Several weeks ago a pet skunk came in to see me because it just wasn’t acting right. The skunk had been purchased from a breeder and had lived with the owner for five years. Although normally an indoor pet the owner had built an enclosed area in the back yard so that the skunk could be safely outdoors. When the owner first purchased the skunk it had gotten a rabies vaccine and a clean bill of health from a veterinarian but had not been in to see a vet since then.
I walked into the room and saw the owner with several blood soaked paper towels wrapped around his hand. The skunk was in a carrier on the table growling and biting at the bars. I asked him if he was ok and he said yes, the bite was very minor and it happened all the time. Slowly I approached the carrier and the skunk began screaming and biting the sides of the cage.
“Has anyone else been bitten?” I asked.
“Oh, probably my whole family. He’s never been very nice.”
Slowly I bent down to look into the carrier again and the skunk rammed the front snarling and snapping. I felt drops of saliva hitting me in the face. Gently I explained to the owner that I was extremely concerned this skunk was rabid and his entire family and anyone else that had been in contact with the skunk needed to get to a hospital immediately and get rabies post-exposure treatment. The owner was understandably upset and asked me to please look at the skunk close. Politely I refused and told him there was no way I was going to open that carrier nor expose my staff to a possibly rabid animal. After several more minutes of discussion he agreed to allow me to euthanize the skunk and have it tested for rabies but he wasn’t going to go to the hospital.
“What could happen if it is rabies?” the owner asked.
Very sternly I told him, “You’ll die. There is absolutely no treatment for rabies and the only possible outcome is death. You will die. Your family will die. Anyone who has been bitten or exposed to the saliva will die.”
“Is it expensive?”
“If you have insurance it should cover it. If you don’t, yes it can be expensive. But this is literally a matter of life or death. I understand being concerned about medical bills but the alternative is death.”
The owner said he would think about it. I sent the head off for testing and didn’t think anything more about it.
A few days later I got a phone call from the health department telling me that the skunk was positive for rabies. The phone numbers and information the client had given me, which I included on the submission form to the lab, were wrong and the department could not get in touch with the family to tell them they absolutely needed to get to the hospital. I got a little sick to my stomach thinking about the saliva that had gotten on my face and likely into my eyes as well. Luckily I had already had the pre-exposure vaccinations so would just need to get two booster vaccines and would be fine. If the family did not get medical help soon they would die of rabies. I gave the health department all of the information we had on the clients.
A few days later I got word that a man had gone to the hospital saying he had been exposed to a friend’s skunk that was diagnosed with rabies. Luckily that man was able to give the correct information to the hospital and the health department was able to get in touch with the family and they came in and were all treated for rabies exposure. I don’t think they ever really realized how close they came to dying.
There are a few lessons to take home here:
Skunks don’t make good pets. Leave them in the wild where they belong.
Rabies is not an old timey disease that people used to die from. It’s still here and vaccinating against it is still very important.
Give the proper information when you go to the vet! These people probably gave false information because owning a skunk is illegal where they live but vets aren’t interested in turning people in. We desperately needed to contact them to save their lives.
Finally, rabies is nothing to mess with. There is no treatment; there is nothing that can be done when symptoms begin. It is far better to pay for vaccines than it is a funeral.
Rabies spreads up the nerves from the site of the bite. It spreads at a certain rate a day, and will infect different people at different times depending on where the bite was. The important takeaway is that, once the virus reaches the brain, you will die. Once symptoms develop, you will die.
60,000 people die every year from rabies.
Fewer than 12 people in the history of modern medicine have survived it.
Rabies. Will. Kill. You.
And it will not be a quick death. You will slowly go insane. The best any doctor can do for you once symptoms have set in is put you into a coma so you won’t be awake to feel your own death.
If you have been exposed to rabies, GET TREATMENT. Infection without treatment is 100% lethal. Those <12 only survived with intensive treatment, and are statistical and medical flukes.
Rabies is arguably the deadliest virus known to man. Nothing else has such a high lethality rate once symptoms show up.
