Also, as regards livestock… bunny rabbits are not noted for motive power. If you need things that can’t be water or wind powered, and have yet to develop steam machinery… large animals are there. As I’ve seen it put, “Horses put up with human demands because humans treat them BETTER than other horses do.” It would not surprise me if this universally the case. Yes, there are bad/idiot humans (I have some not distant enough relatives…) but overall… “All you want is I pull? And otherwise nothing happens? Alright, I can pull for a while.”
“And then the human scratched and brushed out my fur, no, really, remember that toe nail I had, fixed that too. Then he gave me clean water and some straw to eat” Horse said to the cow.
“So you’re telling me this random human had you pull something for a day and he gave you all that? Now I know you’re full of shit” the cow replied.
“I am wondering why you left?” the deer asked.
That’s what I was thinking. Dude, never mind the rest; humans have domesticated PREDATOR species — we’ve got finely tuned little killers (cats) and deadly pack hunters (doggos) just lounging around our houses and even doing our bidding, and we act like it’s no big deal.
I wouldn’t touch that with a barge pole. The HCM is forbidden territory. ~:D
Although, I’ve often thought if aliens came they would probably watch us go for a while, then make some blindingly obvious observation and we’d all slap our foreheads.
I literally saw people ridiculing Deion Broxton for the viral video — the one where he decided that he would dive into the car because a herd of buffalo came toward him — on the grounds they were just fluffy cows.
Someone did patiently explain, each time, that actually cows aren’t really jokes either.
I’ve done that. I was going to go hiking at Jacob’s Well in Kansas. Seven or eight bison approached. I went back to the car. They followed. I dove into the car and locked the doors. They loitered. I backed away sloooowly, then did a bootlegger turn and departed.
The group of furcows where I used to live (The place was called Buffalo Ridge) were rather mellow, except the youngest male who could mock charge (fence between us, and I had just wondered how good he’d taste, so . . .) and the owner said he would work at knocking him over so he was looking to sell him off. Otherwise they just wandered up to the offices near feeding time to get Purina munchies. There were the requisite sign saying “Large Beasties, Keep Out, They could kill the stupid! This Means You!” (okay, it might not have been worded that way) and then after selling the place he sold the lot to a breeder (he lost a female to birthing issues so it was 3 of the wig wearing bœuf)
Our ancestors didn’t domesticate cows, then bisons. There weren’t any cows. They domesticated bison (aurochs, the extinct European variety, but very similar to the American bison), then selectively bred for docility and reduced size until they got cows. They are still the same species; cows and American bisons readily crossbreed, producing “beefalo”, fully fertile offspring of intermediate size and temperament.
Ask any farmer or rancher how “tame” cows are. There is a reason this sign is applicable:
“Warning. Must dash across this meadow in 8 seconds. The bull can make it in 10.”
I’ve milked cows by hand. There is a reason leather boots are recommended. There is a reason they are being bribed with their heads between stanchions. Might be tamer than American Plain Bison. Doesn’t make them not dangerous.
:snickers:
Finding bison that aren’t part cow is a huge battle with flame war level fights. It makes “can dogs and coyotes interbreed” from 20-ish years ago (it was claimed to be a myth on par with cats and rabbits crossing) look tame.
Foxfier: Dogs and coyotes interbreeding must have been distressing to biologists who were sure coyote was a different species than gray wolf. Dogs were bred from gray wolves, so a coy-dog hybrid implied there were also coy-wolf hybrids, and tracing canid lineages just became very difficult. E.g., there’s an ongoing debate as to whether the red wolf of the American southeast was a distinct lineage or just a coy-wolf. (It seems to have been crossbred out of existence before scientists got a sample.)
But coy-dogs were rare, because a coyote pack is far more likely to try to eat a dog than to sniff butts. That’s how biologists justify calling different canid lineages separate “species” – there are behavioral barriers that keep cross-breeding rare in the wild. Bisons and cattle apparently get along much better, so when open-range cattle became more common in the bison ranges than the bison, a lot of mixing was going to happen. A first generation cross is pretty obvious, and few cowmen cared to mess with something even more dangerous than a longhorn bull, so crosses were rapidly eliminated from the cattle breeding stock. OTOH, apparently if a cow is in heat, a buffalo bull doesn’t care if the cow is stunted and rather stupid…
d: Dad raised meat calves, so I learned the necessary precautions. They are ready to sell at about 1,000 pounds. At just half that weight, they are at least twice your size and strength and don’t even need to intend harm. If you let a 500 pound calf get “playful” with you, it may look a lot like assault with intent to kill. I was thankful that we were buying just-weaned calves at auction, so we never had to deal with the cows and bulls. That calf’s momma is bigger but perhaps more predictable, and it’s poppa is bigger and mean.
Most beef bulls won’t be mean– although there are folks who deliberately select for them because…. well, family friendly blog, I won’t say why, you get the idea.
As you say, they can murder you just messing around.
Aunt and Uncle have 40 acres on Pine Creek outside of Baker. Spent entire summer 3 times as a teen. They had 3 cows, which they’d breed, then they’d buy another calf so they’d have 4. They’d milk two cows, and put all 4 calves on the other one, Rosie. Because Rosie did not like to be milked. Uncle could, but none of us teens could. So she got to feed the calves. Other than her own calves, she was not particularly accommodating. She had to be cornered in the corral, then someone had to monitor the situation. The not-Rosie calves learned quickly how to be safe as long as she was made to stand in one spot. They also learned how to use her calf so that if she kicked out, her calf got hurt every single time.
They never had more than 3 cows. Suspect there was some swapping of female and male calves with a local dairy. They did sell the excess raw milk. Anything not sold or used by the family, the excess the cream was skimmed and butter made, the rest of the milk went to the pigs raised for slaughter. Learned to keep toes out of the way when feeding those things from outside the fence.
Yes. It does. Just check out FB group “Yellowstone Invasion of the Idiots”. Unfortunately some posters are also idiots. The post on the woman who got gored at one of the Yellowstone cabins (Roosevelt, I think but could have been one of the other internal hotel with cabin options). Woman stepped out of the cabin, walked two steps, and had a bull come stampeding around the cabin corner. In no way was she in the wrong. Bad luck.
