You get told it’s just pneumonia, but it keeps coming back for years.

Eventually someone figures it out and says you have mesothelioma. You travel the country for a few years, looking for treatment wherever you can. It costs everything you have.

Somewhere along the way, you have to put down $120,000 in cash for a surgery that gives you a few more years. But your last years are still mostly pain and exhaustion.

I wish my uncle hadn’t died the way he did.

They have been for a while now. It started before the API thing with subreddits that were basically mirrors of English ones. But (badly) auto translated into German.

A few weeks ago, the Google results got flooded with auto translations. You can still find stuff that was written in German, but you have to limit the search to German subs (site:reddit.com/r/de, for example).

Or check the sub name in the search results. If it’s in German, you should be good. If it’s in English, or if it doesn’t show up at all, it’s usually a machine translation.

Both ways can work. Looking up words, and trying to guess the meaning from context. I use both, depending on my mood and the situation.

I like trying to guess the meaning because you have to think things through. That helps you remember the answer. Doesn’t matter if you got it right or wrong. It’s not always easy, but it gets better with practice.

You can usually look at the situation and narrow it down to a few possibilities. If my guess seems decent enough to get the gist, I keep going. Usually, you’ll find something that helps you figure out if you were right.

If I see a word several times, I usually look it up. Otherwise, it’s probably not that important (unless I happen to be curious).

And if I look up a word and forget it, no big deal. Happens all the time. I’ll either come across it again, or it wasn’t that important.

It can be slow going, no matter what option you choose. But if you keep at it, you can get to a point where you rarely have to look things up.

Some kids have died at camps like this. The link is the story of a 16 year old who died in Arizona in 1994.

He had to hike for miles a day and sleep with no blanket or sleeping bag in temperatures below freezing. He had no food for 11 days out of 20, partly as a punishment for being sick.

He complained about being sick for weeks - stomach pain, falling down, hallucinations. On the day he died, it took him an hour to crawl 20 feet to the fire. He died from an infection from a perforated ulcer. The staff were standing around making fun of him when he collapsed for the last time.

The owners of the camp pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. One of the counselors was convicted of felony neglect.

Earlier this year, a 12 year old suffocated to death at a wilderness camp in North Carolina. His death was found to be a homicide.

Fascinating! So oxygen from the air (or wherever) + hydrogen from food = water.

Plants can make their own food, and birds can make their own water :)

That’s what I thought too, but bones are about 1/3 protein with a lot of fat and minerals. Kind of like tonkotsu broth.

They also store well. If the vultures find more than they need, they’ll keep the extra bones in a storage place really high up. The fat content drops a lot when the bones dry out, but the protein is still there.

The downside is bones don’t have a lot of water, so bearded vultures need a source of fresh water in their territory.

Bearded vultures are pretty neat too. They pretty much only eat bones. They can eat surprisingly big chunks whole. Or if the bone is too big, they drop it onto a rock to break it up.

And they’re very peaceful, because they know no one is going to fight them for the bones.

An Illinois sheriff’s deputy charged with murder in the death of a Black woman shot her in the face during a tense moment over a pot of water in her home, authorities said Thursday.

Prosecutors said Grayson “aggressively yelled” at Massey to put a pot down. They said she put her hands in the air and ducked for cover before she was shot in the face.

And then right after that is the part about the medical kit. So you kill someone who asked for help because they were holding a pot of water.

Maybe it depends on what you watch. I use Youtube for music (only things that I search for) and sometimes live streams of an owl nest or something like that.

If I stick to that, the recommendations are sort of OK. Usually stuff I watched before. Little to no clickbait or random topics.

I clicked on one reaction video to a song I listened to just to see what would happen. The recommendations turned into like 90% reaction videos, plus a bunch of topics I’ve never shown any interest in. U.S. politics, the death penalty in Japan, gaming, Brexit, some Christian hymns, and brand new videos on random topics.

A pretty bird with striking eyes. I think I read that burrowing owls eat insects, but I didn’t know bigger owls did too.

This article is part of a pretty big investigation that’s worth reading. It talks about different kinds of “less lethal” force that can kill people. Tasers, punching, body slamming, restraining people face down.

And injecting them with sedatives. It happened to someone with schizophrenia who took meth and was wandering around at night. A guy whose mother made a mental help call when he was having a manic episode. And someone who was having a seizure.

Those are some of the cutest owls I’ve seen. I guess they’re mostly fluff, but they look a decent size considering they only weigh 3 ounces.

Wow, so in about 6 weeks, they grow from tiny smidgens (video of last year’s brood, listen to the peeps) to ready to fly:

(The video just says that the female laid 4 eggs in March. The male fed her while she sat on them. The chicks hatched over Easter, and if they grow up healthy, they’ll be released in Austria.)

It’s so cute how owls lie on their bellies to sleep. This is the first time I’ve seen an adult do it.

Here’s a link to the original song. The part the meme comes from starts around 0:45. It was a hit in 2004.

Other made up offenses include having a knife and having nothing but walking toward them

Or having a seizure on your kitchen floor.

Or having dementia and ending up at the wrong house because you think you live there.

Were you standing inside something when you took this, or is the black frame something that was added later?

Yeah, it’s crazy how fast they grow. And no wonder, the way they eat. I don’t know how the parents keep up. Quote from here:

In contrast, the owls very quietly brought half the animal kingdom to their nestling, day after day. We started to jokingly call them “the murderers."

Oh hey, I love your owl posts. I always read the comments too because I know there will be more pictures and info. I’ve been meaning to comment there, but work got super busy and I forgot to stop by.

And then there’s the different ways to connect verbs in English.

• I want to go to the movies. (“I want going” is wrong.)
• I like going to the movies. / I like to go to the movies. (Both ways work.)
• I despise going to the movies. (“I despise to go” is wrong.)

There aren’t rules for that, as far as I know. Just very fuzzy guidelines at best. And word stress is pretty random too. Both of those things can be tricky for non-native speakers.