#specifically because of the fossil

[and-this-gun-i-found]

Borealopelta markmitchelii has gotta be my favourite Dino SPECIFICALLY because of the one fossil remain we have of them that looks ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS!!

LOOK AT IT

It looks like a sculpture

Absolutely gorgeous

This is how B. markmitchelii became my #1 guy

EVERYONE WHO SEES THIS HAS TO TELL ME WHAT THEIR FAVORITE DINOSAUR IS GO GO GO

[bonefall]

On the topic of Flight Rising (as a fellow FR enjoyer) I'm curious what flight(s) you've been in? If you dont want to share thats fair but it's interesting to hear peoples reasonings. I joined in the early days of sign up windows, didn't have internet and got put in Lightning by a friend who made the account for me. It has been years and years, don't even know that friend anymore and am still a die hard Spark.

I was actually a Light flight to begin with! Which is another thing that must be an Absolute Shocker, I'm sure. Girlboything who likes writing was in the flight well known for being full of weird writers.

My move was to the Wind flight because minty green is my favorite color. I do love the aesthetic of the wind, the kites, and the traveling, but I'm actually saving up gems to go to Earth next. I think I vibe the most with its lore, even though its scenery is a little uggo. I love how many cities are there, I love the idea of the crypts and the hidden treasures, preserving and documenting history.

I kinda wish you got a free flight change every like... 5 years. That's more than long enough to be fair I think. I've been playing since 2016 which is actually 8 years so... idk give me free flight change. let me out. im literally from the travel guys let me travel

[codecicle]

Help wait you're 14?? ok that makes sense actually (NO OFFENCE)

every once in a while someone decides to actually read through my pinned and I get an ask like this a little while after don't worry anon you're not the first to be surprised and you won't be the last o/

[pokeology]

howdy prof. teak! i recently got an arctozolt (she's 5mo, adopted her from an archeologist who had helped her learn her manners before turning her over to me. her name is Tozu). was wondering if i'm meant to help her with her runny nose like one might with cubchoo? and what is the runny nose a result of? she's never exactly seemed to be running a fever, but i can't be sure and i haven't seen very many people owning arctozolts. tozu's very energetic and doesn't seem to be very bothered by her runny nose, and none of the pokemon at the pokeparks have gotten sick from her, so i'm a little confused. in short: should i worry about her runny nose, and what does it come from?

Arctozolt and the others from its set are very controversial as a majority of them have very, very poor quality of life. Luckily for you, artctozolt is the best one to own, as its only major concern is in movement.

Arctozolt's runny nose is likely similar to cubchoo's, in that both are related to their Ice typing- but unlike cubchoo, you will want to try and keep arctozolt's airway clear. It isn't at any risk of adverse health effects if you don't, but it does carry pathogens that can get you sick- just like any bodily fluid from any pokemon would.

It's currently unknown why it developed this way. I do not specialize in ancient pokemon, but revived ones do automatically fall under my jurisdiction- it's a complicated crossroads for me here, haha.

[arolesbianism]

Sigh. Nikola why must you be one of the more interesting oni characters. I don't wanna think abt you with your stupid spiky blond hair and your unethical science that mostly just serves to make Jackie more shitty by proxy. But I do. Because you're kind of orbo blorbo. Fuck you Nikola I hope you explode again

[arcxnumvitae]

If I wanted to go into specifics, I could make things messier by saying that technically the dragons, fae, and all my other super long-lived muses speak a very old dialect of their respective languages (Mandarin and Scottish Gaelic for the fae/dragons), and also a very ancient accent. I didn’t want to drive myself crazy with technicalities though

[knowerofuselessfacts]

I WANT TO VISIT YOU

I wanna visit you too!

