Onfim was a child who lived in Novgorod, Russia, in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark (beresta) which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who archaeologists believe was six or seven at the time, wrote in Old Novgorodian; besides letters and syllables, he
drew battle scenes and drawings of himself, his family, and his teacher.
i’ve seen similar ones from roman children living in what is now england, too. People have ALWAYS been people.
i love this so much, history with real people in it
see also -archeologists at hadrians wall dig up a letter from a roman soldier to his family tanking them for sending him a new pair of underwear in the mail -norse runes scattered around constantanople and several cathedrals turn out to be viking graffiti, including “this is very high” over two stories up -the oldest known joke (egyptian) and the oldest known english joke are both lowbrow sex jokes -roman gladiators had equivalents to sponsorship deals, some murals found were basically ‘gladiator brad pitt rubs himself with capelli brand olive oil, try some today’ and action figures were also found of prominent fighters for chidlren to play with -flat stone fragments left at egyptian construction sites were used as post it notes by workers, some included variations of ‘the foreman is a jerkface’ and a crude drawing of the pharoh with a comically large donger -we have an embarrassing wealth of 4,000 year old receipts referring to one specific merchant being an ass. WE KNOW HIM BY NAME, he wasnt even a king or anything,
Ea-nasir will be known through history for being a dick about refunds
I love how children, even in the 13th century, can never remember how many fingers someone has.
Oh no Ea-Nasir strikes again.
You left out the best part about the Ea-Nesir receipts! From the original post about this historic jackass:
The majority of the surviving correspondences regarding Ea-nasir
were recovered from one particular room in a building that is believed
to have been Ea-nasir’s own house.
Like, these are clay
tablets. They’re bulky, fragile, and difficult to store. They typically
weren’t kept long-term unless they contained financial records or other
vital information (which is why we have huge reams of financial data
about ancient Babylon in spite of how little we know about the actual
culture: most of the surviving tablets are commercial inventories, bills
of sale, etc.).
But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all
of his angry letters – hundreds of them – and meticulously filed and
preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?
Ea-nasir, the FUCKING LEGEND
Departing from Ea-nasir, reportedly there are surviving thirteenth century letters to students at the University of Paris saying things like “I’ve heard it’s cold, wear your scarf” or “I will not send you any money because I have been informed you never study but just sit around playing your guitar”.
what cracks me up about ea nasir is that despite all this, despite constant complaints, a clearly terrible reputation, not only did he keep all his angry letters, HE KEPT USING HIS NAME. HE DIDN’T GO TO A NEW TOWN WITH A NEW NAME, NO, HE STAYED PUT AND KEPT ON BEING EA NASIR
Why do grown ass adults want to eat Tide pods so much?
Because a ton of the visual/olfactory/textural sensory information these pods give me the match nutritionally-dense fruit. It’s got the oleic gleam of something high-fat like an avocado, but bright carotenoid-rich coloration like a berry that wants to be eaten by red-seeing primates and birds. It tends to smell sweet and slightly floral, enhancing that effect. Similarly, when you hold it, it is quite dense (denser than water), but very soft and liquid, once again reaffirming that this “fruit” has either high sugar or high fat content and almost no cellulose to it.
As a result, within me is a less-clever monkey just screaming to eat this delicious fruit in my hand about to go into the laundry, and it does in fact take willpower to tell him he’s a stupid monkey and this is a bubble of foul-tasting poison. But every time I do laundry, this fucking limbic monstrosity rises again and assures me it’s basically like a cherry but Even Better. I have legitimately debated just biting down on one in the hopes of inducing a deterrent memory to forestall this urge in the future, but that’s what my goddamn mammal-brain wants me to fucking do and I refuse to let it win.
Human Brain: Don’t eat the posion pod its fucking posion Monkey Brain: Eat the fruit pod its fruit Lizard Brain: The Washing Machine Is Vibrating Give It The Sex Fish Brain: Climb inside the washing machine it is safe.
This is a tough question, and a very big question. Since it’s just about impossible to objectively explain why birds are amazing (they are, btw), maybe I can explain why birds amaze me and why they’re the focus of both my career and a significant portion of my recreational time.
1. Birds are dinosaurs that you can hold today.
Flashback to 2010, a time when little Redstart was thinking about applying to college. For a while I was convinced I would pursue animation and go be some awesome art director of nifty animated films starring animals. Then I realized that a) I wasn’t good enough or motivated enough to make it, and b) having art as a career would ruin creating art for me. So, then it was back to my other passion: paleontology.
I literally applied to college planning to be a geology/biology double major with a long-term career goal of being a professor of paleobiology. I doggedly pursued this game until my sophomore year of college, when I discovered birds.
Birds are dinosaurs. Just about everyone knows this now (thank goodness). The big, significant realization here is that you can study dinosaurs today. Think about the magnificent breadth and depth of scientific questions you can ask about an animal when it’s right in front of you, instead of turned into rock and shattered into a million fragments! Don’t get me wrong; paleontology is an awesome field. But instead of dedicating my life to recreating the world of millions of years ago, I decided to work on unraveling the mysteries of today’s dinosaurs.
2. Birds are Pokémon.
Stay with me, now! As a wee youth I was obsessed with Pokémon. Wait, I’m still obsessed with Pokémon. Well, it turns out that birding and bird banding are just about the closest thing you can get in real life to filling out the Pokédex.
