I've been vaccinated against the flu.

[conuly]

I hate getting shots, but I hate getting the flu more. Got it once in high school. NEVER AGAIN. Even our bout with rotovirus doesn't compare.

**********************

How to make the cosmic web give up the matter it’s hiding

Get to Know Your Japanese Bathroom Ghosts

When Sonar Doesn’t Cut It, These Bats Crawl to Hunt Prey

Surgeon aims to diagnose deformities of extinct saber-toothed cats

Mountain Lions Are Way More Social Than We Thought (Didn't expect to hear that, but still... not surprised. People are bizarrely wedded to this idea that All Cats Are Loners, but it's not true for housecats, so why do we expect it be true for mountain lions?)

Hogwarts Express rescues family stranded in Highlands

A to Z of English usage myths

Fighting racism: Teaching kids to identify individual black people can reduce racial bias

How a Quarter of Cow DNA Came From Reptiles

Rotten Apples That Will Last Forever

The Secret History of the Female Code Breakers Who Helped Defeat the Nazis

Old-school news: sensational, moralistic and, above all, sung

Jeremy, The Lonely, Left-Twisting Snail, Dies — But Knows Love Before The End

Birds gone wild: Resurgent turkeys spar with human neighbors

Google Will No Longer Allow Users to Skirt Paywalls Using Its Search Engine (Not exactly. Google will no longer penalize companies for not allowing users to skirt paywalls, but it won't stop them if they choose to allow it.)

The Underclass Origins of the Little Black Dress

Pythons are invading Florida. Meet the scientists fighting back.

The Secret Lives of Leonardo da Vinci

When the Larsen C ice shelf broke, it exposed a hidden world

How Stalin Hid Ukraine's Famine From the World

The scientists persuading terrorists to spill their secrets

9th Circuit Rules There’s No Constitutional Right to Sell Firearms. Will the Supreme Court Care?

Poll: Majorities Of Both Parties Favor Increased Gun Restrictions

Analysis of 141 hours of cable news reveals how mass killers are really portrayed

The less… umm… fewer the better (Gotta laugh so you don't cry)

U.S. House approves disaster funds as Trump criticizes Puerto Rico

The Trump Administration Is Preventing Undocumented Immigrant Minors From Getting Abortions (More)

The Constitutional Counting Crisis

What Facebook Did to American Democracy

To Save Her Children, She Pretended To Be Crazy

Courts Sidestep the Law, and South Carolina’s Poor Go to Jail

Trump administration reduces support for prisoner halfway houses

Penguins die in 'catastrophic' Antarctic breeding season

Comments

[wpadmirer]

YAY! for flu shots. I need to get mine. I always go to Walgreens because my insurance covers it, and they have that "get one, give one" program. For every vaccine they sell, they give one overseas.

As for the pythons in Florida. Yep. We have them. The fuckers breed like crazy and are eating all the small mammals, especially in the Everglades.

[kyrielle]

Yay for flu shots.

I'm with you. As I tell my kids, the shot usually hurts and usually you're sore/tired a bit afterwards, which is annoying, but much better than the actual flu would be.

[conuly]

And with any luck, they'll never know from experience.

[bibliofile]

Well, not until they've moved out and skip the flu shot for whatever reason.

[conuly]

A mistake they won't repeat.

[cactuswatcher]

Re Wild Turkeys:
Yep, I've seen that. There was a flock (a tom and five or six hens) that started hanging around my old house in the woods in Missouri. The hens were very skittish and stayed away, but the tom was very curious and quite bold. He was tall enough to walk up and look straight in the side window of the car when I came home from work. Except for very large bird droppings on the front porch we got along. But one day, he was getting too close to some paint I was working with outside, so for his sake as well as mine, I shooed him away. He did not appreciate that at all! From then on he'd get very huffy when I walked outside. Once or twice he chased my car down the road when I went to work.

Not too long after, the neighbor across the road grew afraid our not too distant subdivision neighbors would start shooting them as fall was coming on. So she called the county, which came, caught the lot and released them in a park many miles away.

[conuly]

I'm surprised it worked at all. In my experience, turkeys don't shoo easy.

[cactuswatcher]

All I needed was for the turkey to concentrate on me instead of the paint. Even big flying birds will startle if you suddenly spread your arms and fingers, as if there is some reason you are about to take off. Keep doing it and they will get the idea to stay away. Of course, then they may think you are a rival for territory or whatever, like the tom, and may become a bigger nuisance.

[elf]

Paywalls and Google:

No, this won't help the news sites sell subscriptions. It'll bump more "infotainment" news-esque articles to Facebook subscribers.

Removing news access from the poor is not going to help anyone. Newspapers cost money - but anyone who worked in a large office could pick up a secondhand newspaper. News websites, like many other publishers that have gone digital, are working really, really hard to institute "one payment = one reader" as a policy.

[sovay]

Jeremy, The Lonely, Left-Twisting Snail, Dies — But Knows Love Before The End

I am glad this saga remained amazing.

[conuly]

Likewise, though I'm slightly dismayed that none of his offspring are as unique as he was.

[chanter1944]

Yay flu shot. Got mine as well. I travel on public transit almost every day, I work in an office building and live in an apartment building. Catching the flu /stinks/, but so does potentially sharing the flu with somebody's old grandmother/tiny child/immunosuppressed friend. I'll take the sore arm.

[conuly]

Agreed.

[siderea]

Yay flu shot! As a side note, now is the time to plan something for the 100th anniversary of the Great Influenza, which started about Labor Day weekend, 1918.

The scientists persuading terrorists to spill their secrets

I'm full of naches! Also slightly queasy. I first heard about this work from BuzzFeed in 2015. Motivational Interviewing is a non-obvious descendent of the branch of psychotherapy that's the core of my practice, and the Alisons are empirically rediscovering the core principles of that foundational school of psychotherapy.

It is simultaneously unbelieveably weird that the school of therapy that has long been considered the touchiest-feeliest, most hippy-dippy, most woolly-headed branch of therapy has turned out to be the stuff that gets used by LEO interrogators, hostage negotiators, addiction counselors, and (in my case) violent felons – and, well, utterly inexorable, because we really were right all along, and had the sharpest knife in the block.

[conuly]

As a side note, now is the time to plan something for the 100th anniversary of the Great Influenza, which started about Labor Day weekend, 1918.

I guess a picnic isn't quite appropriate.

Gonna read the link.

[siderea]

I guess a picnic isn't quite appropriate.

Depends on what graveyard you hold it in.