The patient didn’t make it, doctor

Emergency surgery: the patient, a handsome Mozambique tilapia in the prime of life, was trapped inside a maze of tunnels, an environment not compatible with life. Medical scans revealed its location, but it was deep and too large to be easily extracted.

The only solution was to go in and widen the tunnels. When they finally got to the fish, though, it was too late. It had expired.

It may have been dead for a while, and its location was not exactly conducive to preservation.

To make matters even more disgusting (if that’s possible), medics were reportedly gagging at the smell in the operating theatre.

Tragic and horrifying. O Poor Tilapia! We grieve for you.

The question remains: how did this terrible event happen to the fish?

When a nurse questioned him on it, the patient claimed he’d ‘accidentally sat on’ the fish, which then entered his body via his anus.

Seems legit.

A chat transript has circulated on China’s social media service Weibo. It states that the healthcare worker responded, saying: “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

People, look before you sit down. You never know when a fish might be sitting in your chair. From the perspective of any innocent small animal taking a break on your office chair, you’re just an ominous stinky dark hole lowering itself to engulf anything on the seat.

Can I be her when I grow up?

I’m reading Tea Francis’s story, and wow, that’s me, except I waited until I was 60 to get into spiders. I wasted so much time! (Well, not really, I do have a family and a career, so I can’t complain about that.)

I have kept spiders for almost 20 years now, sometimes just one tarantula, sometimes lots of different types of spiders, but they’ve been present in some capacity ever since I was 17 or 18. After moving somewhere with more space at the beginning of last year, my collection had expanded significantly to almost 200 spiders of all different types. I decided to start an Instagram account to post about my spiders as whenever I posted anything to do with them anywhere else, I got a load of the usual ‘kill it with fire’ responses which I find grating, to say the least. I started to focus my attention on studying them a lot more closely. I invested in my very first DSLR and macro lens and set about learning how to use it. That in itself unlocked a whole new level of appreciation for them and I quickly became hopelessly, irretrievably obsessed. With new photos popping up on my Instagram feed every day, sometimes multiple times a day, they seemed to be gaining rather a lot of interest from other enthusiasts, photographers, keepers and even arachnophobes who were consciously working on overcoming their fears. This was a bit of a revelation for me & definitely a motivation to do more! I took it to Twitter as well and began posting there too, where I ended up meeting a lot of arachnology folk who were either studying towards or already active in the field I had always quietly dreamed of being involved in myself. Actually working with and researching spiders.

Then look at her lovely spider nook! It’s like fantasy land!

I’m not too jealous, though. I look at that and see a heck of a lot of maintenance work, and also sadness — most spiders aren’t that long-lived, so there’s always death among the beloved horde. Also, this would be a terrifying time to be at the start of a science career. Stay strong, Ms Francis!

Lawless police

The police were systematically slashing car tires during the protests. They initially lied and said they didn’t do it, or that it was a few random incidents, but when every car in a lot is slashed in all four tires, you know that’s a big fat lie. Now that there’s video of cops destroying property, they’ve changed the lie.

The Star Tribune has identified the officers puncturing tires as state troopers and deputies from the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office. The officers strategically deflated the tires to “stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement,” said Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bruce Gordon. The troopers reportedly targeted cars that “contained items used to cause harm during violent protests” such as rocks and concrete. The Anoka County Sheriff’s Lt. Andy Knotz said deputies were following directions from the state-led Multiagency Command Center.

Yeah, right. Lie, lie, lie.

Also of note: these are Minnesota state troopers, not the Minnesota Police Department. The city is talking about defunding their police, but the staties aren’t being touched. Maybe when they’re hit with all the towing bills and lawsuits, somebody will wake up and realize they’re just as corrupt?

Just look at these pretend-soldiers destroying private property!!!. Shock! Horror!

The gray car in the video above was the rental car of Luke Mogelson, a New Yorker writer who typically covers war zones and is now stationed in Minneapolis to write about the protests. As the protest on Sunday evening turned hairy, with law enforcement tear-gassing peaceful groups soon after curfew, Mogelson went to check on his car, showing his press pass to officers along the way. (Media were exempt from the curfew.) One officer took a picture of his press pass and said he would “radio it up the chain so everyone knew that car belonged to the press,” said Mogelson. When he came back later that evening to retrieve his car, officers informed him that the tires were punctured. “They were laughing,” Mogelson recalled. “They had grins on their faces.”

