Samantha

Health care 🩺 - Trading 📉- USAF veteran ✈️ 🏥 SEATTLE REIGN 🔥 ⚽️

[Seattle Reign FC @reignfc]

Sharing our condolences and heartfelt sympathies with everyone impacted by the tragic scenes at the Seattle Center last night.

[Seattle Police Department @SeattlePD]

Police are investigating a shooting. Multiple shooting victims. Shots fired at the Seattle Center. More information to come. Please avoid the area.

[Wolf of X @WolfofX]

In 2003, Melanie Shaha was diagnosed with a benign pituitary brain tumor. She underwent surgery, but the tumor returned twice. After radiation treatment in 2017, she lost all of her hair, along with her eyebrows and eyelashes. Doctors told her it would never grow back.

Her son, Matt, couldn't change what his mother had been through, but he found one thing he could do.

Once he was able to, Matt spent more than two years growing his strawberry blond hair. When it reached about 12 inches long, he had it cut and sent to a company that specializes in making wigs from a loved one's own hair. He didn't stop there. He also paid around USD 2,000 to have the custom wig made.

When Melanie put it on for the first time in 2022, she wasn't just wearing a wig. She was wearing her son's hair. Because their hair color and texture were so similar, it looked remarkably close to the hair she had before treatment.

Matt later explained his decision with a sentence that said everything.

"She gave me the hair in the first place."

For Melanie, the wig helped her feel like herself again after years of surgeries, radiation, and living with the visible reminders of her illness.

[palmer @decentbirthday]

Jimothy fever has reached my grandfather

[TOGETHXR @togethxr]

The wait starts now 😉

[ᜰ @markklfc]

Lamine Yamal consolando a Lionel Messi tras el triunfo de España sobre Argentina en la final de la Copa Mundial de la FIFA.

🗣️ Lamine Yamal: “Ganar la Copa del Mundo debería haber sido el momento más feliz de mi vida, pero cuando vi a Leo allí de pie después del pitido final, se me rompió el corazón. Por unos segundos, olvidé que éramos rivales. Solo vi al hombre que me hizo enamorarme del fútbol.”

“Me acerqué a él porque ninguna leyenda debería abandonar un escenario así sintiéndose sola. Este es el mismo Lionel Messi que inspiró a toda una generación a soñar, el mismo hombre cuyo nombre gritaban todos los niños mientras jugaban en la calle. Verlo con el corazón roto no fue nada fácil.”

“Le dije: ‘Gracias’. No por esta noche, sino porque sin ti, no sé si hoy estaría aquí. Antes de que tuviera la edad suficiente para entender el fútbol, tú ya habías cambiado mi vida. Les diste a chicos como yo la oportunidad de creer que la magia era real.”

“A los 39 años seguía cargando con Argentina, seguía pidiendo el balón, seguía decidiendo partidos y seguía atemorizando a los mejores defensores del mundo. A la mayoría de los jugadores se les recuerda por lo que hicieron hace años. Messi seguía haciendo historia en el presente. Eso merece mucho más que aplausos; merece un respeto eterno.”

“El mundo celebrará a España, y debe hacerlo porque nos ganamos este título. Pero no permitan que un solo resultado les haga olvidar todo lo que Messi le dio a este Mundial. Cada vez que tocaba el balón, sentías que algo imposible estaba a punto de suceder. Ese es un regalo que muy pocos futbolistas le han dado a este deporte.”

“Cuando lo abracé, no estaba consolando a alguien que había fracasado. Estaba abrazando al mejor jugador que ha visto mi generación. Las finales se ganan o se pierden, los trofeos cambian de manos, pero una grandeza como la de Lionel Messi le pertenece al fútbol para siempre.”

“Algún día la gente me preguntará cómo fue enfrentar a Lionel Messi en una final de la Copa del Mundo. No empezaré hablando del trofeo. Les diré que compartí la cancha con mi ídolo, que lo miré a los ojos después del pitido final y que le di las gracias por cambiar el fútbol para siempre. Ese momento permanecerá conmigo el resto de mi vida.”

