As I gaze at the structural column in Copley Station, cracked nearly in two and held together with zip ties that have been carefully painted over to match the column underneath, I feel my soul intertwined with that of a small Italian boy of days gone by, who also stopped to look up at a large, groaning, newly painted tank full of molasses
I feel that some non-Boston people think I may have been exaggerating this. While I did not snap a photo as I was on the train, someone else did several months ago. I do want to stress that this column is now freshly painted and therefore completely structurally sound and in absolutely no danger of causing the entire tunnel to collapse. And yes, it did in fact never cross my mind that the original post was nearly 105 years to the day of the Molassacre
This is so safe this is the safest I’ve ever felt good job mbta gold star
Fun fact: Copley station was built 5 years after the molasses flood so we’re in good hands
I love that the turtle is explicitly bothering the cat, rather than just zooming aimlessly around.
“Mom it’s not supposed to BE that fast!”
This just in: Turtle gains speed and immediately becomes a menace to local cat. “Why is he chasing me? Why not explore the house?” Cat comments. More on this in the evening.
For those curious, this was taken at the Oceti Sakowin camp during the No DAPL protests in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The photograph is titled “Defend the Sacred” by Ryan Vizzions. I did not find the name of the subject on horseback.
Her name was
Marissa Blacklance. #Dakota38 rider, & front line water protector at Standing Rock. She was killed by a drunk driver in January of 2018. Her mother is using this tragedy to make changes benefitting our community with the Yellow Scarf tribute.
Amusing too that even though some parts of Brook’s movies have aged (as all comedy does), it still hasn’t aged as badly as that comment saying that they should aspire to be more like Woody Allen.
All art is subjective and everyone has their own likes and dislikes
And if people don’t like Blazing Saddles that’s their call
That said
Anyone who thinks that anything Woody Allen has done in his entire career is better than even the worst film Mel Brooks has ever made is an appalling buffoon who has no fucking business being a film critic ._.
Today we celebrate the life and works of Terry Pratchett who would have been 76 years old today
Having spent many times in his company over the years, we would like to hear your stories of “Time with Terry”, be it at conventions, book signings or elsewhere !
Let us know your Time with Terry moment in the comments.
in guarani there’s a standard greeting that literally translates to “are you happy” (ndevy'apa) and the natural reply is “i’m happy” (avy'a) and as americans learning the language we were so distressed like “but what if we’re not happy…..” and our teachers were like “that’s so not the fucking point”
we kept trying to think of any other way to reply but our teachers kept trying to get it into our brains that it’s an idiomatic greeting, it literally is not the time or place to traumadump, and as usamerican english speakers we are not some special exception for saying “what’s up” with the reply being “not much” instead of “the ceiling”
but anyway while i was working in paraguay – the country with the largest population of guarani speakers – i got sent an article by some friends back home like “look! they’re saying that paraguay is the happiest country in the world!”
and the methodology was “we went around and asked paraguayans if they’re happy and recorded their responses” and i was like. oh. of course you did. and of course you got a 100% positive response rate.
wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?
ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.
The Erfurt latrine disaster occurred on 26 July 1184, when Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held a Hoftag (informal assembly) at the cathedral provostry in Erfurt. The combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement. This event is called the Erfurter Latrinensturz (lit. 'Erfurt latrine fall’) in several German sources.
A house is abandoned, and trees grow through the floor. A ship sinks, and is encrusted in sea life. Grass grows where there was once a railway, dirt seeps into the palace, rollercoasters rust and collapse, the sun breaks through the broken roof of the church. Something has died and gone, but life continues. Devours. Recycles.
An abandoned space station? It just stops. Perhaps the remains of life will continue for a little while, leave their stains, but then that stops too. Life eats itself and then extinguishes itself, leaving only the ghosts. No soil, no bacteria, no air, no heat, no change. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.
The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.
But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.
It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.
(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)
It’s so easy to underestimate the significance of the fact that all of Johnny’s songs are classic folk-americana tunes, honestly! Like, of course thematically what matters is meeting “technically challenging but obnoxious” with “genuinely skilled and beautiful, you just didn’t expect him to be good because he’s poor,” but the music choices are significant for another reason.
Bluntly: Standards.
Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate….but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.
But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.
All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap.
Johnny had more heart, of course–that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.
