This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen on the Internet, and I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff.
Why are the men not wearing any clothing?
Why do they all look identical?
Why are they yelling?
Why are they so buoyant?
I have no idea, but I couldn’t stop watching.
If you have any theories, let me know.
Filed under Uncategorised
Traditionally, people weren’t supposed to wear white after Labour Day if they wanted to be seen as fashionable. Almost no one follows this rule anymore, so I thought I’d nominate some guidelines for this time of year.
Let me know which one you want to vote for as the official replacement in the comments below.
Filed under Uncategorised
Here is this week’s list of confessions, poems, comic strips, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.
Only In My Dreams via nazmaniatweet. Confession: I had never heard of Debbie Gibson before I read this post. It was a spellbinding story, though.
If You Give a Man a Fish. Someone should start a site that takes other sayings to their logical conclusion. This was too funny.
Why We Should Celebrate Shyness. I loved this.
The Neuroscience of Mindfulness via bakadesuyo. What an interesting way of thinking about unhelpful thoughts.
On The Anniversary Of Emmett Till’s Death: Why The 1950s And ’60s Were Not ‘A Simpler Time’. Exactly. This is one of several reasons why I side-eye people who want to return to the good old days.Those days were anything but good for huge portions of the population. I don’t think nostalgic people realize exactly how much society has changed for the better since then.
From How to Feel Better When You’re Down (Without Forcing Yourself to Be Positive):
We all have our times with the negativity blanket. It’s not soft, warm, or big, but it’s so familiar.
When that feeling knocks the door and you don’t want it anymore, close it tight, win the fight. You got this.
What have you been reading?
Filed under Uncategorised
Last month I blogged about why now is the perfect time to start preparing for winter. Since September is National Preparedness Month, I thought I’d talk about preparing for emergencies with you today.
When I was a kid, my family had plans for what we’d do if there was a house fire, if a tornado touched down in our neighbourhood, if a severe thunderstorm knocked out our electricity for a few days, or if the Y2K bug ended up destroying modern civilization as we knew it by permanently confusing all of our computers.
We never had a fire, but we knew what to do when tornadoes touched down nearby or the electricity went out. As for Y2K, it was easily the least climactic apocalypse in recorded history. I slept through it all and woke up to a completely ordinary day in the futuristic year of 2000.
This tendency to plan ahead for possible emergencies stayed with me when I became an adult. One of the first conversations I had with my then-finance when we moved in together was how we should respond if a tornado touched down near the apartment building we lived in back then.
My spouse and I currently have enough supplies to look after ourselves for a few days if something bad happened in our neighbourhood and the grid was temporarily disrupted. I would like to add extra bottled water, nutritious food that doesn’t need to be cooked, and less common first aid supplies to our stash, but I’m mostly happy with what we have right now.
Emergency supplies are personal things, though. While everyone needs water and food, there are a lot of things that are highly dependent on your health, age, family size, and where you live.
Depending on your situation, you might need diapers, baby food, pet food, gasoline, enough prescription medication to last a few extra days, spare batteries for medical devices, or other necessary things that can be tough to find in an emergency. I know a few people whose medication needs to be kept at a specific temperature or whose medical devices need to be charged up or plugged into a wall in order to work. In these cases, it is even more important to plan ahead and know how you’ll meet those needs until help arrives.
You don’t have to buy everything at once either. I’ve slowly been accumulating needed items like flashlights that don’t need batteries to work and a fire extinguisher. There have also been occassions when I’ve ended up with certain items thanks to relatives who shared stuff with us.
I hope this post has inspired you to start thinking about preparing for the unexpected. The links I shared above have a lot more information about what to look for and how to make sure that you’ll have what you need if something dangerous happens. I’d love to know what kinds of things you have in your emergency kit as well as what you’re planning to add to it in the future!
Filed under Uncategorised
Video credit: BBSRC.
Honeyguide birds live in Mozambique. These birds have learned how to make a call to lead humans to bee nests. The humans harvest the honey, and the bird gets to eat the wax combs that are left behind.
I’m amazed that this relationship between humans and wild animals has developed. Wouldn’t it have been incredible to see this the first time humans and these birds realized they could work together to get a sweet treat?
Filed under Uncategorised
There are people in this world that you’ll like immediately.
You might warm to up other people over time as you get to know them better or as your circumstances change. It’s much easier to like someone when you’re not competing for the same cozy bread hole, for example.
