1. In English cathedral cities, guests are allowed to shoot the host’s birthday cake with an arrow without recieving any form of social opprobrium. This stems from the historical need to defend the city from fire at all times, no matter the form that it may take.
2. Failing to RSVP is punishable by lifelong snubbing in four US states. However, these days the sentence is usually commuted to a pointed eyeroll.
3. Are you concerned about using the wrong fork at formal dinners? Then you might want to invoke the International Maritime Organisation’s 1978 treaty which declared all forks to be equally correct when dining in international waters. You may need to declare the dining location to be on the high seas; this can be done, for example, by staging a mutiny.
4. You may be used to removing your hat when entering a room. But do you know what the correct etiquette is on entering a large hat? Although enterable hats are a novelty item these days, this has not always been the case. Indeed, many itinerant salespeople lived in large hats in the olden days. The correct action depends on the location of the larger hat, but generally in this situation you should keep your hat on, so as to reassure the hat-dweller that they need not step outside in response.
5. Following a historical dispute in the elbow trade, personal space is twenty percent larger when crossing the border between France and Germany than elsewhere. This applies only to entities with elbows; you should not be wary of keeping a larger distance than usual from elephants at the border, for example.
6. Although it is rude to leave your chopsticks sticking upwards in a bowl of rice if you are alive, it is permissable if you are undead. This rule is not more widely known because the majority of the undead do not eat rice and/or are not interested in etiquette.
7. It is never permissible to leave a handbag containing a live bear at a coat check. This applies even if you did not know about the bear. It is everyone’s responsibility to check their baggage for stray bears. This is how bears spread, and one simply cannot hold a polite soiree if every surface is covered in bears.
I like how this gets more and more trollish as it goes on
I have literally never skipped a class and have no idea how I could.
One time in high school I skipped advisory – which was not even a class, just a 20-minute check-in twice a week – because it was my birthday and I went to go eat cake with a friend in the band room or something and I literally got detention
Our high school was more anal about missing advisory than missing actual classes. It was almost funny how fussy they were about advisory.
But if you don’t show up to play ten minutes of board games, how will they know if you’re doing drugs?!
What’s “advisory”?
(This is a serious question; maybe this is a more recent development than my school years, but I’ve never heard this word in this context before.)
at least in my high school, you got assigned at the start of the year to an arbitrary ‘homeroom’/’advisory’ – a group of ~ten students and one teacher
homerooms would meet on certain days of the schedule in a dedicated time slot, with the idea that the homeroom would be, as @funereal-disease said upthread, and opportunity for the teacher to socially check in on the students in their homeroom and an opportunity for the students to socialize with some of their fellows they might not have met otherwise (since class sections and streaming generally mean that there’s some fraction of your grade you have no classes with and thus have less social exposure to)
(my high school was rather small, hence the ~ten students per homeroom; I imagine larger schools would have somewhat larger homerooms)
Homeroom meant something different in the old days (I was in high school in 1992-1996). You went there for the first 10 minutes or so of every day for attendance and announcements and such; in my school, you had the same homeroom teacher for all four years, but there was no advising function associated with it.
For many, accessing an abortion is difficult, but it’s an uphill and often impossible battle for people who are incarcerated. Trust me, I know. When I was incarcerated, I was denied an abortion when I asked for one, even though it’s nearly impossible for those who are in prison to access basic prenatal care. Preventative healthcare access is rapidly becoming a myth, especially for women living inside the prison walls.
Currently, there are just under 50,000 prisoners in Ohio, more than 4,000 of whom are female. Most people are aware that health conditions for people in jail are horrendous, but many are surprised to learn that the system’s shortcomings are even more significant and devastating for people who are pregnant. One in 25 female inmatesin state prisons are pregnant when they arrive. While many people boast that our country offers the best healthcare available, that claim couldn’t be further from the truth for people experiencing pregnancy while incarcerated.
I found out I was pregnant during the intake process. A nurse yelled, “Tell her it’s positive,” from another room. That was it. I had no choice but to keep moving through the intake process while my head was spinning. I was already having trouble processing the fact that I was jail—I’d been convicted of a minor, nonviolent crime and even my lawyer was shocked that my sentence included any jail time—and now they were telling me I was pregnant? I desperately needed to talk to my boyfriend, my family, a friend, anyone, but I couldn’t. I was totally on my own.
Later that night, when I finally had some time and space to think about the news, I came to the conclusion that while I loved my boyfriend and thought that we would be good parents, this wasn’t the right time for us to raise a child. I wanted to finish college. I wanted to become a parent eventually, but on my terms, under happy circumstances. Being pregnant in jail felt cold, terrifying, and wrong. Like my first abortion, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to have an abortion.
