Taliban fighter doesn’t like his job
My dog might me smarter than me
Six billion dollars in quarters
Rock musicians financed Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Update: Jamie McCarthy pointed out on Mastodon that this isn’t 100 percent accurate. Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull did help finance The Holy Grail, but George Harrison didn’t — he did, however, mortgage his house to finance a different Monty Python movie: Life of Brian.
Made some new friends on a paddle down a Florida creek
We drove down to spend March in Florida, near Venice — just south of Sarasota, on the Gulf side — so of course I brought my kayak, and when I had a free afternoon I took it down to Curry Creek, which runs behind the mobile home park where we are staying, and empties into the bay and from there into the gulf. It was a beautiful day for a paddle, so I took it slow and paddled about three or four kilometres — saw a few ibises, a couple of herons, some miscellaneous birds of various kinds, and lots of moss hanging from the trees.
While I was paddling, I saw a man sitting on a bench on the bank of the creek and he was looking at something across the creek. “There he is,” he said, pointing at an alligator sunning himself on a sand bar — about eight or nine feet long probably. As I paddled by he submerged, so I only got a shot of his head poking up above the water. Further along I saw another one, but he was completely obscured except for his nose, and seemed to want to have nothing to do with me, which was fine with me 🙂
The only downside to this whole trip is that it was such a beautiful day that I just kept on paddling for about two hours, despite a dull ache in my shoulder that had been there for a few days, and I haven’t been in a kayak for about six months. I thought maybe I could paddle it out, but this was a mistake — the following day I could barely move my shoulder without pain, and it was throbbing even without me moving it. So now I am on a rest, ice, warm, no exercise regimen for awhile I guess. But it was worth it! Almost.
Nicknames for workmates in Australia
A police chase in Canada
A Japanese game show
Where the word clue came from
I’ll have the rude chicken
Time to invade
Richard Dreyfuss and Jack Nicholson
The winged sea caribou
It’s never too late
Why do so many medical entities use the wrong symbol?
A guy posted a tweet about a mural on a medical building that shows someone who presumably represents medicine fending off death, while holding a staff with wings at the top and two snakes wrapped around it. Pretty normal, right? Except that the staff with wings and two snakes has nothing to do with medicine at all — it’s called a “caduceus” and it’s associated with Hermes the messenger (or Mercury, if you are Roman instead of Greek), who is associated with commerce and other things. What this medical god should be holding is the rod of Asclepius, which has no wings and only one snake.
Despite this, lots of medical iconography, especially in the US, uses the caduceus instead of the rod of Asclepius. The US Marine Service started using it in 1857, and in 1902, it came to represent the US Army Medical Service and the US Public Health Service, which adopted it in 1881. Why did they choose the wrong one? Probably because it looks more impressive. After all, it’s got wings. And two snakes instead of just one. Way cooler 🙂
There are also theories that the two-snake rod became popular as a symbol representing medicine because early medications used mercury, and from there it became associated with pharmaceutical side of medicine, and then later was used to represent all of medicine. But some medical professionals don’t like to use the two-snake staff because it is primarily associated with commerce, rather than with the healing arts in general.