Don’t die of “didn’t get vaccine”.
This post gave me the WORST nightmare…. which is usually a good indication of a memorable quality
When you send someone else an email, your mail server connects to their
mail server to transmit the message, and spy agencies have made a
surveillance banquet out of these transactions, harvesting emails by the
billions.
A protocol called STARTTLS allows mail servers to encrypt the traffic
between them, frustrating criminals, spies, corporate spies, and other
nefarious parties (though bad guys have figured out ways to trick mail
servers into skipping the encryption step in order to keep snooping).
STARTTLS is a pain for mail server administrators to set up, though,
from the process of getting the encryption certificates to configuring
the mail server to use them (including taking the countermeasures to
stop spies from bypassing the encryption).
So the Electronic Frontier Foundation – as part of its ongoing quest to encrypt the whole internet (see also: Certbot, Let’s Encrypt, HTTPS Everywhere, and related toold) – has just released STARTTLS Everywhere,
an automated tool that generates the certificates, helps install and
configure them, and double-checks the configuration to make sure
everything is safe and secure.
Unless you run your own mail server, you can’t do anything with this: but you can
(and should) send it along to whomever administers your email and get
them to have a look. It’s totally free, and solves a real problem,
widely observed in the wild, of mass email surveillance.
Conservatives have nothing but good things to say about James O’Keefe
and Breitbart’s tactics of using hostile video crews to harass people
in public. They don’t complain when abortion protestors bomb clinics, or
when Trump encourages violence at his rallies.
(“Knock the crap out of them, would you? I promise you, I will pay your
legal fees.”) But they think it’s awful when liberals confront Trump
apparatchiks who orchestrated the unthinkably horrific practice of mass
child cagings. Liberals are rude and uncivil! Bill O’Reilly, who
harassed women so viciously that he had to pay $32 million to buy their
silence and lost his platform at Fox News, is aghast that a restaurant
owner privately told Sarah Huckabee Sanders to dine elsewhere. Some
Democrats are also telling protestors to pipe down. But Michelle
Goldberg, opinion columnist for The New York Times writes that “we have a crises of democracy, not manners.”
The entire column is worth reading, but here is one of many highlights in here piece.
“The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.”
WD40 has replaced its traditional taped-on, easy-to-lose nozzle straws
(so important for getting the slippery stuff into the stuck places) with
a pair of new options: a “smart straw”
that is permanently affixed and delivers either a focused beam or a
wide blast, controlled by a thumb-button; and a poseable metal “EZ Reach” straw
that you bend into the desired shape and then direct, allowing you to
squirt into hard-to-reach, places around corners and behind obstacles.
Me reading dystopian fiction growing up and internalizing the message in the narrative: there’s no place for me in this world, I’d be dead the moment the regime took hold. I’m not strong enough. I couldn’t stand the suffering. Maybe the narrative is right. Maybe only the strong survive.
Me now as an adult getting ready to rip the pin from the grenade with my teeth and brandishing a molotov cocktail in the other hand: IF I GO DOWN I’M TAKING YOU MOTHER FUCKERS WITH ME, BRING IT ON IF YOU THINK YOUR HARD ENOUGH. YOU THINK YOU’RE SCARY? MY IMMUNE SYSTEM IS EATING ITSELF AND I HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE. COME GET SOME
I 100% implore you to give me all the criticisms you come up with for my novels when you get them
my one requirement is you phrase them exactly like this every time 😛
-After beating a giant rat to find a large cache of cheese-
Rogue: Cheese…that’s all? Paladin: Doesn’t sound like you’re having a gouda day. Ranger: I don’t see your problem, cheese is grate. Cleric: I don’t disabrie. DM: Rogue, make a will saving throw. Rogue: ….6. DM: You take 5 points of damage and have disadvantage on your will saving throws until you take a rest
1 yard of patterned fabric (I suggest a polka dot-type pattern so it looks like suction cups)
1 medium piece of black felt, 1 medium piece of white felt (for the eyes)
white thread, black thread and thread of the same color as the felt you’re using
pins
about 5 lbs. of stuffing
a couple big sheets of paper to draw your pattern
First, you need to draw out your patterns. Here’s a basic template to get you started, although most of the measurements are reasonably fudgeable. If in the likely event you don’t have any four-foot-long pieces of paper lying around, just tape a few pieces together.
