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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • In 1971, Rep. Tom Moore, Jr. of Waco, Texas sponsored a resolution commending Albert de Salvo for his unselfish service to “his county, his state and his community.” That resolution read, in part:

    This compassionate gentleman’s dedication and devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely throughout the nation to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future. He has been officially recognized by the state of Massachusetts for his noted activities and unconventional techniques involving population control and applied psychology.

    Albert DeSalvo had another claim to fame.



  • GraniteM@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzClueless about Biology
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    9 days ago

    Maybe you get “digested” in the sense that you get incorporated into the sarlacc’s body, like it’s using you in a parasitic sense. It makes you one of its internal organs, and it keeps you alive as it slowly uses you up over the course of a thousand years (assuming we take that phrase literally). I think acting as a gall bladder for an underground sand monster sounds like a fate worse than death.




  • There doesn’t necessarily need to be a hard limit on how rich you can be but there should absolutely be a limit on how poor you can be.

    Now, I’m pretty sure that once we feed, clothe, educate, and provide for the general welfare of the entire populace to a humane level that it will be significantly more difficult, if not impossible, to become a billionaire, but really that’s just as it should be. It should be borderline fucking inconceivable.






  • There are people who, disturbed by “big government” today and its tendency to curb the advantages they might gain if their competitiveness were allowed free flow, demand “less govern- ment.” Alas, there is no such thing as less government, merely changes in government. If the libertarians had their way, the distant bureaucracy would vanish and the local bully would be in charge. Personally, I prefer the distant bureaucracy, which may not find me, over the local bully, who certainly will. And all historical precedent shows a change to localism to be for the worse.

    —Isaac Asimov, Nice Guys Finish First, collected in The Sun Shines Bright, 1981





  • Not GPS, but I found myself waking up in the back seat of a car when some friends and I had driven all night to catch a Violent Femmes concert in Pittsburgh. The sun was coming up and they hadn’t found our motel. This was in the days of printed MapQuest directions.

    I asked “Did you follow the directions from where they started?”

    They said “We don’t need to start from there, we’ve already been there!”

    I said, “Let me fuggin drive.”

    So I get behind the wheel and start back tracking to the previously established starting point while they say over and over that we don’t need to start from there, they already know that spot, they just need to drive around a little longer and they’ll get there eventually.

    And then I followed the directions, to the letter, from the starting point on the directions, right straight to the motel.

    So the moral of the story is always follow the directions and don’t try to improv that shit, because you’ll find yourself lost in Pittsburgh.

    Also, holy shit, Pittsburgh is laid out on a triangle rather than a rectangular grid, and that will throw you right the fuck off your sense of direction if you’re not familiar, which none of us were.






  • GraniteM@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyz8 Minutes
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    1 month ago

    There’s a pretty cool short story where a guy is looking at the full moon and he realizes that it’s gotten way too bright, and that could only happen because the sun has just spontaneously exploded, and he basically just makes peace with the fact that the world is going to be destroyed very shortly.