Dan Solomon ✡️ ❄️

social media coordinator (formerly: @morrisanimal) | pets | nature | science | geekery | board games | birding

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

Around Easter-tide, if you were to ask one of the older residents of Old Fox's village to show you a palm tree, they would take you down to the quiet water meadows, midst the swans and the marsh marigolds, and point to the long-wanded sallow trees, with their velvet buds of creamy yellow and sea-mew grey and palest rose.
"Here it be!" they would say, and, with their pocket-knife, cut four or five branches for your parlour, and a slip or two for your church hat or buttonhole.
For in the old days in that little corner of Dorsetshire, Palm Sunday was known as Sallow or Sally Sunday, sometimes Willow Sunday, and in every church and household there were placed vases of pussy-willow from the river-bank and woods, and every congregant carried them and processed with them, and that gentle, country plant stood firm and strong and proud, a steward of a great weight of story, of the noble usherment of the king of the unnoticed, of the small and of the poor and of the powerless.

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

Wolf had found the evening paper in Old Fox's desk. He took it to his room & slowly read the names aloud, into the silence. Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Victor Manuel Díaz, Heber Sánchez Domínguez, Renee Nicole Good, Parady La, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz.
He thought of each soul, earthy & loved as roses, high & holy as falcons, fire stars raken into the breath of night. He imagined each name as a child, their first steps, moving towards smiling faces, outstretched arms of love and care, playing in the street on endless summer afternoons, the sidewalk burning hot, laughing until their bellies hurt, blowing out birthday candles, wishing for the future, the rich unlived life beyond. And then he thought of their murderers, and the dark sky seemed to shatter, falling into cold irretrievable fragments.

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

It was a windy, rainy February morning. Even the church bells sounded muffled and iron-cold. Old Fox had persuaded Wolf to go for a walk, only a short stroll around the village, down to the Roman bridge and back, but Wolf was miserable and getting more and more growly with every step. The river had swelled to a fierce, churning brown, the ditches were full, the fields were flooded and every footpath was muddy and pierced with deep glassy puddles. Yet within the overcast land were the delicate heralds of spring – white plum and sloe-thorn and wild daffodils and the proud nests high in the elms and the snowdrops and crocuses on the Green and in the churchyard, and stopping at the bridge, Old Fox made Wolf stand and smell the air, that smell of brook water and rich earth and flowers, until he could feel the Great God Pan rise up inside him with all his wild, green, unfettered, woodwosed joyfulness.

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

Every year at Candlemas, great drifts of snow-drops bloomed across Old Fox's village – miraculous, unadorned, pilt into the pale February sunlight from the dark, moleish earth below. In the churchyard around the graves and by the yew trees, across the green, in cottage gardens and under wayside oaks, they bowed their delicate heads and quickened hope in every heart and every weary soul.
Lady Mary's Fair Maids, Grey Brock called them, here to herald the spring and fare ye well to Christmas for another season in this old and stormy world.

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

It was Candlemas, the very ebb of the day, & in his ramshackle cottage at the edge of the sea-cliffs, a mile or so from Old Fox's lane, the Stoat was about to have his tea. While the kettle began to slowly rattle over the fire, he took a new candle from the candle-box, ground it into a pewter candlestick & with a rather shaky paw, lit it with a taper from the stove. He then put it carefully on the sill of the bow-window with the buckled glass and the light flared in the dusk, strong as a ship's lantern, bright as the gold in the twilit, kirning waves below.

[Soft Side @SoftSide1]

Pawject Runway: the animal welfares fundraiser/adoption event so amazing we need to add a warning label.

Friday, April 24 at @CFGBankArena.
Tickets on sale now! (See next tweet)

Meet cool celebs, snuggle with four-pawed models, and help save lives! 1/2

[Dan Solomon ✡️ ❄️ @FuzzyDanSo]

@AdamSchiavone @dynemetis @Andercot … about just this sort of thing before.

I don’t think you are actually stupid. Is it just that this issue doesn’t matter to you, or that it *does*, and this is how you self-soothe?

[Dan Solomon ✡️ ❄️ @FuzzyDanSo]

@AdamSchiavone @dynemetis @Andercot … remember, as I mentioned coincidentally right before you started shrieking ‘you’re having an obsessive meltdown!!!!! You crazy person!!!! I must block you!!!’ (paraphrase, to be sure; you have some ability to control your affect and such), you’ve been confidently wrong…

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

That September afternoon, on the eve of Michael's mass, standing at the edge of the golden, tangled woods by the hamlet, Mouse felt she could suddenly see a very long way – past and future in an accordance which left a sliver of presentness so thin she could barely stand ungiddied. She saw her own little scrap of a ghost before the war, playing in the whispering groves of the forest of Fontainebleau with her school friends & at the same time, far, far beyond through the strange, shimmering mist-light of the unknown, unlived years to come: 1931, 1932, 1933...

