hi everybody, welcome to another wonderful episode of Weird Biology! I’m your host, Bunjy.
we’re here today to talk about a seriously adoraweird critter with a heart of gold! (or maybe just fluff, it’s hard to tell)
so put all your emotions in your front pocket where you can reach them and give it up for-
he’s meow-vellous!
the Manul is a smallish wildcat native to the mountains of Central Asia. they are also called the Pallas Cat, after German Naturalist Peter Pallas. however, we won’t be using that name because he was a fucking idiot.
seriously, he thought the Manul was related to the Persian, which is a breed of domestic cat. (Persians are descended from the African Wildcat just like the rest of housekittydom, sorry Pallas. you moron.)
also he didn’t discover shit, the native Mongolians have been calling it the Manul since the first human to meet one got their shins clawed off hundreds of years ago.
and their scientific name, Otocolobus manul, means “ugly eared Manul”. where are these scientists, I will fight them. FACE ME, COWARDS.
Manuls are about the size of a housecat, weighing up to 10 pounds. however unlike a housecat which is composed of about 30% fluff, the Manul is composed of nearly 110% fluff. there’s barely any cat in there at all! you could probably stick your hand right through. try it yourself! go ahead, I’ll watch from back here.
what? I just like to keep 10 feet and a solid barrier between myself and other people at all times. do it. you can trust me.
(no you can’t)
anyway as you have possibly just found out from the emergency room doctor, there is in fact some cat inside the Manul’s grand fluff and it is not fond of being pawed at by people. (Manuls make terrible pets, so get that thought out of your head right fucking now. go see them at the zoo like everyone else.) it’s a shame, because that fur coat is goddam luxurious.
in fact, the Manul has the longest and thickest fur of any wildcat! this is because they live only at high elevations (up to 16,000 feet, which is 15,997 feet higher than I will tolerate), where the weather is windy and brutally cold. you’ve probably also noticed their tiny Garfield ears, which help to minimize heat loss. this combo keeps them toasty warm on otherwise bare mountainsides.
at least until Jim Davis sues them for copyright infringement.
though all these biology facts are very interesting, I must confess they aren’t the reason that I’ve chosen the Manul for this week’s topic. the real reason is that they’re a bunch of hyperemotive memelords.
no seriously, the Manul has catapulted (har!) to internet fame in recent years because their round faces, wide expressive eyes and stubby bodies combine to form a perfect emotive machine. this cat can express emotions that haven’t been invented yet, let alone named.
let’s call this one "Swoom”
seriously, how can you top that? it’s like a living emoticon.
this is “Woderous”
okay, where were we before I got distracted by cat memes? *paper rustles* ah, right. the spite chapter.
Manuls are ambush predators, despite their fluffy bulk. they mostly eat Pika, (sorry, Pokemon fans) a small rabbity creature that squeaks a lot and doesn’t really deserve the fame Nintendo gave it. Manuls are solitary animals and live alone.
(this sounds sad, but it’s actually because every Manul hates every other Manul in existence and not even god himself can change this)
this is not the face of a creature that enjoys the company of others.
Manuls avoid each other, keeping fiercely to their individual territories. the only contact adult cats have with each other at all is during the breeding season, which is pathetically short. after briefly working together to make some kittens, the Manuls part ways. (presumably while avoiding eye contact.)
after about three months the female gives birth to 2-6 bouncing baby kittens, which all hate each other immediately. seriously, Manul kittens growl and hiss at their littermates before they can even open their eyes! talk about sibling rivalry. once the kittens are old enough to make it alone, they’ll take off in different directions and never call home again.
like the Brady Bunch, except very much not.
unfortunately the Manul is classified as Near Threatened in most of their range. human encroachment and environmental destruction takes a toll, but most of the problem is a little more cartoon villain-y than you’d expect.
see, humans really really really like that plush fur coat, but they like it even better as an actual fur coat. (I was going to make a 101 Manuls joke here but it was just too depressing.) Manuls are still hunted for their fur in a fair amount of their range, though that is beginning to change. many nations are putting protections in place for our favorite stubby emotion machine, and we can only hope this is enough to save the wonderful pile of antisocial fluff that is the Manul.
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IMAGE SOURCES
img1- Atlas Obscura img2– Huffington Post img3- Persia Digest
I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to read thoroughly through the terms of any publication before you send your writing to them. It is mandatory that you know and understand what rights you’re giving away when you’re trying to get published.
Just the other day I was emailed by a relatively new indie journal looking for writers. They made it very clear that they did not pay writers for their work, so I figured I’d probably be passing, but I took a look at their Copyright policy out of curiosity and it was a nightmare. They wanted “non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license and right to use, display, reproduce, distribute, and publish the Work on the internet and on or in any medium” (that’s copy and pasted btw) and that was the first of 10 sections on their Copyright agreement page. Yikes. That’s exactly the type of publishing nightmare you don’t want to be trapped in.
Most journals will ask for “First North American Rights” or a variation on “First Rights” which operate under the assumption that all right revert back to you and they only have the right to be the first publishers of the work. That is what you need to be looking for because you do want to retain all the rights to your work.
You want all rights to revert back to you upon publication in case you, say, want to publish it again in the future or use it for a bookmark or post it on your blog, or anything else you might want to do with the writing you worked hard on. Any time a publisher wants more than that, be very suspicious. Anyone who wants to own your work forever and be able to do whatever they want with it without your permission is not to be trusted. Anyone who wants all that and wants you to sign away your right to ever be paid for your work is running a scam.
