So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.
So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.
Well Shit! goes my grandfather, them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one. So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.
They’re gone for a LONG time. according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.
Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise! they have a Pheasant. Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant. Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen.
“TOM!!” She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point. “THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”
They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.
“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?”
“We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him. Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages.
Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot. They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods. They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.
And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.
“dubiously related man named uncle popeye” wasn’t even close to the wildest part oh my god! This is such a good story!!!!
So you prompted me to call my mother and ask how Popeye was related to them, and apparently he’s my great-grat-grandmother’s first-husband’s cousin’s son.
The First Husband is the whole reason my mother’s family came to america in the first place apparently. in 1902, he decided he didn’t want to be father to 9 girls anymore, so he went out for a pint one night and fucked off to Chicago without actually divorcing GGG. For a few years she thought he’d been killed and dumped in the Thames (these things happened in Liverpool in the 1900′s) and shortly re-married, and Second Husband fathered two more daughters with her, including my Great-Grandmother.
In 1908, First Husband wrote from Chicago for money. This was a problem because despite fucking off to another continent, they were still married, and GGG was committing bigamy. Despite pleading her case before the courts that Really, Y’all gave me his death certificate when he didn’t turn up after a month, they fined her an outrageous amount of money and only commuted her prison sentence because “her brood would place undue stain on the orphanage”.
Yes, really.
Second Husband, who was a halfway decent man that only beat her sometimes, suddenly dies of knife wound in a Pub fight, and GGG is left up shit creek with 10 girls and nobody willing to hire a bigamist maid. So GGG attempts to woo First Husband back to England. She goes so far as to pay a photographer to take Nudes of her to remind him what he left.
That was an exciting Christmas, going through an old album and finding THOSE.
Despite GGG’s heartfelt efforts and godlike booty, First Husband remained in the US, enjoying his new life of running credit scams and bootlegging.
After another 4 years of this nonsense, GGG gets the money to ferry herself and her brood across the atlantic to America, where they weren’t so uptight about the sex lives of domestic workers and she could probably get a job. The ALMOST come on the Titanic- we found the tickets next to the nudes- but at the last moment, Great-Aunt Liz catches the Measles, forcing everyone into quarantine and saving them from an icy death. They instead come on the next boat, and have to pick up the survivors of the Lusitania. Everyone gets lice and has to be shaved at Ellis Island.
Once in america, GGG finds out First Husband has died, For Realsies, please come identify his corpse and also he owes the state of Illinois like $500 in court fees so-
To which GGG goes “LOL, NO.” and moves to Cleveland with her Youngest daughter (my great-grandmother) and her new Russian husband, and takes over as manager of the local grocery store and leads a life of relative american-lower-middle-class comfort until her death in 1928 at age of 58.
…So you understand our confusion that GG knew of Popeye’s existence at all.
This is the quality content I am on tumblr for! 😂👍🏻 Thank you for sharing this and bless you and your family! 💕
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “’Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
That’s a great story. I’m not sure bus drivers in Rome would answer like this to Latin…
While in Alsace, Brett, Doug, and I had lunch at a restaurant/creamery/cheese-ery. The gratin was heavenly but way too rich for us to finish. There was enough left for 2 or 3 servings, so I suggested we take it back to the airbnb and reheat it for breakfast the next morning.
None of us speak French beyond a few basic words, so we spent a minute or two mumbling at the waitress, “s’il vous plaît, un…. uhhh… [google translate on phone] boîte?… uhm… boîte pour, uh… aller le, uh, le repas? Uhm…”
Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like
Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?
Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?
Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?
Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.
Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like
Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money.
These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them.
Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad.
“Looting? I thought these were supposed to be nonviolent protests”
I know it’s incredible! People are literally coming out of the woodwork to comment on this photoset to focus on the looting headline with “well yes it is nice they were helping people hit with the tear gas, but stealing is still wrong uwu” as if they’re back to kindergarten morality.
Like everyone who’s gone to boot camp I’ve been tear gassed. They put about 50+ of you in a gas chamber and toss it in. You have to stay there until your rank is allowed to exit. Before that though, you have to say your name, rank, and social security number. You then exit and file into ranks (again) outside and are not allowed at any point to rinse your face or eyes for the entire day.
That right there? Easily the worst part of boot camp. My eyes were literally swollen shut. I was blinded for a good 30 minutes and my chest hurt for days.
I have zero problem and not and ounce of judgement for people raiding a mcdonalds that can easily afford to repair damage for ANYTHING to help ease the shittiness that is being tear gassed. Esp because every one of us in boot were medically sound to deal with tear gas. Children, asthmatics, people prone to panic and anxiety attacks, the elderly as sooo many more are NOT going to handle tear gas well at ALL.
Or that smoke the police use either.
It’s easy to sit there and judge someone from the safety of your home and say things like “it’s just tear gas” or “it can’t be that bad”.
Fuck you. As someone who HAS been gassed, you need to stfu.
I remember all the preparation they did to get us ready for the gas chamber in boot camp. We were taught how to handle ourselves, how to control our breathing, not to touch anything, how to avoid the worst of the gas. But it still didn’t matter. I remember taking in that first breath and feeling like I had just been kicked in the chest. I remember a few guys in my platoon falling down and vomiting. We knew the gas wasn’t as bad on the floor but we were the fifth platoon through and the vomit kept us from bending over more than absolutely necessary. I remember a few guys, guys in peak health training to be infantrymen, breaking ranks and running for the door only to be dragged back in kicking and screaming until they said name, rank and serial. They were expecting it, trained for it, bragging about how it wouldn’t bother them. I remember standing there with all of the mucus from my nasal cavity on the front of my ACUs and thinking to myself “This is the nonviolent option?” Covered head to toe and my skin still itching I looked down at the silver wedding band hanging next to my dog tags and realized that the gas had eaten little pits into its surface. I stood there and thought of all the news reports I had seen over the years. The uprisings and revolutionaries being gassed, the crowds running from men in masks. That’s the moment I got it, staring at my ruined wedding band, that’s the moment I realized terrorism isn’t about bombs or who is using them. It’s about controlling people through fear. It’s about removing their ability to act reasonably, to make them seem like the monsters. Terrorism is about triggering people to fight or flight then blaming them for not being rational. It’s about power. Remove someone’s power to act with reason, and you remove their humanity.
Oh fuck
My god this commentary is perfect. Also a reminder that it turned out this “looting” was not that at all, the police bust that window with a bullet and the staff were gracious enough to hand milk out it seems, the protestors did not break in but even if they did just look at what they were trying to do with that milk, look at what they went through. The immense endurance that’s been shown by the people of Ferguson in the face of all this is incredible.
