TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")

The dark side of Beatrix Potter

2026-06-13T16:28:23.293-05:00

Beatrix Potter, despite the efforts of Graham Greene and many others, is still tarred with a certain National Trust tweeness, even though her tales of murder and separation are among the darkest if funniest books ever written. Those books would be nothing without their illustrations, and in her masterpiece, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, she should have firmly established herself in a direct line of gothic illustrators stretching from Fuseli and Blake to Mervyn Peake. This picture, of Tom Kitten being turned into a roly-poly pudding, is among the funniest yet also most terrifying illustrations of the 20th century.[Martin Rowson]

Text and image from a gallery of writers' favourite classic book illustrations posted at The Guardian. I was unaware of this supposed "dark side," but found two relevant commentaries, the first in a Guardian column in 2006:

The Tale of Tom Kitten does not teach adventurous disobedience; rather it tells us that disobedience is punished with violence. Or this, at least, is what I thought when I flung the book across the room in disgust (only, intrigued, to pick it up again soon after).

Tom Kitten and his siblings are smacked and sent to bed for their notional disgrace. Worse yet, when they continue romping in the bedroom, they disturb what Potter calls the "dignity and repose of the tea party". Can the reader who finishes the book rest easy that subversive Tom has triumphed? No: the fact is Tabitha Twitchit thrashes her children for losing their clothes. Imagine what grisly fate will befall them when she stomps upstairs from her ruined tea party! To her credit, Potter leaves the sadism of this neurotic to the imagination.

So far, my daughter and I have found Beatrix Potter to be a proselytiser for sadistic punishment, a sartorial fascist, a property-upholding reactionary, an obsessive-compulsive nutcase (or rather nut-kin) and, conceivably, a bystander in the face of an intolerable natural dystopia that, with her sick (though gifted) writer's mind, she culpably imagined. As an adult reader, I must say, I'm beginning to like her.

And this at Wig and Pen:

Use discretion when reading Beatrix Potter to your children. In almost every Potter tale, her main characters—everyone from Peter Rabbit to Jemima Puddle Duck—flirt with mortal danger...

The Silence of the Lambs has nothing on Potter’s description of the house and yard [in The Tale of Mr. Tod]:

The house was something between a cave, a prison, and a tumbledown pigsty. There was a strong door, which was shut and locked. [In the yard] there were many unpleasant things lying about that had much better have been buried: rabbit bones and skulls, and chickens’ legs and other horrors. It was a shocking place and very dark.
Peeking through a window, Benjamin and Peter discovered that Tommy Brock had retired for the night after stashing the brood—still alive and kicking--in an oven for safekeeping and for his next meal.

I have no personal insights to offer, not having read any of the canon. Knowledgeable readers should feel free to offer comments.

Reposted from 2012 because I found it while trying to look up information on Beatrix Potter's use of cloche gardening on her farm.

Cloche hats

2026-06-13T16:23:15.696-05:00

Here's the Wiki:

The cloche hat is a fitted, bell-shaped hat that was popular during the 1920s. (Cloche is the French word for bell.) Caroline Reboux is the creator of the cloche hat.

Cloche hats were usually made of felt so that they conformed to the head. The hat was typically designed to be worn low on the forehead, with the wearer's eyes only slightly below the brim. By 1928-1929, it became fashionable to turn the brims on cloche hats upwards. This style remained prevalent throughout the early 1930s until the cloche hat became obsolete around 1933-1934.

Often, different styles of ribbons affixed to the hats indicated different messages about the wearer. Several popular messages included: An arrow-like ribbon which indicated a girl was single but had already given her heart to someone, a firm knot which signaled marriage or a flamboyant bow which indicated the wearer was single and interested in mingling...

Photo via the wonderfully-named My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning. Too bad it has now gone inactive (but still browseable).

Reposted from 2010 (!!) after watching Agatha Christie's Seven Dials miniseries last night and seeing Mia McKenna Bruce in the starring role of a 1925 character:

Personally I would be happy to see this hat style come back into fashion. It looks very comfy and reasonably sensible in a world concerned about solar skin damage.

Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes in 1973 - his "tremendous machine" performance

2026-06-13T16:09:22.658-05:00

Everyone who watched the Belmont 40 years ago will never forget Secretariat's race that day. He had already won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness; this was his bid for the Triple Crown, and he was so good that few owners wanted to enter their horses against him in the Belmont - that's why there were so few racing that day. The track didn't even take "show" bets, and it's an interesting (?unique) anomaly that Secretariat was so favored by bettors that he would have paid more to show ($2.40) than he did to win ($2.20).

