theres a guy in my asian art hist. class who is visually the epitome of a redneck stereotype except hes an art history major and is very clearly passiomate about it
imagine a bowlegged white guy with a beard wearing flannel, a belt buckle, and cowboy boots talk about the intricacies of a hindu temple in sri lanka. this is the future liberals want
have y’all ever had communion bread that was just so….nasty? like i know we have to suffer as christians, but do we really need to have whole wheat bread as the body of christ?
my old church used hawaiian bread. my standards are high
Some old housemates of mine were Syrian Orthodox. At their church different members of the church took turns baking the bread that would be consecrated for the Eucharist. This was all well and good until one woman baked raisin bread. This led to the memorable occasion of a rather flustered priest, who had not seen the bread until that moment, declaring, “This – except for the raisins – is the Body of Christ.”
EXCEPT FOR THE RAISINS omg
Raisins are just dried grapes though, and wine is his blood so really its like a two in one shampoo & conditioner except with jesus
like a two in one shampoo & conditioner except with jesus
Molly Suzanna shared a story on Facebook that she had never told before: when she was 19, she ran a red light while crying, then was pulled over and forcefully removed and beaten by a police officer. She explains in the letter that she believes her situation would have been even worse had she been black — and she ends the letter with an important call to action.
The public needs to hear more stories like this as well.
Wow. This is horrifying.
Cops are drunk on power. Add any ism to that, you have a bunch of abusive, gun wielding, trained to kill, non empathetic, killers running around.
This woman got hauled out of a window, beaten, stripped, tortured, and humiliated, and she still is able to understand how white privilege saved her life.
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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this was the best time ever bc my host had just changed the tire and I was like “oh hell yeah an old tractor tire! you know what that means!” and everyone was like “no….” the French boys and the Norwegians were like “we dont actually” and I was like my god….I’m the only hillbilly here….it’s Up To Me
and I like to think of that as the only significant cultural impact I made.
everyone’s so worried about my tree trajectory but that’s the best part about rolling downhill in tractor tires: so much of the shock is absorbed by the tire so you can pretty much do anything. in theory. i’m not a doctor I actually don’t know you could probably still die. one of the guys I roped into this went over a huge boulder and went airborn for a hot second though so that was fun
I think my favorite experience with an American was when I said “I’m from Finland” and she said “Oh so do you speak Scandinavian?” and I swear to god nothing will ever surpass that moment
Actually I fucking lied I’m pretty sure to peak was when my mother was telling a cashier in a target that we couldn’t wait two weeks because we were on vacation and we lived in The Netherlands and she said “The Netherlands? you mean that peter pan place?”
i went to summer school in england when i was like 14 and there were some american people and when i said i was italian they started speaking spanish, and when i was like “hey i don’t know spanish can u pls speak english” they were like “but…. you’re from italy… do you not speak spanish in europe?” “No, we speak italian in italy” “oh, that’s a language?”
one time I frustrated this girl so much at one point by not speaking English around her to avoid conversations with her because she was a terrible person and she said “GO BACK TO FRANCE” after snapping one day, entirely convinced Italy was in France
Asdfaddahsd this reminds me of a girl in my geography class when i was in the USA who believed Paris was the capital city of Italy. She also couldn’t be convinced that Poland is a real country because she said it was made up for a movie.
I’m ashamed of my people.. 🙄
My boyfriend told me a story about when he went to Norway and while he was queing for something this American came in and started snapping his fingers yelling “GARCON! GARCON!” (Yes garcon not garçon like he wasn’t even saying it right AND was in the wrong country AND was being incredibly rude)
I’m from New Zealand. I’ve had Americans say to me:
“Where in Canada is that?”
“You speak such good English!”
