Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
It's been years since I grew tomatoes and never knew any of this. Now that I know, I'm with Brandiwyn🎶 I'm not eating any tomatoes with chemicals in them.
Hm. Where I live right now, we've had days over 85F in January. Summers get up into triple digits. I guess my tomatoes will have white, shriveled rings?
Tomatoes need a very balanced diet to grow well. In addition to the potassium, which prevents white rings, they need calcium to prevent blossom end rot.
When your hobby becomes your job, it loses a lot of what makes it interesting.
I'm not sure if I'm the right gauge, since I have a disorder that makes my hobby-turned-career more difficult and in some cases, impossible, but I still play piano for fun occasionally. Not nearly as often as I used to.
Doing nothing feels differently depending on location.
When I do nothing at home, I have dishes and dusty floors silently judging me.
Second Son got stung on the cheek by a bee in Rome and his face swelled up like that of a cartoon character. We spent half the day resting in the hotel room. It was the most glorious doing nothing ever. We were in one of the oldest cities in Europe in a modern hotel doing nothing.
The best doing nothing in many years. Except for the bee sting.
I have a lit of leisure time..most of the time. I used to feel guilty thinking I needed to be doing something constructive. I'm getting passed that..I worked my entire life..now it's time to relax and do what I want..if it's nothing..so be it.
All I really know about it, was that there was a police department that had an issue with cops that liked to abuse their power. They tried yellow bands (or whatever), but other officers thought they had looked cool, and intentionally got into trouble to get them. So, they decided to punish the officers with Hello Kitty stickers - hard to look intimidating, or cool, with one of those stuck to your breast pocket.
Many years ago, I had this recurring schtick about how a certain white kawaii cat from Japan was evil and taking over the world. I called her the Nefarious Neko. I dropped it because it got old for me, but along the way, I learned way more than I ever wanted to know about Hello Kitty. So this BBC article caught my attention:
I, of course, never actually hated Hello Kitty. If there's something I actually detest, I normally just leave it alone, like the way I almost never talk about sports in here.
The designer behind Hello Kitty is stepping down after 46 years, during which time she oversaw the feline character achieving world recognition.
"World domination" is more like it. I remember some years ago, I saw an article about what was called "the most remote community in the world" or something, a tiny village in northern Siberia that was the only place of human habitation for many kilometers around. (Perhaps there are islands more remote, technically.) I don't remember many details, but it's the kind of thing that's only accessible by rail, and, because it's Siberia, only for like three months out of the year or something. Point is, it is quite literally the farthest corner of the world, and I distinctly remember, in one of the photos, a little girl wearing a Hello Kitty shirt.
Yuko Yamaguchi took over design duties for the character - who isn't actually a cat, but a little girl from London - in 1980, five years after she first launched.
It's not widely known, but yes, she's actually a little girl and she's actually British and her name is actually Kitty White.
Yamaguchi herself often wore Kitty-style dresses in public and piled her hair in buns.
One of these days, I'm determined to visit Japan. I'll need to brace myself for that sort of thing.
The Hello Kitty character first appeared on a coin purse in 1980 and has become a global marketing phenomenon.
This is where I started to metaphorically scratch my head. Up there, it said she took over "in 1980, five years after [HK] first launched." Seems to be a glitch in the timeline there.
She has appeared on clothes, accessories, video games, and even an Airbus plane.
And I saw an entire bullet train with a Hello Kitty theme. Well, pictures of it, anyway. Not to mention the Hello Kitty vibrator and the Hello Kitty assault rifle, which I called the HK-47.
Unlike other Japanese exports such as Pokemon, there is little backstory to the character of Hello Kitty. Sanrio has said she "isn't a human, [but] she's not quite a cat either".
As she has an actual cat as a pet, if she were a cat, it might raise questions about slavery and feline trafficking.
She was born in London and has a twin sister named Mimmy and a boyfriend named Dear Daniel, according to Sanrio.
And yet, the article fails to mention her name. Fortunately, I covered that up there ^
Kitty will make her cinematic debut in a Warner Bros film in 2028. She has already appeared in several animated series but has never spoken, as she doesn't have a mouth.
Now, I want you to stop and think for a moment about the optics of a British little girl character, created in Japan some 30 years after WWII, whose distinguishing feature is being voiceless. And maybe you'll see one reason why I had that schtick going for a while.
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