“On the heights of a mountain range just 30 miles west of Sydney’s Central Business District, the population of a charismatic marsupial was found to be ballooning despite recent fires.
Recorded at 45% higher than before Australia’s drought-wildfire combo of 2019, it was described as “nothing short of remarkable.”
The greater glider is an arboreal marsupial that can glide the distance of a football field using a long skin membrane that stretches between its arms and legs. With a diet composed exclusively of eucalyptus leaves, a lack of trees means a lack of gliders, and in the Blue Mountains, parts that were only lightly burned are positively full of these animals.
“It’s been fantastic to see greater gliders bounce back to well above pre-fire, pre-drought levels in the best and most lightly burnt habitat,” said Dr. Peter Smith, an experienced glider biologist, and author of the study that included the new population estimates. “Because of their low reproductive rate, we didn’t think that they’d be capable of making such a strong recovery. The rapid increase in numbers is extraordinary.”
On one night, he and his co-author/wife Judy used powerful flashlights to spot 59 gliders overhead in a single corridor located by the southern edge of the Blue Mountains National Park and near the adjoining Mares Forest National Park and Wombeyan Karst Conservation Reserve.
Gliders are not just vulnerable to logging and wildfires, they carry a mere one joey per year, and so have been assumed to be far more at risk than similar marsupials with greater fecundity.
Other surveys proved less-joyful, though. In some areas where the eucalyptus had not recovered from the 2019 fires, there were no gliders at all. Another way to look at that might be: provided eucalyptus trees can be restored to degraded habitats, gliders can take care of themselves.
“That’s why the remaining greater glider strongholds are so important,” Dr. Smith told WWF Down Under. “The forests in Mares Forest National Park and the southern end of Blue Mountains National Park now support exceptional numbers of greater gliders and are vital for the species’ recovery in this region.”
As to why this species might have been so much more well-stocked, Smith reckoned it was because of the increased rainfall in recent years, driving more heavy vegetation among the trees this flying possum calls home.”
-Article via Good News Network, March 11, 2025. Video via World Wildlife Fund, June 15, 2022
“Steve Vladeck: “To spoil the punchline, although what the government has done to this point is profoundly disturbing, and is, in my view, unconstitutional retaliation for First Amendment-protected speech, I’m not sure it is as clearly unlawful as a lot of folks online have suggested. And that’s a pretty big problem all by itself.” Michelle Goldberg: “If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration.” John Ganz: “Here’s the most important thing about this whole affair: The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live under a police state. And don’t kid yourself: They will not stop at non-citizens.””
I want you to T-pose. Turn your right thumb up and your left thumb doen and look at your right thumb. Move your arms up and down a bit until you feel a nerve running from your armpit to your palm. Now turn your right thumb down and your left thumb up, and look at your left thumb. Keep your chest facing forward and your shoulders back. Move your arms again until you feel that nerve again. Keep alternating between these two for a minute, or look at each thumb thirty times each.
Now sit down. Put your left hand firmly under your left buttock, palm down. Keep your shoulders back and put your right hand over the crown of your head, very gently pulling it to the right. Do this for thirty seconds, then do it again but with your right hand under your right buttock.
These are stretches for the nerves in your arms, and are very good for people who sit behind a computer a lot, or fibre artists, or you name it. Do them daily. They will hurt in the beginning, but keep doing them, even after the pain has gone, or it will return and you’ll have to start all over.
Hey, I know another type of stretch for this!
I had to go to occupational therapy a while back due to pain in my ulnar nerve (same nerve that acts as your ‘funny bone’). It was getting compressed from jamming my elbow against hard plastic armrests that were in a too-tall fixed position on my cheap old office chair. I was having burning and tingling pain and numbness radiating from my elbow into my ring and pinky fingers. It sucked. Honestly, I found it worse than carpal tunnel, because a rigid elbow brace makes life way harder than a rigid wrist brace.
Anyways, the main exercise that my occupational therapist had me do was called a nerve glide. The stretches OP describes help improve flexibility, but the nerve gliding exercise helps move the nerve out of the pinched spot so it can move more freely.
Here’s the best diagram I can find of it:
It’s a little confusing, so have some extra description on the weird parts:
Step 3: thumb side moves down and towards the front.
Step 4: hand rotates out and around, pinky side first.
Step 5: nothing fancy here, just straighten your elbow.
Step 6 (not on diagram, but recommended by therapist): with arm in the same position, tilt your head towards the opposite side for a few second (works as a stretch).
Ulnar nerve compression (aka cubital tunnel) is apparently super common, but I had never heard of it before I started having issues. If you lean forwards on your desk or armrests a lot, I’d suggest giving these a try. It feels kind of weird because you can feel the nerve, but it shouldn’t hurt at all.
I would like to add The Birdcage (1996) to this list of drag queen movies (mind you, it’s based on a French stage play from 1973).
