Ivy

My friend, are you in for a treat! The lake sturgeon, which is the sturgeon found in the Great Lakes, can grow to be two meters long and weigh 90 kilograms! It is the biggest fish found in the Great Lakes!!

But, see, the lake sturgeon isn’t the biggest sturgeon species. That would be the beluga sturgeon, which regularly grew to be four to six meters long before overfishing took a toll on their populations. Belugas are a lot younger on average nowadays — these fish can live to be over 100 years old — and seldom exceed three meters, but I mean, even that isn’t anything to scoff at. The very biggest beluga sturgeon ever caught was a jawdropping 7.2 meters long, and weighed 1 571 kilograms!! Other beluga sturgeons of such sizes have been caught too, and some unverified sources say that there has even been belugas that exceed 10 meters! They are the biggest freshwater fish in the world, and are up there among the biggest bony fishes in the world. That’s so big, it’s hard to even grasp or imagine. Seeing pictures of sturgeons puts it in a better perspective, I think. Here is a 800 kilogram sturgeon, a bit more than half of what the biggest sturgeon weighed:

Like, look at that. You see this?? That’s so fucking insane!!! Sturgeons never cease to amaze me with how… impossible they seem. These fish are like aquatic dragons or prehistoric beasts from days long gone, and in a way they are the latter! Sturgeons have been around as a group for over 160 million years, so they did indeed live in the age of the dinosaurs. Whenever I see pictures like this I can only wonder what the humans who first saw big sturgeons must’ve thought. I know what sturgeons are but I still have trouble grasping their gargantuan sizes, imagine seeing the dark form of a giant in the water and not having the faintest idea of what it is, or even that it's entirely harmless to humans.

Other sturgeon species are also very really big! The lesser-known kaluga isn’t that far behind at a maximum length of 5.6 meters and maximum weight of about a ton. Several white sturgeon that have exceeded three meters and even just shy of four meters and weighed over 400 kilograms have been caught, and the biggest, but unverified white sturgeon even caught was around six meters long and weighed 900 kilograms. The critically endangered Chinese sturgeon maxes out around five meters and 600 kilograms. All this to say, these old fishes are massive!!!

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!

lemonbo_y - fish market + happy new year!! 𓆝 ⋆.𖦹°‧🫧

So far so normal, right? But then:

Like what. And then:

GIRLS THAT'S FUCKING TERRIFYING,, PLEASE FACTORY RESET YOUR PHONES GET NEW ONES IF YOU HAVE TO GET AN INDEPENDENT SIM card WHAT IS HAPPENING

I'M BEGGING YOU

What's the worst that can happen if you do it anyway? Genuinely. The literal worst. Catastrophise about it with me for a sec.

Will your mum yell at you? You're an adult. Yelling at fellow adults is Not Okay Actually. (Yelling at kids is also not okay but let's take this one step at a time.) If your mum is yelling at you, a fellow adult, she's the one being weird and out of line. You asked your friend and they said so too (me. I'm the friend.)

Will she cut off your phone plan? That would be a problem. Can you look into whether you can afford to switch to a new plan she doesn't have access to? Most phone companies will let you port your number over pretty easily.

Will she cut you off financially? Run the numbers again. Can you afford for that to happen? If the answer is no, that's okay, I believe you and I know you're making the best decision for your own well-being that you can in the moment. If there's anything you can do to make it more affordable, I do suggest doing that, though.

Will she be physically violent, inclusive of breaking stuff that belongs to you? That’s assault. That's a crime. It's not okay for her to do that and she almost certainly knows it.

Will she stop talking to you? Honestly I gotta say at this point that's not sounding like a bad outcome. It sucks. It really really sucks and I'm sorry if that's a choice you're having to make, but take it from someone who's been there and done that: when someone who is being abusive to you (stalking is abuse! Yelling at you is abuse! Threatening to cut off your funds if you don't do what they want forever is abuse! Breaking your stuff or physically hurting you is abuse!) decides of their own volition to cut you off, it hurts for a hot minute, and then you suddenly realise that you can breathe, and it feels so. Goddamn. Amazing.

Delete the tracking application. Live where you want to live. Change your name. Join or leave the religion. Get the piercing or the tattoo or the surgery. Live your life, because it's yours and not your parents'.