“It’s about controlling people through fear. It’s about removing their ability to act reasonably, to make them seem like the monsters. Terrorism is about triggering people to fight or flight then blaming them for not being rational. It’s about power. Remove someone’s power to act with reason, and you remove their humanity.”
aufanficfanatic said: Isn’t it like, 14 or something? I dunno man, educate me.
I’m so glad you asked @aufanficfanatic because I have so much to say!
In upper classes the children were considered the property of the family, so they married whenever the parents wanted them too. There were children of the nobility who where married as infants and then never saw their spouse until said spouse’s funeral due to the ague or whatever. Even the daughter of a simple gentleman might start feeling a bit alarmed if she hit 24 without any offers of marriage, but then her duty was to secure a suitable match.
The merchant, crafts, and agricultural classes were a bit different. And by a bit different I mean they were entirely different. A lot of this marry at first blink of puberty thing is part of the mythology that because the average age of death pre-1700 was about 35-40 that meant everyone died at forty. What really happened was that most people lived to 70 and half of all children died. Application of math tells us that if you add 70+0 and then divide by two the average death date is a bit misleading as a statistic.
The two most important things to people in a primarily agricultural culture is population numbers and food. You need more population to grow more food and you need more food for your population. There are other, more complicated factors such as the local nobility using the peasantry as cannon fodder, taxation, self-defense of the village, trying to avoid depopulation, but we’re going to skip that discussion.
Population is the big issue when it comes to marriage age, and let’s be honest. When we pick a teenage marriage age the picture people have in their minds is a forty year old man and a sixteen year old girl. This large age gap marriage mythology is a largely colonist era idea that means to depict sexual exploitation of children is natural and traditional for the purpose of corrupting men’s natural healthy instincts and discrediting cries of alarm from women.
But we’re not here to talk about politics, we’re here to talk about population. For Western Europe marriage was for the purpose of creating a home, a social, emotional, and physical support system – children were an expected part of that. However! Even among women who chose not to get married, and there was at least one bastard born every year, they chose to have their children at an older age.
There are several issues about a woman’s body that could get in the way of a young marriage age. First being that historically the first child a woman had usually died within a month, if the child was born alive at all due to a variety of issues like nutrition and stress on the woman’s body. You know how everybody tells women not to carry things? Well, European women didn’t always have that luxury. The older a woman was, the more like she would be to be strong enough to lose less babies.
Second, poor nutrition can push back puberty, or at the very least menstruation. This meant that many young ladies would only have superficial signs of puberty until they hit about sixteen, meaning that even if someone was going by some patriarchal conception of when a woman was marriageable, she’d only appear ‘on the market’ at sixteen, not be married by it.
Third, the woman’s body was insufficiently developed as a teenager, IE if she was sixteen or younger, her vagina would be smaller and her vaginal lining would be too thin as the thickness therein is determined by the amount of estrogen in the system. Usually the vaginal lining is not childbirth safe until the end of puberty, which depending on the female, is between 18-20. People are good at picking up patterns. They figured out pretty quick that women under eighteen tended to die during childbirth. I won’t be graphic, suffice to say they bled to death.
Fourth, due to apprenticeships and occupations, many women were too busy to get married as teenagers. Women had occupations other than some variation of mother or healer?!? Yes, rhetorical question, they did! If your last name was Baxter or Webster, not only do you descend from a woman who was a Master of her craft (baking or weaving respectively) but that one of your male ancestors took on her surname instead of the opposite. Other female heavy professions were black smithing, silver smithing, accounting, leather working, agricultural labor (except wagonering and plowing – no innuendo intended – that was more of a man’s job since they would often have to travel), administratrix (more legal than a steward, more useful than a lawyer), ale wifing and brewing, knitting and lace working, and notary-ing. Since having one or both of a couple having a craft occupation meant that their children would have a shoe in to a network of guilds it was of great benefit. Additionally since many men traditionally worked the land or went to war, it meant that their family would be taken care of if something happened to his health.
So there you go! Women generally started getting married after they finished their apprenticeships or when they reached about 20 and started having their own property and kept getting married until they were tired of it.
I will keep reblogging this until the last person who says any variation of “They married really early back then because everyone died at forty!” has been Informed of the Truth of the Matter. (That is to say, probably forever.)
Okay also I would like more explanation of the occupation of administratrix because I kind of want that on a business card now.
A person appointed by the court to manage and take charge of the assets and liabilities of a decedent who has died without making a valid will.
When such a person is a male, he is called an administrator, while a woman is called an administratrix. An administrator c.t.a. (cum testamento annexo, Latin for “with the will annexed”) is appointed by the court where the testator had made an incomplete will without naming any executors or had named incapable persons, or where the executors named refuse to act. A public administrator is a public official designated by state law to perform the duties of administration for persons who have died intestate.
An executor differs from an administrator in that he or she is named in the decedent’s will to manage the estate. If an executor dies while performing these duties, a court will appoint an administrator de bonis non cum testamento annexo (Latin for "of the goods not (already) administered upon with the will annexed") to complete the distribution of the decedent’s estate. This term is often abbreviated: administrator d.b.n.c.t.a.
(West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc.)
What this means is an administratrix would see to the burial, settle debts and disputes, help sell or divide goods, occasionally help to assign guardians to minors, and sort through who had a right to what which meant finding distant heirs on super rare occasion. It was an awesome job and great for women like maiden aunts who knew everyone and everything in a town.
This one time a dark wizard tried to kill me when I was a infant but couldn’t
Stab
I tried to hold an angry cat
someone put an iron on my hand
My teammate tried to jump over me and cut the back of my neck open with his hockey skate.
I got a couple left over from chicken pox.
tried to climb a dead tree
as a child I came up behind a sleeping dog with a squeaky toy in my mouth
Twisted up in rusty metal chains.
Learned the hard way:
– Why you don’t pull a cat’s tail (I was two) – The importance of shoring up roof structures – Why you don’t use a poorly balanced cinderblock as a support when drilling – Burny things are hot – Rotted fence palings make a surprisingly effective flail when they snap in half back along your inner arm as you pull them down. – Win the fight before your opponent has the chance to hit you in the face with a metal chair
Spider bite that got infected. Doctor informed me, “Oh, it must have bitten you while you were asleep!” and I stayed awake the entire next night in paralytic terror and also pain.
Poorly planned re enactment of 101 Dalmatians.
i was 2 and my mom told me not to do something but i did it anyway
I slipped and cut my arm open
Evil cat. Playing the game spoons with plastic butter knives. Nearly taking a need to the eye.
Tried to outrun the tide when climbing up some rocks /closer/ to the water.
Was using heelys while walking my dog late at night when I couldn’t see tiny rocks in my path.
Fred n I push each other’s buttons.
I forget where I put my iron, then I find it.
