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the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG and the Bundle of Holding: bringing fiscal sanity to the modal possibility of existence since … I dunno, sometime this morning?
“In 2000, Virginia legislators got involved, asking Governor Jesse Ventura to return their captured icon.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘We won.’”
LMAAAAO
All the salty racists in the comments are a cherry on top.
Die mad about it energy strong af
Okay but this is a story that @dadhoc loves to talk about because this is a REALLY BIG DEAL in Minnesota.
I have heard the story of The First Minnesota at LEAST ONE HUNDRED TIMES in the course of my marriage and now I GET TO TELL THE REST OF YOU.
So. It’s not just ANY Confederate flag. It is the Confederate flag that the First Minnesota captured on July 3rd, 1863. The First Minnesota prevented the Union line from crumbling by keeping the Federalists from being pushed off of Cemetery Ridge on July 2nd, and on July 2nd, the First Minnesota sustained 82% casualties.
EIGHTY-TWO PERCENT CASUALTIES. They started out as 262 men and ended as 47. But they held the line. They held. The. Line. Then on July 3rd they were placed in one of the few places where the line was breached, and they thus had to charge in again and retake the line breaches, and they did.
It was during one of these charges – remember, they’d already lost eighty-two percent of their friends – that Private Marshall Sherman of Company C captured the flag. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for this.
The survivors of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg served through the rest of the war.
Now, Virginians have asked for it back repeatedly, saying ‘it’s our heritage.’ But the response from the Minnesota Historical Society has basically been, as @dadhoc has summed it up, “to us, this is the legacy of 215 men who were killed or wounded in the preservation of the Union. What, exactly, is its legacy to you?”
No one’s been able to give an answer that isn’t ‘it’s our legacy of trying to destroy the US over slavery,’ because there isn’t one.
Fuck Virginia wanting that flag back, it belongs in Minnesota.
I get the point here but Virginia may want it to put in historical museums in Richmond, I dont think we’d fly it anywhere or try to display it proudly, especially not with two Democratic Senators and a Democratic Governor. Does MN have it in a museum over there at least?
In 2003, Democrat Governor Mark Warner (currently our Senator along with Democrat Tim Kaine) asked for it back – I think at this rate it’s just wanting it for VA Civil War museums, since Richmond was the Confederate capitol.
Not letting VA use it almost seems like they’re keeping the tensions alive? Why not exchange it between the states and have it shared between historical museums? Virginians dont really hear about this historical event, and having the original flag could educate us and all the tourists we get in Richmond about it. Idk, seems a lot to keep holding onto it at this point?
It was on display until its preservation required it be removed from display and kept in safe keeping. Trust me, we’re taking very super excellent good care of it up here in Minnesota.
Seems to me that asking for it every few years after being repeatedly told no is keeping the tensions alive. We’ve said no. We’ve said no repeatedly. We’ve stated time and again why the answer is no, and why the answer will always BE no.
The unit with the highest casualty rate in the history of the US Military is the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Regiment. Higher than the 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn. Higher than the 3rd Infantry Division at Anzio. Higher than the 101st at Bastogne. And in the midst of that sacrifice in blood, they performed an act that during that period of warfare was the single most gallant act of bravery that could be performed. They took the regimental colors of the 28th Virginia Infantry.
We didn’t steal that flag, we bought it with the lives of our fighting men. We aren’t holding onto the flag, we’re holding on to the memory of the sacrifice of one of the first regiments to answer the call of the Union. A regiment fully comprised of men who volunteered to be there. Who knew they were advancing in regimental strength on a full brigade of screaming confederates and fought for seven minutes, surrounded on three sides, when they were asked to buy the union just five minutes. And in doing so saved the entire Union army.
If anyone is keeping tensions alive, it’s every person that insists on flying flags like this one to preserve a heritage of slavery and human suffering. Stop everyone around you from flying them sincerely and maybe we’ll actually for a moment believe Virginia wants it back as an historical relic, rather than a rallying point for continued bigotry.
So. Once more, on behalf of the entire state of Minnesota and the St. Olaf’s Lutheran Women’s League and Hotdish Circle:
spiders will pull their own legs clean off if they get damaged because most of them can regrow legs during molting, which explains why you often see spiders missing a leg but never any missing half a leg?
some remarkably distressing scientists proved this by getting a spider to pull off all of its legs and then feeding its limbless torso for months until it sprouted a full complement of legs again and then hopefully used them to get the fuck out of dodge
baby spiders don’t get lenses until their first molt and before that they just have baby eyes and while this ought not to be any weirder than the concept of baby teeth, welp,
there are so many spiders floating around thousands of metres up in the air that they’re described as “aerial plankton”
The Sky Is Full Of Spiders
there are spider-parasitising spiders but instead of laying eggs in organs or stealing blood or anything like that they just ride on top of bigger spiders and steal snacks when their mighty steed is eating
there are ant-mimicking spiders that use their disguises to raid ant nests and w/e but there are also ant mimics that just. hang out. they make fake ant colonies full of fake ants. sometimes the actual ants that they’re mimicking find their house and live with them. stealth 100
some mother spiders live in communal family nests, where multiple mothers can work together to bring down bigger prey while all their collected babies are cared for by the babysitters
some mother spiders feed their babies mouth to mouth like birds
some mother spiders carry their babies around and i was aware of this but not the fact that if you steal their eggsac they’ll freak out and search for it for hours and sometimes end up adopting anything that’s vaguely the right size, they will carry around empty snail shells for weeks and lovingly dote on them…
guys i am literally about to cry over spider moms
i borrowed the book op cites from the library (biology of spiders by rainer f. foelix) because of this post and my two favourite new spider facts are
-they don’t just have an exoskeleton – they also have a secret partial inside skeleton
and
-you know the guy who gave spiders drugs and took pictures of their fucked up webs? he ended up studying them because his buddy was studying garden spiders and they spin webs at 2-5 am and his buddy was like, Ugh, fuck this, i want to sleep in, do you have anything i can give these spiders to make them spin webs at not two in the morning -and this guy, A Pharmacologist, was like, hell yea, here are some amphetamines for your spiders -and all those did was make the spiders spin some exceptionally weird webs at 2-5am -and i guess his buddy gave up in disgust at these spiders who wouldn’t let him sleep but mr. spider amphetamines was like, you know what, this is cool, i’m gonna keep going with this
The Original Meeting for The Prince and Snow White, from the original 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs comic strip, released weekly, beginning December 14, a week before the film’s premiere.
Look, everyone! He has a name.
Well it about time that we know what his fucking name was.