Words for the day: "shoulder pal" and "kidult"

When I clicked on the link I thought it said "My weird week of wearing shoulder pads," so the "shoulder pals" was a bit of a surprise.  

"There was a time when adults who owned collections of stuffed toys were relatively uncommon, weird even. All that has changed recently: the rise in popularity of toys such as Squishmallows and Jellycat Amuseables has been linked to the growing “kidult” market (adults buying toys for themselves) which accounted for almost 30% of toy sales last year. On the whole, cuddly toys are something people keep at home, on their beds or on display shelves. But that’s changing too – plush toy keyrings such as Labubus are now everywhere. And some “Disney adults” (self-professed grown up Disney fans who might, for example, go to the theme parks without taking children with them) have gone one step further: attaching toys not just to their bags, but to themselves.

“Shoulder pals” (variously known as “shoulder plushies”, “shoulder toys” and “shoulder sitters”) are small toys made in the likeness of Disney characters. They have magnetic bases and come with a flat metal plate designed to be placed under your shirt, so the toy perches on your shoulder. Since the first one, baby Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, was brought out in 2018, these toys have become a common accessory at the Disney theme parks."

The source article at The Guardian goes on to describe the experiences of a person who wears the shoulder pads not at Disneyland, but in the "real world." I sometimes mock fashion innovations and marketing ploys, but I rather like the concept of "kidult" if the trend can bring just a few moments of levity into otherwise stressful lives.

"I’m relieved when I finally take Remy off. I’ve never felt fully relaxed while wearing a shoulder pal – partly out of self-consciousness, and partly out of concern that it might fall off. But I can’t deny that the responses I’ve had to Remy and his friends have been much more positive than I thought they were going to be. Wearing something so silly and unexpected has invited conversations with strangers, made my friends laugh and created, as Potten puts it, “a little bit of joy in a hard world.

Image cropped for size from the original at the source, credit David Levene/The Guardian.

Lake Nokomis [Minneapolis] in the 1920s

Image from the Historic Minneapolis Facebook page.  Here's a recent view via Google Maps:

This is Google's 3D view.  The angle is different from the 1930s image, but it's still interesting to compare the changes that have occurred as the result of development.  I agree with this comment posted at the stie:

"One the best things that the city did early on in its existence, was keeping the shoreline of our lakes public, and not allowing real estate developers to build homes on the lake shorelines."

Posted for my high school classmates, some of whom grew up in this neighborhood.

A Fairburn agate and a Waterline agate

Image from the whatsthisrock subreddit, where this is identified as a Fairburn agate ("the rarest agate in the world").  More info from Wikipedia -

"Fairburn Agate is a type of gemstone found in the agate beds of southwestern South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska. It is also the state gemstone of South Dakota. Fairburns are characterized from other types of agate by their colors and the shape of the bands... fortification banding distinguishes fairburns from other agate types. Fortification banding means that the concentric layers have sharp changes in direction which cause the bands to form angles in ways which are especially distinguishable from other agate types."

An illustration of the fortification banding -

As a child I spent inordinate amounts of time searching for agates in Minnesota.  I still have a jarful in the garage that I've never polished.  Here's another spectacular agate posted at whatsthisrock:

"Beautiful “Waterline Agate” as they are commonly called. The combination of the concentrically banded agate bordering the waterline agate complimented by the pocket with botryoidal chalcedony is absolutely stunning. This is a beautiful expression of the mineral quartz."

Is there a GenZ 2.0?

I've seen quite a few reports on the internet observing (or lamenting) the fact that young Americans can no longer be expected to adopt a liberal/progressive viewpoint.  Lots of reasons have been proposed, with no concrete data to explain the phenomenon.

The current issue of Harvard Magazine has an article entitled How MAGA Went Mainstream at Harvard:
Trump, TikTok, and the pandemic are reshaping Gen Z politics.  Herewith some salient excerpts:

Harvard, like many American universities, has long been seen as a bastion of liberalism. In its attacks on the University, the Trump administration has often pointed to a lack of ideological diversity on campus—a charge that even Harvard’s own leadership has conceded, at least in part, by launching formal efforts to address it.

But whatever you think you know about the politics of Harvard’s faculty, its student body is an increasingly different story—one that reflects a broader shift in Gen Z politics. In poll after poll, the youngest members of Gen Z have shown a surprising conservative tilt. In the last presidential election, a Democratic polling group found, white men under 20 voted for Trump at higher rates than those in their late-20s—and at higher rates than white baby boomer men. And the latest Yale Youth Poll revealed a whopping 18-point partisan gap between voters aged 18 to 21—who leaned Republican by 11.7 points—and those aged 22 to 29, who leaned Democrat by 6.4 points.

