Jack’s Walk

Over the weekend Charly wrote an interesting post about different types of fungal infections in trees. Today, Jack and I came upon this downed tree and if I remember his post correctly this is a sapwood infection with unaffected heartwood. The damage is quite extreme and I think the infection is parasitic rather than fungal. So much of the wood has been eaten away that I suspect some sort of critter made a banquet of this tree.

©voyager, all rights reserved

 

 

 

 

Trump Behind Bars.

Installation view of Indecline’s “The People’s Prison” (2018) at the Trump International Hotel & Tower (all photos by Jason Goodrich for Indecline and used with permission, unless indicated otherwise).

Installation view of Indecline’s “The People’s Prison” (2018) at the Trump International Hotel & Tower (all photos by Jason Goodrich for Indecline and used with permission, unless indicated otherwise).

Robert Mueller may not have succeeded in bringing Donald Trump to justice yet, but for a fleeting few hours Friday night, the shadowy art collective Indecline did what millions of people in the US and beyond have dreamed of doing since November 2016: they put Trump behind bars.

It may not have been the actual maximum security prison of our collective dreams, but Indecline — most recently known for surreptitiously staging a graveyard at Trump’s Bedminister Golf Course, hanging a troupe of “Ku Klux Klowns,” and previously for planting naked Trump statues in multiple cities during the 2016 election — managed to stage a prison cell installation, dubbed “The People’s Prison,” in a suite on the third floor of the Trump International Hotel & Tower next to Columbus Circle. The work was installed in less than 24 hours, entirely undercover, and without the knowledge of hotel employees, who unwittingly helped carry all of the props and equipment to the room.

Installation view of Indecline’s “The People’s Prison” (2018) at the Trump International Hotel & Tower.

Installation view of Indecline’s “The People’s Prison” (2018) at the Trump International Hotel & Tower.

Surrounding the one-man prison cell were portraits rendered on American flags, burned and tattered at the edges, each illuminated with its own individual lamp. Indecline worked with 12 artists — including Molly Crabapple, Ann Lewis, LMNOPI, and the Panic Collective — to create the portraits of 12 artists and activists from across history, including Muhammad Ali, Leonard Peltier, Angela Davis, Hunter S. Thompson, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and even more contemporary figures like Erica Garner and Edward Snowden. Interviews with each of the portrait subjects played for the duration of the show over a background soundtrack of strangely relaxing ambient music.

All of the figures in the portraits, an Indecline spokesman told Hyperallergic, are “activists and fighters that we look up to. Activists that made a difference and made a good point. He has to sit here with the people who actually made a difference.” The spokesman continued: “Everyone on these walls fought to make this flag stand for something greater than it does currently under the Trump administration … they’re the ones who should be regarded as historical figures.”

You can read and see much more at Hyperallergic!

Freeeeedom! Freedom In My Veins!

My, my, conspiracy lunatic and asshole christian Rick Wiles has been booted off Youtube. This is a terrible event, everyone! It presages the very worst of all history wadded up together in a nasty spitball.

“America’s leftist snowflakes are furious that half the country no longer listens to their idiotic Marxist propaganda. My ancestors were German Reformed Church members who fled religious persecution in Europe in the 1700s and risked everything to come to America so they could freely worship God. There’s freedom running through my veins. My ancestors were not silenced, and I won’t be silenced by YouTube’s New Nazis. Every generation has its tyrants. We have tech tyrants,” stated Mr. Wiles.

Pastor Wiles fears America is on the verge of a French Revolution-style upheaval during which leftist mobs will try to execute Christians and conservatives to purge “Old America” speech and thoughts from our society. “France is an atheistic, socialist nation today because it never recovered from the French Revolution that started in 1789. The Jacobins decapitated Catholic priests and burned churches over a period of 10 years. Likewise, the communists who overthrew Russia in 1917 slaughtered 300,000 Russian Orthodox Church priests. Don’t tell me it can’t happen here,” Wiles remarked.

“Mao Zedong would be proud of the Marxist cultural revolution sweeping America and erasing our heritage,” said Pastor Wiles. “It must be stopped, or we will be swept into a communist nightmare that could take 70 years to escape.”

Hmm, last time I looked, France was doing okay. Haven’t noticed that it’s particularly atheistic, but yes, it is secular, as a nation should be, in order to serve all its citizens well. As for Mr. Wiles’s grasp on history, he could use a bit of work there. Missing a fair amount of bits. Perhaps if Mr. Wiles stopped braying for a moment, he’d realize no one has siphoned the freedom out of his veins – he still has the freedom to worship as he likes, where he likes.

“I have warned for years that a spirit of Nazism is rising up inside the USA,” he added. “The new Nazis are here. America is on the verge of a French Revolution-style upheaval during which leftist mobs will seek to execute Christians and conservatives in order to purge American society.”

