this point the historical record becomes confused, with some sources asserting there was a fourth False Dmitry, though others insist that the third False Dmitry was simply counted twice due to poor record-keeping. Still, whether we’re talking about three False Dmitries or four, imagine the whole mess from the Tsar’s perspective. Dude just wouldn’t stay dead!
This is called the Time of Troubles, and it was a catastrophe.
The thing is, after Ivan the Terrible and his elder son Feodor both died, there was no one left with a reasonable claim to the throne. Literally no one. Feodor’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov was crowned Tsar, largely because he was already the power behind the throne under Feodor, and it was relatively easy for him to seize power.
Dmitry died in 1591, when Feodor was still alive. The investigation into his death found that it was an accident, that he was playing with a knife and had an epileptic seizure; the accepted narrative for centuries was that Godunov had him murdered and covered it up; these days, we have no idea, both narratives sound plausible.
Unfortunately for Godunov, False Dmitry I was super convincing. He managed to convince a whole army, and when Boris Godunov suddenly died mid-war, he took Moscow, killed Godunov’s wife and son, raped his daughter, and crowned himself Tsar.
After which he was promptly deposed by Vasily Shuisky, a prominent nobleman descended from Grand Princes of Moscow before they were Tsars; Shuisky was in turn deposed by a coalition known as the Seven Boyars, who looked at False Dmitry II and at the Polish army that was, by now, outside their doorstep and agreed to crown the Polish Prince Władysław; the Polish army tried to forcibly convert the whole country to Catholicism, the country rose in revolt in response, Sweden invaded, False Dmitry III declared himself, was captured and killed, and eventually the resistance kicked the Poles out of Moscow.
Once the Poles retreated, the nobles decided to crown one of their own – Mikhail Romanov. He was the great-nephew of Ivan the Terrible’s first wife, but more importantly, he came from a reasonably prominent noble family, he was Russian, and he was young and easy to influence. Which is how the Romanov dynasty first came to power.
By the time things settled down, a third of the population was dead, Moscow was in ruins, and a bunch of land had been annexed by various neighbors.
I went to a vaguely pretentious academy that thought it was hot shit, as I’ve mentioned vaguely before (and it was, in the same sense a bag of shit on top a tire fire is lit) so we had lots of committees and stuff. I had to attend etiquette lessons and learn things like “how to host dinner parties and write formal invitations”, which in hindsight turned out to be a lot more useful in my life than algebra. So thank you Madame Williams, I still think of you every time I set out a European table setting for a formal event.
One of the other things we had to do was like, social skills and learning how to work with people on elaborate projects. This could mean organizing charity fund raisers, or things like our own school vacations. (We actually got to set up our own prom or “Leaver’s Function” as it was officially termed, which is why it was a hot mess, but that’s another story) Or in this instance, writing, producing and publishing a formal year book for the school records, and for our own keepsake.
Which went about as well as you’d imagine it would, when you give 17-18 year olds the power to write about each other. It was, to put it simply, total all out war.
It started out normally enough, those of us who wanted to be involved joined, and seen as how I was taking advanced lit, it was suggested to be a good activity for me. Cause y’know, all writing is the same. I was also joined by a couple of my theater friends and a lot of the art dept kids, and a few of the lads who were destined to go into careers in computer science who were told they had to participate because they were the only ones who knew how to work a laptop.
But there was also a large portion of the group who, shall we say, were not interested in playing nicely with others. I have no idea why. I suspect it came from thinking others hated them because they were gifted or nerdy, when in actual fact people hated them because they were assholes.
Anyway, it all went fine for the first few months. We were kept vaguely in line by a rotation of English teachers. And then for some unknown reason, the adult support dropped away entirely and uh, well remember those people who hated everyone else? Well, they started reviewing the year book as a means to revenge.
Articles that got written for clubs they were not a part of vanished. The sports teams lost their pages. Award winning students who were not part of the clique had their honorable mentions scrubbed. Suddenly there were three pages dedicated to the debate team. A page about charity work done by the “popular girls” was ““““jokingly””” reworded to read “Hoes In The Community” instead of “Hope In the Community”.
And when those of us who thought that was a little, shall we say, fucking deplorable, voiced our opinions, suddenly we were no longer included in group meetings. We’d show up to the tower on the third floor on Thursdays to find it empty. Jobs we were supposed to be doing got taken away from us. The photographer we spent weeks securing was cancelled and replaced last minute by the camera club, meaning all our photos turned out awful, and they all had to be done again by a professional, at extra cost cause it was a rush job.
The sponsors in the community we had found to help pay for the project dropped us because the charity work we were supposed to do in exchange for the sponsorship never happened. We had to scrabble to find a printer who would still produce a semi decent (leather hardback) book for a fraction of our previous budget. Which was roughly the point myself and several others said “fuck this, we quit” and washed our hands of the stress. Until one of my friends, Mark, came to find a group of us in the library one day at lunch and said “hey, uh… you should… you should probably see this” and pulled us all up into the computer lab to show us the final draft of the book which he’d stumbled across when one of the Assholes had left the laptop unattended over lunch.