*blank look*
“Is that the place where weed is legal?” (mixing up with the Netherlands I assume)
in grade 12 we were reading romeo and juliet and we were at the romantic-ass balcony scene and this hot girl in the class volunteered to read juliet’s parts and i put up my hand to volunteer for another part and the teacher goes ‘oh do you want to be the nurse, amanda?’ and i was like ‘no i wanna be romeo’ and the hot girl swiveled around in her seat to give me a Look™
she and i later ended up making out at a bunch of parties in university lmfao
in retrospect this moment was absolutely pivotal to my butch awakening but it was also just a lesbian power move
I too got a girlfriend over this play. In grade 10, I was reading the balcony scene to study with two other people (one guy and one beautiful girl) and I insisted point blank I had to read as romeo, because he had the most lines and I’m a dramatic little shit.
So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.
We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.
And then I look up.
And holy shit.
There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”
And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.
Juliet and I have also been together for more than 4 years now. She’s every bit as spectacular as she was when I was a lovestruck teenage Romeo, kneeling on the yellowed linoleum floor of second block english.
Mormons have some kind of list of which houses NOT to stop at; they will pass you by when they are out doing their missionary thing.
From the corner window, I saw two young guys in the white shirts and the ties walking up the block towards my sidewalk. Then they passed by and went up to the next house.
I assume it’s because I engaged the last pair of Mormon missionaries with questions: why no one ever told them the truth about old Joe Smith who was a conman arrested twice in New York before he invented Mormonism, why a supposed divinely-inspired text would be full of untruths about Native Americans, how old Joe Smith’s doctrine of religious polygamy was an attempt to bamboozle people who thought he was immoral for marrying several young girls …
I also assume they reported my questions back to their mission leader and he (well, it would be a he, wouldn’t it, knowing Mormon views of women in leadership) must have put my address on a no-go list to avoid the chance that I might contaminate the faith of a future Mormon.
Poor kids. They are lied to their whole lives. Poor me, I missed my chance to enlighten a couple of ‘em.
LOL They absolutely do X your house. My dad was a shift worker and they once woke him up about 30 minutes after he’d gone to bed. He answered the door, naked as the day he was born and furious, and threatened to strangle them all with their ties. They never ever returned–and my parents lived in that house for 25 years.
oh lord what a great story! Glad I wasn’t there to see it, though 🍑
Piling on:
I lived for a while in a communal household with a bunch of people who rescued animals, and for a while we had this incredibly sweet Burmese python named Dolores that we were caring for. She rebounded from neglect very quickly and was basically a joyful and energetic bundle of sunshine, but she’d had mites and they were hard to get rid of. Treatment includes coating the snake with olive oil and waiting an hour, which causes the mites to suffocate. Now, it’s not a good idea to put an eleven-foot long greased snake into a glass habitat, so the best bet was to hold her for the hour. This was a formidable task, as Dolores weighed almost seventy pounds, but as i am a robust and muscular individual i stripped down to my underpants, picked up Dolores, and went about my business in a very slippery and greasy way (i was test-fitting new fangs for halloween).
Which was when the mormons stopped by. My housemates had seen them from the front windows, which was why they insisted i answer the door.
Me, befanged, mohawked, tattooed, pierced, greased, naked except for a ripped and sagging pair of drawers and an enthusiastic and friendly seventy-pound oily snake: hi!
Dolores, who was really having such an awesome day: new friends? yes? hello? you have treats?
Mormons: sorry wrong house. (they actually turned whiter i did not think that would have been possible)
Me (to housemates): keep an eye out for the assembly of god folks, okay? we might as well do this right.
One of my SCA buddies was dressed to go to an event when the Mormons knocked. He answered the door in his black, hooded cloak, long knife strapped on, and then looked back and called, “Brothers! The sacrifices have arrived!”
As you might imagine, those were the last Mormons he ever saw at that house.
Not as dramatic as the above stories, but my stepdad was once moving into a 2nd story apartment and the Mormons dropped by. My stepdad, always on the hunt for an opportunity to be “a cheap bastard,” asked if they’d help him move his couch up the staircase. To their credit, they did help move the couch … but strangely enough he never got visited by the Mormons ever again after that day.
