Yesterday I did something I used to do more often, and looked into the latest discoveries in paleontology and archeology and such.
And shortly after remembered why I no longer do it every month.
Apparently the latest, greatest news is that — yo, this is amazing — they’re finally not studying pre-history through the eyes of racism and sexism, and as such have determined that pre-historic hunting parties were as much as 80% female.
This is a discovery that of course makes perfect sense. No doubt the males were all back at base camp, chest-feeding the babies. Thereby freeing the pre-historic girl bosses to go and hunt them some mammoth.
If you’re staring at the screen with dropped jaws, I haven’t gone insane. I know this is utter and complete nonsense. It’s not my fault that the people running all our intellectual institutions, including research are morons studying to be idiots.
Applying the Heinlein filter for the actual reason they have to believe that up to 80% — 80%! — of pre-historic hunters were female, i.e. “Again and again, what are the facts?” we get that they found one grave — one — where the DNA of the remains are female (and here we’ll keep quiet about the strange idea that 6000 (I think) year old DNA is easily extracted, non-contaminated, etc. We’ll pretend we don’t know all the times they walked back “new species” because the DNA amplification techniques CREATED those discoveries.)
Let’s assume they’re correct and this was a female, buried with hunting implements. Sure, maybe she was a hunter. There will always be one or two in a large enough band, for the reason that in primitive societies some women are brought up as male: lack of a son, need to support the family, etc. (It is rarely a sexual thing, or because the person WANTED this. In fact it’s often decided for them before they are weaned. In fact, in primitive/ancient societies including the ones of our ancestors that we know about in detail, there was remarkably little room for self expression, self-conception or self interest. When you live close to the bone, such things are subjugated to the needs of the family, the clan, the tribe, more or less in that order. Because survival is hard.) We’re also informed, in BREATHLESS tones that it’s now thought that spear throwers were used to make sure women could throw spears fast enough! That’s why they exist.
But spear throwers are made and used by males, the world over. Go look at the tubes of you and you’ll see videos of people making them and using them, and they’re all male.
Further there is no society today of the ones still surviving more or less in a stone age way that has that kind of distribution for hunters. More importantly, there is no record of them, going as far back as we can.
Maybe this is because yes indeed, the past (being much closer to the bone, and therefore less willing to indulge in story telling) viewed things through a racist and sexist lens. Why not? After all I grew up in an intensely patriarchal society that still hadn’t adapted to the idea of women taking any hand in intellectual pursuits. And yes, that was unwarranted sexism. And every society is racist against every other (Actually culturist, but it’s often couched in terms of race.)
But still… You’d think that here and there there would be a race of valiant Amazons, whose men stay home and pound the taro while they go out and hunt, right?
But the truth is that if you put this notion to the remaining stone age people, they will laugh till they pee themselves. Yes, I know, I know, they internalized sexism from the evil white colonizers whom they’ve met three times in the last 100 years. That’s how powerful and evil whiteness is.
Or, listen, okay? I know this is just crazy talk, but maybe males and females are different and have evolved to fulfill different reproductive functions. And the reproductive function of females is more onerous than that of males. Women in our natural state, and unless something has gone seriously wrong — which of course makes us of less use to the tribe — spend most of our lives pregnant, nursing or carrying for children too young to care for themselves.
I know for well nourished women of the 21st century who are maybe pregnant once or twice in their lives this might not seem incompatible with being a mighty hunter, but please, try to realize that there is no such thing a consistently well fed hunter gatherer. Not in our terms. They might be well fed for some time period, but not over their entire lives. And for women nutrition is very important, because we grow entire other humans inside us, and our body has a way of leeching thing we need to give them to the baby.
You might think that “losing a tooth per child” is an old wives tale, but I did. Because in childhood I didn’t have enough milk or dairy products (Mom being convinced they were a trigger for eczema. They weren’t. Sugar was. But… culture.)
Now imagine people living at stone age level, where eating organs is necessary to get vitamins. And women…. Well, most women were not in great shape. In most primitive societies the world over, in all of recorded history women and children eat last.
This is not sexism, it’s “men need strength to walk for days in pursuit of an herd.” Now, if women were hunters… Yeah, that. They would walk for sometimes three days straight, while on the verge of giving birth. Give birth, then walk back three days. Carrying the baby and the dead animals, of course.
This is nonsense on stilts as any woman who has ever given birth will tell you. Yeah, yeah, Chinese peasants gave birth and went right back to work. Well, it was the Cultural revolution and they didn’t want to be killed, so some/many probably did. But this was not good for either mother or baby.
And in the end this is what is driving me bonkers about this drivel. If women want to have fantasies about great female warriors or leaders in pre-history, what harm does it do?
Oh, yeah, there was also the fact a great pre-historic ruler in Iberia was FEMALE. (If you heard that in breathless tones, that’s how I heard it in my head too.) She was buried with SYMBOLS of kingship! She was obviously a great war leader! And this means women had far more of a role in leading these societies than we thought!
Or you know, it could mean that she was born to kingship or clan head, because there were no sons, and that her role was like that of many warrior-queens in history who did strategize but not actually fight. (Most rulers didn’t. Male or female.) Or she could be all that and a rare exception. It still doesn’t show that “women” had a greater role. Only that perhaps this woman did. And doesn’t erase the fact that in most stone-age societies recorded by other civilizations women didn’t take such roles unless the society was in such trouble that they had to and they were the only ones available.
Because women’s normal role of producing the next generation and keeping them alive was more important. Because without the next generation there was no future for the tribe, when the current generation aged out. And no one to look after the elders.
So, what harm does it do to let educated women of the 21st century have their little fantasies? If it makes them happy to think history was girl bosses as far as the eye can see, why not give it to them?
First of all, because it’s a lie. Lies have a way of corrupting everything they touch. It is impossible for humans to know the truth of everything as far back as it goes, but it is important to try, and to at least not tell lies.
Second, because it creates hatred between men and women, which in turn destroys our future. If women were always equal or superior even to men, in pursuits we view as male, then the only reason this was obscured in the recent past is because of men oppressing women. And that must mean it’s some sort of war, instead of a co-operation.
Third, because it creates in women an expectation of what they should be able to do that’s completely insane. I felt guilty as heck because I wasn’t up and functioning normally after giving birth, because “peasant women in China did” — which was probably a gross lie, but even if it weren’t didn’t mean it was good for you. (But also led insurance to deny care after 24 hours, which had its own issues.) — I routinely feel guilty because I need to sleep 8 hours, because I was raised on “the driven artist” myth. If young women are raised to think that their foremothers walked three days straight through while in the third tri-mester, they’ll feel pampered and inadequate and do themselves violence.
Fourth, because it erases womanhood. I know what they think they’re doing is showing how powerful and strong women were, but what they are actually doing is saying the only roles that matter are male, and therefore if women are to be important they must have filled this role that — until yesterday — we knew mostly men fulfilled. Having children, child care, and child birth are suddenly unimportant. Cooking — which in those days was far more difficult — and keeping the shelter from leaking/keeping the tribe covered, curing pelts, looking after the aged and the sick, none of that matters. Gathering supplemental food that keeps the tribe from starving when the hunting is bad? Doesn’t matter.
Walking for days after an herd and driving them over a cliff and/or making war on neighboring tribes is the ONLY THING that matters, because it’s traditionally considered a male role. And the only good women fulfill male roles.
This is bad crazy.
Anyone with any knowledge of biology, anthropology, or you know… how humans actually work, knows this is nonsense. Anyone who has lived in any way close to the bone (even if still in incredible abundance by pre-historic standards) knows this is nonsense.
But it’s being published in scientific magazines, because our intellectual elite produced by an educational establishment incapable to teaching people to read fluently and devoted only to indoctrination, is so poisoned with story they think they can wish cast the past into existence.
They completely ignore that the reason we can and have overcome racism and sexism to a great degree is because we live in a time of incredible abundance.
And they’re willing to throw it all away for a feel good story that doesn’t pass the laugh test. Even if it hurts the future.
According To Hoyt 
If women were so powerful in the past, why did patriarchal societies develop?
Surely, these “super-women” could have crushed the evil males? [Sarcastic Grin]
Right?
Wreckers and kulaks, comrade.
he question I have is how do a bunch of people who keep saying “gender is a construct” and basically deny basic biological science, all of sudden assert that ancient societies doing all the hunting, etc.
The one thing you can count on from the left is absolute illogic and inconsistency; its as if they think doublethink and “reality is what The Party tells you it is” are fundamental precepts…..oh wait….
Actually it’s quite consistent. “Finding,” large numbers of women doing “traditionally male,” things *proves* gender is a construct…undoubtedly created by the Evil Patriarchy to Put Women Down.
Mind you, women did this, in extremis. The other hypothesis for “woman buried as a warrior” was either every man in the tribe was dead and she fought like heck to keep a little remnant alive till the boys grew up OR “enemy attacked basecamp while men were away, and she managed to hold them off long enough for men to get back, but we couldn’t save her. H*ll yeah, we’ll bury her as a warrior.”
In Albania, I have read there was a tradition in certain limited cases, for a woman to become a ‘sworn virgin’ – to assume male clothing and all the social responsibilities of a male. Usually because of having no living brothers, and the responsibility for providing for aged widowed mother, or younger minor children. But it was a very limited set of circumstances and I understand that it was not undertaken lightly.
Yes.
I used this in my WWII novel, when a medical transport was forced to land in Albania – and one of my heroines, who was an Army nurse explained to the Albanian family offering them shelter that she and her fellow nurses were a sort of sworn virgins, as they had taken an oath and put on trousers so they could be nurses for their soldier brothers.
Almost any serious cult requires its victims to loudly declare blatant and obvious falsehoods as if true. It is an instrument of control. Sometimes the lie is huge, sometimes quite tiny. But all must declare the Emperor’s New Clothes to be The Great Thing, of face sanction.
