Parts Of The Pea Plant.

illustration from Christina Rossetti's poem : 'Goblin Market' by Hilda Hechle, 1914

prints in my shop! :)

A kindly looking fey approaches you.

"I'm not going to pretend you're as foolish as someone else would say you look. Though it appears you are in need of assistance. There are several things I am willing to take in exchange for helping you. So, before we get started,

It is your choice, of course."

bryan and cherry alexander photographed these asperatus clouds in the morning sky over qaanaaq, north west greenland. the alexanders, who have extensively documented the north and its native peoples for over fourty years, noted that “just about everybody in the village was amazed, including an elderly inuit hunter who told me that he had never seen anything like that before in his life.”  

asperatus clouds gets their name from the latin aspero, a word used by romans to describe the sea as it was roughened by the cold north wind. though the cause of their formation remains unknown, it is likely that the lumpy, undulating underside of the clouds is a result of warmer, moister air from above meeting colder, dryer air from below, combined with high level wind passing over rolling terrain. 

see also: circumhorizontal arcs, mammatus clouds, polar stratospheric clouds, noctilucent clouds, lenticular clouds and more asperatus clouds

I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?

Nim Chimpsky.

Fucking monkey pun.

And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But

BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.

Dandelion crowns are such a nostalgic ware for so many folks! Remember to pick in later in the season once their pollen has already had its first picks for the bees!  

It always upsets me so much when I see interpretations/illustrations of the two headed calf poem that show a living calf being torn away from its mother and killed to sell to a museum and framing the poem as being "humanity kills beautiful things for being different".

Two headed cows almost never survive more than a few hours after their birth. The farmer finds the *body* the next day. The calf was destined to die, and that's a tragedy, but for the time it was alive, it had a beautiful and unique experience.

It's not a poem about the cruelty of man. It's a poem about the beauty of life in an indifferent universe. It's about purpose and beauty being able to exist even in an existence doomed to come to an end, as all our lives are. It's not a poem about how a calf dies, but how, even for only a brief moment, it was alive.

And, for that moment, because of that life, however fleeting, the sky had twice as many stars.

iridescent pileus cloud photos by esther havens in ethiopia, becky bone dunning in jamaica, ken rotberg in florida, and david lapuma.

as a cumulus cloud containing warm air convects upwards and condenses, a thin layer of humid air containing water vapour is thrust above the cloud, cooling from the lower pressure into droplets, which, when small enough and uniform in size, diffract light from the sun when it’s at least fifty eight degrees above the horizon.

see also: circumhorizontal arcs, asperatus clouds, mammatus clouds, polar stratospheric clouds, noctilucent clouds, and lenticular clouds 

creating a universe with your own hands

scientists in the 1990s, putting a Get More Purple gene attached to a harmless plant virus into an already purple petunia: please get more purple

the petunia, sensing an apparent honest to god Get More Purple Disease, using the previously undiscovered RNAi antiviral ability to shut down all other purple genes along with it just in case: you put VIRUS in petunia? you infect her with the More Purple?? oh! oh! her children shall bloom white! jail for mother, jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!