Sending good vibes that you get back to a place of peace and stability soon.

I am so sorry. Holding you in my heart.

And communication!

Absolute banger from @samforstag.bsky.social www.instagram.com/reel/DW7Z2ym...

My new favorite chore is babysitting the burn barrel.

A dog collar for Spork with colorful cartoon monsters and rhinestones and text that reads "BIG FEELS"

The previous dog collar stretched out against a measuring tape

A dog collar with a groovy psychedelic mushrooms and rhinestones printed with the text "Girl Boss"

The previous dog collar, stretched out against a measuring tape measuring 20 inches

Everything is terrible, so I decided to spend some money about it.

Boston Globe mock front page from April 9, 2016. Date says April 9, 2017, with giant headline “DEPORTATIONS TO BEGIN” and “Markets sink as trade war looms.”

Ten years ago today, in April 2016, the Boston Globe printed a satirical front page imagining a future Trump administration. The page was called "alarmist," "hyperbolic," "dystopian." But we’ve put up with so much since then it now looks like . . . a slow Thursday?

Mostly beans, remainder cheese

I haven't been posting them on Bluesky but Spork is a TV watcher I have a whole series of #SporkWatchesTV on TikTok. He absolutely recognizes cartoon animals and sometimes it gets a little too arousing for him.

Holding you gently in my heart.

Happy anniversary!

A group of rats in beautiful garments, posing for the camera at The Museum of English Rural Life. Each rat is wearing a different costume, inspired by experiences of childhood in historic rural England.

The results have exceeded even our most whimsical expectations.

Meet our rats!

This is hilarious.

Also, completely enraging.

Have you thought about taking it to the froptometrist?

I've put it in small amounts, blended, in spaghetti sauce. It works! Unidentifiable umami hit.

A black German shepherd mix dog with a white star on his chest sitting inside the illusion of a snow globe against a backdrop of a snowy woods with bright fairy lights and prismatic snowflakes

Roses are red, and
violets are blue, and
Spork sends a wink, asking
Hey, how YOU doin'?

I tried to make a joke about the proper term being "graham cracker" but it turns out I had gotten my corn flakes/graham cracker history mixed up.

I've told this story on ContrabandCamp but it's worth sharing for BHM because it's one of the greatest stories ever.

A thread.

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

The emergence of Nadine and her stormy-weather friend:

Happy Ta-Ta, Ta-Tas Day!

Danny DeVito was on to something.

Northern Virginia Family Services appears to have no religious affiliation and has a thrift store www.nvfs.org/support/thri...

She is super food motivated and will do just about anything for a good treat.

She did not make it easy for us! She's still shy around new people and in particular has had little exposure to men, so we need to keep working on that. So she wasn't the same happy, tail wagging pup she is at home but I was able to get her to start using her "place" training to get her posed.

A tan puppy with beautiful eyes sits for a studio portrait on a red cushion with a blue backdrop.

A tan puppy lays on a dog bed that looks like a miniature old-fashioned metal framed bed, looking at a toy stuffed rabbit.

A tan puppy lays on a red cushion on the floor of a photography studio with a blue backdrop

Jellybean the Beauty Queen got her glamor shots the other day thanks to a friend who also does people/pet portrait photography

A pale tan puppy in a leopard print jacket stands on the deck of a small tractor

A pale tan puppy in a leopard print jacket sits on the deck of a small tractor

A pale tan puppy in a leopard print jacket sits up on her hind legs with her front feet in the air on the deck of a small tractor

Doin' farm dog shit

No room in the truck for 3 dogs!