Things you were shockingly old when you learned

my cat acts like a squirrel and she's 11 years old

I think there's been a move to frame all life expectancies as "life expectancy post infancy", as citing average life expectancy has led to ahistorical takes on human societies. Like the idea that people only lived to their thirties in the Middle Ages, when that average is skewed by high infant mortality. So, uh, I guess they're doing the same thing with squirrels?

the idea that people only lived to their thirties in the Middle Ages, when that average is skewed by high infant mortality.

Well hell. At least I'm inside the right thread.

this is the info on squirrels that always shocked me:
https://ssec.si.edu/stemvisions-blog/why-do-squirrels-bury-nuts-and-other-mysteries

While it might be frustrating for squirrels to lose their carefully hidden nuts, it can be beneficial for other organisms. In particular, it can help the forest itself! A study done at the University of Richmond cites that squirrels fail to recover up to 74% of the nuts they bury. This misplacing of so many acorns (the seeds of oak trees), the study says, is likely responsible for oak forest regeneration. When squirrels misplace these buried acorns they allow for these seeds to eventually grow into full oak trees! The squirrels’ habit of widespread caching is also important to the growth of the forest, as it allows the genetic information to spread far.

ha, i learned that a while ago when i became really interested in squirrels and their acorn burying, found this bbc video also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcdSmFXdbMo

xpost Heh, "nuts."

To this day I still don't know what squirrel poop looks like. There must be loads of it out there.

xpost Holy shit, I want a robot squirrel now!

My daughter actually trained a squirrel to come by for snacks over the summer. Our cat did not give a shit, and just let it hop all around, inches away.

Oh god, those Spy in the Wild covert ops robots are hilarious/creepy af.

squirrels fail to recover up to 74% of the nuts they bury

I giggled at this for far too long. I am a child.

My niece and nephew are Australian, and when they came to visit the first time they were just fascinated with squirrels, which I found really charming, as their country is rife with all these exotic and colorful creatures, and yet it's the most quotidian of animals here they found the most entrancing. I mean, even if wombats and kangaroos are their equivalents, those creatures are just so much bigger and weirder! imo.

Same thing with my wife!

I guess you don't find wombats ransacking your bird feeder in most populated areas.

Squirrels are indeed the most charming thing about the norhtern hemisphere in total. They run like li'l animated tildes!

That th edouble down bunless chickenburger had crossed the Atlantic.
I thgought it was just a sign of what was wrong with exceses in the US diet , now seeing it on the menu of the local KFC as of a week and a half ago.
NOt seen when it first appeared. KFC isn't around here much. the one up near my local supermarket is about the only one in thsi town.
Still not sure why they appear to have disappeared in th emiid 90s and only reappeared about 5 years ago.
I know there was one on O'Connel st in Dublin when i got there in 92 and it was gone a couple of years later leaving none i was aware of in the centre of town A at least at the time,Could be they fell back to target areas or something.

So yeah surprised to see this turn up over here, what with the irish diet being so healthy.
Not seen how they're eaten without getting grease all over you either.

That Substack is a newsletter platform, not some coding thing like GitHub

My niece and nephew are Australian, and when they came to visit the first time they were just fascinated with squirrels, which I found really charming, as their country is rife with all these exotic and colorful creatures, and yet it's the most quotidian of animals here they found the most entrancing. I mean, even if wombats and kangaroos are their equivalents, those creatures are just so much bigger and weirder! imo.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, November 16, 2020 9:43 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

My American brother-in-law came to visit my Dad and while the family were strolling to the local pub, he was looking at various plants and fauna, picking leaves off trees etc when suddenly he's like "OW!". My Dad asked what the matter was: "This leaf STUNG me?! It hurts!". We died laughing. If there's one thing people in the UK know it's not to go wading into suburban edgelands without checking for stinging nettles first. It had never occured to me that these don't exist in California.

Huh. I wonder if those plants have different names in different places? There were definitely stinging nettles where I grew up around Philly, but they were weeds on the ground. Just googling, it looks like they exist in California, too, just not above a certain altitude. Poison Ivy, is that mostly a US thing?

Now fireflies, those are things you generally don't see how west (I learned late in life). Also something of a novelty to my Aussie family.

they do exist all over the U.S., not in desert areas afaik. not as recognizable/known as poison ivy. i got stung by it not knowing what it was when i was doing similar, touching unfamiliar plants on a roadside like an idiot.

xpost Yeah, I learned not too long ago that poison ivy is primarily a North American phenomenon.

Seems nettles were introduced to North America. I'm not sure if that was deliberate or not.

You can make booze from them I suppose.

Oh, here's a late-in-life poison ivy thing I learned a few years back: the plants can still give you a rash in the fall/winter, even after they've lost their leaves and are hard to recognize!

watch out for the hairy vines

Now I’m terrified of poison ivy. Nettle rash is quite tame by comparison, passing very quickly.

