#i got tired of people misidentifying miles

[reading-stains]

miles morales & his spanish

I’d like to start with the disclaimer that headcanons are headcanons and if people are having fun with fluent Miles, then have fun. I’m so proud to see a Spider-Man with the blood I was raised with, with a mother who gives her bendiciones and kisses her son with the love I have seen my whole life. 

And while my discussion may be in criticism of some things, I need to communicate this before anyone thinks otherwise.

I am proud of Miles Morales and what he represents. I love to see his family really feel like the life of someone in the diáspora. It is heart melting, and it is worth so fucking much to me as someone that’s seeing the growing recognition on this small, lovable, beautiful island. He is a part of the pride of my flag and of my home.

So yeah, I love that Miles Morales is Boricua. 

But I do have some things I want to point out on Miles and the way he’s been observed within the fandom. After all, he’s kind of been discoursed into two people, neither of which I agree are accurate in the language sort of terms. 

The first point is the following.

Miles is not a fluent Spanish speaker, switching between languages in sentences because he can’t remember words or he’s lost in his own head. He thinks in English. 

Miles is not fluent enough, as observed by his vocabulary and sentence structure to think in Spanish. He is not a fluent character. He rushes words and in turn, speaks in Spanglish.

His pronunciation is the one thing that can be argued if the previous factors weren’t there. 

One can be fluent in English and still struggle with pronunciation. However, that requires well developed grammatical knowledge, which we haven’t observed enough from Miles. 

There’s only two full, Spanish spoken sentences that we see in the whole movie, which I will quickly break down. 

“¿Qué tal tío?” Directly translates to “how are you, [insert colloquial term of impersonal endearment]”. 

This is a quick greeting, not colloquial to Puerto Rican Spanish, and thus can be quickly assumed to be a class-learned thing. Which, you know, doesn’t help the argument that he is fluent.

And then there’s this:

“Te trajé una empanada.” That translates to “I brought you an empanada”.

Once again, this is a very easily taught sentence. Actually, it’s grammatically found to be a simple sentence, as it holds only one verb. But also, he pronounces the verb wrong. He pronounces it almost as “dress” instead of “brought you”. The meaning shifts with the spelling of the word (ex. papa vs papá). 

The second point follows.

Miles doesn’t need to be fluent to be a Spanish speaker. 

The Spider-Man clearly showcases understanding of his mother in the college counseling scene, and that is enough to observe him as a Spanish speaker.

People can say they speak a language after having enough knowledge to hold a conversation. The previous evidence observes Miles being able to conduct an introduction and a point. That’s enough words to be passable when ordering food, yk? And that’s good enough.

He’s definitely able to capture terms and realize what words mean, which clearly showcases how he can continue his effort to know more, but still has enough basics to communicate himself. 

And now, the final point.  

He doesn’t need to be a Spanish speaker to be Puerto Rican.

Miles isn’t explored enough in the language to show his understanding of Spanish as fluent.  

And that’s okay. Miles represents a very specific type of person. But also, he represents millions of experiences.

Being from somewhere else, being from a diáspora is an experience that while I personally haven’t been able to relate to fully, millions have. For example, all immigrants know what a diáspora is. Maybe not in the coined term, but in its significance and its pain. Being away from a motherland and living in a fundamentally different nation. 

But Puerto Rico is an interesting situation because it’s officially part of the United States’ territories, but is still experienced as a foreign place. One of its fundamental differences is the main language explored in the island, being Spanish vs the US’ English. 

And because of its particular, and very colonial-esque, nature around the island, Puerto Ricans can often find the discourse of what makes a Puerto Rican a Puerto Rican. Born, raised, fluent, and influenced by Puerto Rican culture are oftentimes the most important aspects to acknowledge someone as being from here.

Many times, people from diásporas find themselves being rejected in where they live, but are just as marginalized from where they come from (biologically, culturally, or otherwise). And this experience is what often bothers me about the whole situation regarding Miles’ Spanish. 

Because Miles, and any other Puerto Rican, doesn’t owe people a certain origin to be a Boricua. You can live your whole childhood in England after moving from the island, and still say you are Puerto Rican. You can be raised by Puerto Rican parents and never step into the island’s soil, and you are still Puerto Rican. You’re able to be born somewhere else, but be raised and loved by a family here, and you are still Puerto Rican. You are who you are, identity is in your grasp, and no one owes anything to others.

