mini plants and mega nerds

An elderly British man with an accent - you can picture exactly what he looks like and what he is wearing, somehow, and you know that he will explain the important concept of Yorkshire to you at length if you make eye contact - is saying “And w’ four snickets t’ wicket, Umbleby dives under the covers and romps home for a sticky bicket.”

There is a deep and satisfied silence. Weather happens over the radio. This lasts for three minutes.

A gentle young gentleman with an Indian accent, whose perfect and beautiful clear voice makes him sound like a poet sipping from a cup of honeyed drink always, says mildly “Of course we cannot forget that when Pakistan last had the biscuit under the covers, they were thrown out of bed. In 1957, I believe.”

You mouth “what the fucking fuck.”

A morally ambiguous villain from a superhero movie says off-microphone, “Crumbs everywhere.”

Apparently continuing a previous conversation, the villain asks, “Do seagulls eat tacos?”

“I’m sure someone will tell us eventually,” the poet says. His voice is so beautiful that it should be familiar; he should be the only announcer on the radio, the only reader of audiobooks.

The villain says with sudden interest, “Oh, a leg over straight and under the covers, Peterson and Singh are rumping along with a straight fine leg and good pumping action. Thanks to his powerful thighs, Peterson is an excellent legspinner, apart from being rude on Twitter.”

The man from Yorkshire roars potently, like a bull seeing another bull. There might be words in his roar, but otherwise it is primal and sizzling.

“That isn’t straight,” the poet says. “It’s silly.”

“What the fucking fuck,” you say out loud at this point.

“Shh,” says the person who likes cricket. They listen, tensely. Something in the distance makes a very small “thwack,” like a baby dropping an egg.

“Was that a doosra or a googly?” the villain asks.

“IT’S A WRONG ‘UN,” roars the Yorkshireman in his wrath. A powerful insult has been offered. They begin to scuffle.

“With that double doozy, Crumpet is baffled for three turns, Agarwal is deep in the biscuit tin and Padgett has gone to the shops undercover,” the poet says quickly, to cover the action while his companions are busy. The villain is being throttled, in a friendly companionable way.

An intern apparently brings a message scrawled on a scrap of paper like a courier sprinting across a battlefield. “Reddy has rolled a nat 20,” the poet says with barely contained excitement. “Australia is both a continent and an island. But we’re running out of time!”

“Is that true?” You ask suddenly.

“Shh!” Says the person who likes cricket. “It’s a test match.”

“About Australia.”

“We won’t know THAT until the third DAY.”

A distant “pock” noise. The sound of thirty people saying “tsk,” sorrowfully.

“And the baby’s dropped the egg. Four legs over or we’re done for, as long as it doesn’t rain.”

The villain might be dead? You begin to find yourself emotionally invested.

There are mild distant cheers. “Oh, and with twelve sticky wickets t’ over and t’ seagull’s exploded,” the man from the North says as if all of his dreams have come true. “What a beautiful day.” Your person who likes cricket relaxes. It is tea break.

The villain, apparently alive, describes the best hat in the audience as “like a funnel made of dove-colored net, but backwards, with flies trapped in it.”

This is every bit as good as that time in Australia in 1975, they all agree, drinking their tea and eating home-made cakes sent in by the fans. The poet comments favorably on the icing and sugar-preserved violets. The Yorkshire man discourses on the nature of sponge. The villain clatters his cup too hard on his saucer. To cover his embarrassment, the poet begins scrolling through Twitter on his phone, reading aloud the best memes in his enchanting milky voice. Then, with joy, he reads an @ from an ornithologist at the University of Reading: seagulls do eat tacos! A reference is cited; the poet reads it aloud. Everyone cheers.

You are honestly - against your will - kind of into it! but also: weirdly enraged.

“Was that … it?” you ask, deeming it safe to interrupt.

“No,” says the person who likes cricket, “This is second tea break on the first day. We won’t know where we really are until lunch tomorrow.”

After spending a day fucking around, from what I absorbed grudgingly, New Zealand was winning, until a sort of slow-motion trainwreck of improbable miracles performed by England.

So the effect was of the usual gibberish for about 8 hours, and then, at the very end, suddenly, without explanation, the crowd began singing “We Will Rock You” in freaky menacing unison, which is what happens when England does???? something?????? 

And I was like: “but quoi the fuck? you guys have been LOSING all DAY” and the commentators began to just go “ASLKJASHJSALHDKJHF” at top speed, and Dr Glass goes, worshipfully, “I don’t even know what’s happening!”

During this, several people went on strike and hid in cow corner.

and then, a commentator said, without irony, in the tones of a man defying all the gods in the pantheon, clutching his belief to his heart like the armor of righteousness: “I defy anyone to tell me that cricket is boring after THIS.”

SIR.

SIR, I HAVE A DELIVERY OF DEFIANCE FOR YOU.

IT IS ACTUALLY JUST A GIANT EMPTY PVC TUBE THAT I DELIVER OVER YOUR HEAD.

YOU ARE TRAPPED, NOW, SIR.

STAY IN THE TUBE OF DEFIANCE.

YOU ARE DEFIED.

SIGN HERE.

So it was suddenly a tie, because somebody had thrown a ball at an England player, who was looking the other way at the time (because, like, obviously it would be ridiculous to be expecting somebody to throw a ball in your general direction at a ball game! especially when you are hiding in cow corner, that’s illegal)

and it bounced off his bat, which counts as him hitting it, and got on a bus bound for Cardiff, to join the Extinction Rebellion blockade, which scores 200 points obviously, plus an extra 17.5 points for demonstrating social responsibility! which meant that England was suddenly tied with New Zealand and the game was over. BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE A TIE FOR THE WORLD CUP, obviously, you can have it for all of the others but not THE WORLD CUP! so they played another game and had another tie, and when that happens, the oldest player on the field calls their dad and has him count up all the technicalities, and so England won on a technicality. 