Also, I kinda wish I could take you to the shores of one of the Great Lakes to go rock hunting. Best ones are in Superior though so we'd have to take a trip lol

[genderqueerdykes]

i love when intersex people try to talk about our issues people try to hit us with a "that doesn't count, that would be like 0.01% of the population you're talking about," ahh response, which I have personally received several times at this point.

everyone loves to be confident to pull some bullshit statistic out of their ass to be dismissive, but it's funny because they never do a second of research. the United Nations Human Rights Office estimates 1.7% of the population are born intersex:

even if the numbers were any lower, it would still be worth talking about intersex issues. any amount of people with these experiences are worth representing and discussing. we should not have to be invisible because our conditions are so stigmatized that many of us receive "Corrective" procedures just after birth, during childhood, or puberty. so many of us are swept under the rug, that's part of the reason why the statistics vary depending on which area is reporting the statistics.

you can't weaponize how marginalized someone is against them. if we fight for people with the most specific gender identities that can't be easily explained in one or two words, we must include intersex people. if we include people who use unique pronouns not seen in current common vernacular, we must support intersex people. if we support other queer minorities, we must support intersex people.

it's not an option. you can act like we are a statistic on a page, a number you can't possibly fathom in your mind, but we are all around you. everywhere. existing in real time. we are not fossils. we are not extinct.

you don't have the pleasure of ignoring us anymore. intersex rights are human rights, and sometimes, they're queer rights, too.

[zooophagous]

So why do you hate the advertising industry?

Hokay so.

Let me preface this with some personal history. It's not relevant to the sins of the advertising industry perse but it illustrates how I started to grow to hate it.

I wanted to be a veterinarian growing up, but to be a vet you basically have to be good enough to get into medical school. I do not have the math chops or discipline to make it in medical school. I went into art instead, and in a desperate attempt to find some commercial viability that didn't involve moving to California, I went into graphic design.

I've been a graphic designer for about seven or eight years now and I've worn a lot of hats. One of them was working in a print shop. Now, the print shop had a lot of corporate customers who had various ad campaigns. One of them was Gate City Bank, which had a bigass stack of postcards ordered every couple months to mail to their customers.

Now, paper comes from Dakota Paper, and they make their paper the usual way. Somewhere far, far from our treeless plain there is a forest of tall trees. These trees are cut down and put on big fossil fuel burning trucks and hauled to a paper mill that turns them into pulp while spewing the most fowl odors imaginable over the neighboring town and loads the pulp up with bleach to give it a nice white color.

Then the paper is put on yet another big truck and hauled off to the local paper depot, then put on another big truck and delivered to my print shop, where I turned the paper into postcards telling people to go even deeper into debt to buy a boat because it's almost summer. The inks used are a type of nasty heat sensitive plastic that is melted to the surface of the paper with heat. Then the postcards are put on yet ANOTHER truck and sent to the bank, which puts them on ANOTHER truck and finally into the hands of their customers, who open their mail and take one look at the post card and immediately discard it.

Heaps and heaps and literal hundreds of pounds of literal garbage created at the whim of the marketing team several times a year. And thats just one bank in one city.

I came to realize very quickly that graphic design was the delicate art of turning trees into junk mail.

And wouldn't you know it there are a TON of companies that basically only do junk mail. Many of them operate under the guise of a "charity," sending you pictures of suffering children or animals and begging for handouts and when they get those handouts the executives take a nice fat cut, give some small token amount to whatever cause they pay lip service to, and then put the rest of the cash right back into making more mailers. "Direct mail marketing" they call it.

Oh but maybe it's not so bad, you can advertise online after all. Now that there's decent ad blocker out there and better anti-virus ads usually don't destroy your computer anymore just by existing.

Except now when I search for the exact business I want on Google it's buried under three or four different "promoted search items" tricking me into clicking on them only to shoot themselves in the foot because I searched for the specific result I wanted for a reason and couldn't use those other websites even if I felt like it.

And now we have advertising on YouTube and on every streaming service, forcing more and more eyes onto the ad for the brand new Buick Envision that parks itself because you're too stupid to do it on your own.

