me: it’s awkward when men approach me because i don’t know how to turn them down without putting myself at risk
some idiot: um just tell them you’re gay sweaty
meanwhile,straight men:
Worth noting: She told the dude several times before, politely, that she wasn’t interested and he wouldn’t take no for an answer and kept following and pestering her. After turning him down multiple times, she finally said she was gay, and he snapped and started attacking her. He climbed on her windshield, kicked it in and shattered it, causing glass to get in her eyes.
Also worth noting iirc, there were numerous witnesses and not one person did anything to help this woman. They all saw this man pestering her, her turning him down, repeatedly, and him jumping up on her car to kick her windshield in and her driving to try and shake him off, that not working, and her jumping from the car to flee. And no one did anything. The police never caught him.
“Since he did this and got away with it, he had no repercussions,” she said. “He’s going to think ‘if a girl rejects me, I can do this to her. I didn’t get caught last time.’ ” (source)
How about instead of “just tell them you’re gay” we teach men how to take no for an answer?
This isn’t because Burger King is nicer in Denmark. It’s the law, and the US is actually the only so-called “developed” country that doesn’t mandate jobs provide a minimum amount of paid vacation, sick leave, or both.
kinda debunks that claim that they can’t afford to pay their workers those sort of wages and still make a profit
Its corporate greed, plain and simple.
It is the same in Sweden. It is so funny every time an american company opens up offices here and then tries to do it the american way and all the unions go “I don’t think so”.
They refused to sign on to the union deals that govern such things as pay/pension and vacation in Sweden. Most of our rights are not mandated by law (we don’t have a minimum wage for example) but are made in voluntary agreements between the unions and the companies.
But they refused, saying that they had never negotiated with any unions anywhere else in the world and weren’t planning to do it in Sweden either.
Of course a lot of people thought it was useless fighting against an international giant, but Handels (the store worker’s union) said that they could not budge, because that might mean that the whole Swedish model might crumble. So they went on strike in the three stores that the company had opened so far.
Cue a shitstorm from the press, and from right wing politicians. But the members were all for it, and other unions started doing sympathy actions. The teamsters refused to deliver goods to their stores, the financial unions blockaded all economical transactions regarding Toys ‘r Us and the strike got strong international support as well, especially in the US.
In the end, Toys ‘r Us caved in, signed the union deal, and thus their employees got the same treatment as Swedish store workers everywhere.
The right to be treated as bloody human beings and not disposable cogs in a machine.
and that story right there? is exactly why Republicans in the US work so hard to bust unions. it’s because unionizing WORKS and they’re terrified of workers actually having some power.
We’re getting pretty close to having adults who weren’t alive during 9/11, and we really need to admit at this point that the overemphasis on 9/11 in the US is just a propaganda machine to indoctrinate the younger generations into nationalism and to justify all the horrible war crimes the US committed in the Middle East, and the continued mistreatment and distrust towards refugees.
Hairdresser: We’re going to have to use a color remover to take out the blue pigment, then apply more pigment to allow for the proteins in the hair to adhere to it. Then possibly mix three different types of toners to reach the goal of your natural hair color.
Hairdresser: pretty simple
Me: this is chemistry
Hairdresser: yeah, but people don’t like when we talk that way
Hairdresser: so you’re a mortician?
Me: apprentice
Hairdresser: do you know why formaldehyde is used in clothing?
Me: I didn’t know that was a thing
Hairdresser: I think it’s due to the preserving qualities? But I don’t think that’s right.
Me: It’s not just a preservative, it’s also a disinfectant ‘cause it destroys bacteria as well as their food supply. It’s also a dehydrator.
Hairdresser: why not just use alcohol?
Me: good question. Formaldehyde is super cheap, so probably to cut costs
Hairdresser: is it really a carcinogen?
Me: yeah, I’m going to have so much cancer
Hairdresser: so you’re going natural to work at a funeral home?
Me: yeah
Hairdresser: while still in school?
Me: well we work in the funeral homes so we have uuuuh … experience with cases
Hairdresser: you can just say bodies it’s fine
Me: oh thank god
Five Minutes Later
Me: yeah so we don’t do autopsies it’s one of my pet peeves
Hairdresser: what if someone wakes up while you’re embalming them?
Me: there’s a huge difference between a living body and a dead one
second hairdresser: I think we should add more toner, but yeah I think rigor mortis would make it pretty obvious
Me: that and being in a fridge for a few days you will be dead by the time you get to us
Hairdresser: I think pumping them full of a carcinogen would help with that
Sigmund Freud: All men secretly REALLY REALLY want to have sex with their mothers
It’s the Oedipus Complex
Oedipus: (Who literally gouged his own eyes out and killed himself when he found out he accidentally had sex with his mother) I’m sorry it’s the WHAT complex
[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff – she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that – but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject – well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]
Griffins: a very mysterious mystery
“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”
The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters – people thought griffins were legit – real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point – except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same.
Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.
This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins – art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh.
And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know – they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals – wow and amaze – you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.
(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)
And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?
And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.
(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)
So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils – and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.
And guess what they look like.
Just fucking guess.
[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]
Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah – as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.
Man, don’t you just love mythology?
(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.)
Zu Asche, zu Staub.
Unpopular opinion: carn in 71 is authentic and adorable. A little lost? Sure. They are just in-that-phase™, and I have faith in their character that they will find out how to be truly independent.