In April, a theory about this shift went viral on X.

“I said it before and I’ll say it again,” Rachel Janfaza ’20, an analyst focused on youth politics, wrote. “There really are two Gen Zs.” Her post included a graphic contrasting “Gen Z 1.0,” the liberal-leaning older cohort, with “Gen Z 2.0,” their younger, more conservative peers.

According to Janfaza, the pandemic marked a dividing line. Older Gen Zers were in college when it hit, able to quarantine with roommates and friends; younger ones were still in high school, isolated at home. The two cohorts also came of age in different political climates: Gen Z 1.0 came up during Trump’s first presidency, when resistance meant protesting at the Women’s March or walking out of school for climate action. Gen Z 2.0 grew up under President Joe Biden—disillusioned with institutions, skeptical of pandemic rules, and more likely to lean into contrarian conservatism.

Now, Gen Z 2.0 is filling college campuses around the country, including at Harvard. They’re revitalizing conservative institutions, shifting the boundaries of campus discourse, and getting ready to shape national politics.

Much more at the link.  Please at least browse it before waxing eloquent in the Comments with your own theories.

"Blonding" of a tree

Excerpts from the discussion thread at the often-interesting arborists subreddit:

"That is an ash tree that has been stricken with the Emerald Ash Borer. That happens from the woodpeckers going for the larvae. As the woodpeckers go, the outer layer of the gray bark falls off, leaving that brownish color...it's called "blonding." While there are treatments, they can be expensive, and the infestation must be caught much earlier than this. This particular tree is a goner."

"And the price of removal goes up (or at least it should) as the tree's wood gets sketchier. So much of this job is intentionally making wood fall apart the way we want it to; it's way harder when the wood has a chance of randomly disintegrating while we're climbing. EAB is the current poster child of sketchy trees."

This medication capsule is full of little rings

Image via the mildlyinteresting subreddit, where the discussion is mostly trivial.  These are not "timed-release Spaghetti-O's.  The explanation can be found at this pediatric gastroenterology page, with radiographic images at Radiopaedia.

You learn something every day.

"Seeking a chalk artist..."

"I'm hoping to find a sidewalk chalk artist (or two) in our neighborhood.

We recently needed one piece of white chalk for a household project, and wound up with 47 extras in a rainbow of colors.

We would like to commission the drawing on our driveway of a large, colorful (and totally imaginary) flower, perhaps with several equally exotic butterflies hovering over it, and maybe a caterpillar on the stem.  

Two artists (siblings, best friends) can work together if they can amicably share the box of chalk prize.  No tryouts or portfolio review necessary - first response gets the commission."

I posted the above in a neighborhood Facebook page.  Here is the completed magnum opus -

In addition to the flowers there are seven butterflies, a spider, and a rabbit.  My sincere thanks to Louisa and Maddy.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I've been doing crossword puzzles every day for mental exercise for as long as I can remember, but this week was the first time I've ever encountered supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as a crossword clue.  

Everybody who is my age knows the word, but to be honest I didn't realize it had a definition, so I had to look that up for the blog.  Apparently its history goes back to the 1930s:

"The word is a compound word, and said by Richard Lederer in his book Crazy English to be made up of these words: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and -docious "educable", with all of these parts combined meaning "Atoning for being educable through delicate beauty." 

The Oxford English Dictionary first records the word (with a spelling of "supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus") in the column titled "A-muse-ings" by Helen Herman in the Syracuse University Daily Orange, dated March 10, 1931. In the column, Herman states that the word "implies all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb, wonderful".

The word was popularized in the 1964 film Mary Poppins, in which it is used as the title of a song and defined as "something to say when you don't know what to say".

The Sherman Brothers, who wrote the Mary Poppins song, have given several conflicting explanations for the word's origin, in one instance claiming to have coined it themselves, based on their memories of having created double-talk words as children. In another instance, they wrote:

When we were little boys in the mid-1930s, we went to a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where we were introduced to a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. ... The word as we first heard it was super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus."

There are additional "things you wouldn't know" at the link, including information about the backwards version, a Mahatma Gandhi pun ("super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis") and an old Randy Rainbow parody.

Why Moses has been depicted as a man with horns

"It all goes back to Ancient Hebrew, which, like a lot of ancient languages, didn’t have quite enough words for all of the things the writers of the Bible wanted to talk about... Specifically, it didn’t have a word for a ray of light, so most biblical authors used the Hebrew word for horn... So, in Exodus chapter 34, after spending several days on Mt. Sinai, taking down God’s dictation of the Ten Commandments, Moses’ face is described as being “horned.” The writers of the third-century–B.C. Septuagint, the Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, got the gist and rendered the word as glorified...

