okay i swear im trying to sleep still but i keep thinking about how on wednesday i was watching monster factory w my friend and he said “the hot mcelroy is my favorite” and i was too busy laughing at the secondlife series to ask what that meant but which one does that mean? which one does that mean??
do you ever do something so extra so you don’t smudge your nail polish? case in point i just separated all my laundry using my elbows and feet
I unfollowed everybody except like 6 people who i like and who post interesting stuff…my tumblr experience is way more enjoyable now. bless y’all
My boss slaughters his egg chickens either every fall or every other fall depending on how old they are when he gets them, on the logic that the personal hassle and carbon foot print of getting chickens to lay eggs in the winter is not worth it. As he was explaining this recently, a newer co-worker asked how he hid that from his children. And she’s new, which means she’s never had the delightfully goth experience of watching my boss’s two charming dimpled daughters who are ALSO deeply unsentimental farm children respond to you with utterly withering scorn if you ask them something like, as I once did, “oh, what’s that chicken’s name?” The oldest daughter, all of four years old at the time, told me in a firm, Wednesday-Adams-talking-to-a-moron voice, “We’re going to eat them. They’re not pets.”
My boss, who is gentle and does not respond to people with scorn when they ask innocent questions, instead told her, “Oh, we’re pretty open with them about the facts of life. They know where babies come from and where chickens go.”
Anyway, that phrase haunts me and I wanted to share it with you. It sounds like some 19th century grandma saying.
dogs get so excited when you tell them they’re going outside…they’re like yes! i can pee! i love to pee!!!
TEACHIN TIPS THAT WORK ON HUMANS AND YOUR DOG!!!
hello everyone i am a high school english teacher and a Human Mother to sivi the silken windhound and this is how i raise all my beautiful children, primate or canine (feel free to add)
-set them up to succeed!!!!!!! no one likes to feel like a big dumb Fool
-make it worth their time!! humans will work really hard for poop stickers and dinosaur stamps. some dogs will too. both parties enjoy candy and praise
-give em a break! it’s dumb doing the same boring thing forever and ever
-give them options and encourage their interests WHICH LEADS TO…
-~*makin them think the resulting behavior was their idea all along*~
-don’t give overly harsh corrections. what does that do but startle and upset your dear student!!!!!!!
-allow them to shine!! let humans tell u all the wonderful things they know more than YOU about!!! let ur human and dog students show you what they’re good at and harness it like an evil genius except you’re not evil you love them and want them to be stars!!!
-work them hard, but not unfairly (would YOU like it if u had to do mental pushups for an hour for NO OBSERVABLE REASON?!???)
-see thru their eyes. take a class or have someone teach u something new regularly so u are always remembering what it’s like to be the one learning
-give lots of praise when they do it right and do it in front of EVERYBODYYYYY (this part is mainly for the humans)
-know ur student. some need more help than others understanding what you want, focusing, or finding motivation. teach em how they learn!!! if they need to run a lap around a field before they can look at you, LET EM
-it’s not you vs. the student!! it’s both of you working toward one goal. ur lessons are competing with their history, their nature, their surroundings, and a million other things!!
-keep trying your best!!!!! teaching is hard!!
-and at the end of the day!!!! let them know you love them!!!!!!!!
shout to any childrens media nowadays that has female characters who are just super fucking weird bc growing up i just remember lot of boy characters who got to be funny and weird and all the girl characters were like the serious ones who desired order and followed the rules meanwhile i was always running around barefoot and foaming at the mouth and eating snails and i barely knew what gender was
Taking the subject out of the tags because it’s both an interesting and important one:
I’m not sure where the job lies exactly - it’s possibly either scientists themselves, or otherwise scientific journalists - but science really needs to be more accessible.
Practical subject of the day being animal behaviour and training, being that’s one of the subjects I know most about. Here’s the article that sparked my train of thought here. It’s filed on the website under Reports > Training, and right above the first sentence it says ‘Training your horse’ - which signals to me it’s an article meant for an interested amateur.
The first sentence?
“Dominance hierarchies, alpha positions or leadership in social groups of horses are man-made concepts that should not form the basis of human–horse interactions.”
A 24-word sentence [fingers crossed I counted correctly, lol], 11 words before it even reaches a verb, a somewhat complicated sentence structure, and several difficult words or unknown concepts. Most people would be behind before they even began reading, and I think the majority of people would stop reading immediately or after the first paragraph or so.
I took a journalism minor in uni, and one of the seminars was entirely devoted to writing for people with low- to medium reading comprehension, as well as writing for a non-academic public in general. When I say ‘low- to medium reading comprehension’, some people might think I’m using that as a euphemism for stupid people, but I’m not. The lecture was given by a man who had a fairly high function somewhere in the building industry - he wasn’t an engineer IIRC, but something close. He clearly was not stupid. He’d also spent the first 45-ish years of his life practically illiterate, without his wife or bosses ever finding out. Eventually he got help and whilst he can read well now, it’s also not at academic level, and the majority of people are not at academic level [including, ironically, a lot of uni students, but I digress].
Animal behaviour, especially behaviour of domestic animals/pets [cats, dogs, horses] is one of those fields that can sometimes be immediately applicable to real life. Which means that real people should get to understand it, imo. And here’s where that gap between scientists [and also those with very keen interest in the subject, colloquially ‘nerds’ :P] and regular people comes in, and the utter lack of understanding between the two.
Scientists/nerds don’t understand why regular people follow training gurus à la Milan or Parelli, regular people don’t understand why it’s wrong, because they’re painting a logical-seeming narrative and show that they book results. And whilst it probably would be the best of both worlds to reach a compromise, I fear that most of the compromising will have to come from science’s side, to present as clear a message, with as clear a result, and show that the results are better or easier to achieve, hopefully without utterly bashing the training gurus since we all know that such negativity will only make a good amount of people dig their heels in.
Back to the sentence:
“Dominance hierarchies, alpha positions or leadership in social groups of horses are man-made concepts that should not form the basis of human–horse interactions.”
It puts forth two issues:
1. dominance between horses is a man-made concept
2. dominance should not be used by humans training horsesI’m really crap at editing academic writing down to intermediary reading comprehension [it is a field unto itself! it should be a more respected and practiced brand of writing/journalism!]. But if you split the starting sentence up into two and make sure you clearly and concisely reflect those two issues, it would’ve been much better. Repeat re; the rest of the article, lol.
Ironically this post is probably super confusing since not only do my sentences tend to run on [and here we go again], but I also did not take the effort to structure it properly, check big words, check punctuation or any of those other things good writing entails. Oh well, it’s just a blog post, but I think the point stands and it’s something both scientists and the wider +R/’scientific animal training’ community needs to have a good think and discussion about.
i LAUGH EVERY TIME I SEE THIS FUCKING PICTURE
ring ring
HELLO??? captain haddock asks, shoving the shower head against his face as water shoots out of it. HELLO??
Ok mais la version française est encore mieux avec “Allô ?” (à l'eau)
I’m so disappointed that this pun doesn’t translate