The jail kept all of the pregnant prisoners confined to one area called the Pregnancy Pod. When I got there it was completely overflowing with pregnant women who outnumbered the available beds—50 women in a pod that holds 30. The lucky ones got to climb cement blocks to sleep on a paper thin mattress with coils sticking through. The unlucky ones just slept on the floor. Even though the jail was legally required to provide us with food that met our nutritional needs, our meals often consisted of a shared banana and a single carton of milk. The cells in the pregnancy pod didn’t have toilets. If we needed to use the bathroom, we had to wait until we were allowed to leave our cells. Guards forced us to wait for hours if we needed to go. When you have a growing uterus pushing on your full bladder, being forced to wait for hours is pure torture.
I was locked in the pregnancy pod for about two weeks before I was able to visit a healthcare provider. During those two weeks, I had no idea how far along I was, and I didn’t have access to prenatal vitamins or any sort of medical care. As soon as I arrived for my appointment, I made it very clear that I wanted to have an abortion. The jail staff told me it wasn’t possible, “you’re only here 60 days,” they said, and if I wanted to have an abortion, I’d have to wait until I got out. I am not the only one.
While several courts have held that incarcerated women have the right to an abortion, many women aren’t able to get them because sheriffs refuse to pay for the transportation costs or monitoring, which is added to the cost of the abortion and totals tens of thousands of dollars. When I was released, I was around 20 weeks, so I was around 12 weeks when I went in. If that had happened now, I wouldn’t have been able to get an abortion because Ohio now bans abortion at 20 weeks, with no exceptions, a clear violation of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion until viability (between 24 and 28 weeks). What happens to the women who are asking for abortions, think they might be able to get one when they get out, and find that their constitutional right has been stolen from them?
Petition to stop using the phrases “hard sciences” and “soft sciences.” Different fields of science shouldn’t be pitted against each other. A hierarchy of importance shouldn’t exist among scientific fields.
Instead use phrases like “physical sciences,” “social sciences,” “life sciences,” “medical sciences,” etc. You better get across what field you’re actually talking about and don’t put down anyone’s work in the process! It’ll take time to make advances in interdisciplinary research, let’s start by leveling the field to make it possible
Remember too that the ‘soft sciences’ weren’t considered soft until women started practicing them in numbers. The delegitimization of a science goes hand in hand with sexism.
that move to reclassify biology as a soft science now that it has more women in it? it’s not sneaky. we can see that shit.
It’s also a distinction that falls apart when you think too much about it.
Is it about how much math is used? Because social science can involve a shit-ton of hard math (check out computational social science), and biology, despite becoming “softer” over time (as @anaisnein notes), is more maths & CS heavy than ever in all specialties (judging from all my PhD buddies).
Is it about how physically tangible the concepts are? Because I’m not sure dark matter qualifies, and a lot of what we know about quantum mechanics was largely theoretical & unproven for years, and we still don’t have a very intuitive understanding of how some of it works. We’ve just had longer to work on these problems than problems from other disciplines, but that’s a poor metric for “hardness.”
Is it about the steepness of the learning curve? Maybe, because sure, psychology 101 and sociology 101 are more intuitive & easy to grasp than physics 101 – we use normal words that normal people know, & most people in these classes are humans, so they have, you know, experience with these concepts – but when people are making these comparisons, they’re often mentally comparing psych 101 to work at CERN, and that’s…just not a fair comparison. Start imagining all of the working parts you need to pin down from psychology, sociology, public health, education, neuroscience, and biology in order to understand human behavior, & then imagine all of the work in computer science, data science, and statistics you need to learn in order model & test this behavior. There’s a reason I refer to myself as a social scientist rather than anything more specific – studying humans well requires a vast amount of knowledge from a large number of disciplines. Let me know how long you think that’ll take you to master…
Is it about the importance of the problems? I’ve heard physicist revel in the fact that they are investigating the fundamental fabric of our universe. And sure, that’s super awesome!! I love physics findings!! But are you telling me you don’t also care about the health of our planet? Or what’s living in our oceans? Or how to cure diseases? Or how are genes work? Or how to stop crime? Or how to better educate our children? Or how to live a more fulfilling life? Or how to prevent or treat mental illness? Sure, the universe will outlive us, but you have to live on this planet now, and your kids and your grandkids and your great-grandkids have to live on this planet in the future. Are you telling me that investigating problems that may make yours or their lives better is not of comparable interest to you??
