grani-frugi-detritivore

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unlawful ICE raid in Newark

fuck this, seriously.

anyway Newark is excellent. Donating to NJ orgs now:

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birds can too smell

"During the next 25 years Wenzel launched olfaction studies at home and abroad. She repeated the electrode tests on a raven, a turkey vulture, mallards, canaries, bobwhite quail, and black-vented shearwaters. “Every bird we tested showed some kind of olfactory function,” she says. Her fieldwork in New Zealand revealed that kiwis, the only bird with a nostril at the tip of its beak rather than at the base, sniff out their earthworm prey. The National Science Foundation nixed her request to visit an Antarctic station—scientists were required to share rooms, and they wouldn’t let her bunk with a man—so she studied seabirds closer to home. Off the Southern California coast, she released odors of various substances, from fish oils to bacon fat, and found that two seabirds, northern fulmars and sooty shearwaters, were most attracted to the smells. “What was especially noticeable was that on a foggy morning the fulmars would appear out of the fog from downwind and fly around and round as if to say, ‘There’s got to be a fish here someplace,’ ” Wenzel recalls. “That convinced us it really was an important concept to pursue.” "

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SAINT LAURENT Spring/Summer RTW 2025 if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

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relatedly: calomel

oh my god THIS shit. They put this in baby teething powder. :

Benjamin Rush, btw, from Philly lol

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today's wiki read:

WHAT A RIDE:

Tartar Emetic:

"..long been known as a powerful emetic, and was used in the treatment of schistosomiasis and leishmaniasis. ... It typically is obtained as a hydrate."

Poison!

"After British physician John Brian Christopherson's discovery in 1918 that antimony potassium tartrate could cure schistosomiasis, the antimonial drugs became widely used.[6][7][8] However, the injection of antimony potassium tartrate had severe side effects such as Adams–Stokes syndrome[9] and therefore alternative substances were under investigation."

"Tartar emetic was used in the late 19th and early 20th century in patent medicine as a remedy for alcohol intoxication, and was first ruled ineffective in the United States in 1941, in United States v. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness.[12][13] "

love a snake oil story:

And look at these gross little beauties

Found via "Dimercaptosuccinic acid", because I was looking up how to cure lead poisoning (average Wednesday):

You have to chelate it (bind the metal out)

And now I have "you gotta keep it separated" in my head

Thank you wikipedia

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Some links about textiles and waste

from circular philadelphia:

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TOVE JANSSON

I have to get Moomin memorabilia, thank you for this reminder

Happy birthday Tove Jansson!

Queer author and artist Tove Jansson was born on 9 August 1914 in Helsinki, Finland. She's best known for creating Moomins - the cute little hippo like creatures in the picture above. Tove first started drawing Moomins in anti-fascist cartoons in the late 1930s when she worked for the magazine Garm - you can see one peering around the side of the 'M'.

Tove went on to incorporate Moomins into 14 children’s books and a long-running comic strip. Many of her characters were based off people in her life, including two of her female partners.

Learn more about Tove in our podcast!

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some of my favorite woven tapestries, by Cecilia Blomberg:

Point Defiance Steps

Mates

Rising Tides

Vashon Steps

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THOM BROWNE Pre-Fall 2024 if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

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Cribraria cancellata by allthingsfungi

[grani-frugi-detritivore]

I got a job at a Ukrainian museum.

On the first day someone asks me if I have any Ukrainian heritage. I say I had ancestors from Odesa, but they were Jewish, so they weren’t considered Ukrainian, and they wouldn’t have considered themselves Ukrainian. My job is every day I go through boxes of Ukrainian textiles and I write a physical description, take measurements, take photographs, and upload everything into the database. I look up “Jewish” in the database and there is no result. 

Some objects have no context at all, some come with handwritten notes or related documents. I look at thick hand-spun, hand-woven linen heavy with embroidery. Embroidery they say can take a year or more. I think of someone dressed for a wedding in their best clothes they made with their own hands. Some shirts were donated with photographs of the original owners dressed in them, for a dance at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, in 1935. I handle the pieces carefully, looking at how they fit the men in the photos, and how they look almost a hundred years later packed in acid-free tissue. One of the men died a few years later, in the war. He was younger than I am now. The military archive has more photographs of him with his mother, his father, his fiancé. I take care in writing the catalogue entry, breathing in the history, getting tearful. 

I imagine people dressed in their best shirts at Easter, going around town in their best shirts burning the houses of Jews, in their best shirts, killing Jews. A shirt with dense embroidery all over the sleeves and chest has a note that says it is from Husiatyn. I look it up and find that it was largely a Jewish town, and Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. There is a fortress synagogue from the Renaissance period, now abandoned. 