Not the same group but another Yellowstone group recent post. Woman was in the park with her daughter, someone who frequents the park. They’d been at a particular spot for over an hour watching wildlife and watching for the grizzly “Snow” and her current twin cubs of the year, but no one (and trust me a lot of eyes looking) had spotted the trio. She decided to have her picture taken slightly up the hill for a lot of detailed reasons. No sooner had her daughter shot the picture, her daughter got excited and started pointing. Daughter did not want to yell. Reason? Snow with the twins had come out of the brush 10’s of feet (well within the 100 yard minimum to keep from bears). Woman very slowly moved down the hill to the road, talking calmly, got in the vehicle, took the camera and started shooting pictures. Comment “was shaking so bad surprised any of the bear pictures are in focus”. Moral. No matter how close you are to the road have bear spray on you. Naturally, only a few feet up the slope off the road, the bear spray was in the vehicle. Oops. FYI. Lots of pictures with bears on boardwalks this year too.
This is from someone, that as many times as we’ve been to Yellowstone, and off the road, we’ve never carried bear spray. OTOH we rarely see bears. This last spring an exception. Don’t know why. (Although we didn’t see the number of grizzlies we should have. Just not that lucky.) Just was. We weren’t off hiking either.
Which brings up another SF trope. Aliens who are shocked at the variety of environments humans survive in on their own home planet.
I have heard tales of German immigrants moving into the central plains and bewildering the friends and family they left behind as the SAME PLACE could be -20 F in Winter… AND +100 F (or more!) in Summer. And to a European mind (blessed with Gulf Stream currents & the Med. as heatsink/buffer) that was MADNESS.
I remember some evening a number of years ago, when the local (Boston MA) weather guy mentioned that on that day a town in ND observed a new record high and a new record low in the same 24 hour period. Eek.
After spending a winter in WI (attending college) I sure wondered about all those fellow Dutchmen who emigrated to Michican, not to mention various Central Canadian provinces. I also remember that same winter making an emergency hike to the local Army/Navy store to buy an adequate parka; Dutch “winter coats” are not in any way fit for dealing with WI winters…
Lower Michigan (Da Mitten) has Lake Michigan moderating its temperature significantly. Now, WI.. yeah. One particularly nasty Winter it was (in Wausau area..) -40 every night for two weeks, and the high wasn’t up to 0 F for that time. That was, amusingly and fortuitously right when $UNION said “You not-union folks must park elsewhere, we park where we can see the vehicles.” EXCEPT that ‘sentenced’ us to…the EXECUTIVE parking (day… we were night…) with the OUTLETS. And I had a vehicle with a block heater….
Alien returning to mother ship and reporting in to commanding officer from sickbay: “Sir! They were ‘this big’! I swear!” Shows picture of a pack of chihuahuas. “Then we went to the next target. It was bigger, but there was only one.” Shows picture of domestic house cat (feral or not). Conclusion: “Humans are insanely tough. They co-exist with vicious not intelligent species!”
How many Aubrey / Maturin in space book series are there, I wonder? David Drake’s RCN series (first book is With the Lightnings) is the one I know best, and I love pretty much all the books in the series. I’m happy to learn of more.
I’m recalling the story of aliens visiting,curious about what’s taking us so long to destroy ourselves after they first sensed our nuclear weapon use. They encountered a deer who chased them, then got killed by a bear, who was chased off the kill by a wolverine who peed all over the kill and wandered back to the human who treated him like a pet. They fled in terror.
The computer chewed up the available data regarding size, probably body mass, and other related factors of the two different animals, [grizzly] bear and wolverine; it then compared this with data from other worlds, considered the possibility of reducing the high Ferocity Index of the bear, found that it could not logically do so, discovered that it could not handle the Ferocity Index of the wolverine, and ended up with a stoppage. The wolverine’s Ferocity Index was off-scale.
Another one, I can’t remember author or title: Aliens scouting for planets to conquer land at a hardscrabble ranch in East Texas. The owner is out working the cattle or something, leaving his boy at home. The boys Pa taught him how to treat visitors, so he serves them chili and white lightning. After a bite and a sip, they flee to their ship, and mark the Solar System as off limits on their stellar maps.
Reminds me of a historical anecdote we got in Maine. The chief of the local tribe was at the local festival (which celebrates the first naval action the Revolutionary War). The British sent a landing party up the river in a longboat. The colonists and local tribesmen, who got along pretty well, were on the third day of a three-day celebration of their new alliance. The celebration involved LOTS of alcohol, and when they spotted the oncoming landing party there was some consternation.
Until one native said, “Bet I can hit that guy standing up front in the boat. Hold my beer!” Or something like that. He proceeded to drill the CO of the landing party square between the eyes.
At which point, the entire landing party turned around and went downstream as fast as they could. Then they reported they’d been faced with a horde of howling savages and barely escaped with their lives. (I suspect the fact there was only one casualty undermined their story).
It’s on Wikipedia under, “Machias, Maine,” along with the story of the Battle of the Margaretta. It’s under, “Raid of 1777.” That story mentions other shooters, plus 40-50 Indians, shouting their war cries. The colonists joined in. The entry reads like it was written by a Brit. What we heard was oral history/tradition from the chief, who seemed to be a bit of a character. (Gathered the tribe is poor, but has a pretty large wilderness area to hunt/trap/fish in. He came across as a probable member in good standing of the, “Stay Off My Lawn!” Party.
The Reader has a long list of books that should be in ‘Religious Fiction’ before The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Anything by Marx goes to the head of the section.
So here’s an encouraging thought. The answer to the Alien’s last question is public school and socialism and culling the most aggressive via pointless wars. Farmer types and historians can no doubt give more details on the processes.
AND even fully domesticated, a sow with piglets is dangerous to the would-be farmers. And what, two generations after escaping captivity they have to hunt the pigs with explosives, yes?
And it’s first generation after escape that you can’t tell them from generations feral.
Once saw a female hog take about two feet off of a two inch dowel, four inches at a time, when she took offense to piglets screaming as they got doctored.
She didn’t have any piglets, just a homicidal attitude.