Over 5,000 winning tickets were never redeemed because the holders valued them more as souvenirs than for their cash value.

And to this day his speed for 1.5 miles has never been equaled. Even if you have no interest in thoroughbred racing per se, you owe it to yourself to watch this 3-minute clip to see one of the iconic moments in the history of sport.

Reposted from 2013.

Addendum: A tip of the blogging hat to reader demenace07, who offered this link with more information about the economics of uncashed winning tickets for a more recent race:

Some enterprising horse bettors are selling their tickets on eBay, where such tickets are selling for $20 to $30. Other sellers bought up many of the cheapest Belmont Stakes gambling tickets. One seller is selling a lot of 500 such tickets. Another is selling 150 tickets in a lot.

Tickets for the Triple Crown wins of Secretariat (1973) and Seattle Slew (1977) sold for big money on the collectors market.

Rovell said that the tickets are simply worth more to collectors than the cash-in price. He said, “Whether you want to keep it for your memory or resell it, it’s worth ten times more than if you cash it in. So people are making good bets.”

Reposted again in 2026 because I found it while looking for other stuff. I don't follow or even enjoy watching horse racing, although I did see some dressage events during my years in Kentucky, but this race is so iconic that it's worth preserving here in the blog.

Some observations re SpaceX

2026-06-13T15:59:45.999-05:00

"By Friday, however, the macro narratives were entirely overshadowed by the excitement of the SpaceX IPO. It’s an IPO that will go down in history for a remarkable combination of reasons—from its sheer scale ($75 billion, almost three times the previous largest IPO) and the $1.8 trillion valuation (which places it immediately, on day one, as the seventh-most-valuable US company), to challenging the traditional playbook on investor allocation, price discovery, and fast-tracked index inclusion. It has also triggered an unprecedented wave of wealth creation, from Elon Musk’s new trillionaire status to some 4,400 millionaires minted among the firm’s current and former employees. All this for a company that generates no profits, is highly valued, and carries enormous key-person risk."

Excerpted from the weekly substack email from Mohamed A. El-Erian (boldface added).

Why mosquito eggs float

2026-06-12T15:23:46.823-05:00

This hand-coloured scanning electron micrograph was the favourite of the jury in the section "Best Scientific Image". The image shows the surface of a mosquito egg (from Culex pipiens), which generates a water repellent network by connecting microscopically small structures to trap a thin layer of air. The vitally important structures avoid immersion and enable the egg to float and aggregate with neighbouring eggs.

The website of photographer Martin Oeggerli. Reposted from 2013 because I had my first encounter with mosquitoes this week in the woods behind our house.

What's wrong with people nowadays?

2026-06-12T15:20:09.212-05:00

"A space in Mankato that promotes reflection and healing for families who have lost a child has been vandalized, according to the nonprofit in charge of the memorial.

The nonprofit behind the One Bright Star memorial at Victory Drive and E. Main Street said on June 5 that someone in recent days broke off a large landscape rock, damaged a plaque and threw both of them into the memorial’s pond...

One Bright Star was founded in 1998 by four mothers who each experienced the death of a child, and the memorial was completed in 2003. It includes a shallow pond centered by a large star sculpture and a wall with paver bricks in remembrance of children who have died."

"The police in Boston are searching for two boys who they said flashed a handgun at a pair of children running a lemonade stand on Wednesday and stole... cash from a bright pink lockbox...Tiffany Byrne, the aunt of the two children working the lemonade stand, said that about $80 was taken...

Ms. Byrne said her nephew, David, 12, and niece, Juliette, 11, “were pretty shaken up” but otherwise unharmed. She said she believed the robbers were wearing masks and were around middle-school age."

Studying whiskers on an elephant's trunk

2026-06-11T17:14:56.962-05:00

This is the sentence that piqued my curiosity:

"Haptic researchers discovered a difference of two orders of magnitude in the elasticity of the thousand whiskers of an Asian elephant's trunk as they progress from the base to the tip."