And to find out that all of our articles were completely gone, our pictures had been changed for extremely ugly non-official ones, and our year book quotes, supposed to be written by our friends (so your image would have things underneath it from people saying nice things about you) had been rewritten to say things like “most likely to become a junkie” or “most likely to become homeless”, or in my case “most likely to start a cult”.
And true to form,
Mister Hadley, the piece of garbage that he was, had signed off on it—likely without reading it—and the book was approved to be sent to the publisher on the Tuesday, cause Monday was a bank holiday. And this, was Friday. So there was no way we could fix this. Even if we went to a teacher we had no time to rewrite it all and remake the whole book in time. Not when the school was closed on Monday and the books were meant to be part of a presentation for our formal graduation.
And people were understandably upset by it. One of my friends was in visible tears over being voted “most likely to wind up in a mental institute”, which I’ll admit, was the snapping point for me. We didn’t want our parents to see this, we didn’t want our names attached to it as being part of “The Year Book Committee”. This wasn’t the work we had done. And it would reflect as part of our final grades.
Now, with hindsight, I would hope that the printer would have taken one look at the vile shit that had cropped up under the photos and refused to print it, or at the very least, contacted the school. With hindsight we should have gone straight to our year head with the laptop and pitched a fit.
But I wasn’t thinking logically at that point. I was thinking with all the clarity and rage of a 17 year old who had just been voted “most likely to start a cult”, and I was willing to live up to that particular epitaph. So I proposed instead that we sneak into the school on the Monday when the school would technically beclosed, but was still open while the teachers were in doing work, and work to fix it. Whose with me?!
Cue a lot of coughing and ringing silence, until Mark, gods love him, a willing enabler to a lot of my impulses said “sure” with a shrug and agreed to help me.
Which was how, on a bank holiday Monday, my friend Mark and I went for an early morning stroll through the surrounding forest around the school, and just happened, happened, to come out by the tennis courts up on the west field, hopped the fence, and managed to sneak in through the gymnasium to get into the school proper, and wound up sitting in the computer lab with the lights off, pouring over a laptop so thick and heavy by modern standards it resembled a cinder block and likely weighed about the same.
It took us several hours, but we managed to remove all of the offensive content, and replaced it with the original rough drafts which we’d managed to piece together over the weekend. And what we couldn’t replace, we made up. Benign, bland pleasantries, which no doubt left a lot of people confused. But harmless in their banality.
Things like “going to miss you loads, xoxox” and “most likely to own a posh car one day”. That sort of thing.
We also swapped out the ugly photos for more pleasant ones. And just generally removed the spite from it. Because that’s not what year books are for. You’re supposed to move on from them, not freeze yourself in time through an act of vindictiveness.
But when it came to changing my quotes back, I hesitated over deleting the “most likely to start a cult” line, watching as Mark (several irn brus to the wind and a box of malteasers overwrought) typed up the very kind “most likely to write a best selling novel” comment provided by my friends, and said “actually keep it in.”
Which is why in my year book, I am voted most likely to write a best selling novel, but also, to start a cult. Because while I wasn’t so keen on the nasty things they’d written about other people, I absolutely wanted them to know who had made the changes to the file. I wanted them to open it up on the Tuesday to find a file with no previous saved versions and no other documents, and know that they had to hand it over, or fail.
And Mark, knowing me, and knowing what I was thinking, quietly and wryly joined me by writing the words, “most likely to become a hacker” next to his own name.
And hit save.
It was all very terribly dramatic and unnecessary, but so is everything when you’re 17. And the book was still an absolute piece of shit and dull as dish water. But at least no one was hurt by it.
“Omg look at this fucking shit, gluten free mascara, ahaha, people need to be fucking stopped.”
Yes, I’m sure the person with a wheat allergy wanting to avoid putting wheat containing things near their eyeballs is truly the reason society is failing.
Also if anyone does actually need gluten free mascara, Zuzu Luxe is one of the best I’ve been able to find. Hardly clumps and doesn’t flake off like a lot of the others. Their other products can be a little hit or miss texture wise, but the mascara is great.
I once saw a person point out that common allergens are in so many things, and it even has to do with “this facility uses it in another product but it’s still the same facility” and I stopped laughing. And then I felt bad. I was ignorant, but I didn’t think about like. My corn tortillas better not have gluten! They’re corn! And then I realized….same facility. Airborne particulates. Someone working on one line, accidentally dropping particulates in another line just by walking past.
Cause there are people who are *that* sensitive. And they deserve to be protected and have safe products.
I specifically do not take issue with people just not knowing things. Cause why the heck would anyone know things like that unless they ever had to? Why would you know wheat is a common ingredient in things like mascara or shampoo? I sure as shit didn’t till I started to piece together why my body went into meltdown every time I washed my hair.
