A Glowstick About To Snap

He was aware enough of this to get off on trolling the class, though.  Whenever some force diagram in a homework assignment needed to be weightless, instead of being some generic spacecraft it would be “Mir” specifically.  And he’d always use ‘cosmonaut’ instead of ‘astronaut’, that kind of thing.

One day about halfway through the semester, he’s doing this with in-class examples on the board, and one of the students finally gets up the guts to troll back a little.  So this kid shouts from the back of the auditorium, “Hey professor, what’s the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?”

These horses went extinct in the wild 60 years ago! They were reintroduced in other parts of Mongolia and Central Asia earlier than they were reintroduced on the Steppes, but having them back here has been generational conservation work. It's truly amazing.

These horses and other kinds of horses are probably different branches of evolution, which is CRAZY AWESOME. Modern horse breeds trace back to one branch, and these dudes evolved separately. They have 33 chromosome pairs whereas the horse you're used to seeing in movies and TV shows (or riding if you too are a horse girl - gender neutral title of expertise) have 32.

Despite this, you can interbreed these two species and they will have fertile offspring. That's really rare! (A common equine cross between species, the mule, is an always-sterile offspring of a donkey and a horse, for instance).

I did have to look the exact numbers up here, full disclosure, but it's believed that Przewalski's horses and other breeds have a common ancestor about between 160,000 and 38,000 years ago

The horses you see on cave art? These guys!

It's likely that Attila the Hun and his armies rode these horses (though hard to prove decisively)

Part of the conservation efforts around them involved CLONING to avoid a genetic bottleneck. ISN'T THAT DOPE. You can read more about that here

These are the only truly wild horses. All other "wild" horses -- Australian brumbies and American mustangs, for instance -- are feral descendants of domesticated horses, which is partly why you can see such a wide range of heights, colors, conformations, etc in those populations.

or the concept of a pride flag is considered to be inappropriate for 13 year olds.

happy pride 2026. here's a pride flag for when corporate interests of a site run by dogshit transphobes, handwringing pearlclutchers, and "powerless" "allies" tell you that pride and your gender is no one else's fucking business:

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.