Katie Mahoney

***SPOILERS*** 

She came from a family with a history of teen pregnancies but she was the exception to the rule. As her senior project she wanted to see how things would change for her if she “succumbed” to what was expected of her by society and statistics. basically she told her bf for his permission and one or two school officials (I think her sister or mother as well but I read it soo long ago).

2013 World Taxidermy Championships

If you are in Springfield, Illinois right now, count me incredibly jealous: the 2013 World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships started yesterday and run through the weekend. The WTC is the olympic equivalent of competitive animal preparation, and the event offers the sculptors and artists the opportunity to showcase their work, view advancements in taxidermy technology, and appreciate one another’s efforts over the last year.  There are competitions for every division from Youth and Novice, to achievements in Freeze-Drying, and - of course - the Master Division, where the winner is awarded a $4,000 prize, some amazing live-mount eyes by Karl Lange and Tohickon (like the Rolls-Royce of glass-blown, hand-crafted eyes), and the honor of knowing you created the most beautiful taxidermy mount in the world. 

There’s also the honorable Carl Akeley award granted to the sculptor who can best exhibit that, indeed, wildlife taxidermy is a valid form of art, and the practice is still alive and well today. 

About the images:

Lowell Shapley keel-billed toucan won the Carl E. Akeley Award in 2011.

Ken Walker’s panda was awarded Best in Show in the Recreations category - the ‘panda’ is actually comprised of the dyed skins of multiple American black bear specimens, seeing as how giant pandas are protected. 

Dennis Harris - “Air Zebra” Lion and zebra won Best in World at the 2009 WTC.  The lioness is only supported in one area, where her tail touches the arm of the zebra.  If that isn’t an incredible feat in animal engineering, I don’t know what is. 

And Gaston is NOT a woman-driven fantasy. Gaston is a male wish fulfillment fantasy. Gaston is not what women want, he is what men want to be. He is hyper-masculinity to an extreme degree, dripping with sexism and testosterone. The fact that men think that Gaston is what women want says an awful lot about those men. 

While I don’t want to generalize, female fans tend to prefer a very different kind of male hero. We like the Rogers, the Milos, the Hercules. Genuinely kind, often awkward men who are sometimes vulnerable and respectful to women. 

Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -

And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”

And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.

Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.

The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.

I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.

I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.

I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.

And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.    

Felice never played a trick on me again.

Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed. 

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

They actually tested me for a learning disability in high school because I was consistently failing math.

They discovered that I actually scored in the 80th percentile in that sort of learning.

Problem was, in every other subject, I was in the 99.8th percentile.

I had never learned how to study because I never needed to—and then, when something proved to be even the slightest bit challenging, my brain went

“LOL nope this is impossible abort”

Meanwhile, this entire time I’m scraping by in subjects like English. The assignments I did turn in, I’d score top marks—but I’d avoid turning in projects I didn’t think were “good” enough.

Essentially, my brain had two settings: “100%” or “0%”.