Tag: facts

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

ANNUAL REMINDER:

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such an arrangement, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.

Holy Moses! That snake fooled me, too!

I cannot get over how persuasive the movement is of this snake’s “faux-spider” tail lump-and-floofs is. Structurally, it looks practically nothing like a spider; it’s like a skin tag put on a feather boa. But the way the snake moves it is an amaaaaaaaazing piece of puppetry. I could watch this video all day.

If you want more danger noodles, here’s the excellent Ze Frank explaining how kangaroo rats put snakes in their place:

If you’re looking for a monstrously overwritten 1870s guide to NYC brothels, then you’re in luck!

…’cause the whole damn thing is digitized online: and free for all: A Vest Pocket Guide to Brothels in 19th-Century New York for Gentlemen on the Go

Choice bits include these sick burns on pg. 19 (original page numbering):

Text from "A Gentleman's Directory (of NYC Brothels)" published in 1870. Reads: "The establishment Spring street is a house of assignation kept by Hattie Taylor, It is 8 third class house where may be found the lowest class of conrtezans. It is patronized by roughs and rowdies, and gentlemen who turn their shirts wrong side out when the other side is dirty. The house NO. 114 PPL05 is kept by Mrs. Palmer. It is a low eatablishment and frequented only by the fagends of the community."

and this bit:

Text from "A Gentleman's Directory (of NYC Brothels)" published in 1870. Reads: "No. 127 W. 26th street is & ladies boarding house of the second class, kept by Madame Buemont. There is a report of a bear being kept in the cellar, but for what reason may be inferred. There is not anything else attractive about the place."

I’m gonna admit that I’m extremely naive and just say it: I cannot infer the reason the bear is kept in the cellar. Our sex ed class didn’t cover this. Can someone please explain?

I also love the reasoning highlighted on pg. 7 (annotation #3), because it’s literally Skinner’s “I was only there to get directions on how to get away from there!” gag from the the old “Marge vs. the Burlesque House” episode of The Simpsons:

Recommended Listen: Rick Rubin interviews Tom Hanks

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin: Tom Hanks

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t always agree with Rubin’s choice of guests. But when this show is good, it’s really, really good. This episode with Tom Hanks is a really good one. I always love listening to accomplished craftsmen discuss craft (as I’ve said before, if there was a documentary interviewing accomplished old plumbers called “Talking Toilets,” I’d be there). In part, I just enjoy hearing the intricacies of any craft. But I also like the consistency that I hear across crafts and craftspeople, and it boils down to something like this:

In order to be good at a craft, we need to accept and embrace the fact that we are an intelligent conduit for that craft. We are nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

Hanks says basically that in a gajillion little different ways here, and each is worth hearing.

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such a arrangment, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.

A fun halloween read!🎃👻⚰️🔒

A fun read for those interested in revenants, vampires, European history, grave robbery, and quixotic Jewish funeral rites—SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE!!!

(gift link below) 

“Undying Dread: A 400-Year-Old Corpse, Locked to Its Grave: In 17th-century Europe, the dead were a constant threat to rise again and bedevil the living. Now archaeologists have found the remains of a suspected child revenant.”

Let Us Consider the Scaly-foot Snail

The scaly-foot snail (also known as the “sea pangolin” or “volcano snail”) is a deep-sea hydrothermal-vent snail. It doesn’t just differ greatly from other marine gastropods, or from other deep-sea gastropods, or from other gastropods in general; it differs greatly from everything.

The species was discovered in 2001, living on the bases of black smokers in the Indian Ocean, and wasn’t properly named until 2015. It lives in the  “midnight zone” of the ocean, an abyss darker than the far reaches of our solar system, where the only light comes from the bioluminescence of other animals. To survive down here you need to be your own biome. In this case, that means housing symbiotic gammaproteobacteria in its esophagus. These bacteria subsist on sulfur, and in turn sustain the scaly-foot snail.

i.e., The scaly-foot snail lives on the largesse of bacteria that eat brimstone.

Now about those scales and it’s shell:

They are made of iron. The scales on its foot overlap like roofing tiles, forming a flexible plate-armor.

“Each shell layer appears to contribute to the effectiveness of the snail’s defence in different ways. The middle organic layer appears to absorb mechanical strain and energy generated by a squeezing attack (for example by the claws of a crab), making the shell much tougher. The organic layer also acts to dissipate heat. Features of this composite material are in focus of researchers for possible use in civilian and military protective applications.”

“Scaly-foot gastropod” via Wikipedia

These are the only living animal known to use iron in their skeleton. That shell rusts as they age.

They are under two inches, mostly. Those two smooth, pink, forked “cephalic tentacles” aren’t eye-stalks, as they might be on land snails; the scaly-foot snail has no eyes. It has no copulatory organs, either. But it nonetheless has “high fecundity,” as it is a “simultaneous hermaphrodite”—it has both types of sex organs at the same time, and can produce both types of gametes within the same breeding season. If told to go fuck itself, the scaly-foot snail can and will, and won’t take offense. 

That might be because it has a bigger heart—relative to its body—then any other animal, around 4% of it’s volume.  By comparison, a whale or human heart is closer to 1/4 or 1/3 that proportion.

Let us consider the scaly-foot snail. They—for each of them is most decidedly a they—have iron bones on the outside, and are armored where their cousins are so notoriously gooey.  They thrive on brimstone down in the hell-fires bubbling deep beneath everything we know or recognize.  They are so little, and so alien, but they’ve got a while lotta love to give. 

There’s a lesson here, I’m sure of it—but I’m helpless to articulate it in any clear way, try as I might.