Jerome translated the Old Testament directly from Hebrew into Latin, bypassing the Septuagint entirely—and because the Hebrew said “horns,” “horns” was what went into the Vulgate... And so, for the next dozen centuries, Moses had horns...

You might be wondering how depicting one of the Bible’s key figures as having horns—a feature commonly associated with the devil—could have become so popular. The answer is that horns weren’t actually associated with the devil until fairly recently. Scripture itself offers few, if any, visual descriptions of Satan, and what is there rarely mentions horns

[B]y the time Michelangelo was working on Julius II’s tomb, it was pretty widely known that the idea of a horned Moses stemmed from an overly literal translation. Which, of course, raises the question of why Michelangelo chose to portray his Moses with horns anyway..."

Discussion continues at Christ and Pop Culture.

Doom and gloom in the world of art

Excerpts from an article at artnet:

"The art world is in a precarious state as it heads into the second half of 2025. Not a week goes by, it seems, without a major gallery closing: Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, and Kasmin are other prominent summer casualties. Smaller galleries are exiting and downsizing discreetly. Each case is different, but many voice the same laments: Overheads are killing businesses. Sales are down. It’s no longer fun. Primary pricing is untenable. Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. The art world has become bloated, and there isn’t an easy way to cure the malaise.

“I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”...

Another revealing indicator: Soho Art Materials, a popular art-supplies company in New York that works with artists and galleries, traces the sector’s decline to the summer of 2022. The firm’s sales began falling gradually and then in June 2023 dropped 20 percent from the previous month, according to Jonathan Siegel, a co-owner. The company was stretching 700 to 1,000 canvases annually for three years, starting in 2020; it now does about 200 a year, he said.

“The industry is in a free fall,” Siegel said. “Galleries are closing left and right. They have overextended. Everyone thought the light would never stop shining. The ramifications of the past two years have been dramatic. It’s been a disaster, basically.”

In the U.K., firms must file financial disclosures, which reveal razor-thin profit margins for galleries big and small, as falling turnover collides with stubbornly high fixed costs...

I have covered the art market since 2006, and I have never heard people as down as they have been this summer. Suddenly, they are openly talking doom and gloom, instead of fighting against that narrative..."

A "gigantic jet" is a "transient luminous event"

As reported on the NASA website:

Did you see that gorgeous photo NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers took on July 3, 2025? Originally thought to be a sprite, Ayers confirmed catching an even rarer form of a Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) — a gigantic jet...

Gigantic jets are a powerful type of electrical discharge that extends from the top of a thunderstorm into the upper atmosphere. They are typically observed by chance — often spotted by airline passengers or captured unintentionally by ground-based cameras aimed at other phenomena. Gigantic jets appear when the turbulent conditions at towering thunderstorm tops allow for lightning to escape the thunderstorm, propagating upwards toward space...

Sprites, on the other hand, are one of the most commonly observed types of TLEs — brief, colorful flashes of light that occur high above thunderstorms in the mesosphere, around 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. Unlike gigantic jets, which burst upward directly from thundercloud tops, sprites form independently, much higher in the atmosphere, following powerful lightning strikes. They usually appear as a reddish glow with intricate shapes resembling jellyfish, columns, or carrots and can span tens of kilometers across.

More details about the image at the APOD site.

Related: "Jet lightning" and "ELVES in the sky"

Zodiac signs change over time

I trust most readers here regard horoscopes derived from zodiac signs as curiosities from the history of science.  For those interested in the subject, there is an article in the New York Times detailing how the precessional "wobble" of the earth's axis results in changes in the zodiac constellations associated with calendar dates. 

My embedded image is a composite created by combining several of the excellent illustrations at the link.

A teacher expresses doubts about her career

"I start school tomorrow with 150 new students. Although I don’t know them yet, I’ll protect them with my life if/when a shooter decides we’re the target.

I decided to be an English teacher when I was in seventh grade. I’ve never really wavered in my vocation. I started volunteering in schools as a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I student-taught at twenty-one, the same semester in which I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from my elite liberal arts college. (There were only four of us teachers in my class at Macalester, and the school has since stopped offering teacher training because no one wants to do this job anymore.)

In my career, I’ve switched positions more than teachers usually do, I think because I keep hoping that there’s a utopian school community that embodies what I feel is possible in K-12 education. Maybe I can find the right grade level, I tell myself, the right school policies, the right leaders, that will make me feel at home. A parent of a student once told me I was born to be a teacher. It was a compliment — I’d done well for her kids. I do think I’m born for it, but I don’t really want to do it this year.