ACAB. Indisputably.

Gosh. Maybe I should respect the police perspective on all this.

Linux goal for the day: iMovie replacement!

I tried KDENLive. It was too much — so many quirks and clumsiness, perhaps because it was just trying to pour every single video editing option possible in willy-nilly.

Today, I’m experimenting with Shotcut, on the recommendation of a reader. It’s simpler, so not quite as overwhelming. I might be able to work with this.

A couple of common problems I run into everything Linux. With no universal interface guidelines, every program seems to want to do everything their own way. I appreciate how the programmers can find that liberating, but in the absence of constraints and standards, they always seem to make bad choices, and you have to just stare in wonder at how they’ve decided to arbitrarily fuck up their own work. It also means that using the thing is awkward and not at all fluid, at least not until the user develops their own novel workflow. It also means the user has the power to make the most godawful ugly videos ever — I was testing various things out and made this nightmarish thing with purple 3-D titles and funky video effects and random stuff appearing in spectacularly elaborate ways that will never be seen by the eyes of any other human. I’m about to take it ’round back, shoot it, throw it in a hole, and set it on fire. But I figure out how some things work while building that monstrosity!

Bottom line: Shotcut might be my replacement for iMovie, as ugly as it is. I might just have to become insensitive to non-Mac ugliness. I know, I shouldn’t complain, it’s free software…but iMovie is also free.

First try:

Also, I’ll be on this channel at 3pm tomorrow (9 June) for a free-for-all rant about Kent Hovind and other creationists.

Let there be change at last

Give ’em hell, John Oliver. Good summary.

I would also point out a fact revealed in this thread: most police activity isn’t about preventing crime, it’s about inventing crime, finding reasons to harass and intimidate and punish people to justify their existence. That’s the reason crime rates go down when the police go on strike: it removes a significant factor, the mere reporting of crimes that are generated to give the illusion that they are essential. Cop busy work is harassment of citizens.

Ever policeman in the country needs to be thinking about alternative employment opportunities. Preferably something that doesn’t involve carrying a gun or baton.

Did he think he’d go to heaven?

In the news, residents of Bristol tore down a statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it in a river.

I knew nothing about the guy and had to look him up, where two prominent facts are mentioned.

A. He made a lot of money in the slave trade. In fact, he held the highest office in the Royal African Company, so he was the head honcho of the institution responsible for the British side of the slave trade.

B. He was loved in Bristol as a tremendous philanthropist, founding churches and hospitals and poorhouses, and was spending a lot of money on local, British charities.

Huh. So he was busy generating great misery in the black people of Africa, and using the profits from that ugly enterprise to benefit the white people in his hometown. Those two perspectives are irreconcilable, unless he also thought his black victims were undeserving or non-human. I rather suspect that the suffering he caused greatly outweighed the good he did at home, especially since his goodness was fortuitously focused on maintaining the institutions that kept him wealthy and powerful. So, yeah, throw his monument in the river. Recognize that the good we do for our local benefit has to take into account the global harm that we do.

It’s also an interesting example of how European communities benefited at the expense of African and Asian peoples.

Now, Belgium…about King Leopold II…

Hallelujah!

The Minneapolis city council has committed to dismantling the police department!

“Decades of police reform efforts have proved that the Minneapolis Police Department cannot be reformed and will never be accountable for its actions,” they said. “We are here today to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.”

While some council members have provided hints of what the changes might mean — sending mental health professionals or social workers to respond to certain emergencies, for example — the group did not present a single, unified vision for how they would replace policing in Minneapolis.

Organizers with Black Visions said they too don’t have all the answers about what would replace the police department, but they said police can’t be reformed through initiatives like training and body cameras. This is the beginning of the process of putting together a “police-free future,” they vowed, by investing in more community initiatives like mental health and having community members respond to public safety issues.

I’m not sure what that’ll look like, but any organization that you can call for help that does not immediately dispatch armored thugs with guns will be preferable.

Also, the state of Minnesota has filed charges against the MPD for civil rights violations. They haven’t got a friend in the world, other than a few deranged Republicans.