Going through the pile of books to go to charity shops and there’s this amazing kids history one that’s literally like
Give your friend a neolithic burial
Exactly
I’m so glad this post is finally reaching the people it was meant for; weird little kids who liked playing history and death
The book also had instructions for making a paper replica of a mammoth bone/hide hut 🦣 🛖 and I was never allowed to take over the living room and do it
Reblog to give your mutuals a neolithic burial 🦴🌼⚱️🗡️
this is like that
Husband: Hey, what's up? Is it important? I'm in a meeting--
Me: There are just so many salmon today. The bears are going to have so much to eat!
Husband: That's great. I'll call you back--
Me: And a lot of the bears are still asleep right now, so most of the salmon are making it up over the falls. They'll create the next generation of salmon, and that will continue this beautiful cycle.
Husband: Yes, I'm very happy for you. And them.
Me: When there are THIS many salmon, the Big Boys only take a few bites out of each fish before catching a new one. The small moms and their cubs and the subadults and even the birds can all eat the scraps! And you know how worried I was about that one really skinny mom with the two tiny babies!
Husband (to his coworkers): Sorry, just a minute--my wife needed to share some, uh, news.
Coworkers (now convinced I'm either pregnant or maybe NASA's newest astronaut): 👀
Anyway, watch the feast on the livestream.
Mom and cub sharing some salmon!
And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/
at their communal tables, spartans ate nutritious but bland food, sometimes described as soup or gruel. asimov relates there was a contemporary greek joke, of course spartans don’t fear death, if all you have to look forward to is gruel every day, death seems preferable.
i posted similar thoughts on livejournal back in the day, i watched 300 and laughed out loud in the theater.
I think it’s only fair that two thousand years of idolising the Spartans is followed by two thousand years of roasting them to heck.
This.
Husband: Hey, what’s up? Is it important? I’m in a meeting–
Me: There are just so many salmon today. The bears are going to have so much to eat!
Husband: That’s great. I’ll call you back–
Me: And a lot of the bears are still asleep right now, so most of the salmon are making it up over the falls. They’ll create the next generation of salmon, and that will continue this beautiful cycle.
Husband: Yes, I’m very happy for you. And them.
Me: When there are THIS many salmon, the Big Boys only take a few bites out of each fish before catching a new one. The small moms and their cubs and the subadults and even the birds can all eat the scraps! And you know how worried I was about that one really skinny mom with the two tiny babies!
Husband (to his coworkers): Sorry, just a minute–my wife needed to share some, uh, news.
Coworkers (now convinced I’m either pregnant or maybe NASA’s newest astronaut): 👀
Anyway, watch the feast on the livestream.
Just found out my facebook birding group is public because my cousin (a lawyer who is not into birds) casually said to me “saw you couldn’t identify a willet the other day… pretty embarrassing”
cannot believe this post breached containment and now I am being repeatedly assassinated in the notes for my humiliating failure at shorebird identification 😭
I'm unspeakably grateful that every summer, I can sit in my living room and count each individual claw of a bear as it settles down for a nap 4,000 miles away.
I'm awestruck when I take a sip of my morning coffee while watching a baby elephant pester his aunts as they stop for a drink in South Africa.
In spring, I shout for my husband to run to the living room because "The whales are jumping!" and "The eaglet is about to poop!" and does he know that we are witnessing REAL nature happening RIGHT NOW?
When I stay up late reading in the winter, the northern lights keep me company.
My television is a window to these remote and wonderful sights, and--in a twist he would probably be horrified by--YouTube allows me to become Emerson's transparent eyeball.
So many bears fishing tonight!
Tumblr, please believe me when I tell you that whatever you are doing can be improved by putting some bears on in the background.
Just SO MANY BEARS. And look at these tiny cubs!
I'm unspeakably grateful that every summer, I can sit in my living room and count each individual claw of a bear as it settles down for a nap 4,000 miles away.
I'm awestruck when I take a sip of my morning coffee while watching a baby elephant pester his aunts as they stop for a drink in South Africa.
In spring, I shout for my husband to run to the living room because "The whales are jumping!" and "The eaglet is about to poop!" and does he know that we are witnessing REAL nature happening RIGHT NOW?
When I stay up late reading in the winter, the northern lights keep me company.
My television is a window to these remote and wonderful sights, and--in a twist he would probably be horrified by--YouTube allows me to become Emerson's transparent eyeball.
So many bears fishing tonight!
Tumblr, please believe me when I tell you that whatever you are doing can be improved by putting some bears on in the background.
