randwolf

The plaque beside this painting says that it was created by students at Easthampton High School in 2019.

Nice job, students! Very evocative painting you've made.

The stars that were seen as bears in parts of Eurasia were also seen as bears among North American and Siberian peoples, and the brightest stars in the Great Bear have also been seen as a ladle (or dipper), a plough, a wagon, a rudder, a shrimp, and a crocodile, among other things. (These facts brought to you courtesy of Wikipedia.)

An earthly bear is gazing up at a spirit bear. The earthly bear made of fur flesh bones blood seems completely at ease near the spirit bear made of earth water sky, not abashed or frightened in the least. The spirit bear is looking up and away, maybe at the stars, but grows from the sunlit grass the earthly bear is sitting on. Maybe the earthly bear can teach the spirit bear something about daylight life that the spirit bear wouldn't otherwise know. Maybe the spirit bear is the earthly bear's dream.

Lots of possibilities. Meanwhile, close by, there's Corsello Butcheria--Italian Beef!--Every Day! and sunlight catching the ripple of the bricks.

solarbird

I’ve been calling for people to post pictures, video, whatever, of their towns when Herr Fuckface describes them as war zones, as hellholes, as whatever he pukes up this time. Particularly Chicago, and now, extra particularly Portland. But any blue city or state he lies about.

Post the truth.

On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel requested people do that too, using the hashtag #ShowMeYourHellhole. They’ll look for and highlight some of those videos and contact you if they want to use it, so only use it on video you specifically want seen by as many people as possible.

Post your reality; use the hashtag to help other people see it, if you’re okay with the one in a million shot that they ask you to let them use it on Kimmel.

In reality, of course, they’ll mostly be checking YouTube and maybe other corporate social media, not cooperative spaces like the Federation. But he’s famous enough that if he calls for a hashtag, a lot of people will use it, and in this case, that’s no bad thing.

So – Portland. Chicago. Los Angeles. Memphis. DC. You in particular, but not just you…

…mods are asleep. Post your reality.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

solarbird

Pamela Bondi went before Senate Oversight on Tuesday determined not to testify to Democrats, and to help Republicans deflect and defend the Trump regime’s fascism. That’s obvious; it happens fairly regularly.

But usually, people doing this routine at least pretend to answer the questions. They don’t provide answers, no, of course not. But they pretend and follow forms.

Bondi wasn’t even pretending. Her responses were unrelated, spurious – and as Senator Schiff put it, “pre-canned” – attacks on and insults of Democratic questioners, over and over again. We couldn’t be entirely sure of it at the moment, but Reuters managed to photograph her notes during her “testimony”, and now we absolutely know for sure they were prewritten.

Later, she started launching these prewritten lie clusters during questions, while Democratic senators were speaking. Here’s an example of her interrupting Senator Schiff over and over again with literal unrelated whatabouts and insults.

Eventually, I guess she ran out of pre-installed lie clusters, because she ran out during a response to a question from Senator Whitehouse and froze up. She literally couldn’t seem to talk.

It’s quite the clip. Watch her, she just shuts down. Here’s the moment she realised she didn’t have anything left so couldn’t come up with another lie cluster attack and just sits there, stalled out:

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) posting "has anybody ever been more obviously full of shit than Pam Bondi is at the end of this 20 second clip?" over a video of Pamela Bondi not saying anything with "An error occurred" superimposed over the image below her face.

(I swear to you – I swear to you – I did not add that caption over the video. It was a player issue. But I couldn’t not keep it, now could I?)

But I do think there was a point here, and it wasn’t just not answering questions while giving Republican Senators time to lie and deflect on behalf of the regime. That’s all too normal.

No, I think the intent was to show their utter contempt for the legislature. I think this a stupid version of Caligula’s expression of contempt for the Senate, when he said he was going to appoint his favourite horse as a member.

(He didn’t actually do it, legend aside. The record is reasonably clear on that. He just mocked them with the idea.)

At least Caligula’s version was funny. This, by contrast, is just sad. But sad or not, I do think there was a point, and that point was to display contempt for representative government and to metaphorically blow a horse’s fart in the faces of elected representatives.

And I think that’s something people should understand.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

asakiyume

A couple of weekends ago was the B'town fair. I didn't get to see the parade, but I did seize some time to go to the exhibit hall and the 4-H tent. The theme for the fair this year was "Shake, Cattle, and Roll" (lots of good entrants for the brochure cover contest...), and inside the hall was this poster with cow** facts:

(You can click through to see it bigger)

These are amazing! Cows only sleep three hours a day? They are great swimmers and can swim for miles? I had no idea ...