Oh thats ok maybe I'll get Spotify premium and go ad free and listen to some podcasts- SIKE we have the hosts of your show doing the song and dance now. Are you depressed and paranoid from listening to my true crime podcast about murdered and mutilated teenagers? That's ok, my sponsor Better Help can keep you sane enough to stay alive and spend more money.

It's gotten so terrible that now you have content farms, huge hubs of shell companies that crank out video after video to get more and more precious clicks. Which if the videos were innocuous maybe that wouldn't be so awful except now you have cooking hacks that can actually burn your house down and craft hacks that can electrocute you being flung into your eyes at the speed of mach fuck so some slimy internet clickbait jockey doesn't need to get a real job.

It of course goes without saying that animals are also relentlessly exploited by clickbait companies that will put them in compromising situations on purpose to create a fake fishing hack video or even just straight up killing them for sport by feeding small animals to a pufferfish that rips them apart for the camera.

And all of this, ALL of this doesn't even touch how adveritising is the death of art in general. Queer topics, any kind of interesting art, any kind of sex or substance use topics are scrubbed clean and hidden at the behest of advertisers.

Sex education, a nude statue, topics such as racism or sexism or bigotry in general have tags purged or hidden from search, even life saving information about SDTs or drug use, because if someone saw that and complained then Verizon might sell fewer tablets and we can't fucking have that.

Conservative talking heads often bitch and moan that they're being censored on social media. The stupid part is, they're right! They are being censored! But it's not by a woke mob, it's by ATT and Coca Cola not wanting their adspace sharing screen time with their stupid fucking opinions.

However, they won't ever figure that out, because the talking heads they get their marching orders from like Tucker and Jones ALSO rely on the sweet milk flowing from the sponsorship teat and they aren't about to turn on their meal ticket so they have to come up with even stupider shit to say for the train to continue rolling.

I managed to rant this far without even getting into the ads I see for the beauty industry. The other day a botox ad described wrinkles as "moderate to severe crows feet" as if wrinkles are a symptom of a fucking serious disease! Like having a flaw in your skin is a medical problem that you need thousands of dollars of literal botulism toxin to fix! I was incandescent with anger.

Advertising is a polluting, censoring, anti educational and anti art industry at it's very core. It destroys human connections, suppresses human thought and makes us hate our own bodies. It ads no value, actively detracts from value, and serves no real purpose and I believe it should be almost if not entirely banned.

[gorgynei]

(puts on my botany hat) okay. so the firelights tree is very specifically inspired by a ginkgo tree

some examples of ginkgo leaves ^ extremely distinct! the firelight tree's are pretty big compared to the real thing though

this is interesting mostly because on earth, the gingko tree (Ginkgo biloba) is the only extant species of order Ginkgoales and is extremly old

fossil of a ginkgo leaf from. a long time ago ^

gingko trees also specialize in growing in disturbed environments (environments near flowing bodies of water or impacted by wildfire, invasive species, floods, volcanic eruptions, etc.) and prefer areas with lots of water drainage, which fits well for it's ability to grow in the firelights hideout!

[reasonsforhope]

"Tuesday’s [April 9, 2024] definition-shifting court ruling means nearly 50 governments must now contend with a new era of climate litigation.

Governments be warned: You must protect your citizens from climate change — it’s their human right.

The prescient message was laced throughout a dense ruling Tuesday from Europe’s top human rights court. The court’s conclusion? Humans have a right to safety from climate catastrophes that is rooted in their right to life, privacy and family.

The definition-shifting decision from the European Court of Human Rights means nearly 50 governments representing almost 700 million people will now have to contend with a new era of litigation from climate-stricken communities alleging inaction. 

While the judgment itself doesn’t include any penalties — the case featured several women accusing Switzerland of failing to shield them from climate dangers — it does establish a potent precedent that people can use to sue governments in national courts.