(Also he didn’t summon an entire goddamn backup band to do the heavy lifting for him, but like. Of course this is the American folklore Devil, the trickster-spirit archetype figure who is really more akin to the Fae and not the actual Christian concept of Satan, but “the Devil cheated” still isn’t exactly an instant disqualification. That’s kind of a given. He is, after all, the Devil.)
I would like to note my mother got to see Charlie Daniels play this live, and there’s one more reason the Devil lost:
Care.
See, apparently Charlie Daniels actually kept extra fiddles on the stage for this song, because playing the Devil’s part WILL snap the fiddle strings. Yes, both Johnny and the Devil have longer solos in the live version because this song is really just Charlie Daniels showing off (earned, though, lbr), but my mom said his fiddle strings were literally SMOKING long before he got into the extended part. And so by necessity, when one set of strings snapped he’d drop the fiddle and pick up another.
The Devil is using his fiddle the same way he uses people: he’s abusing it, treating it as something worth nothing but disdain. I want to pause here briefly and note that when this song was originally written, the best violins in the world were considered to be the Stradivarius violins; there are now modern violins that match or beat their sound, but that’s an EXTREMELY new innovation. This means the Devil is likely playing on a violin worth tens of thousands of dollars; even if he’s conjured an infernal violin for himself, the contempt he shows for Johnny’s (implied) poverty and simplicity says it doesn’t look like just any old violin. And yet, he treats it like garbage—and that’s exactly what comes out of it.
(If you’re wondering where the violin comes into this, a fiddle is a violin played differently, and this is one great way to show the difference between “high” and “low” art is spelled B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.)
Meanwhile, Johnny is some backwoods hick who’s probably never even heard the word Stradivarius, wouldn’t know what to do with one if he had one, and likely plays an absolute shitkicker that looks like hell and cost him fifteen bucks at the pawnshop.
But Johnny VALUES his fiddle. He doesn’t so much play it as make love to it. What we hear is beautiful because he understands he’s not the only one with a soul; instruments have souls, too. He’ll take that solid gold fiddle because he can use the money, but he’ll go right on playing his cheap beat-up old thing until the day he dies. He loves it like he loves his home and his music, and that love makes magic.
The Devil loses because he doesn’t understand the concept that love will beat out greed every time. Johnny wins because he values and respects what he has.
[Image description: screen shot of a social media post from Brendan Frasier Crane (@bf_crane): “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” is the most American of songs, because it’s set up like a cautionary tale about pride leading to a fall but it turns out the fiddler actually is the best and his vanity is justified. 9:23 PM. 05 Jul 23. 137K Views. Description ends.]
Also, the Devil values his fiddle because it’s made of gold. But and actual golden fiddle would sound terrible – not like a handcrafted instrument carved from wood. Like other Capitalists, the only value the Devil can understand is monetary value.
BTW, for those interested, here are the fiddle tunes referenced in Charlie Daniel’s song:
Fire on the Mountain, run, Boy, run. Devil’s in the House of the Rising Sun. Chicken’s in the bread pan, pickin’ out dough. Granny, Will Your Dog Bite? No, child, no.
I’ll never forget the time I was sitting with this guy, nice kid, didn’t know him well, I think we must have had a bottle of wine or some questionable hashish or something, and in response to an awkward silence I just started talking and ended up going on a long meandering rant about how ugly American robins are. I’m talking a full monologue. I had an intro and conclusion. It was pointlessly vehement. I have never been so mean or loquacious about anything in my life.
Consider my horror when this perfectly nice guy wordlessly lifted his shirt to reveal a full-torso prismacolor tattoo of his spiritual soul animal, the American robin.
Their scientific name sounds like “Migrating Turd” but otherwise I find them charming if fairly derpy and mundane. I don’t know if I’d get a tattoo of one though. They’re like the potato of American birds.
