In the town where I grew up, there was a large statue in one of the parks, of a famous historical white colonizer. I’m not going to say who specifically, suffice it to say that it was someone who wasn’t worth memorializing for their deeds. And as you can imagine, this statue was a frequent target of vandalism, with paint or toilet paper or eggs on multiple occasions. Now, the local council was generally pretty lax when it came to repairing potholes or other public damage in the town, but every time, 24 hours after this particular statue was hit, the same person would always appear in a Hi-Vis vest, hat, mask and sunglasses, carrying a bucket of water, and wash it clean. They would do it as quickly as possible, but always made sure the face and the name carved at the bottom were generously scrubbed. This only encouraged people to do it again, and so it became a vicious cycle.
Within a year, the statue had sustained so much damage that it was unrecognizable and the lettering unreadable, so eventually the council came and took it down. Also apparently, the person in the Hi-Vis vest didn’t even work for the council. They were supposedly just some ‘good samaritan’ who cleaned it, often before the council even discovered it needed cleaning, so they just let them do it and ignored the problem. They didn’t bother putting the statue up again.
Much later, we found out that the anonymous 'samaritan’ had been deliberately washing the statue with a bucket of saltwater, which had dramatically corroded it, causing irreversible accumulative damage far worse than spray paint ever would have done. It’s even theorized that they were also often the one spray-painting it, just so that they had an excuse to come back after a day to wash it.
please do keep telling me about your pdfs in the tags. it is everything
Every single professor when they upload the class readings to the course page with no cohesive naming/formatting system either for the files themselves or in the syllabus
why is the sims so addictive but only for a short amount of time??? like all u do is play the sims u don’t sleep u don’t eat it’s like you’re on drugs for around two days and then forget about it for the next whole year
God creating Adam and Eve then fucking off for the rest of the eternity like
It gets even better, because he was doing all of this on a pitch black night. This dude swam towards a lure, slapped at it with his glove, and when it got caught; he let himself float and tugged on the line so the fisherman thought he had hooked a 100+ pound salmon. Once he was finally up to the shore, he turned a flashlight on in the guy’s face and walked out of the water, saying “good morning, gentlemen. State fish and game warden, you’re under arrest.“
At this point, the guy who had reeled him in had literally fallen over in shock, and the other people with him were scared shitless. The warden whipped some citations out of a plastic bag in his wetsuit, made the trespassers sign them, asked if they had any questions, and then gathered all of their fishing gear. And he just. Walked back into the river. And quietly swam away, without another word.
This man is a legend.
warden coming out of his river to shame fishermankind
Y'all ever get so excited about a scientific paper you’re reading that you get chills???
So I thought to myself
Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan
And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat
And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China
And ohhhhh my goddddd. I’m vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.
The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:
KUDZU IS NOT WILD. IT IS SEMI-DOMESTICATED.
In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!
THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH
and in turn
HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS
*AND*
in its natural range, humans are the main “predator” of kudzu
“Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas.”
Kudzu is like that because it co-evolved with humans.
WHAT
YALL
This means
That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans
The other half of the ecological partnership that keeps Kudzu in balance with everything else isn’t a caterpillar or a hoofed beast. It’s us.
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okay but this is a power move above any other
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It gets even better, because he was doing all of this on a pitch black...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1fd447caa3b037691cd21fe9101a7388/tumblr_oyqfosuqIB1rhavdko1_500.png)
