child: What happened in Europe in the 2010s? parent:

Weird Questions

If I’m somewhere where there are Educational Personell (Museum Docents, Q&A zookeepers, Park Rangers, Public School Teachers, Professors etc.) I have a question I like to ask them:

“What’s the weirdest question someone’s ever asked you?”

I say weird and not Dumb becuase even buckwild questions can have important answers, but whoever I ask it too usually has to think about it for a bit, then comes out with something different every time.  And I love every single answer becuase it just warms my heart out there to know people are trying to understand the world a bit better, no matter how limited thier starting point. A collection of favorites so far:

So one of my neighbors has a lawn Roomba or whatever they're called, and this thing trundles around looking like a background robot in the background of the original trilogy, and ABSOLUTELY BAFFLING THE DOGS.

They have concluded, I think, that it's some kind of prey animal because right after this video ended they decided to crouch down and stalk it, which means I'm 90% sure I'm going to have to stop Arwen from eating it at some point.

Of course it's a prey animal it fucking eats GRASS

While I can’t fault your reasoning on robot taxonomy, apparently we’re both wrong:  Arwen, as much as she is a high-prey-drive animal, is foremost, a herding dog, and has decided that the Lawn Roomba is a SHEEP.

What happened is the lawn roomba belongs to the guy that does most of the maintainence on the neighborhood park, and he had it out grazing on a different section of lawn when my parents came down for a walk and Arwen was siezed by 200 years worth fo Kelpie Instincts, rolled out of her Harness and proceded to herd the shit out of this tiny, oblivious robot.  

Everything was on display- mock-stalking, intimidating eye contact, barking, running in front of it to try to get it to balk, the scariest barking she can muster (which is actually.  pretty scary if you’re not used to Loud Dogs), looking back at my parents for directions.  or rather, looking at my Mom while Dad tried unsuccessuflly to capture her.

After about ten minutes they realized she wasn’t biting it, and decided to let her play Sheep Simulator 5000 for a while. She eventually figured out that 

Conent that this was apparently some kind of blind, deaf and particularly stupid sheep, she could now manage the robot by smacking it if it got too close to the creek bed or fence for her liking, and was eventually content to sit on the highest point of the field and Supervise (TM) it.

“Hey.” Said Roger, owner of the robot. “Do you think if I put the ramp down she’ll herd it into the back of my pickup?”

Arwen was mostly asleep in the afternoon sun as roger put the ramp down but woke right up when mom Whistled, then pointed at the truck.  She immediately went after the robot and did something that wouldn’t have occured to me, an allegedly more intelligent being: the robot is roughly triangular, and when it hits an obstacle, will change direction so that one of its other sides (rather than points) is now the ‘front’.  So to get it to move in a straight line in the direction she wanted, Arwen would smack the two sides of the robot that she didn’t want it to go in in quick sucession, and got it across the field, over a small hill and up the ramp as fast as it’s clumsy little wheels could go.

“I didn’t know you had a fully-trained sheepdog!” Said Roger

“Me either.” said Mom.

So Arwen now has a Semi-Weekly Appointment to play with Sheepbot.

I think that when you are thinking about planting roses, an important consoderation to keep in mind is that someday, you will die

Perhaps you love the meditative nature of caring for rose bushes but one day you will die, and no one will be able to manage the weirdly intense Gardening Regime that you set for everything you planted and your roses will become overgrown and dangerous and someone, perhaps, even, your beloved grandchild, will be obligated to take a pruning shear the size of their own fucking arm to a bunch of rose canes that are as big around as their own fucking wrist, PERHAPS, PERHAPS THESE THINGS MIGHT HAPPEN. JUST SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND.

This is a call out post for my grandfather who I love and miss very much every day... Wish he was still here with us, to trim his fucking rose bushes

Jumpy bois

(via)

This incredibly colorful fluffy bird is called a white-browed tit-warbler (by Hiuying Tse). 

