menderash:

i saw a really cool butterfly expert man on PBS and was so in awe of him and his butterfly knowledge i tracked down the episode online to see how to spell his name and found his twitter and followed him, only for the next day to awaken to him having read not only my webcomic, but also my livetweets saying how i wanted to marry the butterfly man. he said he was flattered. anyway the moral of the story is please don’t underestimate how far down your twitter a bored entomologist will scroll, and also the internet was a mistake.

rivendellrose:

simpleanddestructivechemistry:

gallusrostromegalus:

spooky-spaghetties:

gallusrostromegalus:

So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.

So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.

Well Shit!  goes my grandfather,  them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one.  So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.

They’re gone for a LONG time.  according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.

Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise!  they have a Pheasant.  Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant.   Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen.

“TOM!!”  She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point. 
“THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”

They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.

“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?”

“We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him.   
Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages.

Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot.  They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods.  They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.

And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.

“dubiously related man named uncle popeye” wasn’t even close to the wildest part oh my god! This is such a good story!!!!

So you prompted me to call my mother and ask how Popeye was related to them, and apparently he’s my great-grat-grandmother’s first-husband’s cousin’s son.

The First Husband is the whole reason my mother’s family came to america in the first place apparently.  in 1902, he decided he didn’t want to be father to 9 girls anymore, so he went out for a pint one night and fucked off to Chicago without actually divorcing GGG.  For a few years she thought he’d been killed and dumped in the Thames (these things happened in Liverpool in the 1900′s) and shortly re-married, and Second Husband fathered two more daughters with her, including my Great-Grandmother.

In 1908, First Husband wrote from Chicago for money.  This was a problem because despite fucking off to another continent, they were still married, and GGG was committing bigamy.  Despite pleading her case before the courts that Really, Y’all gave me his death certificate when he didn’t turn up after a month, they fined her an outrageous amount of money and only commuted her prison sentence because “her brood would place undue stain on the orphanage”.

Yes, really.

Second Husband, who was a halfway decent man that only beat her sometimes, suddenly dies of knife wound in a Pub fight, and GGG is left up shit creek with 10 girls and nobody willing to hire a bigamist maid. So GGG attempts to woo First Husband back to England.  She goes so far as to pay a photographer to take Nudes of her to remind him what he left.

That was an exciting Christmas, going through an old album and finding THOSE.

Despite GGG’s heartfelt efforts and godlike booty, First Husband remained in the US, enjoying his new life of running credit scams and bootlegging.

After another 4 years of this nonsense, GGG gets the money to ferry herself and her brood across the atlantic to America, where they weren’t so uptight about the sex lives of domestic workers and she could probably get a job.  The ALMOST come on the Titanic- we found the tickets next to the nudes- but at the last moment, Great-Aunt Liz catches the Measles, forcing everyone into quarantine and saving them from an icy death.  They instead come on the next boat, and have to pick up the survivors of the Lusitania.  Everyone gets lice and has to be shaved at Ellis Island.

Once in america, GGG finds out First Husband has died, For Realsies, please come identify his corpse and also he owes the state of Illinois like $500 in court fees so-

To which GGG goes “LOL, NO.” and moves to Cleveland with her Youngest daughter (my great-grandmother) and her new Russian husband, and takes over as manager of the local grocery store and leads a life of relative american-lower-middle-class comfort until her death in 1928 at age of 58.  

…So you understand our confusion that GG knew of Popeye’s existence at all.

This is the quality content I am on tumblr for! 😂👍🏻
Thank you for sharing this and bless you and your family! 💕

@gaslightgallows, I feel like you need to see this.

dduane:

I’m about to have a strange conversation with @petermorwood when he wakes up.

DD: That yellow towel in the bathroom? Put it in the wash.

PM: What? Why? It was just washed yesterday.

DD: Yeah, that was before I had to go out and throw it over a swan.

One of the juvenile swans who hang around the pond behind our house somehow got out of the field and into the road, and was walking up and down trying to figure out how to get back where it belonged. A number of casual drivers had pulled up and parked and were waving other traffic away from it while they tried to figure out how to get it to safety.