I attended the Air Ground Operations School in the 80s. In one exercise I was the Intel officer charged with trying to locate a Soviet FROG battery so we could take it out. My sources had it localized to within one grid square and I was looking at tasking recon assets to localize it further, in a highly dense Air Defense environment.
The scenario CO (an Army Colonel from the school at Ft. Leavenworth) asked me if we had access to MLRS (which was brand new, this was pre-Desert Storm). I said yes, we did.
His answer was “Remove the grid square”. Verify if we got the battery, if not, repeat as necessary.
I liked John Ringo’s description of the ballistic missile subs modified to launch about a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles each. Because they reworked the USS Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Georgia it became known as the OMFG Program. :-D
They tried to change the acronym but it was waaay too late…
Did not serve on, worked on while they were safely tied up to the pier, mostly safely. I have a problem going on a ship that sinks itself on purpose, there’s a logic problem there.
The trick is coming back up afterwards, something for which there is a lot of planning in the production of submarines, both under normal conditions and adverse ones.
Or all persons. “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end”. Avoiding that sudden stop is what makes skydiving like flying and scuba diving: “…not inherently dangerous, but like the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect”.
“Seems like a very low number of rodeos,” or
“Seems like a very small quantity of rodeos.”
Amounts are continuous. Numbers and quantities are discrete. Of course, if I went in and actually told them that, they’d stare at me motherf*ckerly, as well they should.
I assume you suggest that “stumbling” or something similar is the correct term, but I’ve seen some pretty dang wasted chicks walk pretty well in high (maybe not 5″ high, but still…) heels.
On the Amazon one: I’m pretty sure toddlers were involved in this plot too!
On the Odyssey one: There was an airline ad a while back that was comparing a flight on one of their planes to The Odyssey. My reaction: “Er, either you never read that book, or you’re hoping that your customers never did.”
Reminds me of a car ad on TV (Toyota?) a decade or two ago. Nice ad, but they used the Dies Irae from Verdi’s requiem as the sound track. My wife write a newspaper columnist about that and he enjoyed printing that. The ad disappeared a few days later.
Consider the complex behavior of a flock of starlings, or a school of herring. There is no Boss Bird or Big Fish directing them, no rigid hierarchy of command and control. Order arises as an emergent property of the independent actions of all the individual group members.
Now imagine that YOU are the boss of that flock, or school, with a bunch of subordinates each out to gain any possible selfish advantage, willing to sabotage the others if they can get away with it, and, oh yeah, you need them to implement your instructions with perfect coordination and micromanage each bird or fish’s actions in real time.
No matter how hard you try, you will never pull it off. The result will be chaos, confusion, birds or fish crashing into trees or coral, and each other. It’s simply not possible to collect all the relevant information, process it, and then figure out what each bird or fish should do in every split second.
But some idiots believe they can do that with 330 million people and a multi-trillion-dollar economy. AAARRRGGH!!
———————————
“We know we’re not smart enough to micro-manage the lives of 330 million people. You are stupid enough to believe you can.”
There needs to be a word for groups of idiots of that caliber. Like murder of crows, flock of sheep, herd of deer. P*ssbucket of idiots? Something that summons up the image of a person or persons in desperate need of a smack on the back of the head, pretty much every time the open their mouths.
Did you mean to link to amazon dot cn? Or is that just how WordPress rewrote the Amazon link just for me* because of what part of the world I’m in, and everyone else saw the normal amazon dot com link?
I did the most basic Amazon link, and WordPress made it fancy automatically. For me, it shows that it’s going to .com, so I guess that’s part of the fancification. In any case, it should be purchasable everywhere since the author died nearly a hundred and forty years ago, far outside the reach of even the most idiotically long copyright law. And the pricing should also be equivalent in all Amazon stores.
..far outside the reach of even the most idiotically long copyright law.
Moronic lawmaker who has just received a large “campaign contribution”: Challenge Accepted!
Happily (for values of “happily”), changes in copyright law have rarely been that retroactive. While there have been retroactive applications of the law, pulling works out of the public domain and back under the copyright umbrella has only really happened, to my knowledge, with foreign films in the US, basically to get them back into copyright in conformance with their home countries’ laws.
As far as books published in Great Britain in the 1800s, they were literally never eligible for US copyright until… 1898, I think. Possibly the early 1900s, I need to go back over my research on that to be sure. As best I understand it, it is simply not possible to apply copyright to something that never qualified. (And the book has been public domain in Britain since 42 years after Whyte-Melville’s death, which was in 1878, so from 1 January 1921.)
One wonders whether, in a century or two, speakers of English will assume the term was coined specifically from this historical incident.
Serious etymologists will insist the phrase was current long before that, but most regular people will think they’re full of baloney. It’ll be lonely knowing better. Some things don’t change.
I put up.a link to a YouTube video claiming that Baldur’s Gate 3 has more genital options than body options (and you can’t customize the pre-selected bodies).
Yeah, it literally showed up for me right after I posted my “Hmm…” reply. No idea what’s going on.
Long story short for the curious, the new game “Baldur’s Gate 3” (which is not a sequel to the old BG1 and BG2 games, even though it shares the name) has an unusual implementation of character body customization at the start of the game. Most games these days have more sliders for character customization than you know what to do with, giving you the ability to create a wide variety of faces and body types for your character if you play around with them. This is true even if you spend very little time in the game looking at your character. BG3 doesn’t. The video shows an elf being created. The person creating the video has four body types available – big (tall and muscular) with or without breasts, and slender (and shorter) with or without breasts. That’s a total of four body types. With breasts has eight preset faces, without breasts has seven preset faces (you also pick your gender, as usual, but character creation fully embraces the trans philosophy, and your choice of M/F/NB makes no difference in what your character’s body looks like). There’s no ability to adjust anything in those preset bodies and faces.
And you also pick what your genitals look like. There’s default. There’s vulvas A, B, and C. And there’s male genitals A-E (not using the word to avoid this turning up in the wrong kinds of search results). So you quite literally have more options for male genitals than you do for body types (with or without breasts).
The developers have some very odd priorities, imo. And this is screaming, “Stay away from this game!”
Back in 2020, the Baldur’s Gate 3 devs were shaming their players because, according to their analytics, the average* created character was a white man with brown hair. I have not been following the game since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the move to character presets was related.