The reason they rewrite the past is the same reason the Soviets did it, the CCP did it, 1984’s Oceania did it, etc. They are firm believers in “who controls the present controls the future, who controls the past controls the present”, or as they used to say in the Soviet Union, “in the Soviet Union the future is known; its the past that keeps changing.” (I think that part ended up as blog post title…somewhere… :)
A good example of this kind of delusion can be found in the writings of a certain N.K.J., multiple Hugo winner.
I enter an excerpt of my 1 star Amazon review of ‘The Awakened Kingdom’.
“Her story involves a ruling council of peaceful women who at some point in the past overthrew the wicked patriarchy which oppressed them. Golly. How did they do that? Drug the men? Surely they didn’t use violence to establish their rule? That would contradict their ‘peacefulness’. Nor would their use of violence have been successful. It is ludicrous to attempt to create a world in which women are warriors and men are subjects. This is feminist delusion. Never in the entire blood-soaked history of the human race has there been an army of females, much less a successful one.”
Never in the blood-soaked history of the human race has there been a matriarchy.
Matrilineal or matrilocal societies, yes. Societies where women are sometimes consulted for advice on high politics, yeah, occasionally.
Societies where women rule? Never happened. Not in recorded history, not in archaeology.
But those Peaceful Matriarchal Societies wouldn’t have overthrown the Eeevul Patriarchy with <gasp> violence, would they? 😛
I’ve been thinking for a while that the patriarchy was invented by a woman who was tired of waiting for her brothers to return from trying to schtupp the beauties in the tribe and thought that she might get more work out of one guy if she promised to put out exclusively for him and he knew all the little sprogs were his own.
The chocolate ration has been increased from three grams to two grams. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Curiously enough, the women I know who were generally most comfortable with and aware of the differences between men and women seem to have very physical lives. I wonder if it is the experience of it that shows the differences?
My motger, for example was the one I would go to to talk power tools with.
I’m the handywoman of the house. 😀
…. I still couldn’t walk three days while in the third trimester…
If it’s any consolation at this juncture, that Chinese peasant that gave birth and was back in the field doing whatever didn’t show such dedication because she wanted to, or could, or hadn’t been introduced to the modern, Western idea of childbirth as medical problem, like the dog that ran away from the javelina, she did it because she had to. Mao may not have been the motivator, it may have been nothing more than the prospect of starving in the winter if this crop didn’t get in in time.
Yes. And that’s what I said. But no, it wasn’t starving in winter. They had saner traditions until the cultural revolution.
How many women that aren’t physical do you get an opportunity to find out where they stand, unless they’re one of those folks who won’t be quiet about it?
I honestly don’t know. It just seems like whenever there’s something really physical that needs to be done, there are the ones who can’t imagine someone doing it without a full safety committee involved, and the ones who pick out the two or three strongest guys and get them to handle it. The latter usually seem to either have had an active life at some point, or a relative who used to do stuff like that, that they never had enough strength or physicality to do themselves.
:grimace: I’ve had to clean up after some things where someone “just” sent in folks to “handle it.”
Short form, one of the guys is now disabled. Because the woman had no freaking clue what she was doing, so she just grabbed a couple of “big, strong” technicians and put them to lug-work. And their already understaffed shop became even more short handed.
It was the kind of thing where actually knowing about physical work would’ve avoided a lot of issues, and following the requirement to run things through safety would’ve fixed more.
I’d think those “big strong technicians” should’ve had some clue themselves that maybe things weren’t right. I mean, didn’t *they* know anything about physical work?
Granted, I don’t know what the actual situation was…
For most of my life, I’ve been one of those called on when it’s “just grab a couple-three strong guys and have them do what’s needed” time — but what’s needed is *never* injuring yourself, cuz that won’t help anybody. One of the things that has to ride along with “strong” is capable/knowledgeable. Sometimes all you need is a certain amount of muscle and endurance. Other times, you need at least one of those guys to *know* something and direct everybody else.
One of them did.
She was going to write him up for refusing a lawful order.
“refusing a lawful order”
The power dynamic just changed in this story. 😁
:dryly: Never tried saying “no” when the Woman In Charge “suggested” you do something, huh?
There are lots of ‘requests’ that only become optional when something goes wrong and the person who ordered you to do the thing doesn’t like the results.
Power dynamic definitely didn’t change. Just a lot more obvious.
For some reason, such ladies get offended when I say “If you know so much about it, why don’t you do it yourself?” and leave.
I’ve been known to do the female version of that.
So I am very familiar with the fallout from such things.
It’s not “woman in charge”, it’s the fact that “refusing a lawful order” is a military term and not used anywhere else that I am aware of. You can always tell your boss to shove off in the civilian world.
The approach I’ve found effective over 35 years is to ask for obviously stupid instructions in writing. Always in the form of “This is the conversation we just had. I’m not clear on what you are asking for. It sounded like X, which is either impossible or possibly unethical / illegal. Please give me a requirements document so I can start work with a clear understanding of what you’re asking for.”
That usually gets them to reconsider. When it doesn’t, it provides a defense.
You can do so in a military setting, as well.
The consequences are just a lot more obvious, even if you are right.
That is due to the situation being formalized.
Okay, so abuse of authority — or at least idiots in charge. And the idiot in charge almost never bears the consequences for the stupid shit they made everyone else do. That’s a problem everywhere.
Formal, and informal, authority.
Which is where the safety groups and such came in– because there were too many folks abusing the authority they never should’ve had. .
Have also been on the short end of the stick, getting the work nobody with experience/seniority/salary wants to do — at one employer, they just started calling me OSHA Boy. (I was fine with it; wasn’t a bad job, actually, and they had been threatened with a business-killing fine, so they *needed* me to do that thing they didn’t want to do and had been avoiding to the point where it got them in trouble.)
Anyway, a couple of things I ran into, I flat refused to deal with. A poorly labeled, corroded container that may or may not contain hydrofluoric acid and is sitting in the middle of a puddle of limonene? Yeah, no. Not a job for OSHA Boy, who has no experience with hazardous chemicals and no PPE. You’re on tap, Mr. Chemical Engineer. (“Just do this and this,” he says. Says I, “The only relevant knowledge I have in this situation is that this shit can kill people in horrific fashion.” Unsaid, but understood: “enjoy paying your multimillion dollar fine.”)
Ah, those were the days… Not sure I’d say they were the bad old days, but I ain’t angling to go back, either.
This whole feminist girlboss attitude about history suggests that women should be celebrated as uniquely powerful and special simply for doing things that men did every day. That, frankly, is more sexist than any traditional gender attitude could be.
(Let’s see if this formatting works, or if it goes WPDE.)
<blockquote>Fourth, because it erases womanhood. I know what they think they’re doing is showing how powerful and strong women were, but what they are actually doing is saying the only roles that matter are male, and therefore if women are to be important they must have filled this role that — until yesterday — we knew mostly men fulfilled. Having children, child care, and child birth are suddenly unimportant. Cooking — which in those days was far more difficult — and keeping the shelter from leaking/keeping the tribe covered, curing pelts, looking after the aged and the sick, none of that matters. Gathering supplemental food that keeps the tribe from starving when the hunting is bad? Doesn’t matter.</blockquote>
It’s always fascinating to me that people would rather have women compete only in categories that men can compete in, because wouldn’t it make more sense to emphasize the things only women can do? *sigh*
Nope, doesn’t like blockquotes anymore.
If you click on the Paragraph symbol (the backwards P) in the upper left corner of the text box you will see TRANSFORM TO with LIST and QUOTE below it. Position the cursor in a paragraph, click and select QUOTE. Like this:
So that’s what that ‘Add citation’ does.
Using the “>” does the same as the backward paragraph, still. Starts the block.
Typical Londo phrase. And I’ll have to remember that one.
Typical Londo phrase. And I’ll have to remember that one.
On occasion selected by WP at random, perhaps, html tags will work correctly. If you get the header with bold, italic and such, html tags are completely ignored.
If there’s a way to force it (came up html-friendly in this post), I haven’t found it.
WordPress Delenda Est! (OTOH, Blogger might be worse…)
Sometime WP here accepts html, sometimes markdown (e.g. using **stars** for italics). It doesn’t tell you which, and there is no edit.
WPDE
So many feminists who view a man refusing to do “women’s work” as *necessarily* denigrating such work. Not a one of them willing to believe that men might consider themselves unworthy/unable to do such work properly. No, it must always be viewed in a negative light. Shows where their thoughts are, doesn’t it?
In my younger days, I encountered plenty of “men in the kitchen” jokes and some “men house-cleaning” jokes where it was “obvious” that men couldn’t do those jobs correctly.
I wondered (then) if such jokes were created by women to keep men from attempting to do such jobs or if the jokes were created by men in order to keep from doing such jobs.
Of course, the answer may be “both”. [Very Big Crazy Grin]
What do they think single guys, single dads and gay guys do without a woman in the house?
The some of best kept houses I’ve been in belong to perpetual bachelor professionals or gay professionals. Like you could do surgery on the bathroom floor type of clean. I’m sure some had a maid service, but I know others that scrub tile grouting with a toothbrush and have detailed chores in their calendar/day planner.
Also they can be some of the worst, but a close second in disaster areas has been single working women with poorly trained preteens/teenagers.
I actual cleaned half the house of a minor mob boss/business owner that I was doing some computer/networking installs for. Trash everywhere. Apparently his wife thought he was boinking the maid, so she fired the maid and let the place go to hell.
In order to get my job done, I had to move things. Roaches!
Since I was waiting on a part and a printer to be delivered and had the time, I straightened up and filled about 25 bags of trash, emptied the moldy experiments out of the fridge, did the dishes and organized the pantry.
He comes back, thanks me, parts and printer arrive, I finish up and leave.
Then his wife gets really mad. Major screaming fit. They make up after he convinces her he wasn’t messing with the household help and shamed her about the condition of the place and some geek had picked up because of bugs. Yada, yada, yada…
Show up his business office to do some more work and get paid. Also get a bonus/present and the rest of the story.