Yes, most of us who are at least part way woke are all too aware of the nazis running about, and we aren’t happy about it. You might want to pay attention to actual news now and then, Mr. Wiles. I’ll happily settle for defanging all you deluded asshole christian conservatives. You can still have your churches to run to, where you can complain and moan to your heart’s content. I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to execute anyone. I probably wouldn’t mind gagging you lot for a while though.

RWW has the story: one, two.

I Is For Ilma.

Ilma.

Ilma is Finnish for air and also colloquially weather. In November 2017, it was windy and wet snow was falling in Hesperia park in Helsinki. With flash, it was possible to catch the trajectories of the falling snowflakes in the air (thanks for the advice in this blog a few months before, Caine).

Click for full size!

© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.

Anatomy Atlas Part 2 – Lower Limb Skeleton

Colloquial Czech does not distinguish between a foot and a leg. The word “noha” normally refers to the whole limb from the hips down. Medical terminology differs from this and the word “noha” means only the foot, and “dolní končetina” is used for the whole limb. Professor Kos has hammered this point home throughout multiple lectures and we were suspecting that if someone were to use the term “noha” in its colloquial sense during an exam, it would be an insta-fail.

Lower Limb Skeleton

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Legs and feet are our means of movement, so they are very important. It is therefore important to look after them. Which, regarding the bones, means adequate exercise and not more than the body can handle.

What ordinary people do not usually know is that bones are not fixed structures. They are consumed from within and regrown throughout our lives. That way they can heal, but also change shape. That way they can also get injured in a rather peculiar fashion.

One of the stories Professor Kos was telling was a story of “march fractures”. Fresh army recruits, especially those from cities who were not accustomed to walking a lot, were often complaining about pains in their legs and feet bones after long marches. Initially they were deemed as pretenders becaue the x-rays looked normal, but some of them broke their legs when forced to go on. Then someone took a magnifying glass to an x-ray of the alleged pretenders legs and feet and noticed microscopic fractures developing before a clearly visible fracture occurred.

These are so-called fatigue fractures and they happen when a bone is deprived of nutrients. The bone continues to be consumed at a normal rate, but it does not manage to regrow back fast enough. Over time these tiny deficits accumulate and the bone starts to hurt and can even break.

A colleague of mine has developed just that in her foot during nordic walking strolls that were just a bit too much, too sudden and too long for her. It took a few weeks to develop and over a year to heal, with a surgery and a very long rehab being necessary.

Too much exercise is just as bad as none.

Jack’s Walk

We went to the lake today to look at the lingering ice and there was none! This was cause for celebration and Jack chose to do his happy dance in the cold, cold water. Don’t worry, though, he’s fine. Jack’s coat is so dense that only his guard hairs get wet. His undercoat and skin stay completely dry. Labs are thoroughly built to be swimmers. They even have webbed feet.

 

©voyager, all rights reserved

Trump, Ever The Good Christian.

Donald Trump, left, stands next to the Easter Bunny, right (Screen cap).

Donald Trump, left, stands next to the Easter Bunny, right (Screen cap).

Before entering Bethesda-by-the-Sea Church for Sunday services, Trump stood in front of the front doors and answered questions about his call on Twitter to end deportation protection for so-called Dreamers who were brought to the U.S. as children.

When he was asked about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump blamed Mexico for “not helping at the border.”

“If they’re not going to help us at the border, it’s a very sad thing. Mexico has got help us at the border. And a lot of people are coming in because they want to take advantage of DACA. And we’re going to have to really see,” the president said.

There’s the christian that all the lunatic, asshole christians love, taking an oh so pious stance (look, I’m going to church!) and then denying responsibility for and degrading children. Can’t you just feel that christian love? Afterwards, the Tiny Tyrant did the bunny and egg roll stuff, with a by now standard idiotic word salad message to all the sprogs:

In his address to the children at the event, Trump began by referring to the White House as “this house or building or whatever you want to call it because there is no name for it, it is special.” Trump then said that he and his staff keep the White House “in tip-top shape, we call it sometimes tippy-top shape, and it’s a great, great place.”

He then pivoted to talking about the military, which he said would soon be “at a level it’s never been before” and “you see what’s happening with funding” and “just think of $700 billion, because that’s what’s going into our military this year.”

My, who knew there was no name for the white house? When did that happen, because I certainly missed it. So, I guess we now have Tippy-Top Shape House. That seems to accord well with the Tiny Tyrant’s mentality. Moving on, what’s more joyful to talk about on Ēostre Day, to children, than a military sucking up yet more money, a bloated horror of a tick sucking the lifeblood out of the country? I suppose you can’t start priming the next gen of cannon fodder soon enough, eh?

Both stories via RawStory, one, two.