Which starred Nathan Lane as a drag queen just two years after he had voice Pumba in “The Lion King”:
And we ESPECIALLY need to remember Victor Victoria from 1982 (during the REAGAN administration) which is SET IN THE 1930S and stars everyone’s favorite curtain-sewing nanny as a struggling soprano who decides to pretend to be a boy doing drag (DOUBLE THE DRAG FOR YOUR MONEY). I mean look at this photo:
Count Victor Grazinski isn’t putting up with your transphobia (or you being a dick to Robert Preston).
Unfortunately, the representation of drag and female impersonation (as it was often called pre-Stonewall) is scant in mainstream American cinema due to the Hayes Code. There are definitely more, but these are biggest, “family-friendly” names I can think who have starred in major motion pictures as drag performers.
can I add another?
Some Like It Hot (1959), it got in trouble with censors and still went ahead, but it featured a lot of Gender and a character getting really into this whole “being a girl for real” thing, as well as the implication of a a gay engagement being on the table
but like? It has Marilyn Monroe in it and banger music and it’s a classic! I only know from my mother bringing it up and also a tiny bit of exposure to russian tv channels, but I think it was also popular in the Soviet Union? So she’d seen it as a child and loved it so much she watched it with me when I was also just a child.
(not to mention big traditions of children’s theatre with drag performance)
And NOT ONE of you has mentioned
2005 movie adaptation of 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical! Lesbian couple! Kind-of-gay-kind-of-het-with-a-side-of-trans-it-was-the-90s-the-definitions-are-squishy couple! Every single couple in it is interracial!
1999 teen comedy satire about being a lesbian! Ridiculously fucking funny!
YOUR MOM’S CHICK FLICK COMEDY-DRAMA!! 1991!! The woman on the top left was in love with the woman on the top right! It’s implied that the woman on the bottom right is the elderly woman on the top left! In the book the two women on top are explicitly lovers! It won two Oscars and three Golden Globes! This movie passes the Bechdel test basically every thirty seconds!
YOUR MOM’S ROMANTIC FANTASY-DRAMA! 1992! A young bride switches souls with an old man and she and her newlywed husband have to figure out how to connect! Those are two of the biggest stars of the era on that cover!! You will notice the word “joke” appeared nowhere in this description!
1994! The only “it’s a man in a dress” humor comes from a male bus driver developing a crush on the titular character! There’s nothing dark or deviant about the fact it’s Robin Williams in drag even if the plot wouldn’t pass muster today! The comedy comes from a very cishet American dude trying to navigate life both as himself and a “cishet British nanny who’s a widow” at the same time!
1982 comedy! Christmas release! Similar plot to the abovementioned Victor/Victoria! Main character actually learns and grows due to his experiences as a woman!
Legal drama! 1993! You probably STILL know the names on this poster! That’s Tom Hanks playing a gay man with AIDS who’s suing his former employer for sexual discrimination! That’s a Black man playing his lawyer!
1973! If you’re wondering what the fuck a Jesus movie is doing here, it portrays Judas as being in love with Jesus! Judas is Black! He’s also a sympathetic character who’s doomed by the narrative! My mom remembered seeing it in theatres and told me there were massive protests, not because of Judas, but because Jesus is shown being royally pissed off! And by the way…
THEY DID IT FUCKING TWICE!! The remake is from 2000 and it kinda sucks but it also garnered basically no outrage (except from musical theater fans pissed about the weak casting) in spite of the fact it’s significantly more explicit than the original and suggests that whole “in love” thing was reciprocal!
Now let me tell you what ties all of these movies together, except for the second Jesus Christ Superstar and also But I’m A Cheerleader because my mom was deeply biased against teen comedies:
THEY WERE ALL ON MY SHELF WHEN I WAS GROWING UP. A VERY AVERAGE MIDWESTERN FAMILY OWNED ALL OF THESE.
And you’ll notice I didn’t mention Angels in America, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brokeback Mountain, Jennifer’s Body, Saved!, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Flawless, or Torch Song Trilogy. I only provided movies my family owned.
In many ways, we have moved forward. But in a very real way, here, we also need to go back.
Honorable mention to:
Also the Reagan years. And you can lean into the fact that the guy is in a relationship he has to hide because people wouldn’t understand it, but the real standout is the character of Hollywood Montrose.
He’s not gay. He’s thrilled. And yes, it’s played for laughs– but he is very much the Gay Best Friend to a male character, and the only person who says anything negative about him is one of the villains, who is nothing but an assholes, and gets called a bigot to his face by the lead. (And is too dumb to realize that it happened until he walks away.)
Another honorable mention, since it wasn’t as mainstream as those other films, but this honest-to-gosh gay RomCom took a humorous and heartfelt look at gay culture at the height of the AIDS crisis (Patrick Stewart, playing a gruff gay elder, is predictably, brilliant):
Jeffrey (1995), tagline “Love is an adventure when one of you is sure and the other is positive”
amhrancas 