What does get to me is how inherently shitty some people are about it. Like why is the first go to for things like this mockery? Why? I mean I know the answer is “society is inherently abelist even if people don’t realize they are doing it” but I’m still allowed to be frustrated by it. (It’s the same with infomercials. Those products are not lazy or worthless, they are designed for people with disabilities!)
And I know this seems like such an over reaction to something like someone in Walgreens being shitty over gluten free mascara haha. But it’s so much more than that.
So much of my daily life is emotional and mental labor just trying to spoon feed people how not to be unthinkingly meanall the time. And
it’s not like I can ever stop because this is my life. I am living in a
world not designed or meant to include me, so constant emotional and
mental labor is required to justify both myself and the things that make
my life easier.
And I wish people would just think with a little more kindness sometimes. That’s all.
Also people have a weird desire to catch you “lying” about an allergy? There’s a preservative used in a lot of artificial caramels that I’m allergic to, and my aunt used to get so mad because she was convinced my mom was lying about it. Once when I was a toddler she offered me a bowl of ice cream with this really smug look on her face while I ate it—a look that quickly died once I started projectile vomiting all over her brand new couch. Yup she hid the caramel in the ice cream.
Feeling miserably sick for a while aside, the look on my aunt’s face at the state of her couch was rewarding
HGSKL ALL THE TIME, PEOPLE DO THIS ALL THE TIME AND IT IS NOT OKAY
wait i’m sorry if this is a dumb question but why in the fuck is there gluten in mascara?
Wheat and wheat by products are common thickening ingredients in a lot of cosmetic products, but it is also used for other properties in cosmetics too. Hydrolyzed wheat protein for example, is often found in anti-ageing creams and some liquid face soaps because supposedly it can help to smooth out the appearance of wrinkles and refine skin texture.
(you’ll sometimes see it listed as wheatgrass or wheatgerm too)
So it’s not that unusual to find it in beauty products. Also even if it’s not being used directly in the product, if the product is made in a location that does use wheat for other things (like a face soap) there’s a chance of cross contamination somewhere along the production line. Which is why gluten free certified facilities are a thing for both food and non-food products. To avoid cross contamination.
For some people with celiac and gluten issues, topical application is not a problem. But in others who are more sensitive or have a straight up wheat allergy, it can appear as atopic dermatitis or present as lesions like dermatitis herpetiformis. Or it can be a more severe reaction like anaphylaxis. It all depends on the individual, and those of us with compromised immune systems (such as having an auto-immune disease like celiac disease) are at higher risk of either having or developing those kind of reactions through exposure.
So that’s why 🙂 And why it’s important that things like soaps, shampoos and make up brands etc list whether they are gluten free or not. Although it’s important to note that just because some products are gluten free, that does not make them wheat free, so if your concern is wheat allergy, gluten free brands are a safer bet for you, but it’s also still a good idea to thoroughly check the ingredients.
I want to clarify that if you are celiac you cannot ingest any gluten, a protein from wheat and other related cereal due to this cereals affects the vellosities from the guts destroying them so the nutrients can pass to the circulatory system.
You can put any product with gluten in your skin even you are celiac but not if you have an allergy to wheat because you could have an allergic reaction and a ride to the hospital if it is severe.
Always talk with your doctor and check the labels.
Except for some people with celiac, skin contact absolutely can be enough to trigger some form of reaction 🙂 Not the same kind of reaction they experience through ingesting it i.e. gut and intestinal problems, pain, fatigue, brain fog, etc but problems all the same, usually presenting as some sort of rash or skin problem that no one can figure out until they put two and two together, somehow come up with five, and realize it’s the stuff they’re applying to their skin topically.
It’s not generally how celiac works, and the research on it is limited (but lets face it, a lot of the medical criteria for diagnosing and treating celiac is poorly done to begin with. I know so many people who were diagnosed later in life after significant damage was done because they were told they didn’t have celiac cause their doctor only did the blood test and not the biospy) but it is not impossible either, and there’s quite a few people in the notes with celiac chiming in to talk about issues with skin sensitivity reactions—who do not have a wheat allergy.
It was my own immunologist who told me about gluten and skin sensitivities. And he’s not some crunchy hippy “I got my degree online” doctor either. Proper board certified fully licensed “seen a lot of weird cases so I keep an open mind and listen to my patients” doctor.
So, y’know, yes what you are saying is typically thought to be true, but it’s not the exclusive celiac experience either.
I have spent the last 8 horrified/fascinated hours digging down the rabbit hole of a famous Cornell University marketing professor’s fake-research empire crumbling as soon as anyone actually looked at his methods and it just keeps getting crazier the more I look. Among other highlights, the Joy of Cooking copyright holders actually caught him before the scientific community did.