The sentence was one of the "Findings" listed in the May 2026 issue of Harper's Magazine (this recurring feature is a wonderfully eclectic potpourri of scientific observations). The source was not provided, but a brief search led me to the arXiv of Cornell University and to the source text: "Functionally graded keratin facilitates tactile sensing in elephant whiskers." The research was conducted at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart. Here is the abstract:

Keratin composites enable animals to hike with hooves, fly with feathers, and sense with skin. These distinct functions arise from variations in the underlying properties and microscale arrangement of this natural polymer. One well-studied example is mammalian whiskers, elongated keratin rods attached to tactile skin structures that extend the animal’s sensory volume. Here, we investigate the non-actuated whiskers that cover Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) trunks and find they are geometrically and mechanically tailored to facilitate tactile perception by encoding contact location in vibrotactile signal amplitude and frequency. Elephant whiskers emerge from armored trunk skin and shift from a thick, circular, porous, stiff root to a thin, ovular, dense, soft point. This smooth transition enables interaction with widely varying substrates, reduces wear, and increases the vibrotactile signal information generated during contact. The functionally graded geometry, porosity, and stiffness of elephant whiskers tune the neuromechanics of trunk touch, facilitating highly dexterous manipulation.

The non-scientist reader will want to skip down to the Conclusions to get a sense of the "why":

Biological functionally graded material composites like elephant whiskers can inspire engineered devices that use functional gradients to achieve specific capabilities ranging from fatigue reduction to signal power increases. One of the first animal stiffness gradients discovered was the beak of the Humboldt squid, but mimicry of this stiffness gradient in soft materials posed a considerable manufacturing challenge at the time of this discovery. Recent advances in multi-material 3D printing enable unprecedented control over the deposition of materials with widely varying mechanical properties; cutting-edge inkjet systems create monolithic parts from materials with elastic moduli that span three orders of magnitude. Recent characterization of composites built from these materials enables inverse design, whereby one achieves desired system properties such as stiffness, toughness, and frequency response by prescribing both geometry and constituent materials at the microscale. Fields ranging from material science and neuroscience to haptics and bio-inspired robotics rely on signal processing through material interfaces, and functional gradients have significant potential to enable programmable signal shifts tuned to specific use cases.

Back in the 1970s when I began my postgraduate science research, United States Senator William Proxmire (a Democrat!) was ridiculing bench researchers for publishing what he considered to be trivial scientific findings. He created a "Golden Fleece Award" to demean such research. Some of the research mocked at that time was probably truly trivial and wasteful of public resources, but the luddite attitude was unfortunate, and the humor involved may have carried over to influence public opinion of science. In those years I was studying the effect of serum complement and Protein A on the clearance of staphylococci and gram-negative bacteria from BALB/c mouse lungs; fortunately I was well below his radar.

I'm posting this now to make note of the "why" of studying elephant trunk whiskers. Mother Nature has been doing hard science for millennia, and finding out how she achieved results can guide humans in an endless variety of quests.

An interesting Sudoku variant

2026-06-10T11:07:41.830-05:00

I have been away from Sudoku for a year or two, but got lured back when this variant was posted by Kottke this morning.

In this variant the numbers in the dotted "cages" have to add up to the designated total (without duplication within the cage), and the numbers in the "thermometers" have to rise, with the lowest in the "bulb" of the thermometer. Otherwise normal Sudoku rules apply.

You can play this grid online here, where there are the standard tools for entering "possibles" and for checking the validity of your entries as you go along. I used the latter feature regularly, and managed to fill in the grid in 64 minutes without blind guessing.

2026-06-09T08:55:52.400-05:00

College students who cannot read

2026-06-09T08:29:13.256-05:00

Excerpt from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Longread at the link.

Ending a movie with a preposition

2026-06-08T17:42:43.021-05:00

Last evening while trying to avoid doomscrolling I browsed some movies recorded on my DVR. I noticed that the dialogue in The Maltese Falcon ends with a preposition.

I found some commentary on the phrase at Blog of the Darned:

To be fair, the quote is based on a quote from Shakespeare:

Prospero:
...
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 156–158

Also "The stuff that dreams are made of" did not appear in Dashiell Hammett novel. Humphrey Bogart reportedly suggested the line to John Huston, and they went with it. Bogart was a stage actor on Broadway before turning to film, so I presumably he was familiar with The Tempest.

I'm not a rigid prescriptivist regarding usage of the English language, but last night I wondered whether any other major motion pictures end the dialogue on a preposition. A quick search of "last lines" mentions "And then I woke up" from No Country for Old Men, but in that case it would be an adverb (it's also not a preposition in "I'm ready for my close up."

There are probably many such examples. If there are movies with Minnesota characters, they might end a scene asking "are you coming with?"

I offer the challenge to the readers here. Not just any movie sentences ending with prepositions, but final words spoken in a movie.