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

He told his students to go to the windows.
Get out. Jump if you have to.
Then Liviu Librescu walked to the classroom door and pressed his body against it.
He was 76 years old. He weighed 140 lbs
The gunman was in the hallway.
It was April 16, 2007. A Monday morning. Solid mechanics class at Virginia Tech, Room 204. Twenty-two students, most of them 19 or 20 years old.
At 9:45 AM, gunshots echoed through Norris Hall. Room by room, the shooter was working his way down the corridor.
Liviu heard it. He understood immediately.
He had survived the Holocaust. He had survived a labor camp. He had spent decades living under Communist oppression. He knew exactly what evil sounded like.
He told his students to escape through the windows. Second floor — it was a drop, but they'd survive. Then he walked to the door and held it shut with his body.
The shooter tried to force it open. It wouldn't move.
He fired through the door. Wood splintered. Bullets came through.
Liviu stayed.
Behind him, students were climbing out the windows. Dropping to the ground. Running. One by one, all twenty-two of them got out.
The shooter kept firing through the door.
Liviu held it shut until every student was safe.
Then the bullets killed him.
When police arrived, they found his body at the door.
All 22 of his students survived. Not one was injured.
Liviu Librescu was born on August 18, 1930, in Ploiești, Romania.
He was Jewish. In 1941, when he was eleven years old, Romanian authorities sent him and his family to a labor camp. His father died there. Liviu survived. When the war ended, he was fifteen.
He went back to school. Studied engineering. Earned a doctorate from the University of Bucharest.
But Communist Romania had no interest in allowing a Jewish intellectual to succeed. He was blocked from academic positions. Passed over for jobs he deserved. He applied to emigrate. The government kept refusing.
Finally, in 1978 when Liviu was 48 years old — Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened. Romania let him go.
He had spent most of his adult life trapped in a country that didn't want him.
In Israel, he taught at Tel Aviv University. Published over 300 papers. Became an international expert in aeroelasticity — the science of how air flows over aircraft wings.
In 1985, Virginia Tech offered him a position. He moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. He taught there for 22 years. His students loved him — demanding but kind, high standards, genuine care.
He was still teaching full-time at 76. Still publishing research. Still showing up every Monday morning for solid mechanics.
April 16 was the first day of Passover — the Jewish holiday celebrating liberation from slavery and oppression.
Liviu Librescu died on the day his tradition sets aside to celebrate freedom.
He spent his entire life escaping death and oppression by luck, by persistence, by the intervention of others. And on his last morning, he chose to stand at a door so that twenty-two young people could have the future he had fought so hard to reach.
He could have run. He could have hidden. He could have climbed out a window with his students.
He chose to stay.
The Virginia Tech shooting killed 32 people that day — the deadliest school shooting in American history at the time.
Room 204 had zero casualties.
Because a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor held a door with his body until every student behind him was gone.
His funeral was held in Israel. Students from Virginia Tech flew across the ocean to honor him. The Israeli government awarded him the Star of David Medal posthumously. Virginia Tech named a scholarship in his memory.
His son said his father died the way he lived — protecting others.
A man who survived everything evil threw at him for 76 years.
On his last day, he made sure 22 kids survived too.
Professor Liviu Librescu. August 18, 1930 — April 16, 2007.
Holocaust survivor. Labor camp survivor.
302 published papers. 22 years at Virginia Tech.
22 students out the window.
He held the door.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In Louisiana the woman at the bakery gave me thirteen donuts and charged me for twelve.

I told her, with respect, that she had miscounted.

She did not look up. She said, "That's your lagniappe, baby."

I did not know the word. I asked her to say it again. She said it the way you say a thing to a man who is plainly not from here but is trying, which I have come to believe is the warmest voice in the American language.