Turned out, he never messed with the household help, he was doing the office manager.
Stay tuned next time for more “Nasty Network Installs”…
“Turned out, he never messed with the household help, he was doing the office manager.”
LOL
Installed PCs and cables in a “daily work – daily pay” joint with multi-year water/roof leak and mold worthy of a sci-fi dystopia. They had sealed off the back rooms with trash bags and duct tape.
The ex-cons were generally decent, once I told the first inquisitive unhappy (and huge/ripped) one that I only got paid when they got paid, and if I was explaining things I wasn’t working. Hulk-con then was my bodyguard, repeating my shpiel, dang near word for word, to any who sought to query/threaten.
Got done in reasonable time despite others prior bad planning/choices. Got several more to do.
But binned the clothing from that one freakshow.
Apparently they had trouble finding geeks that wouldn’t run off.
Or possibly male self-defense. At first my ex did the cooking and I did the dishwashing, but after a while she wanted to me to do some of the cooking too. But then would get mad because I was “doing it wrong”. Or she would send me to the store for such-and-such an ingredient, and the store wouldn’t have it precisely, so I would get what sounded/looked like the nearest equivalent, and then get chewed out when I got home.
What I am careful never to do. Ron White (?, might be a different comedian) does a comedy routine on this. Goes like this.
Dinner. Mom/wife goes on a rant that no one helps out. That laundry, putting dishes in the dishwasher, vacuuming, etc., is never done by anyone else. Dad pops up with “apparently no one else is capable”. Of coarse the comedy part is “this was the wrong thing to say” after a suitable pause. Then lists what dad himself had been told how he did it wrong. Improper sorting of laundry. Improper placement of dishes. Etc.
I haven’t done son’s laundry since he was showed how to do his own laundry, and towels, to be new chores when he was 11 for Family Merit Badge. I haven’t done his laundry since. Seriously. No clean cloths? It is because he didn’t do his laundry. If he has stuff bluer than should be? He forgot to was new jeans separate more than a few times. He knows. He learned. I haven’t done hubby’s laundry since he retired and I was still working. He did the towels too. Since I’ve retired, I’ve taken over towels, only because I don’t wait until there are two loads to wash, between the two bathrooms. Oh sorting? What is that? I don’t do that (exception is new jeans). Dishes same. I tend to do the dishes more often but just because of some OCD tendencies. When I cook, what I use and don’t need again, goes directly into the dishwasher. Should they load something, if I do move it (rearranging for efficiency), I sure in the heck do not say anything.
I just finished loading the dishwasher and launched it.
If I had waited, the wife would have scolded me for not sticking in 47% more dishes like a Tetris expert. Just easier to take her out of the loop and do the dishes myself instead of being nagged.
She has me trained.
Depends. If can get everything in by “Tetris”, sure. If not getting everything in regardless. Eh. Why? Also depends on what needs to be washed and what can wait.
Well, at least you didn’t have to wash the dishes in the sink before putting them in the dishwasher.
I never saw the point of that. If your dishwasher is so crummy you have to pre-wash dishes, then spend another few minutes doing them in the sink and cut the dishwasher part out of the loop.
Depends on the dish. Pots and pans tend to get rinsed and scrubbed first, and depending on how full dishwasher is already, just washed by hand. Yes, our dishwasher is probably on it’s last legs. If nothing else it still sterilizes. Newer dishwashers? With all the regulations? Doubt they’ll do as good. As long as this one has no leaks and still cleans almost everything without pre rinse, it’ll do.
But we have to Save The Environment! We all need toilets that don’t flush, dishwashers and washing machines that don’t wash, and dryers that don’t dry. ‘Sustainable’ detergents that can’t get anything clean. Then we need additives and accessories to cover up the stink of our unwashed clothes.
What’s next, ovens that don’t cook? Oh, wait…
$SPOUSE isn’t terribly fond of my cooking; I tend to have a heavy hand with the spices (influenced by a couple of roomies who grew up in chili country). I cook my own breakfasts, 3X per week pan roasted potatoes and twice a week an omlette. I do an oatmeal thing that I’ll admit is weird, but have been doing it for many years (raisins, sliced banana, oatmeal, then fruit. Heat without extra water. Then yogurt. It works, but I’d never serve it to anybody else.)
OTOH, I run the grill, empty the dishwasher and do the dishes when I do my potato dishes. I prefer not to do laundry because I don’t get it quite right. (she’s a wee bit OCD and a perfectionist. I’m close enough for horse grenades and hand shoes.) I usually make the bed, though on sheet changing day, it’s both of us. The shop/barn is my mess, and I’m cleaning it at a glacial pace when I can. (Almost nothing for 6 weeks. Sigh.)
I’m the designated shopper, and have been since Covidiocy. (She hates masks more than I do, and Kat-the-dog does not handle being alone.) With the supply chain issue, ingredients are best guess, or occasionally there’s a phone call.
Cleaning my office is on me. She usually does the rest; I’ll keep Kat company, though she’s less bothered by vacuums than our previous Border Collie. Potty walks, me when I can, $SPOUSE when I can’t. Kat does not like going ouside alone. (I’ve doing minimal walking the past couple of days; they said the arthrogram was going to make the pain a bit worse. Yep. And the knee is quite stiff until the liquid dissipates.)
It works.
House cleaning. Me. Again, like the towels, not a purist, but needs doing sooner than hubby or son care.
Dog. I let her in and out (residential fenced yard, but ’70s version) most the time, especially in the middle of the night. Also I walk her. Yard *bombs* are also my responsibility. As is dealing with her 98% of the time when we are on trips. She is, after all, my service dog.
Cat boxes. See cleaning. Same principle. I’m more anal about it.
Pet food. Pet water. Mostly, except for the dog, because I pay attention better. Dog, she gets fed twice/day, she is my responsibility.
Sheets. Again a bit OCD. I like clean sheets more often (or like having cats help, whatever).
Cooking? When is time for him to cook, we go out. Except grill. He grills. Regardless, I clean. Because by the time we actually eat, all not the actual hot grills themselves, cooking stuff is rinsed and in the dishwasher.
Wouldn’t have ever said I was OCD, but it really shows here. One of the reasons why for holidays we use heavy duty paper plates (Costco generally has them). Makes cleaning a whole lot faster and easier. Still dishes to do, just there are no plates, whether what we eat off of, or putting cooked dishes on/into. The OCD also shows up when packing and on trips with hubby and taking service dog. Trust me “i”s crossed, and “t”‘s dotted 😜to the nth degree.
OTOH while a bit OCD that whatever gets done. It is an OCD with a bit of RTI (round to it) involved too. Take the dishes. Not enough room Wednesday night. So dishes left in the sink, through today. We went out for pizza (dad’s night to cook – okay he wanted pizza). Knew we were meeting sister and BIL tonight for dinner. So clearing out sink could wait. Okay, already, just didn’t want to empty dishwasher. Actually did get dishwasher emptied and refilled today, because going to need dishes for cats can food dishes, in dishwasher and clean, for Saturday, because dishes used are all now dirty.
We’re more predictable in dishwasher use. I’ll sometimes put dishes in, $SPOUSE checks them for the spots I tend to miss [oops], and we’ll run every other day. I’ll unload the first thing in the morning, rinse the filter and add the drying agent when necessary.
We don’t go to town for dinner (Kat and the Lonely-phobia), but I’ll pick up dinner in town every other week (used to be every week, but FJB). Good weather times, we’ll go to neighbors for the occasional party. I need to get Kat scheduled for a bordetella vax, and we can see if she’ll play (& stay for a few hours) with the neighbors’ dogs. That would let us go to town together more often, which has been rare since Covidiocy. Now, it’s usually because Kat has to see the vet.
The USSR found it produced a lot of trouble by pushing women out of the home. Turned out that the women listened and they couldn’t get any of them to hire on as household servants.
Personally, I want to know how they reconcile “Women have always been warriors. We’re just now finding out how much of a warrior they’ve always been!” and “Women have never had agency and have only ever been oppressed throughout history.”
Or reconcile “Women have always been warriors” with “If women ran things there wouldn’t be any wars”.
In a different, but related, vein, I’ve been noticing various short videos of cheerleader teams where a man will throw a woman into the air and catch her on one hand, holding her over his head while she performs various balance/strength feats while standing on that hand. Somehow, it’s never a woman on the bottom of these teams. Surely, if men and women are equal, there should be as many women doing the throwing as there are men.
And at least one man being thrown. Granted they do usually pick the smallest girl to be the flyer, but you’d think that statistically you’d be able to find a small-enough boy, wouldn’t you? If we were interchangeable.
There’s groups of girls that will do stunts with flyers and serve bases. But it’s more than just cheer leading, the flyers are acrobat/gymnast. (One of my cousins girls was a flyer in high school and college.)
If you really want to check out the best teams, search videos for Weber State, they won last years NCAA championship. Guys and gals are in insane shape.
There are a few ballroom dancer and skater pairs who have girls throwing guys, but there’s a trick to it. (Like the guy is doing a lot of the launching in tandem with the girl.)
Not very common, though.
This is very similar to the “Blacks invented/wrote/created everything and ruled all the great empires.” and “Blacks have always been slaves and need reparations.”
Huh?
Can you stick to something semi-believable, ya insipid wackadoodles? And please stop tearing down accomplished individuals that don’t kowtow to stupid ethnically flavored Left nonsense.
Reconciling it is easy: Men covered it up, so you don’t want to go back to letting them hide it from you, do you? You don’t want to go back to being barefoot and pregnant in your oh-so-modern kitchen, do you? DO YOU?!”
That’s all the “reconciling” they need to do, unfortunately.
what? Reconcile? Why do that? They just shout louder.
mumble mumble something Gods of the Copybook Headings, terror and slaughter return.