*No word on how the “average” was calculated, but the naive approach would be to take the most popular choice for each trait. Which would spit out the result the devs got even if the traits only had a plurality, making the whole exercise meaningless.
Most players prefer to create attractive avatars for their personal character. So, not average by any means. But that’s determined by things like body and facial features, not “white, male brunette”. And of course, body and facial features can’t be customized in this game.
The bit that amuses me, though, is that they were seemingly unhappy about people picking brunette hair. Usually it’s blonde that draws the ire, as it’s linked to the 3vul!! Aryans, and brunette is the hair color of nearly every non-white group (with the primary exception being black hair in East Asia).
I guess they wouldn’t have been satisfied unless the popular choice was something like pink hair, although even then they might have blamed that on anime-loving weibos.
On the “tanks and jet fighters” thing, it never ceases to amaze me that people pushing this notion don’t know those devices have humans to operate them, maintain them, and command them. I like to point them to the novels of Matthew Bracken (or the movie “Red Dawn).
They also fail to remember the people they’re talking to are the folks who use to operate those machines, and trained the guys that the forgetful think will be shooting at the trainers!
Two reasons. The first is the classic saying: “Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.”. The details of what make those F-15s work is irrelevant to them.
Second, the Left has a bad habit of thinking of groups – including, but not limited to the military – as lockstep acting robotically as the Left thinks appropriate for that group.
Speaking of which, there’s reason to believe that at least part of the PLA thinks that the invasion of Taiwan which everyone is certain Xi wants to launch, is a catastrophically bad idea. How bad? So bad that it’s suspected as a possible motivation for why the son of the head of the PLA’s rocket force (which oversees all of China’s long-range missiles, including the nukes) leaked a bunch of classified info here in the US (presumably at his father’s urging).
According To Hoyt 
I’m coming to appreciate modern songs played on medieval instruments. Here’s “The Final Countdown” as played by a medieval bard:
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But my favorite one is one of his more recent covers. (Click the link if it doesn’t embed).
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Sans vocals, that is SO much more tolerable!
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No kidding. I vastly prefer the rock/metal instrumentation, but the timbre of that dude’s voice is like driving nails straight into my eardrums.
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That’s quite lovely, honestly. ;)
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Too cool.
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Ah, be careful about that whole “tossing cookies thing.”
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Jack Daniels? Oy, that must be a terrible job. At least go up to Mellow Corn or Jim Beam. Though at least it isn’t Black Crow.
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Also, as regards livestock… bunny rabbits are not noted for motive power. If you need things that can’t be water or wind powered, and have yet to develop steam machinery… large animals are there. As I’ve seen it put, “Horses put up with human demands because humans treat them BETTER than other horses do.” It would not surprise me if this universally the case. Yes, there are bad/idiot humans (I have some not distant enough relatives…) but overall… “All you want is I pull? And otherwise nothing happens? Alright, I can pull for a while.”
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“And then the human scratched and brushed out my fur, no, really, remember that toe nail I had, fixed that too. Then he gave me clean water and some straw to eat” Horse said to the cow.
“So you’re telling me this random human had you pull something for a day and he gave you all that? Now I know you’re full of shit” the cow replied.
“I am wondering why you left?” the deer asked.
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Aliens would flip out that we keep carnivorous predators as -house pets- and let our kids play with them.
Me: “Who’s a good boy? I think it’s you!”
Enormous Dog: [grumble groan yawn lip smack]
Alien: “Dude, that thing’s going to eat your head.”
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Enormous Dog. o O { But then who’d throw the ball/frisbee? And pet me? And… }
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That’s what I was thinking. Dude, never mind the rest; humans have domesticated PREDATOR species — we’ve got finely tuned little killers (cats) and deadly pack hunters (doggos) just lounging around our houses and even doing our bidding, and we act like it’s no big deal.
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“doing our bidding”
More like “bidding us do”…. 8-)
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“You know your cat would hunt and eat you if he was big enough, right?”
“Yeah, and?”
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“You know your cat would hunt and eat you if he was big enough, right?”
“Isn’t it cute when he does that? [squee!]”
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also, “look, he lets me pet the beans on his cute little murder mittens.” (This morning.)
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Human: “Toe beans! Eeee!”
Alien: “Look at the CLAWS on that thing!”
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Wait a minute…. how does the “would totally murder me if it was possible, thus is adorable” logic interact with the crazy/hot matrix?
Or is this Forbidden Philosophy?
(like forbidden science, but more stabby)
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I wouldn’t touch that with a barge pole. The HCM is forbidden territory. ~:D
Although, I’ve often thought if aliens came they would probably watch us go for a while, then make some blindingly obvious observation and we’d all slap our foreheads.
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All evidence is that they domesticated themselves.
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Humans: “Oh, look! A huge animal that could kill me easily. I’m gonna pet it.”
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Aliens: “That hawk could take your eye out!”
Humans: “That’s part of the challenge. And the fun. Wanna go hunting with us?”
[Random falconry fact: a falconer is supposed to keep his hawk from taking game birds out of season. Um … Oooh kay.]
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Sounds like a rule by someone who’s never SEEN a falcon outside of a book.
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& what was it almost all grandmothers say?
Oh yea, “Never run with a pair of buzzards in your hands.”
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Or, regarding certain recently-promoted videos I’ve seen, “Look at the big fluffy-headed cow! I’m gonna go pet/ride/take a selfie with it!”
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I literally saw people ridiculing Deion Broxton for the viral video — the one where he decided that he would dive into the car because a herd of buffalo came toward him — on the grounds they were just fluffy cows.
Someone did patiently explain, each time, that actually cows aren’t really jokes either.
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I’ve done that. I was going to go hiking at Jacob’s Well in Kansas. Seven or eight bison approached. I went back to the car. They followed. I dove into the car and locked the doors. They loitered. I backed away sloooowly, then did a bootlegger turn and departed.
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Also known as auditioning for a Darwin Award.
We’ve seen a lot of bison this summer. Haven’t eaten any lately, but sid have a bit of beef/elk chili.
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I have NOT asked any who raise bison (“buffalo) how they deal with them. Mainly from lack of opportunity. Mainly.
