People have been nagging me to share “the curry story” on here for ages, so alright, I’ll do it. (If you’re Indian and reading this, I am so sorry).

I swear to god, everything I am about to say in this story is true.

When I was eleven, I moved to a small town in rural England and acquired a new best friend at school. Her at that point seemingly-very-normal-parents- nice suburban house, three kids, trampoline in the backyard- invited me over for dinner, and said they were making curry and rhubarb crumble.

“Curry and rhubarb crumble”. Never in the history of mankind have words been so untrue.

The “curry” consisted of, I swear I am not making this up, a vague mixture of * deep breath, oatmeal, tofu sausages, corn, tomato juice, chopped onions, raisins, “leftover broccoli leaves”, kale, and scrambled eggs. The only spice in it was the tiniest smidgen of turmeric. All these ingredients were vaguely stirred together, undercooked, and stuck under a broiler for ten minutes. 

They gave me a massive portion. I somehow, I still don’t know how, was polite enough to finish it.

“I’m done,” I said.

“No,” said her father. “In this house, we LICK our plates clean.”

He did. They didn’t make me hold it up and lick it like they all did, but they did make me clean the plate with a piece of bread and my fork until they were satisfied.

Desert came. The rhubarb crumble was entirely unsweetened. Not so much as a raisin. I can’t remember what the crumble part was, because my mind is still haunted by the memory of being forced to eat an entire bowl of unsweetened rhubarb. You know in old Looney Tunes when characters would be tricked into eating allum and their heads would shrink? That’s what eating it felt like. They made me clean my bowl of that too, and wouldn’t let me leave the table until I finished. 

The next time, (I was in middle school and as yet too polite to turn down my best friend’s parents) they made “spaghetti and meatballs and salad”. The spaghetti was utterly plain and so undercooked it was crunchy, the “meatballs” consisted of a single large orb of some grey material i have yet to identify, and the salad was, i shit you not, limp boiled lettuce. Crunchy spaghetti, unidentified lumpy grey stuff, and boiled lettuce.

The fascinating thing is that, while yes, these people were obviously health nuts, it was so much more than that. They were health nuts who also cooked like aliens who had never seen human food before. Or like small children making “potions”. One of the more edible things they served to me once was a dessert they made up which consisted of halved apples rolled in cornflour with some milk poured on top. One time, they were convinced to make pizza as a treat. They decided to put an onion on it. Fair and fine, you’d think. Not in that house. They just cut the onion in half once, and stuck each unchopped half facedown on one side of the pizza.

Speaking of onions, one time, my friend decided to make a banana and yoghurt smoothie. Her dad came in, said it wasn’t healthy enough, and made her add an onion to it.

They had a homemade cereal I thankfully was able to opt out of trying which 100% looked like the contents of a vacuum bag. I still have no idea what it contained.

Amazingly, it was by no means just me who experienced this. It was a small town, and every girl in it my age had a selection of horror stories about being invited to dinner at this friend’s house in the exact same ritualistic horror-film fashion. We used to sit around comparing them at sleepovers. Age did not exempt you. One time, this friend’s six year old brother had a friend over for dinner at the same time, poor soul. His mom arrived to pick him up, and wasn’t allowed to take him home until he finished whatever crime against cooking was on the menu that night. 

Every story was the same. The ritual that never varied. Every time, these people would make a huge fanfare out of inviting you over for dinner, act all hospitable and excited, set the table, and then serve you a massive helping of the worst food in the world, and make you clean your plate of it, desert included. Who the hell forces you to finish your DESERT?

It’s a mystery to me. They clearly had SOME degree of self-awareness, because after I came to my senses and started coming up with excuses to avoid eating at their house they would tease me saying things like “ohoho, you don’t like LIKE our food do you”. If they had been a bit more fun and less generally puritanical sort of people, I could totally believe this was a family trolling activity where they secretly schemed to come up with the worst possible dishes, secretly filmed themselves forcing people to eat them and watched it and laughed afterwards, I could believe it.

All I’m saying is I’m pretty sure they weren’t aliens, but the more I type this out, the more tempted I am to believe it. Fuck it, maybe they WERE aliens.

This whole thing is wild but I’ve tried to read the list of ingredients in that “curry” like 3 times and my brain just checks out every time. It’s like you’re trying to read a long passage in a textbook you don’t understand. My brain is just noping right out of there.

caption by @/ashleytheebarroness on tiktok: People reach for the Gestapo comparison because it sounds extreme and foreign. It lets white Americans pretend this kind of policing came from somewhere else. But ICE looks closer to slave patrols because that's our history. Local enforcement. Racialized suspicion. Vague authority. Taking people first, justifying it later. Gestapo is a warning. Slave patrols are a mirror.