How many MMA women fight men, and win? With less than an 80+ pound weight advantage? Is that even enough?
Guys will beat women in the same weight class with the same amount of training 99.99% of the time if not allowed restrain themselves. That’s the difference of T and mindset.
We would do drills and warm ups coed, but when it came to holding pads or sparring, the differences were obvious. I had no problem holding pads for any female of any weight or belt, but a small guy with modest technique could make the experience painful after a while. Soccer guys were the pain with low kicks due to the leg speed.
The differences in punches between sexes was laughable. That’s why they teach women how to fight dirty (effective) in defense situations. My nieces went through several rounds of instruction by the family and have claws. They also hunt and one does 3-gun.
And while experience can beat brute strength especially in BJJ, sometimes that’s not always true any every situation or art. I was able to overpower a few smaller higher belt guys almost purely on strength and some modest technique because they had never faced someone that could brute force overpower them.
Nowadays I just avoid people and carry “tools”, just in case.
Is 80 pounds sufficient to “equalize” a MMA fight? 200 pound Middleweight female vs 120 pound Strawweight male. More? Has there ever been a sanctioned M/F fight at any weight?
I saw an interview with a noteworthy woman MMA who said “no way” to fighting men at -any- weight.
Are there -any- 220 pound MMA females? I knew a 180 pound Karate Brown Belt female, long ago.
This kinda puts the kibosh on “just as good at fighting” stuff.
Whoops. Should have been “200 pound MMA females”.
Logic is sexist.
…
Wow. That is…um….
Well, that’s something.
I’m guessing they didn’t contaminate the theory with actually trying to use an atlatl to hunt or anything?
(Yes, I do know how to spell the weapon. I am a D&Der. I also know that the holy water splasher is called an aspergillum.)
To add to the nerd note, atlatl flinging is pure bloody fun. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
It *is* fun, just as much fun (and just as difficult to do competently) as using a sling. (“sling of David”, not “slingshot”). Ask me how I know, and how close you can come to hitting something *behind* you (with a sling, that is; it would take real talent to hit something behind you using an atlatl).😉
That said, it wouldn’t have been unusual for the women to be along on hunts, especially “mass” hunts such as practiced by Ituri killing elephants or plains Indians after multiple bison, but they were there (usually along with most or all of the tribe) to butcher the kill, not to hunt. If a hunting party (5-10, usually) kills a couple of deer, no problem toting the meat back to camp. But the same number who kill a dozen bison? Or an elephant?!? No way; bring the tribe to the meat, not the reverse. And, incidentally, stuff everyone ’till they can’t walk. Rinse, repeat, until it’s all gone.
At least, so I’ve read in articles by multiple first-person observers (and sometimes participants).
Yes, of course.
And speaking of women on hunts, of course I can’t find the reference, but I read a few years ago about that one Indian tribe that supposedly honored and celebrated their gender-confused members. I think this is where “two-spirit” comes from (so when white people use it, it’s cultural appropriation, right?).
Turns out in this tribe women weren’t allowed to go on the hunt without spiritually polluting it and causing it to fail. But, these “trans” members were allowed, because since they weren’t technically women they wouldn’t pollute the hunt, but since they were women-by-courtesy they couldn’t actually participate but could be made to do all the camp chores.
Some “honor”.
Yep. “You won the honor of keeping the fires going, cooking all the meals, and helping butcher the carcasses and carry the meat.” Such a deal! 😒
You can tell which animals are domesticated by which ones you find all the bones for.
And of course, my dad being the kind of man he is, taught me and my brother to use both an atlatl and a slingshot. My brother’s better at the slingshot than I am, but my dad? He can hit a starling at 50 feet with a rock, easy. I haven’t recently used an atlatl, but can confirm that they’re fun. Would I win a contest with a man? No, because despite being in pretty decent shape for a woman, upper body strength matters when flinging objects hard, fast, and accurately.
From your description, by “slingshot” I assume you mean the 2-strings-and-pouch type, not the forked-stick-with-elastic-bands type, since the latter doesn’t rely much on upper-body strength?
Both. The way my dad does rubber bands, they require upper body strength. He believes that bigger is always better in such instances, and I don’t know where he found ’em, but he got super thick walled 1″ rubber tubing once to create a slingshot of such monstrous size that I couldn’t pull it back. It must’ve had a draw weight of 30 pounds or more – far too much for my wimpy child’s arms to manage. Once, he found tubing and a forked branch of such size that it took 3 Boy Scouts – one holding the apparatus steady, and two pulling back – to send small pumpkins flying.
Actually, he does slingshots of all sizes, and can kill a fly with a broken rubber band, as he did in the middle of a church meeting to the amazement of the entire council. He has become legendary.
He also taught us how not to knock ourselves on the head with the pouch-and-string type, and demonstrated his deadly accuracy with all the joy of a Scoutmaster of long standing.
Knowing more than a few scoutmasters. No doubt at all.
You have a *great* dad! 👍👍👍
The heaviest slingshots I’ve used employed surgical tubing; probably 15lb at full draw. Nowhere near your dad’s creation. Did he ever get involved in “Punkin’ Chunkin'”, trebuchets in general, or potato guns? They sound like they’d have been right up his alley. 😉
Punkin’ Chunkin’ was banned locally while we were still in scouts (others did “demonstrations”). But water balloon tossing with trebuchets weren’t. Bonus, could even make the balloon toss at other units. They were suppose to catch them and toss them back. Yep. That “worked” just great. Well at least everyone go good and soaked and had fun.
In BSA, currently, Punkin’ Chunkin is banned nationally. Bummed about that, back in the 2000’s the council had a punkin chukin event that was well attended and saw some great builds.
Atlatls are also on the verboten list.
Risk management types have a bit too much sway.
There was a time when Venturers could shoot anything they could find a certified instructor for…
So “Crew Served Weapons” badge is out…. Drat.
I know. Not that it was easy to find the appropriate BSA certified instructor. Luckily locally range certified instructors, were often BSA certified too. While Venturers couldn’t get instructions at camp (not that there were Venturers BSA summer camps (other than high adventure like Philmont) at least we could take them to a gun range, and let the Venturers fire everything that everyone brought and the range instructors had on hand (after leaders dredged their respective creeks, rivers, ponds, lakes, then dried, inspected, and cleaned, that is. All that work, and fun, then oops, another boat accident. Funny how that keeps happening.)
Oh. We scored some 25-35 for the old 1894 Winchester. Dredged it up, cleaned, checked. Fired it at the range. Needs regrooved. Fires fine. Sights in true. Just sometimes tumbles, and not spinning, when exiting. Got a name of recommended gun smith. Hubby is checking into it. Not that it needs to be fixed. We aren’t selling it. Family heirloom.
Oh yes, he certainly did. We have a 1/4 acre garden, and he and the scout troop built a trebuchet once to hurl rotten tomatoes as far into the neighbor’s weed patch as they could. Great fun!
Productive, too; if they were “heritage-type” tomatoes your neighbor should have thanked you for providing all the free tomatoes via the vines that grew as a result. 😉
I used spear thrower because it has too many ls and they were in all the wrong places. RUNS SCREAMING!
Atlatls rattle when you carry ’em with your spears.
As I understand it, if it’s thrown, whether by hand or with an atlatl, it’s generally called a javelin. Not always, of course, but usually. Just my pedantry surfacing… 😉
True. The atlatls stuck in my head as the “spear chucker” because that’s how I could remember to spell it correctly.
It is okay. I am a pedant, too, so I get it.
(deletes rant nobody wants to read on history and prehistory of the spear, terminology and language etymology…)
If you’d used atlatl you’d have to define it anyways, and I wouldn’t get to show off!
Like the ould scribes comment on a Welsh manuscript: “ABVNDAT Y”
Y’know, I can just see ye going (in full antebellum style), “Well, just bless their little hearts!”.
They do not realize that they are doing EXACTLY what they accuse the previous historians and scientists of the “patriarchy”. They are letting their own hopes and desires cloud the interpretation of the Data they have.
For example hunting is dangerous. If you are hunting large game that large game can turn on you and injure you. If you are hunting smaller game the threat is not the game but the predators that are quite happy to steal your catch. Watch 20 minutes of any nature show with predators and you will see them happily stealing from each other. Even armed with various neolithic tools your odds against even a medium predator (say a lynx or bobcat) are poor. Against a mountain lion, Brown bear, wolves or similar you are just somewhat less tasty additional protein.
Males are EXPENDABLE, If you lose them you lose only their skills. Young women are similar until pregnant (or of reproductive age). At that point they are the tribes future and are their children are their surety against their old age (say 32).
Margaret Mead bought into the ludicrous Noble Savage concept with her studies. Napolean Chagnon went and studied the Yanomami in the early 60s a Neolithic tribe in the Brazilian jungle that had no contact with the outer world. He brought back tales of constant warfare and intertribal conflict including tales that made the rape of the Sabine women look like a methodist picnic. His stuff was STILL hated amongst the established Anthropologists nearly 20 years later as it took Ms Meads silly junk and made clear it was at best a very tainted interpretation and likely out and out fabrication. Sounds like they’re still at it hating the actual data covering their ears and screaming “LA LA LA LA” as loud as they can.
MAGAfauna? Mammoths for Trump? Sounds like a tall tale to me. 😀
They just want to Make Anthropology Great Again.
Full disclosure, I might be a MAGAfauna, too.
But are you a charismatic MAGAfauna? 😀
I am a giant marsupial.
It was not a Freudian slip, it was just another dig at the lefties. I love to twitter them.
During the time of Mega-fauna their were giant marsupials, I can’t remember if the giant three toed sloth was a marsupial or not?
Australia had them for certain. The Procoptodon family were largeish Kangaroo Like beasts with P. Goliath nearly 7ft tall. I think there were some in the Americas based on the Opossum family.
From Sarah.
