‘We Beat Them Before, We Will Beat Them Again!’ 

I love tumblr tags so much. Like okay here’s the main post and here’s my little secret thoughts and addendums for the besties

im fucking sobbing why did they kill him twice in a row in the community notes

does anyone know what i came in here to post

IS THIS YOU MOOT??? DO YOU KNOW THAT YOURE ON INSTAGRAM Y2K CLICKBAIT ACC 😭

I didn’t even like. realize until I read the blog username in the screenshot and was like omg oomfie is famous

HOLY MACKEREL I’M FAMOUS!

I swear, the original post doesn’t even belong to me (it belongs to @msboutofcontext ) but somehow it’s my addition to it that broke containment.

None of this stuff is serious or complete and it all comes with a huge helping of "perhaps" and a grain of salt.

Nothing here should be taken as the final word on anything. No matter how sure of myself and arrogant I may sound. I know most of this stuff I write is silly or off-kilter or flawed in major ways.

So don't look for the flaws. You will no doubt find them. Look for what is new, different, insightful, creative, revolutionary, outrageous, or true. Try to understand the ideas and test those. Maybe each blog entry, as a whole, is a wreck for you. But there will parts that are treasures for you.

It ain't all that earth-shattering or revelatory to the world either, just to me at the time.

We are all becoming and we all figure things out or learn things at different times in our lives and often independently of others. Sometimes we really are the first person to think of an idea. Usually not. There are over 5000 years of recorded human thought and at this very moment there are around 8 billion other people. There is going to be a lot of convergent thinking going on. And a whole lot more of me hearing things sometime somewhere but forgetting where I heard it from (because I am a very curious and highly educated person who's been around and thinking for a longish time and it's hard to keep track of where all the shit in my head came from and which I created) from others or getting bits and pieces others worked on first and I had heard/read and then put a few things together in my head thinking it was all me.

So I don't promise they will all be new ideas. But they will all be new ways of looking at them. And I do think you'll find a few real originals in there as I transfer stuff from my gmail drafts over to this.

If I have a weird-ass idea or loving take on things that changes the world for the better, God bless it. But mostly I'm just here to share what my brain spit out for our mutual shits and giggles.

Even if I think there might be some really good stuff buried in there for anyone to find if they have the eyes to see and the ears to hear and the heart to understand.

Rabbits manage their predators

We've all seen the graph of lynx and snowshoe hares where the rabbit populations increase and lynx increase with larger litters and increased survival to adulthood in response to the abundance of food. Eventually the lynx outpace the rabbits and eat all the available rabbits and starve themselves to death back down to numbers that can survive on the number of available rabbits at which point the hares, being R strategists can reproduce faster than K strategist lynx and the whole cycle starts over again.

It's used as a classic example in ecology courses of predators preventing prey populations from overwhelming a landscape. And we see it as a cautionary tale about the need for good stewardship of resources and need for population control to prevent the suffering of boom and bust cycles.

That story is not quite accurate. The people who came up with that interpretation where all children of privilege and identified with the predators. It wasn't until more scientists from indigenous and lower-class groups began to make up the ranks that we questioned that story.

The hares are actively starving out their predators through solidarity.

When stress levels build up in hares from constantly being hunted and close escapes, this changes their reproductive system to have much smaller litters. Even when stressed individuals mate with outside hares, they have small litters and males somehow induce their unstressed mate to produce smaller litters even if she would otherwise have produced a large litter.

The entire population of hares effectively withholds their bodies from the predators by not reproducing beyond just enough to keep the species alive while laying low for long enough to starve the majority of their predators to death and force them to have smaller litters in response.

It seems to me there is a lesson in there for us in the midst of Capitalism. Stop having kids and starve the system of labor.

Then let the invisible hand of supply and demand do its magic to raise wages and reduce housing prices.

You can't afford to strike. They might fire you if you slow down too much (I still think a national slowdown is a safe bet). But they can't do jack to you for not breeding (yet).

So focus on your career and having fun and living a life of service to make a better future.

I actually went to Gobblers Knob in Punxsutawney and was close enough to see the no shadow for myself before the drunk guys in top hats told us what they saw.

I experienced the whole frigid, boring, tedious, painful, boring, long, standing room only for 6 hours of physical hell, low rent, cheapass, tacky, corny, tawdry, obnoxious, fucking dry event for you.

It involved security pat downs for liquor on every man woman and child to keep out liquor. Weed was illegal by community consent thanks to Reagan. It was 10 degrees and dark in the dead of a Pennsylvania Winter. And there was absolutely no entertainment for hours till it got daylight. Then this local DJ comes on to entertain the out of towners. He's horrible.

Remember that we are the cash cow for this little group of local good old boys and their buddies. And for the entire town. And they treat us like shit. Just penned us up and hit us for cash money at every turn. This was 1998, so that wasn't unusual everyone outside major businesses required cash. I'm dead sure they have those little credit card scanners everywhere now. They milked us for everything they could think of.

