OH MY GOD so an urban legend nearly happened to me at work today, I’m not even kidding.
SO I took my class ice skating for their first ever session and was having a whale of a time trying to persuade a student with ASD to let go of my jacket, and then I see a line of kids go down like freaking dominoes. One flails and knocks the girl next to him over, she butts another on the way down and then he wipes out two more. So that’s pretty funny, until someone starts screaming. They all struggle to their feet and one has her hand aloft like she’s victorious, celebrating the downfall of her friends and then I realize oh dear god she is bleeding and she is bleeding a lot.
I abandon my ASD friend, leaving him with the one already-competent skater in my class and hurtle over the the dominoes. The girl is still holding her hand up and it’s just bleeding everywhere, all down her arm and onto the ice. The coach looks like she’s trying not to swear and quickly says to me “please can you get her off the ice.” It’s worth noting that the screaming is still happening, though the girl who is bleeding everywhere is not the one screaming. She’s just looking at her hand in mild surprise, like “oh dear, all of my blood is evacuating via my fingers.”
So I grab her wrist and haul it up above her head and skate the fuck off the ice with girl in tow. By this point some bright spark is yelling “SHE’S LOST A FINGER,” and my entire class is freaking out. ASD boy gives up and lies on the ice with his legs and arms in the air like a distressed turtle. The rest of them just form a sort of perimeter around him, one of them happily explaining to the coach that yeah, he does this a lot, he’ll get up in a moment.
I take the girl off the ice to the medical room. By this point the ice looks like a massacre has happened, her jumper and leggings are wrecked, my jacket is doomed and both of our skates are covered. When we get her into the medical room I find that she’s still got all of her fingers (I did at one point think omg how do I explain to her mum that her kid is coming back missing a finger) but there is a huge gaping slice down one finger – i won’t go into any more detail apart from to say it was fucking gross. The medic immediately goes for adding pressure, so he’s gripping her finger while holding it up above her head and I have to ring school and ask what the procedure is when a child in my care has been maimed.
Half an hour later, the bleeding has stopped, the ice has been cleaned, her mum is on the way to pick her up and take her to have it stitched up, and the kid is still super chill. I’m not kidding, there was no screaming, no crying, not even a complaint. All she said was “it hurts a little but, less than shutting my toe in the door.”
I, on the other hand, am traumatized forever. And I broke a nail getting her skates off when she couldn’t do it one handed.
Many scientists have used a test paradigm in which the creature under
investigation has to figure out how water displacement works in order
to reach a treat. As it turns out, some raccoons just don’t buy into the
premise.
The paradigm of water displacement actually comes from an ancient
Greek fable written by Aesop called “The Crow and The Pitcher”, and it’s
been used to investigate whether birds and small children understand how cause and effect work.
The fable is about a thirsty crow that can’t drink from a pitcher
with a low water level. To raise the water level higher, the bird drops
stones in the pitcher until the water level rises and it can drink.
(This paradigm has actually been tested on New Caledonian crows with amazing results.)
Now, a group of researchers from the University of Wyoming and the
USDA National Wildlife Research Center has found that raccoons have a
different way of being innovative when it comes to getting their sweet
prize.
Trying to get into the swing of practicing comic pages regularly so…have some entirely unplanned Rampage vs Botanica for my vaguely Beast-Wars-Y setting? I’ve been calling it TF: Paradise.
Both of them are incredibly adaptive, functionally immortal, and capable of almost entirely re-growing their bodies for different environments, to heal damage, or to give themselves specialized features. This is probably relatively early after the first time they met- seeing as Rampage seldom underestimates his opponents, and likely doesn’t know that deserts are just as happy to host plants as anywhere else, yet.
Transcript under the cut, because of my handwriting.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 