Though ... it gives me a wicked desire to make up other cow facts that aren't true at all. After all, if a kid's display is going to have me believe that cows can swim for miles and steer with their tails, what else might be true?

--I have perfect night vision
--I have a kind of moo I use only with my calves. It's called the lullaby moo
--If the circumstances are right, I can live to be 80–90 years old

I mean, why not? Any fake cow facts you'd care to add?

**Isn't it weird that in English, we don't have a common, nongendered, singular word to use for this type of animal? We have "cattle," which can be either sex, but that's plural. But all our other words are gendered: "Cow" does not include bulls or steers (castrated bulls), which as terms in turn exclude cows. And "heifer" is a young cow, "typically one who hasn't had a calf."

asakiyume

Thanks to

osprey_archer's Newbery project, I got out The ~~Flying~~ Winged Girl of Knossos (thanks for catching that

light_of_summer!) originally published in 1933 and reissued in 2017 by Betsy Bird, who's served on the Newbery Committee, reviewed books for Kirkus, blogs about children's literature, and has in fact written her own middle grade novel (Long Road to the Circus --I haven't read it).

It's easy to see why Betsy Bird and

osprey_archer loved this story: it's great fun and excellently told. I loved it too. The author (Allena Best, writing under the pseudonym Erick Berry) was entranced with ancient Minoan culture, and that love shines through on every page. And in Inas, the daughter of Daidalos (she's genderswapped Icarus for Inas), she's got a great heroine. Who dives skillfully for sponges? Inas does! Who is the best bull vaulter? Inas is! Whose hang glider experiment leads to realization that flying into the wind works better than flying with it? Again, Inas!

The authorial voice is definitely not contemporary, but it's lively and fresh. Every now and then there's something about people's races or features that's winceworthy, but mainly the 1930s-ness of it wasn't intrusive in a negative way.

Tangentially, I loved this description of archaeologists, from the author's introduction: "Then in our own time came the archaeologists, those magicians who build authentic history out of lowly potsherds." Magician archaeologists.

I also read a hilarious short story about the foiling of a racist: "Supply and Demand," by

f0rrest. Why yes, his user name is my IRL last name, but we are not related in any way. We stumbled upon each other quite by chance.

In "Supply and Demand" a pushy racist is hoisted by his own petard, his petard in this case being his successful participation in capitalism: he ends up supporting and promoting what he despises. I loved the hapless narrator (a young employee at a big-box home goods store) and the digs at retail training scripts. I will also offer a content warning, though, because the racist dude says alllllll the negative things you can think to say about "those people," as he calls them. There are no slurs, and he never specifies exactly who comprises "those people," but you may not feel like imbibing his nonsense, even if it's to see him taken down. His vituperations are pretty hilarious though, e.g, his rant about the historical Santa Claus (and later, his praise of Santa Claus as a hard worker up there at the North Pole).

Anyway, if you want to see a racist taken down in an unusual way, give it a try. It's about 7,000 words.

solarbird

If anyone’s wondering whether US farmers exporting to China just need a little “temporary help” to get over Trump’s trade war, read this thread from farmer Sarah Taber on Mastodon. She’s a farmer from North Carolina and deeply involved in farming issues. Read all of the thread.

If you won’t, though – if know your US Civil War history, you might know about how the Confederacy self-embargoed cotton exports, withholding “King Cotton” from the market.

They thought it would grind textiles production in the UK to a halt and force the UK to come in on their side of the war.

What happened instead was Egyptian cotton.

Trump pulled his bullshit thinking China would bow to him over soybeans; what happened instead was Brazil and Argentina. They haven’t bought a single goddamn US soybean since last spring, as South America ramped production right the fuck up.

Soybeans were the US’s largest agricultural export.

Emphasis on were.

And arguably, it gets worse from there.

So seriously, go read the thread. It’s good, knowledgable shit.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

solarbird

Fascist Trump’s allies are out today repeating the “cities are war zones” lie, so anybody in Chicago needs to get out there and starting posting pictures of their “war zone” just like Portland.

“Chicago’s a nightmare, it is literally a war zone” — Rand Paul

People you expect to know better will not, in fact know better. I’ve run into this too damn many times. People who you’d think wouldn’t bite on this bullshit absolutely will bite on this bullshit. So you need to reveal the lie through a massive flood of photographic evidence you vouch for personally, yourself.

Post your reality, Chicago. Everywhere. Starting right now.

(video with relevant quote via Aaron Rupar)

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

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Ursa Major and Ursa Minor

post your reality, part two

I do think there was a point to Bondi’s performance

Cow facts

Wednesday reading

confederates never learn a goddamn thing

Chicagoans, post pics and video!

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October 2025

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