And it was so fucking cold. You don't understand cold until you know standing huddled still in the dark cold. Most people never really experience cold. Insulation is really fucking good now. I overpaid so much when goose down jackets got sorta affordable. They were like miracles to me. I would have given anything for such a miraculous jacket then. I had to make do with layers of insulated flannels and long underwear. I did have true winter underwear from my Boy Scout days so I was a good bit less cold than my buddies who didn't know how to layer.

Most people only experience shoveling snow cold. Maybe skiing cold. A few hunting cold. (Real damn cold) And a mighty few who have lived in it for days just sitting around camping in tents with nice sleeping bags and a big fire to warm us. In teens or subzero temps. I have. You have to dig deep and layer well. And just accept being cold every single minute of your life outside of your sleeping bag.

So we were doing hunter cold. This was Western Pennsylvania. Everyone knew how to do hunter cold. My buddies were all suburban kids. I told them how to dress. A few listened.

3+ hours of my best friends in the world talking shit to AC/DC and Ace of Base or whatever was the thing.

That night we started at like 3am and drove a few hours of dark Pennsylvania highway. Just darkness, trees, and sky. I can't remember if the stars were out. Something about those Appalachian Forest highways just are monotonous in a weird way.

Those road trips are always fun. I strongly suggest. Even if you have to brave the Appalachian Static.

Anyway we arrive at Punxsutawney. It is in the middle of nowhere. Just another isolated abandoned steel town. They have a bit of a real downtown that most of these towns utterly lack. Often it's a gas station and a Dollar General and a bunch of run down houses with a school 40 minutes away it shares with the other rundown towns.

But Punxsutawney has a nice little town of happy people because of Phil and our fascination with this thing.

So of course there is not parking for 30,000 people. In a town of 5,000. So they rope off some field frozen solid and park us all charging Disney parking fees.

They subcontract school buses to haul people from the parking lot to the main event. The bus drivers are the first line of defense against alcohol and drugs.

Security is the second. Compete with pat downs and local cops along with PA Troopers with drug dogs and quotas to meet. No spoiling the fun with chemical enhancement!

Then you walk for fucking ever. Slowly. Going to the Knob.

It is deadly cold. And it begins to dawn on you what you are in for in this grassy pen with nothing but a porta potty or two for entertainment.

Look at all that fun!

This was before phones people. My friends and I were super studious and none of us owned any kind of video game. No handheld games. Maybe you thought to bring a newspaper or book. I think I brought a book. I'm sure at least one of them brought engineering notes to study. Most just talk and bitch about the cold.

Cold in the dark is different from cold in the light. It is so much deeper without the solar radiation slightly warming your surface and your spirits.

Then the dawn brings light and a little warmth and hope.

Then the dawn brings the DJ.

Small town DJs are interesting critters. They are small town famous and often they are unique personalities that can be really entertaining. At least between songs and commercials. Some of them are pretty amazing like Nipsey, Jen, and Earl in Harrisburg/Hershey/Lancaster/Lebanon area back when it was even more podunk backwater.

It was 1998 and this guy showed up.

So this small town guy is used to entertaining local venues with his shtick that everyone knows and loves with his slightly out of date look and inside local jokes.

Today he has 2 hours of just him on a stage in front of 30,000 pissed off college students who were expecting a lot more entertainment and maybe some food or drinks and tired & grumpy rural folk hoping to get in a little fun and excitement before going to work. At least half the crowd had found a way to sneak in a flask or something. So people were unruly.

And we just watch the poor guy spend 2 hours fighting for his life up there feeling bad for him trying to entertain us while hosting his fun little morning show for his listeners who are probably loving it all.

He got heckled. Badly. This was 25 years ago and we weren't very nice.

After 2 hours of this entertainment. The main event started.

My heroes arrived on the scene.

They have been partying all night long. In a nice warm place with warm food, comfy chairs/couches, running water, and a ton of alcohol. They are all drunk as skunks. The all come up on stage, wave and whip up the crowd, pull out their buddy, give him some scritches and lift him up to the crowd like he's the new Lion King, and then examine his shadow, make their proclamation, smile and wave, go back to their party, and count their money.

This is the highlight of the entire event. The peak of excitement. The best it got for the whole day.

Then they shoved the DJ back on stage, the national media and anyone with connections left, and the rest of us were kept penned up for another hour or 2 till it was our turn to take a school bus back to our frozen car, a 3+ hour drive through winter highways to get back in time for afternoon classes.

It was so much fun.

Sometimes it feels like everyone around me is speaking in a secret language and I'm the only one who doesn't know it.

a mite (Daemaeidae sp.) feeding on Stemonitopsis typhina by Barry Webb