For reference: this is a dude who has mostly worked in the psychology of food and nutrition. He got famous for publishing a whole lot of catchy studies about what makes people eat more or less, and you’ve probably heard some of his stuff that got turned into huge media soundbites. Probably his most famous one was an experiment where they served people soup, but half the people had trick bowls that were connected with a tube to a pot of soup under the table so they constantly refilled, and he claimed people ate more without realizing. I remember reading about it in Muse when I was in middle school and everything. This dude is a tenured professor at an Ivy League school! He’s done TED talks! He’s authored books! He’s done speech tours! He was a policy advisor for the USDA!
He published a paper that requires you not to notice that the amount of food eaten by children and the amount not eaten add up to more than the amount served in all three categories.
Half his papers are >40% copy-pasted from other papers of his. In one case the data table was copied over, despite allegedly being from a different study. He allegedly sent out three different surveys to three different demographics several years apart and got exactly 770 back for all of them. (In one case this was a 77% response rate. For a randomly mailed survey.) One of his papers claimed in the text to have been conducted on 8-11 year-olds, but was actually conducted on toddlers age 3-5. Another paper claimed Pringles weigh 11 grams each. (For metric-challenged Americans, that’s basically the weight of two quarters.) Sometimes what was in charts didn’t match what was reported in the paper text. Sometimes graphs were misleading. Sometimes his reported sample sizes changed within a paper.
Stephanie Lee at Buzzfeed News seems to have been leading the journalistic charge on this, but if you feel up to reading scientists talking about statistical analysis, more of the gory details of exactly how bad this is are over here.
I especially recommend the links to James Heathers’ SPRITEanalyses, because he’s hilarious even though I only know, like, 30% of the statistics involved. (At least read the first one, for the statistical analysis that concluded that one of the children in the study was secretly a Clydesdale.)
The Joy of Cooking thing is summarized in this New Yorker article: a letter This Dude published in 2009 claimed JoC’s recipes had gotten 44% higher in calories per serving since it was published. The people who owned the estate pointed out that he’d only looked at 18 recipes in the cookbook, out of 4500. He claimed there were only 18 that had been in it since it was first published. Since they were working on putting together a new edition, they found that there were 245. It turned out that he’d only looked at things that had exactly the same names, which resulted in comparing some totally dissimilar recipes, AND that some of the recipes he’d looked at didn’t even specify serving size. When all the rest of this broke, the Joy of Cooking Twitter dragged him into the ground in exactly the tone you would expect from the Joy of Cooking dragging someone into the ground.
In short:
The whole story has been going on for well over a year, too – Chronicle of HIgher Education ran a story on his p-hacking issues in March of 2017 when it appeared that he might just have made a few typographical errors and maybe wasn’t aware of latest developments in the field of statistics, rather than just being a full-on fraud. It’s well worth a read, they interview him and he does a very early attempt at charming spin control.
They talk a lot about why he might have been published even if people noticed his math/methodology was wrong, the gaps in the gates at peer-reviewed journals and such, but I suspect a lot of it is that he was frequently “confirming” stereotypes about the relationship between food, self control, and obesity.
i mean, all you have to do is confirm that fatties are weak and bad nonpeople, and everyone will fall over themselves to publish you, because they’re all terrified of fatness and become stupid with relief at the idea that they won’t become unhumaned by fat because they are not weak and bad.
I can’t stop thinking about crocodiles for some reason so here’s some cool pictures I found of probably the second largest one in captivity, his name is Utan:
isn’t he beautiful
listen to the SOUND when he bites
and that’s not even a real power bite, that’s mostly just heavy bone falling on heavy bone from his jaws and the air rushing out from between them
2000 pounds of Good Boy
you get me
I honestly expected like 5 notes, what HAPPENED here
More tags on this ridiculous post:
Wait, thats the 2nd biggest crocodile? Then what does the biggest one look like?
That would be Cassius, a very old Saltwater crocodile who is estimated to be around 114 years old and lives at Marineland Melanesia in Green Island, Australia. His official measurement is 5.48 meters, which makes him the largest in captivity currently. Because Utan is only slightly smaller and much younger, (only in his 50s), he will likely break Cassius’ record eventually. But for now, Cassius holds the title:
He is NOT, however, either the largest crocodile ever captured in Australia OR the largest ever in captivity.
A slightly larger crocodile has been reported (though not yet comfirmed) to have been captured at 5.58 meters.
And while the famous Brutus of the Adelaide River was estimated to be just slightly larger than Cassius at 5.5m, he was driven out of his territory by a younger and even larger crocodile, who as a result has been given the name, The Dominator. He is estimated to be just over 6m.
This is Brutus, with an appropriate caption:
It is believed that he lost that arm in a fight with a Bull Shark.
The Bull Shark lost.
THIS is the crocodile who kicked him out. The Dominator:
And that’s STILL not the biggest.
