The comic quite rightly does not mention size, which is absolutely variable by region and can be very hard to tell from a distance, (though my usual mnemonic is “if you ask if it’s a raven, it’s a crow, if you ask if it’s a small plane, it’s a raven.”)
Also, the size thing only works on the Common Raven! You go south and get a Chihuahuan Raven in the mix and it’s big, but not THAT big, and you end up going “fuck, crow or raven, can I get it to hold a banana for scale?”
And we had a huge problem—or rather, I had a huge problem, as the primary birder—in China because the Thick-Billed Crow has (surprise) a very thick bill and is only a smidge smaller than a Common Raven (23” vs 25”) and we were in an area of range overlap.
You kinda had to do it by proportions on the head. “Does this look like a freakishly undersized head for that beak? Thick-Billed Crow!”
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WHO WANTS TO HEAR THE SAGA OF ME ATTEMPTING TO ARRANGE A REAL ESTATE TRANSACTION DURING AN PANDEMIC?
Of course you do. Buckle up.
So my mom is getting up there in years and will eventually want to move to be closer to me. She was thinking that she’d like to move sometime after my kid brother finishes college.
Great, we can do that. I contact my local real estate agent and am like “we have a couple years, this is NOT urgent, this is what I’m looking for, if something happens to cross your desk, let me know.”
It’s gonna sound weird, but what really brought this home to me was hatching chicks from eggs. Chickens externalize everything, and lots of eggs just don’t hatch at all, or get far enough along that it looks like something’s happening, but it stops.
And a fair number of chicks get as far as hatching, then keel over because something is wrong internally. You really see the numbers game in action when there’s eighteen or twenty eggs from under the hen and you get maybe six that survive.
But since women obviously aren’t hens, every chance is emotionally fraught, and hardly anybody is thinking “an embryo developing is an enormously complicated system with all kinds of room for glitches,” because that’s just not how most of us think!
And also screws with the rat sperm quality. Although rams apparently have no problems, even at double the dose.
The moral of this story may be that unless you’re a sheep, ivermectin appears to be hard on sperm.
Mind you, the first study assumes normal human treatment doses. Chow down on ivermectin three times a week and your semen may soon resemble the Dead Sea…salty, lifeless, and shrinking fast.
So there I was in the Target feminine hygiene aisle, shopping for the usual suspects, when I see something in Aggressively Eco-Friendly-Looking packaging.
I like eco-friendly things, I think. I examine this product.
It is a pad that claims to be infused with essential herbs.
Now, it was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea, when I was young and my mother gave me the talk, which involved, among other things, “Do not put scented stuff on your nethers, you’ll probably get a rash.”
This advice has served me well in life.
Deeply puzzled, I examine this product more closely, and discover that it is, in fact, infused with herbal essential oils, namely lavender, rose and…mint?
Incidentally, according to the Mayo Clinic, the human dose for a 200lb individual to get rid of roundworms is 18mg or so. ONCE. (That’s what I took that one time.)
For river blindness, it’s less, and may be repeated in 3-12 months.
I shudder to think what daily is doing.
*idly looks it up* Persists in the intestines for up to twelve days. Hmm, so if you’re taking 6mg 3x a week, you’re maintaining around a 36mg dose in your intestines, which is twice the recommended amount for a human to take once.
So yesterday I was in this thread chatting about ADHD and the problem of writing drafts because writing drafts has never been a thing I understood at all and would usually fake during high school, and then it struck me like a bolt from the blue why drafts existed.
It was because people wrote longhand, or on typewriters. You had to do a second draft because when you thought of the clever thing you should put over there, you had to rewrite the whole goddamn thing from scratch.
Now, you are probably thinking "Thanks, Captain Obvious," but let me point out that I learned to type on a Commodore 64, lo these many, many ages of the earth ago, at the age of about seven. And I hated writing longhand.