"The devil went down to the crossroads, and I went to Baltimore to watch the ships come in"

I was having thoughts about port cities and/as liminal spaces, so I sampled the sea chantey "Leaving of Liverpool" and wrote a song about it.

musicbyastrid.bandcamp.com/track/baltim...

the electronic signs on DC metro platforms say "BRD" while the train is at the platform, which always unscrolled into "Be Right Dere" in my head. I didn't think it actually stood for that, but I couldn't think of anything else that made sense and I'd never bothered to ask. Anyway it's "boarding"

was completely fine but now i'm sobbing bc i remembered that (as far as i know) every language has a word for mother that sounds something like "mama" because that's the first consonant that babies can reliably produce

i know some people believe that if a region has popular anti-gay beliefs in systemic politics then it deserves to be bombed to rubble, but we'd have to move half the music industry outta nashville first and i just think that's too much of a hassle

Plz forgive another post about Astrid Lundberg (@oddpride.com)

In my youth, I was chided for writing from an assumed position of cultural literacy; that everyone had seen/read what I had

Here, Astrid compellingly makes the case that this is a facet of neurodivergent communication to be cherished🧵

putting together an elite team of people with music history autism and people with windmill autism for a road trip to lubbock, tx. not sure what else we'll get up to but i think this could be the matchup of the century

the american windmill museum boasts the world's largest collection of historic american windmills, a superlative that raises fascinating questions like "where is the second-largest collection of historic american windmills?" and "are we sure west texas is real?"

the 1950s pop music hyperfixation has taken me to google maps where i am currently staring at lubbock looking for insight into what was going on with buddy holly & the crickets, which is how i just found out that there's an american windmill museum (it is in lubbock) (it was not there in the 1950s)

Finally laid down a decent demo of Bitter Coffee Eyes, by the way. It's a pop ballad with a big catchy chorus, and I hope you like it :)
musicbyastrid.bandcamp.com/track/bitter...

the only upside of being allergic to raw apples is that i don't have to follow or care about whatever's going on in the apple cultivar snob world
pink lady: makes my face hurt
granny smith: face hurt
red delicious: oop look it's face hurtin time

where I would live in the US (realistic)

I was feeling slightly smug about not being one of the people who mix up Jane Goodall and "Diane" Fossey and then I looked her up and learned I've been spelling Dian Fossey's name wrong for years 🙈
Never get complacent, people!

if it ain't brock it's probably one of the other kids, i dunno, i never watched the pokemon anime

if it ain't broke don't fix it
if it ain't baroque you don't need to learn to read basso continuo

Hemophilia is kind of a mean name for a disease. "Hey check it out this guy *loves* bleeding." It's got "stop hitting yourself" energy

can we talk about how many people have managed to demonize both enjoying food and enjoying sex? you're literally a living thing. like that's the whole point of being an earth animal. jesus.

straight men who drive themselves bonkers comparing themselves to peak conventional attractiveness would do well to remember that we had a whole beatlemania about a group of guys whose winning formula was "these three cartoon pirates are best friends with clara bow"

on one hand the antlered-ness of santa's reindeer in the middle of winter seems to imply that they're female, since male reindeer don't keep their antlers year round
on the other hand, typically neither male nor female reindeer fly, so

also the the background paintings were just so PRETTY, like. look at this shit

Would I have grown up to care about conservation regardless? Maybe. But it was a brilliant show and I'm grateful to it for helping inspire my love and genuine care for woodlands. If you like the way I spin yarns about nature, you can thank the combination of Farthing Wood and Walking With Dinosaurs

A juvenile fox becomes dependent of scavenging from bins, but living around humans puts it in the path of an oncoming car. All presented with incredible pathos. It didn't take much digging for seven-year-old-Astrid to discover that these things really happened to wild animals near me ALL THE TIME.

The hedgehogs' instinctive defence of rolling into a ball is useless against a car. New foxes move into a woodland after being displaced by a development, and a territorial local fox kills one of their cubs. A snake is killed in its burrow by an invasive rat.

this British woodlands conservation propaganda for children made me who I am as a person
The Animals of Farthing Wood is incredibly effective conservation messaging bc it kills off a LOT of main characters, specifically in ways that are SUPER REALISTIC tragic deaths for suburban woodland creatures 🧵

this was pre waylon, but yeah god knows how this would’ve gone down if he’d been there