Well, shoot. Here I was going to say it wasn’t such a bad one to get wrong but the world goes and proves me wrong. That’s just heinous.

It’s entirely possible her baby died due to Chernobyl-related pollution from her inhaling radioactive dust after the blast, but it sure as hell wasn’t made worse by her caring for her husband. She was probably safer inside whatever isolation unit they had him in than outside, since it was cleaner. I can forgive the nurses in 1980s Ukraine for not knowing that but a TV series written in the 2020s should really not be furthering that misunderstanding.

It’s a shame because plenty of the other radiation-related stuff in the show was fine but that one was just so off base and clearly has had extremely negative real-world consequences.

I hate to say it because so much of this show was actually really excellent and accurate but in the Chernobyl miniseries they totally did the “radiation is contagious” thing and it is just not true.

Things and people that are irradiated/hit by radiation in a situation like a reactor failure or contact with radioactive waste do not become radioactive. They can have radioactive particles on their clothing/skin or inside their body if they have ingested/inhaled radioactive material, but they are not emitting radiation themselves. Furthermore, a thin sheet of paper or cloth will stop the kind of radioactivity that would be emitted by such material, if it is on the outside of a person’s body.

Anyways the point is that the woman whose husband was dying of radiation poisoning and then she went in and spent time with him did not lose her baby because she spent time with him. That’s just not how it works.

Lots of environmental contamination-related stuff in movies is inaccurate but that one is the most recent I can think of.

Yeah this is what happens with our kid (who, admittedly, has ADHD so maybe he’s a bit unusual). The first day or week after a cool experience he’s pretty meh about it and won’t volunteer much in the way of thoughts or feelings and then suddenly he’ll realize it was real again and all of a sudden he won’t shut up about how cool it was! Then eventually he settles down into a steady pattern of “hey remember when we did X thing wasn’t that so cool we should do it again” which is my favorite phase because that’s how I know what he really likes that stuck with him. : )

cries in working parent

My employer gives us 8 sick days a year. When we run out of those we are supposed to use vacation time. It’s downright depressing how fast we blow through the sick time in a bad winter season.

I’m very very lucky to work from home, so I can neglect my sick kid at home while getting work done and thus avoid having to burn through my vacation time as well. Others aren’t so lucky.

Pretty sure the shelter paid us to take our current cat lol. Or at least all the chipping and medical fees were waived. She’d been there for months and months and had already had one failed adoption.

She’s ornery as hell and never wants us to pet her but somehow mysteriously happens to be in the same room as us all the time. And she sleeps on us at night. Deep down it’s clear she loves us in her own cat way. 🥲

Also despite her…odd… temperament she is a beautiful cat! No clue why anyone would pay for an expensive breed when there are so many cuties like ours just wasting away in shelters.

You seem to be implying all people and countries are on a scale moving closer to some single ideal.

I mean that’s definitely how some people interpret it but at least for me, patriotism encompasses the idea that my country should be best for me and the people in it but that other people in other countries get to think the same thing about their country and work towards their own version of “best.”

But I’m not gonna argue that everyone does patriotism this way because that’s clearly not the case 🙃 plenty of “patriots” out there willing to wreck their own country in a war over bringing their own ideals to a different place.

I take issue with the first panel.

To me, patriotism is “I’m going to work on my house because I love the people who live in it and I want them all to have the best house.”

If you start from the assumption that your country is the “best” that’s nationalism and straying too close to the roots of xenophobia.

Seriously, that stuff is delicious! Don’t throw it out.

Add it to cornbread, use it to fry vegetables, put it on popcorn, use it to season your cast iron… The list goes on and on. And it keeps almost indefinitely in the fridge thanks to all the salt. There is almost no reason I can think of to throw out bacon grease unless you eat so much bacon that you can’t possibly keep up with the grease or you don’t have a refrigerator.