I had a very David Lynch-inspired dream… I was offered a cup of coffee by A Mysterious Entity that I remember nothing about, and was pleasantly surprised by the flavor.
“Funny,” I said. “I don’t usually drink my coffee black, but this isn’t bad.”
The Entity began to laugh. “That’s not coffee you’re drinking,” it said, darkly.
I paused with the mug to my lips as horror slowly dawned on me. Then something inside my head shrugged, said ‘fuck it’, and tipped the mug back. I did not blink or break eye contact with The Entity as I slowly chugged whatever nightmarish substance it had given me.
There was an awkward silence, and The Entity cleared its throat uncomfortably.
If someone says something that you only partially understand:
DON’T ask for clarification with a generic “What?” or “I’m sorry?” (In my experience, people will repeat the phrase the exact same way without helping you to understand).
Example:
Them: “Hey, do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “What?”
Them: “Do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “I’m sorry, what?”
Them (annoyed): “Do you like pahganabasa?”
Instead, DO repeat the part that you did understand, and substitute a “What?” for the unintelligable part.
Example:
Them: “Hey, do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “Do I like what?”
Them: “Pineapple pizza?”
Autistic Person: (Understands the words!)
I’ve also had successes with “I’m sorry, I only heard the first half of that sentence,” or actually verbalizing my interpretation of the part I heard incorrectly as a question: “Pahgana… basa?”.
Sometimes that makes the speaker think that they might be mumbling, or verbalizing in a way that makes them difficult to understand (because there are times it’s really not your brain–it’s their mouth).
This is also a lifesaver if you have Auditory Processing Disorder. It stopped the amount of annoyed sighs because ppl thought I was deliberately ignoring them or them saying the same thing but louder (which does not help when volume isn’t the problem)
y’all: peter was able to stop bucky’s fist in civil war bc bucky heard peter’s voice, realized he was a child, then weakened his punch bc he was so worried about hurting a child uwu
me, eating pistachios: y’all know peter can canonically lift up to 75 tons, right. y’all know bucky’s fist is easy as hell for peter to block, right. y’all know bucky didn’t know shit about peter being a child and was just shocked that someone was able to so easily block his punch, right. y’all know that, right.
naw fuck that bucky’s punches aren’t easy to block, it’s WAY funnier if peter blocked a full force punch from bucky, who only a few seconds later realizes he’s a kid as soon as peter opens his mouth
that’s the face of a man who went from “holy shit he blocked my punch?” to “holY SHiT a 12 YEARoLD BLOCKED mY PUNCH???” in 3 seconds flat.
i hate when customers at work hand me a 100 dollar bill and then scoff when i check the watermark. like, lady, i will break out the counterfeit pen. i’ll draw your god damn portrait over benjamin franklin’s before i make a ruling. i’ll get a second opinion from a coworker on the opposite side of the store. i’ll call the mint like, “heyy…it’s daniel…you guys print any hundreds lately? i got a lady here with a hundred, just making sure it’s one of yours…haha cool just checking. so how are the wife and kids?” the people that make a fuss are always like, obviously rich too and you know that’s why they have a problem. like the nerve of me to doubt a rich person’s money. how dare i lump them in with a normal person with a hundred dollar bill. eventually one of them is going to let it slip. i’ll take the bill from them and go to hold it up to the light or feel it between my fingers or something and they’ll laugh and go, “oh, no, no no no i’m wealthy.”
i had a co-worker catch a counterfeiter. back then we all had “truth teller” pens. and the rule was “anything over a ten gets checked if you’re not comfortable with it” but not everyone did it. but this girl was hard core about her pen. especially if she got a bad feeling from a customer. girlfriend had TWO truth teller pens in case one gave a false positive.
this couple come through her line with a lot of stuff and they acting like they are in a hurry. this was the wrong thing to say to this girl. you say that to her and she goes slower cause it freaks her out.
she finally gets to the end and the guy hands her a bunch of 20′s. first she straightened them out and counted them, and then she took her pen out. when i used it i made a little flower so that i would know that i did it. she made a swirly. the first swirly came back black, the second swirly came back black. she got out the SECOND truth teller pen and scribbled a like down the center of the bills…. black as coal.
she was freaking out. dude look like he was intense. she very politely asked if he had another form of payment as she would not be able to accept his money. “WHY NOT?!”
