If I’m somewhere where there are Educational Personell (Museum Docents, Q&A zookeepers, Park Rangers, Public School Teachers, Professors etc.) I have a question I like to ask them:
“What’s the weirdest question someone’s ever asked you?”
I say weird and not Dumb becuase even buckwild questions can have important answers, but whoever I ask it too usually has to think about it for a bit, then comes out with something different every time. And I love every single answer becuase it just warms my heart out there to know people are trying to understand the world a bit better, no matter how limited thier starting point. A collection of favorites so far:
Art Museum Host: “A man once asked me “Can you help me find someone and if you can’t can you find someone who can?” Which I always thought would be a great title for an Artwork.”
Park Ranger: “I’m so glad the Japanese couple asked me “Is bear spray like mosquito spray and it goes on the jacket, or on the bear?” instead of just trying it.”
Zookeeper: “A man once pointed at the live red-tailed hawk I had out for a demo and asked me “Aren’t those extinct?” We eventually figured out he meant “Endangered” but I hear that question every time I see a redtail now.”
Primary School Teacher: “About every other year a student asks me what part of the school I sleep in at night, because clearly I live here. I tell them I sleep under the bleachers in the gym but it’s actually the Nurse’s office.”
Professor: “A student asked me “So how do I use this in a conversation when my aunt is wine-drunk at thanksgiving and being a jerk again?” Which honestly is a fair question about philosophy and really changed how I teach rhetoric.”
Natural History Docent: “A woman once asked me what the difference between a Million and a Billion was. Kinda pieced together that she’d just left her church for her safety, and was learning about Earth’s Natural History for the first time. Nobody else was there because it had been snowing, so I walked her through the Hall Of Time and answered as many questions as I could. She was bewildered, but really trying. It always struck me as a really brave thing, to try to understand all of that while fresh out of a dangerous situation. I hope it helped.”
Forensic Scientist: “People ask me how to commit murder all the time, but if you really hate someone, stealing thier identity causes much more suffering and is a lot harder to get caught at. A guy did ask me if working at a body farm was creepy and did not like that it was ok until you learned that decayed human fingers are a deer’s favorite midwinter snack.”
Zookeeper: “People call us becuase they think they’ve found an escaped animal all the time, or they think they’re neighbor’s husky is a wolf. One guy asked me if his dog was part hyena because it had spots. But that one guy really did have a Tiger in his toolshed that one time so we try to take them seriously.”
Meteorologist: “A guy once emailed me about how hard you’d have to fan a tornado to make it start spinning in the other direction and included a picture of him holding up a box fan at an approaching tornado. We printed it out for the work fridge.”
Park Ranger: “I was giving a talk on the Yellowstone Supervolcano and a guy asked if, after it errupted, the earth would be ‘hollowed out’. I suppose I was just relieved that he understand that the earth isn’t flat.”
Primarcy Shcool teacher: “A student once asked me where she could sell her bones online so she could by a dog. Which? Same.”
Natural History Docent: “A guy asked us ‘If I had a time machine, and managed to kill and cook a T-Rex, what would it have tasted like?’ and every paleontologist on staff deciced to take him seriously. They did research to learn about fat distribution, and read up on culinary science to learn what flavors meat, even did chemical analysis on the bones. They concluded that it’d be Tough (no evidence of juicy fat pockets), bitter (carnivores tend to taste foul) and would probably kill him, because heavy metals travel up the food chain and T-Rex accumulated a lot of the cadmium that was in the dirt in the late cretaceous. Wrote him a letter with our findings and he sent us back a drawing of him and his buddies cooking a T-Rex over a fire and all of them throwing up and dying, and it’s my favorite drawing in the whole world.”
I can’t stop thinking about the contrast between the first and second times Stede leaves home.
In the first one we have hesitancy.
We’ve got clutching a jacket and the model ship for comfort.
We’ve got wide shots that make Stede look small in his surroundings. And we don’t actually see him move from place to place, we just see him standing still in a new location.
Then in episode 10 we’ve got confidence.
The one wide shot is an active one, with Stede pulling the boat out into the waves himself.
The camera stays close to Stede for most of this. He’s the main act here, not someone lost in his surroundings.
And of course the first scene is narrated by Stede’s letter to Mary, his excuses that she reads sitting alone in their bedroom. The second is narrated by Mary herself, surrounded by others as she gives a eulogy to Stede after the fuckery they pulled off together.
