southsamurai

There’s nothing funny about guard geese. They don’t fuck around

Yeah, it’s an issue for sure.

Southeast.

Now, I’m going to warn anyone ahead of time, this comes from conversations in meat space, not reading. So if you want sources, you’ll have to go dig up a body, and hunt down an ENT that I can’t even remember the name of.

With that disclaimer, the smell of boogers outside the nose is the smell of the proteins reacting with the acids on your fingers and the air.

When they’re inside the nose, they’re moister, and stuck to the inside of the nose, with no contact with anything volatile.

If you want to test this, get some plain, cheap tissues. For a few hours, blow your nose occasionally, sniffing the resulting expulsion. Notice that there will only be a very faint smell, if any.

Now, pick your nose and wipe the substance onto the tissue and wait a few seconds before sniffing. You should notice a slightly stronger smell. Then, just pick the nose and roll the booger around a little, then sniff. Slightly stronger again.

Boogers, inside the nose, are a lot of water, mixed with your own proteins and traces of whatever microbiota are there, plus hints of particulates. In other words, they’re damp and warm, but non reactive in situ.

Once you pull them out, you’re exposing a greater surface area to air, causing the water to evaporate faster, and anything I’m suspension to be exposed to air.

If that removal is done via bare finger, the oils and acids of your sebum can react with the proteins and other solids.

Happens with mucous from the lungs as well. Ever notice tar when you’re sick and cough something into your hands, it smells different than when it’s into a tissue? Not that most people would notice, what with being sick, and possibly also having a stuffed up nose.

But guess what! It isn’t just those mucuses. Vaginal secretions change smell on fingers vs other surfaces. Not as much, because the ph involved is different, but if you’ve got a sensitive sniffer and pay attention, it’s there. Even semen changes smell a little, though you really gotta pay attention because it’s over fast for some reason I’ve never figured out.

In theory, I’d guess that rectal mucosa would too, but that’s going to have much stronger smells to begin with because of where it’s produced. So I doubt you’d be able to detect it even if you were willing to try. I’m not willing to try.

Fwiw, yes, I know that means I’ve sniffed my own semen on my fingers. What? You weren’t curious about the stuff when you first cranked some out?

That’s exactly it :)

Sin tar is the usual way, though it’ll sometimes come out more sin tawr, where the au is a bit more drawn out.

Sin tore is a fairly common one.

However, sin tar is more common, at least with what I’ve heard in meat space. That’s a fairly limited thing though, since most of the people I have talked to over my fifty years have been fellow southerners. We do tend to use softer vowels in most cases, and tar is softer than tore in the way we tend to do vowels.

However, with the latin and Greek origins of the word, I’d argue that the tar or tawr would lean closer to that than tore, just because of similar words. When an au is present in medical terminology (which is where almost all of my latin and Greek comes from) it usually gets pronounced aw or ah, not oh.

But, I never hear anyone pronounce the initial C as a K, and that’s the way it would have been in both of those languages originally. The Greek version is spelled with a K, when written with the usual alphabet rather than Greek. Kentauros.

Which is an aside.

Wikipedia lists the two I did as the usual pronunciations, fwiw. And all the dictionaries with audio options are either those two, or slight variations of them, where the au sound is rounder or flatter than the norm.

Thing is, it’s a word in a living language. Whatever the original English pronunciation may have been, that can change, so supporting a pronunciation is kind of meaningless. What matters is consensus over time, and by location.

So, a regional accent that sounds more like cent-ur is just as valid in that region, it just isn’t standard. So would any other variant be, if there’s enough people using it to be called a consensus.

I respectfully dis-disagree, sir.

Legit though, what’s not to like, if you eat meat at all?

Meaty goodness, tomato sweet tanginess, the kick of spices.

I mean, it is essentially chili on a bun, just more tomato focused. But isn’t that a good thing?

Blasphemy!

You keep best sandwich’s name out of your mouth!

There’s no way this is going to end well.

Here’s an ugly truth.

If a person is going to take on the responsibility of caring for an animal, they are supposed to give it all the care it needs. No limits to that.

Snakes as pets are a horrible idea. They can’t be domesticated, the best you can hope for is a snake that’s not aggro. This isn’t to say they aren’t just as wonderful as domesticated animals, they are. But there’s really no such thing as a pet snake, only a captive snake.