It’s my twenty-fourth year. Because I’ve taken three years off along the way, the math works out like this:

The Columbine shooting happened while I was student teaching at Tartan High School in 1999. The school had been designed in the 1960s progressive era, and the classrooms were situated in circles with a common space in the middle of each loop. The classrooms didn’t have doors.

The teachers sat in the auditorium on the afternoon of the first school massacre. Was it even safe to go to the auditorium, all together like sitting ducks? We teachers wondered this that day. We discussed how shooters in our school could just stand in the middle of our department areas and hit people in each room around the circle without even moving their feet.

The very next year, or soon after that, I started practicing active shooter drills with students. In the beginning, we all did the same things — turn off the lights, pull the shades, hide in the corner. At one school, they wouldn’t tell us if the drill was a drill because they didn’t think we’d try hard enough to enact the protocols if we knew we weren’t actually going to get shot. Kids would always ask, “Is this real?”

“Probably not,” I told them. “Listen for the sirens. If we don’t hear them, it’s not real.” And then, we’d go back to talking about characters or commas, or whatever we were doing before the alarm sounded.

There was a big kerfuffle the year I was teaching third grade (I had decided maybe elementary was the utopia I sought) because the school moved to a run-hide-fight model where you trained children to throw scissors and staplers at the shooters who came to their classroom doors. Some of us thought that it was inappropriate to teach them to expect to be shot.

At my next school, we started table-top drills during which we discussed shooting scenarios. It was a Catholic high school (also not the utopia I imagined), and the kids were empowered to make their own decisions during attacks. I imagine this is because of liability? Like, if I, the teacher, decided to go out the window, and we all got obliterated that way, then at least the girls had had the choice to run down the hallway instead?

Anyway, you get the idea. My new school does the I Love U Guys model. We teach with our doors locked and closed all the time. We stay and barricade. We practice the system a bunch of times per year and assure the children that we’ll protect them with our lives if necessary.

Last week, my brother’s and my sister’s kids’ school was the latest site of a school shooting. My brother was there, as was my sister’s husband. They all saw it. They were all there at Mass, not a location we normally practice in, by the way. We don’t practice escaping shooters at lunch or recess or in the auditorium because it’s super logistically hard to do. I think today’s shooters know that. All of today’s madmen and women have been through the same drills I just described for the last twenty-six years themselves.

So… in addition to being in a job where, despite my talents and qualifications and dedication to the craft, my earnings are capped in the five figures…

… in addition to being in a job where all/most/some parents think they know more than I do about how to teach…

…in addition to being in a job that suffers the whims of public opinion about our lack of quality and suitability as professionals…

…in addition to being in a job where successfully writing and publishing four novels makes me LESS employable (thanks to the snobbery of high school English departments??)…

I also have to be ready to die at work.

I already thought about it a lot, and now that six of my family members have actually been shot at in school, I’ll think about it more. I’ll go back tomorrow because I have to (I need a full-time income, I have a life and family), and also because it’s my vocation. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.

But I don’t want to do it tomorrow."

The author is Kathleen West, a daughter-in-law of one of my high school classmates; she is currently teaching at a public middle school in northeast Minneapolis.  The essay has been published in her Substack.

Bohemian Rhapsody in isiZulu

There are approximately 10,000 covers, variations, and adaptations of Bohemian Rhapsody.  Over the years, all of them have been posted at Neatorama.

The Ndlovu Youth Choir was formed in 2009 at a childcare facility in Elandsdoorn, Limpopo, South Africa. They are all grown up now, but are not about to change the name. They released their first album in 2019 after appearing on the TV competition show America's Got Talent, when they made it to the final round. 

The Ndlovu Youth Choir got authorization from Queen to cover "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the isiZulu language of the Zulu people of South Africa. Or partially, because some of the song is in English. It is also partially a cappella, with a band joining in halfway through. The singing is sublime, the staging is sumptuous, and the video is pure eye candy. You can see more from the Ndlovu Youth Choir at their YouTube channel. -via Damn Interesting 

Medieval mindset in Afghanistan

"Women and children on Monday in Mazar Dara, Kunar Province, where male rescuers would not pull women from under rubble or tend their wounds, witnesses said".Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Excerpts from a report in the New York Times:

The first rescue workers reached Bibi Aysha’s village more than 36 hours after an earthquake devastated settlements across eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous areas on Sunday. But instead of bringing relief, the sight of them heightened her fears; not a single woman was among them.

Afghan cultural norms, enforced even in emergencies by the ruling Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not family members. In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding, were pushed aside, she said.

“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” she said. No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them.

Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, a male volunteer who traveled to Mazar Dara, also in Kunar Province, said that members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to pull women out from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Trapped and injured women were left under stones, waiting for women from other villages to reach the site and dig them out...

More at the link.