I just saw an item where a male elephant charged a jeep on safari, ran it down and knocked it over. A 79-year-old woman on a, “my last adventure,” trip was killed. Don’t mess with Dumbo.
And note the preferred pre-firearm method of hunting buffalo was stampeding them over cliffs. That was dangerous, too.
Apparently the driver was somewhat getting away… and then for some reason, he stopped the Jeep. And that was it, for everyone including the driver.
Even bull giraffes sometimes get mad and chase the Jeeps, so I sure as heck wouldn’t have been stopping.
My husband thought I was a wuss because I traveled to Cleveland on Friday for a baby shower, went to a wedding on Saturday, traveled to northern PA for a birthday party on Sunday for our nephew, and returned to Pittsburgh that evening.
I worked on Monday (8 months pregnant), went to the doctor for a prenatal exam, then went into labor that evening. I couldn’t persuade him it wasn’t false labor, so I was up all night at home. I was admitted on Tuesday morning, and delivered Wednesday morning.
Stayed in the hospital for 2 days (while my premie baby went to a children’s hospital), and hubby was surprised that I wasn’t able to finish packing up our house and loading the truck. I kept having to lay down.
The proof that I’m a candidate for sainthood is that I didn’t kill him; we celebrated our 50th anniversary this last January.
Years later, I was in the middle of another move, and kept collapsing on the couch. Turns out that I had pneumonia.
Today, I would laugh at his presumption. I have a better sense of reality now. I know to set limits, get my sleep, and tell him to kiss off when he makes unreasonable demands.
So …. we have earthquakes in NJ to go with the eclipse. Battles near Armageddon, millennialist mullahs in Iran, red heifers in Jerusalem. Portents and prophesies, Oh My!
Margery Taylor Greene actually went, “The eclipse is a sign from God,” route, while a “progressive,” female attributed the earthquake to climate change. Oy.
both attributing it to their distortions of the deity. Interesting n’est ce pas?
We really do seem to be sliding back into the Dim Ages, don’t we?
And some folks are mighty Dim indeed!
And so loud about it, too.
My wife said “At least MAGA has a few dim hoes on our side too…” Ouch!
I’ll take MTG and Boebert over “The Squad” any day.
Idiots on the Left, idiots on the Right, here we are, stuck in between.
I saw that this morning!
“This has been a test of the End-of-time Alert System. If this was an actual Apocalypse, the screaming and wailing and mass mayhem you recently heard would been followed by a great trumpet and the coming of Our Savior. This concludes this test of the End-of-time Alert System. We now return you to your irregularly scheduled pandemonium.”
There is apparently a magnitude of end-timers awaiting Rapture. One of them is the wife’s godmother.
I don’t get to talk to her anymore since I told her no one knows the time of His Return, so stop making excuses and get on with enjoying the crazy train show on Earth.
And Jesus also told a parable about servants who, when their master goes on a long journey, stop working and just sit around drinking all day. He’s not happy with them when he gets back. His point was, “When I get back, I want to catch you doing the work I assigned you before I left, not sitting around doing nothing.”
All that horseshit is just more Marxist effort to destroy all civilization totally, so their insane Revolution can finally bring about their imaginary Radiant Future.
In other words, it is so powerful and perfect it can’t compete with -anything- or -anyone-. All must be first destroyed.
Idiots.
The Radiant Future is optional these days, except to fool the Useful Idiots. They’ll count it a victory if they can do in all those right-wing so-and-sos, even if they themselves all die screaming in the doing.
Or: “Better dead than red-state.”
There is no possible role a human being can fill that comes close in importance to bearing, feeding, and raising a child. The bizarre sense of inferiority that drives this sort of desperate attempt to believe that women at some point filled male roles is rank insanity. We, at our best, protect and provide for you while you create, support, care for, and justify us. Those who begrudge us even that lesser role are hateful.
It takes both a human male and a human female to create a human child. It takes both a mother and a father to properly raise said human child. Both are necessary.
Women, proper feminine and strong, are needed. Every bit as much as men are. Alone, we a re bereft. Alone, we are lesser. The fundamental human unit is the family, evolutionarily speaking.
Want humanity to continue? Have more families. Want humanity to die? You might be a Progdolyte Commie Bastard.
But if having kids is important and meaningful, that tends to go against abortion as the superduper feminist action that every woman should do at least once. (Yes, this is the current frenzied state of allegedly feminist rhetoric.)
And more to the point, female activists who are sad about their losses of babies, or about not having had a chance to have babies, are not encouraged to admit it, in woke circles. They especially are not allowed to admit it to themselves.
So being a girlboss becomes the only acceptable way to be a woman.
Murder as a right of passage? I thought that was just in gangs …
Gangs are functional organizations. Otherwise, some other type of organization would be used instead for organized crimes.
Okay, destructive function, but if destruction is one’s goal, still functional.
Childrearing in any way but studied and deliberate isolation may effectively be sending your kids to hang with the crips, or hiring the bloods for babysitting.
The de facto religion caused by the academic or left magical practices is an evil religion, that seeks destructive ends.
Right? It’s crazy stupid.
Cutting your nose off because you don’t like the smell, then they realize it’s because they don’t shower, but not wanting to admit it, they complain about everyone with a nose. And now everywhere women will start cutting off their noses because smelling good is patriarchy. Did I say they were insane, and lonely, by Gia’s chaffed Vagina are they lonely and unhappy. So they try something new, well if cutting off my nose didn’t fix the imaginary problem, so I’ll cut off my ear, in protest. At least then they won’t have to hear people saying how ugly they are. Still nothing, so I’ll cut off my breasts and tell the world I am a man. Yes they are insane, driven that way because they know Communism is a lie and a failure, but they can’t admit it, not even to themselves so they go even deeper into insanity and curse all those who wont join them.
They are trying and failing horribly at changing history to suit their own prejudices, because anything built upon a lie, is like a house built with a foundation of sand. It can not stand up to reality. Nor can houses built upon sand withstand the waves of the ocean. It is easy to believe every woman is Queen Boudicia leading the Celts against the Romans. And it was a male dominated academia that erased the truth. Two things, Boudicia lost, because she was out teched by the Romans. The only reason only anyone remembers Boudicia is because it was so unusual for a woman to lead. Same could be said for Cleopatra or Catherine the Great or Elizabeth I of England.
On a squirrel note, Interesting how these supposed divine rulers of England can trace their lineage so far back, with so many childless rulers like Elizabeth I. Meh go figure.
The answer to the royal line thing is secondary branches. Richard III had no children, but Henry VII had a common ancestor in Edward III centuries earlier and was married to Edward IV’s daughter. Queen Elizabeth I had no children, but James was her first cousin twice removed. William III was James II’s nephew and was married to his daughter. Etc. All the way back to Wotan. 😀
“It is impossible for humans to know the truth of everything as far back as it goes, but it is important to try, and to at least not tell lies.”
My first thought was of Harry Potter raising his scarred writing hand to show the newest Minister of Magic what Dolores Umbridge had had magically inscribed via quill in detention on his hand: I must not tell lies. This was done by the ultimate lying toad to convince Harry to lie. It had the unintended result of convincing him to speak the truth instead, no matter what.
:shows back of her own hand: I must not tell lies.
Voldemort may have been the Big Bad in the Harry Potter novels, but he was far from the most evil thing in it. All he wanted to do was rule the world.
Dolores Umbridge, on the other hand…she found joy in torturing children. There’s a good reason why readers hated her most of all. The “progressive” left *is* Dolores Umbridge.
Yup. Exactly.
There’s also the fact that we’ve all meet at least one Dolores Umbridge in our lives.
The truth?
They can’t handle the truth.
They wouldn’t know the truth if it came back to bite them.
And it will.
Same, more or less. I would once have called the vile spew coming from my former discipline as a tragedy. This is untrue. It is a travesty, intentionally inflicted, upon careful students of pre-history.
What comes before written history is not subject to your fantasies and deeply held desires. This is the fertile ground of fiction, and you are welcome to pursue all its wonders with my compliments.
But cease ye the whole-cloth fabrications. As students as recently as twenty-five years ago, you were taught that the physical evidence comes FIRST. It is your foundation. Everything thereafter must, perforce, be built upon the firm ground of FACTS.
Your theories and hypotheses must withstand the harsh winds of bitter criticism. And your fellows must for their own sake as well as yours do their dead level best to destroy your beautiful little idea.
The only theories that matter are the ones that survive. You cannot playfully stroke them in awe and worship them like primitive pagans. They need the full force of your intellect, else they are useless.
You make a mockery of your forefathers with this filth. The credibility of trained science hangs by the thin thread of public faith. When such bald face lies are presented to the public, that faith withers. And with it, what little support you may have once earned.
Oh, I know why such studies as this exist. ”Public” funding for such projects is sourced from politicians, and is thus tainted at the root. This is an indefensible excuse. Have some damned pride for once, foolish children.
Be the rebels your silly youth maleducation urged you towards. Buck the trend. Produce truth. Revel in the hate and bile your fellows heap upon you. Truth is often painful, hated, distrusted, and reviled.
But truth has a way of standing despite the opposition. Lies shift and flee when the truth walks among them. Wouldn’t you rather be on the best side?
Test your fundamental assumptions mercilessly. Discard any the fail. Then subject them to the strongest arguments you can find. It requires courage and the ability to face failure fearlessly, as you will fail many, many times.
But a true student of the past is unbothered by this. Study what is as well as what was. Let not the former infect the latter.
In the end, truth is what will stand the test of time. These current lies will be forgotten by all but a slim few.
A smart guy I know reposted on FB a few years ago a link to an article about the “maritime” hypothesis of populating the Americas via Beringia, as opposed to the “glacial gate” hypothesis, with his added commentary that the earlier hypothesis was so self-evidently stupid, now that we know the timing of the gate is off by millennia (or never happened, I can’t remember).
I had to hold myself back from commenting, “Yeah, what idiots those scientists were, coming up with explanations for things based on the evidence they had at the time. How moronic.”