All the gates to the field were locked and we don’t have any of the keys, so I wound up dropping one of our bath sheets and a blanket that one of the drivers had brought over the swan, wrapping it up well (the wings were my main concern). We were helped by the swan being a bit young and uncertain: by the time it would have started arguing the point, its head was already covered and it couldn’t see what to do – so it went quiet.

I picked it up and carried it to a spot where the fence into the field was low enough to drop it over. At that point some hissing was beginning from inside the bundle, so the timing was right to lean over the fence and shake the swan out of the wrappings. It landed on its feet, waved its wings around a bit and then headed in the general direction of the pond, looking faintly embarrassed but otherwise none the worse for wear.

So the various drivers and I congratulated one another and went about our business. Just another exciting day in the country…

everkings:

When I was like, five, my mom took me to a local dr’s clinic, or maybe a pediatrician, and their office was one of those old houses that they turn into places of business, and I was a wee human creature but I found out real quick they were gonna give me a shot and little Everkings (ok, even big Everkings) Does NOT Like Shots. So, I told them I had to use the restroom, which was on the second story of this house, and I locked the door, and opened the window, and climbed on the roof, and then climbed down a tree, and then somehow managed to cross a four lane road without getting splattered, ran into a blockbuster, marveled at my genius new life of a runaway, the sixteen year old girl became my friend, gave me those boxed candies and ultimately betrayed me and called the cops, and my mom found me an hour later with three policemen and I was so ADD I’d forgotten my plight and was sitting on the floor trying to decide between episodes of star trek and ninja turtles that I wanted to rent that night.

This is what I always think of when I think of walking into blockbuster.

teamfreekickass:

I remember once I was talking to two guys and one of them was complaining about his parents when the second chimed in. “Try having four parents!”

We automatically assumed that he had divorced parents that got remarried. He corrected us; “No, there is a plot twist. My mom and dad never got married but had me. They were going to get married, but then my dad suddenly confessed he was gay. My mom was so relieved and said that she discovered she was a lesbian and was afraid to tell him. So they stayed together in the same house for me. Then eventually both got partners. So my dad has his husband and my mom has her wife.”

And the third kid just looks down at the ground for a really long time before whispering, “That’s gay. “ 

thedisreputabledog:

raptortooth:

clevercheshire:

geardrops:

cupcakewitchery:

geardrops:

pyrrhiccomedy:

spacetimeandcoffee:

pyrrhiccomedy:

pocketofmadness:

pyrrhiccomedy:

I see a lot of posts about people feeling embarrassed, like, about everything, all the time, being embarrassed is I guess a huge part of some people’s lives. well listen

my girlfriend left her shoes in the middle of the living room floor, so I hid them in the oven drawer. because I thought it was a drawer that you could like–store things in?? I don’t know, I somehow made it to this point in my life without knowing that the fire happens in there. then I forgot I’d done it, and like, two days went by.

so the next time we went to make dinner, the shoes caught on fire.

then the oven caught on fire

then our whole house was full of black smoke

then the NYC firefighters had to come out to our apartment. there were like six of them.

half the people in our building came out of their apartments to find out what was going on, and if they were going to die or if they needed to evacuate their cats or something

and then an actual, New-York’s-finest firefighter looked me wearily in the eyes and said “try not to keep shoes in your oven” as he left.

and now we need a new oven.

and I would say that I felt…mild embarrassment? I experienced a patina of chagrin. “whoops,” I thought to myself, as the firefighters tromped off and the firetruck drove off into the night. “I should probably have known that about oven drawers.” then I bought my girlfriend a new pair of shoes, since I’d burned her old shoes. then we ordered a pizza.

if I can not feel embarrassed about that, I hope you guys can take heart.

Serious question: What is an oven drawer?

I mean come on, it just looks like a drawer, right

Isn’t that where the pots and pans go?

I definitely remember pots and pans getting stored in the drawer of the oven we had when I was growing up. so I figured, okay, that’s a drawer for putting stuff in. key detail I guess: pots and pans are fireproof

unlike shoes

GUYS

THAT’S THE FUCKING BROILER

OH MY GOD

Not always the broiler actually. Sometimes it is just a drawer. My aunt keeps snack foods in there (Oreos, Cheetos, the shit she doesn’t want people to know she eats) and her oven has never caught on fire.