I literally thought rolling in a ditch was some sort of hillarious passtime, and there was a stick.
My wart fell out.
Also, I was slicing some cheese with a hooky knife and my thumb was there.
When I was in the special “hand and arm” PT clinic after breaking my wrist, they had a whiteboard much like the above, and in one corner was simply the phrase “slicing a bagel” with a number of hatchmarks underneath it. Also notable was “caught myself on a sandbar while canoing”.
But my absolute favourite was “Bitten during a fight over who got to eat the last Cheeto (we are both 22).”
I have fair but excessively freckled skin and thus don’t scar, so despite my reputation for extreme injury during non-extreme experiences (cooking, walking on flat dry pavement, being in a parked car, poor aim by a nurse whilst removing a cast on the abovementioned broken wrist) I have no interesting scars.
– angry little birb – scared medium birb – dog fight – v. angry v. big birb
…I might need to rethink my love of animals
Wore roller skates while playing sidewalk tag. Jumped a path, slid forward down a tiny grass hill, and my arm hit the concrete. Compound fracture that nearly severed a nerve in my right wrist. Ended up wearing a cast for three months. 👍
tried to ice skate while on a school trip in the second grade; promptly ate shit on the ice & split my lip open. 2 stitches later and I still have a scar I have to cover up with lip liner =w=;;;;
My tray of granola slipped out of the potholder backwards toward my arm when I pulled it out of the oven.
Apparently my director went to see a production of West Side Story a few years ago, and the guy playing Chino forgot his gun before coming out for his final scene. Once it got to the big scene where he is supposed to shoot Tony, he screeched “Poison Boots” and kicked the actor playing Tony until he went down. The girl playing Maria then had to jerk the shoe off of Chino’s foot, and had to do the gunshot scene asking “How many kicks Chino? How many kicks, and one kick left for me”.
There should be a blog dedicated to theatrical urban legends. Like that opening weekend of Dracula where Dracula (still hungover) vomited all over the audience during the first stage direction that everyone has a friend of a friend that worked on the show and was there.
or the one where the bridge never came out for Javert’s suicide and so he just pretended to stab himself and then lay there until the lights went out
best story i heard was when a friend of mine saw a show where juliet forgot to bring the dagger out on stage so she just ripped the squib out of her chest and blood squirted everywhere
During a passion play a friend of my brother was supposedly in, one of the roman soldiers who was supposed to stab jesus on the cross and accidentally grabbed the wrong spear- he was supposed to grab one with a fake tip, but instead he grabbed one with an actual metal tip and, well
Jesus screamed “JESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED ME”.
Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadn’t been adjusted.
So Jesus, instead, ROCKETED UP into heaven (or, just, above the stage).
This is wild from start to finish
I was in Peter Pan once and one night at a performance, the adhesive holding our Hook’s mustache on was wearing off. It was near the end with a big fight scene and when he got attacked, he let his mustache fall and went “YOU RIPPED MY MUSTACHE OFF!” in a scandalized tone and it added a new note of hilarity to the whole scene (which was supposed to be funny anyway)
In my seventh grade play, which was a midsummer night’s dream, Thisbe didn’t have a sword so she stabbed herself with a coathanger
My junior year we were doing Romeo and Juliet and after Juliet poisons herself it was supposed to go dark and she’d get off the stage. well the light crew accidentally turned them back on and Juliet who was sitting up slammed back down on the wooden bed with a loud bang. To which my theater teacher says into the com “zombie Juliet” and everyone who heard that had to keep as quiet as possible while our eyes were filling with tears.
i attended my county’s performing arts high school majoring in vocal studies, (mostly geared towards musical theater and opera styles) and once a year we got a field trip to new york (we were in jersey, so it’s not exactly far). we would do one touristy thing, an actor’s workshop with friends of our teachers working in various performing industries in nyc, and then see a show.
my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadway’s The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.
in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one night’s performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.
so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-
everyone froze. and then all ran off stage positively HOWLING with laughter.
the lesson: sometimes there are fuck ups you just can’t recover from.
During a high school production of Beauty and the Beast, where I was assistant costumer and assistant prop master, our director decided that we needed to spice up Gaston’s introduction. You know: in the movie, when Lefou runs in trying to catch the duck/goose that Gaston has just shot out of the sky?
Originally, the actors were going to stroll on stage with our Lefou hauling in the really neat (and real!) taxidermied deer head that we had found in a local thrift store. Now, two days before opening night, our director wants Lefou to run in from off stage and catch a stuffed duck that Gaston has just shot. This, of course, requires two things to work properly as a scene: a gunshot noise, and a stuffed duck.
The gunshot noise, we had covered. Blue-collar, redneck school? Guns a plenty to record. The stuffed duck? Harder than you might have thought to obtain.
Three hunting stores, two taxidermists, and one Pet Supply Store ™, I’d finally found a semi-realistic pheasant squeaky toy. What follows is an account of the ways this dog toy managed to be the nightmare prop of the six show run.
Opening Night: The stagehand, who was supposed to drop the bird from the ceiling catwalk, missed his cue and didn’t drop the it. Lefou’s actor rolls with it and does an excellent job of looking around foolishly before getting cuffed upside the head by Gaston. The stagehand then drops the bird squarely on Gaston’s head. Cue laughter.
Saturday Matinee: Different stagehand throws the bird instead of dropping it and beans Lefou directly in the face with the prop. Lefou falls over. Cue laughter.
Saturday Night: Bird is missing during curtain call. Director hauls the deer head down from it’s place on the tavern wall and tells Gaston and Lefou to revert to the old blocking i.e. no gunshot, no bird, just walk in with trophy. During Gaston and Lefou’s conversation, gun shot sound goes off and a stagehand throws the bird onto the stage…from the wrong side of the stage. Lefou and Gaston stare at it in awkward silence for a solid thirty seconds before Lefou makes off-script, subtle joke about Gaston’s gun going off late instead of early. Cue adults in the audience laughing.
Sunday Matinee: Director begs the stagehands to get the cue right at least once. Gunshot and bird prop go off without a hitch. Lefou accidentally catches the prop when it falls from the catwalk. He’s so startled that he caught it that Gaston runs right in to him. They drop both the gun and the bird props, and grab the wrong prop in their scramble. Gaston spends the rest of the scene gesturing dramatically with a stuffed pheasant, instead of a gun.
Sunday Night:
Director is fed up with bird prop, decides that Lefou should just carry bird prop in after gunshot happens off stage. Lefou accidentally squeezes the prop during the intro conversation, startling both actors into silence with the squeaky toy noise – apparently, neither of them realized it was a dog toy.
