Things That Are Really Fucking Me Up Today

Your average banana is about 150 cubic cm, but that’s too complicated for the math I want to do, and once its masticated you can put it in a smaller space so let’s just call it 100 cm^3. Eating a banana gives you a radiation dose of about 0.1 microsieverts, so ten bananas, or a thousand cubic centimeters of banana in your stomach, would give you one microsievert of radiation. The thing about radiation, is that it won’t kill you very much until you’ve gotten a lot of it, the maximum amount of radiation that astronauts are allowed to take in over their life is 1 sievert, which is the same as if you ate ten million bananas. In fact, even that doesn’t represent a significant danger to them because radiation is most deadly when it happens all at once, so a dose of about 4 sieverts is potentially fatal if it happens all at once, but the highest known non-fatal dose was around 64 sieverts administered (in deeply unethical circumstances) over 21 years, so if you ate about forty million bananas all at once you’d get a potentially lethal dose, but if you had eight thousand bananas for breakfast each morning you could survive the radiation. 

Now, I’m an astrophysicist not a biologist, so people who actually know things will have to forgive me when I say that the human stomach is probably not bigger than a 10x10x10 cm cube, I mean maybe it is, we played with those 10x10x10 cm cubes in math class and they weren’t *that* big, maybe the stomach is two of those, but honestly if I misplace a factor of two here or there it really doesn’t matter too much, I’m doing far worse things to the numbers here, but you certainly shouldn’t be citing anything I’m saying to the sort of precision where a factor of two should matter, I’m being very open about how approximated this is. Human beings, on a similar note, are probably about a cubic meter or two tops, one or two million cubic centimeters, or in other words, about ten or twenty thousand eaten bananas of volume, and the stomach is probably ten or twenty. I know the human digestive system, miracle that it is, is capable of expanding somewhat to fit its contents, but the upper bound on that has to be somewhere less than the entire volume of the human body it is contained in. So if you’ve stuck with me on this exciting journey, I can now lead you directly to the point I’ve been slowly building towards, which is this: If you want to give yourself acute radiation sickness you are going to have to find a method other than eating bananas. You cannot fit enough bananas inside you at any one time to fatally poison yourself with radiation.

spending $10 of my hard earned money so i can shove my favorite pic of my cat onto ur dash

But I can’t talk about climactic sentences in Tolkien’s works without mentioning what is, in my opinion, one of the best things that has ever been written in the English language.

And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

This is unparalleled. This gives me chills every time I read it. It may be my favorite quote in all of Tolkien’s works, except that choosing a favorite quote would be an impossible decision to make. It’s so inspiring. It’s so moving. It’s so heroic. And obviously, it’s a moment of pure eucatastrophe. Rohan had come at last.

And the moment that Pippin hears the horns of Rohan:

When the dark shadow at the Gate withdrew Gandalf still sat motionless. But Pippin rose to his feet, as if a great weight had been lifted from him; and he stood listening to the horns, and it seemed to him that they would break his heart with joy. And never in after years could he hear a horn blown in the distance without tears starting in his eyes.

I LOVE LORD OF THE RINGS SO MUCH

The hilarious thing about Sauron is that according to most versions of the legendarium, he was originally, like, a god of planning and logistics, and he initially supported Melkor’s plans for world domination because he regarded the world’s present state of affairs as inefficient and poorly organised. He’s literally what happens when you take the kid who’s fed up at everybody else fucking up their part of the group project and give him phenomenal cosmic power.

“In 1404, King Taejong fell from his horse during a hunting expedition. Embarrassed, looking to his left and right, he commanded, “Do not let the historian find out about this.” To his disappointment, the historian accompanying the hunting party included these words in the annals, in addition to a description of the king’s fall.“

LMFAOOOOOO rip to that guy

kidnap dads pillow/blanket forts !!! 🥺

48. Pillow/Blanket Forts

Maedhros halted abruptly as soon as he crossed the threshold of the boys’ room. “What are you doing?”

Elrond and Elros froze guiltily. Elrond looked down at the ground, while Elros scrunched up his nose.

“Building a blanket fort?” he said.

A blanket fort? Maedhros blinked, re-examining the mass of pillows shoved beneath chairs, blankets draped over them, the cozy little cavern the twins had created for themselves. He’d done similar things as a child, he recalled, though there had been no concept of “forts” in Aman. It stung his heart to think that they had never known peace, had been born and raised in a land where even forts did not stand for long...

But this would would, this blanket fort within a fortress. Maedhros would defend Amon Ereb, so the children could defend their quilted creation.

“A fort should have defenses,” Maedhros said, crouching down to inspect it. “It should be strong enough to withstand enemy attack. I would know—I held Himring for centuries, and hold Amon Ereb even now.”

Elrond looked up, eyes wide. “Will you help us, Atya?” he blurted out. “So if Atar comes we can—defend it from him?”

Maedhros laughed, ruffling his son’s hair. “Of course,” he said. “First—let’s spread these chairs out, and find some poles and books to build with, so we can expand our fort and I can fit inside...”

~

“What are you doing?” Maglor asked, baffled, as his brother and their sons marched past him with arms full of blankets, books, and...stilts?

The twins scampered on ahead, completely oblivious, but Maedhros paused, a cheery sparkle in his eyes that Maglor hadn’t seen there since...before Fingon died.

“I’m instructing them in siege warfare,” he pronounced. “Keep out of their room for an hour or two, alright? You’ll be playing the enemy, eventually. Just like our drills back in the day!”

“Atya!” Elros called. “C’mon!”

Maedhros grinned—grinned!—and all but pranced away, more excited than Maglor could remember him being in a very long time. A little morbid that it was battle tactics that put such a spring in his step, but, well, that was Maedhros...and Maglor saw the truth. His brother was happy to feel useful, instructing the twins on something important, something he knew well, and able to spend time with his sons as well.

He shook his head with a smile, already turning over ideas of how to play the game along with them. If Maedhros had a hand—hah—in the fort they were building, it would take a little more than knocking over a chair to take it down...not that he’d really do that. He’d let the boys take him hostage.

After all, of the four of them that comprised this strange little family, he was the only one who’d never been kidnapped before!

Literally obsessed with @damianwaynerocks ‘s post about Zuko meeting Batman, all dialogue is from that. Anyway, here’s Robin!Zuko feat. his blue spirit mask (kind of):

It sure is convenient that all these songs that ostensibly weren’t written in English all rhyme when translated into English, isn’t it, Mr. Tolkien?

8 year old Dick’s third trip to Bruce’s office and being so helpful that he pressed ALL the elevator buttons so that they could shout good morning to each floor