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Hester Pangs

@hesterpangs.bsky.social

660 followers 740 following 3.5K posts

Clevelander. Relapsed Catholic. Into good music, good books, works of mercy. Currently enjoying punk rock semi-retirement.

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · Dec 3

I've been "exploring" random cities on Google Maps instead of doomscrolling and am finding all sorts of amazing things (ongoing thread)

Jaws Corner, Zanzibar:
www.google.com/maps/place/J...

Photo of man in front of Jaws mural on a Zanzibar street corner.

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 3h

I turned this recipe into a pilaf instead of stuffing the tomatoes and now my house smells absolutely amazing.

I wish I'd known a lot earlier that there was so much more to Polish food than what my grandma made for my picky grandpa.

polishhousewife.com/polish-stuff...

Polish Stuffed Tomatoes

You'll want to try Stuffed Tomatoes with Millet, Cinnmaon, and Almonds from Fresh from Poland: New Vegetarian Cooking from the Old Country!

polishhousewife.com

Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 9h

This is a heck of a puff piece right here and it's how I learned that the money came from a guy in the fracking business.

Current @current.org · 13h

The new studio will be a place “where various institutions dedicated to jazz can come, convene, perform and use it for their own purposes,” said Ideastream CEO Kevin Martin. current.org/2025/10/clev...

Cleveland’s Ideastream bolsters jazz programming with ‘landmark’ $1M donation from local family

The donation from Northeast Ohio's "first family of jazz" will fund a new studio for performances and live hosting.

current.org

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 11h

All I can think of is that Conner O'Malley skit where he's trying to reboot the Irish mob and there's some guys doing a barbershop version of "Paradise City."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYLx...

Reposted by Hester Pangs

Soren Spicknall @sorenspicknall.bsky.social · 1d

"Community" is a word that's often used to obscure divides. If you don't actually know vulnerable people in your community, your mental version of what your neighborhood is experiencing is likely centered on very different things than theirs. If you want to help, don't invent tactics from scratch.

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 14h

blurry sticker from the Happy Dog bathroom but great advice.

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Reposted by Hester Pangs

Spooky Leia🇵🇷🏳‍⚧ @madamephosphorus.bsky.social · 22h

Vetoing HRT stockpiling is so fucking ghoulish.

If trans people make it the next 4 years en masse, it will be from our own strength, not because of the Democrats.

"You can change your name, but you can't stockpile on life saving care!" Kiss my ass.

Trans News Network @transnews.network · 1d

CA UPDATE:

Newsom has signed these queer rights bills:
- AB 82 / SB 497 (Medical privacy)
- AB 1084 / SB 59 (Name/Gender changes)
- SB 450 (Adoption access)

And vetoed these bills:
- SB 418 (HRT stockpile)
- AB 554 (PreP)

Final total: 8 bills signed, 2 vetoed.

transnews.network/p/california...

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 17h

Feeling bad because I was all "why didn't this person email me back, what a flake" and then realizing "oh this was in my drafts and it never got sent in the first place, MY BAD."

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

there are so many better books to introduce teenage girls to feminism and none of them are by Kate Chopin.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

for the side of my family that ended up in southeastern Ohio's coal country, the last names got really anglicized and look way more Appalachian than Polish, but that happened in the 1930s a generation in as opposed to coming into the country.

Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

I went down a whole Litvak genealogy rabbit hole last week because the person's last name was transliterated twice from Yiddish somewhere between Kaunas and Cleveland because i just knew that "Russia" as a birthplace probably meant somewhere further west in the empire like it did for my ancestors.

Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 1d

Lots of us have great-grandparents names who were absolutely changed when they came here, and when people say otherwise, they're assuming your great-grandparents name was in the Roman alphabet.

Robyn Pennacchia @robynelyse.bsky.social · 1d

Now, more than ever, it's important to understand why so many the myths we tell ourselves about immigration are actually very harmful.

First of all, your great-great-grandparents names *were not changed* at Ellis Island. No one there had the authority to do that.

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

Ashtabula.

Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

One of the college ladyfriends heard this at Michael's tonight while buying craft supplies and I'm here for it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-UO...

Pretend We're Dead

YouTube video by L7 - Topic

www.youtube.com

Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

seeing people in the local indivisible group not coming up with good ideas for a lady and her 94-year-old mom saying "well it's pretty red out there and you'll have to drive to another county" has me going "do this DIY, you're not the only ones out there in that town who feel that way."

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHsB...

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Reposted by Hester Pangs

👻 Ghoulolaj Kill Bill 🎃 @nikolajbill.bsky.social · 3d

It is quite a deliberate choice to allow an editorial in a church bulletin that defends Christopher Columbus (if transparency it wasn’t the pastor himself).

It’s even more of an interesting choice when that editorial does so by paraphrasing Tony Soprano.

Brethren,
When we lead with our faith, we can accomplish wondrous things. Monday reminds us of this truth. Why Monday? Because it is the day our nation sets aside to honor the bravery and exceptional skill of Christopher Columbus, who navigated the Atlantic from Spain to the
"New World."

In this council (and I hope this parish) Christopher Columbus is a hero. He discovered "America", It's what he did. Because of his bravery in service to Christ we have this beautiful nation to call home.
Tomorrow, please take a few moments and remember the bravery of this Catholic hero, and how many good works still stem from his inspiration.

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

sometimes I wonder if the reason why people get so mad that students come home from college with changed views is because so many of us got there and realized that so many of these people were full of love and we'd been raised to fear them, hate them, and assume they all hated us.

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 1d

Meanwhile in Cleveland my old city councilman who talks liberal was doing a whole "heritage not hate" thing about this government holiday.

Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 2d

saw one of those stickers on a cybertruck and was very "I don't believe you."

Reposted by Hester Pangs

good hyuck, babe! @markpopham.bsky.social · 2d

But because we refuse to admit that, what voters see is that one party is aggressively addressing a "problem," while the other party frets about it, endlessly talks about it but never does anything. Even when Obama and Biden bragged about their record deportations, it didn't move the needle!

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good hyuck, babe! @markpopham.bsky.social · 2d

I truly believe a big reason why Democrats are failing to appropriately respond to the moment is a pathological refusal to admit that there were aspects of the American status quo pre trump that were extremely fucked up and unjust

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Reposted by Hester Pangs

Jake @jakeall.bsky.social · 2d

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 2d

Semi-related to all this but this only adds to my very personal beef with First Things and how much it drives me bananas that serious people think it's good and edifying.

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 2d

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 4d

it's bananas that the Bulwark folks and the non-shitty libertarians are more vocally cognizant of the current moment than the opposition party is.

Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 4d

I watched an Arabic-speaking pastor friend trying to explain to white evangelicals on Facebook why this is just saying "God is good" in a different language and that Arab Christians also say it and "no this isn't demonic, please stop."

Hester Pangs @hesterpangs.bsky.social · 4d

oh I would be all over this.