Lagniappe, she said, is a little something extra. Given for free. For no reason. You did not ask for it and you cannot give it back. The thirteenth donut is not a mistake. The thirteenth donut is the law.

I stood in that bakery and I understood that I had just been shown a secret.

I have crossed an ocean. I have buried a father. I have held a line that could not be held and I did not step back. And in all of it I had never once handed a man a thing he had not earned, for a reason that did not exist. These people did it before nine in the morning, over donuts, and thought nothing of it. I resolved, right there, to learn the way of lagniappe if it cost me the rest of my life.

It did not cost me the rest of my life. It cost me about a week, and it went badly.

My first attempt was at the hardware store, where a man had once dropped a free screw into my palm. I returned to balance the debt. I bought a birdhouse I did not need and told him, quietly, that the second birdhouse would be his lagniappe.

He said he only saw one birdhouse.

I said the second was coming. I would build it. For him.

He said, "...you're gonna build me a birdhouse."

I said yes. As lagniappe.

He said that wasn't really how it worked.

This was a hard lesson. Lagniappe is given by the one who has, to the one who happens to be standing there. You cannot charge it to yourself as a debt and deliver it as a chore. I had turned a gift into homework, which is the one thing lagniappe will not be. I left the birdhouse unbuilt, which I am told is the correct number of birdhouses.

My second attempt was worse.

My neighbor, a kind woman named Miss Brenda, brought me a plate of what she called "just a little dirty rice, don't make a thing of it." I resolved to answer her lagniappe with a lagniappe of my own, and, being a samurai, I could not do little.

I gave her a tomato from my garden. Sensing the gift too small to hold my gratitude, I added the rest of the tomatoes. Then the plants they grew on. Then I went back for the wheelbarrow, to help her carry the plants.

She stood on her porch and watched a foreign man advance on her home pushing a wheelbarrow of his entire garden, and she said, and I will hold this in my heart until the day I die, "Oh, honey. No."

Oh, honey. No.

She sat me down. She poured me sweet tea, which I now understand was itself a lagniappe, and which I very nearly tried to repay with the wheelbarrow a second time. Then she explained, slowly, that the whole point of a little something extra is that it is little. That a gift a person cannot lift is not a gift, it is a bill. That the tomato had been perfect. That the wheelbarrow had been a cry for help.

I had believed generosity was a mountain, and that the tallest mountain won. In eight hundred years no one had told me it was one warm plate handed over a fence with the words don't make a thing of it. I have made a thing of everything. It is, I am beginning to fear, my whole personality.

The next morning I left a single tomato on Miss Brenda's porch. One. The good one. I did not knock and I did not explain. That, she had taught me, is the art: you leave the little thing and you get gone.

She caught me anyway, halfway across the yard.

She held up the tomato. "This my lagniappe?"

I said yes.

"Well, alright then."

Well, alright then.

Louisiana is the finest place I have ever failed to understand. I get something wrong here nearly every day and nobody minds. They feed me, and correct me, and feed me again, and send me off with one more of whatever it was, for no reason, which I am no longer permitted to refuse.

I keep one good tomato by my door now.

You never know who is going to happen to be standing there.

[Karen Kenyatta Russell🍀 @Karen_Russell]

Despite their efforts, Trump and FIFA didn’t ruin the World Cup! The fans and host cities saved us. Proud of both my host cities!

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Little boy: "If you score a goal can you do this dance?"

Neymar: "I will do that one then, deal?"

[TIME @TIME]

Martin Jacobson, known as Coach Jake, is the winningest high school soccer coach in New York City history. At 80, he’s showing no signs of slowing down.

@newyorknico spent a day at Manhattan’s Martin Luther King Jr. High School, where Jacobson has coached for over 40 years.

[MP Arizona☀️🏳️‍🌈💙🌵🐕🐕‍🦺🫂💦🏜🐟🌴🎙🌎🌻♍️🌊 @AzPetrich]

Seems like a good time to remind everyone that the United States Women's National Soccer Team has won 4 World Cups.