Scribbles on a bookmark - solved with AI

2026-06-07T08:04:51.083-05:00

When I read books I use white paper bookmarks so that I can jot down new words to look up. or pithy statements or clever insights worth quoting in TYWKWDBI. The best bookmarks are cut-up greeting cards, which have white expanses and the proper stiffness.

Embedded above is a scan of the top portion of a bookmark I recently found in a pocket while doing laundry. And to my dismay I had no idea what book I had been reading at the time, or how long ago. I can still look up words, but how to retrieve the "advice" from some page 61? (I had already decided to skip the "cure for lesbianism" on page 32).

Does anyone want to try to guess the book, based on the words harvested? Answer tomorrow.

Addendum: I could not for the life of me figure out which book I had been reading. So I asked AI:

I immediately remembered the book, which I had read because it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I had returned it to the library many weeks ago. So I looked at my list of "Books read" and there it was - graded with a "2+" on my personal scale of 0-4.

That rating meant it wasn't worth a potential future reread and not worth reviewing for TYWKIWDBI, so I won't be recommending the book here. I may add attercop, inchwell, swingle scutch, becks, and casemate to my huge list of interesting words (sigil is already there). And I've requested the book from the library again to see whether the "cure for lesbianism" or the "advice" are worth blogging.

I'm posting this now not for the book per se, but to make note of the amazing power of artificial intelligence. I used the commonly-available and free "AI mode" on Google. What amazes me is that it appears that 127 pages of this book have been loaded into a database. So I wondered whether the book could be reproduced by asking the AI to "regurgitate" it passage by passage ("give me a sentence, give me the next sentence etc...). This morning I asked...

That was followed by links (to New Direcrtions Publishing and to Penguin Books Australia) where I could purchase the book. Interestingly there was no link to a third-party seller like Amazon, and (to my disappointment and that of John Farrier) no suggestion that "you can get this book from your local public library."

All of this would seem to be within the boundaries of copyright law, but it still amazes me that a book just published this past year has already been scanned into storage into a massive data warehouse that is guzzling cooling water somewhere in a rural agricultural area.

Creating ponds for wildlife

2026-06-06T12:50:36.093-05:00

I don't have access to saltwater tidepools, so in my world the most fascinating microenvironment is that of a freshwater pond. I was therefore delighted to read an article about a fellow who is turning his earthmoving skills into creating ponds de novo on the English countryside.

Britain has lost at least 400,000 ponds over the past century, according to the Freshwater Habitats Trust. A similar number remain but many are overgrown, degraded or affected by nutrient pollution.

“Everyone realises we’re in a sorry state with freshwater and it needs to be addressed,” says Hancox, of Creative Wetlands, a contractor who has dug scores of new ponds for charities and rewilding projects across Britain.

Hancox acquired his skills – the excavator “becomes an extension of yourself, it just flows,” he says – digging landfill sites and golf courses for his family’s groundworks company. “My original job was a shaper on golf courses. We travelled all over, to Portugal, Germany, Belgium, building bunkers and drainage – everything really that wasn’t good for wildlife. I’ve always had a massive interest in wildlife, so we’ve got to the stage now where we want to put something back.”

At Heal Somerset, a 185-hectare (460 acre) former dairy farm being turned over to nature by the charity Heal Rewilding, Hancox is digging four new ponds, including one double-bowled pond 30 metres in diameter.

The ponds are specifically for great-crested newts, which have been found in low numbers on the farm but have no suitable ponds in which to breed. Usually within a year of being created the ponds fill with aquatic life, including damselflies and dragonflies, and provide food and shelter for birds, from moorhens to house martins, who feed on the insects and use the pond-side mud to build nests...

Crucially, these new ponds are not connected to any river system, which can wash nutrient-rich or polluted water into them. Instead, they are charged by clean rainwater or clean groundwater, enabling more delicate aquatic plants to thrive.

Kudos to this fellow for shifting from creating golf courses to creating wildlife ponds. And kudos to the farm family that has hired him to do the work. Reminds me of the people who install wildlife guzzlers in the desert.

Unusual "throne"

2026-06-06T12:33:35.177-05:00

As an elderly person I applaud the presence of the armrests, but as a housekeeper I'm dismayed by the prospect of cleaning it.

Found at the Awful Taste But Great Execution subreddit.