*gulp*
“cause it’s not real, sir.”
“MONEY IS FUCKING REAL! YOU BETTER GET MANAGEMENT OVER HERE! MY MONEY IS AS GOOD AS ANYONE ELSE!!”
she very quickly walked over to the phone and paged, and her voice, was so tinged with panic that everyone, even CUSTOMERS stopped dead in their tracks and listened to the page.
you’d never seen a page answered so quickly. it was prolly ringing before she put the phone back on the receiver. “what’s wrong? what’s going on? are you in danger? are you okay?”
and she told them that no, she wasn’t okay,, her customer was screaming and cursing at her and his money wasn’t real and she had no idea what to do now, this wasn’t covered in the CBL’s!
this got manangement on their feet. “stay call, take a deep breath, we’ll be there in 5 seconds with back up. it’s going to be okay. just breathe.”
which is easier said than done with a man that weighs 150 lbs more than you is screaming his ever loving head off. even the retiree door greeter came over and stood by her just as a show of solidarity, she couldn’t really have done anything, but she was a witness, and sometimes that’s enough to get people to back down.
it must have felt like a hour later, but it was about 2-3 minutes before the store managers came walking down the aisle with the popo trailing behind them. the cops were soooooo happy to see him.
one member of management took over the register as the other led the cashier off to sit and collect herself, while the cops talked to the guy and eventually arrested both the guy and the girl. (apparently they’d been looking for them)
management was so fucking happy that she caught him because he had like 300 dollars in funny money and she caught him dead to rights. they calmed her down, thanked her profusely, gave her the rest of the day off with pay, and called her bf or mother or someone to get her home, because she was shaking like a leaf and they didn’t want to her to get hurt on her way home.
So yes, i will use my pen when i have too. i’ll hold them fuckers up to the light to make sure that the right pressie is in the corner pocket.
don’t fuck with the money honey it just don’t pay.
When I was a manager for a large craft store chain, I had a customer pay with a $100 bill. One of those new ones, the blue ones that look more like they belong in a game of Monopoly than in your wallet, and there was something… Off… About it.
The watermark of Ben Franklin on the bill looked like the shittiest line art of a man you’d ever seen. It was horrendous. But it passed my marker test, so I had to give the guy his change and with a smug grin and $50 worth of Copic markers, he left.
I thought about it all night and into the next day, when the local weed dealer came in to buy his baggies. See, jewelry baggies are cheaper than ziplocks despite being the same fucking thing, and I was the only one who would treat the guy like a normal fuckin dude, so as we were chatting as I rang him out, I sighed and said, “I got a counterfeit hundo the other day.” And I told him about what I’d gone through. I told him what the guy looked like, what he bought, how he acted in line. And when I was handing him his receipt, I said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, man, but just watch out for any suspect looking Benjamins over the next few weeks.” I gave him one of the counterfeit markers and told him that they wouldn’t do any good, but he could have one anyway.
I guess I just wanted to tell someone about it, because I stopped thinking about it after that.
Until the day I got a call from the pot dealer about a month later. He was furious. Someone had ripped him off in over $250 of weed, and they’d done it with–yup–fake Benjamins. He gave me the guy’s name, his description, everything. And then, at the very end, he added, “I’m luring him downtown for a drug deal. Call the fucking cops.”
So I did.
The cops swooped in and grabbed the guy, and not only did they find my Copic markers that he’d bought from the store, he found similar high ticket items from other stores in the area. The cops came back, returned me my markers, and asked how I knew to tip them off.
I told them it was a lucky guess.