There’s everything to show that sex differentiation was very strong among early humans, and that women were definitely more gracile (and shorter by a lot), most of the time.
If you want a mythical time when men and women were somewhat equal in ability to hunt, you either have to consider snares and traps; or you have to look to the days when steppe tribes first tamed horses, and nobody else had done it yet.
If you’ve got a pony-drawn wagon with archers in it, or little kids with little bows who’ve tricked the pony into letting them ride, then you can have reasonably mighty women/girls acting as hunters.
And then when the size of horses had been bred up enough for adults to ride, you have Scythian women sometimes riding with the men, using their Scythian bows.
But even with archery, men can pull more weight. Even with little steppe crossbows, until the crank was invented, arm strength did matter.
I guess catching doves in big gluey nets was a community thing, but even stuff like scaring and herding game into enclosures would normally be something that boys and men do.
“And shortly after remembered why I no longer do it every month.”
Oh, holy crap. Thou hast pushed my button.
Once upon a time, in the prehistoric mists of the 1970s, The Phantom was taking his BA in Anthropology.
At that time the “controversy” surrounding E.O. Wilson’s book “Sociobiology” was raging in full song. I put “controversy” in scare quotes because it was not that. It was the first real mau-mauing of a respected, tenured scholar, Dr. Wilson, at an American university, over Leftist politics.
I watched the farce play out in real time. Wilson would show up somewhere to give a speech, Lefties would show up out of nowhere and throw a pie in his face. He would be shouted down. He would be ridiculed. His papers were attacked in the journals.
I was in third-year at this point and thinking about trying to get a Masters and a PhD in Anthro. I could have done it. Wouldn’t have been all that hard, even as a callow youth.
But I looked around at the teaching faculty, and the kind of people in my third-year courses. They were -weirdos-. One in particular I recall was this butchy woman who dressed kinda like a guy (obviously gay in retrospect but I didn’t know that at the time because 1970s kid) and always proposed the -craziest- sh1t in seminars. She didn’t react well to the notion of measuring things, I remember. The whole notion of counting and measuring seemed like it annoyed her a little bit.
So, after careful consideration, and thinking about doing nothing but write papers the rest of my life, I decided it would be better to do -anything- else and ended up painting houses for a few years.
That was my experience in the 1970s. Fifty freaking years ago, almost.
So now I hear “Exciting new study says women were prehistoric hunters!!!11!” and I think of the butchy lady in my physical anthropology course, arguing that of course women could hunt a mammoth just like the boys.
During a lecture when we were talking about skeletons of pre-historic European Neanderthals displaying multiple healed fractures, spear wounds, joint damage caused by overuse of one type or another, and how they were all MEN getting f-ed up like that. (Neanderthals were freakin’ super-chads, going by the skeletal record.)
Women had damage too, from different sorts of overwork. But none of the battle damage displayed by the men, that was just for the boys. Women were apparently so magical they didn’t get busted up hunting mammoths or whatever. Or they just stayed the f- home like any intelligent woman would.
Quoth Uggette, cave woman, to her man Ugg: “Hmm. Make sammich and feed cute baby, or get broken arm maybe die while throwing spear at frigging hair-covered mountain of p1ssed-off flesh with teeth ten feet long. Hard choice, Ugg.”
“No be smartass, Uggette. Make sammich good. Ugg want two sammich.”
You know what the brown crude between mammoth toes is?
Butchy women who think they can hunt mammoth……🤣
I can so picture that as a cartoon. Not Far Side. Something more.. base.
c4c
Hatshepsut and widowed Nefertiti and Cleopatra prove that it was totally normal and accepted for women to be kings of Egypt, and the only reason we don’t have more examples is because men conspired to erase them from history. Don’cha know.
Oh, and Akhenaten was trans. Clearly. Just look at his statues.
[eyeroll]
But Cleopatra was Greek.
Liar! She was Egyptian and Egypt is in Africa so that means she was a PROUD BLACK AFRICAN QUEEN!!!!!! Slay!!!!!
George Washington: Native American.
I swear by Nuada’s silver hand, the next time I hear someone say “slay” I’m going to dye my hat next to their cooling corpse …
But I thought the Redcaps were Scottish? :wink:
Cousins, so.
Greek-to-Egyptian trans?
Ah, but maybe the prehistoric female hunters identified as male, thus gaining all male abilities? Checkmate, Sarah!
Please see above comment about brown crude between mammoth toes. snark.
Male hunting party lead:
”Where did Karen go?”
Proud Female Huntress of the Frigid Steppes:
“Hah! I have you now, mammoth! Quail in fear before my solo female hunting mightiness! And stop moving so much so I can stab you!”
Mammoth (in Mammoth):
“I reject your obviously mushroom-altered reality and reimpose the common one!”
(Loud squishing noise.)
“Bu- but you’re a herbivore!”
“I’m not gonna eat ‘er.” 😀
IIRC, the Cape Buffalo is one of the most dangerous animals in Africa to hunt but is a “mere” herbivore. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
If you see the perils of Yellowstone listed by the harm they do, it’s a bunch of herbivores, a bunch of inanimate perils, and THEN a bunch of predators. (Some do make the top 10, I’ll grant you.)
Everyone is afraid of the big scary grizzly. Least likely to be the problem. Sure make sure to have bear spray. Odds are won’t use it. Problem for those flying home. Donate it to the rangers.
Olympic and Rainer national parks. Most dangerous animal is not the black bear or cougar. It is the deer and elk. Difference is conflicts with deer and elk, just like the buffalo/bison in Yellowstone, don’t get the animal put down. Where as conflicts with bears or cougars, even if initiated by idiots, not the animal, result in a dead animal. Although to be fair to the park rangers they don’t try very hard. Now the WGW or MGW (state game wardens) OTOH pull the trigger too dang fast.
In Africa, hippos lead the kill standings for herbivores, crocs for carnivores, because they both live in the one thing no one can stay away from: water.
You’re a bad man. Think shame on– wait you cmment here. YOU HAVE NO SHAME.
Oh, I didn’t want to do this, but d go and stand in the corner for half an hour with no books!
No… books? Unpossible! I’ve at least a mini-novella of Kipling memorized in my youth, several stories of my own needing finished, and a backlog of scribbles that might turn into something someday.
New pun-ishment! You must translate CC style Biden’s mumblings for one speech or fifteen minutes, whichever is more painful. Proper spelling and all!
sits down on a chair in the corner and uncorks a new bottle
Dis should be fun.
😀
For some reason, the last few decades have revealed a strong effort to demonize the difference between men and women, while forgetting the strengths of a society that use the best of both sexes offer to thrive and flourish. There is a difference, neither traditional role is better than the other, and the only real problem is understanding the importance of both. Destroying the basic goal of survival, which history shows is best promoted by a family, leads to what we see today. Men, and women, have important responsibilities, and they aren’t the same. Destroying the role of either destroys societies.
OK, this popped up on a Firefox ‘New Tab’:
So, apparently *UMFs are the next ‘Oppressed Minority!’ Get ready.
*Ugly M-F’ers
You mean I can finally have a Official Victim Group of my own?
Joy forever, unconfined.
I may be an ugly M-Fer but I identify as a MAGAfauna today. Respect my identity, leftist proglodytes!
MAGAfauna is my new designation.
This is MAGAfauna country!
Off topic. Learning what happens if your cell phone contains your life. We all got a glimpse (rant?) when Sarah’s phone got illegally cloned. Here is my nephew’s journey, or rather his parents, because they are dealing with it. Nephew is a 22 year old college student, starting two months study overseas (Spain, specifically). Parents went over with him, vacation time, because why not. They split off from him to the southern Spanish coast, and he went to Scottland for 10 days or so (has to do with visa for Spain, don’t need to know). Last weekend his phone was stolen out of his hands as he is using it (really targeted the wrong person, in general). Apple phone, an old one.
Thieves immediately turn off auto off, and family tracking (they all 5, + grandma’s phone, use the tracking app). Do something to defeat the facial security recognition required (which all the apps use). Quote from sister “Apple face recognition security sucks“.
Purchase items using Apple Pay, with triggers alerts to parents (student, mom & dad are on everything, which is why “wrong phone” is the mantra). Thus mom & dad are alerted, almost immediately. They immediately call provider and get phone shutdown, cards are shutdown, bank funds are transferred out of banking accounts (dad is on the account), and fraud alerts triggered. Still dealing with fallout, but mostly contained.
Note, sister and BIL both worked their most their careers at HP. Technically challenged is not the situation. Nephew has a new phone (parents bought it, just had to get it to him). Was using mom’s Costco credit card until got him setup with a new one. Now mom got a “credit card added to new Apple Pay account” account (nephew had added it to the new phone Monday, that alert had already come through). So she shut that card down, is getting a new one. Adventure is not over, as there was a lot of nephews personal information on the phone. So dealing with fallout that comes up from that. And yes, one thing they did do was lock everyone’s credit bureaus down. Unlocking appropriate people briefly to get new cards in place.
Fun times for them.
Fallout for me? Need to get our mother’s facial recognition turned off. Otherwise not so much. None of us put our credit cards on our phones. Have bank and credit card apps, son & I do, but not using facial recognition, must login to use, user names not stored, and double authentication if user name and password gotten correct (just as likely to get myself locked out because of fat finger on cell keyboard syndrome). Android phones require the security to change security (PIA but YEA!). Now that supported, need to lengthen my security code.
[Looks at flip-phone that needs to be replaced]
I am soooooooo glad I don’t use a smart phone for anything other than running a couple of stupid* travel trailer apps. I tend to keep my life on my computer(s), with one laptop a clone of the desktop (more or less). We locked down credit bureaus long ago, though there’s one I managed to fat-finger the password, so if I ever need to unlock that one, I’ll have a really fun task ahead.