Wasn’t present for this as it happened before my birth, but it’s something of a family legend.
It was springtime during the years where my grandfather was making a go at being a farmer again, post retirement from the telephone company. Part of this was raising goats, so there were many baby goats bouncing around.
My grandparents had also just gotten a load of gravel delivered with the intent of covering the driveway with it. That hadn’t happened yet but the family children had leveled off a sort of plateau in the big pile while playing.
Enter the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
My mom was tasked with restraining Grandma’s gangster dogs, Clyde, Mugsy, and Ralph who were all offering to chase off the intruders very vocally. This landed my mom a front row seat for what went down next.
Grandma Sharon listens to the whole pitch very enthusiastically, smiling and nodding along. Eventually they get to the end and ask if she would like to attend services with them.
“Oh we’d love to,” she replied with her best, most innocent of smiles. “And in return we’d like you to come worship with us! We’re sacrificing a goat to Diana at the full moon!” And she swept her arm out to point at the impromptu rock pile alter.
As my mom says, “never saw two people leave so fast. And they never came back.”
Alas, I was never willing to do more than just explain I had a morman relative, was pagan, had read the book, and had no interest in converting. But should you want to be taken off the list, Mormons are told not to talk to people that have no interest in converting and are inclined to debate Christian theory, Mormonism, or really anything that might inspire doubt in the missionaries.
Onetime a couple of LDS missionaries came to my flat and I… don’t think I was that weird at them? I think I was wearing a blue & white vintage batik kaftan and maybe the place lowkey smelled of weed, but I was hyperfocused on comparative religion that month so I opened the door like “OMG are you guys Mormons? That’s awesome! I’ve been hoping you’d show up I want to know all about your religion and I didn’t know how to get in touch with you! Can I have a copy of your book? Do you want to come in?!” and they gave me a copy of their book (I never did get around to reading it), made an appointment to come back another day, and apparently blacklisted my place on the spot because I never saw them again.
Which was frankly a little bit rude of them.
so a former roommate had (British?) penal orange overalls, from dressing as Nathan from Misfits for Dragoncon one year, as an excuse to shout profanity. after the con, he wore the thing as pjs pretty often, and answered the door to greet a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in it at least once.
my roommate @decoplusboco usually talks to missionaries because comparative religion fan i guess
the one time i answered the door for someone who wanted to talk to me about jesus, it went something like
them: Hi! We noticed you moved in recently! Have you thought about attending [some church]
me, standing on a skull doormat, wearing all black with a prominent ankh ring: uhhhh no i. i wasnt thinking about that.
this is not counting the multiple times i thought girls were hitting on me at work when i was a barista and they were actually leading up to inviting me to church or telling me about jesus. you’d think this wouldn’t be an easy thing to mix up but
look, when a girl slides you a napkin with her number and “Call me! 🙂 “ written on it, i dont think im out of line in assuming she’s flirting. AND YET.
My mother got our house X’d when I was a kid. She accepted their free copy of the book of Mormon. They saw a plump little lady. She invited them to come back for tea a week later.
That was all the time she needed to read it and make a list of every theological and other contradiction in it. She took those poor guys apart.
People thought my mother had a degree in education or music because she was a music teacher. Or they thought she didn’t have one at all because of her appearance and manner.
What my mother actually had…
…was a degree in theology.
This wasn’t the only time she weaponized it against what she used to call “evan-jellyfish”
have to reblog for “evanjellyfish”
Thanks everyone for the wonderful and inspirational stories. As an atheist person who had to pass today by the humongous, empty, brand new and pristine Mormon church with a pristine never used basketball court (Ecuadorians are crazy about basketball…)*** and will see Jehowa Witnesses waiting for the catch of the day at the town plaza tomorrow, I appreciate this deeply.
*** Why the church existence irritates the shit out of me? Because I live across a school; kids in the communities up in the mountains wake up at 4:30am, to make it to school on foot or a bike. A small school bus or two… never mind.