Children in Gaza are being shot in the head - updated

2026-06-06T12:27:15.027-05:00

Fahd Abu Haikal shows a photo of his seven-month- old son, Sam, who was killed on Friday when Israeli soldiers fired at their car. Photograph: Mahmoud Illean/AP

The children being shot in the head are not victims of accidental crossfire; they are being individually targeted for assassination. Most news sources that provide news about Gaza tend to focus on the ongoing genocide, and the mass starvation, without details about the children being intentionally head-shot. I only learned of this phenomenon from a podcast on This American Life. Herewith some excerpts from a transcript of their "Solving for Why" segment of the "Chaos Graph" podcast on April 25:

Chana Joffe-Walt:
"One of the hardest places to see through chaos in the middle of a war-- fog of war, all that. This is especially true for the war in Gaza. There is very limited information moving in and out of Gaza. Israel has banned international press from entering the strip for nearly 18 months, except for a few brief trips, accompanied by and under the control of the Israeli military. One rare outside group has gotten a view on the ground of Gaza-- medical workers. Since the start of the war, over 100 American doctors and nurses have traveled to Gaza, treated patients there for weeks at a time, and come back out. Producer Ike Sriskandarajah talked to a dozen of them who volunteered there...

Ike Sriskandarajah:
"Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from the US-- he's also volunteered as a doctor in the war in Ukraine and with Palestinians in the West Bank. He's closely studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though his family is from a small ethnic minority in what is now Pakistan.

Feroze Sidhwa:
"The nurse that was showing us around didn't really speak English very well, and she just pointed at these two kids, and just pointed at her head, and said, shot, shot. There were four kids in the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head. I just thought that that was unbelievable. And I just assumed that she was just wrong. I didn't think she was lying, but she was just incorrect. That probably was a shrapnel injury or something like that. But then, I looked at these kids, and they didn't have any other evidence of an explosive injury. And then we pulled up their CT scans, and sure enough, it did look like they had been shot in the head. And then we went on and found two more kids also shot in the head in the other ICUs.

Ike Sriskandarajah:
"Feroze works at a hospital near Stockton, California, which has higher rates of violent crime than most of the country.

Feroze Sidhwa:
"But to see four kids with gunshot wounds to the head already admitted to the hospital when I get there, it certainly struck me as being very unusual...

Feroze Sidhwa:
And what I wrote down is that I was going through the ICU, and I found an eight-year-old girl shot in the head overnight. Her pupils are fixed and dilated. It's a transcranial gunshot wound, definitely non-survivable...

Feroze Sidhwa:
Yeah, the bullet didn't stop. And then, let's see, the next day. So the next day, the eight-year-old girl had died, and in the same bed is a 14-year-old boy shot in the right chest and the head.

The next day, I said, I went through the ICU afterwards. The 14-year-old boy turns out to be 12 when his family arrived. So then, let's see, two days later, he's been replaced by a 13-year-old boy shot in the head. I wrote, he'll also die.

So then on that same day, I wrote, I took care of a two-year-old girl who was brought to the ED after being shot in the head. She arrived with bilateral fixed and dilated pupils, also a non-survivable brain injury. We then had a mass casualty event a few minutes later...

Ike Sriskandarajah:
At the same time that Feroze was starting to document this, Mark, working with his patients-- he was seeing the same thing. He vividly remembered the day he saw two kids brought in who had both been shot in the head and the chest.

Mark Perlmutter:
One of the kids was there with a family member. I ripped up his shirt, and there was a bullet entry wound right over the heart. And then I picked up the dressings on his forehead, and a second bullet went in right in front of his left ear hole, in front of his ear and out of his neck.

Ike Sriskandarajah:
Oh, my god. What was the kid doing when this happened?

Mark Perlmutter:
Walking with their adult to get water.

Ike Sriskandarajah:
Was there a street battle happening?

Mark Perlmutter:
I didn't ask if there was a street battle going on, but it happened twice in the same day.

Ike Sriskandarajah:
Could you say the second time?

Mark Perlmutter:
Yeah, right next to that kid was another kid who got shot in the head and the chest. And that child had no adult with him, so I couldn't get a story. It's hard to see it.

Ike Sriskandarajah:
These weren't kids injured by collapsing buildings. They were kids who'd been shot-- direct gunshot wounds into 12-year-olds, eight-year-olds, even toddlers...

Ike Sriskandarajah:
13 children in 14 days. Even with all the other traumatic injuries and deaths they saw, the kids who were shot really stuck with Mark. It was haunting him.