And that’s how a drug dealer and a junior store manager bagged a counterfeiter.
i went to the dentist today and my dentist honest to god said “can i ask you a question…….what the hell is in your mouth”
it was in awe lmao
then the hygienist and assistant all came over to look too and they were like “wooooow” and my ass was sitting there like
oh my god i posted this and then went to work, and
story time
okay so to preface this, my hometown where i’m originally from is a really fucking weird place. like from the outside it seems like a normal suburban town, but once you’re there for awhile you get the feeling that’s something’s not…quite all together. a lot of people are really fucking weird there — so much so that that was a running joke in school growing up, that people in the town were just like that. everyone knew not to go out to the farm lands surrounding the town especially at night, we called it “the cuts” and people used to disappear out there all the time or get shot at by the especially weird people that would live out there. the news was and still is truly a thing of horror. every time i come back i’m regaled with even more stories of crazy shit that has happened there.
to put it in perspective we generally never had “normal crime” like robbery or anything like that when i lived there, though that did happen sometimes. the news stories were always like, “a kid was kidnapped by local residents and tortured in a house around the corner,” “a random person was chased down and shot for sport in a really nice neighborhood,” “someone was gored to death by a bull while out car shopping,” etc. (these are all real, btw). everyone does drugs and the whole town is located really close to a government site where they test nuclear weapons and chemicals and shit. this is how i grew up, in this bizarre environment.
i need to preface it this way so that you get that it’s weird. it’s a fucking weird place. i used to listen to the welcome to night vale podcast and make comparisons from it to my hometown, that’s how weird it is.
i only say this so you know that this town is where i got my orthodontics from.
all the kids in my town went to this one particular orthodontist. i also used to go to a dentist in town that a lot of people went to as well. i had a permanent retainer put on my bottom teeth after braces and no one had ever said anything to me about the model of retainer itself or it being weird type of retainer at all. i saw a ton of other people (mostly other kids that were my age at the time) that had the same type of retainer as me too so i never thought about it.
so i kept my retainer in — it’s never caused me problems and it keeps my teeth straight, why not?
however i went to a dentist for the first time in a metropolitan area now, and when he saw it in my mouth his literal first reaction was to say “uh can i ask you a question….what the hell is that”
LITERALLY the words that he said
which in hindsight makes almost too much sense. of course my town of all towns would put these weird unnecessary contraptions in kids’ mouths, and of course it happened so much that everyone just thought it was normal. that sounds exactly, to a T, like my hometown.
my permanent bottom retainer is apparently this prototype that is so rare that he’s literally never seen it before in his life, not in dental school, nowhere. it’s not that it’s an outdated type, it’s just rare as fuck. they were still staring at pictures of it on my chart in wonder when i left the office.
so just know somewhere out there, in a weird ass suburban town where they test nuclear weapons and a good portion of the residents go fucking nuts, there’s probably hundreds of people still walking around with this same contraption in their mouth that exists nowhere else in the world thinking, “yeah, that’s cool. that makes sense. let me go drink the definitely not-contaminated water now and never move away from here.”
This sounds like an X-files episode
Okay, so I looked into it and I think that the town is Tracy, California.
I looked up the bull-murder thing OP mentioned and Tracy seemed to be only town that came up with a matching case. Though the man didn’t actually die from his injuries everything else matches up one for one. So just to make sure that it was the right town I looked to see if there was any murder-torture of young people in Tracy, and unfortunately there was. It was a 17 year old boy who escaped and survived the torture. And just to solidify that it was in fact Tracy I looked up shootings in residential areas and there was one of a 20 year old man who was shot and killed in a nice neighborhood.
Okay, but I decided to look into Tracy more to find out more information about it and the town is super suspicious. There’s been a lot of murders and shooting in the town. Back in 2009 an 8 year old girl, Sandra Cantu, was kidnapped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who said she had no idea why she killed Sandra. Another case happened in 2018 when four underage boys were shot and one was killed by four teenage boys. There’s a lot of news stories on shootings, homicides, and drug busts in that town. It’s a really cute town from the outside, if you just look up Tracy, California there’s a lot of really cute businesses and nice articles on sweet things that happen in the town, but if you actually look into it the town is really sketchy.
So yeah, this sketchy town with a military base, multiple homicides and shootings is maybe Tracy, California.
………………..yeah, you guys caught me
i grew up in tracy
also i have to add another person’s tags to this since it’s honesty hour because they’re hilarious and true
Honestly I wasn’t even surprised when I found out it was in California. Even less surprised when googled it and found out it was near the Bay Area. That sounds about right.