I have no actual animosity towards them. They’re fine. I like them. They remind me if my college roommate and beloved friend. I don’t know why I said any of that—I was grasping at straws for something kind of provocative to say and failed so catastrophically that I was catapulted into a Seinfeld skit.
eerily similar to the time in college someone tried to make conversation by making fun of a silly book a former high school teacher of theirs had written only for me to just pull out a physical copy of the exact book because i’d realized he was talking about my dad
the foot seeks the mouth like leaves seek the sun
yesterday was the ten year anniversary of my insensitive American Robin comment and my tattooed friend messaged me to celebrate the “funniest thing that had ever happened to him” so sometimes critically failing a charisma check leads to a whole decade of joy for someone else
listen, if you want to be with someone that has ADHD and doesn’t / can’t take medicine for it, you have to understand that we just forget. Yes, we know you had us write it down and put it somewhere obvious, we still forgot. Yes, you just said it 10 times, we still forgot. Yes, you literally, to our face, seconds before, told us in detail, we turned around and forgot immediately. we forget, everything, immediately, most of the time.
adding! sometimes we do just need a little nudge, a small, gentle reminder. we don’t need to hear your frustration, we’re frustrated, we live with it. you live adjacent to it.
Got pulled over because he “saw someone flash their lights at me” and it made him “think something was going on”. After he ran my paperwork and did multiple full walk-arounds of my car, he decided everything was in order and I was free to go. I just wanted to get home from work.
Living in MD got pulled over when I pulled into my landlady’s [100%, rich, suburban] community and questioned what my purpose was there. “I live here” was not an acceptable answer and I ended up needing to call my landlady to talk to the officer and convince them that I really did live there, in her basement inlaw apartment, courtesy of her granddaughter. When he finally let me go he told me he “actually” pulled me over because he “thought [my] headlights were out” but on “second glance” they were just fine. Dunno how you can mistake headlights being on or off.
And I know I’ve told the story of when one of my elderly white neighbors called the police on me for training my dog in a public use field and how even the cop that showed up thought the call was stupid and racist.
My dad got pulled over when I was still in a carseat because they thought it was “suspicious” that a grown man would have such a young child with him on a school day. He was driving me back to school from a doctor’s appointment. They made him get our of the car, lean against it, and searched both him and the car because they “smelled something” while he did his best to keep me calm and tell me that it was going to be okay. I was too young to understand what happened at the time. I just remember he was furious the entire ride back to school, and he was still mad when I got off the bus that afternoon.
It really is just Like This, being black in this country.
I will be 70 years old and I still will never have gotten over the time the Mythbusters used a rocket powered steel wall to - and I use this word as literally as possible - vaporize an entire car into red mist
If you haven’t seen this episode of Mythbusters I feel so bad for you because “What car?” remains to this day as a defining moment of my adolescence and my entire life
That was a near-religious experience
I made a gif of it for those of you who cant watch the video in your country. Or if you know you just want to stare at it mesmerized like me
Oh wow they sure did vaporise that car into red mist
today I learned that in 2008, the city council of florence overturned dante’s sentence of execution if he returned from exile. yes, dante’s inferno dante, who died in 1321.
but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.
the funniest part is that the vote was 19-5. five people voted to uphold dante’s exile.
The objectively funniest part of this is actually that the city that holds his remains, Ravenna, refused to give his remains back. This was a ploy from florence to have his remains moved back for the tourist money and its been ongoing for a long time. Florence had a fake tomb built in the city to trick people into visiting, and have tried to force the return of the remains.
His actual caretakers have been very steadfast in keeping them hidden, moved, or generally out of reach to respect his choice in life to never, ever, ever return to florence, even when he was first offered the chance to return. This is at this point an almost millenium long feud that florence is really, really mad about losing
so basically the five people who wanted to uphold his exile were in the right
by Gabriel Moisan, Professeur, Département des sciences de l'activité physique, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR)
Over the years and to this day, many health professionals have supported the theory that flat feet pose a major risk factor for musculoskeletal disorders. (Shutterstock)
For many decades, if not centuries, researchers, medical professionals and the general population have believed that people with flat feet are more prone to developing a variety of problems.
Specifically, having flat feet was believed to predispose individuals to future pain and other musculoskeletal problems (i.e. to muscles, tendons and/or ligaments).
Flat feet were believed to be a kind of time bomb.
However, in a recent editorial published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, my research team challenges this myth. We demonstrate that the theory that having flat feet inevitably leads to pain or other musculoskeletal problems, is unfounded.
As a researcher in podiatric medicine at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), I will explain the main conclusions of our study here.
Where does this theory come from?
The idea that flat feet are a problem dates back centuries.
These clinician-researchers were the first to propose that if feet did not meet the specific criteria of normality (for example, a well-defined plantar arch, a straight heel in line with the tibia) they were abnormal, less efficient and more prone to injury because of multiple biomechanical compensations, such as greater arch flattening while walking.
