Humans are almost unique in the animal kingdom in needing C-sections, due to our overdeveloped brains being almost, and occasionally slightly, too big for our birth canals.
Wolves and most functional dog breeds give birth with no issue at all.
It’s mostly bulldogs and other wide-headed breeds that need assistance, which sounds to me like breeders going way too far on the wide head / narrow hips route of trait selection.
I didn’t know the phrase “free whelping” until I was reading about some pure breed that was known for being able to give birth without medical intervention, on account of there are some breeds in which it’s fairly common to need C-sections. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that being able to give birth unaided ought to be a baseline of health for any goddamn dog in the fucking world.
I’ve only ever found one zip-up hoodie with decent insulation and pockets deep enough that my phone won’t fall out of them if I’m not careful, and you better believe I’m taking good care of it.
My mom once gave me a cat litter scoop like this one
in my Christmas stocking. This was not, to my knowledge, in the context of a conversation about needing to clean up after the cat more often, but for all I know it was her way of subtly trying to get the point across.
Damien, Jason, Freddie
Castle of Not
Cursed castle. Everything within it can only be defined by what it is not.
[Players meet the beautiful princess.]
“A hideous prince does not stand before you.”
[Players find a chest of gold.]
“You have not found a rotten sack full of live crabs.”
Sounds like something that would need to be secured by the Antimemetics Division.
I loved swordfish steak the one time I had it, so I’d bet that Scylla, Charybdis, or the Kraken would be quite good.
Oh, also The Kraken is quite tasty.
One time in high school, I heard somebody yell “Steve, you [bundle of sticks], stop talking to your girlfriend and let’s go!” and Steve was in fact at the time talking to his girlfriend.
The sheer concentration of cognitive dissonance has stuck with me to this day.
This is the whole “if humans were going to have wings we’d have to redesign the whole organism from the ground up” fiasco all over again.
Blacula is legitimately fantastic. It’s full-on a story about the lingering violence springing from European colonialism and the slave trade.
Just one example: The main character is an African prince, and his name is Mamuwalde, but when Dracula turns him, he says “I curse you with my name! You shall be called BLACULA!” For the rest of the film, no one calls him Blacula, because his name is Mamuwalde! Except there was one subtitle that slipped and read something like “BLACULA: I lost her because of you!”, and I immediately thought, “Hey you subtitling asshole, his goddamn name is Mamuwalde!”
By the end of the movie I was rooting for him in the fight with the LAPD.
John Stark, one of the rescuers of the Donner Party.
In Summit Valley the remaining rescuers discussed what to do and took a vote to save only two of the children in Starved Camp. That might have been all they could manage. The others would have to stay behind.
John Stark, above, could not abide that. That meant that nine people, mostly children, would die on the mountain, exposed to the elements down in a very deep hole in the snow. John Stark decided he would save all nine, “Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process again and again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough.” Once they were out of the snow he would eat and rest he said, but not before. He saved all nine. That is extraordinary and that is heroism. It was also heroism he never got contemporary credit for.
Kamala is the best version of a normal politician fighting against Trump. It remains to be seen if that’s enough, because he’s just so goddamn weird that it’s difficult to even compare Tool A to Problem B.
I think she’s incorporated virtually all of the strengths of any of her comparable peers, and almost none of their weaknesses. I think that, given the nature of the opponent and his total lack of seriousness, she said everything I would reasonably hope she would have said during this debate.
I also think that I don’t properly understand the collective psyche of the American electorate. I don’t understand how the election could be this close, when it is a choice between a serious, competent, passionate, talented professional, and a man who is literally a collection of all of the worst possible traits a person could have. That it could come down to such a narrow choice is a mystery for the ages.
Picsart. I’d like something that can do a bit of photo editing, adjust brightness/contrast/curves, work with layers, and conveniently slap together collages, but that doesn’t interrupt me in between every other operation with an ad or a request to sign up for a subscription to the app.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Harmonica holder
If you pick up a cursed armor or weapon and aren’t sure if it’s worth cleansing, throw it at an explosive trap, or throw a bomb at it. An un-upgraded item will be destroyed, while an upgraded one will not, and therefore may be worth using a cleansing scroll on.
Fans of The The in absolute shambles.