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🥺!! (x)

happy 438th birthday🎉

A moment of light during the siege

Mixing the two ingredients, and wielding a simple needle, they applied traditional tattoos to their faces, legs and hands.

“I was in love with a man, who later became my husband. I wanted him to find me beautiful,” says the 84-year-old Yusufoglu. “Although the needle hurt badly, we young girls of 10 and 16 used to tattoo each other.”

They collected the soot from the bottom of cooking pots used on wood fires, and mixed it with breast milk from a mother feeding an infant girl.

“The milk of a mother nursing a girl is used because the tattoo made with this milk comes out a paler shade of green,” 87-year-old Hulu Aydoglu says. “The milk of a mother nursing a boy comes out darker.”

The tattoos are still visible on Yusufoglu’s lined face 70 years on, but the practice is dying out.

Some women blame growing Islamic opposition to the practice, saying preachers have told them the tattoos are a sin.

“At that time, the tattoos were our make-up,” she says. “Now there is make-up - and no need to make oneself beautiful with tattoos.”

cat breeds round #2: Arabian Mau, Egyptian Mau, Burmilla, Havana Brown, Japanese Bobtail, Cymric

find round #1 here

One more post coming soon and that will be the final in this series.

I want to take this opportunity to talk about short tail mutations in cats, with the Japanese Bobtail and Cymric as examples. Btw Cymric is just a longhaired Manx, so we're talking about the Manx gene here. The Manx mutation for short tails is notorious for the associated health complications, even including death. You see, the mutation works by eliminating some vertebra and that makes the tail shorter. Sometimes it eliminates too many vertebra. In any case, you should never breed tailless x tailless Manx. In contrast, the mutation that gives the Japanese breed its short tail seems to be harmless and devoid of negative side effects. There are probably more than these two that can cause short tails in cats - some harmless, some very dangerous. Anyway. Think twice before buying a Manx or one of the breeds derived from it, and carrying a potentially very dangerous mutation.

GHOST APPLES - ice formations formed by freezing rain coating the apples. The rotten apple inside falls out of the bottom of the ice spheres, leaving them perfectly translucent.