What’s left? Perhaps the degree to which you can bullshit through the degree without knowing what you are doing? I might give you this one. In undergrad, you would’ve been hard-pressed to fake your way through our chemistry program, but you might’ve eked by in our psych program and probably could’ve done so in our soc program. But you’re not going to be hired in that field doing that job. The people who call themselves “social scientists” are not those people, not it’s a poor way to categorize disciplines.
So tell me…what exactly is a hard or soft science again?
thank you for thinking of me. When I initially had the Teletubbies-are-toddler-versions-of-a-more-terrifying-adult-cryptid dream, I researched it briefly before talking about it in public, just to make sure that I hadn’t subconsciously picked up on any real-world resonances. This was where I learned that the new Teletubbies reboot features infant Teletubbies. This cemented in my mind that the teletubbies on the show are toddlers, and the Tiddlytubbies or whatever the fuck they’re called are infants.
I also stumbled upon the controversy in the late 90s that made Tinky Winky a national icon.
Tinky Winky presents as male (inasmuch as Teletubbies have gender or perform gender roles). He is always referred to with male pronouns. He is purple, with a triangle-shaped antenna, and carries a shiny red handbag. His name is also mildly funny. Beginning in 1997 there was (apparently) a large controversy that appeared to begin when the LGBT+ community jokingly referred to Tinky Winky as a “gay icon” and “the first queer role model aimed at toddlers.” Hilariously predicting the Babadook discourse to follow in 20 years, I guess.
Right-wing pundits became increasingly convinced that Tinky Winky is Gay. He’s a gay color and has a triangle and a HANDBAG.
And more than that, he was normalizing gayness to babies. The delusion spread and soon in the USA and Poland, there was (apparently) serious Discourse about the Gay Baby Show and the Insidious Agenda of the Gay British. Jerry Falwell, a Twitter troll before Twitter, went on a rampage.
A Polish politician apparently declared that she was going to “scientifically prove” that Tinky Winky was gay and harmful, although she wasn’t able to come to a conclusion in the end.
Eventually one of the BBC producers said:
“Tinky Winky is simply a sweet, technological baby with a magic bag.“
Regardless, Tinky Winky was declared a National Icon, “More so,” people said, “than Ellen DeGeneres,” and he was even used as a symbol of gay culture. He was apparently something of a meme.
So that’s why Tinky Winky was considered a National Icon, and appears on lists of influential celebrities.
More importantly, twenty years ago, everyone missed the clue that would have unlocked the mystical knowledge of Adult Teletubbies for themselves.
the BBC themselves said “Tinky Winky is… [a] baby.”
The take-home message here is that the BBC went on record and declared that the Teletubbies are babies. And having added the Tiddlytubbies to the show, in the canonical knowledge that the Teletubbies themselves are juveniles, they are basically saying that the Adults Are Out There Somewhere.
This is hilarious but I’d like to add the gay thing isn’t an exaggeration, I was a child in New Zealand and my mum told me a story of her friend (who had a son and daughter I was friends with) who voiced her concern that her son might turn out to be gay because Tinky Winky was his favourite teletubby and he had a handbag.
I distinctly remember being about 7ish years old (i was at the grocery store dressed up as a lion for no apparent reason, so i guess 7 sounds about right) and seeing on one of the newspapers out front that he was gay. i asked my mom (i was too old for teletubbies but my sister liked it) and she got flaming mad and went on a rant about how ‘who gives a shit if hes a f*g, its for fucking babies, they dont fuckign know that triangles and purses are queer!’ )
I’ve heard a lot of advocates of inclusion say things like “kids with disabilities work twice as hard as everyone else” or “my employees with Down’s syndrome never come in late or take a day off.”
This sounds like praise, but it isn’t.
The time disabled people spend working twice as hard as everyone else has to come from somewhere.
There are reasons why kids aren’t in school every waking moment. There is a reason why vacation time exists and why it’s normal to be late occasionally.
People need rest. People need leisure time. People have lives and needs and can’t do everything.
Being disabled doesn’t erase the need for down time. Being disabled doesn’t erase the need for play, or for connections to other people.
Working twice as hard as everyone else all the time isn’t sustainable. Praising disabled people for doing unsustainable things is profoundly destructive.
People with disabilities should not have to give up on rest, recreation, and relationships in order to be valued. We have limited time and energy just like everyone else, and our limitations need to be respected.
It is not right to expect us to run ourselves into the ground pretending to be normal. We have the right to exist in the world as we really are.
tl:dr – If I doesn’t has time to rest I will have meltdowns that could have been avoided.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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