Plastic Paleontology
With a magnifying glass to the stars we can cook any ant
Duckstack, seasoned to perfection
We hope you will enjoy today's Duckstack slow roasted over honey briquettes, giving it its characteristic sweet flavor. We have little ducks in our kitchen, flipping griddles, juggling seasonings, and frantically watering herbs to grow them in time for each churned out recipe1. The aromas wafting throughout the building are incredible. And they do it for you. We give the Duckstacks to the ducks who are storks, and have them air-mail them to your kitchen window, like pies, to make you feel welcome and at home2.
Go ahead, lay out your picnic blanket across your walnut wood table, or that grassy hill. Get out your fork and knife, and prepare to enjoy: The Duckstack.
WROUGHTCRIME
Very suspicious that Right wing criminals never actually say anything particularly right wing. Our apologies for covering a Current Event. If you do not like current events, you may skip this section. It will not affect your score.
There was a mass shooter last week. He was, apparently, a “white nationalist” concerned about “the great replacement” and the % of whites in the nation declining so he very calmly decided the way to fix this would be to shoot a bunch of white people
I don’t want to make light of it, there’s video and its pretty horrific3. The shooter had published a manifesto on why mass shooting would save the white race which reads a lot like how I imagine a liberal imagines people becoming right wing happens, which is why I know its fake. Or if not fake, it is something that approximates fake. Its literally like “the conservatives love bombed me, and brainwashed me into realizing I had to kill people, I didn’t understand what was happening” and he uploads this screed and then commits a mass shooting the next day, I’m not saying anything here, I’m just sharing my notes.
Obviously I’m suspicious; I still don’t know what happened with the Vegas shooter. I figure all news is fake unless it really makes sense. Maybe and probably the guy really was extremely mentally ill. I think he should be taken as wholly and uncritically as representative of whatever demographic I like least.
Everyone will want to pin horror on everyone especially when it claims upfront to be ideological- The Christchurch shooter was the same. He committed terrorism in a mosque, so to liberals he was a white nationalist. He claimed to be a communist in his manifesto, so to conservatives he was a communist. I think people can just be insane and bad.
I rather dislike many liberals, but they have reasons for what they believe. I don’t think those reasons are sufficient or persuasive- I don’t think women’s rights is valuable enough to excuse abortion, I don’t think libertarian laissez-faires principles are valuable enough to grant gay marriage, I don’t think affirmative action actually helps black people when all is said and done. Conservatives have reasons for what they believe too. You can spot someone’s lineage by how they reason. Mass shooters never seem to have any4.
Anyway, storybooks and fables aside, I feel there isn’t really a “lesson” to be taken from horrors. If they were easily parsable, they wouldn’t be horrific, and the abominations would instead get respectable names like war or justice or politics or whatever. Trying too much to extract or pin blame makes you bonkers. Pre-internet most people could go their entire lives without a tragedy of this scale and now we have to think we’re surrounded by the possibility of it constantly. Maybe we are. But even if it was true, it shouldn’t be believed. Life is about better things. Here are some.
TIME TRAVEL SECTION
Present-ing: The Past
HISTORY
Present-ing: The present
The littlest one went to mow our lawn this week. We let him crawl around and sequentially discovered him eating: Walnuts, dirt, grass, and then a snail, which we fished out of his mouth and the snail obviously had no idea what was happening just knocking around in there like “ahhhhhhhh!” being like gummed to death
The little one has a diaper rash, “why didn’t you tell me you were poopy?” “Because you didn’t get me a chip when I cried.” Oh. Okay. This is his developing sense of justice.
our fridge broke and our tub broke and our sinks broke and our sprinklers broke and the sink drain piping in our basement broke
I was on the toilet and the Little One randomly came in and said to me, “how bout this?”, as he was brushing his head with two combs simultaneously.
We were asking him to help us name the chickens. “What about this chicken? Is it briquette or dottie?” And he was like, “but, that’s just a chicken! And that’s its mouth!” So that one’s named “chicken” now
Some quotes from the Little one: “I can get my own sucker actually. Because I have hands! To pick a sucker! And legs! To walk! (pause) actually, I have feet”
“Can you get me the banana playdough?”
“Mama I really like dinosaurs, but they bite all the time. They bite dinosaur food all the time! I bite me food all the times. With my hands! Like this!” And then he made little pinching fingers at us
The little one has become a backseat driver. “Stoppp! There’s a stop signnnnn!” in his singsong voice. Keeping us safe. Mama asked him “should we drive into the car in front of us us?” And he said “uh huh”, and she said “does mama give bad advice?” and he said “uh uh. but you’re funny!”
We took the Little one to an all you can eat buffet and he ate exactly: Peas
Later, he really wanted to watch a Halloween show, but was scared, so he waited for us to be there so that he could watch it while safely holding our hands. Really warming, how much he wanted to watch something that scared him.
Time is accelerated for ducks, one duckstack a week is actually 10 per second in duck years
Average kid on the internet has watched more people violently die, for real, on camera, than your ancestors would have experienced even if they fought in a war.
“hatred”, theoretically. They hate theoretical harm. Politicians have actually harmed me in reality. Nobody hates politicians.