I was working with a seagull and I said “as someone in Wildlife I know I should never anthropomorphize animals or hold them to any human moral standard, but seagulls are capable of and regularly knowingly commit evil” and the vet tech with me said “no yeah that’s true.”
I can’t stand that magazine (…) One time Rolling Stone tried to write a political piece on us. I think the guy was deaf or his battery had run out. But it was very creepy. They have this very superior pseudo-intellectual approach to everything. They don’t approach anything with their senses. They were very nasty, and I wrote them a very nasty letter back, which they did print.
—
He wrote the letter on an airline sickness bag
“fucking proud of its music (not all).”
also can we talk about how well written this was???
when an intellectual wants to roast you
My sister and I have actually been talking about this very thing recently. People especially like to portray Roger as an idiot. But like, every last one of these guys are absolute geniuses. Freddie created the Queen crest, and he designed and created beautiful clothing. His sister owns two BEAUTIFUL, amazing coats he made. John sat his exams in the middle of recording Queen II (and passed) and returned the same day to continue recording. He basically created Queen’s sound system. He also boosted his own car’s engine, and kept track of the band’s finances. We all already know Brian is a fucking astrophysicist. Hello. And Roger was in medical school before switching to biology. And he pens things like this. Absolute artistic and logical, scientific geniuses, all four of them. It just floors me.
if youve never physically been in the presence of like, a real live wolf, and you probably wont get the chance to, heres some stuff about them you should know
a wolf’s fur is so unbelievably thick that you can get like, your whole hand into it while petting. and then you can keep going
wolves are a lot bigger than you think they are. think about how big you think a wolf is then just like double that
they dont really smell like dog but they DO smell and youre not going to be able to figure out if its a good smell or not
a wolf really wants to lick the inside of your mouth. he will not stop trying to lick the inside of your mouth at any cost, and generally speaking you need to press your lips together kind of tightly when he approaches your face so that he doesnt worm his damn tongue in there to give you what he thinks is an appropriate greeting
a wolf doesnt really want to look at you while you pet him but he wants you to pet him. hes embarrassed
if a grown ass wolf decides to lay down on you, you just have to deal with it and thats your life now
young wolves, much like young dogs, are overwhelmingly goofy and stupid. a teenage wolf will see your very fragile, very human shoulder and go “i can probably step on that with my full weight” and then he will do it
letting a wolf eat out of your hand is actually not remotely frightening, and youll want to do it all day
The Netherlands democratically puts a list of the 2000 best songs together every year around New Year’s and the biggest mystery every time is whether Bohemian Rhapsody wins again
i’m serious, if it doesn’t win, it’s second place
every winner before 2005 is Bohemian Rhapsody as well
why arent we talking about the constant presence of hotel california
I’ve had snakes tossed at me twice myself. Once during an animal demonstration at the zoo when the keeper holding a corn snake had a sudden and very intense hiccup, and once on an extraordinaily ill-fated middle school backpacking trip when one of the other girls thought she was picking up a necklace in the bushes and instead picked up a garter snake and panicked.
I’ve also had spiders, birds, cats, lizards and on one particularly memorable occasion, a small shark lobbed at me on acident. It happens, and cake is an appropriate way to apologize.
A shark?!
So when I was a kid, my ADHD was… much more visible to others than it is now- lots of physical stimming, climbing on stuff, starting a sentence on one topic and ending on another while leaving out the middle, poor impulse control and emotions at roughly 5000%. I didn’t get into trouble per se- I did well in school and didn’t get into fights but I was an extremely ODD child and probably very difficult for the more neurotypical kids to get along with.
This wasn’t an excuse for Anna to constantly tease and bully me, calling me things like “Retard” and “Freak” and organizing my social ostricization, and it DEFINITELY wasn’t an excuse for her mom, leader of the local girl scout troop to tell my mother, in front of me, that “She needs to get that condition treated so I know she isn’t a danger to the other girls before we can let her join.”
So my mom did what any reasonably pissed off woman would do for her extremely odd child and enrolled me in every Science and Outdoor summer camp she could, which is how I got to go to Marine Science Camp, which is hands down the best fucking thing I ever went to.