I love going viral on tumblr.com. It’s like if you stood in a field and said some of the stupidest shit a human being is capable of and then like fifty thousand crows attacked you
The Ocean? The Moon? Both sapphics & they’re married, your honor…
[ID: Two digital paintings of Yue and La from Avatar: The Last Airbender. The first image has three depictions of La. She has deep purple hair and eyes, deep brown skin, and wears all purple clothing. On the left there is a full body portrait in which she is wearing traditional water tribe clothing, but instead of blue lined with white fur hers is a deep purple that matches her hair, lined with lavender fur. She wears a helmet similar to the wolf helmet Sokka and Hakoda wear, but hers’ covers the first half of her face and is the face of a Koi fish. She holds a spear with a deep purple blade tied to it with lavender cloth. Next to the full body portrait is a bust portrait of La. She wears an off the shoulder deep purple top, her hair down and with two pieces in the front separated similar to Katara’s “hair loopies”. She wears a deep purple betrothal necklace with the charm being the white half of the yin and yang symbol. Under the bust portrait is a drawing of a deep purple koi fish with slim lavender oval on the center of it face and lavender eyes. The background is white.
The second painting is of Yue and La. They are drawn with their hair and clothes extended, so they make up the two halves of the yin and yang symbol, with Yue at the bottom and La at the top. Yue is shown as she is in the show, however she is wearing a white betrothal necklace with the black half of the yin and yang symbol as the charm. She looks lovingly at La. La is wearing the same outfit as in her full body portrait, but now she is holding her helmet in one hand and reaching out to Yue with the other. She looks into Yue’s eyes with determination. There is a soft halo of light around the circle they make up, and the background is a warm lavender. End ID]
a thing that will forever amuse me is the movie fandom’s depiction of the relationship between gandalf and pippin. like “haha old man is annoyed by younger man” is funny on its own but what most of them don’t know is:
gandalf is an entity, an angelic being taking up human form who is older than time itself. pippin ‘i exist to spite god’ took is like 17. this is a teenager constantly fucking up an ancient being.
pippin is the biggest minor inconvenience in gandalf’s life.
Pippin:
i personally hope that the valar see peregrin took being like that and decide he should just… stay
and like gandalf visits the shire, realizes it’s been like 2000 years now and is just like “what did i do to deserve this?”
the valar watching pippin in the background as he makes a grab for gandalf’s staff “we just think he’s neat”
and i personally love that thought
Reblogging again because I need to make an addition:
It’s Gandalf who advocates for Pippin (and Merry) to join the party.
'But that will leave no place for us!’ cried Pippin in dismay. 'We don’t want to be left behind. We want to go with Frodo.’
'That is because you do not understand and cannot imagine what lies ahead,’ said Elrond.
'Neither does Frodo,’ said Gandalf, unexpectedly supporting Pippin. 'Nor do any of us see clearly. It is true that if these hobbits understood the danger, they would not dare to go. But they would still wish to go, or wish they dared, and be shamed and unhappy. I think, Elrond, that in this matter it would be well to trust rather to their friendship than to great wisdom. Even if you chose for us an Elf-lord, such as Glorfindel, he could not storm the Dark Tower, nor open the road to the Fire by the power that is in him.’
Pippin: I wanna come too
Elrond: Lol no, you don’t have the prerequisites
Gandalf: Dude literally no one does
Also, earlier in the same chapter:
(Pippin talking to the other hobbits): 'I shall go, unless they chain me up. There must be someone with intelligence in the party.’
'Then you certainly will not be chosen, Peregrine Took!’ said Gandalf, looking in through the window, which was near the ground.
Pippin is ready to throw hands with god, but he is fully aware that he’ll only get away with it because he and god are already on a talk-shit basis
'Hurray!’ cried Pippin, springing up. 'Here is our noble cousin! Make way for Frodo, Lord of the Ring!’
'Hush,’ said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. 'Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Morder, whose power is again stretching out over the world. We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is getting dark.’
'Gandalf has been saying many cheerful things like that,’ said Pippin. 'He thinks I need keeping in order.’
Gandalfknows Pippin is Like This, and he still advocates for him to come along.
Also doesn’t the math come out to him being like 13/14 when the adventure starts? lmao
Yeah hobbits live 100-120 years on average and pippin was 29 when it started which works out to about 24 percent of his life span if he lived to 120, equal to 16ish years if he were a human. So a literal teenager.