Birds have the Goldilocks number of species, which makes them incredibly appealing to pursue, study, identify, and watch. Think about it! Mammals, while are certainly *~*~*charismatic*~*~*, are mostly nocturnal. There are also like 10 of them in the world (yes, that’s an undersell). Lame! Insects and other invertebrates are amazing, but there are too goddamn many for many laypeople to really get into (side note: my alternate field would probably be malacology because I love Mollusca). Fish have some good numbers and variety, but require getting into this whole aquatic sphere– a different world entirely and one that is not readily accessible to those of us who matured in NYC.
So there’s the numbers game and their incredible charisma at play here. Humans have trained their companion psittacids and cacatuids to speak, to understand; as intelligent social animals, we can feel a mysterious connection with birds in the same way that most humans feel an inherent connection with your typical charismatic megafauna, such as wolves and lions (*eyeroll*).
3. Birds are diverse.
Cassowaries are three-toed behemoths that can communicate in rumbling infrasound like elephants and kick a grown man to death. Woodcocks can see in 360 degrees without a single turn of the head. The booted racket-tail is a hummingbird about the size of a quarter with a tail three times its body length that goes torpid every night after its daily frenzy of foraging for nectar. The Chiroxiphia manakins coordinate sexual display in an incredible show of teamwork, after which only one male gets to mate. The bowerbirds build ornate structures that rival some human creations, and then dance and sing in front of them for a mate.
Albatross can maintain a pair bond for decades, and once their chicks fledge they may not touch solid ground for three years. Steller’s eiders from both North America and Russia winter together on the sea ice of the Bering Strait, where they fish for molluscs in the cold. Bar-headed geese fly over the Himalayas. Arctic terns breed as far north as the Arctic circle and winter all the way south in Antarctica, in the longest migration known to the animal kingdom. Martial eagles kill and eat small antelope by flying them up high and dropping them to the ground. Starlings and mimids can imitate hundreds of sounds. Numerous seabirds can go their entire life without a single drink of freshwater due to their advanced salt glands.
…And so on. The breadth of the bird world is absolutely incredible. With roughly 10,000 species worldwide existing on every continent (something that cannot be boasted by many other taxonomic classes), birds have evolved to occupy so many amazing niches.
4. Birds matter.
Now, this isn’t to imply that other animals don’t matter! It is incredibly vital that we keep a steady stream of funding to all biological sciences, but I must say that in my work with birds I have always felt that the research I’ve been doing plays its part in the greater scheme of things.
Birds are an easily seen indicator species; their high sensitivity can be informative about how the world at large is doing. As climate changes and anthropogenic disturbance increases, we can see bird populations shifting their range and phenology from year to year.
Since they are so prominent, birds have also been among the numerous species to face untimely extinction; take the story of the magnificent great auk, for example, which was rapidly hunted into oblivion due to its flightlessness and colonial breeding strategy. Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, Bachman’s warbler, ivory-billed woodpecker, Labrador duck: these are all species that used to be seen in North America that are nowhere to be found today.
And it’s through some well-timed intervention spear-headed by biologists and conservationists that we have avoided the loss of other amazing bird species. The National Audubon Society keeps an egret in their logo, a nod to the birds that were almost destroyed in the hat trade. The Atlantic Puffin was completely extirpated from the Gulf of Maine until it was successfully reintroduced on Eastern Egg Rock. And remember the shitshow that was DDT? It was birds that let us know how much of a threat that pesticide was; brown pelicans, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, osprey, and more faced steep declines thanks to the substance.
These reasons just brush the surface of why birds are amazing– and yes, why I am constantly amazed by birds even though I look at them every day in my backyard or as part of my work. We haven’t even mentioned feathers, or vocalization, their incredible physiology, or the way they have inspired artists for centuries.
Getting into birds literally changed my life; it was a turning point for my career, for my mental health, and for my outlook on this incredible world that we live in. I want others to have similar realizations about the natural world! That’s why I run this blog, and that’s why I’ll never stop birding.
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There are twice as many bird species alive today as mammal species. And the vast majority of those 5000 mammals are either rodents (tiny things hiding in the dark, you know, like throughout the entire Mesozoic era), or bats (you know – bird wannabes).
if you need binders/breast forms/makeup/etc but don’t want your parents to know, now is the best time to get it.
you can order whatever it is online and when the package comes in if the ask what it is you can say something like “it’s a secret!” or even just sssh them. they’ll assume it’s a present for whatever holiday you celebrate and probably won’t press the issue.
Moves by truck, train or boat. Ridiculously common. And see those holes on the bottom? Mobile by forklift. Also, HEAVY, even when empty they’re in the tons. If you had some warning you could string these things end to end for miles and human bodies can’t move them. Plus they’re nice and wide so you can comfortably walk on top of them for patrols.
“But we don’t have easy ways to kill them!”
Put the shotgun down you fucking idiot.
No tires to pop. Heavy and slow but inevitable. Climbing required to enter and thus, relatively zombie proof, especially if you spend like an hour to protect the glass.
A lot of large farming equipment can destroy cars.
Want to guess what it’d do to a decaying human body? It’s not pretty.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Merely flattening them with common construction equipment or farming gear isn’t enough.
“But we need ways to move a lot of people that zombies can’t stop!”
BEEP BEEP MOTHERFUCKER. Deer don’t have a chance and neither does a zombie.
“But that’s not good enough!”
NOW it’s time to call our friend the military because this ride stops for no one.
Do I need to keep going or is it clear the movies are bullshit yet? Seriously a dozen prepared people with heavy equipment licenses could clear an entire street of zombies AND powerwash it after.
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