Mark Perlmutter:
Early on, I thought it was just an isolated jerk carrying out, because every army has jerks. War changes people, and so you can absolutely have rogue people behaving inappropriately...

Adam Hamawy:
When I was in Iraq, there were civilians that were injured. There were children that were injured. And that's called incidental, collateral damage, all the terms that we use to cleanly justify what's happening. But the scale was, I mean, not even-- not even close to this.

I mean, I probably took care of, like, five, six children the whole time I was in Iraq, and I wasn't there for three weeks. I was there for eight months. I mean, it didn't look-- it didn't appear that they were intentional targets. Those you could really say that they were wrong place, wrong time.

I didn't see targeted gunshots to little kids that were five, six years old or 10, 15 years old. In fact, I mean, I'm thinking back. I mean, I don't think I saw a gunshot wound to a kid at all when I was there...

Adam Hamawy:
These are little children that are being shot, and these aren't stray bullets. These are aimed. They're precise. So a stray bullet will explain one or two of them. It's not going to explain the string of precise, targeted shootings that are being done on children since October.

Ike Sriskandarajah:
The medical worker I spoke with who spent the most time in Gaza also saw the most kids shot-- 50. She showed me a picture she took of a scan of a five or six-year-old's skull. There's a bullet in the middle of it. She was told this child was playing with their friends when an armed quadcopter drone came overhead and shot the child...

Ike Sriskandarajah:
Feroze reached out to as many American medical workers as he could-- doctors, nurses, paramedics. He created a survey to send out and compiled all the answers. The results stunned him.

Feroze Sidhwa:
Almost everybody had the exact same experience. Almost universally, they said the same thing, which I really was surprised by.

Ike Sriskandarajah:
Out of the 53 American medical workers surveyed who did emergency care for children in Gaza, 44 said they saw kids shot in the head or chest...

Ike Sriskandarajah"
Feroze published an op ed in the New York Times with the results of the survey. A group of the doctors wrote two letters to then President Biden outlining what they saw. Feroze thought that would mean two things-- they'd get a call from the White House and there'd be an investigation...

Ike Sriskandarajah:
I talked with three people who worked at the US State Department and reviewed allegations like this, including the person who, until recently, was the Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice, a position that used to be called the War Crimes Ambassador. They all agreed the doctors' report sounded credible and significant enough to investigate.

Each of them said the next step should be asking Israel for answers. One, who is involved in vetting US weapons transfers, told me if this had been another country other than Israel, this is what would have happened...

So we asked the Israel Defense Forces how they explained the reports from American medical workers. They declined both my interview requests, but sent a statement, saying, "The IDF does not target minors and takes extensive measures to prevent harm to civilians, including children. The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm and operates in full compliance with international legal obligations. For security reasons, we cannot elaborate on operational policies."

What follows the above segment is an interview with an Israeli soldier about the possible whys and hows of the described events. I've already excerpted too much from This American Life, so I'll offer apologies to them and suggest that the very few readers who will be interested in more details should read the full transcript at this link, or even better listen to the full podcast (I had to stop twice and do other things while listening, because the information is so unsettling).

Here are several observations from medical personnel from the op-ed published in the New York Times.

“One night in the emergency department, over the course of four hours, I saw six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull.”

“Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head. They all presented to the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”

“One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”

Other related articles: Mother Jones interviews Sidwha, and a denial by The Times of Israel.

Most of the press coverage about Gaza is about the ongoing starvation and genocide. I hope to address that later. In the meantime I'm sending some additional $$ to the World Central Kitchen. I fully realize Israel has assassinated WCK workers delivering food to Gaza and have an ongoing blockade of food trucks at the border, but if I do nothing I will have no answer to the question "What did you do during the genocide in Gaza?."

"Thanks to your support, WCK has offloaded 49 trucks of essential food supplies at the Kerem Shalom crossing after more than 80 days of border closures. This milestone brings us closer to resuming meal production in Gaza, where our operations had been paused after serving over 130 million meals and 26 million loaves of bread. While awaiting approvals for additional deliveries, our field teams remain ready to restart operations, with trucks loaded, fuel secured, and kitchen systems prepped. In the meantime, we’ve distributed over 2 million liters of clean drinking water, reaching 170,000 liters in a single day, bringing hope and dignity to communities in need. Thank you for standing with us to help nourish those facing unimaginable hardship."

Reposted from 2025 to add the photo embed at the top and this documentation that the process is still going on in 2026 !!

