my favorite student is this little excitable turkish kid who waves me over at lunch every day to holler a joke at me & then urges me to get the other teachers to come listen to his jokes. my favorite so far is Q: what do you call somebody who doesnt want you to go to the bathroom? A: a teacher (the other teachers did not find it as hilarious as i did)
this child, hollering at me in the middle of class: YOU NEED PUN.
me: yeah i do whats ur pun
this child: what was the real name of the titanic? …the fathership. ……….because fathers are Big.
me, at recess: hey u got any jokes today
this child, stumbling off a log & dramatically yeeting his paper hat full force for no apparent reason: i have,,,,, ONE. [dramatic pause] i really have to KETCHUP on fortnite
todays the last day i have this kids class & he was like “u need a GOOD final joke” & i want yall to know his final joke to me was: why are frogs so happy? because they eat what bugs them. he then proceeded to hug me for a solid minute while a bunch of other kids came & took turns hugging me,
This 100% was me at the zoo. Don’t touch Melon, he’s mean. Okay, but I have to touch Bob to make him get his stupid emu head out of my shirt, so what if I also touch Melon until he likes it?
Sephiroth is angery because he has one wing and sometimes attacks people? I want to pet him also. Also he won’t get off the rock I have to clean anyway, surely a little pets on the good side will be fine.
Martha and Stewart are assholes that tag-team while the pond is filling? I bet I could CUDDLE THEM.
The female deer will excitedly nuzzle you in the stomach for feeding them. This is fine, because they don’t have antlers. The male deer is locked up while we’re putting out food because he will gouge you to death with his little nubby asymmetrical horns, because he thinks the females are doing it.
The entire monkey enclosure will eat your fingers for a single fruit loop. They also have the smallest arms and can reach through holes they’ve made in the tarp on the gate to their enclosure. Do not hold hands with the monkeys. (2nd gen old man monkey will also pee on the keepers that don’t give him fruit loops. He is a jerk.)
The rehabilitated bear that still sits like she’s on a couch because she did that when she was living in a crack house? Yes, she looks chill. Yes, she looks The Softest. No, do not pet her back through the fence. No, do not go into the corridor and try to offer treats for pets.
Big Mac does not know he will break your ribs, but YOU know he will break your ribs. Do not enter Big Mac’s enclosure no matter how much he chuffs and displays his belly and rubs on the cage and looks sad. Yes, he genuinely wants pets. Yes, Pinkie is deliberately getting pets where he can see it as a sign of dominance even though she’s a housecat and he could eat her in approximately one bite.
The turtle is mean. Period. He is an old man and he does not like you. He does not like the parrot getting fries and he does not like that he is in a kiddie pool to warm up because his enclosure lost power, and he does not like you behind him preparing food for the owls and raptors. Petting him will not help this. He will rock back and forth and mean mug you forever because he is a grumpy old man.
All of the rabbits need more handling on principle. They don’t know you and they are very distressed that you’re taking their poop away. They can learn, a little, kind of. The guinea pig is insane and will not learn. Do not pet the guinea pig.
this post is gathering some highly blessed zoo stories i love it! thank you
as biologist, can confirm
brain: that frog is very small me: well spotted, brain brain: put smol frog in mouth me: no!
brain: that lynx…looks so fluffy… me: it does brain: we should pet it. me: it’s awake and angry so no.
brain: baaaaby bunny. me: yup. brain: baby bunny goes in pocket me: nooo it doesn’t.
theres something that feels very colonial/imperialist about superfood fads
the idea that a rare and exotic grain or berry from some pristine Ecuadorian mountain or a salt slab from “the himalayas”(those are all mined in Pakistan) will suddenly cure you with their magical benefits is all pseudoscience. eating more fresh produce is definitely good but the “magical nutrients” of those superfoods are no different than common produce, and there’s no food that makes you slimmer that’s not how calories work, its snake oil. and it causes damage from overfarming and making a once staple food in a community inaccessible when its value soars, leaving them open to predation from food giant.
anyways i’m just tired of Bethany from facebook bragging about “discovering” the health magic of some new plant from cambodia or whatever, but in reality it’s advertisers making this shit tantalising to justify an insane price markup of a superfood and playing to that colonial mindset that things from a foreign far away land used traditionally by its natives is instantly mystical and cool so you want it. frankly it reminds of the victorian’s egyptomania craze when people believed in the health properties of mummies
I have a friend that insists that sea salt and pink salt are better than “regular salt” because its “less processed” and has more minerals.
I’m not paying double for salt because of “extra minerals,” I get enough minerals from tapwater. ITS ALL SALT TODD.
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
adam sits in a window seat at the barns, a mug half full of coffee forgotten by his side, and a book open in his lap. he feels ronan’s approach and shifts to make room, the way he always does for ronan, without even looking up. this is a language they have long ago perfected; the slight movement of legs or arms, the rearranging of one’s self in a space so another fits in, the unthinking way either of them would shift in bed or on the couch or in a doorway so the other can share their proximity. ronan sits where adam’s legs had been stretched a moment ago and replaces adam’s cold coffee with a fresh one. there is a smile in adam’s voice when he thanks ronan, and a sarcastic answer lined with fondness in response. they sit there, adam’s feet tucked under ronan’s calves (to keep warm), and ronan occasionally reaching out to run his fingers down adam’s arm or across his palm, taking a sip out of adam’s second forgotten cup of coffee, sharing adam’s space and body heat as the glowing afternoon fades into a serene evening.
Every time my extended family gets together in upstate ny, we (the Adults) all get wasted & at least 1 giant Family Scandal comes out…..tonight is that night..
We’ve Got A Winner Folks, And It Involves Arson AND A Nun!
So apparently my aunt cecelia (not really my aunt, just the best friend of my dads cousin, whomst we also call aunt) once married a dude referred to only as Florida Asshole. He was named such because he apparently left my aunt cecelia while she was in the hospital, stole all of their stuff, and fucked off to florida. Aunt cecelia then hired a p.i. to find him, as u do, and went down to florida with my dads cousin (who was going to florida for a work trip, and had no idea Florida Asshole was there). Apparently the p.i. told aunt cecelia which city the guy was in, but hadnt found the exact address yet, so ofc aunt cecelia did what any other able bodied half insane scorned person might. She went to a costume shop, bought a full nun costume, and went door to door under the assumption that she was collecting charity. (She did, in fact, donate everything she collected. This was an important fact to her). At one of the houses, she looked in the window and noticed an awful lot of furniture that used to be hers. So she, obviously, went to a gas station and bought several cans of gasoline, threw a molotov cocktail through the front window, and began pouring gasoline over the rest of the house. At this point, Florida Asshole came outside, recognized his ex wife looking like a renegade nun sent to punish him for his sins, and began beating her. The neighbors, seeing the strange new man beating a nun in his front yard while his house was on fire, did the only sensible thing in this story and called the police. Who promptly arrested Florida Asshole for assaulting a nun. Aunt cecelia did not get arrested, came clean to her best friend, and was immediately sent back to new york with a ticket bought under my other aunt’s name. We don’t know if she still has an arrest warrant out for her in florida, and that’s tonight’s Family Scandal!
At the next family gathering im gonna sit down, unsuspecting, w my bottle of rosé and the scandal is gonna be when my cousin whips out her phone and opens it up to this post and then everyone’s gonna scroll thru my blog and im gonna stick my head in the oven
tumblr backup 