The verdict will serve “as a blueprint for how to successfully sue your own government over climate failures,” said Ruth Delbaere, a legal specialist at Avaaz, a U.S.-based nonprofit that promotes climate activism...

Courting the courts on climate

The European Court of Human Rights was established in the decade following World War II but has grown in importance over the last generation. As the judicial arm of the Council of Europe, an international human rights organization, the court’s rulings are binding on the council’s 46 members, spanning all of Europe and numerous countries on its borders.

As a result, Tuesday’s [April 9, 2024] ruling will help elevate climate litigation from a country-by-country battle to one that stretches across continents.

Previously, climate activists had mostly found success in suing individual countries to force climate action. 

A 2019 Dutch Supreme Court verdict forced the Netherlands to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent, while in 2021 a French court ruled the government was responsible for environmental damage after it failed to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals. That same year, Germany’s Constitutional Court issued a sweeping judgment that the country’s 2019 climate law was partly “unconstitutional” because it put too much of the emissions-cutting burden on future generations.

Even in the U.S., young environmental activists won a local case last year against state agencies after arguing that the continued use of fossil fuels violated their right to a "clean and healthful environment."

But 2024 is shaping up to be a turning point for climate litigation, redefining who has a right to sue over climate issues, what arguments they can use, and whom they can target. 

To start, experts overwhelmingly expect that Tuesday’s ruling will reverberate across future lawsuits — both in Europe and globally. The judgment even includes specifics about what steps governments must take to comply with their new climate-related human rights obligations. The list includes things like a concrete deadline to reach climate neutrality, a pathway to getting there, and evidence the country is actually on that path...

Concretely, the verdict could also affect the outcomes of six other high-profile climate lawsuits pending before the human rights court, including a Greenpeace-backed suit questioning whether Norway's decision to grant new oil and gas licenses complies with its carbon-cutting strategy.

An emerging legal strategy

In the coming months, other international bodies are also expected to issue their own rulings on the same thorny legal issues, which could further solidify the evolving trend. 

The International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights all have similar cases working through the system.

"All these cases together will clarify the legal obligations of states to protect rights in the context of climate change — and will set the stage for decades to come," said Chowdhury, from the environmental law center."

-via Politico, April 9, 2024

[bonefall]

Odd question but I actually know very little about geology;

Does anyone have good resources where I can learn how places get iron in the soil? Like... how does that happen? How would you know if a place would be iron oxide-rich?

This is specifically about if BB!Cats have access to Ochre but I'm casting a wide net here

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Sorry if you've already covered this, but I was scrolling socials and saw that the San Antonio zoo got a large donation to expand their savanna habitat. The only thing that jarred me as I read through their expansion plans was apparently they're going to be outfitting some 'safari' vehicles so guests can be taken into the habitat to feed and interact with the animals (from within the vehicle). I was always under the impression that this kind of interaction wasn't necessarily good for either the humans or the animals-- is there a way it can be done ethically?? Anyway, I just thought it was interesting!

Ooo, okay, your question aligned with a thing I've been chewing on for a while, so let's talk ~ethics~ and ~philosophy~ aka this is gonna be a bit long. I do promise I'll answer your question, though!

The first thing I want to note is that you're really asking about two different things, which are almost always conflated these days when it comes to talking about animals: welfare (is the animal happy / healthy / safe) and ethics (is what's happening good / moral / acceptable). It's really important that we distinguish between the two, because welfare is an objective measure of physical and mental wellbeing, and ethics are a human construct that involves subjective interpretation.

A useful but highly oversimplified example of this is the bothering of cats for online videos. Pestering a cat to get a funny reaction once in a while may not impact their overall welfare. Welfare is the cumulative impact of an animal's experiences, which means that single acute moments may not weight heavily on the entire balance. If the cat is healthy, fed well, enriched, and has a good and positive bond with their humans, those momentary irritations for videos might not matter much. That doesn't mean that you or I, as viewers, might not still find bothering an animal for internet clout ethical. We can believe that humans shouldn't ever unnecessarily put their pet through negative experiences, and we can think that doing so just because it brings the human money or fame is distasteful. But! We have to recognize that as used in this example, those ethical stances aren't inherently tied to the animal's welfare state. Many people I know who dislike cat-bothering don't care if the animal has good welfare outside of that situation - they don't like that the situation occurs at all, ever.