Israeli troops killed a seven-month-old Palestinian baby in the occupied West Bank and injured one of the child’s parents after opening fire on the family’s car, despite it having complied with an order to stop.

Soldiers opened fire on Friday on a car carrying the infant and his parents in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron. The seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, was critically injured, evacuated in critical condition to a hospital, where he later died. His parents were also injured...

He said it was still daylight and that the soldier who opened fire could clearly see the occupants were a family. “The soldier signalled me to stop. I brought the car to a complete halt and raised my hands on the steering wheel. Immediately afterwards, they opened fire on the vehicle,” he told Haaretz...

“The soldier was about 10 metres away from me. He saw me, he saw my wife and the children,” he told Haaretz. ‘‘The windows were not tinted, it was broad daylight and everything was clear. You can’t say he didn’t see that it was a family.

“I stopped as I was instructed to, and then they simply shot at the car,” he added. “There was no clear checkpoint, just soldiers standing in the street. I stopped when I was asked to, and then the shooting started,” he said.

This latest victim was not "targeted" as such, but the end result is the same. And this is happening during a so-called "ceasefire."

"Mogging" explained

2026-06-06T12:16:10.440-05:00

Mogging’s origins are in the manosphere, where it began as a verb derived from the acronym “Amog” (alpha male of the group). In misogynistic forums in the 2010s, to “mog” came to mean to outdo someone in terms of sexual desirability. Mogging has been adopted by “looksmaxxing” influencers such as Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular, who encourage men to try to alter their looks – sometimes in extreme ways – to increase their “sexual market value”. Such an influencer might talk of “frame mogging” another person in a photo or video – a variation on mogging that specifically refers to being more muscular.
Even now, as the term has begun to be used much more widely, and in a tongue-in-cheek way, it is still typically associated with looks (a friend of mine, for example, was described by her boyfriend’s younger siblings as “mogging him” in a photo). But increasingly, mogging can mean besting others at basically anything. The gold medal Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu said in an interview last year that her main competition strategy was “to mog”, while a 23-year-old colleague of mine tells me that she and her friends joke about “walk-mogging” when they overtake people on the street.

Discussion continues at The Guardian.

Blue flags (Iris versicolor)

2026-06-04T11:37:16.600-05:00

They look beautiful even in a stagnant drainage ditch.

These windshield dots have a function

2026-06-04T11:34:11.853-05:00

Explained at the whatdoesthismean subreddit:

Those little black dots on your car’s windshield are called frits. They are printed on the glass using baked-on ceramic paint and serve several important purposes: Secure the Glass: The solid black band and the dots provide a rougher, etched surface for the urethane glue to bond the windshield to the car frame. Protect the Adhesive: The solid black border acts as a shield to block harmful UV rays from degrading the glue and keeping it strong over time. Regulate Heat: The dots decrease in size as they move away from the solid black band. This creates a gradient that absorbs and distributes heat evenly, preventing the glass from warping, cracking, or suffering from optical distortion when it gets hot in the sun. Reduce Glare: They diffuse harsh sunlight so you don't experience intense contrast between the dark frame and clear glass.

Clever bus design

2026-06-04T11:26:20.670-05:00

Via Bits and Pieces, where there is always a variety of different and humorous material.

English farms diversifying with side hustles

2026-06-04T11:19:20.210-05:00

As reported by Bloomberg:

“This is a working farm,” boasts a sign at Rushett Farm. At first glance, the scene appears to be just that: A tractor is parked by stacks of hay bales while rapeseed grows in a field. It’s a quintessential image of working, rural England, at a spot just inside London’s orbital highway, where the city sprawl dissolves into the countryside.

Yet things aren’t entirely what they seem. A barn is now a Pilates studio; a path leads down to a café hut overlooking the crops; fields are dedicated to glamping stays and occasionally a corporate event tent. An old hangar now houses a gym and wellness classes, including meditative “sound baths.” Rushett offers a different world of adventures to the theme park up the road; whatever it is, it’s not just a working farm.

Rushett is in fact one of a growing number of English farms diversifying away from agriculture as making a living through traditional means gets harder and more unpredictable. The farming industry has — like that of many other countries — been squeezed by higher input costs in recent years...

More than 70% of England’s farms now top up their earnings through non-conventional activities, up from 50% less than two decades ago, government data show. Those side-hustles range from the fairly traditional — camp sites, Airbnb rentals and farm shops — to solar power installations, ice rinks and facilities for business team-bonding sessions.

