You mean those seats in the engine cowl aren’t any good? Maybe I shouldn’t have booked through cheapoflights.con :)
Out of my second floor window, I spotted a mother and young daughter pointing at my house and then taking pictures with their cell phone. Why are they doing this I wondered. I was going to go out ans ask what they were doing when I spotted the reason. They weren’t taking pictures of my house; they were taking pictures of the hawk on my front lawn chowing down on the remains of what might have been a mourning dove.
I have grainy video of a sharp shinned hawk that caught a squirrel in the winter here. I didn’t see the chase, but you could see the chase in the snow and got video of the dinner party. Where the hawk grabbed the squirrel off the snow, then took it to one of our flagstones to use as leverage to peel it apart. It ate EVERYTHING, except the very end of the tail and the lower intestines.
Tim - what kind of hawk was it? Can you post a pic?
It looked like a red-tailed hawk which is very common around here. No pics. By the time I was able to grab my camera and get outside, dinner was over.
Well if he wasn’t his family certainly was. :)
TMI - and trigger warning for eye stuff.
So I was walking my dog, and I was like 20 minutes out from the house. This gnat was aggresively buzzing around my face. I was waving at it, but it kept hovering right in front of my right eye. I blinked rapidy, and suddenly, it must have gotten trapped by my eyelashes or something, but I could feel it get caught and trapped under my lower eyelid. It was slightly painful, like any other eye irritant, and I kept poking and prodding to see if I could work it out. No luck. I started walking home, and kept blinking, and working at it, but could actually feel it moving along the outside and back of my orbital socket. My eye was pretty irritated from the constant poking, and occasionally I felt a sharp pain. I wasn’t sure if I had already worked it out, and my eye was just mad, because I kept messing with it.
By the time I got home, I immediately went to the mirror and checked it out. I don’t use contacts, and never mess with my eye, so I don’t have eye drops or anything similar. I rolled it around, pulling back the lid, and couldn’t see anything. By now, the sharp pain had subsided. I figured either I managed to work it out, or eventually it would just get eaten up in my eye socket.
This morning - doing my morning routine - I was washing my face and pulled back my eyelid just a little bit. POP this f-ing gnat slides out of the corner of my eye. Despite the initial revulsion of having a dead bug work its way out of my eye socket during the night, I’m also bizarrely proud that…my eyeball managed to work out a dead bug during the night.
You’re lucky the thing didn’t eat your brain.
That may well be the worst joke I see this week!
I don’t know if this counts as interesting as much as horrific, but yesterday my daughter was conned into sending a picture of herself in a bra to some rando on Instagram. Said rando then turned around and immediately blackmailed my daughter with the picture and got her to send full nudes.
My daughter is 10.
Thankfully she quickly had a change of heart on his admonitions to keep this secret or her nudes would be sent to all her school friends, teachers, and family. She brought this to our attention quickly and we assured her that even though she had done two things we specifically warned her not to do, we aren’t angry and she was still a good person, etc etc.
What really bothers me about this is my attempts to report this to both Instragram and local law enforcement have met with apathy and attitude of “eh, report it if you want, nobody can really do anything about it.” The person who did this is guilty of a laundry list of child pornography related felonies. But apparently this sort of thing is just too common and humdrum for anyone to get excited.
Local law enforcement said they would send out an office to take a report “if I wanted” but we really need to get in touch with Instragram. Instagram said talk to the cops. I’m frankly disgusted that we live in a country where we can pay for upteen trillion TSA agents for security theater in airports, hordes of ICE agents to round up the brown “illegal” people but there’s no law enforcement agency concerned with protecting minors from being victimized online.
Holy fucking shit, dude! I don’t know if I’ve read a more disturbing post in my life! Have you thought about taking to the media, getting more exposure about this?
No shit, I’m thinking this is a lawsuit against Instagram, seriously! What the actual fuck on their end for not responding, ditto police.
There has to be some means to compel Instagram to identify this person for prosecution.
Your daughter was manipulated by a master. He is doing it to other girls, and is going to keep preying on them until he is put away for good. Absolutely raise this to the highest level and don’t let it go. If you need help due to time constraints I would help in whatever way I could.
The law enforcement officials are lazy. Super, insanely, horribly lazy because it would take a bit of effort. Just unreal. I bet if you told them it was an illegal immigrant doing it from this country there’d be a thousand agents assigned to the case. I would absolutely use threats of going to the press to show they don’t care about pedophiles to embarrass them into action.
So sorry to hear that happened to your family, Tortilla. I think this is one of those times when you need to push to elevate. Call the police chief, call your mayor, state representative, or congressional representative.
There isn’t a monolithic “police” or monolithic “Instagram”. What you have is some low level functionaries who can’t understand the big picture and just trying to be lazy. The response you got from them isn’t necessarily the response you’d get by elevating this further, either within those organizations or outside of them.
Oh god yes. Call the chief of police if you can, and if the police still are doing nothing call the local media to embarrass the hell out of the lazy bums.
I’m not going to sue them, though I wish they’d like ban his account (anime.sks for anyone interested) or something. It’s not like they encouraged or invented internet creepers. I realize that’s a problem as old as TCP/IP.
If they are allowing internet creeps and making no effort to stop them from exploiting children? Man, I dunno. Sure they didn’t invent it, but they sure as shit have a responsibility to act on it.
I would agree that you need to push the cops, and do it in person. I don’t know where you are, I can understand small police forces lacking the manpower or knowledge for this, but I think here they have a few guys who do just this. Mainly because the guy isn’t just doing this to your daughter but to many, many daughters out there.
Thanks for the kind words. While I could make a big stink about this, and use publicity to make this case a bigger deal that would get more traction, I’m not sure that’s best for my daughter.
Which is why an intermediary is a very good option.
They asked us for screenshots of chat logs and so forth, but the other person had already blocked my daughter after getting what he wanted. In Instagram that apparently deletes or hides old chats. So we have no proof. My wife saw the chats before the blockage, so we know my daughter isn’t making this up or anything, but in terms of hard evidence we’ve got just about nothing. Which is probably why Instagram and police are so unenthusiastic about it.