So, back to your question. You're wanting to know if it's okay for a zoo to have a drive-through aspect of an exhibit where people get to feed the animals. You're asking if it's safe for the humans and for the animals (which is a welfare question) and if that type of interaction is ethical. I could just tell you that of course it's fine, San Antonio is an AZA zoo and their accreditation only allows them to do "good things" but that's now how it works here (nor is it the reality of accreditation).

The safety aspect is one I'm not worried about. It's actually a pretty common thing for reputable facilities to do some sort of vehicle tour in savanna habitats, whether in the guest's vehicle (safari parks) or on a hay-ride type vehicle (zoos). Many of those allow guests to feed out specific parts of their animals' diets. Offhand, I know Tampa and Fossil Rim both have feeding tours like this in a staff-driven vehicle. It's not specified from the zoo's press release, but I can guarantee you that guests will not be driving those vehicles - which means the interactions will be proctored by staff and what people are feeding out will be carefully regulated. The habitat is going to have rhino, giraffe, zebra, ostrich, and antelope/gazelle, and I'd guess that the drive-through is going to stick to those latter two and maybe additional species. Those are animals where a car is an appropriate safety barrier.

As to if it's ethical to do? It's spiny question, because it depends very directly on the ethical perspectives of the person you're asking. I think it's fine - you may not. Let's break down the different things that come into consideration on the ethical side, and my responses:

"The zoo is commercially exploiting animals by letting people pay to get closer." If the issue is that people paying to get closer to animals is using them for money, well, that's the business model of a zoo (non-profit or not, they still need revenue to operate). So IMHO it's not like it's "less ethical" than anything else the zoo is doing, using that framing.

"Zoo animals should be allowed to be wild and undisturbed by guests driving in their habitats." Zoo animals aren't wild, and their entire lives revolve around humans and the human work schedule. As long as a vehicle entering the habitat doesn't have a negative welfare impact (e.g. they're not scared of it), it's not very different from the rest of the routine of managed care.

"Feeding zoo animals will encourage people to try to feed wild animals." Thanks to obnoxiously viral content creators, people are going to try to feed wild animals no matter what. Doing it in a proctored situation where a staff member can try to do some education at the same time is probably the best possible scenario.

"People just do those tours to get close to cool animals." People are always going to want to touch the animals. If being able to pay for a tour keeps them from jumping the fence to try to pet a rhino, great.

There's one more that I want to talk about separately, because I think it's where a lot of confusion gets generated. It's this idea that "Humans shouldn't be interacting with animals at all, any interaction is unethical and bad for the animals." This is a welfare crossover, but not one actually informed by welfare science in a captive situation. And I think it's because the internet lacks nuance. Yes, it is absolutely correct to say that with wild animals, you should never ever try to feed a deer out of your car (or similar). It is incredibly harmful to those animals on both an acute and chronic timeline. But thanks to the rage-bait algorithms on social media and people endlessly justifying doing stupid, dangerous, bad things (and getting pushback for it), there's been a lot of bleed between the public's understanding of what wild animal welfare is and what captive animal welfare is. Combine that with the reality that captive animal welfare cannot be assessed or diagnosed from a single context-less clip, and that people with strong beliefs and no practical experience with the field/species/individual will pass judgement loudly to their audiences...

The result is almost a reflexive believe in many sectors of the internet that any human-animal interaction that isn't couched as a "rescue" is inherently unethical, for reasons people often can't articulate. Which is why, I think, so often people want to support certain aspects of captive animal management but feel guilty for doing so. I see this a lot in the questions the blogs gets, and I'm glad people feel comfortable asking, because it's important to think through not just the individual instances but the patterns leading us to question them.