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

Michaelmas morning and the first latchet of heavy light was seeping over the downs. Along the quiet chalk lanes and the old Roman roads, edged with teasels and burnt dock and tall purple daisies, came the Newcomer.
A fox of the North wind, teller of tales, righter of wrongs, bringer of deep autumn and the golden tide of the high angels of harvest. His wagon was gold too, and the clear blue of September skies and the startling red of rose hips. Above him, the hawks cried and made their circles, tours known to heaven, as old as the earth.

[Dan Solomon ✡️ ❄️ @FuzzyDanSo]

@dynemetis @Andercot … of repetitive DNA sequences, including long terminal repeat transposable elements” (as per the species’ Wikipedia entry).

[Dan Solomon ✡️ ❄️ @FuzzyDanSo]

@dynemetis @Andercot Just in terms of size, Paramecium tetraurelia has had three episodes of whole genome duplication. Picea abies has roughly the same number of genes as humans despite having a genome six times larger, with “[a] large proportion of the spruce genome consist[ing]…

[Dan Solomon ✡️ ❄️ @FuzzyDanSo]

@iloveyouall694 @maxkatz515 It took you four months to think up that intellectually devastating rejoinder? Huh.

I’ll check back in October to see what you come up with next.

[Dan Solomon ✡️ ❄️ @FuzzyDanSo]

@Olixius2 @ValforNevada Hey @Olixius2 - happened to see this again, so poking my head back in 5+ weeks later to say - I was genuinely asking, and hope you will reply. (Clearly I have Views on this subject, but I also don’t really grasp the other side, and even if nothing else want to *understand*.

[Dan Solomon ✡️ ❄️ @FuzzyDanSo]

@Olixius2 @ValforNevada Thought experiment: we get to peek at the timeline where Harris was elected President by a narrow margin.
1) is anything different?
2) are any of the differences good things that matter, from your POV?

Thanks.

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

An Island of Flowers, an Island of Friends.

The Stoat who ran the flower shop in Dorchester was originally from Madeira, his stately old family having established themselves there during the Napoleonic Wars. His kit-hood on the island in the parish of Santo da Serra had been idyllic – a time of green mountains wreathed in salt-grey clouds, ancient forests of pines and eucalyptus, dense ferned cauldrons scattered with dusty golden light, the hot, dry eastern wind known as the Leste, bright red and yellow tins of sugar cane honey cakes, carefree frogs singing in the valleys, and levadas, water channels like serpents twisting through the wild fuchsias and the starry myriads of blue and violet agapanto.

So many, many flowers, a bounty which had marked his very stoatish soul and guided his path to floristry. When he moved to England and opened his little shop in Dorchester, he determined to impart the profound love and pride of the Madeirenses for their flora to his new neighbours, preparing such extravagant bouquets that any particularly successful attempts at floral arrangement in Old Fox's village became affectionately know as "Madeiring" in honour of the Stoat, who was often seen staggering under the weight of his flowers at births and funerals and marriages and dinner parties, and at the first delicate hints of love in the Maying Dorset land.

And in their minds, Madeira became not just a distant island of flowers, floating untethered in the blue Atlantic swell, but an island of friendship, of beauty and interest – for every immigrant tethers two worlds together with embroidered garlands of words, of sweets, of flowers, of children, of dreams, turning strangers into friends and planting seeds of incalculable good.

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

🦊🌷Competition time! To celebrate May Day and the longed-for coming of summer, I'm giving away a signed edition of my 'Reynard the Fox', a copy of the accompanying gold-tipped 'A Fox for All Seasons' journal, both with map endpapers & fine ribbons, packets of Dorset red butter crumb biscuits and Dorset tea to honour my other main vulpine character, the West Country dwelling Old Fox, & a charming & extremely fluffy fox companion! Simply like, retweet & follow to enter! A winner will be picked on Saturday. 🌷🦊

[🏳️‍🌈Mar G-O 🌐🇺🇦 @MariGO2thepolls]

I don’t know why ppl think it’s such an own that “the bad schools” spend a lot of money. Like yeah the students have difficult lives and are hard to educate. Some things worth doing are expensive