So this is handy information for me to start inspecting the oven of every place I ever move into from now until eternity.

fair enough but i feel like if shoes go in and fire comes out it’s probably the broiler

Oh thank god it’s sometimes a drawer. I thought I had a broiler for years and never used it.

So there’s a compartment that SOMETIMES is extra storage and SOMETIMES is full of fire?

Yep, basically.

owlmylove:

sapphicshepard:

sapphicshepard:

sapphicshepard:

sapphicshepard:

i’ve definitely told you about this before but my dad and my uncle have this whole star wars vs star trek rivalry where they’ll get each other passive aggressive gifts (my dad is a star wars fan, and will always get my uncle star wars merch. my uncle claims star trek is so much better and star wars is lame. he will always get my father star trek merch. this has been going on since my parents got married.) 

this is going to be a good year for arguing 

my uncle just arrived. my mom shouted “kids, uncle rich is here!” my dad bellowed “MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU” down the stairs. my uncle shouted back “YOU CANT SEE IT BUT IM GIVING YOUR DOG THE VULCAN SALUTE” i love christmas here

dinner was alright until over dessert my dad brought up “so, richie, you see the new star wars movie” until it devolved into a wine fueled shouting match. highlights include “WELL AT LEAST WE DIDNT HAVE JAR JAR GODDAMNED BINKS” “AT LEAST WE DIDNT BLOW UP–” “YES YOU DID. FIRST MOVIE. YOU BLEW UP A PLANET” “shit”

this years argument, like every year before it, ended with “nice to see you.” and them slapping each other on the back which i think is a guy way of hugging goodbye.

this is the best thing i’ve ever seen

myfrozenstrawberries:

drst:

lesbianshepard:

so my english professor told us this story last year about how he met his wife and it’s completely possible that he made it up just to entertain us but he says it happened and the story is this

he’s a a cruise with his parents to australia where he’s gonna spend a year or so for some reason. can’t remember why but it was job related. his mom is worried that if he spends too long away from her without her constant advice (my mom is also like this lol) he’s going to do something impulsive and ridiculous. 

so, he decides to prank her by pretending to get married to a woman he just met. because he’s obviously so impulsive and ridiculous. so he’s talking to people and stuff and he asks this woman if she’s cool with pretending to marry him to prank his parents. and she says yes. then he goes and talks to the captain and crewmembers and he’s like “i have this ridiculously funny prank where i’m going to pretend to marry this lovely woman to freak out my mom.” and they, of course, reply hell yeah. so like since the first mate has the power to marry people, i guess, he agrees to the fake wedding. 

so at lunch he’s like “mom, dad, this is alyssa. i met her last night and we’re in love and also getting married.” and his mom freaks out and that could be that. but no.

if they’re gonna do this they’re gonna go big or go home.

so, he changes his facebook status to “married to alyssa” and invites all his friends to his wedding in the middle of the ocean. (and they believe him and congratulate him and he’s concerned that his friends think he would really marry a random woman he met like six hours ago) 

now his mom is getting really nervous b/c alyssa (the fake bride) got her friends she was on the cruise to be her bridesmaids. they got the first mate to “marry” then at dinner in front of people. the mom is horrified. 

anyway the next day he goes “just kidding!” and it’s hilarious. but then he has to contact all his friends who were calling him on the phone and stuff to congratulate him to tell them it was an elaborate joke and they all think he’s an asshole and he and alyssa part ways but keep in touch b/c they… actually get along pretty well. 

anyway like a year later they meet up again in boston (i think? big city that wasnt new york) and talk and end up dating for like a year and then end up engaged for real. and now he invites his friends to his real wedding and all their RSVPs essentially say “i’ll show up, but if this is another fake one i’ll fucking murder you” and the mom just flat out didnt believe him for a month because she’s not falling for that again.

and now they’ve been married happily for like three years and they’re expecting their second child who has probably been born by now 

and the overall point of this post is: imagine your otp

Well this is a prompt for fic if I’ve ever seen one.

This is beautiful