consider the sperm whale and the squid. an ancient rivalry that dates back millions of years. we know the whales eat the squids. we know the squids do not make it easy for them. we know this because of the scars the whales carry, scars on the outside of their body, and on the inside as well. how badly must you want something to endure wounds inside your mouth? inside your gut?
consider the whale, who is harmed by what sustains her. consider the squid, whose flesh is soft and delicious but refuses to go down easy.
This post is about lactose intolerance I can smell it.
If I can recommend you do 1 low-effort thing for the love of God it is this:
Keep 5 cards in your pocket. One will say “yes”, the second will say “no.”
If you lose your voice, or lose speech, or want to make a dramatic embellishment at the right time, it is an elegant and efficient solution that is right there at hand.
But what if people question you from there? “Why do you have that card? Why would you do this? How long have you had that in your pocket?” For this, or whatever else they say, the third card: “I don’t have a card for that.”
“What the fuck,” they ask. They laugh. They are bemused. You bring the energy back down with the fourth card: “I have laryngitis. I’ve lost speech. My throat hurts”. Whatever you expect to occur.
The joke is over. Rule of threes. Now they are curious. YThey wonder about logistics. “How did you know I would say that? Is everyone so predictable?”
As a three-part bit, nobody ever sees the fifth card coming.
“I have powerful wizard magics.”
Gets them every time
On it boss!!
[id: a set of 5 UNO cards upon which has been written, “Yes”, “no”, “I don’t have a card for that”, “can’t talk right now 😢”, and “I have powerful wizard magics 🙂”. End id]
no Male Author Moment has ever made me cringe quite as viscerally as the ending of Grapes of Wrath and that was a full decade before I found out about this
Sanora Babb’s own novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was buried by the publisher after Grapes was published. It was eventually released in 2004, a year before her death.
My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner
A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’
‘…My school is older than your entire town.’
‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’
*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’
A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian. We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary. We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.
“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”
We all brace ourselves. A long bus ride? How long? We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible. We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.
The answer. “Two hours.”
Oh.
English people trying to travel around Australia and wildly underestimating distance are my favourite thing
a tour guide in France told my school group that a particular cathedral wouldn’t interest us much because “it’s not very old; only from the early 1600s”
to which we had to respond that it was still older than the oldest surviving European-style buildings in our country
China is both old and big. I had some Chinese colleagues over; we were discussing whether they wanted to see the Vasa ship (hugely expensive war ship which sank on it’s maiden voyage after 12 min). They asked if it was old, I said “not THAT old” (bearing in mind they were Chinese) “it’s from the 1500s.” To my surprise they still looked impressed, nodding enthusiatically. Then I realised I’d forgotten something: “…I mean it’s from the 1500s AFTER the birth of Christ” and they went “oh, AFTER…”.
My dad’s favorite quote from various tours in Italy was “Pay no attention to the tower – it was a [scornful tone]
tenth century addition.”
My last boss was Chinese, and she said when her parents came to visit her from Beijing they pronounced Chicago “A very nice village.”
This post keeps getting better
European problems include:
- Missing a turn and now you need to cross the border;
- Towns built 500 to 800 years ago with really small roads where cars can barely fit;
- That road/parking lot/etc they were building is gonna take twice the time to finish because they found Roman ruins AGAIN!
European problems extended:
WW2 bombs.
I love this post but also hate it because people never acknowledge the structures of native and indigenous people in America and Canada. We literally have pyramids here in Illinois that are thousands of years old.
There is stuff here from the Aztecs, but since it wasn’t made by settlers people think that America is only as old as when Europeans came over.
The population that got wiped out and displaced by Europeans is still here and needs to be acknowledged. America and Canada aren’t “young” and have more history than most ppl acknowledge.
RT only for the last post.
[Image description: headlines of WWII bombs either exploding unexpectedly in European towns and cities or being found during road works. /ID]
I went walking on some public footpaths in England and everyone was like “oh this one was a Roman roads, these are so ancient!” and I ended up cranky because there are ancient or at least hundred of year old roads in the Americas, we just don’t pay attention to them because Colonization.
To be clear - I don’t have any issue with OP’s statement (or even any of the reblogs). Im just cranky at the US educational system. And boomers, a little.
Where do you think the oldest shoes in the world are? China? Greece? Iraq?
they’re from Oregon:
Catalog #1-33612 and #1-31699 Sagebrush Sandals: Fort Rock Cave, Oregon, ca. 10,000 years old