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The group of furcows where I used to live (The place was called Buffalo Ridge) were rather mellow, except the youngest male who could mock charge (fence between us, and I had just wondered how good he’d taste, so . . .) and the owner said he would work at knocking him over so he was looking to sell him off. Otherwise they just wandered up to the offices near feeding time to get Purina munchies. There were the requisite sign saying “Large Beasties, Keep Out, They could kill the stupid! This Means You!” (okay, it might not have been worded that way) and then after selling the place he sold the lot to a breeder (he lost a female to birthing issues so it was 3 of the wig wearing bœuf)
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Fluffy yeet cows are not yet domesticated enough to pet. But they are fun to watch someone ELSE try.
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Do not pet the velcro yeet cows.
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Our ancestors didn’t domesticate cows, then bisons. There weren’t any cows. They domesticated bison (aurochs, the extinct European variety, but very similar to the American bison), then selectively bred for docility and reduced size until they got cows. They are still the same species; cows and American bisons readily crossbreed, producing “beefalo”, fully fertile offspring of intermediate size and temperament.
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Ask any farmer or rancher how “tame” cows are. There is a reason this sign is applicable:
“Warning. Must dash across this meadow in 8 seconds. The bull can make it in 10.”
I’ve milked cows by hand. There is a reason leather boots are recommended. There is a reason they are being bribed with their heads between stanchions. Might be tamer than American Plain Bison. Doesn’t make them not dangerous.
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Biggest difference is “usually recognize fences exist.”
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:snickers:
Finding bison that aren’t part cow is a huge battle with flame war level fights. It makes “can dogs and coyotes interbreed” from 20-ish years ago (it was claimed to be a myth on par with cats and rabbits crossing) look tame.
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Foxfier: Dogs and coyotes interbreeding must have been distressing to biologists who were sure coyote was a different species than gray wolf. Dogs were bred from gray wolves, so a coy-dog hybrid implied there were also coy-wolf hybrids, and tracing canid lineages just became very difficult. E.g., there’s an ongoing debate as to whether the red wolf of the American southeast was a distinct lineage or just a coy-wolf. (It seems to have been crossbred out of existence before scientists got a sample.)
But coy-dogs were rare, because a coyote pack is far more likely to try to eat a dog than to sniff butts. That’s how biologists justify calling different canid lineages separate “species” – there are behavioral barriers that keep cross-breeding rare in the wild. Bisons and cattle apparently get along much better, so when open-range cattle became more common in the bison ranges than the bison, a lot of mixing was going to happen. A first generation cross is pretty obvious, and few cowmen cared to mess with something even more dangerous than a longhorn bull, so crosses were rapidly eliminated from the cattle breeding stock. OTOH, apparently if a cow is in heat, a buffalo bull doesn’t care if the cow is stunted and rather stupid…
d: Dad raised meat calves, so I learned the necessary precautions. They are ready to sell at about 1,000 pounds. At just half that weight, they are at least twice your size and strength and don’t even need to intend harm. If you let a 500 pound calf get “playful” with you, it may look a lot like assault with intent to kill. I was thankful that we were buying just-weaned calves at auction, so we never had to deal with the cows and bulls. That calf’s momma is bigger but perhaps more predictable, and it’s poppa is bigger and mean.
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Grew up on a beef ranch. ^.^
Most beef bulls won’t be mean– although there are folks who deliberately select for them because…. well, family friendly blog, I won’t say why, you get the idea.
As you say, they can murder you just messing around.
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100%
Aunt and Uncle have 40 acres on Pine Creek outside of Baker. Spent entire summer 3 times as a teen. They had 3 cows, which they’d breed, then they’d buy another calf so they’d have 4. They’d milk two cows, and put all 4 calves on the other one, Rosie. Because Rosie did not like to be milked. Uncle could, but none of us teens could. So she got to feed the calves. Other than her own calves, she was not particularly accommodating. She had to be cornered in the corral, then someone had to monitor the situation. The not-Rosie calves learned quickly how to be safe as long as she was made to stand in one spot. They also learned how to use her calf so that if she kicked out, her calf got hurt every single time.
They never had more than 3 cows. Suspect there was some swapping of female and male calves with a local dairy. They did sell the excess raw milk. Anything not sold or used by the family, the excess the cream was skimmed and butter made, the rest of the milk went to the pigs raised for slaughter. Learned to keep toes out of the way when feeding those things from outside the fence.
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Foxfier: Dogs and coyotes interbreeding must have been distressing to biologists who were sure coyote was a different species than gray wolf.
Oh, you missed it?
:gigglefit to end all howls:
Oh, it was horrifically awesome……
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Happens almost weekly at Yellowstone.
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Yes. It does. Just check out FB group “Yellowstone Invasion of the Idiots”. Unfortunately some posters are also idiots. The post on the woman who got gored at one of the Yellowstone cabins (Roosevelt, I think but could have been one of the other internal hotel with cabin options). Woman stepped out of the cabin, walked two steps, and had a bull come stampeding around the cabin corner. In no way was she in the wrong. Bad luck.
Not the same group but another Yellowstone group recent post. Woman was in the park with her daughter, someone who frequents the park. They’d been at a particular spot for over an hour watching wildlife and watching for the grizzly “Snow” and her current twin cubs of the year, but no one (and trust me a lot of eyes looking) had spotted the trio. She decided to have her picture taken slightly up the hill for a lot of detailed reasons. No sooner had her daughter shot the picture, her daughter got excited and started pointing. Daughter did not want to yell. Reason? Snow with the twins had come out of the brush 10’s of feet (well within the 100 yard minimum to keep from bears). Woman very slowly moved down the hill to the road, talking calmly, got in the vehicle, took the camera and started shooting pictures. Comment “was shaking so bad surprised any of the bear pictures are in focus”. Moral. No matter how close you are to the road have bear spray on you. Naturally, only a few feet up the slope off the road, the bear spray was in the vehicle. Oops. FYI. Lots of pictures with bears on boardwalks this year too.
This is from someone, that as many times as we’ve been to Yellowstone, and off the road, we’ve never carried bear spray. OTOH we rarely see bears. This last spring an exception. Don’t know why. (Although we didn’t see the number of grizzlies we should have. Just not that lucky.) Just was. We weren’t off hiking either.
