Elizabeth

@kitabet.bsky.social

972 Followers 1036 Following

earthquake aficionado & disaster studies scholar. outreach lead for PNSN; views and posts my own. now returned to the salish sea, but in the words of my former mayor, “you know first stop is always istanbul."

View from the gangway boarding the Victoria clipper, Olympic mountains in the distance

Screenshot from NYT: “At the height of the outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes — more than 800 per day, or four times the city’s normal death rate.”

Man in bright outdoor gear pointing at a dead upright tree in a marsh with some horizontal cuts in it for dendrochronology sampling

Cat with front paws on the edge of the bathtub looking horrified

The opening text crawl of the Hunt for Red October

A tv screen showing Kylian Mbappé on the pitch and the “pausa de hidratación” graphic. In the foreground is a beer can in a pausa de hidratación koozie.

Tahoma (Mt Rainier)

Tv screen showing the AUS-TÜR match with a 🧿 taped to the top

brown tabby in front of a screen showing the Turkish team in a huddle

A brown tabby reclining on a yellow bedspread whilst getting belly scritches

screenshot of text reading: "By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone."

screenshot of a news radio guy complaining that the mayor making transit policy “for a corridor carrying 30,000 vehicles a day has never once sat behind the wheel…”

image of a white marble statue buried upside-down in the ground in front of a building that says "Zoology," beneath the empty plinth from which it has fallen. The head of the statue is completely buried and the base is labeled "L. Agassiz"

Framed photo of a couple in Edwardian clothing (her a white dress with a dark belt, him a dark suit) gazing at each other.

Another trip to Magdalena Bay for target practice, upon the completion of which I was detached from the Chicago and on 16 March 1906, reported for duty on board the U.S.S. Princeton. My tour of duty on the Princeton was short but interesting. It included a period of about three weeks patrol duty at San Francisco, immediately following the great earthquake and fire that wrought such terrible havoc to that wonderful city. Then we moved to Portland, Oregon for the Alaska-Yukon Exposition. While there I was placed on the sick list and soon found myself at the Naval Hospital, Navy Yard, Puget Sound, as a patient. After about a month in the hospital I was detached from the Princeton, ordered home and granted six months sick leave.

A black and white photo of a row Victorian houses tilted at odd angles presumably due to liquefaction, labeled “Peculiar Effects of Earthquake”

A tabby lying on a brightly patterned rug, half-lit by a parallelogram of bright sunshine

Tv screen above a bar showing the Artemis II capsule with striped parachutes against a blue sky)

A mesa and butte above the town of Golden, Colorado.

A brown tabby lounging on a yellow bedspread

screenshot from NYT live feed noting that astronaut Jeremy Hansen “asked for guidance on the appropriate way to clean the inside of the Orion capsule’s windows. The crew has been touching them too much while gawking at the earth and now they are dirty.”

The first two stanzas of Martín Espada's poem "Imagine the Angels of Bread":

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges,
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will that owns
the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.

video of the mountain goats singing “up the wolves” (from “I’m gonna commandeer the local airwaves” to the end of the chorus) at the Fillmore in San Francisco

The text of the poem Witchgrass by Louise Glück:

Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder–

If you hate me so much
don’t bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything–

as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
one enemy–

I’m not the enemy.
Only a ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
a little paradigm
of failure. One of your precious flowers
dies here almost every day
and you can’t rest until
you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion–

It was not meant
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.

I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

A hardback copy of “This Year: a book of days” by John Darnielle on a yellow bedspread

Fireworks on the field at PayPal park

the meme in which a girl labeled “Apollo” throws a ball labeled “the gift of prophecy” at three other girls labeled “random Internet users just trying to be comedic”

tabby perched on top of a pajama clad lower body reclining in bed

screenshotted tumblr post by somebody called rotmance that says “ever since i heard that version of ‘no children’ by the mountain goats that was recorded at a concert where the singer didn’t sing at all and it was the audience, instead, who sang the entire song together surprisingly well and coherently (i reblogged it here) it’s like.. i too have wanted to go to a mountain goats concert and experience something like that. imagine. imagine singing ‘i am drowning, there is no sign of land, you are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand’ with hundreds of other people and your voices blending together into one sea. for a crowd to take those horrifically tragic lyrics and make it something communal, something connective. it would be something i’d always remember. oh to sing no children by the mountain goats in collective anon… doesn’t it sound transcendent! does anyone here get what i mean”

color-coded map of Ocean Shores (a narrow peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and Grays Harbor) showing travel times to safety in the event of a major Cascadia tsunami