The current smart phone is a Samsung, replacing a refurbed Iphone that suffered fatal battery elephantosis. Not-so fun fact: You can’t clear the memory on an Apple phone unless you have a cell signal for it to phone home to Steve Job’s grave, or something. Holding a phone up to get the minimal signal at Casa del RCP while half expecting the battery to explode in one’s hand made for one of the more memorable Apple Experiences. And the reason why the replacement is a Samsung.
((*)) One controls the stereo system because the included remote isn’t cool enough, the other controls some of the lighting, the awning, and reports the battery status. I can control the awning from the underpowered control panel, while that panel’s battery info is very crude. The fancy lighting is only via app. Schweinhund’s never put that functionality into a built-in panel.
we keep nothing financial connected to the phone. that hit could have been much worse.
Ditto. In fact I have one of hubby’s locked down so good he has to call in to that bureau to unlock it, so we can reset the parameters to lock it down again (long story). Whatever. Not getting loans for anything, anytime soon.
Our phones are Samsung too. Samsung can delete back to factory settings without connecting to the web (done it). Hubby has financial apps on his phone that our IRA’s are at but he never logs into those apps on his phone. They are research/tracking apps not related to the accounts. I have banking apps, but only use them to track preview (traveling). To do anything must do full log in, with double verification, log in is NOT facial recognition, and given my password, very easy to fat finger improper password. Son and I both have our phones locked down, with (PIA) locked settings. We do not use facial recognition.
Every once in a while, you have to just shake your head and wish for the Sweet Meteor of Death. If only because there are far too many people that are this stupid.
Once upon a time (and maybe in the future) I actually read up on this. And talked with SCA people before third-wave feminism hit. And looked at the research. With very few exceptions, in a pure physical contest, men are going to beat women any day of the week. They don’t have the bone density, the musculature, the sheer mass, and the testosterone needed to handle body-shattering physical labor, day in and day out. They can’t have it, and never will have it. The dimorphism isn’t extreme, but it is there.
And women have other issues. The width of the female pelvic girdle means that it’s weaker, because women have to have the space to pass a bowling ball between their legs. The structures for caring for a child means that there are greater vulnerabilities. And, once again, testosterone seems to provide some protections against low-level infections and abrasions that heavy labor generates.
There are exceptions. There always are. For a lot of these things, skill and technique can compensate for lack of the sheer muscle. And it’s scary to realize just how indifferently trained most combatants are/were prior to even the 18th/19th century. A fresh-to-his-first-unit American soldier today is probably as good as low-level veteran troops of most other historical armies, just in terms of skills and general training. The few known women duelists and legendary combatants were just very, very good and very skilled and only fought in places that they could make the most of their advantages.
Labor became divided into “men’s work” and “women’s work” because of this. Men, for the most part, are expendable in quite a few circumstances. This means that they can be lost if needed in dangerous tasks like hunting. To raise children properly, even in the most primitive of times, requires a lot of labor. And most of the tasks that women did historically were things that women could pause, take care of a child, then go back to it.
But our current generation of fourth/fifth-wave feminists, Girl Boss yas! “women,” outright nihilistic Marxists, and the “male feminists” who hide behind all of these women to conceal their own horrible natures…they want the world to be what they think it should be.
I write about female soldiers and warriors. And with very few exceptions, all of them know that going toe-to-toe with a male in a “fair” fight is suicidal. Even the ones that are augmented can only go so far.
As a female martial artist – even a pretty decent one, I think – thank you for writing sane women who know their limits. I would never in a million years want to take on my larger, stronger, more determined brother in an actual fight. He would cream me. Without even trying. I would not want to take on any man if I could possibly avoid such a situation. And I’m strong for a woman and have years of training!
But yeah, while skill and technique and sheer experience can go quite far in a fight, reach and speed and brute force can go farther, even with less training, and it’s silly to say otherwise.
I know!
I love watching a good female fight, but when you see a girl 98 pounds soaking wet trade punch for punch with men whose thighs outweigh her…your suspension of disbelief falls apart quicker than the Francis Scott Key bridge when a freighter hits it.
It’s why Samuel Colt made men (and women) equal, after all.
Haha, I definitely weigh more than 98 pounds, and I wouldn’t ever want to go up against some of the senior men in my class, one of whom changes truck tires for a living and has wrists larger than my calves (my calves are not small). He is 30 years my senior, but never would I ever believe that I could beat the man, who definitely has far greater bone density than I will ever achieve. The man is built, as my sensei says, like a Sherman tank. I’m pretty sure that any punch or kick I tried would hurt me more than him.
So yeah, when I see a woman fighting like a brawler against a guy who’s head and shoulders taller than her, with far greater weight and muscle, unless he’s agonizingly slow, ain’t no way, honey. This is why I appreciated the first season of The Mandalorian with Cara Dune, and why I hated Rey. Gina’s actually built right for me to believe that yes, she absolutely could take on whoever she would like to. She’s tall, buff, and fast, and understands her inherent disadvantages as a woman and works through them in ways that are believable (force multipliers for the win!)
I think it’s something like the 5th percentile man is stronger than the median woman. I’m sure somebody here knows the exact number. A woman commented once somewhere else that her advice to other women was to assume that any man, no matter how short or wimpy, would be much stronger than her.
One of my characters points this out to a trainee-“If you’re in a fair fight, you’ve screwed up somewhere along the line.”
Also, “never try to just beat someone up, that’s just going to get you hurt worse than your opponent. Within the circumstances, fight mean and fight dirty. Go for joints, soft spots, genitals, eyes and ears, fingers and toes. Just trading punches means that at some point, the check comes due for both of you, and you don’t know how much money is in your pocket.”
Yup! Fight dirty and hard, disable or otherwise stop your attacker/the Bad Guy, and get the heck out of there.
My daughter, the two-hitch Marine, is close to 5-10, and when she was in the Marines, was very, very fit. She says when her unit did hand-to-hand, and they deliberately matched her with a guy approximately her height and weight for practice bouts, it was all that she could do to make it an even match.
It isn’t often that TV or movies gets it right, and casts a woman who has the right build and presence to make a half-way believable cop, or worker in a physical-type job. One of the few that I remember was Molly Price as the female cop in Third Watch. She had the right presence and swagger as a police officer.
If it makes you feel better, you could probably beat me up – but so could anyone with any training.
I recently read a book on the myth of the Spartans that pointed out, inter alia, that the Spartans were the most fearsome warriors of Greece because they had any training whereas the rest of the cities had amateurs who didn’t train at all.
And then the Spartans got decisively defeated when Thebes put together a minimally-professional force and used innovative tactics. And then again against Philip’s Macedonians, and then for the last time when they got easily squashed by the Romans.
Plus, there’s another factor. Up until recent history, people didn’t live all that long. They were old at 30 and ancient at 40. In order to keep the tribe from dying out, every woman had to have 5, 6, 7 or more children, starting at age 15, before it was too late. Because at least half of those children would die before they were old enough to have their own children. Some of the women died in their first pregnancy, so the survivors had to provide even more children for the tribe. Life was nasty, brutish and short.
The men had to spend all their time on hunting and war, lest the tribe either starve or be eaten by the next tribe. Boys started their training at an age of 7 or 8 and never had time for anything else. Probably a third of the men died young, from the hazards of hunting and war. Women outnumbered men by as much as 3 to 2.
Women were not ‘oppressed’; the tribe all had to work together for survival. Nobody had any energy to spare for oppression.
‘Nother headline: ‘Killing of Iranian general by Israel has Biden officials worried about retaliation’
What are they gonna do, send their terrorist proxies to massacre Jews? Oh, wait, that’s what they’re doing now. If the Iranians could do anything worse to Israel, they’d already be doing it.
When you’re at war, you kill the enemy. So, what do you call a dead Iranian general in Syria? A good start.
Actually, in old times, once you hit age 5 or so, you were pretty much set until about the 60s or so. The low average age at death comes from infant and young-child mortality, which was high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire
Of 100,000 people, a full third would die in their first year. After that, only half the remainder would still be alive at 40 (about 30,000) and only half of that remainder still be alive at 60 (about 15,000). Only about 5% would make it to 70.
Now, this is in a “civilized” society, with disease sink towns/cities and lots of domestic animals around, and it’s apparently clear from the archaeological record that at least in Britannia overall health went up in the post-Roman period. So the hypothetical Paleolithic hunter-gatherer tribe demography might have been somewhat better.
The only people I’ve found saying we always lived about this long and blah blah are commies. They want to convince us return to the paleolythic would be fine, I guess.
From my ancient anthropology degree, it turns out paleolithic hunting/gathering is a better gig than paleolithic agriculture. That’s why we did it for 200,000 years. If you made it past the baby stage you were good to go. Old people skeletons fairly common in hunter gatherer populations.
Villages and domestic animals collect pestilences and vermin. Primitive agriculture is a sh1tload of work. The one thing it does is allow a far greater population density. Cities. Fertile crescent agriculture and cities. Egypt, you can feed a lot of slaves and do some fancy architecture.
But really, in Europe we didn’t get back to the nice quality of life enjoyed by hunter gatherers until (wild guess here) about 1880s, and even then only because of Louis Pasteur. The great Pasteur literally invented his way out of the problems towns and cities cause humans.
Coincidentally Commies sprang up to f- things up at around the same time. Like a visitation of evil to offset all the good being done.
Not true, though. Yes, the skeletons of the hunter gatherers were better, because they were YOUNGER.
The reason agriculturalists out reproduced hunter gatherers is because ti works better.
What you were taught was already bullshit.
It was in service of “Agriculture brought private property and is evul.”
:getting the giggles:
“Wow, all these graves are for young, healthy people! Their culture must be WAY better than the one that has graves full of folks who were old, sick, and otherwise dying!”
As I recall the idea was that there were more old, busted skeletons among the hunter gatherers indicating they looked after their elders (and that some of them did live to be around 60), and the agriculturalist skeletons tended younger with less battle damage but more disease and work-related damage.
