Lion Gets Stuck In A Tree Before His Brother Helps Him Down. All photos by Carters News via The Huffington Post ~ Please click through to see the gif they made of this hilarious incident. It was too big for me to post it here for you. 😀
The brother on the ground is displaying the most perfect face of “This asshole got stuck up a fucking tree again” I think I’ve ever seen.
Okay, storytime. Both of my parents worked full time, and the woman who ran the family daycare across the street “went away for her health”- a charming euphemism for her family having her institutionalised because they couldn’t cope with her schizophrenia, but that’s another story for another time- so I went to preschool for two years. The preschool I went to was a good one. Still is, actually. My brother and his wife have their little sprout on the waiting list already, and he’s not two yet. It’s built onto the side of an ex-church, and it has great play areas, a sandpit, ducks, the works. Nice. We did all the usual preschool stuff; craft activities, storytime, naptime, playing with toys. To help us learn to be responsible and cooperative human beings, we were expected to clean up after ourselves, and put things away when we were done with them. Being small children, this had mixed results, so at the end of every day, there’d be a big group cleanup, where we went through and picked all the toys and books up off the floor of the main room and put everything in order.
All very nice, right? Trouble was, about half of the kids got picked up at 5, 5:30ish, and the other half, whose parents worked later hours, would be there till 6 or 6:30. The cleanup usually happened around 6, so the kids whose parents could pick them up early never had to clean up, and I noticed pretty quickly that the kids who never had to clean up at the end of the day didn’t seem to pick up after themselves during the day, either. They knew they wouldn’t have to deal with it, so they didn’t care.
I feel I should mention that my mother was, at the time, the secretary of a large public sector union. She’d been a unionist for some time (we’ve got a great picture somewhere of baby me on her lap at a Women In Leadership conference) and sometimes she had people over for dinner, and they’d talk about union business. I knew what was going on, here. This was a discriminatory practice. It targeted kids whose parents couldn’t afford for one of them to stay home with the kids. It encouraged unfair behaviour in the kids who didn’t have to clean up. This had to stop.
I went to the staff first. Mostly they laughed at me- in their defense, please picture a tiny blonde four-year-old in a princess dress squaring up to you about “dithcriminatory practitheth”- and told me I should set an example for the other kids by being tidy. Well. That wasn’t going to change anything. Having been knocked back by the administration, I took the struggle to the people. While we were cleaning up, I talked to the other kids who had to stay late, and we came to a consensus that things had to change. Look, to be honest, I don’t remember this happening with any kind of clarity. I was very small. Mum has told this story with great pride for some years, though, and most of the details come from her retelling. I don’t know if it was me who first suggested strike action, but I know it was me who led the sit-in protests; I’m told it was me who made an inspiring speech about fairness and division of labour, and it was definitely me whose parents got called.
Upshot was, we went over to a system of shorter clean-up sessions throughout the day- one before lunch, one after naptime, and one at the end of the day- and my mother has never let me forget that four-year-old me was a rabble-rousing monster child.
your periodic reminder that a good chunk of Europe basically shat the bed for a few centuries while everyone else kinda did their thing.
I am sorry I’m going to be that person.
This map is extremely inaccurate.
1) China was not going through business as usual China was going through the TANG DYNASTY i.e. the Golden Age of Chinese culture, which would lay down legal and social and poetic norms for the rest of Chinese history. The Tang is so influential that a lot of languages call Chinese people 唐人 (People from Tang.) (We call Chinese people “people from Qin” so.)
2) Japan is _first becoming literate_ during this time period (due to the influence of the Tang they adopt Chinese script), which is a BFD for poetry, religion, politics, society. Japanese court culture develops, which near the end of this period (11th century, around the time Europe enters “high middle ages”) will produce The Tale of Genji (by a totally awesome woman named Murasaki),widely regarded as the world’s first novel because of it’s deft use of irony and social commentary.
3) The southern part of Korea is experiencing the emergence of Unified Silla, a state that will last the entire period and will see the importation of Chinese and Indian buddhism, the construction of the first Confucian college in Korea, and so on.
4) In Mesoamerica, the Mayans are inventing astronomy, writing (the third and final independent invention of writing in human history), and a whole crapload of other stuff. This is the triumph of their culture.
5) The Umayyads in Spain are a massive center of technology, learning, and (comparative) religious toleration.
6) The Eastern Roman Empire, which spans both the green and yellow portions of your map, isn’t doing too badly either, bouncing back after losing territory to the Caliphate.
7) The Polynesians are colonizing the ENTIRE PACIFIC using amazing advanced navigation technology not rivaled until the INVENTION OF GPS.
8) I am not equipped to talk about Sub-Saharan Africa in detail (cue rant about how we never learn about subsaharan africa in the western educational system) but you can bet there are some major, amazing developments going on there too. I’d be shocked if there weren’t.
11) THEY WEREN’T BURNING WITCHES IN EUROPE DURING THE MIGRATION PERIOD (dark ages). Witch burning took off in the EARLY MODERN PERIOD, nearly 1000 years after this. Europe was going through some tough shit, which would leave them backwards compared to the rest of the world for 1000 years, but also there were some amazing things happening there, at least have the decency to be like “angry dudes with swords stabbing people” not WITCH BURNINGS FFS.
12) And ABSOLUTELY Islamic Caliphate was a totally amazing flowering of intellectual, artistic, and spiritual culture, a mixing pot between a thousand cultures and languages, and totally amazing. Don’t in any way want to diminish that in any way.
Known as one of the world’s first Realist paintings, Gustave Courbet’s landscapes, specifically seascapes are world renowned for their composition. Composed with a heavy brush stroke and muted color palette, Courbet’s portrayal of the sea is often violent, passionate and heavy. Its moody milieu, heavy clouds and deep blue colors construct a romantic scenery of the Earth’s most coveted element: water.
Imagine how pissed you have to be to engrave a rock
Ok but there was this guy called Ea-nasir who was a total crook and would actually cheat people ought of good copper and sell them shit instead. The amount of correspondences complaining to and about this guy are HILARIOUS.
Are you telling me we know about a specific guy who lived 5000 years ago, by name, because he was a huge asshole
More like 4000 years ago but yes. Ea-nasir and his dodgy business deals.
And we haven’t even touched on the true hilarity of the situation yet. Consider two additional facts:
He wasn’t just into copper trading. There are letters complaining about Ea-nasir’s business practices with respect to everything from kitchenwares to real estate speculation to second-hand clothing. The guy was everywhere.
The majority of the surviving correspondences regarding Ea-nasir were recovered from one particular room in a building that is believed to have been Ea-nasir’s own house.
Like, these are clay tablets. They’re bulky, fragile, and difficult to store. They typically weren’t kept long-term unless they contained financial records or other vital information (which is why we have huge reams of financial data about ancient Babylon in spite of how little we know about the actual culture: most of the surviving tablets are commercial inventories, bills of sale, etc.).
But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all of his angry letters – hundreds of them – and meticulously filed and preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 