At other times you’ll meet people that you’ll never learn to like at all.
Maybe your personalities will clash. Your values could be coming from such wildly different places that you’ll fail to find any common ground at all. Both of you might have interests that won’t overlap no matter how far you stretch them.
Likewise, there will be people in this world who like you instantly, gradually, or not at all.
None of these are bad things. It really is okay.
I know I’ve mentioned this before on my blog, but it bears repeating. You don’t have to like everybody. Not everyone has to like you, either.
Life isn’t that simplistic.
Not liking someone doesn’t mean you stop being polite to them, but admitting to yourself how you really feel about them can make it easier to treat them with kindness.
There’s something so freeing about loosening these expectations.
Friendship is a gift. It’s not something you can demand from someone or have demanded from you. Liking someone is also a gift, so it’s something you must decide to give. Demanding it would be like demanding a smile from someone who was frightened or sad. What you’d actually get in that situation would only share the most superficial resemblance to the real thing.
So relax and allow things to develop however they will. I promise that it will be okay.
Filed under Uncategorised
Here is this week’s list of tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.
What Trans Men See That Women Don’t. What an excellent article. I wish every man could experience something like this, just like I wish that white people could experience what it’s like to be a racial minority, straight people could be treated like a member of the LGBT community, etc. The world would be a much better place if people from majority groups had the chance to experience the less-pleasant parts of being outside the “mainstream” in some way.
Sundays at the Table via JAHesch. The twist at the end of this poem was my favourite part of it.
Here’s What Happens When “Beauty” Becomes “Duty.” This doesn’t surprise me one bit. Similar things are still happening on 2016.
Obey the Berry via thatgirlmsshe. Do you know how to tell when a raspberry is ripe? I especially enjoyed how this blogger tied picking raspberries into her everyday life.
Artificial Sweeteners Not as Sweet as You Think via colleen_m_story. I’ve suspected this for a while. It’s interesting to see what the latest research says about artificial sweeteners.
Stop Spending So Much Time In Your Head. I really need to learn how to do this.
What have you been reading?
Filed under Uncategorised
My friend Michael asked me this question a while ago. It was an interesting thought experiment and writing prompt, so I decided to share my answer with you today. I’d love to know how you’d answer it as well. Only time will tell if Michael is secretly an alien who wants to show us other planets, though. Ha!
If one of your friends turned out to be an alien hailing from the general vicinity of Betelgeuse, and offered to help you hitch a ride on the next spaceship to drop by, would you go?
It’s obvious in this scenario that there’s at least one other world out there that can support humanoid life. If someone from another planet could live on Earth for years without a problem, I don’t see why I couldn’t do the same. They clearly have the technology to travel from one place to the next, so I’d assume that I could always return home if I didn’t like it or if the living conditions didn’t agree with me for some reason.
It would be fascinating to see how life – intelligent or otherwise – had developed elsewhere. Did my friend have to undergo any cosmetic surgery to look more human before they migrated here, or would every member of their species look more or less like a person on Earth from the outside? Could I blend into their society or another one like it? This sounds like a wonderful adventure to me.
If the planets I visited didn’t have intelligent life, what kinds of creatures could I find there? Earth has had many different kinds of animals and plants over its evolution. For the first three billion years or so, all of the life here was single-celled. I would be excited to look at those microbes through a microscope, although I’d might need extra safety equipment to survive on their surface if the temperature or atmosphere wasn’t right.
So, yes. Sign me up. I’m beyond ready for it.
Filed under Uncategorised
This was one of the oddest and most thought-provoking things I’ve seen on the Internet lately. I can’t say much else about it without giving away spoilers, but I highly recommend checking it out.
Filed under Uncategorised
Someone found this blog recently by searching for this phrase. I don’t remember blogging about this before, and I thought it would make an excellent conversation piece. I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it!
There are a lot of things that I admire about the modern skeptical movement: their intellectualism; their curiosity; their willingness to change their minds when presented with new evidence; their hesitation to take anything as the gospel truth regardless of who says it.
With that being said, it isn’t a perfect movement. Like any other group of people that is loosely tied together, skepticism has its own share of shortcomings.
I’m going to end this post with an old XKCD comic strip. As usual, the guy who makes them hit the nail on the head.
Filed under Uncategorised