The largest living crocodile ever reliably measured was Lolong, who for the 1.5 years between his capture and his death was the largest crocodile ever held in captivity, at a whopping 6.17 meters (20 feet 3 inches) and 1075 kg (2,370 lbs). He had been feeding on both humans and very large livestock in the Bunawan creek in Agusan del Sur in the Philippines. It took 100 people all night to drag him to shore during his capture.
And here’s why:
Also, to prevent credit from getting buried on a separate reblog, I have been informed that the above image of the crocodile with the cartoon eyes and halo was made by @rashkah! (And it is wonderful and I would like to thank him for its existence, because it perfectly captures my feelings about terrifying giant primordial reptiles.)
As far as Brutus is concerned I was led to believe that he lost that arm when relatively young.
Since then Brutus developed a habit of hunting and eating Bull Sharks.
Here’s him with a prey.
And if you thought that you’ll be safe if you just stay out of Australia then think again!
Meet Gustave the Nile Croc.
This crocodile became almost legendary for both it’s size and the habit of hunting both livestock AND humans.
So how big is Gustave?
No one is sure. Since he was NEVER captured.
His estimated size is of at least 5,5m but some give him over 6m.
The terrifying parts are:
1) He is still growing having only about 60 years.
2) Adult crocodiles often perform a gesture of submission to him – something usually done by young crocodiles toward adults – Gustave is just THAT BIG.
3) His sheer size makes it difficult for him to catch agile prey Nile crocs tend to feed on – hence why he developed a habit of hunting either larger prey like Hippopotamus or creatures which are not good at spotting danger in the first place like livestock and humans.
And this is NOT ALL.
Gustave actually has a noticeable scars on his body – he was shot at east 3 times and stabbed with a spear or something similar at one occasion.
He lived to tell the tale – my question is:
What happened to that one dude who attacked Gustave with a spear?
*Crocodile Dundee voice* Mate, that’s not Gustave:
THIS is Gustave:
And he is the PERFECT CROCODILE. He is the perfect example of what I mean when I talk about (as I do) how the morphology of extremely large crocodiles adapts to the changing physics of their bite.
This is a typical adult Nile Crocodile:
And THIS is a god among his kind:
This is it, folks. The Final Form. THIS is what peak performance looks like.
Crocodiles and physics have an interesting relationship. Crocodiles have, by a CONSIDERABLE MARGIN, the strongest bite of any animal on Earth. EVER. Scaled up estimates (based on Nile and Saltwater crocodiles) give the extinct Deinosuchus an estimated bite force MORE THAN DOUBLE the recently updated Tyrannosaurus bite estimates. Living crocodiles have bite forces measured in the range of 5000 pounds per square inch, for an individual around 15-16 feet. It is estimated that modern crocodiles in the range of 18-20 feet would have bit forces around 7-8000 psi or more.
That’s a problem.
Because a crocodile’s skull is only designed to handle so much pressure. Go beyond that limit and the force of impact when those jaws snap shut could literally shatter their own skulls.
But evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting crocodiles, so PHYSICS ISN’T GOING TO STOP THEM. What ends up happening in the skulls of these extremely large crocodiles is they will increase dramatically in mass to compensate for the increased forces. A crocodile’s skull is almost exclusively solid bone, with only minimal space for nasal passages, a surprisingly advanced brain, and some slightly porous looking framework that helps the bone distribute the force over a larger area. The effect is by far the most pronounced in Nile crocodiles, which most regularly feed on larger prey and need to make use of all that power.
Compare, 26 inch skull:
vs 29 inch skull:
Both of those are Nile crocodile skulls (or rather, replicas thereof).
And just for fun, here are the skulls of completely different (and very extinct species), Deinosuchus:
and Purussaurus:
The bigger the crocodile (within a given species), the more massive the skull needs to be to compensate for that UNBELIEVABLE bit pressure. This is one way to see from a distance whether you are looking at a normal sized crocodile:
and a truly extraordinary individual:
One of the things about Gustave that’s so impressive is how healthy his teeth look. A lot of large crocodiles, in their old age, have very worn down and often missing teeth. They do replace them many times over a lifetime, but when they get very old this slows down. Gustave, at least in every picture taken of him, had teeth that were in very good condition.
Even crocodiles much smaller than Gustave’s reported size (probably similar in size to Dominator or Lolong) tend to have smaller or more worn teeth:
than the pinnacle of his kind:
Lolong! It means Gramps or Grandpa, because he’s a relic of an ancient world where crocs more massive than he was walked the earth. His body is on display somewhere right now though I forgot where.
Every time I see this post there’s more crocodiles. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
I have never seen an advertising campaign more evil, more insidious than the one for the army currently airing in the UK
“This is belonging”
We’re introduced to a group of earnest young men. they’re white, they’re black. they drink tea. they play practical jokes. they quote popular TV shows. they talk about sports. they face their fears. it’s loving and domestic and all too easy to overlook the guns and camo and helicopters blaring overhead.
make no mistake, these adverts are aimed at the young and disenfranchised. poor people, people of colour, people who have been bullied and abused by society and made to feel like they don’t belong anywhere. Join the army, they’re told, and you can have the love and acceptance you crave but have always been denied. Elsewhere, you might get called racial slurs. you might get called a pansy or a fairy, but not here. You belong with us.
