I can’t do justice to one of the weirdest camp stories I know. My friend tells it so well, and I can offer only a pale shadow of his story.
Last summer, he was working with one of the younger units comprised of ten year old boys. They had spent the night camping on another beach and were just readying themselves to depart. “Make sure you have all your things!” called my friend. “Don’t leave anything behind!”
One small boy came up, dragging a massive tangle of decomposing seaweed behind him. “But… what about me boy?” he asked, lip trembling.
“…what is ‘me boy’?”
The child held up the stinking wad of bull kelp. “This is him. This is Me Boy.”
“Me Boy is not coming back with us,” said his counselor. “You’re going to leave Me Boy behind on the beach where he belongs.”
The campers loudly mourned the loss of Me Boy. They insisted on giving him a Viking burial at sea, which just consisted of pushing him solemnly off the back of the rowboat into the water and watching him drift away in the surf.
That was only the beginning. Me Boy would be back.
The campers, in true camp fashion, possessed some kind of cultic hive-mind and a predisposition for bizarre memes. Me Boy would not be forgotten. They started telling each other stories about Me Boy and how he would one day rise again. There were warring factions with contradicting dogmas about Me Boy. Only when the gardener allowed them to take home a zucchini she had harvested did they find their god, born anew.
Me Boy, The Zucchini That Was A God, became the whole unit’s mascot. The kids would bicker over who got to carry him. They built nests and carriers for Me Boy and brought him to different activities, fiercely defending him from those that would do him harm. One child appointed himself the Voice of Me Boy and would translate the zucchini’s divine wishes into human speech.
It got out of hand. Me Boy had become a distraction, a fixation, a violent controversy. Something had to be done.
My friend, their counselor, took it upon himself to kill Me Boy. The children wailed in despair as he chopped their God into refreshing slices. With this sudden turn of fortune, followers of Me Boy turned to theophagy. “We must eat him to preserve his power!” they cried. Boys who would otherwise never have touched a vegetable ate greedily of this sacrament, eager to let Me Boy live on within them.
For a time, it seemed that peace and order had been restored, and the religion had already faded into its silver age. But only for a time.
In the last few days of camp, the religion of Me Boy splintered into several denominations. Every meal yielded new vegetable matter said to be a reincarnation of Me Boy, only for opposing groups to dismiss these as false prophets. Some believed that Me Boy was gone. Others believed his spirit lived on, intangible, omnipresent. Some believed he had found a new vessel inside a carrot, a pear, a slice of cantaloupe… even inside a child. There was chaos, and strife, and heartbreak without the guidance of Me Boy.
The tags on this post are very polarized. Half of them are “#I’m glad I never went to camp” and “#reasons why I never want kids”, the other half are “#BOY I LOVE CHILDREN CAMP IS SO GOOD AMIRIGHT?”
We’re used to radiation being invisible. With a Geiger counter, it gets turned into audible clicks. What you see above, though, is radiation’s effects made visible in a cloud chamber. In the center hangs a chunk of radioactive uranium, spitting out alpha and beta particles. The chamber also has a reservoir of alcohol and a floor cooled to -40 degrees Celsius. This generates a supersaturated cloud of alcohol vapor. When the uranium spits out a particle, it zips through the vapor, colliding with atoms and ionizing them. Those now-charged ions serve as nuclei for the vapor, which condenses into droplets that reveal the path of the particle. The characteristics of the trails are distinct to the type of decay particle that created them. In fact, both the positron and muon were first discovered in cloud chambers! (Image credit: Cloudylabs, source)
Buzzfeed is the latest national news site to report on what residents of Arizona cannot avoid — a hellscape second in the Inner Solar System only to the surface of Venus in parched, inhospitable real estate.
Man, they built a city in the middle of the fucking desert. Color me shocked.