So yes, I'd say that a staff-led experience in a vehicle chosen for safety is an ethical way to proctor an interaction between guests and certain savanna species. It will vary by facility - I'm always more wary about guests driving, although many drive-through safaris are fine - and by setup. I think what San Antonio is doing will be fine, though, and will be interested to see / hear about the setup when they start up.

If you've got a question about ethical captive management, I'm always happy to talk about it - but I'd invite you to poke around in your head a little and send me not just your question in the ask, but your thinking about why or why not something might be concerning. It's great practice for understanding why you relate to animal ethics the way you do, and where those beliefs come from.

[max1461]

Thinking about this post. "The only way to make a cell is from another cell" is somewhat of a troubling fact to me. I mean, not for any practical reason, just because it underscores the precarity of *gestures broadly*.

It's like, some people talk about trying to de-extinct the mammoth. And people are trying to sequence the genome of the mammoth, I don't know if they've done it yet. But even if they do, one of the problems with the idea of de-extinction is... to grow a baby mammoth, you need another mammoth! Last time I heard people talking about this, I think they were talking about using an elephant as a surrogate mother. But imagine if elephants were extinct too.

The point is that information is often tied to the systems that transmit it; even if you know everything in the mammoth genome, once all the mammoths are gone there's nothing capable of reading and using that information. Like when you can't read the data on a perfectly good floppy disk because your computer doesn't have a floppy drive.

This is related to why language death troubles me so much. Even the most well-documented languages aren't actually that well understood; linguists have produced more pages of work on English syntax than maybe any other specific descriptive topic and yet still the only reliable way to get the answer to any moderately subtle syntactic question is elicit native speaker data. We know almost nothing, we can barely extrapolate at all! And every language is like this, a hugely complex system that we know basically nothing about, and if the chain of native speaker transmission is ever broken it's just gone.

"Language revival", I mean from a totally dead language, is kind of a myth. It's like the "came back different" trope. In Israel they revived Hebrew, but Modern Hebrew is really not the same thing as Biblical Hebrew at all. I mean in a stronger sense even than Modern English isn't Old English. All the subtleties of Biblical Hebrew that a native speaker would have had implicit competence with died without a trace. All they left is a grainy image, the texts. The first generation of Modern Hebrew speakers took the rough grammatical sketch preserved in these texts and imbued it with new subtleties, borrowed from Slavic and Germanic and the speakers' other native languages, or converged at by consensus among that first generation of children. There's nothing wrong with that, but it would be inaccurate to imagine Biblical Hebrew surviving in Modern Hebrew the way Old English survives in Modern English. For instance, you can discover a great deal that you didn't know about Old English by comparing Modern English dialects. There is nothing you can discover about Biblical Hebrew by comparing Modern Hebrew dialects in this way.

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. I'm not like, judging Modern Hebrew. I'm just making a point.

Mammoths died recently, so we still have (some of?) their genome. Something that died longer ago, like dinosaurs, we have traces of them in the form of fossils but we could never hope to revive them, the information is just gone. Even if we're not aiming for revival, even if we just want to know stuff about dinosaurs, there's so much that we will never know and can never know.

We imagine information as the kind of thing which sits in an archive, because this is the context most of us encounter information in, I think. Libraries, hard drives. Well obviously hard drives don't last. And most ancient texts only survive because of a scribal tradition, continuous re-writing, not because of actual archival. So I think that imagining archives as the natural habitat of information is sort of wrong; the natural habit of information is in continuous transmission. Information is constantly moving. And it's like one of those sharks, if it ever stops moving it drowns. And if the lines of transmission are broken, the information is gone and can never be retrieved.

Very precarious.