He doesn’t have to speak the language to still identify with the life of a Puerto Rican. Which is why it surprises me to observe people finalizing him as either not a speaker at all because he isn’t fluent (which btw implies he is less connected to his roots when you take away his interest in knowing) or he is fluent (which then takes away about his experience in the diáspora).

This is not to say that people in the diáspora cannot be fluent, just like they cannot be fully disconnected from the Spanish language. I’m personally identifying that Miles can be in between, and still be characterized as who he is within his canonical identity.  Final notes:

When wanting to write more Puerto Rican influenced work, be sure to inform yourself! There’s a lot of things to learn about, and it’s always lovely to know more.

Boricua is a term used in the island to refer to Puerto Ricans.

I definitely encourage people to inform themselves of the term diáspora, especially if you are of foreign descent from where you live!

And of course, thanks for reading!

[themonsterblog]

The Beast of Bray Road

Dating back to 1936, citizens of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, in Walworth county as well as Racine and Jefferson counties have been witnessing a beast.

Reported to be 6ft tall, with grey and brown fur, the Beast is said to have a wolf-like face, shiny yellow eyes, pointed ears, and run and walk on all fours or hind legs as well as kneel like a man. I am reticent to call it a werewolf as shapeshifters are rather outrageous even for the cryptozoology community, but that is the imagery that comes to mind.

The first reported sighting was in 1936. 30-something Mark Shackleman was the night watchman for the St Coletta School For Exceptional Children outside Jefferson. The school had extensive grounds that included wide, open fields that held several preserved Native American burial mounds. Crossing the fields one night when doing his rounds, Shackleman saw a shadow digging into one of the mounds, much like a canine would. The Beast then stood to six feet tall and looked at him, it’s large body covered in dark fur and smelled of rotting meet. Shackleman took a step back, startled, and the beast abruptly turned and ran off into the woods. Shackleman reported seeing it again the next night, but never again.

Due to some what conflicting descriptions of the beast, some cryptozoology enthusiasts believe the beast to be a misidentification of some other cryptid, such as “Eddy” or “The Bluff Monster,” a Bigfoot like creature in Wisconsin. Others suggest a Waheela, or “bear dog;” as well as a Shunka Warakin. Some have even suggested due to the similarities and proximity that The Beast Of Bray Road and The Michigan Dogman are the same animal.

The Beast has been reported to act aggressively, but not outright violent and hasn’t reported to have physically harmed anyone. It had also been reported to charge vehicles, even chase people, but breaking off the chase before catching anyone, suggesting the theory that some have that it is territorial or guarding something, which could also explain the reason that many sightings are concentrated on a 2 mile stretch of farm road.

In 1991, 18 year old, Doris Gibson, reported driving down Bray Road during a storm when she felt her tire hit something. Thinking she had hit a small animal, she got out of her car to investigate only to find nothing. She looked to the side of the road, saw the form of the Beast and rushed back to her car. As she sped away, she said the Beast jumped on the trunk of her car but slid off in the heavy rain.

In the fall of 1989, Lori Endrizzi was driving down Bray Road on her way home from her job as a bar manager, when she saw a hunched figure in the road eating road kill. She flipped on her high beams to see it clearer and realized that whatever it was, knelt like a man and held the carcass in its hands like it had human-like elbows. The creature then stood and started towards her vehicle that had stalled out as Lori panicked and struggled to get it to start. When the engine successfully rolled over, she floored it to her mother’s house. “I didn’t sleep that night very well,” she said in her interview with Monsters and Mysteries in America.

The town of Elkhorn has supposedly had so many sightings of the Beast from the 80’s and 90’s that the Elkhorn Animal Control is rumored to have a file on the creature. The vast uptick in sightings is what had the now defunct Walworth Week assign junior reporter, Linda Godfrey, to investigate and report on the sightings. Linda published her article “Tracking down ‘The Beast of Bray Road’” on December 29th, 1991 and would then go on to write “The Beast Of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf” and become the foremost expert on the subject.

One story Godfrey tells regarding the Beast is about a group of boys heading home from sledding, that was told to her by a friend of her son’s that experienced it first-hand. On their way home, the boys saw a large furry creature drinking water from a creek, thinking that it was a dog, they decided to go pet it. When they approached the creature, it stood, snarled, and took chase after the boys, breaking off after they cleared the tree line. Which, while terrifying, is in line with many reports.

