Benefits Of Being A Fish
Problem is they’re always bugging you for a light.
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Les Apocalypse des Animaux en Caledon Group Chat
In which we learn that if you love your pets, obey all signs.
[00:36] Magdalena Kamenev has a story!
[00:37] Alastair Whybrow sits back and waits for “Once upon a time”
[00:37] Christina Gilderoy: Oh Goodie! \
[00:37] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): So, someone I know has a thing for exotic animals, but she channels it by fostering wildlife rescue animals …
[00:37] Scripted Haiku: Another story!
[00:39] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): And one of the animals she had in her care was a large ball python, that she would bathe by pulling on her swimsuit and taking the snake into the shower with her.
[00:39] Christina Gilderoy: Yikes!
[00:39] Scripted Haiku: Oooo… hot!
[00:40] Alastair Whybrow: she wore a swimsuit in the shower?
[00:40] Christina Gilderoy refers back to Forest Gumps Mama!
[00:40] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): One day, she was bathing the snake when her doorbell rang. She got out of the shower and opened the front door to find a woman who lived a couple of blocks over from her.
[00:41] ‘Cip’ (precipitate.flood): I take it her visitor could be heard several blocks away?
[00:41] Scripted Haiku: “Watch her take the pleasure from the serpent that once corrupted man.”
[00:42] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): The woman was at her door with a petition complaining about the lesbian couple who just moved in on my friend’s block, and gave this whole spiel about decent family values and decadent lesbian interlopers.
[00:42] Sha'uri Cheshire-Angel (lianndraa.gothly) giggles.
[00:42] Christina Gilderoy: Uh-oh!
[00:42] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): The petitioner not realizing that my friend is a bisexual who leans towards dating women …
[00:42] Wrath Constantine: This will only end in tears….. of hilarious laughter!
[00:42] Christina Gilderoy: Did she have a petition against her the next day?
[00:43] Scripted Haiku: We had lesbians and now we have a bear. She’s right to worry.
[00:43] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): And one more thing … the woman was holding in her arms, along with the clipboard for the petition, one of those little toy dogs.
[00:45] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): The snake saw its post-bath snack and before either woman could react - SNAP! CRUNCH! - and half the dog was in the snake’s mouth.
[00:45] Alastair Whybrow: BWAhahahaha
[00:46] Sha'uri Cheshire-Angel (lianndraa.gothly): That’s hilarious. :)
[00:46] Christina Gilderoy: It was a real dog?
[00:46] Scripted Haiku: lmao!
[00:46] Eclectric Breitman: The punchline here is that the little dog and the snake were lesbian-married the next day.
[00:47] Christina Gilderoy: The toy?
[00:47] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): No, it was a real, tiny dog.
[00:47] Alastair Whybrow: I think Magda meant “toy" as in very small real dog, rather than fluffy plaything
[00:47] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): I don’t know what breed.
[00:47] Sha'uri Cheshire-Angel (lianndraa.gothly): Tasty. :)
[00:48] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): As far as I know, my friend was never sued. :>
[00:48] Scripted Haiku: See? Lesbians are a gateway to other predators!
[00:48] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): As it happens, my friend had a sign up in her front yeard, saying that her house was a wildlife rescue and that animals should not be brought on the premises without permission …
[00:50] Alastair Whybrow: Ah, well, she didn’t have a leg to stand on. Like the snake…………..
[00:50] Alastair Whybrow: Did they get the dog back?
[00:50] Scripted Haiku: Half of it.
[00:51] Eclectric Breitman: If you thought that dog was terrified of the shop vac before…
[00:51] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): If I remember correctly, there was an attempt to extract the dog, but it was too late.
[00:52] Scripted Haiku: Extracting one creature from another rarely goes well.
[00:52] Alastair Whybrow pictures the two ladies jamming a car jack into the python’s mouth
[00:52] Magda Haiku (magdalena.kamenev): The end!
[00:54] Christina Gilderoy: Poor dog though! I have a little pup and it would make me really sad to see it go like that!
[00:55] Scripted Haiku: Don’t mess with python toting bisexual women who shower with snakes and you should be fine
[00:55] Artemiss Luminos: i eould have no need of a car jack, i would tear anything ot bits with my bare handsthat swallowed my dog!
[00:56] Artemiss Luminos: i loves me my doggyy, i does!
[00:56] Alastair Whybrow: A friend of mine entered their huge St Bernard in a local pet show. The dog was the only one in its class, and first prize was a guinea-pig. They put the guinea-pig down in front of the dog for the obligatory local press photo, and GLOMP! The St Bernard swallowed the guinea-pig in one.
[00:57] Artemiss Luminos: oh dear
[00:57] Alastair Whybrow: Unfortunately, the kid who’d donated the guinea-pig was there.
[00:57] Artemiss Luminos: awwwww :-(
[00:58] Christina Gilderoy: These are sad stories tonight!
[00:59] Artemiss Luminos: yes, couldn’t we talk of pleasanter things?
[01:00] Artemiss Luminos: shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings?
[01:00] Artemiss Luminos: *grins*
(September 15 2012)
DO NOT LOOK AT HIM OR SHE WILL KILL YOU
…
well, it was nice knowing you. Hope she doesn’t make too much mess.
Two people in Antarctica looking at an emperor penguin chick. The bird has its beak open. Some wit has captioned the image: “Excuse me… what the fuck are you doing here?”
