man oh my god i just remembered my final final exam of high school, my 7th period exam for senior year, held in the auditorium with 2 other classes and like 8 total teachers watching, a guy i was on kinda good terms with asked if id let him cheat off my exam, and i was completely unable to say no to ppl so i was like “of course clifton baby i got u” but i was VERY UNCOMFORTABLE with cheating on exams so i “got up to pee” and our teacher escorted me to the bathrooms and i was like “jack buddy listen, clifton asked me to let him cheat and i said okay but i dont wanna so can u just hover near us so he doesnt get a chance to peek?” and he was like “vicky are u dumb” and i was like “yes” so he stuck near us and after the exam ended i caught clifton after school and was like “omg im so sorry! i can’t believe he just hovered around us the whole time! how unfair!” and clifton was like “omg i know! dont feel bad girl its not your fault” but like girl………… it was my fault…………. im sorry clifton…………..
[ID: A photo of two Black men embracing in a sunlit meadow with long grasses and some yellow flowers. The first sits facing the audience with his knees bent, his feet planted on the ground. He wears beige pants, a brown long-sleeved shirt, and black shoes. His arms are around the second person, who is sitting in his lap. The second person wears a green-grey short-sleeved polo shirt. End ID.]
Years ago back when I worked in cubicle land, we were hiring junior software developers. They didn’t have to have a ton of experience, just a willingness to learn, and some demonstration of their software skills. Like: show me a program you wrote (any language) or a web site you designed. Anything.
And there was this one guy I talked with who seemed super sharp, but had virtually zero experience writing software. When it came time to do the show-n-tell part of the interview he whips out his laptop, brings up a website, and spins it around to show me what he made.
A website of tiny ceramic frogs.
Not for sale. Just… all these ceramic frogs, organized into categories. Frogs on bicycles, frogs with hats, frogs sitting on lily pads. It was a virtual museum of ceramic frogs in web form.
I scrolled through his online collection of frogs, slightly baffled.
“This is your website?” I asked finally.
“Yep!”
“You coded this yourself?” I popped into view-source mode and poked around some incredibly well-formatted, well-commented html. I nodded slowly. This guy was meticulous.
“Yep!”
“So… where’d all the frogs come from?”
“I made those too,” he says, beaming.
And while I’m processing this he rummages in his bag and pulls out a little ceramic frog working at a computer terminal. He places it on the table before us, next to the laptop.
“And THIS one,” he says, “I made for you! As a thank you for the interview.”
It was adorable. I hired him on the spot. I mean, why not? Worst case he’d wash out in 90 days and we’d hire somebody else. He turned out to be one of the best developers on our team.
And yes, his cubicle was loaded with ceramic frogs.
Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato
For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!
I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.
There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼
It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:
And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:
These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.
used to date a guy who was 6'4 and I’m 5'2 and one time we were arguing and he took a picture of me from his eye level to show me what I looked like from his perspective and honestly that was so disrespectful
Men love to talk about how much it sucks to be put in the friendzone but can we talk about how it feels to be a woman and realize that you didn’t have an actual friend? You just had somebody looming over you, waiting for you to agree to fuck them