Vietnamese Mossy Frog

is that a real animal

Hey you guys want to see an actively hilarious bonsai tree?

(source)

Cross stitches at my parents’ house Part I

My aunt stitched this for my parents when they moved into their house in 1987 and it has been hanging in the hallway ever since.

The text is in German and it goes as follows:

Lieber Gott

bewahr

dies Haus

vor Sturm und Feuer

Denn es war

so teuer

Which translates to

Dear God

save

this house

from storm and fire

because it was

so expensive

And apparently both my super religious grandparents (her parents) and my not-so-religious grandparents hated it. They thought is was absolutely distasteful.

Ever since I can remember, people who came to our house for the first time would think it’s hilarious. 

@buetterfliege this reblog is for you

so is it a thing in (american) english to use “texas” as a word for like, something that’s out of control or chaotic, or as like, “crazy”? like “that party last weekend was totally texas!”

because that is a thing people say in norwegian and i just think it’s important for americans to know that?

this is the best thing I’ve ever heard

i’m sorry wHAT

This is like the time I found out that in Israel “Ma po ze, Chicago?” (What is this, CHICAGO?) is a saying for when people are acting unruly. 

in finland if something is far away or in an unknown place we can say that “se on huitsin nevadassa” (it’s in nevada) you can also politely tell that you’d wish someone to fuck off by wishing that they’d go to nevada

It’s good to know that other languages do the “pardon my French” thing.

This is earth shattering, I can’t believe there are people, who don’t think in sentences??? What the fuck is an abstract non-verbal thot? Y’all hoes think in Pictionary???? What the fuck

You’re telling me there are people who actually think in sentences? Like full ass grammatical sentences?

Some of yall dont think in full sentences?

my nonverbal ass is shook bc apparently (according to the replies) people who think in sentences also read in mental sentences… like when ur reading it’s as if there is a voice inside their heads reading it as if out loud. w i l d

what do you do when you read????? Just sit there breathing?????????????????????

This is something that always used to bug me about telepathy in science fiction/fantasy, since I assumed everyone was like me and only sometimes thought in words, and rarely coherent sentences - so how would telepathy even work? If you were a telepath trying to read my mind you would get maybe like, a confusing barrage of images and feelings interspersed with the occasional “HHHMMGGHHH BAGELS”

@moonsandstarsaregay !!!!!!!!!!!!!

We were actually taught in class, gah, almost twenty years ago in neurolinguistics that all thoughts were verbal (unless they were pictorial or otherwise sensory or a mixture). Imagine my seething fury at being told most of the time I don’t think, as I only get internally verbal intentionally (or from reading / listening to language and sort of slipping and falling in). But nobody else in the whole big auditorium wanted to argue the lecturer about tit, so I figured I was weird (that way too). Poor luck on that occasion maybe, but I wonder what the proportions are.

I do both, and I think I've always done both, although of course the word ones are more obvious. I do actually hear a voice in my head when reading books and have trouble paying attention properly if I try not to. But I know that's not universal, and there are things like fast-reading where you can't do that.

I need a Thank u Mr Terry tag

#thank you mr terry#thinking something isn’t doing it and doing is all people see#and deep down it means that when the ugly thought reared its head to be realized#you stood up in front of that ugly hurtful thought and said ‘sit down’

Pardon me, but I needed to read your tags tonight.

Ohhhh my goodness what a precious, regal babe! 😍 Did you just find her or is she a pet? I hope she knows how much I love her

... and this is how I learned that the two spiders I found in my bedroom this week were probably black widows.  On one hand CUTE, on the other hand, U N S U R E

although they have a reputation as scavengers, hyenas are known to take down prey many times bigger than they are

I like how this implies the hyena took down the airplane.

She did.

@werewoofin

me, dumping a load of freshly washed but unfolded laundry on my bed: boy i’m sure gonna be pissed about this when i want to go to bed