Monday Elementary School Show: Lefou walks on stage with the bird. Accidentally drops the prop during conversation with Gaston. Gaston doesn’t notice the dropped prop and steps on it. Cue depressingly sad squeaky toy noise. Cue ten years olds laughing.
In a dress rehearsal for Peter Pan, Wendy forgot one of her lines and started singing the star spangled banner and the audience was singing along and people got emotional
Once during the closing night of our high school production of south pacific, we were havin our pre-show pep talk, and our director reminded everyone (mostly seniors) not to go off script to try to be funny. Of course we had one lead who decided to ignore this advice. So during one scene where the sailors were “fishing” at the edge of the stage, he decides to pull up his rubber fish, make a comment about how it wasn’t big enough, and throw it back into the “ocean”, which of course, was the audience.
Now, this probably wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if he had gently tossed it, since it would have landed right behind the pit. But naturalt, he decided that this fish had to break free in the most dramatic way possible, so he winds up and chucks this fucking foot-long rubber fish with all of his strength.
So now imagine the stage crew, all of us huddled together, silently screaming as this limp fish goes sailing over the heads of the audience in what looks like a low-budget reenactment of free willy, only to slap some poor parent across the face.
I swear, you could almost hear the chorus of “mmmm whatcha saaayyy” rising from all those backstage.
From that moment on, all rubber fish were ferociously guarded by yours truly, under the direction of our stage manager.
This post gets better every time it shows up on my dash
My Junior year of high school our drama club put on Peter Pan,which involved the construction of a small boat fashioned out of scrap wood,plaster and an old wagon. A few of the actors who were cast as pirates had to ride the boat-wagon down the aisle to the front of the theatre,which had a concrete floor that sloped. About halfway down the brake they were using to control their speed gave out,and they crashed into the front of the stage at high speed.The entire boat imploded. The actors just sat there in silence for at least a full 10 seconds in the midst of the wreckage before my friend Adena screamed “ABANDON SHIP” and they all jumped out and took off running.
My school once did a parody of Cinderella and I was Cinderellas dog. At one point Cinderella, the Fairy Godmother, and the dog had to flea the ball. I thought going down the stage steps wasn’t dramatic enough for “fleeing” so I launched myself off the stage and landed painfully in the center isle about three rows in accompanied with a very, very loud thump of face on concrete where I laid there like a dead fish for a while. At this point Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother got to me, not knowing what to do they stepped over me and continued running. But Cinderella had forgotten to loose her shoe so half way out of the room she chucked it back where it hit me in the head. I bolted upright and ran shrieking hysterically out of the room. A moment later the Prince came down to where the shoe was picked it up, looked dramatically at where I had exited and said “I hope that dog’s okay.” completely forgetting his line.
This may be my all time favorite post.
I was once in a production of “Hello Dolly!” and the two leads were complete jokers and would prank each other during rehearsals all the time. The rest of the cast never thought they would do that during a show, but they told the chorus (separately) that they each were planning to add some tongue into the final kiss between Dolly and Horace. Of course, we told neither of them about the other’s plan, so during the very last show, we were all waiting in the wings to see what would happen. What happened was we ended the show with the two leads violently frenching each other on stage as the curtain dropped. They started dating two weeks later.
Last year we did “Once Upon a Mattress” and the jester was supposed to do a somersault off of a stack of like 3 mattresses and then the minstrel and Lady Larken would be covered up with a blanket, but during one show the jester knocked down one of the mattresses and we had no time to fix it so we had to throw the mattress on top of them
In my Freshman year of high-school we put on a performance of Les Mis. In said play there’s the scene where Javert and Valjean confront each-other by the bedside of the now dead Fantine. well, Javert Had his prop weapon (I can’t remember if it was a sword or truncheon,) but Valjean didn’t have his. So we the Crew decided during our builds that we’d rig up a chair to break so our Valjean could use one of the broken legs as a club kind of thing. For all of our shows it went off without a hitch, but for the last one we decided to have some fun.
Originally we really just weakened one of the legs so it would break off after our Valjean hurled the chair on the floor, but for the final chair we too saws and cut into everything. All the legs, the back poles, everything. We cut it just enough so that our Valjean would be able to sit in the chair and not break it, but when he tossed it on the ground? Chaos.
And that’s what happened.
All we told him before the show was “When your toss the chair on the ground, give it your all.” And so when the scene came all of the crew gathered behind the legs and assorted hidden places of the stage to watch. When our Valjean hurled the chair to the ground it shattered. Wood and splinters went in practically every direction and I’m sure that I even saw our Fantine flinch as she feigned death. There was no chair leg left for him to use.
So we all got to witness as our Valjean fended off Javert with naught but a splinter.
Fun times.
THERE ARE BETTER STORIES EVERY TIME I LOVE THIS POST SO MUCH
Back in high school our drama department was putting on a comedy, whose name escapes me now, but the intro starts off telling how the hero was born. The two actors playing his parents came out from either side of the stage and joined in the middle and waved at the audience while the narrator spoke the story. At one point he states ’ they had a bouncing baby boy…’ and a toy baby was literally thrown on stage with a ’ AWAAA’ baby sound effect, then was caught by the father and given to the mother.
Now the first show went off without a hitch.
The second show, my friend was the stage hand that threw the baby on stage.
My friend was also the star quarterback for our football team.
Second show comes on, actors meet in the stage and wave, narrator says his line… And from right stage with the sound effect on cue this baby doll was fucking HURLED into the air about 10 fucking feet and dropped like a sack of wet rags down to the actors and the father actually CAUGHT it first try.
I have never in my life seen the 8D face on an actual person until that day.
Fun fact: Gender and Sex are both human made constructs designed to describe natural phenomenon but are not actually based in any biological reality. Much like the concept of “species”, it’s a model, and no model is an actuality – then it would not be a model, it would be a fact.
In truth sexual characteristics are diverse and varied and do not always match up with sex chromosomes; also, a sexual “binary” of sorts is not constant amongst all living things, and most organisms have other systems of reproduction.
Furthermore, gender is the suite of societally-defined social roles and behavioral characteristics that is typically assigned based on the externally perceived sex of a child; and does not actually have anything to do with biology – even less so than sex. Even though it is assigned based on this externally perceived sex, a person’s gender does not have to remain with the one assigned; much as we don’t determine people’s careers based on who their parents were anymore, your birth has no limitation on who you are and what gender identity you construct for yourself. Since it is a societally defined construct, people can and do construct more than the two traditional ones, and all are valid.
Just because you cannot handle your societally constructed worldview surrounding sex, gender, and genetics being dismantled by sociology & biology itself doesn’t mean, additionally, that you have the right to make other people feel unsafe and uncomfortable – in short, that you have the right to remove people from moral consideration – simply because you don’t like having your world view being dismantled. Believe it or not, the complexities of human behavior & the diversity of sex and reproduction in life cannot all be covered in a simple high school biology class.
