@goddamnshinyrock I’m reading Thomas Hine’s “The Total Package” and thought of you.
I’m so glad the rats liked their 100-year-old veal that went to the arctic twice
today I learned that “the high seas” actually has a specific legal meaning
today I learned that arctic hares have been known to occasionally feed on carrion
…every time I learn that an animal I had previously assumed to be an herbivore is not strictly so I’m unsettled all over again. you’d think I’d expect it by now.
so the current book I’m reading, published in 2010, mentions, in a superior ‘oh weren’t 19th century scientific theories Quaint and Charmingly Wrong’ sort of tone that Franklin’s men on his 1819 expedition (not the famous lost one) believed the aurora borealis made noise, and were hoping to study it and figure out how. I kind of scoffed at the idea but then, out of curiosity, googled the theory and…
after having been in an ecology class where animals were talked about in terms of ‘populations’ and ‘organisms’, being in a marine policy class where they’re instead referred to as ‘living resources’ is really fucking jarring
On this day in 1912 Lawrence Oates, a member of Robert Falcon Scott’s
British team to the South Pole, left his tent never to be seen again.
Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition was his second attempt and aimed to become
the first group to reach the South Pole. The group succeeded in
reaching the Pole on January 17th 1912, only to discover that they had
been beaten by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition. Sadly, Scott’s
entire party of five men died on the return journey. Oates was one of
those who died first. He was suffering from severe frostbite and, in an
apparent act of self-sacrifice, simply walked out of his tent into a
blizzard. He had asked them to leave him behind as his condition
worsened, and it is likely he felt that he was holding his group back
and limiting their chances for survival. Thus on March 16th he walked
out of the tent saying: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
The others died soon after and their bodies were found by a search
party in November, along with some of their equipment and personal
effects. Oates’s body was never found, but he and his companions are
remembered as brave men and national heroes.
“We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.” – Entry in Scott’s diary about Oates
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 