Jehovah’s Witnesses: Have you heard the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Me, in full Roman gear, ready to go to an event: Yes…
Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are clearly very inobservant: Great! Would you be interested in joining us for a service?
Apparently Catch Me If You Can was going to include this con but they had to cancel the scene because when they tried to film it people kept walking up and trying to give Leo their money.
So a professor of mine used to work at a bank back in the day. She says one day a guy in professional attire and a clipboard shows up in a big moving truck. He says he’s from the home office and they’re changing all the chairs. He’s needs them to just load all their old chairs into his truck and later he’d be back with the replacements.
And that’s how they gave away their office furniture to a conman whose master plan was “Wear a tie and carry a clipboard.”
Looking professional is just a pass to do whatever the hell you want.
Put a suit on and you can get almost anywhere.
there’s more to it, look nice and ACT LIKE YOU BELONG. If you don’t look like you belong there, people will stop you.
this smacks of a chef i heard of that was tired to death that every single person ordered their eggs ‘over easy’, so asked the waitress to say ‘were out of over easy, we have plenty of scrambled’ and nobody questioned it
How low must your self image be to plan to rob a bank and all you take is some second hand chairs?
I 100% believe this was a former employee with a grudge.
Kid you not, this is how a sister store of mine got their entire dog treat bar stolen.
A couple of guys said they were with maintenance and they were there to replace the old bar with a new one and the employees were like “Seems legit” and they wheeled them out. The staff even helped them do it.
This is called a “Bavarian Fire Drill” and the trick to pulling it off is to have absolute confidence that it’s going to work. If you seem even the slightest bit nervous or hesitant, everyone will see right through it.
Case in point:
In 1906, a German con man named Wilhelm Voigt dressed up in a German Army captain’s uniform and entered the town of Köpenick claiming to be an “inspector” (inspector of what, he never specified). He managed to wrangle ten German soldiers and a sergeant into assisting him, ordered the local police to halt all telephone calls to Berlin for an hour, arrested the mayor and treasurer for nonexistent charges of crooked bookkeeping, and confiscated the town’s entire treasury complete with a receipt which he signed with his former jail director’s name. He only got caught (two weeks later) because his former cellmate blabbed, and was later pardoned by Kaiser Wilhelm II who found the whole thing hilarious.
That Kaiser is a definite bro.
This is why slytherins like to be fancy and professional looking
When you’re a trickster, it pays to be … low key.
I was hired to help test a security system once. I was sent in to a semi-large company and had to go through a list of certain objectives. My favorite one was “take something out of the building that is too big to hide on your body.“ I paired it with “get into a secured facility within the building.”
I walked in in my general business getup. Shirt, tie, jacket, nice pants, not quite “suit” because it was all just a little bit shabby and not exactly matching but not clashing. Nice briefcase. Clipboard.
Getting into the secured part was easy. Learned the name of the supervisor, told the security guard that “Cindy said they’d let me in without a problem on my first day. Something about the badges not being made fast enough.” Sure, no problem, go ahead.
Walked in, unhooked a PC tower, walked to the bathroom where I’d hidden a dolly earlier, went into a stall and changed into the outfit I’d had in the briefcase. It was what I’d consider workman’s clothes but a worker in an office, not like a construction worker.
Blue jeans, t-shirt, worker’s vest (low key), hat, good boots but 2nd hand.
Threw the tower on the mover’s dolly with a couple other things, stacked very slightly precariously but not likely to fall, walked over to the stairs leading down, and started going down to the way out, which I knew had a security guard on it.
As soon as I saw him see me I stumbled and yelled out. He came running over and helped stabilize everything. Helped me down the stairs. Held the door open for me and told me to “have a nice day” as I left. Never asked for my badge or even where I was going with the stuff.
Act like you know what you’re doing. Look like you belong. Be confident.
That’s 75% of it right there.
That is some Moist Von Lipwig bullshit right there and I am fucking delighted.
Steel Phoenix Studios 