For example: Islamophobia is rampant in the UK. here we have an advert of a Muslim soldier praying while his squadron, armed to the teeth, sits in silence. the message is clear – while the rest of society may despise you, here, you will be respected. this is belonging.
here’s one called ‘expressing my emotions’, featuring a white man in his 40s – practically the posterchild for the UK’s current mental health crisis.
you don’t have to worry about bottling up your feelings in the army. after all, this is belonging.
here’s another one called ‘can I be gay in the army?’. we’re told: “I was really worried about whether I’d be accepted, but within days, I was more than confident in being who I was.” Clearly homophobia is a thing of the past in the army. don’t worry. this is belonging.
and it works. while the response to these adverts from an unfortunately vocal number of people is basically “fuck you, we’re racist and proud of it!” there are young people being taken in by this. I have met gay children, trans children who are determined to join the army because, after being rejected by their parents and peers, they’re now being told “here you will be accepted. here you will be loved.”
fuck that. don’t be groomed; don’t let the vulnerable and desperate people in your life be groomed. we need to fight the root causes of these problems in our society and stamp them out so that wielding a gun and cowering in some blown-out building in a country you helped destroy is no longer seen as some sort of salvation. fight racism. fight homophobia and transphobia. fight the stigmatisation of mental illness. fight the system that prioritises the rich and leaves the rest of us to rot.
don’t be taken in by something that offers easy answers, chews you up and spits you out, destroyed, guilty, with PTSD and nowhere to go. where do you belong when you can’t fight any more? where do you belong when you can no longer be used?
i just want to add that not only is the UK the only country in Europe that recruits 16 year olds (known as ‘recruitment of child soldiers’ when other countries do it), they also target their recruitment to secondary schools in economically deprived areas with high long-term unemployment. in areas where there is a sense among kids that they should move somewhere else as soon as possible, the army tries to be the first people kids encounter to offer that.
Yeah, they play these ads in cinemas as well, it’s why i stopped going in at the scheduled time and waited till AFTER the ads before entering
Today is Armistice Day, and so we as a nation wrap ourselves in an uncomfortable tension; pride, joy, loss and sorrow mingling with awareness and anger.
On this Armistice Day, let’s remember all the people who fought in our armed forces because they didn’t think they had other options. Let’s remember the times when our politicians have used our forces as a blunt instrument for personal political gain. Let’s remember unjust wars. Unneeded wars. Wars that gobble up our young, our poor, our needy – and drain the money that could have been spent on our most vulnerable.
War has a cost. Don’t let our political situation draw us into mindless complacency and blind nationalism.
Our military-industrial complex is not to be praised or lionised. Remember our veterans, used up and thrown away by a country with no more use for them. Remember the children recruited to feed our seemingly endless wars, in far-away places we can comfortably ignore. It’s true that 16 year olds can’t serve on the front line, but they can’t just quit if they turn 18 and don’t want to be deployed to combat. 16 year olds can’t drive, can’t vote, can’t drink – but they can sign their life away?
We need to reform our military, the way we use it, and the way we treat our serving soldiers. Not cover our bloodstained hands in poppies and hide their costs under empty promises of remembrance.
Esther McVey, Secretary of State for work and pensions has just resigned.
Looks like these are being timed hourly to build momentum. It could be to leverage a leadership challenge.
Currency has taken a bit of a tumble.
Some random Brexit Minister has resigned. (This is *a* Brexit Minister, Dominic Raab has already resigned as Brexit Secretary)
Ranil Jayawardena, someone who *absolutely everyone* knew existed, as just turned over a serious resignation that will shake this government to the very core.
Or not.
What I find inherently funny is that these idiots (And they are indeed idiots) thought that the UK would come out on top of any Brexit deal. Brexit was and is a stupid fucking idea pushed by extremists and built on lies perpetuated by Russia. They have been presented irrefutable evidence of this, and still push an agenda that less than forty percent of the adult voting eligible citizens voted upon, and that what the majority of those people have changed their minds on because they’ve learned they’ve been lied to. No matter what happens, if they keep pursuing a Brexit deal, people can and will die because of it. Companies are fleeing the UK at an ever accelerating rate because of it, which is the exact opposite of what the Brexiters said would happen, they knew this was a lie even back then. People *are* going to riot because of Brexit if it goes through, and people *will* die because of it.
Me; The fact that whole wheat flour is more expensive than bleached white flour is elitist bullshit.
Some poor person in the baking aisle of Hy Vee “What?”
My husband; oh no
Me; WELL IT ALL STARTS WITH THE DOMESTICATION OF GRAIN AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE CLASS SYSTEM
Okay kids buckle in you asked for it.
