My Blog

The Panama Canal

How does the lake not drain out completely though?

Lakes are actually always constantly losing water through things like evaporation! However, lakes are refilled in a multitude of ways: by groundwater, by rain, by rivers, and by runoff. So Gatun Lake is constantly being refilled by multiple sources.

TIL a 30-year-old elephant named Ben sought help at a safari lodge after being shot by poachers. The elephant waited patiently near the lodge for the 6 hours it took for a vet to fly in and dress his 3 bullet wounds.

via ift.tt

The fact he’s named kinda brushes over the fact this is a wild elephant. Born in the wild, raised in the wild, the only human interaction is watching the safaris. And after mean humans shot him, he decided the best course of action was to go visit the nice humans who just take pictures in hopes they’d help him. And then, even though they didn’t help him right away, he trusted that because they continued to be nice, he was safe, and they would help him.

also the people saw an elephant and were like “that’s a ben”

i hope he tells the other elephants where they can get help

@brunhiddensmusings

Actually, they do!

https://www.thedodo.com/elephants-travel-humans-help-1353631970.html

Orphans who were rescued, raised, and released by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya have communicated that it is a place of safety to other elephants who’ve never even been there.

Injured animals will show up there when they have been harmed by poachers because they know it is a place where they can get help!

i am very glad elephants have a functioning yelp system

“Took a little while to get served the quality of service made up for it. 4/5 stars. Would reccomend”

-Ben the Elephant

“Just visit your local apex predator and they’ll help you for no reason”

saw a tiktok of a mother taking her very tiny daughter to an art museum and she’s just walking around going “whoooa” “woooaah” to everything but then they got to a marble statue of a nude woman lying on her back and the girl points and goes “mommy🫵” and i just immediately welled up with tears and all the comments are just laughing about it and of course it’s funny but how are you not insanely moved by the way art connects everyone on earth from a centuries-old sculptor to a toddler in 2023

Mother and baby viewing Van Gogh's Madame Roulin and Her Baby at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, US. By the Boston Herald

I’m not sure how to look at art by Lynda Barry

every city should have within fifteen minutes walking distance a tavern where you can ask for rumors or clues from the old barkeep

imagine how beautiful the world would be if you could go to your local bar and ask the bartender if there's any jobs around. instead of going to walmart 6 days a week you can just ask the bartender and he'll be like "Well.. Old Lady Roberts has been having a mouse problem lately. I hear she's offering a reward to anyone willing to clear them out." and you get a hundred bucks or maybe a family recipe of her's. ronald reagan was wrong we don't need a service economy we need a quest economy

It has apparently been ten years since the time one of my professors pulled me aside to tell me I had to clean up after making out before going to class because my lipstick was everywhere and I realized "actually my tapdancing group decided we all had to dress like the Joker for our performance" was an infinitely worse explanation so I just said I was sorry

To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.

Knowing all this has always made this bit of Beren’s song instantly reduce me to tears:

Tolkien straight up wrote a poem that said “the world could end, but it wouldn’t have all been pointless, because she was in this world, however briefly, and that justified all the rest.” Kills me.

Who can outdo Wife Guy Tolkien? Dude was writing elaborate AUs where his wife is an impossibly beautiful magic-wielding immortal elf princess who fights Satan and wins to rescue her human boyfriend from Satan’s doom fortress. Flawless.

dan mentioning their 15 year anniversary suddenly hit me cause it’s still months away. but it’s on top of their minds already and mine too and i just can’t help but feel when the day comes, it’ll be something incredibly special. together for nearly half their entire lives.. i wanna cry tears of joy just thinking about it

I think I’m going to think about this youtube comment forever

phannies eleven years ago:

Thinking of the larger context of LOTR and like, the fellowship swapping old war stories and shit and Sam just says “Yeah I killed a huge spider…Shelob, I think?”

And Gandalf just blinks and is like, “You what now?”

“Yeah, killed it. Had to save Frodo”

Gandalf elects not to tell Sam that he killed the spawn of a primordial demon.

the daughter of the embodiment of darkness which ate the original sun and moon and almost ate the devil.

That's not important. What is important is that it was a danger to Mister Frodo.

“vampires wouldn’t want to have sex with their prey because humans are just like soup and a sandwich to them” INCORRECT vampires are little fucking freaks there’s no telling what they’ll do with their human juice box of the month

everyone is so determined to humanize vampires that we’ve forgotten what vampires are really about: just being a nasty little creature. a fucked up little dude being weird about a human-shaped capri sun

i’m so tired of the old “they’re a bad person so they have no feelings” shtick. abusers get up every day and do normal human things just like you. they don’t wake up and go “ohoho how can i be horrible to as many people as possible today” they wake up and go “should i have eggs and bacon or just a bowl of cereal.” they think “i should take out the trash.” they think “my favorite show is on tonight at 9pm, i should set up a reminder so i don’t miss it.” they think “man, i haven’t called my mom in a while, i should do that.”

the most important thing we always need to remember is that whoever hurt us is also human. and no, it’s not for forgiveness or rationalizing the abuse. it’s so that we don’t forget that abusive people act exactly like everyone else most of the time. it’s so that we don’t assume our friends could never be abusers just because we never see that side of them. it’s so that we don’t ignore the red flags purely because of the presence of the green ones. “bad people” are not a different species, and the more you think that way, the more you are going to get hurt.

i got the job

Litany against unemployment.

when you’re vibing with your cat and they go

grooming you grooming you grooming you grooming you grooming you BITING YOU grooming you grooming you ok done naptime