Just reading up on 'yinz' which is, of course, exactly the same as the 'youse' I grew up with.

... the lack of an equivalent term being a major deficiency in standard English.

The refusal of standard English to bend on this point is so stupid. Like, there are people who trot out all sorts of stupid rules that are supposedly about being precise (less/fewer etc) yet balk at the idea of actually using a second personal plural that would actually avoid real-world ambiguity. Though: a) there’s probably more ambiguity created by the use of you to mean one (“No, not you you, I just mean people”) b) I’m a fine one to talk as it’d be too cringe if I started saying youse or y’all.

I've been using y'all for my entire life, throughout uni and grad school, and continue to use it when I teach. Standard English is for shit.

Also, nettle tea is tasty. Doesn't grow below about 4500' from my recollection, we used to collect it when I lived at around 4000'.

I heard that there was a native American tradition of whipping yourself with stinging nettles to help keep you going when you were running.

Also read Ecological Imperialism which talks about how any human travel had the tendency to take unconscious passengers with them both flora and fauna. Usually as seeds or vermin. Certainly in the early European incursions to the Americas but the author talked about much earlier travel too.

don't get me started on the bad and hated tree of heaven

Now fireflies, those are things you generally don't see how west (I learned late in life). Also something of a novelty to my Aussie family.


any more of a novelty than they are to kids who live in similar population density in the US? there are a couple dozen species of fireflies in Australia, though some may have been wiped out in the bushfires this year

okay, well clearly i'm wrong. or my b.o.l. has lived a particularly sheltered existence

xpost I can't say. There are fireflies all over the place here and everywhere I've lived in the US.

... the lack of an equivalent term being a major deficiency in standard English.

Just wait until you dive into "jawn."

in Australia I've not seen fireflies in cities or suburban front yards, only in woods & by creeks (and in caves, for glow worms).

Never saw fireflies in California, Josh. When this Philly jawn returned home to his roots, he was delighted to have them back in his life.

I caught a few webinars on light pollution a few weeks ago and one thing they were bewailing was the end of the firefly as a partial result of excess light being in the habitats they used to frequent.

Fireflies routinely appeared in my inner-suburban front yard as a child on the US east coast, I have never seen a firefly in Seattle I don’t think.

East coast has poison ivy and fireflies

West coast has poison oak and wildfires

I was surprised by how many fireflies I saw this summer. Usually there are a handful of nights each summer where I see 8-10 fireflies buzzing around our yard, but this summer it was essentially every night for weeks on end.

Yeah, as a little kid I lived in California and don't remember the fireflies there. Just looking it up now, apparently there are in fact fireflies west of the Mississippi, and specifically on the west coast, they just have a very very dim glow and are hard to see.

When I was a child in Missouri there were fireflies. Not sure the range. I do know that my Oregonian friends were amazed and delighted upon visiting and seeing them for the first time.

TIL that europe has decided to stick to daylight savings time, so next year the clocks will spring forward in march but won't fall back in the autumn

however, whether the uk does this is another matter, given that we've left the eu. but the gov website, modified yesterday, suggests that we'll continue for the next 3 years at least.

https://www.gov.uk/when-do-the-clocks-change

(without DSL it'll start getting light at 3:30am in london. but sticking on DSL will mean that greenwich isn't on greenwich mean time...)

wait what

ah, ok, there is some element of choice:

https://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/the-news-explained/daylight-saving-time-greenwich-mean-clocks-back-hour-forward/

"Is this the last time the clocks go back?

On March 26, 2019, the European Parliament voted to stop changing the clocks in the EU.

As a result, the clock change in March 2021 will be the last one for EU countries that decide to permanently keep their summer time.

Member states that prefer to keep their standard time will change the clocks for the last time in October 2021."

so some will stick on summer time and some will stick on non-summertime but it sounds like they'll all stick with one or the other and ditch the clock changing from then on.

lol whut

so you might have spain on one, and france on the other? no way

Spain shouldn't really be on the same time zone as France but that's another matter

yeah i guess it's no more arbitrary than the UK being an hour different from spain

Franco changed Spain from GMT to Central European Time in 1940 and it was never changed back. I suppose France is in the same boat there - in terms of difference between clock time and solar time - and should maybe also be using GMT also.

so you might have spain on one, and france on the other? no way

you might have forgotten the US and Canada's melange of timezones, but let me introduce you to Australia, which in summer has six different time zones, one of which is half an hour off from its neighbours, one state which never goes onto DST, one territory that also never does, and a weird pocket within one state that is forty-five minutes off the hour

Let us not speak of Indiana

My terrible idea: set the whole world to a single time zone and it's either dark at 2pm or it isn't dealwithit.gif