Most of this stuff has been in place for decades. It’s only melting this summer. This is shocking. This is Climate Change. Stay tuned.
yeah… they built cities in the desert designed to LAST in the desert. shit should not be melting. it’s an average of 120F/48.8C there.
hey so i live here and uh….. yeah people’s dog’s paws are being badly burned, people’s skin/bodies are being burned, our homeless population is absolutely frying out here and the people of Tucson happen to be… decidedly dispassionate about the safety of these homeless people so if you’d be so kind, please donate to some of the shelters and organizations out here because there is virtually no shade on our streets and no humidity or breeze at all
and if you live here too, have a heart. i spent the last three bucks in my bank account on water for a gentleman who was out in the hot sun holding a sign at an intersection and he almost cried for it. everyone deserves a little help, especially when it’s 110 degrees before 9 am.
Free Speech Zones, which were a real thing and not a plot element in a particularly ham-handed dystopian novel.
The phrase “hidey hole.”
Watching a budget surplus become a massive deficit that was bigger than it even looked because the White House was just like, “Okay, we’ll just not put the wars on the books and just ask for more money for those every few months.”
The sheer number of times Alberto Gonzalez said, “I don’t recall,” to Congress regarding war crimes and human rights violations.
“…now watch this drive.”
Mission Accomplished.
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” “yellowcake uranium,” Condoleeza’s “mushroom clouds” fearmongering, and all the other bullshit we were fed to get into Iraq.
The President of the United States said so many stupid things that there were one-a-day calendars consisting of an individual quote for each day of the year. They didn’t all have the exact same quotes.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
And then we went to war.
“Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.” – George W. Bush, 2006 State of the Union
Okay, that’s the best one.
Bush watched that Batman Beyond splicing episode and had nightmares for a week
was it hidey-hole? i thought it was spider-hole.
Yeah, it was spider-hole
I think my favorite was how we un-ironically referred to a whole set of countries as the “Axis of Evil” as if that phrase gives us some kind of meaningful understanding of their geopolitical role and isn’t borrowed straight out of a mediocre made-for-TV superhero movie.
And then there was:
We literally got a terrorism forecast on the news every morning like it was pollen. So many of the things that happened, if they were in a dystopian novel, people would be like, “That’s way too goofy and ridiculous to actually happen in real life,” and yet they did.
Not only was the terror threat system real, but it was often raised and lowered based entirely on how panicked they wanted us to be. Famously they raised the level for no reason during the 2004 election.
Also, “Free Speech Zones” looked something like this:
It was literally a cage.
I genuinely forget that people, even within my own age group, has forgotten the Bush era since they were teenagers and below the voting age at the time, and so forgot how fucking horrifying it was.
Why study for exams when you can deduce the answers based on context clues from other questions and then use those answers to provide you with even more context clues for even more questions in an hour-long stress-fueled Professor Layton-esque logic puzzle extravaganza of future-hinging doom.
The ignorance and ableism of Kellyanne Conway saying people who will lose Medicaid coverage under the Republican healthcare bill “can just get jobs” is staggering. According to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the majority of adults on Medicaid *do* have jobs. 8 in 10 live in working families and 59% work either full or part time. But they work jobs that don’t offer health insurance.
Fun fact: That was my exact situation two years ago. I’ve been working at least part of the year since I was 16; during college, I worked several different jobs simultaneously at Westminster, but Westminster prohibits students from working more than 20 hours a week. So guess what? None of those jobs offered health insurance. Neither did the temp agency I worked for when I moved to Oregon. I was uninsured for a year before moving here and on Medicaid for a year after moving because I was working, but my employers did not offer health insurance, and my mom had been laid off, so I had lost the healthcare coverage I had through her. The only reason I’m not on Medicaid right now is because I was able to get on my dad’s insurance plan. Once I turn 26 (or possibly earlier if the Trumpites get their way), I’ll have to go back on Medicaid because guess what? Even though I *am* working, I’m too sick to get a full-time job that offers health insurance. The only reason I got on Medicaid in the first place was because working for the temp agency made me so sick that I couldn’t walk from the couch to the bathroom without passing out. So yeah, if you want me alive, it’s not an option for me to have a full-time job that would actually provide health insurance. And that’s probably going to be true for the rest of my life because, you know, that’s the definition of chronic illness.
There’s really nothing more ignorant and cruel Conway could’ve said about this topic unless she’d said, “I hope all the poor and chronically ill people just die.”
A Middleground 