So next time you want to say “didn’t you pass biology” remember: a biology PhD student, who graduated from the University of Notre Dame with an actual degree in Biological Sciences, has reminded you that you’re wrong.
There are more than two genders.
The end.
Sex is biological tough… It’s not a social construct… It’s not time, racism etc. It’s a physics attribute.
Why are you trying to argue with someone who said species is a constructed model and not a fact? You’re not going to change someone’s mind when they’re that far down the rabbit hole
Me: Spends 6 years intensely studying biological science and evolution at two major universities with widespread academic acclaim, earning honors and high GPAs and am currently working on a PhD in the subject of biodiversity and evolution
You: Somehow thinks they know more because you took a couple of classes
Lol
…Buddy. Buddy. Dude. I really don’t think you want to open this can of worms.
I mean, I know that in school they teach you a very clean, concise, definitive way of doing things and you’ve probably learnt something like the definition of a species is a population of organisms that are able to reproduce and produce viable offspring, or something. But I mean literally anyone who has done even undergrad biology can tell you that that statement is incredibly reductive and incredibly controversial in the scientific community [1][2]. In fact, you probably don’t even need a background in biology to spot the obvious flaw in the logic there, which is the fact that organisms classified as different species do reproduce and produce viable offspring. Quite a lot, actually. Lions and tigers (Panthera leo and P. tigris), coyotes and grey wolves (Canis latrans and C. lupus)… In fact, there’s even a word for new species arising through hybridisation between existing species – hybrid speciation [3]. The great skua (Stercorarius skua) is believed to be an example of this in animals [4], and another interesting one that may be pretty much hybrid speciation in action (though not nearly anything that can be called a new distinct species yet) is the so-called “Eastern coyote”, a population of wild coyotes in the eastern US that are mixed with grey wolf and domestic dog, and can contain as much as 40% non-coyote DNA [5].
And, in fact, the ability of two organisms to reproduce and produce viable offspring actually has very little with how we choose to classify them, because evolutionary and genetic relationships are rarely that simple. For example, some species that are the same genus – e.g. horses (Equus ferus) and donkeys (Equus africanus) can interbreed, but their offspring are usually sterile [6], while other species that are different genera to each other can interbreed to produce intergeneric hybrids, some of which are even fertile (for example crosses between false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) and bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) [7], or between king snakes (genus Lampropeltis) and corn snakes (genus Pantherophis) [8]). Most “exotic” domestic cat breeds (e.g. Bengals and Savannahs) also fall into this category – for some reason felids are genetically Weird in that a wide variety of species in the family Felidae seem able to interbreed with each other, no matter how different or distantly related they are. I mean…
Look at this shit. Now bear in mind that the domestic cat (Felis catus) is known to be able to interbreed with species in the caracal, ocelot, lynx and leopard cat lineages in addition to those in its own lineage, and if that wasn’t bad enough puma/leopard hybrids are a thing that exist. Those species aren’t even in the same subfamily, let alone genus or genetic lineage – the leopard is classed as subfamily Pantherinae, genus Panthera (P. pardus) while the puma is classed as subfamily Felinae, genus Puma (P. concolor).
Although these aren’t even the most distantly related species that are able to interbreed – domestic chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) are known to hybridise with guineafowl [10], and the offspring of these crosses are interfamilial hybrids since chickens and guineafowl are classified in different families (chickens belong to family Phasianidae, guineafowl to family Numididae).
And of course another place where the “able to interbreed and produce viable offspring” definition falls apart is with organisms that reproduce asexually or without the need for a sexual partner, which is even more complicated when you consider that some species (for example, some species in the paraphyletic whiptail lizard genus Cnemidophorus) aredioecious, meaning they have separate sexes, and reproduce by producing gametes via meiosis, but have actually lost the ability to reproduce sexually somewhere along the evolutionary line – these species reproduce predominantly or entirely by parthenogenesis (essentially a form of self-cloning) and the Y chromosome has been entirely lost in the population. This also ties into hybrid speciation because it is believed that these parthenogenic species arose from hybridisation between two or three sexual species [11][12], leading to polyploid individuals (i.e. those with ‘extra’ sets of chromosomes) – for example, the all-female parthenogenic species Cnemidophorus neomexicanus is actually a hybrid of two sexual species, Cnemidophorus inornatus and C. marmoratus (or C. tigris, according to Wikipedia), and thus new individuals of this species can be formed either by parthenogenesis in a single C. neomexicanus parent, or sexual reproduction between a male and female C. inornatus and C. marmoratus/C. tigris [13]. Some female parthenogenic species are also able to interbreed sexually with males from sexual species, resulting in hybrids which may or may not also be parthenogenic [14].
So you can ask, well what the fuck is a genus, or a species for that matter, if it doesn’t necessarily indicate whether two animals are genetically similar enough to interbreed or not? And, more to the point, is there a strict set of quantitative criteria that defines whether two populations of organisms are classified as the same or different species? And I mentioned speciation, which brings up the question, when exactly in the process of evolution does one species actually become another?
The thing is, there aren’t actually definitive answers to these questions – if you ask a bunch of biologists what a species is, it’s likely you’ll get different answers. “Species” also has a number of definitions [15][16], mainly depending on the type of organism being studied and the angle it is being studied from. For bacteria, for instance – where “similar enough to reproduce” really isn’t applicable – I think the general consensus is that individuals are grouped together if their genetic similarity to one another is 97-98% or higher, while a similar definition of “organisms that are highly genetically similar to one another” tends to be used for asexually reproducing organisms such as some plants, and parthenogenic animals like whiptail lizards or Bdelloid rotifers (which does of course raise the question of what exactly “highly similar” means – any decided-upon cutoff point will necessarily be somewhat arbitrary). Such groupings of organisms may be referred to as phylotypes to distinguish them from the reproductive definition of a “species” [17]. Likewise, a lot of ecological writing will define species and speciation according to reproductive isolation, which isn’t necessarily synonymous with reproductive compatibility – reproductively isolated populations may be genetically able to reproduce, but be prevented from doing so or unlikely to do naturally so due to differences in geographical location, habitat or behaviour (think lions and tigers). These are some of the many different “types” of species, with either competing or overlapping definitions of what exactly constitutes a species in each case:
Morphological or typological species (morphospecies)
Phylogenetic species
Evolutionary species
Genetic species
Genalogical concordance species
Reproductive species
Autapomorphic species
Ecological species
Recognition species
Phenetic species
Isolation species
Cohesion species
…You get the idea.
