The Antisocial Socialist

Most of the workers in the Mykolaiv Zoo have been evacuated or have gone to fight, and they're keeping a skeleton staff to keep the animals alive. They're asking people to buy e-tickets to financially support it. The zoo has been attacked but so far the animals are alive and the director is staying behind to help them.

Okay so ngl I'm in tears reading about this guy. Here's an article (in English, with photos). 

You can buy e-tickets here. If, like me, your Ukrainian is not very good*, Google translate works on it. My friend who does speak Ukrainian confirms that it's legit.

I feel helpless in general about Ukraine. I don't really have good solutions besides wishing Putin a very nice polonium tea, very quickly. But anyway. This is a thing people can do to help.


* That was sarcasm; I don't speak Ukrainian.

the fact that heather mallick still has her column is the #1 piece of evidence of what a union can do for you at your workplace

sign a union card todayhttps://t.co/RiHwQVByHo

— Michael O'Shaughnessy (@MDNOShaughnessy) April 22, 2019

Context for non-Canadians: Heather Mallick is among the several local journalists who cannot appear to write a coherent article from start to finish and remains employed despite a surplus of young journalists who would do a better job for much less money. She wrote a column today about stabbing a raccoon with a fork and how the raccoon possibly wanted to have sex with her??? I don't know. It's very incoherent and so many bad things happen in the world that it's really delightful that the entire city can come together to laugh at this.

If you're worried, the raccoon is fine.

There's a lot of newsblogging I could be doing right now, from commenting on how Drug Fraud's cut regulations on daycare (those regulations were there for child safety!) cut regulations on businesses (those regulations were there because otherwise businesses will work their employees to death) and cut protections on the Greenbelt (because lol fuck the environment) and is really bad at accounting (cutting Toronto city council to save money ended up costing the same amount because the councillors remaining after the cull had to hire more staff to, you know, do the job we used to elect people to do), but I'm pretty exhausted from living in a province run by a buffoon, so I'm going to just post a link to the one story that matters.

Actual headline:

‘Make better choices’: Endangered Hawaiian monk seals keep getting eels stuck up their noses and scientists want them to stop

Some choice excerpts:

“It’s just so shocking,” Claire Simeone, a veterinarian and monk seal expert based in Hawaii, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “It’s an animal that has another animal stuck up its nose.”

...

“It was just like, ‘We found a seal with an eel stuck in its nose, do we have a protocol?’”

...

“I struggle to think of an eel really wanting to force its way into a nose,” he said.

...

“It almost does feel like one of those teenage trends that happen,” he said. “One juvenile seal did this very stupid thing and now the others are trying to mimic it.”

Anyway just go read the whole thing; it's all quite good.

Oh, you thought you were done with my vacation photos! Those were just the ones I took on my iPad. There are so many, many more. I have hundreds to go through, actually. I shot them all RAW so of course they take forever to open.

I'm trying to focus on the ones that aren't typical tourist panoramas. I figure you can look up what these places look like if you're interested.

Anyway, here are my favourites from Ballestas, a.k.a. Island of the Cute Animals.


He sleepy.

( cut for the rest )( cut for the rest )

I totally crashed the Guinea Pig Picnic for reasons. It's basically the cutest thing ever, and yes, I took pictures. Copious pictures.


( Behold )

In lieu of providing actual content (outrage burnout continues at pace), here's what I'm reading this morning.

I won't link anything about Syria, Egypt, or the two Canadians under arrest in Cairo, because those sorts of horrors are above my level of cope right now and there's plenty of more intelligent discussion about it elsewhere.

Rage-inducing:

• Jezebel has a good post on how not to react to Chelsea Manning's announcement that she's Chelsea Manning. I'm lucky enough to be shielded, by virtue of currently being within my little progressive bubble and having a strict policy of not reading the comments since Manning's outrageous sentencing a few days ago, but I'm aware that there's some serious stupid out there. The discrepancy between her treatment and that of rapists, murderers, and war criminals is so infuriating that I can't even begin to put it in words—add transphobia and misogyny into the mix and you have a perfect storm of asshattery.

• On a related note, here's a long read about Manning, American institutions, and the internet. (Written before her sentencing and the official announcement of her gender identity, so the article uses male pronouns.)

“Why wasn’t I consulted?” is the fundamental question of post-network democracy, and the fundamental question of the Internet, to which the state mechanisms have so far replied: “Who the hell do you think you are?”

• Locally, some more on the shooting of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim, murdered by pigs on a Toronto streetcar. One pig (not the one who tased the dying kid after he'd been shot eight times) has been charged, but make no mistake—a pig will not actually be convicted for gunning down a likely-mentally-ill person of colour. This is a concession to the massive outcry following Yatim's murder and is intended, ultimately, to absolve all of the pigs of guilt by finding this pig not guilty.

Tell me I'm wrong, people.

• Quebec's proposed religious symbols ban, WTF? Though maybe the Jewish and Muslim communities there, not exactly accustomed to holding hands and singing Kumbaya, will find some common ground in opposing this bullshit. Proof that New Atheism is a continuation of White Man's Burden imperialism by other means.

Amusing:

• I'm getting some lulz out of the food poisoning at the CNE. I mean, isn't the point of eating these things to get food poisoning? The receptionist at my physio place, who is approximately my height and much thinner, apparently eats this kind of shit and announced her intention to try the Cronut despite everyone getting sick from it, and despite a job where she works with health professionals.

Happy-making:

• What, you mean that community-building is actually more effective at stopping crime than putting cops and surveillance cameras everywhere? You don't say! Will you just check out this lady making community housing better for everyone:

“We go up to the crack dealers, face-to-face, and we say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ says the 56-year-old woman, who uses a wheelchair. “‘It’s a beautiful night out. I love your coat. May we sit with you?’”

• Someone wrote a book just for me, apparently. Industrial music, Marx, and the Situationists. I of course immediately placed a hold on it.

• Baby Nautilus!

Useful:

• The title of this article, Anti-Fascist Fitness, made me hope that there was a training regimen to get in shape in order to beat up neo-Nazis, but it's actually not so much about that as about the politics of the fitness industry and the OMGBEESITY panic.

• This article, on how to be an ally to people with illness, chronic pain, and invisible disabilities, is quite a good read. I don't like the random capitalization or Tumblr SJW-style language, but the advice itself is useful and certainly would have been worth distributing to certain people *cough*co-workers*cough*. Especially the bits on being "the doctor," "the parent," and "the worshipper," all of which I've had to deal with in abundance.

Read, discuss if you find 'em interesting.

My heart goes out to the families of the victims, killed in a tragic accident that has provided the most quintessentially Canadian of all headlines: Flying bear kills two Canadians.

...for real. This is a thing that can happen.

If there is any cosmic justice whatsoever, glow-in-the-dark pterosaurs are still alive in Papua New Guinea.

There are many pictures and even a short video of our adventures today. I tried to weed, honestly I did, but there was so much awesome that I almost considered splitting the awesome in half.


We tip generously, but monster_grrrl goes a step farther and also tips a dinosaur.

Beneath the cut lies:
• Natural History Museum and Bug Art
• Dog Chapel
• Bread and Puppets Theater
• The Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment
• Random cool things that happened and animals, adorable and otherwise

( are you ready? )

Tonight, we are in Montréal at ivytheadventure's pad. We bumped into one of her friends and went to her place for beer and conversation. Tomorrow we head home.