[saintsenara]

Hi I have a class question! Is there a significant difference between The Weasleys and Mundungus when it comes to class? Molly seems to have a negative opinion of him that feels partially class based (along with the whole irresponsible leaving Harry thing).

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

the weasleys' class-background is actually one of my personal favourite examples of a culturally-specific thing in the series which i imagine goes over the head of many non-british and non-irish readers...

they are members of the wizarding upper classes.

this is because - while financial circumstances are relevant when it comes to how class groups are delineated - they're not everything. aspects of class performance such as educational background, social circles, naming conventions, language use and accent, and familiarity with social convention and cultural reference points all play as much of a role in marking out somebody's class than their finances do - and, in britain, i think it's arguable often play more of a role in doing so.

in terms of all of these things, the weasleys [and the prewetts] are meaningfully no different from the blacks and the malfoys, hence ron being the narrative mirror of draco malfoy and arthur being the narrative mirror of lucius, and hence sirius stating in order of the phoenix that he, molly, and arthur are all related.

they represent archetypes found in lots of british children's literature [think the mortmains in i capture the castle or the fossils in ballet shoes] - families which are, in terms of the non-financial aspects of class, part of the elite, but whose financial circumstances don't match up at all to their social ones.

mundungus - in contrast - is straightforwardly working-class. you can tell because of his accent, his crude nickname ["dung"], his lack of "polite" behaviours, the fact that he's impulsive and led by his base appetites, the fact that he's a criminal - but not a sophisticated one, the fact that he exists outside the social ties which bind the rest of the order, the fact that he almost certainly didn't go to hogwarts, and the fact that every aspect of his physical description makes him sound like a dickensian caricature.

molly's dislike of him is therefore enormously connected to social class - not least because she's the weasley [along with percy] who seems to agree with the wizarding class system the most.

[hence why her narrative mirror... is the ultra-conventional narcissa.]

[idiopathicsmile]

I've been thinking about American diner lingo lately.

Like, relaying an order for poached eggs on toast as “Adam and Eve on a raft.” Or “shingles with a shimmy and shake” for buttered toast with jam.

(I personally learned about this phenomenon as a very young child because we had a picture book where a bear and an elephant are roommates and temp workers and they get a job at a diner for a while. Couldn't tell you why this streamed back into my brain like a week ago, but here we are.)

I'm not sure I can articulate this but there is something so beautiful to me about it. We as a culture know so little about its origins—maybe the 1870s, maybe the 1880s—or even really why it exists.

Wikipedia (yes I wikipedia'd this, yes I feel actual embarrassment about the lack of academic rigor in this aimless tumblr post but also there is also just not a ton of information on the topic) suggests that some diner lingo might've been mnemonic devices for short order cooks to remember specific dishes but honestly scroll through any list and you'll find it mostly isn't that. What it reads like is bored food service workers, mostly in the 1920s through 1970s, looking for a way to amuse or at least entertain themselves.

Milk is “moo juice.” Jell-o becomes “nervous pudding.” Black coffee is “a mug of murk.”

Western history loves its individual heroes, but my guess is the practice arose organically at multiple luncheon spots across the US. We don't know the names of the servers and cooks who came up with the terms but a few of the terms have survived, in a fashion—as wider used slang (“Joe” for coffee), as a vintage-y affectation in quirky restaurants of the present, and in compendiums of self-consciously useless factoids (oysters wrapped in bacon are transmuted into “angels on horseback”). It's something about the ordinary people of the world of the past, the tiny fossils we leave behind without even knowing it. One unknown day in history, someone then working as a diner employee thought to call a tall stack of pancakes “Jayne Mansfield” because for some reason it made their day a little better, and this somehow caught on to the point where I can, without doing much work, still find multiple written sources insisting it happened. It wasn't a marketer or a CEO somewhere, it was just a bunch service workers passing the time and leaving the slightest little linguistic footprints behind.

I don't know. Imagine if one of your inside jokes from work was still being spread by offbeat trivia lovers a hundred years from now.