Which brings up another SF trope. Aliens who are shocked at the variety of environments humans survive in on their own home planet.
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I have heard tales of German immigrants moving into the central plains and bewildering the friends and family they left behind as the SAME PLACE could be -20 F in Winter… AND +100 F (or more!) in Summer. And to a European mind (blessed with Gulf Stream currents & the Med. as heatsink/buffer) that was MADNESS.
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I remember some evening a number of years ago, when the local (Boston MA) weather guy mentioned that on that day a town in ND observed a new record high and a new record low in the same 24 hour period. Eek.
After spending a winter in WI (attending college) I sure wondered about all those fellow Dutchmen who emigrated to Michican, not to mention various Central Canadian provinces. I also remember that same winter making an emergency hike to the local Army/Navy store to buy an adequate parka; Dutch “winter coats” are not in any way fit for dealing with WI winters…
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Lower Michigan (Da Mitten) has Lake Michigan moderating its temperature significantly. Now, WI.. yeah. One particularly nasty Winter it was (in Wausau area..) -40 every night for two weeks, and the high wasn’t up to 0 F for that time. That was, amusingly and fortuitously right when $UNION said “You not-union folks must park elsewhere, we park where we can see the vehicles.” EXCEPT that ‘sentenced’ us to…the EXECUTIVE parking (day… we were night…) with the OUTLETS. And I had a vehicle with a block heater….
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https://twitchy.com/artistangie/2023/08/10/no-bull-shhh-900-pound-bull-is-still-loose-in-charlotte-nc-n2386168
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:has a coughing fit over the horrible puns:
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Alien returning to mother ship and reporting in to commanding officer from sickbay: “Sir! They were ‘this big’! I swear!” Shows picture of a pack of chihuahuas. “Then we went to the next target. It was bigger, but there was only one.” Shows picture of domestic house cat (feral or not). Conclusion: “Humans are insanely tough. They co-exist with vicious not intelligent species!”
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Wouldn’t it be just perfect if the aliens were descended from rodents? :-D
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Krag. From F Paul Honsinger’s “Men of War” Series (Aubrey / Maturin in space).
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Or the A. Bertram Chandler story where the ship’s rats evolved due to being exposed to a mistuned Manschenn Drive.
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How many Aubrey / Maturin in space book series are there, I wonder? David Drake’s RCN series (first book is With the Lightnings) is the one I know best, and I love pretty much all the books in the series. I’m happy to learn of more.
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Well, ever since David Weber pretty much occupies the whole “Horatio Hornblower in Space” space…..
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Also the original Star Trek series.
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I’m recalling the story of aliens visiting,curious about what’s taking us so long to destroy ourselves after they first sensed our nuclear weapon use. They encountered a deer who chased them, then got killed by a bear, who was chased off the kill by a wolverine who peed all over the kill and wandered back to the human who treated him like a pet. They fled in terror.
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LOL. That is funny. Can see it happening too.
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“The Easy Way Out” by G Harry Stine writing as Lee Correy
discussion and some quotes from the story here:
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/29052/short-story-about-alien-invader-scouts-encountering-a-grizzly-bear
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WOLVERIIIIIINESSSS!!!!!!
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“I’m the best at what I do, but what I do isnt nice.”
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Another one, I can’t remember author or title: Aliens scouting for planets to conquer land at a hardscrabble ranch in East Texas. The owner is out working the cattle or something, leaving his boy at home. The boys Pa taught him how to treat visitors, so he serves them chili and white lightning. After a bite and a sip, they flee to their ship, and mark the Solar System as off limits on their stellar maps.
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Reminds me of a historical anecdote we got in Maine. The chief of the local tribe was at the local festival (which celebrates the first naval action the Revolutionary War). The British sent a landing party up the river in a longboat. The colonists and local tribesmen, who got along pretty well, were on the third day of a three-day celebration of their new alliance. The celebration involved LOTS of alcohol, and when they spotted the oncoming landing party there was some consternation.
Until one native said, “Bet I can hit that guy standing up front in the boat. Hold my beer!” Or something like that. He proceeded to drill the CO of the landing party square between the eyes.
At which point, the entire landing party turned around and went downstream as fast as they could. Then they reported they’d been faced with a horde of howling savages and barely escaped with their lives. (I suspect the fact there was only one casualty undermined their story).
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I need to know more.
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It’s on Wikipedia under, “Machias, Maine,” along with the story of the Battle of the Margaretta. It’s under, “Raid of 1777.” That story mentions other shooters, plus 40-50 Indians, shouting their war cries. The colonists joined in. The entry reads like it was written by a Brit. What we heard was oral history/tradition from the chief, who seemed to be a bit of a character. (Gathered the tribe is poor, but has a pretty large wilderness area to hunt/trap/fish in. He came across as a probable member in good standing of the, “Stay Off My Lawn!” Party.
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The chief was a direct descendant of the Revolutionary War chief.
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Howling Horde, indeed. Endless reps, post snipe, of the local language version of “HOOAH!”
And maybe a few bars of “Pop! Goes the weasel”.
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The Reader has a long list of books that should be in ‘Religious Fiction’ before The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Anything by Marx goes to the head of the section.
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Rousseau, too. While we’re at it, didn’t FDR write something? That ‘un, also.
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Marx = Horror
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The Reader wonders if there a category for ‘Religious Horror?
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Or ‘Horrific Religions’
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Re: ‘Kinky but poor’ — Redneck Bondage! :-D
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Yet another use for duct tape…..
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Overheard at work:
“Duct tape. Is there anything it can’t do?”
“Fix government.”
“…Well that’s one…”
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That depends entirely on where it’s put and how many layers you wrap.
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“Spiraling into Control” – I would love that too!
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Where pigs are involved, I suspect “domesticate” isn’t entirely accurate…
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So here’s an encouraging thought. The answer to the Alien’s last question is public school and socialism and culling the most aggressive via pointless wars. Farmer types and historians can no doubt give more details on the processes.
AND even fully domesticated, a sow with piglets is dangerous to the would-be farmers. And what, two generations after escaping captivity they have to hunt the pigs with explosives, yes?
