writer-at-the-table

[writer-at-the-table]

the idealized version of my tomorrow self will fix this

[writer-at-the-table]

American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), male, family Falconidae, order Falconiformes, found over a great deal of North America and South America

photograph by Steve Rose (@stevenrosephotography)

#birds

[writer-at-the-table]

hey neil idk if you’re the best person to ask but i would like to think you have some sadge advice or something. as an introvert how do you deal with going to funerals and that whole interaction with people trying to support people and people trying to support you? It’s all strange and weird to me. thanks.

You remind yourself that this is not a usual thing for anyone, and that everyone is dealing with their own personal reactions to what's happened, with grief or loss or just the weirdness of it all. And you look after yourself.

And take refuge in things that people say. "I'm sorry for your loss", or "May their memory be a blessing" or "Thank you so much" when people offer their own condolences. It's formulaic but it works.

[writer-at-the-table]

hey neil idk if you’re the best person to ask but i would like to think you have some sadge advice or something. as an introvert how do you deal with going to funerals and that whole interaction with people trying to support people and people trying to support you? It’s all strange and weird to me. thanks.

You remind yourself that this is not a usual thing for anyone, and that everyone is dealing with their own personal reactions to what's happened, with grief or loss or just the weirdness of it all. And you look after yourself.

And take refuge in things that people say. "I'm sorry for your loss", or "May their memory be a blessing" or "Thank you so much" when people offer their own condolences. It's formulaic but it works.

[writer-at-the-table]

I love us.

I love giggling in private messages during zoom Torah study with another queer woman because we’re 12 years old and studying the Song of Songs.

I love sitting in someone’s living room watching the Prince of Egypt and we keep pausing it because someone in the room has a Point and we need to discuss it. And it takes us four hours to watch a two hour film.

I love Hillel sandwiches. I really do.

I love these silly arguments over frog vs frogs and even more so because I know that our rabbis and sages have been arguing about this for literally centuries.

I love that I cry during l’cha dodi every fucking time. Doesn’t matter the tune. Every. Time.

I love that I can say the words “erotic love is holy and sacred too” in a zoom room full of old people and none of them shut down the conversation.

I love that we have a holiday that traditionally means you study Torah all night long.

I love that we have another one that celebrates we got to the end of Torah. Let’s have a dance party and start over!

I love swaying while I pray.

I love that I can disagree with my good friend on fundamentals of our religion and that’s a good thing.

I love that I’m starting to be able to make connections with strangers and say “oh! I know xyz! Do you know abc?”

So many more things but overall. I love us. I love being a part of Judaism. I love being allowed to be here and invited in.

[writer-at-the-table]

This made me so fucking angry I have to inflict it on all of you.

#puns!

[writer-at-the-table]

when people are like “the hunger games just stole the plot of battle royale” like listen everything steals from the plot of everything the lion king is just furry hamlet westworld is jurassic park but sexier lost is edgy gilligan’s island there are no original stories and the only good piece of media is jennifer’s body

[writer-at-the-table]

[writer-at-the-table]

Sometimes reading Arthuriana feels like reading Alice in Wonderland.

“Well,” said Alice, “these are a dreadfully strange assortment of objects!”

“They all symbolize different aspects of Our Lord’s martyrdom,” said the Fisher King, casting a line into his teacup.

“Indeed. I am sure everything symbolizes something else, for if everything was only itself I should be very confused. Might I ask what the point of the bleeding lance is?”

Alice regretted asking the question as soon as she had done so, for she saw the pun that would likely be made about the word point. Instead, however, the room erupted in applause and shouts of “The Grail! She has achieved the Grail!”

The next castle she visited, Alice resolved to herself as the inhabitants of this one danced for joy, would be more sensible.

[writer-at-the-table]

[writer-at-the-table]

the "I believe in abortion only in extreme situations" people (especially women) truly baffle me because I genuinely consider "a human has another human growing inside of them and does not want to" to be a very extreme situation. to me that feels so deeply like an extreme emergency situation. I know this has been said before but it's incredible to me that this does not feel innately horrifying and "extreme" to everyone.

[writer-at-the-table]

favorite doctor who quotes: 64/?

#doctor who #she tells him he's wrong all the time though

[writer-at-the-table]

I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.

You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.

But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.

So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".

But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).

Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.

Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.

"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.

So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?

The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).

In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.

And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)

This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.

The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).

This one is just confusing.

The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...

And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).

This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.

Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.

References

Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.

McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.

Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.

[writer-at-the-table]

Out of curiosity and also guilt over my own coffee intake. I wanna ask:

Now I'm not talking about when you're studying and so you drink 3x the usual amount or something like that. This isn't me asking what your record is. I'm talking about the most basic, average day, how many coffees you drink?

#0 #i don't drink coffee

[writer-at-the-table]

Matt Damon explains why they don’t make movies like they used to. Pls watch.

[writer-at-the-table]

people stop being antisemitic for one fucking second challenge (impossible)

[writer-at-the-table]

can’t stop thinking about them