Tragic news of Titanic's sinking reaches London on this day in 1912

1978 - American model Bebe Buell by Denis Jones, while she was modelling in London.

Shutterstock gives 2 different dates for the second photo, September 5 and December 15, 1978.

Shutterstock/Evening News/ANL

Evening News.

Shot with Nikon D100.

Been drawing a LOT of fireflies recently. 

At some point, they were sure to start doing more pedestrian activities. . .

evening news

6 dead in tragic crash

IS ANYONE ELSE GONNA TALK ABOUT THIS OR

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

2023 Bucket

This is a bucket. Anything you don't want to take with you into 2024, feel free to drop it in the bucket. I will be burning the contents (with Hellfire) at exactly 11:59pm on New Year's Eve.

You don't have to type anything, at all. Just reblog the bucket and your intentions will be known by the universe. Or the bucket. Or whatever you like.

the snake of eden 🥰

a concerning amount of witchblr will be like "um actually new years was stolen by europeans from the ancient god scroobus mcdoobus" and then you actually try to research scroobus mcdoobus and it turns out he was invented in the 1940s by a conspiracy theorist who powdered every meal with ketamine and thinks that queer people are reincarnated fish

As a reminder that good exists out there, a coworker recently confessed to me that he found out his child is questioning their identity (kid's gender redacted for this post). The kid is keeping it from him, so he can't say anything to them or show that he knows, but he's doing his best to get mentally prepared and educated so that he'll be ready whenever his kid does feel comfortable enough come to him.

For context, this guy is a big, bulky middle aged dude who loves sports and typical outdoor "manly" activities. As his coworker and friend, I know he's a kind and sweet teddy bear of a person, but his kid probably views him as a stern, authoritarian figure, the way most teenagers view their parents. His family lives in a conservative area, so I'm sure between that, their dad's looks and interests, and the fact that their dad is a Figure of Authority, the kid is worried that they won't be accepted.

But you know what? When he found out about his kid, the first thing he did was reach out to his closest queer friend and ask for resources for parents of questioning children. His biggest fears are that his kid will be bullied or discriminated against and won't feel comfortable enough to be themself. His second action was to find himself a mentor in another parent who went the same situation (kid coming out in a conservative town). The other person is preparing him for some of the struggles his kid may face and the fights he may need to take on as a parent to make sure his kid is safe and treated well.

Something I want to emphasize for people focused on language as the primary method of allyship is that when we spoke, he used some outdated terms and thoughts about gender and sexuality. That does not make him bad. These were the terms and thinking used about questioning teenagers when he was growing up and he never needed to learn more current ones. But now that he does have that need, he's throwing himself in head first because that's his kid and he's darn well going to make sure that his kid feels welcomed and has a safe place to be themselves even if they never come out to him.

Hey so remember how grocery prices suddenly jackknifed during lockdown and never went back down?

Well turns out the companies would have done that shit either way and had been steadily price-fixing for the last decade!

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson just announced more than $40 million in court-ordained Fuck You money from massive swaths of food production companies are to be paid out to households earning at or below 175% of the federal poverty level ($25.5k for 1 person, $34.5k for 2 people households) before Dec 31st of this year. Happy Holidays.

"The bottom line here is that my legal team took on two large corporate price-fixing conspiracies that increased the cost for groceries for Washington families. We've prevailed, and as a result, we are sending checks to over 400,000 Washington households."

Cannot stress enough the extent of the conspiracies he's talking about here. 15 out of the total 19 chicken producers got nailed in this lawsuit. Not the total number of conspirators, mind, just the ones who left enough evidence for the AG to kick their ass in so expedient a manner. Make no mistake, all 19 were in on it. The court case against the rest of them has been delayed until October of next year, though. None of them are making it out unscathed.

Tuna didn't escape antitrust horseshit either, because the CEOs of Starkist, Chicken of the Sea, and Bumblebee Tuna had a fucking group chat where they complained that the price of tuna was "too low" and they agreed to artificially inflate the price.

“What’s so maddening about the conduct of these companies is the reason that they engaged in this price-fixing conspiracy was greed. They wanted to make money."

So anyway the AG who nailed their asses to the wall and continues to do so is running for governor. If you live in Washington, could be worth your vote when primary season rolls around.

मंडी में 33 करोड़ की लागत से बनेगा शिवधाम, जल्द होंगे टेंडर; आरएस बाली

मंडी में 33 करोड़ की लागत से बनेगा शिवधाम, जल्द होंगे टेंडर; आरएस बाली

Shimla News: हिमाचल प्रदेश पर्यटन विकास निगम (एचपीटीडीसी) के अध्यक्ष आरएस बाली ने कहा कि छोटी काशी मंडी में शिव धाम बनाने का काम जल्द शुरू होगा। इसके लिए जल्द टेंडर किए जाएंगे। आरएस बाली ने बुधवार को शिमला में आयोजित पत्रकार वार्ता में यह जानकारी दी। उन्होंने कहा कि शिव धाम बनाने पर 33 करोड़ रुपये खर्च होंगे। कहा कि पूर्व सरकार के समय शुरू हुई शिव धाम परियोजना की जांच चल रही है। जल्द इसकी…

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Lil Nas X is someone who tragically had to have a wildly successful music career in order to support his true passion, being a top quality internet troll

Imagine being such a pathetic incel loser you are being roasted in multiple languages.