50yearsofwhovians:

001 An Unearthly Child by Anthony Coburn

Illustrated by bananatotheparty

When teachers Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton offer to privately tutor Susan, their strange and otherworld student she rejects their offer on the grounds of her grandfather “not liking strangers”. The pair decide to follow her home to see if everything is alright. They are surprised to discover that her home address leads them to a junkyard on Totter’s Lane and they follow her in to find nothing but a police box. However, the surprises have only just begun.

Her grandfather, a mysterious wanderer in time and space and a fugitive from his home world, kidnaps Ian and Barbara for fear of them revealing their secret and whisks them away to 100,000 BC, to the dawn of man and the birthplace of fire. Will the teachers ever make it home? Can they escape the Cave of Skulls? How can a police box really be bigger on the inside?

The real question is: Doctor Who?

STORY FACTS ~

• Introduces The First Doctor, Barbara Wright, Ian Chesterton, Susan Foreman and the TARDIS.
• The TARDIS is first described as being “alive”.
• The TARDIS’ chameleon circuit is broken for the first time.
• Susan claims to have come up with the name TARDIS and its meaning (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space) herself. This is no longer considered canon.
• This is the only story where the Doctor is seen to be smoking.
• Alternate titles for this story are 100,000 BC, The Tribe of Gum, The Firemakers and The Cavemen.

(via alitbitmoody)

that-gay-bunny:

acciogaysharks:

fag-ology:

beinggayisokay:

I wish this was an exaggeration, I really do.

But its not

Dear lord, this is one of the most accurate posts on this site.

You forgot the ruffles.

this is me shopping

(via majorenglishesquire)

18mr:

gondoleia:

by Jenn Fang

It’s almost the end of May. Do you know your Asian-American history?

Most of America isn’t aware that May is Asian-American Heritage Month. It’s a celebration that started in 1978, when Congress urged President Jimmy Carter to declare the week of May 4th ”Asian-American Heritage Week.” (That date was chosen to coincide with the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants on May 7, 1843, and with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad — built largely by Chinese laborers — on May 10, 1869.) More recently in 1990, following another vote by Congress, President George H.W. Bush expanded Asian-American Heritage Week to encompass the entire month of May.

Sadly, Asian-American history and heritage is rarely taught in U.S. public schools. So for those of you who’ve missed such curriculum, here’s a list of 10 factoids you may not have known about the history of Asian-Americans in this country:

1). The first Asians whose arrival in America was documented were Filipinos who escaped a Spanish galleon in 1763. They formed the first Asian-American settlement in U.S. history, in the swamps surrounding modern-day New Orleans.

2). In the years between 1917 and 1965, Uncle Sam explicitly outlawed immigration to the U.S. of all Asian people. Immigration from China, for example, was banned as early as 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. It wasn’t until the Immigration Act of 1965— which abolished national origins as a basis for immigration decisions — that nearly 50 years of race-based discrimination against Asian immigrants ended.

3). Because of their race, Asians immigrants were denied the right to naturalize as U.S. citizens until the 1943 Magnuson Act was passed. Consequently, for nearly a century of U.S. history, Asians were barred from owning land and testifying in court by laws that specifically targeted “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, American-born children of Chinese immigrants were not regarded as American citizens until the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that the Fourteen Amendment also applied to people of Asian descent.

4). Among the earliest Asian immigrants, virtually all ethnicities worked together as physical laborers, particularly on Hawaii’s sugar cane plantations. On these plantations, a unique hybrid language — pidgin — developed that contained elements of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean and English. Today, pidgin is one of the official languages of Hawaii, a state that is itself 40%  Asian.

5). Despite the Alien Land Law, which specifically prevented Asians from owning their own land, Japanese farmers were highly successful in the West Coast where they put into practice their knowledge of cultivating nutrient-poor soil to yield profitable harvests. By the 1920s, Japanese farmers (working their own land, or land held by white landowners that they managed) were the chief agricultural producers of many West Coast crops. In fact, the success of Japanese farmers is often cited as one of the reasons white landowners in California lobbied to support Japanese-American internment following the declaration of World War II.

6). Many of the early Asian immigrants who worked as laborers on plantations and in factories were instrumental in the formation of the American labour movement, helping to organize some of the first strikes and unions throughout the country. Japanese plantation workers, for example, engaged in the first organized strike in Hawaii in 1904.

7). Anti-miscegenation laws that denied marriage licenses between interracial couples specifically prohibited intermarriage between whites and Asians. For example, the 1922 Cable Act revoked the citizenship of any female U.S. citizen who married an “alien ineligible to citizenship,” a phrase repeatedly used in legal documents to refer to Asians.

8). Unlike Irish immigrants, who predominantly entered the United States via the Ellis Island immigration center, most Asian immigrants entered America by way of Angel Island Immigration Station. Unlike at Ellis Island, where immigrants might spend between two and five hours waiting to be processed, the Angel Island facility’s unspoken goal was to limit the flow of Asian immigrants into the country. Between 1910 and 1940, many prospective Asian immigrants were detained for as long as two years at Angel Island, stymied by U.S. immigration officials hoping to find reasons to deport them. Some of the detainees wrote poems in Chinese on the walls of the Angel Island detention facility; these poems have since been translated and collected into anthologies.