When my partner Aaron visits I take him to an event at the museum where a man shows his collection of over fifty musical instruments from Ukraine, and he plays each one. Children are seated on the floor at the front. We’re standing in a corner, the room full of Ukrainians, very aware that we look like Jews, but not sure if anyone recognizes what that looks like anymore. Aaron gets emotional over a song played on the bandura. 

A note with a dress says it came from the Buchach region. I find a story of Jewish life in Buchach in the early twentieth century, preparing to flee as the Nazis take over. I cry over this.

I’m cataloguing a set of commemorative ribbons that were placed on the grave of a Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Yevhen Konovalets, after he was assassinated. The ribbons were collected and stored by another Nationalist, Andriy Melnyk, who took over leadership after Konovalets’ death. The ribbons are painted or embroidered with messages honouring the dead politician. I start to recognize the word for “leader”, the Cyrillic letters which make up the name of the colonel, the letters “OYH” which stand for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN in English). The OUN played a big part in the Lviv pogroms in 1941, I learn. The Wikipedia article has a black and white image of a woman in her underwear, running in terror from a man and a young boy carrying a stick of wood. The woman’s face is dark, her nose may be bleeding. Her underwear is torn, her breast exposed. I’m measuring, photographing, recording the stains and loose threads in the banners that honour men who would have done this to me. 

Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half, after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad. 

This morning I see images from Israeli attacks in the West Bank, where they are not at war. There are naked bodies on the dusty ground. I’m not sure if they are alive. This is what I think of when I see the image from the Lviv pogrom. If what it means for Jews to be safe from oppression is to become the oppressor, I don’t want safety. I don’t want to speak about Jews as if we are one People, because I have so little in common with those in green uniforms and tanks. I am called a self-hating Jew but I think I am a self-reflecting Jew.

I don’t know how to articulate how it feels to be handling objects which remind me of Jewish traumas I inherited only from history classes and books. Textiles hold evidence of the bodies that made them and used them. I measure the waist of a skirt and notice that it is the same as my waist size. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Jewish homes during pogroms. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Palestinian homes during the ongoing Nakba. Clothes hold the shape of the body that once dressed in them. Sometimes there are tears, mends, stains. I am rummaging through personal belongings in my nitrile gloves. 

I am hands-on learning about the violence caused by Ukrainian Nationalism while more than nine thousand Palestinians have been killed by the State of Israel in three weeks, not to mention all those who have been killed in the last seventy-five years of occupation, in the name of the Jewish Nation, the Jewish People — me? If we (and I am hesitant to say “we”) learned anything from the centuries of being killed, it was how to kill. This should not have been the lesson learned. Zionism wants us to feel constantly like the victims, like we need to defend ourself, like violence is necessary, inevitable. I need community that believes in freedom for all, not just our own People. I need the half of my family who believes in this necessary “self-defence” to remember our history, and not just the one that ends happily ever after with the creation of the State of Israel. Genocide should not be this controversial. We should not be okay with this. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and keep cataloguing banners that honour the leader of an organization which led pogroms. I will keep checking the news, crying into my phone, coordinating with organizers about our next actions, grappling with how we can be a tiny part in ending this genocide that the world won’t acknowledge, out of guilt over the ones it ignored long ago. 

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...uh-oh

Just became super paranoid about how i've been writing this story (and others) for 8-ish years now - several hundred thousands of words at this point, all on various Docs. I've downloaded backups at several points to a hardrive, but what if I somehow survived in that TV show where all the technology is turned off by nanos. Is is nuts/wasteful to print them out before they're finished? (yes, seems like)

Wish crystal memory cubes were real

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existential horror

my rice has bugs in it

All 3 jars. And a jar of pancake mix that I'm too suspicious of to eat. ;_; The compost will eat good this week

...this is what i get for buying a Costco-sized sack of sushi rice for a 2-person household, and then storing that rice in faulty jars.

**ETA: no i just looked it up, and the jar in the picture is exactly the kind of jar i used! https://www.usarice.com/thinkrice/how-to/how-to-store-rice

ETA 2: wait, off-topic but look at this website. Look at their farmers, and the states they're in. That's fishy **Cardi B That's suspicious dot gif**

OK, found another website: (bit bougie, i'd like a Paulownia Box but not trying to buy a(nother) specialty container for this. Also: I feel like if I put uncooked rice in my fridge it would get all condensation-y? Hm.

Oooh this one, now this is the type of shit I like: fuck yeah Extension programs (why are they called that?)

BYU did a *30-year* rice storage study??? Damn, broken clocks and all

OK just one more bc is is a good idea: vacuum bags

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Elaeomyxa cerifera by Sarah Lloyd

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Reminds me of a micro-Aunt Beast (from a Wrinkle in Time)

Tubifera ferruginosa ssp. acutissima

by Jan Thornhill, Canada.

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A spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) perches on moss in Suffolk County, New York, USA

Alex Roukis

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Bichir