More details and discussion at the link. The best gift I ever gave to a relative was funding an opportunity for a tween-age niece to spend a week on a working farm, camping in a tent at night while doing chores in the daytime, including milking the goats and mucking out the horse stalls. She absolutely loved it. If you an find similar opportunities, please consider doing the same. Good for the children, good for the farms.

I'm glad the teacher graded this with a smiley

2026-06-03T21:10:40.722-05:00

Via Miss Cellania.

Reposted from 2024 because I needed a laugh tonight. And it's interesting on a reread to notice how the errors the girl made actually make some sense.

Found in the hair of a trauma victim...

2026-06-03T13:55:38.375-05:00

The patient's wife posted this image in the whatisit subreddit, where I learned that this is a modern xray marker. I spent 30 years reviewing chest xrays, and back in the previous century the xray markers were less elaborate. Classically the orientation was indicated with a lead "R" or "L" (or full word "LEFT") -

- sometimes with a movable pellet inside to indicate upright, supine, or decubitus positioning...

Nowadays apparently the standard is to have the xray technician's initials incorporated into the marker, which the technician can (?has to) buy from sites like Etsy -

You learn something every day - even stuff you thought you knew.

Rhinestone jewelry can be valuable

2026-06-03T13:06:40.026-05:00

The embedded image shows a demi-parure (matched set of earrings and necklace) created with Aurora Borealis rhinestones, which were popular in the 1950s-60s. The image was posted in the Vintage Jewelry subreddit, where the discussion thread offers informed commentary.

Erasing Gaza

2026-06-03T12:59:40.475-05:00

A series of before-and-after satellite photos document the physical destruction going on in Gaza. At the link are a set of photos with sliders that allow direct comparison of the baseline with the current condition. What is shown is not collateral destruction from errant munitions, but a deliberate process to physically erase any evidence of Palestinian history and culture - including the cemeteries...

The Sheikh Mohammed cemetery in the Maan area of Khan Younis has been wiped from the map, and replaced by the tents and armoured vehicles of an Israeli military outpost, according to recently updated satellite imagery added to Google Earth...

The high-resolution pictures, captured on February 25, 2026, expose a landscape where entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to ash, and the surviving population is squeezed into suffocating encampments that spill onto the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea...

For Palestinians, the updated maps provide a devastating, wide-angle view of an ongoing genocide that has killed nearly 73,000 people.

According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israeli forces have fully or partially destroyed 94 percent of Gaza’s cemeteries, transforming places of memory into military barracks...

US President Joe Biden initially drew a ‘red line’ over the invasion of Rafah in early 2024, but Israel went ahead with its brutal operation. Israel faced no consequences for its actions in Rafah, which has largely been flattened...

The methodical destruction extends to the territory’s educational foundation. UNICEF says more than 97 percent of schools have been damaged or destroyed, leaving 658,000 children without formal learning for more than two years. Universities have either been blown up or transformed into displacement shelters...

The Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), which catered to over 20,000 students, and Al-Azhar University, which enrolled more than 16,000 students, have been razed. Both major campuses, along with Al-Israa University in the south, were completely levelled through controlled military detonations...

In the Shakoush area, Israeli bulldozers have razed greenhouses and confiscated the topsoil, directly exacerbating the man-made starvation of the population...

"Confiscating the topsoil" FFS. This is ongoing genocide, and no Western countries are doing anything about it. The destruction of homes and olive groves is what Rachel Corrie died protesting in 2003, when she was run over by a bulldozer while wearing a high-visibility orange vest. And the U.S. continues to fund the criminal activities of Netanyahu, including his use of white phosphorus in Lebanon. And here is the New York Times documentation of the use of white phosphorus in Lebanon.

Addendum: A longread detailed article about the repeated violations of the Gaza "ceasefire" is here.

Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 3,005 times from October 10, 2025 to May 27, 2026, through the continuation of attacks by air, artillery and direct shootings, the Government Media Office in Gaza reports...From October 10, 2025 to April 14, 2026, the office said Israel shot at civilians 921 times, raided residential areas beyond the “yellow line” 97 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 1109 times, and demolished people’s properties on 273 occasions...

According to an analysis by Al Jazeera, Israel has attacked Gaza on 211 out of the past 235 days of the ceasefire, meaning there were only 24 days during which no violent attacks, deaths or injuries were reported.

Despite continuing attacks, the US insists that the “ceasefire” is still holding.

Humor for English majors

2026-05-29T12:47:51.670-05:00