Small Questions | Pandas
I’ve seen Sparkles (Post about my cat: Meet Sparkles) do some incredible things. She is truly an inspiration for evolution’s ability to produce a serial killer. For example: leaping six feet in the air and landing without making a noise or when she catches bats out of the air. I am awe struck by her ability to climb anything with her claws and her capability to understand what is safe to use as a perch.
Then, you juxtapose her incredible feats with a panda and your brain will break. I’ve seen a panda pee on another panda, it just lays there and takes it, another panda poop an avocado of a turd onto another panda’s head, it also just lays there and take it, and I am stuck wondering: “how are these animals still alive?” Okay, so those aren’t great examples of the panda as a failed evolutionary experiment. But just search “panda falls” and you will be greeted by mind blowing moments where pandas fail to do basic tasks… like climb a tree (a necessary function of an animal that eats… leaves). If aliens showed up tomorrow, they would go and see a panda – at which point – they would leave our planet because Earth clearly hasn’t evolved enough for intergalactic politics. Listen, I know they are adorable and cute, but they are also a giant failure of an animal. Their camouflage is black and white… and they live in bamboo forests.
Perhaps, I am being too harsh on the panda. But my simple question is this: How have pandas survived this long?
~Theodore, asking the hard questions. (I also didn’t research pandas, so I know there are reasons they are still alive but I don’t care, I just watch too many videos of pandas failing to climb trees or randomly fall out of trees).
Read MoreAhhh Yeah Baby – Sextant Time
When technology breaks, it can be disastrous – planes can fall from the sky, votes can be manipulated, your vibrator data could be pilfered (true story and it was done on purpose), and all other sorts of weird things. On my drive home recently, I noticed that I was driving North (but I should be traveling South as I am coming from the North), and I nearly had a heart attack: “How long had it been since I had left the gas station?” “How much back tracking had I done?” “Shit snacks on a turd cracker, I can’t believe this is happened.” Then I calmed myself, I hadn’t made a mistake.
I looked up and found the Sun: it was off to my right and it was late afternoon. With that quick assessment, I was transported back in time and leveraged my hiking/camping knowledge to correct the compass in my car – I was traveling South. But boy was it weird constantly looking down at the compass and seeing it tell me the exact opposite of what I was doing at that time.
It was unnerving, surreal, and uncomfortable. Everything I did, I thought I was doing wrong. So then I thought about, when did I choose technology’s answer over my own? Clearly I have deduced that the technology in my car was incorrect and that the Sun (which has been doing it far longer) was giving me the appropriate information I needed to make it home. Not only that, all the signs indicating I was traveling the correct direction. Yet, seeing that little N each time I looked down provided me a healthy dose of anxiety.
Perhaps, I need to cut out the technology and get back to the basics. Time to buy a sextant. (Secondary note: Sun is a pronoun, there should be no the before it, but I know people are used to seeing “the Sun” in text. I’ll write about my issues with “the Sun” but for now, know it pains me to write that).
Read MoreSeven Minutes – Bend the Truth
“Every cigarette you smoke takes seven minutes off your life.” As a kid, hearing this from presenters at school frightened me – my dad was a smoker (I still am, cause I am a big dum dum). At the time, I wasn’t a smoker, but I was concerned that my dad was shortening his life span. I was young and had zero concept of statistics or narrative. So I assumed these presenters were some how capable of calculating that the seven minutes was coming off the entire life span of a human. So the average smoker was taking years off the end of their life each month.
As I grew older, I thought about it (didn’t research it) and came to a conclusion – “The motherfuckers lied to me”. I don’t like being lied to and I was pretty sure there is no way to know how long a life span is (with 100% confidence), but you would have to know: a human’s lifespan, the amount of cigarettes smoked, and then you would be able to calculate the total length of lifespan someone had lost. With these pieces of data, you just divide by the amount of cigarettes, and boom, seven minutes becomes the amount of time you lose off your life when you smoke.
My dad is my hero, he always has been because of the sacrifices he made for my family (my mom is also my hero, but she gets her own blog post about how she killed snakes to protect her kids). So, when someone told me my dad was literally knocking off seven minutes with each cigarette, I grew sad; I didn’t want to lose my dad sooner because of his horrible habit (the irony that I smoke is not lost on me).
Now, while I hate that someone instilled that fear in me, I am grateful because it became the first instance where I learned how you can use words and truth (bended) to trick someone. The seven minutes they are talking about comes from the length of how long it takes to smoke a cigarette. So it isn’t you shortening your life, it is you wasting seven minutes of your life to smoke a cigarette (but I usually smoke and read so that doesn’t impact me).
Either way, I need to quit smoking. Maybe tomorrow…
Read MoreThe Wolf and the Seven Little Kids
Then the wolf ran to a baker and said, “I have hurt my feet, rub some dough over them for me.” And when the baker had rubbed his feet over, he ran to the miller and said, “Strew some white meal over my feet for me.” The miller thought to himself, “The wolf wants to deceive someone,” and refused; but the wolf said, “If you will not do it, I will devour you.” Then the miller was afraid, and made his paws white for him. Yes, that’s how people are.
~Brothers Grimm
Two things before I begin: 1) this project was launched based on the post: “Project Grimm” if you want to know more about the format go read that post, and 2) an update to that post: my friend doesn’t call satchels man purses, rather, he calls them purses. Now that the housekeeping is done, I will jump into the analysis, so click [Read More] only if you don’t care about spoilers.
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