Pastpossum - Decidedly Ambivalent

Today's dramatic grackle.

Thanksgiving

A reddit thread today made me stop and think there really needs to be some kind of grim action movie called JAMESTOWN, taglines including "where it all began" and "forget what you were told in school". It would show the terror of crossing the Atlantic in tiny wooden boats to an unknown shore, the kinds of desperate, stupid, or insane people who would take that bet, the inevitable and understandable Indian attacks, the disease, the starvation, the cannibalism, the arrival of the tobacco brides, the beginning of chattel slavery. Of course the only possible plot I can imagine would be the plucky orphan trying like hell to survive and get on the next boat home.

Pretty certain this would be loudly denounced as anti-American and unpatriotic from certain circles. But it is obvious why schools and society focus on the Mayflower and Plymouth, because who wants to try to explain that shit to a fourth grader?

It hasn't rained in a while so they've had to go to the public pool.

Grackle of the day.

motivation

People keep chickens and bees and plant gardens and sure, maybe it does end up saving money (not bees, keeping bees is not saving money) and give them a hobby but in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy there is a scene in which "Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying, “Blood…blood…blood…blood…” and I wonder if keeping chickens and growing vegetables is quietly the equivalent of counting to computers, but applied to the current American agribusiness/food system.