For vertebrates, I think generally the two most used definitions are the biological species concept (BSC) and phylogenetic or cladistic species concept (PSC), which differ in their criteria for what they consider a species [18][19]. PSC, for example, doesn’t include a subspecies category while BSC does – and thus, some organisms that are classified as subspecies of the same species under BSC are either classified as different species or are lumped together as the same species under PSC. For example, grey wolves and domestic dogs. The domestic dog is/was often considered a separate species to the grey wolf, for obvious (morphological/behavioural) reasons – the wolf was Canis lupus, the dog C. familiaris – but since dogs are descended from wolves (a now-extinct lineage of wolves, not modern grey wolves [20], but Canis lupus nonetheless) they are more properly classified as a subspecies, C. l. familiaris. Likewise, having also ultimately descended from wolves, the dingo is officially classified as C. l. dingo, although there is some debate about that – at one stage I remember it being classified as a “subspecies” of domestic dog, Canis lupus familiaris dingo (and it’s still, to my knowledge, widely considered to be descended from domestic dogs [21][22], in which case the second name would be more correct), while still other people classify it as a completely separate species, Canis dingo [23]. You can see why species boundaries and definitions can get murky, especially when the exact evolutionary origins of a particular animal are unknown or hotly contested.
In fact, canids as a whole are kind of a mess when it comes to phylogeny. How many species of wolf there are really depends on who you ask – some populations traditionally classified as subspecies of the grey wolf, for example the Indian wolf (traditionally C. l. pallipes), the Himalayan or Tibetan wolf (traditionally C. l. chanco) and the Eastern wolf (traditionally C. l. lycaon) have been suggested instead to be classified as separate species – Canis indica, Canis himalayensis and Canis lycaon, respectively [24][25]. Likewise, just last year it was discovered that what was thought to be an African subspecies of the golden jackal (Canis aureus) had in fact been misidentified and was instead an undiscovered species of wolf, now the African golden wolf (Canis anthus) [26]. And then there’s also the fact that, despite being called “jackals”, the black-backed and side-striped jackals actually aren’t very closely related to the golden jackal, or indeed to any of the rest of the genus Canis [27]. In fact, going by the cladogram below, you can see that the African wild dog and dhole – both of which are classed in their own, unique genera (Lycaon and Cuon, respectively) – are actually placed closer to wolves, golden jackals and coyotes than black-backed and side-striped jackals are, even though both of the latter species are considered part of genus Canis (the black-backed jackal is C. mesomelas and the side-striped is C. adustus). Many sources also say that these two species differ from the rest of the group in that they have only 74 chromosomes, while wolves, coyotes, golden jackals, African wild dogs and dholes all have 78. This makes the moniker of genus Canis somewhat useless when trying to determine exactly how genetically similar these animals actually are to one another.
And this isn’t even touching the issue of the “red wolf” (Canis rufus), a critically endangered so-called “species” of wolf closely related to the grey wolf, eastern wolf and coyote, which more recent molecular and genetic analysis has revealed may simply be a wolf/coyote hybrid [29]. Of course these classifications aren’t set in stone, either – new studies and discoveries are constantly uprooting and rewriting our knowledge of phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships among species. Sometimes it’s also pretty much impossible to accurately represent the relationships between similar-but-distinct populations using only the terms “genus” and “species”, which is where alternate concepts like species complex, subgenus and superspecies come in.
Another feature of evolution and speciation that makes classification difficult is what are known as ring species, in which a series of neighbouring populations of organisms may evolve divergently (i.e. undergo allopatric speciation) in such a way that each geographically adjacent or overlapping population can interbreed with the next, but the last population in the “ring” has diverged to the point that it can no longer interbreed with the first (basically, population A can interbreed with population B, B with C and C with D, but D can no longer interbreed with A).
When does the actual split occur, and at what point in the ring can we consider the populations to be different species? We just don’t know. (And in some cases this is considerably more messy and complicated than even the ring species model makes it seem [32]). The point is, though, that there is no definitive, universally agreed-upon cutoff point at which we can say with certainty that two organisms have evolved sufficiently as to become different species, any more than you can definitively say where along a rainbow spectrum of colours red becomes orange or orange becomes yellow. The decision whether to lump or split taxa becomes even more arbitrary in paleontology than it is with extant species [33][34] – when you’re working with an incomplete fossil record and pretty much going entirely on morphological similarities since genetic or molecular analysis often isn’t possible, there isn’t really a way to conclusively determine whether that specimen you found represents a new species, a new genus, or is simply a larger/smaller/juvenile/unfortunate-looking version of an already-described animal. Many specimens now believed to be juveniles of previously-described species were originally believed to be completely new ones – for example, Nanotyrannus is now often (but not universally) agreed to be a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex [35], and Dracorex and Stygimoloch are considered immature specimens of Pachycephalosaurus [36]. And then there was the whole deal where Brontosaurus didn’t exist for a while and then it did again and it was all very confusing [37].
Obviously, at the end of the day, a zebra is materially different from a dog in the same way that, to get back to the original topic, a penis is materially different from a vagina (actually a bad analogy since homologous reproductive organs are much more similar to each other than taxa that have been separated for millions of years, but anyway). The biological differences and similarities themselves exist, but any attempt to categorise and quantify them will necessarily rely on socially constructed and frequently arbitrary models, definitions and assumptions. That’s basically what science is – a continuous (and frequently wildly inaccurate) attempt to try to make sense of reality. We often attempt to understand or make predictions about reality using mathematical or quantitative models of the situation or by sorting things into sets and categories, which is useful and necessary in many cases but is also often far too simplistic to be taken as any kind of gospel truth regarding the actual nature of reality, because simply put reality doesn’t care for or abide by human-made rules and categories. Essentially, we’re trying to find quantitative ways to represent things that are by nature qualitative, and that’s always going to be arbitrary to some extent. Obviously biological characteristics (whether genetic, sexual/reproductive, etc.) objectively exist and would continue to exist if humans and human culture were to suddenly disappear, and in that sense, things like sex, gender and taxonomic classification can be said to be basedin biological reality. But human attempts to define or categorise these characteristics – for example species concepts, the binary model of sex, etc. – are not in themselves biological realities, and are subject to change based on new information. For example, evolutionarily speaking, “reptiles” (as we traditionally understand them) don’t exist [38]. Obviously this doesn’t mean that lizards, tortoises, snakes, crocodiles, non-avian dinosaurs etc. don’t exist or never existed. It simply means that the socially constructed classification of animals into two distinct, mutually exclusive groups called “reptiles” and “birds” is completely arbitrary and not actually the result of any inherent biological reality (in fact the opposite).