1.) Open Google. 2.) Search your LAST name, only your last name. 3.) Take the first picture that comes up. 4.)Put this on Tumblr 5.) This is you in 30 years.
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In thirty years I’ll be myself in early 2009.
Hmm… Apparently I get a sex change, change my name to Margaret and become the first woman doctor in New Zealand.
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nem sirok csak 65ezren belementek a szemembe
A crowd of 65,000 sings ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ perfectly while waiting for a Green Day concert
THIS. IS. PERFECTION.
Amazing!
1. how the fuck did Green Day follow that
2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense - if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day - is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.
That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.
The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.
This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS.
“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”
Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera - information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application - and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.
And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”
This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea - a meme - can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”
“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”
Man I just fucking love people.
Stress-Free… What?
Over the weekend I was fulminating over an article in the NZ Herald concerning the craze for “stress-free meat”. Apparently some idiot at Silver Fern Farms has buckled to this fad and declared that dogs shouldn’t be used to shift livestock as this might cause the animals distress, and also cause potential consumers distress, in that they are contributing to (oh save us!) cruelty to animals.
Idiots. The animals are dead anyway, and they’ve been herded around on the farm with dogs for ages beforehand. Any attempt to replace dogs with people, or technology, will be too expensive and replace the nonexistent problem with real ones.
The cretins behind this “stress-free meat” business might like to explain to lions that they need to have respect for the feelings of their prey, and perhaps look at some other method of killing them that doesn’t involve a traumatising chase, or the slow and probably painful means of asphyxiation to kill it.
What this stems from is the same unfortunate root that spawned the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, the health-and-safety madness of the UK, PETA and just about every other dictatorial, monomaniac pressure group blighting modern existence. And that root is Minimal Risk.
The problem is that some lunatics take this laudable concept and turn it into the impossible goal of No Risk. And then there is the matter of defining risk…
I feel that most of these No-Risk squallers are selfish, fascist zealots, mainly because they want the world to deform itself to suit them. They want people who are not physical, mental and spiritual carbon copies of themselves to be forced to stop existing; their god is Procrustes.
If there should be a law to minimise risk that I would whole-heartedly support, it would be one to ban these sorts of ill-considered, high-handed we-know-better lobby groups.
People cannot be protected from everything, so they must be prepared to protect themselves. And in order to do so, they must be able to identify and gauge risks wherever they arise; the only alternative is to do away with the dangerous follies of human rights and sovereignty, and turn all the world into one gigantic prison, and ring every man, woman and child around with gates and bars and screws from cradle to grave, their entire lives scheduled and arranged for their safety, convenience, and maximal usefulness.
Originally posted 7 December 2009
Stress-free… what!?
Over the weekend I was fulminating over an article in the NZ Herald concerning the craze for “stress-free meat”. Apparently some idiot at Silver Fern Farms has buckled to this fad and declared that dogs shouldn’t be used to shift livestock as this might cause the animals distress, and also cause potential consumers distress, in that they are contributing to (oh save us!) cruelty to animals.
Idiots. The animals are dead anyway, and they’ve been herded around on the farm with dogs for ages beforehand. Any attempt to replace dogs with people, or technology, will be too expensive and replace the nonexistent problem with real ones.
The cretins behind this “stress-free meat” business might like to explain to lions that they need to have respect for the feelings of their prey, and perhaps look at some other method of killing them that doesn’t involve a traumatising chase, or the slow and probably painful means of asphyxiation to kill it.
What this stems from is the same unfortunate root that spawned the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, the health-and-safety madness of the UK, PETA and just about every other dictatorial, monomaniac pressure group blighting modern existence. And that root is Minimal Risk.
The problem is that some lunatics take this laudable concept and turn it into the impossible goal of No Risk. And then there is the matter of defining risk…
I feel that most of these No-Risk squallers are selfish, fascist zealots, mainly because they want the world to deform itself to suit them. They want people who are not physical, mental and spiritual carbon copies of themselves to be forced to stop existing; their god is Procrustes.
If there should be a law to minimise risk that I would whole-heartedly support, it would be one to ban these sorts of ill-considered, high-handed we-know-better lobby groups.
People cannot be protected from everything, so they must be prepared to protect themselves. And in order to do so, they must be able to identify and gauge risks wherever they arise; the only alternative is to do away with the dangerous follies of human rights and sovereignty, and turn all the world into one gigantic prison, and ring every man, woman and child around with gates and bars and screws from cradle to grave, their entire lives scheduled and arranged for their safety, convenience, and maximal usefulness.
Do you ever wonder if the reason that different cultures have such wildly different onomatopoeias for the noise a cat makes is that cats have regional accents?
Actually, they do.
There’s a lot of evidence that animals have regional accents. Both birds and sperm whales in fact to vocalise differently depending on where they grew up.
As for felines themselves, there’s an ongoing study underway on at Lund University precisely about this.
As a phonologist who has watched entirely too many cat videos on the internet, I can confirm that cats of differing countries do have differentiated accents in their cries. Felines in England tend to have shorter, lower “mow” whereas Japanese cats do tend to make glides into high vowels, and are sustained longer, such as the ubiqutous use of “nyaaaan” in Japanese onomatopoeia.
Hope this helps.
WHAT? ?
Makes perfect sense since cats meow at humans as a specialized interaction with us that does not exist in the wild. Means their meows are cultural not inborn.
Not just cats. The songs of the tui differ from place to place as well. Those in Palmerston North sing differently from those in the Kapiti area.