i guarantee you that lup and barry have zero idea what a grim reaper is supposed to look like.
bonus (after a long conversation and a cheesy shopping montage):
One of my neighbors had a REALLY FAT golden retriever she adopted, that needed to be put on a diet, but even super-low-cal food wasn’t working, becuase Ella was still hungry and would open the cabinet to eat the whole bag. Vet suggested that she needed a filler Food so she could feel full without the extra calories, and suggested canned green beans, which are mostly fiber and lean protein.
Ella fucking LOVES green beans. She does a dance for them if you mention them. Her ‘sibling’ the police academy washout shepherd, thinks she’s insane.
Even if your pet doesn’t like green beans*, offering them a canned green bean is inevitably HILARIOUS becuase they’ll either be thrilled or otherwise make strange faces. Results so far:
Ella (golden retriever): Overjoyed. gets up on her hind legs to dance without prompting.
Sampson (Black shepherd): Offended, yells until you give him REAL treats.
Cody (Gentleman shepherd): is concerned, becuase this is Obviously Not Food. Gently takes it to be polite, leaves it out in the yard.
Minx (Domestic Shorthair cat): Smelly Toy Is Hilarious, batted under the couch.
Tiger (Really Fat Domestic Shorthair cat): Total disgust, hissing and sulking in the Prosciutto box. Came out and ate it later anyway.
Wanda (corn snake) we didn’t expect her to be interested but she spent like three minutes licking it.
Sadie AKA Marquis De Sade (Hyacinth Macaw) ignored bean in favor of dumping can on the floor, sticking head in can and screaming. Did not attempt to bite, which is Very Nice for her.
Arwen (Australian Kelpie): ate bean, waited until humans were out of the room to consume rest of the can, got costco-sized can stuck on face and pooped green for three days. Regets nothing.
Empanada/Anderson Cooper/#3 (Plymouth Hens): Excited screaming, kickboxing tournament over possession of beans/can. #3 was ultimately victorious, becuase She is Fattest.
Big Angus (scottish highland cow, I know, ironic): very polite and delicate acceptance of beans for appx 1700 lbs of beef, will now run full-tilt across pasture to meet me, which scared the crap out of me tbh.
Will post further updates as I am allowed to try.
*Please always cionsult a vet before making any dietary changes or offering your pet new foods, but green beans are pretty safe for most pets you can keep in America
Gave cockatiel bean. He gently took it, threw it into my face, and laughed at me
Literally every time someone has tried this with a parrot of some kind, it’s resulted in rage, destruction or mockery, usually all three.
Wildly entertaining tho.
jim: hey spock can i show you this report for a quick second
spock: yes captain
jim, leaning really close to spock: so here-
spock: captain…
jim, draped around spocks shoulders: -are the systematics-
spock: captain
jim, sitting in spocks lap, wrapped around him: -for that new botany equipment-
spock, flustered: jim
Step 1: Read the word.
Step 2: Wrong.
A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS:
Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN”
Aoife – “EE-fa”
Aislin – “ASH-linn”
Bláithín - “BLAW-heen”
Caoimhe - “KEE-va”
Eoghan - Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)
Gráinne - “GRAW-nya”
Iarfhlaith - “EER-lah”
Méabh - “MAYV”
Naomh or Niamh - “NEEV”
Oisín - OSH-een or USH-een
Órfhlaith - OR-la
Odhrán - O-rawn
Sinéad - shi-NAYD
Tadhg - TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)
I work with an Aoife and I have been pronouncing it SO WRONG
As someone who is trying and failing to learn Gaelic, I feel like is an accurate portrayal of my pain.
This is the Anglicized spelling of a people who really fucking hate the English.
No, no, this is the orthographic equivalent of installing Windows on Mac.
The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.
Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse.
They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.
And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.
My point is, there is a METHOD to the orthography of Irish besides “fuck the English.” The “fuck the English” part is just a delightful side-effect.
I love it when snarky quips lead to real info.
If you live under a rock and haven’t already heard, there’s going to be a solar eclipse in the US next week! Did you make plans to see it?
“When I got my first cat, it changed me. There is something about holding a cat that makes your anger melt away. And if someone does something that upsets me—I have to remember my cat. I can’t keep my cat if I get into trouble.”
“I asked if Major Cabanaw had concerns for the safety of the cats. “Of course, we always want to ensure the safety of the cats, and the staff is great about keeping an eye out for them. But mostly, it’s the offenders keeping them safe. I have never once seen an offender kill his own cat. We screen them to be sure they have no history of animal abuse. But I’ll tell you this, there was a guy killed in here because he had spit soda pop onto someone else’s cat.””
Wow.
Cats now control the prisons. They now have an army.
This post went exactly where I expected. Well done.