But I do think that this rapport he and Gandalf had were a large piece of why Gandalf decided it was better that Pippin come if he so chose to: by the time they had reached Rivendell, Frodo had already understood to some extent that this burden would very likely kill him. He was older (51) but still too young to be as solemn as he had already become, and Gandalf could see it. Sam came on the journey to care for Frodo, Merry came to offer some kindness, but Pippin was there to make Frodo laugh, and to remind him that he was still young and had room left in him to enjoy things. Pippin was crucial to Frodo keeping heart on this journey and Gandalf could see it. Bringing the hobbits along was so largely an act of tokenism; they were there to remind Frodo, and indeed all of the fellowship, exactly what they were trying to protect.
these additions are so good and make me so happy!!!!!
also surely “ready to throw hands with god” is in fact a very important qualification when you are on a quest to destroy a god’s favorite piece of jewelry
Yeah Hobbits come of age at 35. If I recall correctly Merry was barely an adult but at least was past that.
But knowing that Pippin is a tweenager (the Hobbit ages between teens and adulthood were tweens long before that meant “pre- and young tends”) explains SO much about how he is basically all the time and I’ve always felt like that gave a nice additional depth to the story.
You know, if we DO make contact with aliens within the next hundred years-ish, enough people are going to give the Vulcan salute to the first alien they see in real life (whether out of quivering excitement, lol memeitude, or sheer awkward, panicked grasping for the one prominent alien greeting nested in the social conscious) that there’s a solid chance that it becomes a thing we’re known for ashumans.
So I was thinking about how it’s pretty thoroughly established that Frenchie can’t read or write, but then we get to episode 5 and he a) identifies the party invitation and b) writes receipts as part of the pyramid scheme. The first one could be explained by what little we know of his background – he knows what a fancy party invitation looks like – but what about the receipts? I’ll admit, the possibility that Frenchie lied about his literacy level in order to avoid getting stuck with Lucius’ job was veryfunny to me, but I went back and looked and no:
No, he just drew pictures again. Which, first off, incredible, love that, but it does kind of make me wonder how he got away with it and the only thing I can think of is that he. That he told them the receipts were written in hieroglyphs.
And presumably a bunch of aristocrats were like “that sounds fake but I definitely don’t know enough about Egypt to dispute it, one half a pyramid please.”
What to call their meals. Boromir thinks, if it is eaten at dinnertime, regardless of whether it is the first meal of the day or not, then it is dinner. Sam thinks it isn’t proper to call the first meal of the day dinner. Aragorn suggests they combine the two words but now everyone is fighting over whether it should be called breakfast-dinnner or dinner-breakfast. The fight nearly becomes physical
Whether Legolas or Gimli is winning their daily argument with eachother
If hobbits are regular sized and everyone else is really big, or if everyone else is regular sized and hobbits are small
The same as above except with horses and ponies
If Gimli’s beard is real or not. This one started as a joke between Merry and Pippin but then Legolas saw how mad it made Gimli and so continues to bring it up
Inter-hobbit fighting about whether it is called pot-ae-toes, pot-ah-toes, or taters
“Can Legolas really talk to trees, or is he just fucking with us?” Aragorn and Gandalf refuse to weigh in on this
Whether the Ent-draught caused Merry and Pippin to grow or if they just did that on their own. This fight is Pippin vs. Everyone Else
Whether the non-hobbits of the Fellowship would be Tooks, Brandybucks, or Bagginses. This argument is unintelligible to most of them, although Gandalf has the knowledge to be offended when Pippin suggests he would be a Took.
“What would happen if someone ate the ring?”
Fights over whether the elves, the dwarves, or the hobbits tell the story of the reclaiming of Erebor most accurately. Even though Gandalf was there, he just shrugs when anyone asks him
Which variety of pipeweed is the best kind. Merry threatened Gimli to a duel over this one
i’ve been so out of the loop when it comes to royals that aren’t victoria and co. so i just wiki’d the invictus games and i can’t even begin to describe how proud i am of harry.
yes actually, I believe we should try to understand why human commit atrocities and that understandingwhy does not in any way, shape or form means that we condone those atrocities and yeah I think studying religions to know why religious people have committed heinous acts is FREAKING IMPORTANT so we can denounce those acts and YEAH I believe calling out those heinous acts is GOOD and yeah atrocities shaped our civilizations unfortunately and YEAH acknowledging that is absolutely KEY and YES ACTUALLY religions are some of the building blocks of our civilization and saying that is NOT saying our civilizations are good and it’s not in any way saying the horrors of our history were good or moral or necessary, it’s saying that they happenedand that their roots are complicated and YEAH if we want to tear out those roots we need to UNDERSTAND and YEAH to understand we have to learn and YEAH to learn we have to study and—