Apparently the motto is “Think Inside the Triangle” and I’m not sure how to feel about that.
what do you think of when I say the phrase “the world’s largest turtle”? an ancient shelled beast, dragging its immense bulk slowly across an uninhabited island somewhere while invasive mammals prey on its vulnerable young? well, that’s usually the case, so I’ll forgive you this time but this is your final warning. because the world’s largest turtle is actually a sleek instrument of jellyfish mass murder the size of a fucking sedan.
put your hands together and make sure you have no jellyfish or jellyfish-like objects on your person, because it’s-
I meant that bit about no jellyfish, I will NOT be held responsible for lost fingers!
the Leatherback is a sea turtle, but one built on a scale so over-the-top-absurd that it’s hard to believe this thing is even in the same general class as your humble everyday pond turtle. god looked down into the ocean one day and told the Leatherback to tone it down a bit because it was making whales feel inadequate. but the Leatherback did not, because the only emotion they can feel is a burning hunger for the living flesh of jellyfish.
and (almost) none of this is an exaggeration, because Leatherbacks can grow to over seven feet long, (as long as Mr. Shaquille O’Neal if you politely asked him to lie down) and can weigh over 1500 pounds! (as much as one grand piano and then half of another grand piano) that’s too large to park on the street in some cities. this incredible size makes them the third largest reptile on the planet, behind a couple of crocodiles who don’t know what they have going for them.
those crocodiles also don’t know that you never want a Leatherback to be directly behind you.
Leatherbacks inhabit every tropical and temperate ocean in the world, and are also sometimes called Luths. (luth is an old-timey bullshit word for “lute”.) they got both names because they lack the traditional hard shell of most turtles, instead having a shell made of thick leathery hide stretched over a bone scaffolding. kind of like an umbrella, I guess, if the umbrella was the size of a car and also very much wanted to bite you. this leathery shell gave Leatherbacks their common name, and also kind of looks like a lute if you’re an 18th century sailor and half-blind from scurvy.
this light flexible shell makes Leatherbacks much lighter, faster, and more agile than a traditional sea turtle. and they abuse the HELL out of this, let me tell you.
a bunch of griefers, that’s what they are.
you don’t normally think “jesus christ that thing can really move” when you think about a turtle, but Leatherbacks are a definite exception. we’re talking speeds upwards of Mach Fuck and well into Dude, Holy Shit territory, here.
Leatherbacks generally cruise along at a fairly zippy 6 mph, but they can and do reach upwards of 22 mph when they feel like it. this might not seem that fast, but imagine an armored aquatic tank bearing down on your feeble human body faster than you can run. and if sheer speed alone doesn’t impress you, Leatherbacks are also capable of turning on a dime. there’s no escape from these incredible ocean bastards!
hold me closer, ocean bastard.
that’s right, Leatherbacks are fast, agile, and extremely aggressive.
adult Leatherbacks have been known to go after sharks, dolphins, human divers, other sea turtles, dogs, and basically anything else that enters the Eternal Turtle Rage zone. they’ve even gone after boats full of terrified researchers!
and you absolutely DO NOT want this to be happening to you, because Leatherbacks pack a gigantic and powerful beak that can snip your arms off like an arborist pruning a sapling. their monstrous bite shears through flesh, bone, and anyone or anything unlucky enough to be on the wrong end of the Leatherback on a bad day. their rage is unyielding and unending.
Leatherback don’t care, Leatherback SMASH.
but usually Leatherbacks aren’t disassembling boat engines with their terrible beak, but horking down huge amounts of soft-bodied animals like jellyfish, squid, and tunicates. they often dive to depths of over 4,000 feet to get these squishy lunches, which is far deeper than any other reptile can manage. the deep ocean is just too cold for other sea turtles to manage, so how do Leatherbacks do it? well, it’s simple: they’re warm-blooded.
Leatherbacks keep a constant body temperature up to 32 degrees higher than the surrounding sea water. this allows them to be active, vicious predators ready to attack a boat full of innocent researchers at a moment’s notice. but what’s REALLY weird is how they pull this body heat trick off- instead of modulating their metabolism like a mammal does, they stay warm by just never sitting fucking still.
they’ve had too much coffee today, and everyday, and forever.