It was like the sun came out from behind the clouds...

Sucks how many people were taught that "horses put their ears back when they're mad" but then never taught the difference between "angry backwards ears," "mildly annoyed backwards ears," "pain backwards ears," "concentrated backwards ears," "sleepy backwards ears" and "just happens to be listening to something behind it."

"Horses put their ears back when they're mad" idk man i think it depends

These are all completely different expressions in completely different scenarios, and only two of them are decidedly negative.

Actually, I wanna talk about the third horse, the one putting its ears back in pain. Over the last 15 years veterinarians and animal scientists have worked out pain scales for most domestic animals by taking photos of the during routine procedures.

We know vaccines painful, and by comparing horses at rest with horses getting vaccinated, we've been able to determine how they express pain visually. By looking at horses with disorders like colic, broken bones, wounds, and so on, we can determine their facial expressions during more severe pain.

At zookeeper school we were drilled through the pain faces of the most common lab animals and livestock. Nowadays I believe this has become a routine lesson in all animal related fields, but the general public still doesn't know that this is a thing that exists.

Here are all the pain face/grimace scales I've been able to find. Please study them if you interact with any of these animals on a regular basis:

source: nottheworstmom on IG

Yeah, these would do numbers at the ren faire. I'm giggling about how her boobs come in like the nose of the star destroyer in A New Hope

Anime boob physics happening in those dresses... But damn I am not upset.

I am crying laughing.

"Can I spank men with one of those giant paddles? I'll work for free." Honey, the men would be paying YOU. A lot. For the privilege.

For all the issues the wolf reintroduction has caused in Colorado (wolf reintroduction=good, the way Colorado has done it=horrid), the one that I have not seen literally anyone talk about is the fact that everyone with a single goat went out and got a livestock guardian dog, chucked them out in the fields without any training, and just called it good. So now we've got a bunch of half feral livestock guardian dogs running around everywhere, just making up their own territories and attacking anyone who wanders through. One attacked my sister's CAR while she was going almost 30mph a few months back. Imagine if that had been a kid on an ATV, not an adult woman in an enclosed vehicle? When we called the non-emergency number to let them know, the dispatcher literally groaned and said, "not again. Nobody is training these things!"

"Wolves are going to start attacking people!11!" No, bitch, your fucking Anatolian Shepherd is.

Instincts still require training and refinement. You do not want a large, independent-natured dog making up its own rules. You will not like many of those rules.

And some individuals won't have good instincts and will require extra training, or plain won't work out.

English shepherds are herding dogs. Australian cattle dogs are herding dogs. My ES/ACD mix dog had zero herding instinct but would have made a decent livestock guardian. He had no desire to chase the sheep. When I *made* him chase the sheep he apparently assumed it was hunting time and bit the sheep. A sharp recall and he was back beside me showing no interest again in the sheep.

#friend of mine's parents got one of those giant bernese mountain dogs and didn't really bother to train it #just let it hang out in the yard and do whatever #chill dog but also didn't understand No or Stop and he apparently did finally attack someone so he had to be kept on a halter (FINALLY) #anyway that was also sort of their approach to parenting well meaning but ultimately no structure and minimal intervention #don't do this to either children or dogs (tags via @arinrowan because I know way too many people who do this to both children and dogs)

So turns out the US are setting babies up for a lifetime of illness and increased likelihood of liver cancer in Guinea Bissau in the name of “research”

7000 newborns will be denied the neoneatal HepB vaccine until 6 weeks to ‘prove’ that the HepB vaccine is linked to neurodevelopmental disability on the directions of the Department of Health vis RFK Jr and in collaboration with researchers in Denmark, despite the fact that the vaccine’s efficacy rate and best protection is when administered to newborns, and the total lack of correlation between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disabilities.

Guinea Bissau has some of the highest rates of HepB on the continent, and infants are the group at the highest risk of contracting HepB, leading to chronic hepatitis & long term hepatic diseases like cirrhosis and liver failure as well as increased chance of liver cancer.

The study can’t be carried out in the US or Denmark because it fails almost every benchmark for medical ethics — surprising absolutely nobody, it is in fact heinously unethical to expose babies to preventable disease that causes liver failure and liver cancer, but the “study” has been green lit in Guinea.

Fuck the US imperial project in Africa, fuck RFK Jr and the US Department of Health, and fuck every single collaborative researcher in Denmark. This is some nightmare Tuskegee Study shit and every single individual involved deserves to be in The Hague.

Good news: cancelled as of this morning.