This theory became central to the educational programs of health professionals. Although today it is gradually disappearing as modern curricula are updated, the theory was taught for almost five decades throughout the world, even though the scientific basis was weak. In fact, science has never validated the theory: it has remained at the hypothesis stage.
Nevertheless, over the years up until the present, many health professionals have continued to support the theory that flat feet pose a major risk for developing musculoskeletal disorders.
As a result, this idea is still firmly anchored in the beliefs of the general public.
Do flat feet cause musculoskeletal injuries?
Contrary to the theory of Root and colleagues, meta-analyses, the highest level of scientific evidence, have shown no increased risk of developing the vast majority of musculoskeletal injuries among people with flat feet.
These meta-analyses only identified weak links between having flat feet and the risk of developing medial tibial stress syndrome (pain in the tibia), patellofemoral syndrome (pain around the kneecap), and non-specific overuse injuries of the lower limbs.
That’s it.
Furthermore, a systematic review and a meta-analysis concluded that runners with flat feet are no more at risk of injury than those with regular feet.
These analyses call into question the idea that people with flat feet have a substantial risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders.
However, despite these findings, various sources such as grey literature, professional websites, forums and other media, often suggest that people with flat feet run a higher risk of injury, or even require treatment — even when they don’t have any symptoms.
Unfortunately, this frequently results in people having unnecessary interventions, such as using orthopaedic shoes or custom-made foot orthoses for asymptomatic flat feet. It also leads to significant concerns among patients about the appearance of their feet.
Runners with flat feet are no more at risk of injury than those with regular feet.
(Shutterstock)
Setting the record straight
Asymptomatic flat feet generally do not require the intervention of health professionals. Based on current scientific knowledge, assessing whether a person has flat feet to determine their risk of injury is ineffective and counterproductive.
While it is possible for a person with flat feet to develop a musculoskeletal injury, this does not necessarily mean that flat feet caused the injury.
It is quite possible for two variables to be present at the same time without there being a causal link. There is an important difference between a causal link and a correlation. A cause-and-effect relationship implies that a change in one variable (the cause) leads to a change in another variable (the effect). When two variables are correlated, changes in one variable may be associated with changes in the other, but this does not mean that one causes the other.
To illustrate the concept, let’s take the following example: we give 500 children aged six to 12 the same math test. By carrying out correlation tests, we notice a trend: the bigger the children’s feet, the higher their final mark in the exam.
This raises the question, does foot size really influence mathematical skills? Of course not!
Another variable that is not taken into account, age, plays a major role in this correlation. Since feet get bigger as we grow older, there is a strong but false correlation!
The same principle applies to flat feet. If a musculoskeletal injury occurs in a person with flat feet, current research indicates that flat feet are not necessarily the cause and that other factors need to be explored.
The link is one of correlation, not cause and effect.
Reducing overdiagnosis in health care
Reducing overdiagnosis in health care has become crucial. This phenomenon, defined as the diagnosis of a condition that brings no net benefit to the individual, constitutes a global burden with potential adverse effects on patients’ physical, psychological and financial well-being.
In financial terms, it is easy to understand that prescribing custom-made foot orthoses costing hundreds of dollars to prevent musculoskeletal injuries associated with asymptomatic flat feet, has a substantial negative impact. This is especially true given that the presence of flat feet only slightly increases the risk of developing these injuries.
To solve this problem, health-care professionals must help to reduce the overdiagnosis of flat feet by making a clearer distinction for their patients between harmless anatomical variants, and conditions of potential concern.
Since overdiagnosis often leads to overtreatment, avoiding unnecessary treatments will help to alleviate patients’ concerns about their flat feet.
Finally, we must abandon the outdated idea, still widespread, that says having flat feet is a problem that exposes individuals to a high risk of musculoskeletal injury. It’s time to change our perspective and our approach to the significance of flat feet and to recognize their natural diversity in the context of overall foot health.
Above all, it’s time to consider asymptomatic flat feet for what they are…simply an anatomical variant!
Gabriel Moisan is a member of the Ordre des Podiatres du Québec (College of Podiatrists Québec). He has received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the War Amps of Canada and the Réseau provincial de recherche en adaptation-réadaptation (REPAR).
ALT