#Fail!

[mesmir-ized]

juns~

[ahedderick]

Foraging

Monday I picked dandelions and violets to experiment with flower-flavored syrups. It was time-consuming, but I just felt like trying something new. I have done violet jelly before, although the results were mediocre.

The first step after separating the petals from the greens was to pour boiling water over each kind and let them sit for a day. The violets had a greenish-blue extract by evening, and by morning it had settled into a deep blue. I tried adding a couple of drops of lemon juice, which shifted it to blue-purple. Violets have the same pigment, anthocyanin, as red cabbage, and it is pH sensitive. I am curious why my tap water (from a well) would have a pH of 9(ish), but I'll go ahead and blame limestone.

I cooked the dandelion first, adding sugar equal to the amount of liquid (1.25 cups). I cooked it for a while and then bottled it when it seemed like it had thickened up (the bubbles start to PLOP instead of 'pop', if that makes sense).

Here it is, compared with honey. The color is virtually the same!

Then I started with the violet. As I heated it, the color shifted BACK to greenish-blue. I added a little more lemon juice, and it ended up weirdly purple from some angles and blue from others, depending on how the light hit it. It's also DARK, too dark for me to photograph and show you much color. When it cooled down it a) turned a steely blue-grey and b) crystalized.

That. that is NOT what I was going for. It also doesn't really taste like anything. Just 'sweet'. Drat.

[houseofbrat]

As someone who works in PR I am ASTONISHED at how bad Kensington Palace is at all of this. It’s the most interesting part of the whole thing for me. Well that, and how much it seemingly vindicates H&M and Harry in particular in what he’s said about the firm and the media’s role in protecting the Heir at all costs.

Yeah I work in PR for a public company and anytime we want to put something out we have to run it up the chain - we need legal and Investor relations and executive approvals.

Even if KP and BP had their individual PR teams, which makes sense, there should still be one main central PR office that everyone answers to that manages the entire royal families PR, makes sure schedules and press opportunities and STRATEGY AND MESSAGING all aligns, before running up the chain for final approvals. There’d be a social team and a crisis team and government relations team and a branding team and a general “talent rep” kind of team, all working in tandem to serve the overall strategy for the royal family.

The fact that there are so many cooks in so many different kitchens is why the royal family has had so many PR disasters honestly for decades now. They’re truly doing it all wrong. So many Worst Practices here, not Best Practices.

It really doesn't seem like there is an overall PR team. Just the separate entities

Yeah and that’s the problem IMO. They are a business that should be run like a business. They should have the individual departments I suggested, and even more, working in tandem.

The fact that there are so many separate entities with different agendas and priorities is a huge part of their problem IMO.

But Charles has been transparent for the most part!! And photographed repeatedly. It’s so bizarre when compared to KP, and feels passive aggressive to me to be honest lolol.

They’re really so so so bad at this 😭😭😭😭 but the British public and the media lets them get away with it 🙃🙃🙃

For heaven’s sake. If she’s recovering nicely, why resort to recycling old photos?

Other sources are making a pretty good case for the fact that it’s a November photo, taken after Catherine and the children visited the baby bank.

Does nobody, and I mean nobody, know how to do PR in that place anymore? Now it's pin all of this on just-recovering-from-abdominal-surgery Kate? Why not on William since they were so proud about how he was the one that took the photo? Somehow they keep making everything ten times worse.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe for a second that Kate personally edited that photo together in such a way that it had to be killed as inauthentic. The pulling of the photo is likely more about the refusal to provide metadata or the raw image for proof rather than silly Photoshop choices. That isn’t an issue of “mummy going wild on the computer,” it’s a larger organizational issue about trust, transparency, and KP’s overall poor approach to news orgs and the press lately.

Why is Kate taking the fall? Why is William such a lout to let an ill Kate put this on her own shoulders rather than admit KP made an error or say KP is going to reevaluate their practices and make a change?

Are college interns running Palace p.r.? Because I cannot understand how they're botching this so badly. If Kate couldn't/wouldn't pose for a legit photo, then just don't release anything. The Royals are basically dumping tankers of gas on the inferno by playing all these games. 

Sorry, am I going insane? After saying they wouldn’t respond to these conspiracy theories, they

a) responded by putting out a doctored image,

b) responded to the backlash of doctored image by claiming the woman recovering from a medical issue was playing around in Photoshop, and

c) responded to the backlash of editing claims by putting out an image where the person in the photo is supposed to be Kate but could LITERALLY BE ANYBODY.

NONE OF YOU ARE FINDING THIS WEIRD? NONE?!

"Kate's Back"

Well, it is indeed a picture of Kate's back

Apparently the main symptom of her mysterious medical condition is that any photo with her in it immediately becomes grainy, blurry, or with people's wrists trying to escape into a fifth dimension.