Mrs. Hoyt brings the warm fuzzies.
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Kulling via making sure any “prey” are armed.
And it’s first generation after escape that you can’t tell them from generations feral.
Once saw a female hog take about two feet off of a two inch dowel, four inches at a time, when she took offense to piglets screaming as they got doctored.
She didn’t have any piglets, just a homicidal attitude.
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Remember that pigs are herd animals, who will defend other members. Her “attitude” makes perfect sense when that is taken into account.
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Pack, possibly– but “social” is more accurate.
Was a 4-H event. SOMEHOW, no kids got hurt….
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One of the many reasons I will not raise pigs. Until I need to hide stuff.
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c4c
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RE: the “Dear Grid Square one”
I attended the Air Ground Operations School in the 80s. In one exercise I was the Intel officer charged with trying to locate a Soviet FROG battery so we could take it out. My sources had it localized to within one grid square and I was looking at tasking recon assets to localize it further, in a highly dense Air Defense environment.
The scenario CO (an Army Colonel from the school at Ft. Leavenworth) asked me if we had access to MLRS (which was brand new, this was pre-Desert Storm). I said yes, we did.
His answer was “Remove the grid square”. Verify if we got the battery, if not, repeat as necessary.
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If the battery is available (not always the case when higher-level assets like artillery are concerned), that’s definitely the easiest solution.
:P
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I like it, although I worked on subs, they just removed whole countries. Their only question was “You sure you want to do that?” .
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The sub guys I worked with in the TLAM program were off SSNs. We only removed building sized targets. ;-)
(I had a sign at my desk “Conventional Weaponeering. Retail Destruction at Wholesale Prices”)
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I liked John Ringo’s description of the ballistic missile subs modified to launch about a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles each. Because they reworked the USS Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Georgia it became known as the OMFG Program. :-D
They tried to change the acronym but it was waaay too late…
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SSBN
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Did not serve on, worked on while they were safely tied up to the pier, mostly safely. I have a problem going on a ship that sinks itself on purpose, there’s a logic problem there.
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Any ship can become a submarine.
Once.
The trick is coming back up afterwards, something for which there is a lot of planning in the production of submarines, both under normal conditions and adverse ones.
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Kind of like the determination that all materiel is air-droppable. Once…
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Or all persons. “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end”. Avoiding that sudden stop is what makes skydiving like flying and scuba diving: “…not inherently dangerous, but like the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect”.
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There’s also been a trend (particularly in ASTAN) where arty has been denied even when there’s Troops in Contact.
I wonder how much of that is due to people from TOC on up being more concerned with covering their asses rather their Joes.
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“MLRS – only you can prevent grid squares.”
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Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Fransisco, Portland, Atlanta, Detroit, Austin and every other Liberal Democrat led city.
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♪ Simple man can make a shroud,
But we can give you a mushroom cloud,
It’s Maaaaagic…. ♪
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snicker
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after a weekend of paintball practice…..
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I chose the image I did because it was a sandwich, not a sub.
Although they say that if Karen Carpenter had had Mamma Cass’s Ham sandwich, they might have both made it….
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(Hands little girl a DEMP gun.)
“…wait…..”
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I’d make that ‘Will deserve neither and lose both’
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Ben Franklin
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“I have altered our Social Contract. Pray I do not alter it further ” (wheeeeez-click)
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“Seems like a very low amount of rodeos.”
Better to write:
“Seems like a very low number of rodeos,” or
“Seems like a very small quantity of rodeos.”
Amounts are continuous. Numbers and quantities are discrete. Of course, if I went in and actually told them that, they’d stare at me motherf*ckerly, as well they should.
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Okay. I didn’t make the meme. :D
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As Midnight withers under Sarah’s gaze… :-)
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Regarding the lady who hates fitness “infleuncers.”
Objection!
I think I dated that girl some decades ago. I don’t think “walking” was the correct verb there.
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I assume you suggest that “stumbling” or something similar is the correct term, but I’ve seen some pretty dang wasted chicks walk pretty well in high (maybe not 5″ high, but still…) heels.
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Actually I was more going for a term like “sashay.” Gal liked to make sure she had your attention, as I recall.
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Ah. Now that makes sense.
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LOL! And LOL again! This might be the best collection of memes I’ve seen here so far. Bogarted a few and sent them to family.
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On the Amazon one: I’m pretty sure toddlers were involved in this plot too!
On the Odyssey one: There was an airline ad a while back that was comparing a flight on one of their planes to The Odyssey. My reaction: “Er, either you never read that book, or you’re hoping that your customers never did.”
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Reminds me of a car ad on TV (Toyota?) a decade or two ago. Nice ad, but they used the Dies Irae from Verdi’s requiem as the sound track. My wife write a newspaper columnist about that and he enjoyed printing that. The ad disappeared a few days later.
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Amen on putting Keynes in “religion.” At least how the latest generation of self-proclaimed Keynesians describe Keynes.
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YES. Sowell, Mises, Hayek, Smith, and Friedman are not given the proper respect they deserve- but m-f’n KEYNES gets it?
spits
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Fantasy.
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Consider the complex behavior of a flock of starlings, or a school of herring. There is no Boss Bird or Big Fish directing them, no rigid hierarchy of command and control. Order arises as an emergent property of the independent actions of all the individual group members.
Now imagine that YOU are the boss of that flock, or school, with a bunch of subordinates each out to gain any possible selfish advantage, willing to sabotage the others if they can get away with it, and, oh yeah, you need them to implement your instructions with perfect coordination and micromanage each bird or fish’s actions in real time.
No matter how hard you try, you will never pull it off. The result will be chaos, confusion, birds or fish crashing into trees or coral, and each other. It’s simply not possible to collect all the relevant information, process it, and then figure out what each bird or fish should do in every split second.
But some idiots believe they can do that with 330 million people and a multi-trillion-dollar economy. AAARRRGGH!!
———————————
“We know we’re not smart enough to micro-manage the lives of 330 million people. You are stupid enough to believe you can.”
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Not some. Lots and lots of people think that.
