a post-doc was doing a guest seminar at my institute and at the beginning of his presentation he was explaining why he chose birds for his evolutionary analysis - so he said "well first of all, because birds are the best and most interesting animals and it's fun to study them" and a few professors in the room gave him a very serious nod

I’m having a spirited debate and need a larger sample size

this is assuming its on art you normally wouldn't jump to reblog. i myself only rb stuff i really really like so .

The 'rude/demanding' tone would be stuff along the lines of "if you like but don't reblog I'll [threat]" which i see surprisingly often, both serious and more silly

biked to the grocery store in the low sun of evening, walked past some basil and was possessed by a vision of bucatini, walked past some sun dried tomatoes and the vision was clarified, cooked with the last remnants of sun and now i get to watch nature documentaries and sleep off the morning's hike... deeply content

French trans woman Marie-Pierre Pruvot, known by her stage name Bambi

Female Mimics magazine 1965

need this

Bed of Lettuce by Paul Octavious

go executive branch go

not to be completely insane but the verb version. is two words. log in. sign in. let down. hand out. hang out. lay out. because it's a verb followed by a preposition. handing is the thing you're doing (verb), out is the direction you're doing it in (preposition). the noun is one word. login. sign-in. letdown. handout, hangout, layout. you only need one word because it's one thing. notice how there's no need to hyphenate any of this because that would not make any sense since we already combine words without a hyphen, in English. but. from the corporate training i am doing. you would not think that the above is the case.

Now that it's no longer winter in my part of the world, it's time to start thinking about buying winter clothing for next year. During the glorious four-and-a-half weeks we get before the snow falls again, the stores put out all their new ski gear for us to sample.

In Canada, it is critically important for your survival that you select only the finest things. A gap in a parka could mean a slow, icy death while waiting for the bus. Mittens that don't fit right will cost you a finger when you try to fumble for your keys to the mailbox. And the balaclava is the most problematic garment of all.

Don't believe me? Maybe you don't know what a balaclava is. It's Polish or French or something, for "ski mask." Balaclavae actually predate the existence of skiing, as they were discovered back in the stone age when cavemen needed to rob banks. And it's that aspect of their history that makes them so troubling nowadays.

While you don't need to go to a bank quite as often now as you used to, the tellers will still get a little on edge when you go in there to cash your pogey cheque while also wearing the classic uniform of a masked bank robber. I'm usually pretty good at remembering to remove them, but sometimes it's just a big hassle. A thin layer of ice covering it means that you'll get snow up your nostrils, and then you'll sound really stupid when you go to talk to the pretty bank teller at the end of the row. Plus your hair will be all fucked up. A non-starter. Better to just risk it, and keep the thing on.

What Canadian civilization needs is a way to separate effective weather gear from a criminal's disguise. Many have proposed alternative kinds of facial covering, ranging from balaclavas that are just brightly coloured, to a plastic mask with lifeless eyes saying "NOT A CROOK" even though it was clearly modelled after Brian Mulroney. These are half-measures, at best, and not enough to fix our broken society.

Here's what I propose: a ski mask licensing scheme. Everyone pays me a bunch of money when they wear their ski masks, fills out a little form, and I give them either a green (good person) or red (bad person) sticker. Then you just show your sticker to the teller, and everything is either fine or you suffer a brutal assault by the security guards. Sure, they could be counterfeit, but that would be illegal, and also why I would like to propose a companion red-and-green sticker licensing scheme.