I mean I know how crappy the highschool biology syllabus can be @valarie-lynn so I’ll also link you to the Wikipedia page on species and the species problem, and also to somemoreonsex and how it’s just as complicated and arbitrary as the concept of species (from Actual Biologists™) if you’re interested. I’ll also leave you with a quote from Charles Darwin:
“From these remarks it will be seen that I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the word variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for convenience sake
I really want a science fiction story where aliens come to invade earth and effortlessly wipe out humanity, only to be fought off by the wildlife.
They were expecting military resistance. They weren’t counting on bears.
Imagine coming to a hostile alien world and being attacked by a horde of creatures that can weigh up to 3 tons, run at 30 km/h (19 mph), and bite with a force of 8,100 newtons (1,800 lbf).
By the time you realise that they can traverse water, it’s too late. The surviving members of your unit manage to make it back by shedding their excess gear and running for their lives; the slower ones were crushed to death within minutes.
You later describe the creature to one of the humans you captured, wanting to know the name of the monstrosity that will haunt your nightmares for cycles to come.
The human smiles as it speaks a single word, slowly and distinctly, in its barbaric tongue.
“Hippopotamus.”
This is giving me the biggest, creepiest grin I might have ever grinned
Imagine being the next crew to go down to earth and thinking “it’s fine, we got this. We have the weapons and equipment necessary to deal with bears and *shudders* hippopotamuses. We’ll be fine.”
And at first you are, you’ve learned how to dodge. You’ve learned where their territories are. You know how to defend yourself.
But then one night you are sleeping in your shelter. You’re in a tree covered temperate part of earth. It seems benign. There are been no sightings of the dreaded “hippos” around. Not even any bears. But there is a slight rustle of the undergrowth. You try and ignore it telling yourself it is just the wind.
Then you hear the rustle again. closer this time.
You peer out into the darkness but see nothing amongst the trees.
The rustle again and now you realise you can smell something. It’s musky and slightly foul. It’s the smell of an omen, a warning. But what of? Where is this smell coming from.
You sit up, but it’s too late. The foul smelling creature is on you. You are hit with 17kg of coarse fur and vicious bites. Long dark claws tear in to you and you are pinned down white the striped creature tries to bite your throat.
It takes some doing but you manage to wrestle free. Blood drips from your wounds and already they itch with the sign of infection. The creature has a bloodied snout, rust rad, mingling with the black and white hairs. It lets out a terrifying growl from the back of its throat and looks to attack again. It’s between you and your knife, so your only choice is to back away.
Eventually the creature gives up and snuffles off in to the undergrowth, down a hole near your shelter you hadn’t noticed before.
When you make it back to your base you once again consult the captive human.
“Badger.” they say, with a solemn nod.
One word: Moose
“Our vehicles are far superior to the local human models, in range, speed, armament, and any other metric you care to name! Nothing could possibly-”
BAMrumblerumblethumpcrash!!!
“That’s called a moose.”
Wolverines.
Also.. dolphins.
The invasion is going slowly. The humans have caught on and are actively destroying information on the planet’s flora and fauna before Intelligence can capture and process it. All that they have are survivors’ accounts. Bears. Hippos. Badgers. Moose. It is becoming obvious this mudball planet is a full-on Death World to the unprepared, and you are so very unprepared.
You lost Jaxurn to a plant. Not even a mobile or carnivorous plant, just one that caused a vicious allergic reaction on contact that killed him in less than a rai’kor. Commander Vura’ko died to an insect bite, a tiny local pest that sucked a tiny bit of her blood and apparently replaced it with a bit of its last meal, which was full of disease. Backwash. She died to bug backwash. And yet you honestly envy them after that… thing you encountered…
When you got back to base the quarantine officer refused to let you inside. They had to roll a containment tank outside to put you in, because you all knew there would be no chance of eliminating the smell if it got into the ship’s air ducts. Smell. You wonder if your nasal slit will ever recover from this stench.
And the smell would. Not. Leave. After incinerating your gear the Q.O. had you use every cleansing agent they could think of, including a few janitorial ones, and still everyone fled the stench if they were downwind of your tank. Desperate to protect everyone’s nasal slits from the smell the quarantine officer interrogated the humans. From them, a glimmer of hope: there was a cure. Somehow the juice of a certain fruit on this mudball was the only thing that could break up the chemicals in the little horror’s spray. Immediately the Q.O. sent a team to recover buckets of the stuff and made you bathe in it. That was hours ago and it didn’t seem to be working, though. All it was doing was turning your blue skin an interesting shade of purple.
Sighing in frustration you wave the med-assist on duty over, who only approaches after checking the wind direction. Annoyed, you flip on the tank`s vox speaker.
“The humans did say it was “grape” juice that removed “skunk” stench, right?“
Every night.
It came for someone almost every night.
Any soldier alone was a viable target for this native monster that moved unseen by any but the security viewers, usually only spotted in hindsight. They were taken as silently as this earth-monster moved. Sometimes they’d find the remains in the morning taken up a tree and hung there, mostly eaten, as if it were a grisly reminder that the monster was still there, waiting unseen, to strike again.
What little they saw of the monster on the vidfeed showed true horror. Yellow eyes that shone with all the light it could gather. It had fangs as long as his grasping digits. Claws half that size formed curved hooks that allowed it to climb up their fortifications with impunity. And in the underbrush, its spots made it almost impossible to see clearly in the undergrowth, if it could be seen at all.
Even the native sentients, the humans, had a healthy respect and fear for it.
The earth natives called the monster a leopard.
It was a constant fear that muddied the senses, and let the monster hunt even more effectively as the soldiers were always on edge. Sleep deprived with fear, it made them even better targets for the monster.
But rumor was that there was worse on this planet. Rumors of a monster like a leopard but larger, and bigger in every imaginable sense. Stripped instead of spotted, which leaped from the underbrush with a sound.
A sound that burst eardrums, paralyzed entire units, and let the monster kill with impunity. While the Leopard wrestled soldiers down and ripped their throats out. This other monster, the Tiger, killed with its pounce alone.
“We’ve been through this,” Group Leader 455 snapped. “The dissection of an Earth life form will help the scientists make weapons to combat the rest of this planet’s hellbeasts. And these are domesticated. Harmless.”
The troops were not-quite-looking at her in the way troops do when they don’t want to be seen to contradict a ranking officer, but can’t quite muster a correct Expression of Enthusiastic Assent. “The name of this species,” she pointed out, “is synonymous with dullness and slowness in the language of the Earth barbarians.” Well, one language out of several thousand—these creatures needed Imperial guidance more than any other world on record—but there was no point in confusing the rank and file.
More not-quite-looking. 455 bubbled a sigh and consulted her scanner. “That one,” she decided. “Alone in the separate pasture. Scans suggest that it’s a male, which means it’s probably weaker. Possibly it’s kept isolated so that the females don’t eat it before mating season. And yes, I know some of you are here on punishment detail, but you’re still soldiers of the Imperium. This squad is perfectly capable of handling a lone, helpless, pathetic male cow.”