Leatherbacks are actively moving almost all the time, a trait almost never seen in a reptile. instead of resting often and conserving their energy like other turtles, Leatherbacks just thrash all over the place like caffeinated toddlers and use the heat generated by their muscles to warm their bodies. it’s estimated that Leatherbacks are actually holding still and at rest just 0.1% of the time!
but this weird trick works really well and offer similar results to a more traditional warm-blooded system like your own! and to top this party of bizarre body functions and eternal turtle rage, the inside of their beaks and throats are hyperspecialized to help them hold on to soft, slippery, squishy animals they eat so much of.
they got spikes in there, is what I’m saying.
*distant jellyfish screams*
but through no fault of their own, Leatherbacks are in trouble. and it’s because we keep wrecking their nests and throwing plastic into the ocean. Leatherbacks lay their eggs in the sand like other sea turtles, and these eggs are often either dug up deliberately or accidentally stepped on despite their protected status. but it’s the plastic that’s the real problem.
as I’ve said, Leatherbacks like to eat jellyfish. and if you’re a sea turtle, a floating plastic bag just looks like a new and possibly delicious flavor of jellyfish. but unfortunately for Leatherbacks, eating enough plastic bags will kill you. (please don’t try this one at home.)
Leatherbacks need their breeding beaches to be better protected, but they also need people to quit throwing trash in the ocean. so the next time you’re on a protected turtle beach, watch where you step, and WATCH WHERE YOU THROW YOUR TRASH. hopefully these bad-tempered reptilian powerhouses can make a full recovery if we all keep this in mind. thanks, Leatherback! please do NOT bite me.
Leatherback thank you! Leatherback NOT bite your arms off.
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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series on my tumblr here, or check out the official archive at weirdbiology.com!
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IMAGE SOURCES
img1- seaturtlecamp.com img2- National Marine Life Center img3- Project Navigation img4- divephotoguide.com img5- National Wildlife Federation img6- PlanetSave img7- GistOnThis img8- The Conversation
sweetmeats are vegetarian and sweetbreads are made of meat
human language was a mistake and we are cowards for continuing to speak
sweetmeat: an item of confectionery or sweet food
sweetbread: culinary name for the thymus or pancreas of calf and lamb
humans shouldn’t be allowed to name anything
I’m a historical linguist! Have some explanation!
The word meat comes from Old English mete and originally just meant food in general. The word underwent semantic change (specifically: metonymy) so that eventually the word was used for a specific type of food, i.e., meat. So what did they call meat in OE if mete was food? Flæsc, which turned into ModE flesh (kind of like German Fleisch)(’Sup, West Germanic language family). So why do we have sweetmeat instead of, idk, sweet food? Idk. Compounds are weird, man, and the less often a word is used / more dialectal it is (never used “sweetmeat” where I came from), the less likely it is to undergo semantic change (Dr W actually talked about this in class Tuesday past).
So as to sweetbread. The -bread part in this is not etymologically related to bread. Bread, as in the stuff made from grain, came from OE… bread (which, funny story, actually use to mean “crumb” or “bit”; the original OE word was hlaf which then later turned into ModE loaf, and whose traces are in the words lord and lady [lord < hlaford < hlafweard “guardian of the loaf”; lady < hlæfdig, -dig < dæge “loaf maid; maker of the loaf”][these are some of my all-time favourite etymologies], but sometime in OE there was a meaning change and there you go). The -bread in sweetbread has kind of shaky etymology, coming (possibly) from OE bræd (æ could have possibly be written ae and then someone, probably a monk scribing somewhere, made a typo, and then people copied that typo, and then it became a thing due to analogy with bread [this is actually why the present tense and past tense of read are spelled the same way: past tense was ræd, with a long æ, but some monk made a typo and then the GVS happened and the rest is history]) which apparently also meant “meat”.
Why they decided to call it sweetbread as opposed to, idk, savourybread or somesuch is beyond me.
I’m sorry I’m such a huge nerd.
this is cool but am I still allowed to resent the outcome?