Good Lord, I haven't followed a disaster story this closely since Oceangate Titan and this one may be even worse. The narrative is out of control and the rules have gone out the window.

They already lost control of the narrative at this point. No matter what they do now, they will be scrutinized more than they've ever been before. And they seem grossly unprepared for it.

She’s not even facing camera, how is this supposed to help? This just feeds the conspiracy theorists! headdesk

It's becoming a PR nightmare that only Olivia Pope can rescue.

Maybe the better question is that people are concerned about Kate's welfare, and most WERE okay with waiting under the timeline KP initially offered that is she will likely return by or after Easter.

However KP has mismanaged the messaging, and with that concern grows over how weird some of the updates are. The article explains why this medical time out is turning into an absolute PR crisis. It isn't so much about Kates right to medical privacy (she definitely deserves that )

It now is about institutional reliability, the heir William's arguably erratic or unusual behavior or his courtiers' comments, the mess with the all kill photoshopped/Frankensteined photo (which has never happened before with a palace released photo), the very different approaches from BP vs KP, etc etc. It's become bigger than Kate sad to say.

And ultimately now people are worried for her, in a way they wouldn't have been, because things have become so irregular and bungled. So the urgency to make sure she is safe and okay has become louder and more insistent.

“CNN is now reviewing all handout photos previously provided by Kensington Palace.”

“In editorial photography, photojournalists and editors commonly adjust a photograph’s exposure or color balance in order to more accurately reflect the scene. Most news organizations, including CNN, regard it as unacceptable to move, change or manipulate the pixels of an image. To do so would alter the reality of the situation the image is intended to document.”

“In the past, the family’s amateur photographs have been well received when posted on social media. But on this occasion, this photo was also released to media organizations as a handout and the palace wasn’t transparent about the fact it had been adjusted.

That will have damaged the trust between the palace and media organizations – many of which, like CNN, will likely be assessing all royal handouts. The editing storm has undermined the existing relationship and when public interest over any possible cover up escalates, as it has done recently, many news outlets will now have take that speculation more seriously.”

[motherofbulldogs]

More ham handed PR attempts by KP that’s going over like a lead balloon. Start around 11:50.

[emo-and-emo-adjacent]

Bury me in some fashion In something fashionable With dirt and words that Sound like a song we used to know But never wrote

[south-africa-official]

Official post of South Africa

Black-backed Jackal fails to catch a ring-necked dove at a waterhole in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, 2018 - by Clint Ralph, South African

[teaboot]

what annoys me about explaining evolution to people who don’t think it’s real is that everyone’s idea of how it works seems to be from this

Whereas the reality is far more like

[bloodbending]

can’t believe tiktok is actually getting banned, twitter is infested with bots and brainworm-infested musk bootlickers, facebook is king of QAnon, instagram caught the plague from facebook and is dying a slow death in real time… and as the dust settles… only Miss Tumblr is left standing… failing upwards once again

[valtsv]

it's such a bummer that losing control of your emotions only makes the entire situation worse in really embarrassing personal ways. losing control of my emotions should give me pyrokinesis.

[melonadem-personal]

i couldnt find the fucking image/meme of the guy pointing to the left and saying skim

so

i remade it from memory

i am sorry

DOWNLOADING MILK …

1% …

2% …

DOWNLOAD COMPLETE .

[yellenabelova]

The Birdcage (1996) dir. Mike Nichols

[victusinveritas]

[houseofbrat]

Someone posted this on Reddit and now I can’t unsee it 😂😂😂

More crack team communications work from The KP Klown Show!

As to your recent submission - this video has two purposes and that’s for (1) Cathy to play the “I had cancer” card so don’t expect me to work and nobody (especially not that elderly man working through cancer treatment) has suffered as much as me and (2) W&C are the most loved up couple ever so definitely no separation here and please book him off work for the foreseeable future too.

That’s it. The Daily Mail which is usually incredibly sycophantic to these two even had mixed reactions in their comments with people making those exact points - that the average Joe lives in a concrete jungle now without ready access to nature etc.

And as for their previous initiatives - the simple explanation is that you can tell which initiatives were launched when they reported and were bankrolled by The King when he was Duke of Cornwall vs. now when they’re independent. Early Years, when launches had outcomes (research, the launch of the foundations etc.).

It went from her “life’s work” to an afterthought that’s only pulled out when she wants a photo op cooing at babies, an excuse to post old baby pics of herself or to hang with celebrities. It’s two different ways of approaching royalty - Charles focused on service and his sons focused on self service.

Here are some comments on Becky English's article on Kate's new perfume ad:

[abisalli]

All our times have come, here but now they're gone

[mousjoy]

I will die your daughter.