I’m enjoying this immensely. Wait until the aliens try Australia for size…
It was a strange creature Tar’van glimpsed at on the vast island known to the humans as ‘Australia’.
“I would warn you not to fuck with us, mate.” Their forced guide, a prisioner, had warned with a chilling grin upon capture. “If you think a moose is bad, wait until you tango with a red back.” To this day Tar’van fears the creature known as the red back, and what horrors it would bring.
The prisioner turned out to be of little help,the stubboness of his people causing them to refuse the danger that the captured human warned of. Tar’van recalls a moment when one of his squad members approached a creature know as a dingo, insistent they had seen these creatures before and they were tame. They barely escaped with 5 of the original 7 members of his squad.
Another moment Tar’van recalls was the brutal mauling they witnessed by the hands of a creature called an ‘Emu’
“Don’t feel too bad,” the prisioner mocked. “We lost a war to the Emu’s as well.”
Now with only 4 members of their squad left, including themself, Tar’van had learned to listen to the prisoner, to be wary of the simplest of creatures. This human was of the sub-species of ‘Zookeeper’ after all.
The ‘Zookeeper’ looks off to the distance, where the creature is.
“It’s a kangaroo, leave it be and you’ll be fine.” Tar’van nods, a human signal of acknowledgement if they are correct. The human smiles a bit.
“That creature cannot possibly harm us.” Tar’van’s squadleader protests. “It is so docile. I will aproach it and bring back it’s head to show this human is a fearmongering liar.”
The human reels back, a look of disgust crosses their face and anger passes through their eyes.
“Fucking do it mate, I dare ya.” The human hisses. The squad leader puffs up their hoinn gland, a sign of pride to their species, and aproached the so called ‘Kangaroo’.
“This will be unpleasant.” A squadmate mutters as they watch their leader raise their fist and bring it down on the creature. The ‘Kangaroo’ looks a little stunned by the impact, before it raises itself upon its strong tail and uses its powerful heind legs to launch their squadleader backwards through the air.
Their squadleader lands upon the ground, unmoving with black blooded oozeing from them. It appears Tar’van is the squads leader now.
“I don’t know what they expected.” the human says, smugness filling their tone. “Kangaroos are fucking shreaded. 8-pack and all.”
Tar’van steps forward to the human, whom inches back in a sign of fear as Tar’van pulls their blade from its holster, and in their first act as leader, frees the human of the bonds around their hands.
“Please,” Tar’van bags. “Get us back safely.”
This is so beautiful.
I love this. Wait till the guys meet rhinos.
It got better.
I await honey badger & mountain lion.
And oh, fuck. Camels.
Vultures. Golden eagles of Central Asia.
No, wait. CORVIDS.
Also, I wanna know what plant killed Jaxurn.
I bet it was monkey grass. My dogs are convinced they’re murderous, based on the marking habits…
I wonder what elephants think of the invaders?
Oh, shit. It just hit me.
JELLYFISH.
SPIDERS.
The war had gone on for so long, the native flora and fauna of the planet ‘Earth’ doing what the dominant species ‘Humanity’ could not.
Squad after Squad died in the plains of what was once ‘North America’ and few ever made it back to their Home Bases from the mountain and jungle areas of ‘South America’. Some soldiers were sent back to safer and quieter Imperial Colonies in an attempt to combat the PTSD, Mental Breaks and Physical injuries that ran rampant through the Squads.
‘Africa’ became the place of horror stories with ‘Rhinos’, ‘Lions’ and ‘Giraffes’ haunting the minds of many. Squad were given access to a variety of weaponry and equipment before they even left the security of their Home Bases. (The Humans laughed at the excessiveness and were not believed when they told their captors that they had once hunted the creatures their captors now feared.)
Many soldiers refused to go to ‘Asia’, rumours of unspeakable things dissuading them. Stories of giant ‘Tigers’, invisible ‘Snakes’ and ‘Pandas’ were whispered over meals while High Command tried to assure the soldiers that none of these creatures could possibly exist. (High Command gave up when a Human managed to release a juvenile ‘Malayan Tapir’ in one of the Imperial Bases and caused uncontrollable chaos.)
The colony that resided in ‘Europe’ was one of the safer parts of the world but only for those who treated their captive Humans with respect. (The incident with Squadron Leader Jar’vix and the ‘Swan’ assured that.)
‘Australia’ and the surrounding islands that were known by Humanity as ‘Oceania’ were just straight up off limits after the seventeenth Unit of six squads went missing with only bloody looking wildlife to show for it and the Human guides perfectly unharmed. [One male Human just looked at the Squad Leader that found them when they asked where Squad 4665 (one of their best) was. “I told ya mates not to fuck with the platypus and did they listen? No.” The Squad Leader decided not to ask what a ‘Platypus’ was. Learning about ‘Magpies’ was bad enough.]
A few brave (but regarded as extremely foolish even by the Humans) Scientists and Soldiers attempted to navigate the depths of the Oceans of Earth with the latest and best equipment The Empire could provide from Home World. Only one ever made it back. When they described the monsters that the Humans called ‘Anglerfish’, ‘Giant Squid’ and ‘Shrimps’, it was decided by High Command that no more expeditions to the Ocean would be allowed until the surface was moderately under control.
The final straw for The Empire came after an attempt to colonise the region known as ‘Antartica’. The frigid temperatures and the hostile environment was thought to be free of any flora or fauna and therefore, safe. Three Earth days later, Total Retreat was called across Earth (much to the relief of many).
The Humans were released. The Empire would not risk the fact that, while Humanity had been easily defeated, they were still the evolutionary product of the hellish world of Earth and the Dominant Species of Earth.
The Empire Declared Full Quarantine of Earth. No Imperial ship, resource or citizen would ever return to that Solar System, let alone the planet itself. Even for punishment, it was deemed too cruel a fate.
As the last Imperial Ship bearing the last Unit left the atmosphere, two freed female Humans sat on a beach, waving mockingly at the silver metal that was vanishing into the skies. One female turned to her companion and nudged her. It had been the other who had led the Final Squad to Antartica and had seen what had happened in person.
“So tell me. How’d they lose a fight to a small colony of Adélie Penguins and how on Earth did you manage to sneak five of ‘em onto that ship?”
Have y’all not read Animorphs tho??q
And, from the sounds of things, they never did meet sharks or electric eels or army ants or pirahna in the Amazon, or anacondas or … goats. No, haven’t read Animorphs but if it’s like these posts, I clearly should.
Yogg-Sarongurt 