Once you’ve drawn out your eight patterns, it’s time to cut the fabric. Pin the pattern to the fabric, laid flat, and cut out the following, leaving a half an inch or so of extra fabric around the edge of the pattern:
FOR THE ARMS: 8 felt and 8 fabric cutouts of piece 1
FOR THE, UH, LONGER ARMS: 2 felt and 2 fabric cutouts of piece 2
FOR THE BODY: 2 felt cutouts of piece 3
FOR THE FIN: 4 felt cutouts of piece 4
FOR THE HEAD: 1 felt cutouts of piece 6
FOR THE EYES: 2 white felt cutouts of piece 7 and 2 black felt cutouts of piece 8
So now you’ve got all your pieces ready, it’s time to start sewing them together. I did mine by hand because my sewing machine is busted and I get a kind of Zen buzz from sewing by hand, but if you have a non-busted one I recommend that you use it as it will be MUCH EASIER. You’re going to be sewing everything with the nice side of the fabric facing in, then turning it inside out to stuff it.
THE ARMS: (To make a quilted pattern that looks like suckers, see this other post). Pin together one patterned fabric piece 1 and one felt piece 1 (with the nice sides facing the inside). Sew down around the U-shape and back up, leaving the top open. Then turn the arm inside out, stuff it (it’s easiest to do both of these things if you sort of scrunch it up like you’re trying to put on a pair of tights, excuse the non-dude-friendly reference) and sew the top closed. Do the same for the other seven arms and rejoice in the fact that this is the most tedious part. Same deal with the two long arms, they’re just harder to stuff.
THE FINS: Pin together two of your piece 4s and sew together the curvy outer edge. Turn the piece inside out, so the seam you just sewed is on the inside, and start sewing up the other side, stuffing gradually as you go along. You should end up with a triangle-ish puffy thing. Repeat for the other two piece 4s.
THE BODY: Put down one piece 3, then place the two fins you have down with the point up and the curvy side pointing in, then make a sandwich by putting the other piece 3 down on top. Pin it all together and sew around the edges with the two fins still inside, as shown. Turn it inside out and move on to…
THE HEAD: So take piece 6 and the ten arms you’ve already done. Lay the arms, fabric side facing you, out with the arms’ top seams in a line half an inch from the top of piece 6. The order should be arm arm arm arm BIG ARM arm arm arm arm BIG ARM. The legs should be almost entirely covering piece 6. Pin them in place and sew a straight line through the individual legs seams to attach the legs to piece 6.
When you pick up the other side of piece 6, you now have something resembling a really weird untied hula skirt. Sew together the two 9-inch ends of piece 6 with the fabric side of the arms on the outside, and keep it inside out for the moment.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: Fit the open end of the body through the arms (still fabric side facing out) and pull the edge all the way through the felt cylinder so it’s even with the edge that DOESN’T have arms attached to it. Sew around the diameters of the head cylinder and the body cylinder to attach them, then pull the legs down over the head and you’re almost done!
Stuff the body, then seal it off by sewing piece 5 over the open end (even if you do have a functional sewing machine, you’ll probably have to do this part by hand).
THE EYES: Sew the black circles on the white circles and whipstitch the eyes onto the head. You do this last because you can’t tell where they’re going to end up on the end product if you put them on before stuffing the body.
“Sarah Sanders just again complained that Democrats support “open borders and rampant crime” that she claims comes with “open borders.” These are straight up lies, so blatant and frequently repeated that I thought it was important to provide links here which can allow anyone who is willing to state and repeat the actual facts again and again and again.”