Taken together the idea was the HGs had a “better” life and lived a little longer (if they didn’t get killed by violence) but the Ags out-produced them, even though they worked harder and died younger.
Also remembering that proper agriculture is only ~10,000 years old, as far as we know. You’d think if HG really sucked and Ag was so much better, they’d have farmed sooner. It isn’t like they were dumber than us, although EVERYBODY in anthropology these days loves to pretend so.
All of this is based on skeletal remains that taken all together will fit in a couple of banker’s boxes, so we sprinkle salt liberally. Note the absence of Mighty Female Warriors in all this. Didn’t happen.
Another favorite speculation of mine is that agriculture originated because they wanted more grain to make beer out of. ~:D
I read speculation that agriculture was delayed because climate.
IE Early agriculture depended more on the proper climate.
Earlier attempts failed due the wrong climate conditions.
I think this is another one of those examples of BGE’s ‘academic field theories that assume ergodicity of behavior, whne that statistical assumption may not hold’.
There are other elements which make make invention of agriculture unlikely, and effectively retard adoption. One, complicated thought process. Two, you need human populations generally high enough to reduce the wild life populations enough that the extant animal (and hunter gatherer human) populations can be kept from eating the crops.
The big driving incentive of agricultural seems to be sustainable food supplies, and with those the possibility of multi-generation (relative) peaces.
The population densities directly mean that preserved agricultural graves are not the same sort of sample. You need different funerary customs to mitigate spread of disease. Also, the priests may be robbing the graves of chiefs pretty frequently, so…
But, the big deal is that the hunter gatherer graves are almost certainly not uniformly sampling the hunter gatherer bands in time.
Hunting and gathering is very boom or bust in terms of food supplies. It is very likely that the interest and ability to try to preserve elderly deceased is much more common in boom periods, and much less common in bust years. Among other things, you have to have some thought and attention to spare for keeping the deceased from being eaten by animals.
It is quite possible that surviving hunter gatherer graves are representative of only the boomiest of boom periods. And have problems of a reduced and selective sample.
Whereas we almost certainly have a lot more agriculturist graves. Those may be a broader sample.
Your point about sampling is well-taken, the sample of agriculturalist burials is much larger than H/G burials. Making it very hard to tell if what we’re seeing in our existing evidence is real, or an artifact of sampling.
Unfortunately all the above these days is essentially moot, as the field of Anthropology has been captured by Leftists who do not do scholarship in good faith. They pursue an agenda rather than report observations.
Apply salt liberally, as if dusting for snails in the garden of knowledge. ~:D
sigh. This is bullshit. Utter and complete bullshit. Depends what you mean by “old times.” The nineteenth and 20th century? Sure. before that? Oh, dear Lord.
Child birth was dangerous. Most work was dangerous. Wars were random and HEAR THIS any piddly infection was fatal.
Hang nails, etc. were DEADLY.
I have no idea what the hell this revisionism is, but heck, when I was a kid 60 was OLD and you looked like 90 year olds now. because, I think, I was the first generation with antibiotics in Portugal.
continuous infection destroys the body.
BUT what we’re talking about here is the neolithic, and we actually sort of can tell the life spans from the remains. 40 was OLD. Like 90 now. They lived HARD.
I’ve seen it pop up from folks going off of bodies found in old hunter/gatherer camps.
Ignoring the issue of “if you’re killed on a hunt and eaten, your body doesn’t get buried. Just babies and old people die at camp.”
Yes, this is what I recall (from the 1970s mind you) regarding burial sites, old people were not uncommon. Also, don’t forget they’d have brought their dead/wounded home for a proper burial if possible. Bros look after each other, its a Human thing. Also a Neanderthal thing, if I recall correctly.
But also not as many made it to be old as died younger, so life wasn’t all candy and balloons. ~:D
The 1970s were extremely wealthy by any measure in history.
The evidence we have is that some people got buried, is about it for Neanderthals. And we’re kind of guessing from the flowers with the remains.
Looks at the top of my feet. Without antibiotics? Shudder. I too easily get Cellulitis from insect bites when bitten anywhere, but particularly bad when on the top of my feet or around my ankles. Without antibiotics, it spreads up my leg (can see the read streaks, put off longer than should have to go to physician). Other than my feet, if I can break the blister on the head of the bite, I can deal with the infection on my own without antibiotics, but using topical OTC infection fighting creams. Son has a similar overreaction to insect bites, except he now rarely gets the Cellulitis and it clears up without antibiotics. But that was not true when he was an infant to around 8 or so, and it happened fast.
same.
Even well into the 20th century, small wounds could easily be fatal. Calvin Coolidge Jr., died at the age of 16 in 1924 because he got a blister on his toe while playing tennis. It got infected, went septic, and there was nothing the finest doctors in America could do to save him at that point.
As was recently pointed out to me, a “healthy immune system” is one that is overworked.
we’re not talking statistical lifespan, just LIFESPAN.
Why a woman’s trousseau contained not only their own burial shrouds, but a number for the children they would bear, and subsequently bury, over their lifetime.
One of the miracles about the historical private family graveyard (est. 1843) is how few infant graves there are. More than a few young women who died due to Consumption (likely either Tetanus or Tuberculosis), leaving children and widower husband behind (more than a few children lived with and raised by grandparents, but provided for by fathers). But few infant graves. Haven’t wandered the other, more public and larger, in town cemetery (also a family branch) to see how many infants. My great-grandmother lost her mother early. Grandma lost her mother early (age 7, siblings ages 9, 13, and 15), but she and her siblings stayed with her father, not great-grandparents. Though by rumor (grandma), her grandfather tried to get great-grandpa to farm the kids, at least grandma and her sister, to spinster aunts. Her teen sister, and brothers, protested (and got away with it).
What frosts me the most was when I was forced into a male-dominated (and rightly so!) career to make enough money when I had been abandoned with three small kids, many men on these heavy construction sites just assumed I was one of these feminist whackos. I valued and still value all the old and time-tested roles of men and women, but when I had no choice but to move outside of them it created painful static. I was not Gloria Steinem’s younger sister; I was a mom trying to feed and raise my kids in the absence of a protective male.
“But I’ve never met anything other than activist women!”
:observe and discover they just assume all women are activists:
The people making the most noise are the ones who get noticed, and thus get perceived as the majority even when they’re outliers, often at the extreme end of one of the wedges of the normal distribution.
Which works fine, until one is being informed one doesn’t do what one knows one does– generally because the TV shows something different.
I’m stupid enough that I keep doing stuff that gets me punished for not conforming, although usually because I don’t realize “this person responds badly to having their narrative shifted.”
BTW, Sarah, Space Station Noir 6 is out.
I’ve read it. 😀
…We are not the monster hiding under the bed. We are the reason it is hiding there in the first place…
aye.
Under the bed is so cliché. Sometimes it’s best to go back to the old ways, the dark forests and wild bogs, the long lonely roads at half midnight.
Rumor has it that it is safer for monsters to be under the bed than it is to be elsewhere.
IE The humans will leave monsters under the bed alone (as long as they don’t harm the human children), but the other monsters don’t leave the weaker monsters alone.
I love doing this in my books. The monsters will remain alive exactly as long as the Humans don’t know they’re there. That’s what they’re hiding under the bed from. Us.
My all time favorite is destroying eldritch horrors with superior technology and firepower.
From current WIP, an example:
Sam made it from the hot spring to the bench and sat wavering a bit, until he got his equilibrium back. He put his gun belt on first, then shoes, underwear, shirt and finally his shorts. Sat for a moment thinking about what would suck the most that might happen, and remembered all the Hollywood movies where the bad guy substitutes blanks in the hero’s gun. That would be pretty bad.
He pulled out his pistol and removed the magazine like Alice had showed him, pulled back the slide to eject the round in the chamber because she had cuffed him three times for forgetting, and inspected the bullets. They looked good as far as he could tell, nice and front heavy with lead, jackets shiny and not corroded, no pocket lint stuck in the hole in the front of the bullet. Primers intact. His engineer brain thought through the problem, and he remembered Alice had showed him how to check the barrel. He put his thumb in the open chamber and looked down the barrel from the muzzle, using his thumbnail to reflect light.
There was a twig in there.
“Göll!” he called. “Got anything to clean a pistol?”
She slid to a stop in front of him after a short sprint, took the pistol out of his hand and checked it. “Good catch, hero,” she told him.
One of her railgun spiders came running up and stuck a fuzzy appendage down the barrel, forcing the twig out the open chamber. “Pine sap,” said the spider in disgust. It sprayed something down the barrel and ran it through. “Sabotage,” it decided, changing its mind. “Let’s see how this goes.” It extruded a drop of something viscous from its mouth onto the limb and ran it through again. The barrel began to fizz as whatever was on the metal reacted violently with the drop of goo.
In the distance, back down the pathway, something shrieked and fell out of a tree. It ran five steps before a hidden mech shot it with a railgun, amazingly loud though it was half a mile away. “Yeah, that’s right!” snarled the spider inspecting the barrel again. “Nano-disassembler beats magic twig.”
Nice little snippet.
Of course, I had a thought.
The Monster-Under-The-Bed is the baby-sitter/protector for the children of Professional Monster Hunters.
They gave the Monster a safe-place to live and in return the Monster protects their children. 😉
I would like to read that story, good sir. Please proceed. ~:D
Notis boni:
Wars and rumors of wars: CHECK
Earthquakes everywhere: CHECK (east coast of US even; double check)
Would someone please go check their fig tree? I think it might soon be summer.
Yes, I think the signs are pretty clear… But it’s always a personal thing.
These singers are already in their eternal reward:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnAW_Dh68Hk
I just saw that there is a new anime series called ‘Wind Breakers’.
I don’t think I want to know. 😀
Not sure it’s been noted but, read “After Some Tomorrow” by Mack Reynolds or Herbert’s “White Plague” ..