New year, new deathclaugust, continuing on at twenty three with Gemstone! A very rare process of living mineralization, and one that has few seen specimens as most never make it to hatching due to their organs being petrified. Lucky survivors only have it affect scale growth.
Hey.hey. Hi! Hello. Parley. Sparrows reporting in for assist with baguette. Assist commence. Fear not! Stand down! Sparrows assist. Thanks for holding, your call is important to us.
whenever im sad i just think about how the welsh word for microwave is popty ping
OH FOR SHITTING GOD’S SAKE
JUST WHEN I THINK I’VE EDUCATED THE WORLD ABOUT THE WELSH WORD FOR MICROWAVE THIS PIECE OF SHIT POST MAKES AN APPEARANCE IN MY LIFE SO LISTEN UP YOU GULLIBLE PLANKS AND GET YOUR SCHOOL BAGS READY BECAUSE I’M ABOUT TO EDUCATE THE ABSOLUTE ILL-INFORMED SHIT OUT OF YOU
THE WELSH WORD FOR MICROWAVE IS MEICRODON WHICH IS A LITERAL FUCKING TRANSLATION OF MICROWAVE WHEREAS POPTY PING MEANS ‘PINGING OVEN’ AND LET ME TELL YOU NOW THAT NO ONE FUCKING SAYS POPTY PING IN WALES AND IF YOU HONESTLY THINK WE EVER USE POPTY PING AS A TERM I WILL PERSONALLY DELIVER MYSELF TO YOUR FRONT DOOR AND SHOUT AT YOU FOR TEN DAYS STRAIGHT
ummm this is obviously a passionate subject and im sorry i was just wondering if anyone knows how this got started? was it a knowing prank, or like someone’s aunt in wales who didn’t really speak welsh panicked when asked “what’s microwave” and said “popty ping” and the lie escaped
Oh damn, this post is old now!
It’s a children’s word. It’s exactly the same as how children in English call a train a ‘choo choo’. And then English people thought it sounded a combination of cute and stupid, which tied in with the whole ‘Welsh isn’t a real/valid language’ thing, and from there it continued because no one listens to Welsh people (I’ve literally had more than one conversation where I’ve explained all this and an English person has looked me in the eye and said “Well I prefer it so I’m going to keep saying it’s popty ping, tee hee”. I also vividly remember an English person on Tumblr - who is otherwise lovely - responding to me on this topic to explain to me that if people start using a word then it becomes a valid word, so actually popty ping now IS the Welsh word for microwave, and I had to explain back that no one is using it outside of nurseries and English people, now please will you actually believe us.)
Basically… imagine if the internet decided that “the English word for a set of carriages pulled on rails by an engine is a Choo Choo” and then either patronisingly simpered about it or sneered about how your language should therefore be wiped out about it and you have the issue
And as a final note, the whole thing is extra ridiculous because Welsh has three different terms for ‘jellyfish’ and every one of them is way more charming and batshit than popty ping on its best day AND are the actual genuine terms, so it’s a missed trick
Please all welsh people call them popty pings from now on.
message to cis allies: buying your trans friend lunch will do much more good for the trans community than debating transphobes who will not change their minds publicaly on social media and making all your trans followers see how much people hate them over and over again
if you base your trans allyship more on fighting with idiots than supporting and loving the trans community you may want to rethink things a little. bc i tend to get sick of when my cis friends want to talk more about how many people hate me than anything else about my transness.
i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this
I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”
No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.
No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.
Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.
All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.