9). During World War II, Japanese American internees — including both Japanese immigrants and their American children — were forcibly relocated from their homes in the West Coast to remote relocation camps. Even still, several young Japanese-American men went on to successfully lobby the American government to be allowed to volunteer as soldiers in World War II, often to prove their loyalty to the United States. The 442nd infantry regiment, a segregated Asian-American unit composed almost entirely of Japanese-Americans, fought in Italy, France and Germany and is still the most highly decorated regiment in United States Armed Forces history.

10). In 1982, a young Chinese-American man named Vincent Chin was brutally clubbed to death by two white men in Detroit, Michigan. The crime was motivated, in part, by anti-Asian sentiment stemming from widespread loss of auto manufacturing jobs to Japanese competitors; Ronald Ebens, one of the attackers, was heard saying “it’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work” to Chin moments before the attack. Despite pleading guilty to second-degree murder, Chin’s killers did not serve any jail time for Chin’s murder, and were only fined $3,000. Vincent Chin’s death served as a flashpoint that ignited the modern Asian-American political movement.

And that’s just for starters. 

Really good stuff to know! 

There is actually a small plaque about Vincent Chin at the intersection of Nine Mile and Woodward, in Ferndale. 

(via ushistoryminuswhiteguys)

did-you-kno:

Source

k this is awesome

brushfireburn:

themarysue:

Doctor Who Cares? - A spinoff in which all is right with the ladies’ storylines and they take custody of the TARDIS every weekend to explore the universe together

Who needs him? WHO needs him? DONNA THIS IS WHY WE LOVE YOU.

If this is how Doctor Who was, then I would actually watch it.

ladies, can you stop by future Dalek-ravaged Earth to pick up Susan please? HEAL THIS HOLE IN MY HEART. She was the first girl kicked off the TARDIS, after all, and it was mostly because the Doctor was uncomfortable that she was growing up and having her own opinions and flirting with boys. 

Budget deficit forcing school officials to close Albion High School | Michigan Radio

this makes me absolutely fucking *ill*. 

they are *destroying* michigan. they are taking the future away from our youth. 

(via iinventedeverything)

what? 

what the fuck are these kids supposed to do now? they’re too young to work, not everyone’s parents can afford a private tutor or private school or homeschooling. this is an entire town of children that are being fucked over royally. 

(via thewaronindifference)

science-junkie:

Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong
By Lauren Davis

The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination. The notion of a supreme pack leader who fought his way to dominance and reigns superior to the other wolves in his pack informs both our fiction and is how many people understand wolf behavior. But the alpha wolf doesn’t exist—at least not in the wild…

Although the notions of “alpha wolf” and “alpha dog” seem thoroughly ingrained in our language, the idea of the alpha comes from Rudolph Schenkel, an animal behaviorist who, in 1947, published the then-groundbreaking paper “Expressions Studies on Wolves.” During the 1930s and 1940s, Schenkel studied captive wolves in Switzerland’s Zoo Basel, attempting to identify a “sociology of the wolf.”

In his research, Schenkel identified two primary wolves in a pack: a male “lead wolf” and a female “bitch.” He described them as “first in the pack group.” He also noted “violent rivalries” between individual members of the packs… Thus, the alpha wolf was born. Throughout his paper, Schenkel also draws frequent parallels between wolves and domestic dogs, often following his conclusions with anecdotes about our household canines. The implication is clear: wolves live in packs in which individual members vie for dominance and dogs, their domestic brethren, must be very similar indeed.

A key problem with Schenkel’s wolf studies is that, while they represented the first close study of wolves, they didn’t involve any study of wolves in the wild… In more recent years, animal behaviorists, including [wildlife biologist L. David] Mech, have spent more and more time studying wolves in the wild, and the behaviors they have observed has been different from those observed by Schenkel and other watchers of zoo-bound wolves. In 1999, Mech’s paper “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs” was published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. The paper is considered by many to be a turning point in understanding the structure of wolf packs…

Mech’s studies of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families: two parents along with their younger cubs. Wolves do not have an innate sense of rank; they are not born leaders or born followers. The “alphas” are simply what we would call in any other social group “parents.” The offspring follow the parents as naturally as they would in any other species. No one has “won” a role as leader of the pack; the parents may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being the parents. While the captive wolf studies saw unrelated adults living together in captivity, related, rather than unrelated, wolves travel together in the wild. Younger wolves do not overthrow the “alpha” to become the leader of the pack; as wolf pups grow older, they are dispersed from their parents’ packs, pair off with other dispersed wolves, have pups, and thus form packs of their owns.

This doesn’t mean that wolves don’t display social dominance, however… Wolves (and other animals, including humans), display social dominance, it just isn’t always easy to boil dominant behavior down to simple explanations. Dominant behavior and dominance relationships can be highly situational, and can vary greatly from individual to individual even within the same species. It’s not the entire concept of wolves displaying social dominance that was dispelled, just the simple hierarchical pack structure…

Source: io9.com

Images credit: Caninest - Michael Cummings

(via duamuteffe)

duamuteffe:

Perfect.

A while ago, I was considering doing the same thing Jolie is now—breast cancer runs in my family and so do back problems, and I’m not super attached to mine anyway. I mentioned this on a blogging site while trying to process some other health conditions I’d recently discovered I had. A guy friend of mine (at the time) IMed me and spent nearly half an hour trying to talk me out of it. WTF.

Go Angelina Jolie, I hope this prompts other women to look into preventative measures for breast cancer and helps remove some of the stigma around masectomy. 

fenris192:

Discworld the early days

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internetpoetry:

collage by lk shaw

inspiration

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