White bread, for a very long time, was something that only the wealthy could enjoy regularly since white flour takes considerably more time and effort to produce than whole grain flour. You have to grind it extra fine, sift it, ect. Therefore, it has historically been more expensive, and still should be because it takes more steps to produce.
HOWEVER, since it was something that was harder to produce, serving white bread was a ‘special occasions’ sort of thing, which led to ‘rich people showing off how rich they were by serving it regularly’. Poorer people, meanwhile, got their regular whole wheat flour, which incidentally is better for you but we didn’t know that at the time.
(Also, whole wheat tastes better, white bread is just bland. Whole wheat bread tastes sort of nutty and delicious.)
So for the vast majority of time this was how things were. Until modern industrialization made producing white flour on a large scale easier, and all of a sudden you had white bread that ordinary folk could afford!!! So of course it is hugely popular immediately amongst the middle and lower classes. Enter the age of Wonder Bread, where you can buy your bread pre-made and sliced!!! White bread with no labor from you, cheap enough for ordinary folk to afford!
So of course, when everyone can have white bread, the upper classes now have to find a way to be Better again. This dovetailed nicely with the discovery that, hang on, whole grains are better for us than bleached white flour, and the rising craze among the upper classes for fitness (Because being soft and plump is no longer something that only the rich can achieve, so of course now being slim and toned is more desirable)
Enter the rise of the popularity of whole wheat sprouted grain artisanal bread for $10 a fuckin loaf, and the fact that if you want to buy 5 pounds of whole wheat flour, that logically should be cheaper as it still takes less effort to produce, you’re going to have to pay about a dollar or two more than if you buy the same amount of bleached white flour.
And don’t give me shit about supply and demand, because whole wheat and white flour are made from the same exact thing, but one just has more steps involved in production. You’d think companies would be thrilled about this, but nah, they know that upper class people feel More Important Than The Peasants when they pay extra for their whole wheat flour so here I am, a humble middle class drone who wants to make her own whole wheat bread because it is tastier and better for you, paying $5.17 a bag for whole wheat flour when white flour is $3.48
It’s classist bullshit.
In Victorian era (do I love some silly Victorians, ha), the fashion for white bread and its more or less general availability came with an interesting side effect: with their… love for substitutes, bakers pretty much had no choice but to replace flour with substances with no nutritional value if not harmful. It was easier on the health of the richer, as their diet had more variety, but very harmful for the people for whom bread was the main source of calories.
Yep. The number of bakers cutting their white flour with plaster dust, chalk, alum, or similar was absolutely stunning.
It led, eventually, to the establishment of trading standards legislation and the appointment of inspectors who could sample and test food products like flour and level heavy punishment on people selling products not up to standard.
The British Sale of Food and Drugs act was the ancestor of the United States’ modern FDA.
Haven’t bread sigils been a thing since Roman times or something, to prevent bread from being cut with bad shit, or from bad flour being used?
Yep the romans had laws about it, but that whole legal system kinda crumbled with the empire.
You and I can never go grocery shopping. It’d turn into an episode of Good Eats meets Adam Ruins Everything but with us.
This just makes me want to go to a Whole Foods store with you TBH
I want to watch and munch popcorn.
Episode 2 is me finding the spice aisle and going on a three hour rant about the total discrepancy between the prices paid to the producers of spices and the prices paid by the end consumer, because it isn’t 1640 anymore we can ship a lobster from Maine to Tokyo in half a day there is no reason my spice merchants should be paying the Badanese women who own the trees and actually produce the spice a few dollars a pound and then turning around and charging me an arm and a pint of blood for a handful of whole nutmegs.
The second half of the episode is me showing you how to make a recipes from the 1640s in a microwave, but only after an educational segue from the part of the world the spice comes from and how the locals use it.
Pearls are clutched as it is revealed that authentic Italian blends should not contain garlic, as garlic use in China predates it’s existence as a wild herb in Italy by some 6000 years. Your meatballs are a lie but that’s okay, here’s how to make them anyway.
Yo @systlin and @thebibliosphere do either of you happen to know why all of a sudden so many people are gluten intolerant? Like, what happened?? What’s going on??? Why is this happening to us??
(Speaking as a person who has gluten intolerance, I love bread so much that it hurts, and I gave it up (along with everything else that has gluten in it, which is a whole lot of stuff tbh) for six whole months, but then I just completely snapped and went back to eating whatever I want.)
It’s not so much that more people are ‘suddenly’ gluten intolerant as ‘we’ve figured out what causes the thing and are diagnosing it accurately now rather than shrugging and saying ‘guess demons cursed you to suffer when eating’’
And a lot of people currently avoiding gluten out of some idea that it’s bad for them even thought they do not have celiac disease or gluten intolerance, because gluten free is the current ‘low fat’ diet fad.
Though I suppose it DOES make gluten free foods more available for people who DO legitimately need to avoid it, but seriously, people, unless you actually have celiac or gluten intolerance you can eat some bread.