USGS PAGER graphic showing red for estimated economic losses and yellow for estimated fatalities

excerpt from article:

Not all of the party’s elected officials act this way. The most important thing about working with a campaign strategist, a political operative I know told me recently, might be figuring out when to ignore your campaign strategist. Jay Inslee, now 74 and still doing climate change activism, served three terms as the governor of Washington and was elected to Congress eight times. During his career, he had a habit of staking out decisive positions that eventually became party consensus. In 1998 he won a swing district by making the risky decision to turn the race into a referendum on the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton. (Inslee argued that it had been a waste of time.) In 2017 he was among the first to protest Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

When I spoke to him, he didn’t seem to think there was much of a trick to it. “I’ve made some decisions just based on my gut,” he said, “feelings about what I believe America is about. When I heard about the Muslim ban, I literally turned the car around and drove to SeaTac Airport. You just can’t resist your impulse to stand up for basic American values, what you think the nation is about."

screenshot of an X post from Yusuf Can noting that grok is now under investigation by the public prosecutor in Ankara

"Eric Adams Questions Mamdani's Commitment to Serving Interests of Turkey" from the mamdanitimes.com headline generator

"To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast — or better. Arranging this situation is left as an exercise for the reader."

Except from the game publisher description: “Tonally, the game is light, reflecting the distance and cavalier attitude of these imperialist powers. We feel there's something horrifying in that, and this approach captures some of that horror.”

screenshot of the NYT interactive primary results map zoomed into Flatbish with the outline & count for Flatbush 42-036 highlighted. That precinct is orange, as are most to the west and immediate north (Mamdani lead) but pretty much everything eastwards is various shades of blue (Cuomo lead): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/24/us/elections/nyc-mayor-primary-results-precinct-map.html

the San Francisco dyke march entering the Castro to a raucous singalong of Pink Pony Club

screenshot from linked article of the following paragraph: "During my reporting in Kensington and Midwood in Brooklyn, I met with dozens of immigrant Pakistani and Bangladeshi women who admitted to not being politically engaged in their home countries yet felt motivated to canvass for Mamdani. According to the 2023 NYC Communities of Interest report issued by the City University of New York (CUNY), Bangladeshis and Pakistanis have poverty rates of 22% and 21%, respectively — higher than the 19% rate citywide. Many believe Mamdani would be an effective mayor because he is a Muslim South Asian candidate who is “one of their own” and would intrinsically understand their issues, whether about immigration, affordability or solidarity with Palestine. Mamdani’s now-viral confrontation in March with Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s “border tsar,” over the detainment of the Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was brought up by many of these women, who are currently experiencing a rise in fear within their communities, with many refusing to leave their homes due to a spate of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel."

highlighted excerpt about Mira Nair nicknaming people that reads: "Nair's talkative, doe-eyed son Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani."

Get Your War On strip from 2001, featuring two clipart guys on the phone, the first saying "ok I hate to act like a fucking dumbass, but are we at war? I mean, did we ever officially declare war?" and the second replying, "Declare war? Who's got time to declare war when there are so many bombs to drop?"

The passage beginning “when I first visited New York City” in the essay linked in the quoted skeet

screenshot of a portion of the Iraq Culture Smart Card with a mystifying classification of Arab male headgear as white ghutra = "has not made the hajj," black keffiyeh = "haji from a country with presidential rule" and red keffiyeh = "haji from a monarchy." no this is not accurate but it is dumb and god knows how many tax dollars were spent on producing it.

get your war on 17 #3, about a young child's first encounter with the specter of Henry Kissinger

Sign reading “chinga la migra” on a black background surrounded by a gorgeous floral and bird motif

A screenshotted excerpt of a portion of the linked essay, beginning with "Everybody takes it personally" and ending with "That was, of course, the last time I saw or will ever see that peak."

a tabby kitten reclining and allowing a person’s hand to pet her belly