The Navajo have a unique tradition. When a baby is born, it is regarded as the ultimate, precious gift and must never be abused. From the moment of birth, the child is watched over continuously by family and friends, who patiently wait for the child’s first…laugh.
“Has your baby laughed?” is common question posed to parents who have infants around the age of three months. The first laugh of a Navajo child is a very significant event. It marks the child’s final passing from the spirit world to the physical world, meaning he or she is now fully human. This milestone warrants a party, and what a party it is!
Whichever brother, sister, parent, cousin, aunt, uncle, or passing acquaintance is present at the first laugh is deemed to have caused it. The laughter instigator then receives the honored privilege of preparing a special ceremony to welcome the child into society.
Once a baby has laughed, training in generosity begins immediately—a value held in high regard among the Navajo people. At the party, where the baby is considered the host, the parents or person responsible for the first laugh help hold the baby’s hand as he or she ceremonially gives the rock salt, food, and gifts to each guest. There are also bags of candy, money, and other presents that the child “gives” along with the food. [x]
Yes it is true. I have had of a few relatives invite me to a A’wee Chi’deedloh "The Baby Laughed Ceremony" however I have not had the privilege to actually attended one personally. The Dine’ peoples believe that babies are of “two worlds” (Earth people & Holy people) when they are born. The first laugh signifies the babies desire to become a part of the Earth People so it is a great cause for celebration.
well, us howlies were willing to do downright stupid stuff for even stupider reasons, so it never took much effort to talk everybody into doing something really really dumb. usually i was the one trying to keep everyone for getting their stupid selves killed, but im proud to say that this particular occasion was all my doing.
so its july 1944, and nazis are still occupying paris. we were sent in to pick up some crucial info from a resistance informer in the heart of the city. but at this point we were already starting to be recognizable, so we needed to disguise ourselves to get through the city. the higher-ups hadnt been specific on how exactly to conduct this particular op, so, left to our own devices, we naturally concluded that we should dress one of the most overmuscled commando squads in the allied forces as women.
we were good at special ops, not logic.
i think whoever suggested it was joking, but in typical howlies fashion, we took things waaay to far, and soon enough we were sourcing dresses and wigs. dum dum and pinky and gabe and jaques and falsworth and morita had to shave their mustaches off. dum dum cried.
morita managed to get his hands on some makeup–he refused to tell us where from–which was great, until we realized that none of us had any idea what to do with it. but then steve admitted what exactly he’d been up to with the ladies of the star spangled show. turns out that aside from hauling their luggage everwhere, he’d also been on hair-and-makeup duty nearly every night. i guess the ladies decided to put his artistic skills to use, because the man knew his way around a blush brush. (the rest of us were not sure what a blush brush was.) even in 2017, he can still do a contour like nobodys business, because he apparently decided that was something worth knowing. so steve did our makeup, and all of us learned how to do lipstick. more useful combat skills for the howlies dossiers.
falsworth had a friend who ran a really fantastic underground drag show, so he negotiated wigs in return for promising to send steve over to help with a show sometime. we did not tell steve about that promise until later. gabe found the dresses, and i dont know where he got them, because they were somehow big enough for us.
except for steve, who has the waist-to-shoulder proportions of a pizza slice. he got stuck halfway into a dress–caught with one arm in, his head and other arm out–with his fully-made-up face slowly turning redder and redder. all of us tried, but we could not wedge steve into that dress.
so instead we put him into a wheelbarrow full of garbage.
the rest of us–the worlds burliest but most well-made-up ladies–set off in groups of twos and threes through occupied paris. happy sam pulled the short straw and had to wheel along the stevebarrow, which not only stunk but was heavy as hell. the nazis working the checkpoints must have liked their ladies large and muscular, because we made it through to the drop point with no problems, aside from falsworth getting a little to in to the flirting. steve kept griping, but we kept telling him garbage is quiet steve, shut up.
we made it to the drop point, this big old house on rue des grands augustins, one of those huge mansions. but what we’d carefully avoided telling steve was who exactly the house belonged to, because his birthday was the next day, and this–aside from being a crucial intelligence mission–was his birthday present.
the house belonged to pablo picasso.
so we all slipped in through a side door, and when happy sam and the steve barrow finally caught up with the rest of us, happy sam turned it over sideways and out tumbled a very irate, still made-up steve in his captain america costume.
he was pissed as hell until he realized who exactly the weird little guy covered in paint was, and then he blushed so red i thought he’d cook the makeup right off his face, and he started stammering like that time in first grade suzy miller said he was cute.
anyway, he and picasso got along like a house on fire, and the rest of us enjoyed some proper french cooking while they babbled art at each other and scribbled in each other’s sketchbooks. picasso drew steve a portrait of himself, which is why one of steve’s battered stained sketchbooks is valued at 700 thousand dollars. it’s because halfway through theres a bunch of picasso sketches, and a little painting of captain america wearing makeup in a heap of garbage.
not that you can really tell, of course. cubism.
Chapter 13: Stealthy, Not Smart has been corrected for caps/punctuation on Ao3! (And I’m gonna send a second ask from that chapter around later)
this is whats called a ‘coffer dam’, you basically build some walls, drop them in the water, tie them together, and then pump out the water from your new hole in the water so you can build while staying dry
its oddly not that hard- the flippin ROMANS were able to do it with logs and mud
occasionally particularly devious people would use this to hide treasure or tombs underneath the river so its not only impossible to find but impossible to get to without an engineer division
Such a deceptively simple looking question has been hotly debated in science for decades now, with vocal advocates on both sides, but I’m pretty damn sure fish feel pain.
The crux of the ‘No’ argument is basically that while fish have nociceptors (neurons which detect pain) but they don’t connect to their neocortex like they do in mammals, so they conclude that while fish probably feel some kind of ‘fish pain’ it’s not equivalent to pain as we know it.
I, personally, am not terribly impressed by this argument. We used to say this about every non-human species on the planet and now we know better.
Stimuli that would cause pain in a human cause increased activity in the whole brain, not just the brain stem, which implies it is percieved consciously.
Fish behaviour changes when injected with something painful, but does not change if injected with both something painful and morphine. Morphine does not change the tissue damage, only how the conscious brain perceives pain.
Fish avoid painful stimuli.
So the evidence is mounting that yes, fish feel a type of pain and while it may not be 100% analogous to pain sensation in a mammal, that difference is likely academic. The fact that their behavior normalizes when given pain relief after a painful stimulus is pretty strong evidence in my professional opinion.
What we do know, without doubt, is that fish can suffer. The details of that pain don’t matter so much as their ability to suffer because of it. We can debate semantics and fine details all day, but if we have stewardship over these animals, it’s our duty to minimize their suffering wherever we reasonably can.
This isn’t exactly a scientific study, but if you watch injured fish, they act differently. They hang still in the water instead of moving with the others, they dull their colors, they clamp their fins, they try to avoid moving the injured part of them. Those aren’t good things to do, they make the injured fish a target.
Most non-domesticated animals, especially less social ones, are good at concealing pain. In addition, non-mammals don’t always express pain in ways that we automatically see as expressions of distress. It’s there, though.
What was that again, PETA? They’re sad and abused you say? Doesn’t look like that to me!
—mod Nick
These are dogs who are literally born to run in the snow. Of course they like running in the snow! They probably like when their owners get all excited about finishing the race, too.
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