It was run out of a university research outpost to fund and get free labor a bunch of marine research in the San Francisco Bay, which means instead of being in a disused daycare with a bunch of bored highschoolers, I was hanging out at a combination marine science museum and spceimen zoo with a bunch of hyperinvested grad students. There was a gray whale skeleton, an above ground pool full of leopard sharks, the fiberglass dummy from Free Willy that one of the professors had stolen off the studio lot, and a semi-functional robot submarine we could drive around the part of the bay the camp was on. There were animal dissections, mucking about in tidepools, and lessons on the higher ed aspacts of marine bio, whcih was fantastic for my hyperfixating ass and the other 20-odd kids, pretty much none of whom could reasonably be called “neurotypical”
The BEST part was every week we’d go out on the university research boat and do the grad student’s transects for them. (A transect, for those of you that aren’t huge nerds, is when you pick out a designated swath of enviornment, AND COUNT EVER SINGLE SPECIES IN IT. fun time!) I didnlt KNOW thats what we were doing until years later when we went to do transects for AP Bio, but when you’re eight and the camp grad students say “Wanna run a net through this section of bay then identify every single animal in this bucket?” which means you get to handle the fish and Do A Real Science, YEAH THAT SOUNDS FUN BRIAN. HIT ME WITH THAT DICHTOTOMUS GUIDE AND A BUCKET OF PERCH.
So we’re out on the boat, hauling in the net and it’s… unusually heavy. this usually means we picked up a bunch of seaweed but whatever. Grad student Brian is getting us all hype about the net becuase he and his slipped disc are real glad he’s got a dosen kids to pull this in. He grabs the bag at the end with all the fish and whatnot in it the dump it into the sorting tank before the job of identifying everything is farmed out to us, and the bag is THRASHING.
“Looks like we got a shark!” says Brian, wildly excited by this. You never grow out of your love of sharks. Sure enough when the bag was opened, out spilled a multitude of anchovies, perch, small midwater fish and a four-and-a-half-foot-long Sevengill Shark.
It looked pretty much like this one (image source)
“HOLY SHIT.” Said Brian, swearing in front of the children becuase during the 80′s the sevengill had nearly gone extinct in The Bay, and this was the mid-ninties, so seeing them again was very exciting. “WE GOTTA TAG THIS THING.” He said, grappling the shark as it tried to make the best of the situation and hork down as much perch as possible. He got ahold of it, and started to jog up the boat to get it to the Big Tank but since he was ingoring Boat safety by not holding onto the rail AND running, he slipped on the stairs, probably cracked his patella, and accidentally lobbed the shark into the air.
Sharks are, strictly speakling, hydrodynamic and not areodynamic, but thier sleek bodies and fine tooth-like scale also do an excellent job letting them sail through the air on the rare occasions they are accentally lobbed at crowds of children by overexcited grad students, and the sevengill arced gracefully though the air, tail flapping in a vain attempt to steer, and landed nose-first, directly into my right eye socket.
A Sevengill is not an insubstantial animal and I was a pathetic waif of a child so the impact knocked me clean off my feet, but I had exactly enough presence of mind to think that I didn’t want the poor shark hitting the rough deck surface or flopping overboard before we could tag it for Science, so I managed to wrap my little arms around the thing, cradling it against my chest as I slammed into the deck, the open mouth of the extremely confused fish cutting a very dramatic slice into my cheek.
The next few minutes were a blur of screaming children, screaming adults and flailing shark but it got into the big tank safely and I managed to convince the grad students it hadn’t bit me that badly as I stood there, blood gushing down my cheek and onto my shirt.
Eventually things calmed down and Brian hobbled over to me and, after apologizing roughly twenty times for throwing a shark at me, asked if I would like to help the adults tag it, since I’d been so Brave?
WOULD I?
It was to my immense glee that I’d be going right after Anna in out baby’s-first-powerpoint-presentations about What We Did That Summer, so once she finished boring everyone with her trip to see a cousin get married in tenesee or something, I got to go up and show everyone the picture of me, surrounded by half a dozen grad students, holding up a shark almost as big as me, with the radio tracker I’d personally gotten to secure to it’s extremely bewildered head, still bleeding, and tell everyone about CATCHING AND TAGGING SHARKS FOR SCIENCE, AND SOMETIMES GETTING BITTEN, A LITTLE.
I never did get an apolgy cake from Brian but that vengence was so much sweeter.
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