Steve Krueger has told a consistent story on both Monster Quest and Monsters and Mysteries in America. Myself being a natural skeptic, once recognizing him on M&M from Monster Quest, made sure to track down his MQ episode, initially thinking that I could rule him out as a credible eye witness if his story changed. It hadn’t in the 4 years between episode airings, which lent more to his credibility in my eyes, albeit the story being more sensational on M&M due to the nature of that show. In November 2006, Krueger, a DNR worker had removed a the carcass of an 85lb doe from a road in Holy Hill, Wisconsin. As Krueger sat in the cab of his truck filling out the required paper work for the removal, he felt his truck shake, thinking it was simply the wind, he ignored it. A second harder shake caught his attention and he looked out the back window of his truck to see a shadowy figure standing at the tailgate of his truck. Krueger shined his flashlight through the back window to get a better look and saw a 6ft tall animal with a wolf-like face, reaching into the bed for the deer carcass he had just removed from the road. Startled, Krueger threw the truck in drive and sped away allowing the Beast to drag the doe off the back of his truck.

Wolf Biologist Peggy Callahan believes all of these sightings can be explained as simple misidentification. “People could definitely misidentify a wolf jumping up on its hind legs,” she tells Monster Quest, in a 2010 interview. Callahan believes that folklore and superstition combined with misidentification has created the tale of the Beast and influenced sightings. “As for the traditional werewolf, I’m going to tell you it doesn’t exist.”

Linda Godfrey on the other hand, does not believe this is a simple case of misidentification and advocates for witnesses saying “I really believe that all of these witnesses have seen what they say they saw. [...] Anybody who drives around much in Wisconsin has seen so many deer, and so many bear, and these other creatures that they would have a hard time mistaking something like that for a completely unknown animal.”

Sightings over the years have dwindled in frequency but recent sightings have been reported to MyRacineCounty.com with Danny Morgan’s January 2018 account of seeing the Beast while driving home from Lake Geneva, accompanied with the cell phone photo that heads this post; and Ron Rice’s 2020 account of seeing the Beast in the town of Lyons while delivering fertilizer.

If you are interested in learning more about upright, Wolf-like hominids, I highly recommend sifting through Linda Godfreys blog at Lindagodfrey.com. She has compiled sightings on there since 2009, but has been inactive since May of 2020.

Sources:

Milwaukeemag.com

Legendsofamerica.com

Lindagodfrey.com

MyRacineCounty.com

History Channel’s Monster Quest

Travel Channel’s Monsters and Mysteries in America

Cryptidz.fandom.com

[ntrending]

When a plane loses pressure, here's what happens to your body

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/when-a-plane-loses-pressure-heres-what-happens-to-your-body/

When a plane loses pressure, here's what happens to your body

Most plane trips begin with a checklist. Socks? Check. Underwear? Check. Sweatshirt just in case it gets a little bit chilly one night? Check. As crucial as your undies are to a successful trip, though, a far more important checklist goes on while you’re complaining about how small the seats are getting. Flight crews do a checklist before the plane takes off to ensure they don’t forget to do something like, you know, pressurize the cabin.

But the crew on Jet Airways flight 9W 697 managed to miss that step recently on their way from Mumbai to Jaipur. The result? A plane-ful of panicking passengers, many of whom awoke from naps to discover intense pain in their ears, bleeding from their ears and noses, and a heck of a lot of confusion.

The airline itself hasn’t released much more than a vague statement, but Lalit Gupta, the deputy director general of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation told the Hindustan Times that “The 9W 697 Mumbai-Jaipur flight was turned back to Mumbai after take off as, during the climb, crew forgot to select switch to maintain cabin pressure.”

First things first: What does it mean to pressurize an airplane?

Air at higher altitudes is under less pressure and is therefore harder to inhale—the molecules of oxygen are literally farther apart. This is why when you visit a city like Denver, which is about a mile above sea level, you may notice that you tire more easily: you’re getting less oxygen to your muscles and brain.

Planes flying above 10,000 feet need to pressurize the cabin so that they can maintain a high enough oxygen level for everyone onboard to function, though they don’t actually pressurize it to sea-level pressures (it’s usually more like the 8,000 ft mark). A normally functioning plane, once sealed off at the gate, will automatically raise the pressure inside smoothly as the pressure outside drops, so that ideally you don’t notice it much. The same thing happens in reverse at the other end to bring everything back to normal.

Why is an unpressurized plane dangerous?