Due to the prevalence of celiac in my family we’ve had a lot of discussions about how many more people are getting diagnosed with it in these last few years. I think at least some of it has to do with how many more people with the genetic predisposition for it are growing up and having kids of their own- my mum was ill throughout most of her childhood before anyone figured out why and, especially before mainstream vaccinations for kids, a disease like measles would easily wipe out the kids already suffering from a compromised immune system.
Studies into how our gut fauna aids digestion of gluten and how those particular types of bacteria are potentially passed on through generationsconvinced my brother that the current rise is due to the changes made to diet in the last century along with greater survival rates of people with the condition and more awareness for people with less severe types of gluten intolerance to be diagnosed.
Still, I’m by no means an expert on any of this and for all I know the ideas have already been debunked and I just haven’t been looking in the right places. Please correct me if this is the case.
The fad dieters don’t annoy anyone in my family too much since while at times we haven’t been taken as seriously, at least it’s far easier to find decent food in regular shops that we can afford and actually eat. yeah, it’s a horrible idea for most people to cut such a large and important part out of their diet but we certainly aren’t complaining about the rich people who’ll probably move onto the next new thing in a couple of months when they realize it isn’t helping them.
Very probable. In a world where the main form of caloric intake was bread and there was no vaccination to protect people with weaker immune systems, people with celiac disease likely died far younger. Now, of course, we can realize what’s wrong and say ‘yeah no, just avoid gluten, get vaccinated and have regular checkups, and you can live a long and happy life.’
But yeah. If nothing else, the gluten free fad has put gluten free food in a much more obtainable position, so that people who actually need it can get it.
I can bore people about the colorful history of celiac disease forever! but the BEST takeaway Fact is this:
In the 1940s, the connection between celiac disease and gluten was discovered by the Dutch physician Willem Dicke, who oversaw a hospital ward of children with celiac disease. The mortality rate of these children was over 35%, until –
Oh! Sorry! Was that shocking or something? Yes. Over thirty five percent of children would die. The children were taken from their parents and put in the hospital because they could not grow. They were malnourished, their brains couldn’t develop, they were weak and disabled and cognitively impaired – and over a third of them were expected to die. Heartbreakingly and in pain. That’s celiac disease, you know, that’s just what it does…
Is that surprising? You know what’s funny – in the Victorian era bananas were marketed as the first superfood, because babies fed on banana seemed to be protected from death by celiac disease. Desperate Victorian parents in Europe would scour the cities for the priceless and rare banana, in the hopes of protecting – or saving – their children from this ghostly and horrific disease. This scourge, this wasting illness that took your bright-eyed chubby cheerful nursling and turned them dull-eyed and listless, screaming when touched, their hair falling out, failing to thrive and all your dreams failing with them. So that’s partly why bananas had such a marketing boom! To this day, people are obsessed with giving bananas and banana-flavoured things to babies, a hangover from a time when people thought they could prevent a deadly and incurable disease! Fun fact. Fun fact.
Anyway, more than a third of little kids with celiac disease were expected to die and the disease was incurable – a life sentence. Back to Dr Dicke, a Dutchman in the 1940s in the Netherlands; you can see where this is going.
Dr Dicke stayed with his ward when the Nazis invaded and began the Hongerwinter, the Hunger Winter, the Dutch famine of 1944. This was very hard for the medical staff, who fed the sick children on the water that they had boiled tulip bulbs in, and so on. But Dr Dicke noticed that his celiac ward, while starving to death and being lightly poisoned by tulips, were also cheering up a bit. The other kids were dying as normal, but the celiac mortality rate went from 35% to zero. “Weird,” said Dr Dicke, who was an admirable scientist despite the stress of looking after dying babies in a starving Nazi-occupied city.
Then the Nazis agreed to let the Canadians air-drop in some food. Naturally, bread was an obvious choice. The Canadians dropped bread on Amsterdam. People grabbed the bread, and some of it made its way to the Hospital for Sick Children, because people are kind. And Dr Dicke took some of the precious life-saving morsels and went straight to his sickest kids, his celiac kids. He was being kind.
aaaaaand they went right back to dying.
“Fuck me!” Said Dr Dicke, “I have solved the medical mystery of a disease that has plagued Western civilisation since the ancient Greeks.”
And just like that, it really was just like that, celiac disease stopped being a death sentence for little weanling babies.
Fun fact!
I mean, I know it’s obvious that modern culture has mindlessly forgotten the events of WW2, but fun fact: we don’t shove bread-and-milk down the necks of three month old babies anymore AND WE KNOW BETTER NOW, and all those babies who would have died from it got to grow up, and got to pass that critical stage of growth where you die from malnourishment.
they got to grow up into a generation that laughs at the accessibility and availability of gluten free food.
Fun fact!
This was a ride from start to finish and also you all need to get a Netflix series stat
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.