These Books Are Great And I Can't Recommend Them Highly Enough!

I was walking on a rather remote beach when I came upon this Whip eel drying up in the sun. These are intertidal eels that can actually handle themselves out of water for a bit, but it’s not normal for them to be fully exposed in direct sunlight like this. The tide was at least six hours from coming in and I felt like this eel was in distress, so I made the decision to dig him out and return to the ocean. His body was too delicate to be simply pulled from the hole without injury, so I got to digging.

This endeavor took about 40 minutes as the eel was quite long and difficult to excavate. Also had to continually refill my temporary eel pond to keep him from drying out entirely while I worked.

If you are an eel aficionado like myself, please enjoy this silly little video of the relocation process set to some jaunty royalty-free disco music.

To The Person I Returned The Expensive Shirt To - Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is now available to pre-order! Get it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

One easy thing you can do to help workers who are being mistreated is to join your union. Even if you don't work for Amazon. If you don't have a union, join efforts to get one, and vote yes. By supporting the unions, you increase the safety for disadvantaged employees to gather and collectively demand better conditions.

If you believe in any kind of mutual support, you should join your union, and do you bit.

She was a sweet cat who didn't really like guests, but tolerated me.

Today I said goodbye to my beautiful cat. Eve was 18 years old and had thyroid disease, kidney disease and a heart murmur, all of this combined (even with attempting to treat the thyroid disease with medication) led to extreme nausea for her so she stopped eating. We tried everything, including different types of food and appetite increasing/nausea reducing medication, and nothing was successful.

For the first time since the late 1990s, we're without a furry friend in the house, which makes this loss even harder.

So let me tell you the story of how she ended up in our lives. We were having a new year's eve party, as you do, and some friends went outside to have a smoke. They came back inside with a kitten, "Is this yours?" they asked. "I guess it is for tonight," I replied, and took the kitten and put her in my bedroom. Our existing cats instantly hated the intruder. We put up signs around the neighbourhood and no one claimed her. So we had a new cat.

Over time the existing cats decided that she wasn't the absolute worst. The older of the two cats taught her how to hunt and catch mice and the mouse terror was born. Apparently mice were a lot of fun to play with, they made the best toys, had to be sung the song of her people, and we'd often just find scraps of mice about the house during a mouse plague. One night she caught 4, each of them smaller and smaller.

She had two litters of kittens before we managed to get her desexed.

After we moved house she spent a period being very scared of everything, but eventually settled down. Sky growls (thunder) and the vacuum cleaner were terrifying for ever, but sneezes and soft-drink bottles opening gradually were less of a threat.

She spent the last of her years lounging on my work laptop, in her comfortable cat bed, on my bed, or on me or my husband while we were in bed. She was never really a lap cat, but happy to curl up asleep on my thigh while I slept on my side or on my husband's bum while he read social media on his phone in bed.

Here she is guarding me from things coming in through the bedroom door.

And my very last photo of her.

May the rainbow road lead you to fields of mice you can play with my beautiful kitty.

Did you see that Magic: the Gathering now has a game state in which you need to prove that there are an infinite number of twin primes to win? I can explain it more if you are interested.

(With reference to this post here.)

By all means, please tell us about the Magic: the Gathering combo which requires proving the twin prime conjecture in order to win.

If you decide to read this, just remember you're not obliged to finish reading it. It's a hard read and stopping and watering the garden or making dinner or having a cup of tea and looking at plants are all good self care.

Quick notes below if you can't read the whole article.

The article expands on a story that became public mid 2024, but in short, Gaiman is alleged to be a serial sexual abuser.

During the acute phase of the pandemic, Palmer who was in the process of divorcing Gaiman, befriended a homeless and vulnerable woman, Pavlovich, and offered her a job in being nanny to her and Gaiman's son (shared custody split between two homes). Gaiman could easily have afforded to pay an experienced nanny but somehow ended up having this vulnerable woman, Pavlovich, come play nanny at his as well. Palmer allegedly told him to leave Pavlovich alone, but Gaiman allegedly did not, and allegedly sexually assaulted/raped her repeatedly throughout the time she was their son's nanny. A lot of terrible abuse is detailed, including under-the-covers sexual activity with the lights on in a hotel room with his under-10yo son metres away looking at his tablet.

Payment for the nannying was... spotty at best.

Eventually Pavlovich told Palmer about Gaiman's behaviour. Palmer tried to help Pavlovich during her (very understandable) mental health crisis as a result but was not very effective. Eventually Pavlovich told the police about the alleged assaults and rape. The police said they'd need Palmer to verify her parts of the story, Pavlovich was convinced she would, but Palmer didn't.

Pavlovich is now doing much better far away from the two of them.

Palmer lost everything in the divorce (an outcome she was probably hoping to avoid by keeping her mouth shut) and now lives with her parents. I'm not sure what the custody agreement is for their kid but hopefully it's not 100% with Gaiman.

Gaiman has been doing fine.

The article attempts at various times to blame Gaiman's behaviour on the abuse he probably experienced as a child from Scientology/Dianetics, that he's never talked about but which may have informed some of the child abuse in The Ocean At The End Of The Lane.

Vulture

There Is No Safe Word

How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.

TW: rape, sexual assault, child abuse

Archived version here, in case you hit the pay wall:

https://archive.is/HJtxW

Think of the most bicyclist unfriendly urban section of road you can. Somewhere that even your most enthusiastic bicycling friends are careful on. Now imagine that road if you just removed every car. Keep the delivery vans, the trams, buses, motorcycles, scooters, crazy pedestrians and bicyclists, just remove the cars. No parked cars, no moving cars, no cars waiting at traffic lights. In such a circumstance, would that road still be "too dangerous" to cycle on?

We're so used to assuming that cars belong on streets, and that everything else is essentially borrowing space. But that's a category error.

EXACTLY!

Some of the women were so contaminated that radiation could still be detected using a Geiger counter of their graves in 1987. 62 years after the chief medical examiner of Essex County, New Jersey, Harrison Stanford Martland, MD, published his report that identified the radioactive material the women had ingested as the cause of their bone disease and aplastic anemia, and ultimately death.

so much rage for anyone who tells the story of the radium girls like “ohoho weren’t people in the 20s fucking stupid” and not like “corporate greed has always cost people’s lives and health”