That’s not a value judgement. I’m not saying that it’s bad or wrong to keep reptiles, IDGAF as long as they’re being kept healthily in all respects.

Which means that nothing involved in keeping a snake is “natural” at all, because the snake would never strike up a deal with a human to exchange food for company. Again, natural doesn’t equal good or better, I’m using the term in the limited definition here.

Trying to pretend that feeding a snake live animals is better for the snakes is, frankly, bullshit. They’re in an enclosed space, so the truth is that the risks outweigh any rewards in terms of the snake’s well being. Even if live food provides them with some degree of mental health benefit, small mammals fight if they’re alive and awake. Snakes get injured this way, regularly.

Since there’s other ways to stimulate them into eating dead mammals without that risk, it’s a pretty shitty caregiver that opts for live feeding.

Has nothing to do with the idea of animal abuse because before you even get to the question of that, the practice falls short of its stated goal: giving the snake the best overall care while captive.

As far as why they’re available on YouTube, the platform allows a wide range of stuff that’s not necessarily in line with YouTube’s stated criteria. The company doesn’t give a fuck about animal welfare, it cares about selling ad space. It doesn’t care about anything else. That’s because it’s a company being run by yet another dickhead ceo that, by choice or by necessity of fiduciary duty, does not give a fuck about anything other than stock values. That’s always the answer to anything “why does YouTube X?”

For real, if YouTube’s owners thought that videos of decapitation and rape wouldn’t lose them ad sales, they would not care.

Fun fact!

Cucumbers taste better when taken in anally

Nah, the roman system developed from even older systems.

They’re tally marks, with a twist.

You take a stick and cut a notch, that’s one. This works up to a point, and that point is 4 or 5, when it becomes unwieldy, and our brains have trouble using the groups of notches.

So you need a new mark to denote a grouping. The v notch is basically adding a / to the already present \ or | tally mark, denoting that the new symbol represents a group of the previous ones.

Different methods have 3 base marks, with the fourth being the new one, others do it at five.

Roman numerals stop at 3 individual marks, and there’s no record of why. But avoiding 4 repeating symbols is consistent with the higher numerals as well.

Basically, once you hit |||, the next number with be the | subtracted from the next higher digit. It works with IX, as well as XL, XC, etc.

But, the idea you suggest is sometimes presented as a possible origin for the earlier systems. Thing is, other tally systems that originated separately follow the same basic concepts, without using the same V symbol, but using other cross marks. Not that it matters because nobody knows. Nobody back then passed the information along.

It does kinda make sense, but the idea that it’s the simplest way to make marks on sticks and stones does too

That’s what I wanna say, 128.

I think it’s https://lucida.to/ this

Yeah, I’ve never run across it before, and there’s too many things that use it as a name to run a regular search

Well, all three are doing well. Fat and sassy as they say. None of them are actually overweight, but they are all sassy, and they look like butterballs.

Anyway, it’s been a slowish week. No big events, just a lot of shoe humping by the rooster, the usual silliness he does at bedtime, and the hens being adorable.

The marans hen has a long standing habit I’ve never mentioned before. She likes ice.

Not too unusual, as many animals do. She, however, turns it into entertainment for us.

Chickens being chickens, they can’t exactly chew on ice the way some dogs love to. No, they have to have it broken up for them, or wait until it melts enough they can handle it, size wise.

Her ice habit started over a year ago. When she’s in the house, she tends to follow one of us everywhere. It’s usually me, but sometimes my wife. One day, I was filling up my water tumbler, and cracked a fresh tray of ice. It was a little over full, and some small chips rained down as they broke off.

Little Cricket starts happily pecking at them, and when those were gone, looked up at me and did her “please sir, can I have some more” buk at me. So I got some of the loose pieces and dropped them for her.

After that, even if she isn’t with me, if she hears the freezer door open, you can hear the flapping of wings and the thunk of a chicken hitting the ground running. She comes around the corner at speed, sometimes sliding a little on the linoleum. And, she is at it, pecking and burbling to herself.