This decision-making process, on the radio, has all the gripping drama of a bunch of men standing around a burst water pipe - you know, how you have the one guy wearing a hard hat down in the hole, staring sadly at the burst water pipe and maybe patting it with a shovel, and five other men in various jazzy costumes all staring at him soberly and commenting on it, and another man to drive the truck? And they all discuss it, at about 0.25 of regular human speed, until 4:46 pm, when they eventually reach a consensus of maybe doing something about it, after they see what the Boss says. And meanwhile in this scenario there is a crowd standing respectfully on the sidelines, just absolutely roaring for blood and doing stomp-CLAP-stomp-stomp-CLAP, just completely fuckin’ ravenous about the methodology being deployed here. That was the process of winning the game. 

And the reaction, which everyone must suffer through today, if they are trapped on these islands with these people, includes stuff like this BBC coverage:

You couldn’t write it, because it was a plotline too twisted to make dramatic sense, too confusing, too remote from what has gone before.

We’re OK with spaceships and child wizards because they have been imagined before. Plenty had dreamed of England winning the World Cup. That’s where logic waved farewell.

And - not to criticize the BBC for being unimaginative - this is where you gotta sit them gently down, and tell them - because nobody else will! - that logic waved farewell to you guys a long time ago. 

dave: hey guys whats up

rose: *Forty bats coalescing into an approximate human form, holding a Gatorade.* 

rose: Not much, how about you?

jade: *five wolves make their presence known with a piercing howl before joining in the circle. they clutter together and take the form of a human with an iced coffee* 

jade: sup!

john: /emerges from the back exit of dairy queen to take out the garbage

@fantrollcharity i’ve been wanting to do a fake friendsim screenshot drawing for some time and decided to try with this boy since he’s still missing entries :v

(if you can, please consider participating to this blog since it has been pretty dead for months now!)

background from here + transparent versions under the cut

Slugwow!

Verkau Affare for @fantrollcharity

I feel like my fellow Americans might not realise how much of a Thing™ Christmas is here in the UK. You think America is Christmas-saturated? Nah, son. America has the overwhelming commercialism and the annual FOX news handwringing, but it has nothing on the UK when it comes to Christmas being a culturally embedded institution. You think the yearly Rudolph airing, manger scenes, and Christmas lights are a lot? You have seen nothing.

And I say that as an American who used to think the exact same thing here.

The Brits are so into Christmas that they associate it with Britishness itself. I’m not even talking on a political FOX news talking points level, but on a deeply engrained 1500+ years of cultural saturation level. There is no distinguishing between the two. If you’re British, you drink tea, you eat curry, you go down the pub, and you eat mince pies at Crimbo.

Thing is, it’s also extremely decontextualised from religion here. And I don’t mean in the plastic merchandising way we do in America, I mean that the religious meaning has been almost totally replaced with cultural meaning. It’s much rarer here to hear conservative people insisting that “Jesus is the reason for the season.”

Anyway case in point, here is a picture of my VERY diverse, VERY secular university’s library that I just took:

It looks like this all over campus. I’m not even kidding. Not a manger or cross in sight, but Christmas still permeates the entire place, because this is Great Britain and you will pry Christmas from the Brits’ cold dead hands. And yet it’s still a diverse place. I can hear at least three different languages being spoken right now, one of them non European. The woman behind the desk in the photo I just took (you can’t see her at that angle) is an East Asian Muslim. She’s worked there as long as I’ve gone here. My school is utterly committed to diversity and makes a point of its international and interfaith presence.

And yet…it’s still the UK, so as soon as December rolls around the decor starts going up.

Anyway all my rambling is to say that it quite simply would not have occurred to JKR that Christmas being celebrated in Hogwarts might come off as strange, or even seen as antithetical to Hogwarts itself as a school of witchcraft and wizardry. For the majority of her early readers, before it went international, this likely also went totally unquestioned. They are British, and in Britain, and therefore they celebrate Christmas. Not to do so would’ve been considered absolutely bizarre, if not out of the question.

This is, in fact, what makes Scrooge’s refusal to celebrate Christmas so shocking in A Christmas Carol, and why his hatred of Christmas is so closely associated with his antisocial behaviour. He is not merely refusing to participate in a holiday, but he is refusing to participate in society itself. That’s how Victorian Brits would’ve read that story, and I dare say that it’s probably how a lot of Brits still subconsciously read it today. For Christmas to go uncelebrated in a British book for British children about British children (and set in Great Britain) would simply not be something that would have occurred to JKR, her editors, her publishers, or her initial target audience.

Now, I’m not saying all this is right or wrong. I’m just saying that it is how it is. But it’s easy for us Americans to forget that Britain is actually quite different from us. We share a language and many cultural traits, but it’s different, with different assumptions and norms. Hell, it’s part of why I was so blindsided by culture shock six months into my residency here.

Obviously there are people who don’t celebrate and there are Complex Cultural Reasons, and It Isn’t That Simple, etc etc etc etc. But it is also a nation that had a revolution and overthrew its own monarchy in the 1600s, replacing the king with a parliament, but then parliament canceled Christmas for a few years and then finally banned Christmas entirely, so they revolted again and re-installed the monarchy.

well okay not every SINGLE one Santa Claus and Grandfather Frost myths are slightly different but the basics are so identical I used to just consider them the same figure interpreted differently in different cultures as a kid

(until I grew up and realized that Santa Claus was Saint Nicholas which is a separate holiday entirely around here)

no….. No

TIS THE SEASON yet i have not had my dashboard graced by