Truthfully... no. It’s more that humans perceive x-color to act like y and approach the animal from the beginning expecting and even encouraging y.

Torties/calicos are extremely beautiful, and people tolerate behaviours from beautiful animals they wouldn’t from more common ones. This is why torties/calicos have a reputation for ‘tortitude’- behaviour that would be corrected or trained out of a brown tabby is allowed to continue because “lol, calicos are always spicy”.

People expect the orange boys in particular to be extremely sweet and calm... so they approach calmer and encourage calmer behaviour. Does this mean it always results in a calm animal? no. But you’re more likely to get one that is calm if calm behaviour is what is rewarded.

My Sundew has his hyper moments, but he’s mostly calm and sweet. This is not because he’s orange. This is because, and keep in mind I love this cat with all my heart, he is incredibly stupid. He’s also not dumb due to being orange. He just happened to fit into a stereotype and bright orange is more memorable than brown tabby or all black.

Glynn Lunney (1936-2021) portrayed by Jackson Pace in The Right Stuff (2020).

5 - fave moment(s) of crew banter

Besides everything Gus ever said (that witty bastard), probably the time Frank Borman was about to lose his mind telling Jim and Bill to go to bed on Apollo 8

17 - the right stuff (cursed) does not exist. cast a movie abt the mercury 7.

That’s a tough question. Certainly repairing the face of Marcus the cat would be way up there. That story certainly has a happy ending. It was a challenging problem solving exercise that I had to manage as a new graduate, without support of nearby specialists.

In recent years, most of the cases that I’ve been really proud of have been Addison’s Disease cases. Partly this is because I’ve noticed, diagnosed and treated them effectively on my own, but also because I still remember a mentor through vet school insisting it was the most commonly misdiagnosed condition in veterinary medicine. It’s uncommon, but very rewarding to get right.

And I did once submit a case report for a very, very complicated Cushing’s Syndrome patient, which won an award. Specifically, her case won an award for ‘most concurrent conditions’ because in addition to her Cushing’s Syndrome she also had allergies treated with vaccines, bilateral cataracts, diabetes melitus, UTI, cruciate ligament tears and eventually seizures.

Ha, so, this is maybe not entirely the way this was meant to go, but it's the way my brain took it.

--

Aliens, Nick Fury thought. Aliens in a Missouri farm town. Yeah, right.

Still, he'd already seen things in the ten years since Pierce and Director Carter recruited him for SHIELD ... things that had shaken his entire worldview and upended his certainties about the world.

This it wouldn't even be the first UFO sighting he'd had to investigate.

It was, however, the first time he'd found multiple witnesses who had seen more or less the same thing: an aerial dogfight between two bright, strangely shaped objects, followed by at least one of them crash-landing in the cornfields out beyond the town limits. It hadn't been too hard to find the spot. The trees were torn up, corn stubble scorched and blackened. Something had crashed here, something damn big.

And it wasn't here now.

Which, Nick thought, was fucking weird. He stood back and surveyed the field as his team cordoned the area off, took photos, and dug up soil samples to be sealed into bags and analyzed back at the SHIELD labs. It would've taken a helicopter or a fighter jet to do that much damage to the trees, and nothing that'd crashed hard enough to set the field on fire could have just flown away.

And yet, something had.

"Did we get the name of the owners yet?" he asked Agent Radshaw, who had just turned up from a quick trip to check in on the satphone with HQ.

She checked a clipboard. "Quill. Gregory Quill. It looks like he owns a big chunk of farmland in the area. Quill and his daughter live right on the other side of those trees."

"Now, I'm not a farm kid myself, to say the least," Nick remarked, looking back at the fields and the charred swath through the trees. "But I'm thinking, something like this happens on your back forty, you'd notice. Don't you think?"

"Yes, sir," Radshaw agreed.

"And I don't know much more about small towns than I do about farming, but here's one thing I do know. Everyone's damn curious about anybody new. We saw that when we were interviewing the locals back in town. But you know what, I didn't see any sign of anyone coming over from that farm to see what we're doing on their property. You see anything like that?"

Radshaw shook her head.

Not really because we are limited intake. We do take rodents and lagomorphs and I’m one of the go-to techs for dealing with those because a- I’m not afraid of them and b- I have *some* knowledge of normal and know how to check teeth and can correctly distinguish between ‘respiratory distress’ and ‘extremely nervous rabbit’.

Ah, tbh Guenter had slipped my mind! I guess my feelings are similar to how I feel about von Braun... so, not great. I think there is a pretty big difference though, in terms of their legacies?

One of the things I’ve been looking for in my research is how people (Jews, NASA coworkers, WWII vets, etc.) felt about former Nazis in the U.S. Among a pretty wide variety of reactions, one that I found particularly interesting was that of Yves Béon, a survivor of Dora (where von Braun built his V-2s). What bothered him was not the fact that former Nazis were working in America -- but the fact that they were celebrated, rewarded, decorated, hailed as heroes.

I remember that movie, it’s entertaining if nothing else. :D

I’ve seen it before! It is totally entertaining, which is why I am watching it again. Plus it’s nice to have the French rattling around in my head. If someone has more 18th century period pieces they want to recommend, I am all ears. Poldark just came in for me at the library.