This loss of pressure seems to have popped some of the small blood vessels in people’s noses and ears, or perhaps even ruptured some eardrums—none of that is unheard of for a depressurization event. Your body is really only designed to work within a small range of pressures pretty close to sea level, and when you go outside that zone delicate areas get damaged. Fluid and gas are both far more susceptible to pressure than solid flesh, so these bits go first. You actually experience a minor version of this in airplanes or even in fast-moving elevators: your ears pop. There’s a little membranous vessel called the Eustachian tube inside your ear that rebalances the pressure between the atmosphere and your inner ear (there’s a little pocket of air in there). Changes in pressure can block the Eustachian tube, making a tiny, painful vacuum in that inner ear bubble. Chewing gum or even sucking on a hard candy alleviates that issue because the act of swallowing opens up your Eustachian tube.

All this is to say that your ears are very sensitive to pressure changes, so bleeding from the ears might not be all that surprising given the lack of pressure on this aircraft. Similarly, delicate blood vessels can rupture in the nose.

How does this even happen?

A lot of the time when a plane suddenly depressurizes, it’s because some kind of damage has occurred and the airtight seal keeping the pressure inside the aircraft is broken. Large aircraft are well equipped to handle this, because air masks drop and provide enough oxygen to for the pilots to get the plane down to 10,000 feet or below, where the air is dense enough to keep everyone alive and functioning. It’s crucial that this drop happen immediately, because perhaps the most dangerous part of losing pressure—despite the dramatic explosions you’ve seen in the movies—is hypoxia.

Hypoxia, or a lack of oxygen, can be remarkably hard to recognize but also completely destroys your ability to function. And it happens really fast. The Federal Aviation Administration says that “The ability to take corrective and protective action is lost in 20 to 30 minutes at 18,000 feet and 5 to 12 minutes at 20,000 feet, followed soon thereafter by unconsciousness.” Many commercial planes fly well above that, at around 35,000 feet, and at that altitude, you have 30 seconds to a minute of what’s called “time of useful consciousness”—the time in which you’re capable of making decisions like “should I put this oxygen mask on my face?” That’s why passengers are told to put their own masks on before helping their children; it sounds like a heartless instruction, but parents who put kids first might not have the wherewithal to save themselves once they’re done.

It’s also worthing noting that the FAA also notes that the effects of hypoxia can be tough to recognize, especially if they come on gradually. So if you maybe forgot to pressurize the plane and the level of oxygen is slowly dropping, it might be quite hard to tell when you or your co-pilot might be succumbing to hypoxia.

Those effects? We’ll let the FAA take this one again: “judgment, memory, alertness, coordination and ability to make calculations are impaired, and headache, drowsiness, dizziness and either a sense of well-being (euphoria) or belligerence occur.”

Because the effects are so severely impairing yet hard to recognize, many pilots—especially those in the military—go through training to experience what it’s like themselves and see it in their coworkers. Basically, a group goes into a hypobaric chamber with oxygen masks on, then one person takes theirs off and is assigned basic tasks to show at what point they stop being able to think properly. You can see it for yourself in this video:

That pilot loses the ability to even tell you what card he’s looking at—much less tell you there’s a problem or fly a freaking airplane—in just a few minutes.

This is a massive problem if hypoxia occurs before pilots are able to figure out what’s going on. The worst case scenario is something like what happened to Helio Airways flight 522 from Cyprus to Athens in 2005. Flight crew members from the previous trip noted an issue with one of the door seals, and in order to fix the problem an engineer had to switch the pressurization system to manual. He fixed the door, but forgot to switch the system back to auto, and flight crews then failed to correct it during three separate checks of the plane—and pilots managed to misidentify the literal warning signs multiple times. Eventually, they radioed to ask for help with the equipment cooling system and the very engineer who had flipped the switch to manual asked the pilots to confirm that the pressurization system was set to auto.

Unfortunately, the pilots were already in the early stages of hypoxia and kept talking about the cooling system, not understanding what was happening. Almost everyone onboard eventually lost consciousness and the plane continued on autopilot to Athens, where it entered a holding pattern. Not long after, the engines blew as they ran out of fuel and the plane crashed into hills outside Athens, killing everyone on board.

Most of the time, though, decompression is survivable. One Southwest Airlines flight got a 17-inch hole in the fuselage while flying at 34,000 feet and absolutely no one died. Two years later another Southwest flight got a 60-inch long gash in it where a joint failed, and again, everyone made it to their destination alive.

So if you’re ever on a flight that does lose pressure, rest assured that you will most likely be fine. You’ll put on your air mask (remember: put your own on before helping others) and you’ll freak out a bit while the plane descends rapidly. Then the trained professionals will, most likely, get the aircraft to the ground in one piece.

Written By Sara Chodosh