Until it’s either gone or melted, when the brrrrrrrrk comes out. Now, that translates to “look, monkey, I know you have some more, and I’m going to be as patient as a chicken can be, but I’m just warning you that I have a pecker and I’m not afraid to use it”

And she isn’t, really. She won’t peck me because she knows that I’ll pick her up and tickle her wing pits. But she will indeed peck the ever loving hell out of anyone else. What she will do is peck right next to my toes until I give her more.

So, what started as an unexpected thing has turned into another ritual.

Small chips of ice melt fast. Faster than she can get them down. So I drop a few, she gets them, then I drop a few more, and this process repeats until I’m either out of chips small enough for her, or they’ve melted in the tray. At which point, I’ll put the tray back in the freezer while she dances around trying to see what’s in there, and scolding me for not cracking another tray.

And there are more. I started over filling all of them a little bit so that there’s almost always going to be at least a few chips for her.

As a side note, the flock is a weird one. Yesterday, the male cardinal of the pair that have been adopted by the chickens hopped his little ass across the ground and pecked my shoe. Why? Because biscuits.

Yup. Not only has the squirrel figured out that the monkeys are the biscuit gods, the cardinals have too. Since we never bother them, they have decided that we are not a threat, and that they deserve their own treats instead of sharing with the chickens. Unlike the squirrel that usually just sits on either the coop or the grill and chatters at us, the cardinal demands his share directly. That’s how the rooster rolls when treats are slow in coming, so I assume it’s a learned behavior.

Thus far, I have chosen to ignore those demands. I don’t want a wild bird getting too trusting of people. It rarely ends well for the wild critters. But I also don’t have it in me to run them off when they’re very sweetly chirping at me. I come out the door, and within seconds, the two cardinals are flitting around the shrubbery and trees, chirping and singing. The squirrel is only a little slower, and his song is not as sweet. But I think there’s a wren that is trying to get in on the action. I’m not certain it’s the same bird every time, but there’s been one lurking just outside the fence lately.

Wait. Am I fairy tale princess now?

It’ll do, mostly. Just have to be slow and careful.

The problem answering this is that there’s an uncrossable barrier involved.

We can’t, at this point in time, accurately and definitively detect the internal perceptions of animals.

We can, to a limited degree detect how their brains change during a given events. We can observe behaviors as they exist. And, it is possible to compare those to human equivalents.

But they are, at the end of the day equivalents. There’s simply no way, at present, to ascribe human concepts to the way they think. The best we can ever say is that animals seem to respond and change in rewards ways that are similar to, or even identical to, the way humans respond to a given stimulus.

“Cute” is a pretty vague concept to begin with, and it’s a concept that refers to a complex series of internal reactions we have to external stimuli.

With all of that said, some animals do seem to respond to humans in a similar way we do to animals considered cute by most humans. That’s the best we can do until someone cooks up something that lets us more fully track what’s going on inside an animal’s mind.

Thing is, mind is a concept in the first place, and it isn’t exactly defined in measurable and totally objective ways as of yet. So, we’d first have to find a way to “read” human minds before we could start to try and compare that to animal minds. So, that some seem to is likely the best answer we’ll have in our lifetimes

Flip a coin between cinnamon and plasma

I tell this story a lot because I miss the hell out of her.

In 2007 I brought home a corgi. She still had floppy ears to go along with those stumpy little legs. She was being house trained, and the fastest place to take her was in the side yard.

One day, a canine buddy saw me and came jogging over. This fella was a pittie, about knee height to me. Big, brawny pooch. He was also as sweet as he was big.

My little Luna love did not know this. She catches sight of him gallumphing our way and almost jumped in front of me, between me and the ghostly white beast. She was barely taller than my ankle

Her hackles rise, and this puppy growl starts unzipping through the air.

She’s a mouthful for him, if he was that sort of dog.

But she was going to take him on if need be. He, however, sat down, cocked his head and just looked back and forth between me and her.

I take a knee and get her redirected, then calmed down enough to introduce them. Didn’t take long, since the big doofus did a play bow and snurfled her, and she switched immediately to fun mode.

So, we go in the back yard where she can be off leash, and they romp until she’s exhausted enough to fall asleep between his paws. Took all of ten minutes. He gives her a bath while I’m petting both of them.

Eventually, she wakes up, and we go in, while the hephalump meanders home.

Removed by mod