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There needs to be a word for groups of idiots of that caliber. Like murder of crows, flock of sheep, herd of deer. P*ssbucket of idiots? Something that summons up the image of a person or persons in desperate need of a smack on the back of the head, pretty much every time the open their mouths.
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“A government.”
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Or a ‘political party’.
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I’ve pointed, at least once – here even, that markets are an emergent behavior so anything trying to quash them is doomed before the start.
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This!
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Victorian Writers meme.
SO true.
whines in trying to get six or seven Victorian novels prepped before Victober
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Novels set in Victorian times? or novels written in a Victorian style?
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Novels written and published under Victoria’s reign.
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E.g, the first one I got finished and published:
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Did you mean to link to amazon dot cn? Or is that just how WordPress rewrote the Amazon link just for me* because of what part of the world I’m in, and everyone else saw the normal amazon dot com link?
* Dawww, don’t I feel special. Not.
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I did the most basic Amazon link, and WordPress made it fancy automatically. For me, it shows that it’s going to .com, so I guess that’s part of the fancification. In any case, it should be purchasable everywhere since the author died nearly a hundred and forty years ago, far outside the reach of even the most idiotically long copyright law. And the pricing should also be equivalent in all Amazon stores.
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..far outside the reach of even the most idiotically long copyright law.
Moronic lawmaker who has just received a large “campaign contribution”: Challenge Accepted!
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Happily (for values of “happily”), changes in copyright law have rarely been that retroactive. While there have been retroactive applications of the law, pulling works out of the public domain and back under the copyright umbrella has only really happened, to my knowledge, with foreign films in the US, basically to get them back into copyright in conformance with their home countries’ laws.
As far as books published in Great Britain in the 1800s, they were literally never eligible for US copyright until… 1898, I think. Possibly the early 1900s, I need to go back over my research on that to be sure. As best I understand it, it is simply not possible to apply copyright to something that never qualified. (And the book has been public domain in Britain since 42 years after Whyte-Melville’s death, which was in 1878, so from 1 January 1921.)
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Our current issues put the phrase “Trumped up charges” in a new light.
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One wonders whether, in a century or two, speakers of English will assume the term was coined specifically from this historical incident.
Serious etymologists will insist the phrase was current long before that, but most regular people will think they’re full of baloney. It’ll be lonely knowing better. Some things don’t change.
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Yep.
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I don’t think it will take even 20 years.
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Uh…
If this is true, I’m glad I decided to skip this game…
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Hmm…
I put up.a link to a YouTube video claiming that Baldur’s Gate 3 has more genital options than body options (and you can’t customize the pre-selected bodies).
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I saw it and approved it. I have no idea.
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Yeah, it literally showed up for me right after I posted my “Hmm…” reply. No idea what’s going on.
Long story short for the curious, the new game “Baldur’s Gate 3” (which is not a sequel to the old BG1 and BG2 games, even though it shares the name) has an unusual implementation of character body customization at the start of the game. Most games these days have more sliders for character customization than you know what to do with, giving you the ability to create a wide variety of faces and body types for your character if you play around with them. This is true even if you spend very little time in the game looking at your character. BG3 doesn’t. The video shows an elf being created. The person creating the video has four body types available – big (tall and muscular) with or without breasts, and slender (and shorter) with or without breasts. That’s a total of four body types. With breasts has eight preset faces, without breasts has seven preset faces (you also pick your gender, as usual, but character creation fully embraces the trans philosophy, and your choice of M/F/NB makes no difference in what your character’s body looks like). There’s no ability to adjust anything in those preset bodies and faces.
And you also pick what your genitals look like. There’s default. There’s vulvas A, B, and C. And there’s male genitals A-E (not using the word to avoid this turning up in the wrong kinds of search results). So you quite literally have more options for male genitals than you do for body types (with or without breasts).
The developers have some very odd priorities, imo. And this is screaming, “Stay away from this game!”
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Back in 2020, the Baldur’s Gate 3 devs were shaming their players because, according to their analytics, the average* created character was a white man with brown hair. I have not been following the game since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the move to character presets was related.
*No word on how the “average” was calculated, but the naive approach would be to take the most popular choice for each trait. Which would spit out the result the devs got even if the traits only had a plurality, making the whole exercise meaningless.
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I don’t think most gamers set out to create ‘average’ characters. What’s the fun in that?
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Most players prefer to create attractive avatars for their personal character. So, not average by any means. But that’s determined by things like body and facial features, not “white, male brunette”. And of course, body and facial features can’t be customized in this game.
The bit that amuses me, though, is that they were seemingly unhappy about people picking brunette hair. Usually it’s blonde that draws the ire, as it’s linked to the 3vul!! Aryans, and brunette is the hair color of nearly every non-white group (with the primary exception being black hair in East Asia).
I guess they wouldn’t have been satisfied unless the popular choice was something like pink hair, although even then they might have blamed that on anime-loving weibos.
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They will never be satisfied. They will always find something to whine about.
That’s why the correct response is “Go f*k yourself!” since they’re just going to whine no matter what you say.
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I prefer “Go away and change your diapers, Cry Baby.” That way I’m not swearing. Bit wordy, but can’t have everything.
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On the “tanks and jet fighters” thing, it never ceases to amaze me that people pushing this notion don’t know those devices have humans to operate them, maintain them, and command them. I like to point them to the novels of Matthew Bracken (or the movie “Red Dawn).
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With the oncoming unpleasantness, the Reader thinks it is better we not educate them. Better it come as a surprise.
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They also fail to remember the people they’re talking to are the folks who use to operate those machines, and trained the guys that the forgetful think will be shooting at the trainers!
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Two reasons. The first is the classic saying: “Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.”. The details of what make those F-15s work is irrelevant to them.
Second, the Left has a bad habit of thinking of groups – including, but not limited to the military – as lockstep acting robotically as the Left thinks appropriate for that group.
Speaking of which, there’s reason to believe that at least part of the PLA thinks that the invasion of Taiwan which everyone is certain Xi wants to launch, is a catastrophically bad idea. How bad? So bad that it’s suspected as a possible motivation for why the son of the head of the PLA’s rocket force (which oversees all of China’s long-range missiles, including the nukes) leaked a bunch of classified info here in the US (presumably at his father’s urging).
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