An hour before daylight the General of the brigade visited my piquet; it was a hazy morning, and daylight broke slowly; a fog hung in the dells and over the undulating ground in our front; there was an upright rock at some little distance in advance of the piquet, which looked, in the uncertain light, like a French vedette with his long drab cloak; the General fell into this mistake, and thinking the presumed vedette had advanced too near, ordered me to fire. Knowing thoroughly the ground in my front, I ventured to assure him of his error, at which insinuation he was pleased to be angry and peremptorily ordered me to obey. Of course my compliance was immediate [….]. At this moment Lord Wellington rode up; he asked what had occasioned the firing; the brigadier had an awkward excuse to make, and to avow his incorrectness of vision; Lord Wellington, turning sharply round, asked him how old he was; the brigadier replied, ‘Forty-four.’ ‘Ah!’ said Lord Wellington, ‘you will be a great soldier by the time you are as old as I am.’ The future Duke at that time was only forty-one.

Send for the Doctor, a fellow’s been severely burnt…

Sir John Cowell-Stepney, Leaves from the Diary of an Officer of the Guards (London, 1854), p. 27-28.

(via ladycashasatiger)

Source: ladycashasatiger

I grew up with a husky-lab mix who had a luxuriant floofy undercoat and a pretty much waterproof topcoat, with a big fluffy tail to cover her one vulnerable spot (nose) when sleeping, so having a dog who is not essentially impervious to the elements is still weird for me. My poor little single-coated southern belle doesn’t enjoy this whole ‘winter’ thing nearly as much as I do.

Tree-dwelling gray foxes decorate with skeletons

typhlonectes:

A professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, Alexander Badyaev
also happens to be an award-winning nature photographer.

Inspired by
both passions, perhaps, his curiosity was piqued by the fawn and rabbit
skeletons he would often find perched on the branches of ironwood trees
outside his home in the desert near Tucson, Arizona. “Once I discovered
that these trees are social centers of gray fox activity, I got hooked
on observing these animals and learning their biology,” he says.

As explained in the California Academy of Sciences’ magazine, bioGraphic,
the curious species first evolved more than seven million years ago in
the lush tropical forests that once enveloped the area that is now the
American Southwest. “Since that time,” notes bioGraphic, “this
anatomically distinct fox has accumulated an impressive array of
un-fox-like adaptations for life in the canopy, including primate-like
flexible wrists and cat-like paws with long, curved claws that allow it
to grip tree branches…”

Tree-dwelling gray foxes decorate with skeletons

goddamnshinyrock:

So my mother apparently was doing some attic organizing and found one of my very early (like, kindergarten) attempts at fiction, whish she of course transcribed and emailed to me. It features my imaginary species (for which I had like. imaginary sub-species and habitats and everything. children of scientists are frequently a little weird) and a lot of violence and surrealism, so I though tumblr might appreciate it:

Tree Rabbits Nation by Mica

Once upon a time there was a tree rabbit
who was fierce.

One day, the tree rabbit was guarding his owners’ house
because other tree rabbits were roaming the country and
slaying people.

He was lying in the sun and looking out at the grey mist world
He came out of his den and went “psitt” “psitt “and spit some poison
the owner said
"why don’t you calm down and sit?”

And the rabbit sat
Then it stood and went “psit”“ psit” some more and spit some poison
because there was danger comes near

The owner said “Stop that, there is no danger near”
And they looked out the window and there was a venomous and fire breathing
tree rabbit looking in the window at them
The tree rabbit on guard stood up and went “psit ”“psit” and spit venom at the intruder
who went dead.

The end

…I think it really says a lot about five-year-old me that my imaginary friends were actually a whole species of imaginary creatures that I imagined domesticating and then killing each other. Apparently there were also illustrations. 

I saw a post floating around with a lot of non-americans expressing astonishment over how easy it is to do shit with guns in this country, and it made me remember the time my mother accidentally smuggled an unlicensed shotgun across state borders. She found it after my grandfather’s death, in the attic of his house, and, not knowing how to dispose of it during house-clearing-out chaos, took it back home to be dealt with later. It eventually occurred to her that this was, just maybe, a little unwise, so she called whatever office is responsible for that shit in Massachusetts and was like ‘so my dad died and I found this gun when I was cleaning out the house in Maine, what do I do?’

and the woman was like ‘wait you didn’t already bring it home with you, right? Because it’s Very Illegal to transport an unlicensed gun across state borders.’

my mother: ’……um.’

I’m like… 75% sure she got it all legally fixed and got rid of the gun but there is also a 25% chance that my mother, who hates confrontation, just hung up and then went and hid the gun in her attic, and someday I’m going to be cleaning out my parents’ house and have the exact same goddamn problem