Protect your writing. It’s not just your intellectual property, it’s also your baby. You worked hard on it. You need to do the extra research to protect yourself so that a scammer (or even a well meaning start up) doesn’t
steal you work right from under you nose and make money off of it.
Exclusive publishing rights have to have a set time frame! Do not agree to anything that doesn’t clearly state “up to five years from signature” or something like that.
What if the publisher goes defunct? What if they get bought by another publisher who doesn’t care to promote or publish your work? You still can’t to anything with it, you don’t own it anymore!
no one tagged me, but i wanted to post six selfies…
that hair… HOW YOU DO THAT HAIR PLZ TEACH
😀
Buckle in, because this is going to be a LONG post. And I’m going to talk about BOG MUMMIES.
For reference, the hair in question:
This updo was actually what convinced me to grow my hair long in the first place (back in ye old 2008), and it has been strongly influential in my personal aesthetic ever since.
The story starts in 1938. Actually, it starts even earlier than that. In ~280 B.C., a woman died, and her body was placed in a bog, where it stayed until it was discovered in 1938, so well-preserved that the hair was still there.
This bog mummy is referred to as the Elling Woman. Here’s a bit about her.
The article talks a bit about her hair, but it’s kind of an unsatisfactory description. I found out about it when the article reached the Long Hair Community Forum in 2008, resulting in a 40-page (and counting!) thread wherein a bunch of long-haired women figured out how to recreate the hairstyle.
The ladies of LHC looked at the images of the hair, and were like: “Yep, that’s a rope braid.” “Here’s how you could do a 7-strand braid with 2-3-2 sections.” Etc. And basically, they tested out different versions, and came up with something that was cool-looking, comfortable, and practical.
Here’s the ~official~ reconstruction on the Tollund Man website:
And here’s a (very confusing) diagram of how the style is supposedly constructed:
There are several different recreations of the style floating around the LHC and youtube and the wider internet. The style also looks and works differently with different types of hair. I had to grow mine out until I could make a waist-length braid before I could really successfully do it with my hair, but my hair is medium-thick and fairly fine, so YMMV. Some people on the LHC did it with much shorter and thicker hair.
The LHC thread about it is a fun read, but it’s a bit long and meandering, and there are several conflicting sets of instructions there, so I’ll just talk about the method that I use. If you want a video aid, what I do is basically this, except I do rope braids for the bottom 2/3s instead of English braids, and I finish it by wrapping the thick braid around the middle braid, like this (I’ve never actually tried that particular method for forming the big braid, but finishing up the bun is the same).
Here’s a written description:
Take the top 1/3 of your hair and braid it in a basic 3-strand braid (a.k.a. an English braid) down to a little past your neck. Tie it off so that it stays braided while you braid the rest of your hair.
Separate your remaining hair into two sections (each about 1/3 of your total hair), one on the left side, and one on the right.
Braid each section into a rope braid (a two-strand braid that’s made by twisting both sections in the same direction, then twisting them together in the opposite direction). Tie them off so that they stay braided. Also, I’ve found that it’s better to make the rope braids so that they’re coiled in opposite directions.
Take the two rope braids, and braid them with the top/middle section of your hair that you’d braided into an English braid. You’re basically making one big English braid. After I’ve started braiding it, I slip off the elastic tie that I’d used to hold the middle braid together temporarily.
Braid it as a 3-strand (that’s made up of two 2-strand rope braids, and one one-strand section that started as a 3-strand braid, so it’s sort of a 7-strand braid!) English braid all the way to the end of your hair. Take out the elastic ties around the two rope braids when you get to them.
Tie the whole thing off with a single elastic tie at the end.
To make the bun, you lift up the simple English braid (the one you made in step one), and you wrap the thick, complicated braid around it in a spiral.
Tuck the end in as best as you can, and then secure it with whatever you want. I’ve used everything from a hair stick, a hair comb, a few bobby pins, and even a single barrette before.
You’re done!
There wasn’t any evidence of any hair pins or anything like that to secure the hair found with the Elling Woman’s body. If your hair is very oiled and/or very unwashed, it might be able to hold itself in place without needing to be tied or secured. As it is, this style does work better if your hair has been oiled, or hasn’t been washed for several days.
This hairstyle is really cool for a lot of reasons, but it’s also extremely comfortable! The middle braid essentially holds the whole thing up, so you don’t experience any of the pulling you feel with some buns.
Basically, if I had to wear the same hairstyle for thousands of years, I’d definitely pick this one. It’s beautiful, versatile, comfortable, and has a really cool backstory.
actually when I was in 8th grade and obsessed with twilight my master plan as a twilight vampire was to sit around in famous shipwrecks like the super deep ones where they can only send robots with cameras from their submarines and when they sent one down i’d be sitting there, pretending to drink out of an old tea cup you know for the drama of it all and the guys in the submarine would know what they saw and that it was real footage but who else would believe them? no one important.
but it didn’t stop there. at the next party they threw to celebrate one of their latest finds, some museum-y banquet idk I was 13, I was going to show up. I was going to show up and make eye contact with them one at a time from across the room and they were going to lose their goddamn minds and then before the volturi could catch wind i was gonna be back in the ocean. how could they find me?
the drama. the theatrics. i can’t believe i didn’t realize i was gay right then but that’s another story, also involving vampires,
I had someone tell me that dislike of Umbridge is usually from ingrained sexism toward female villains. I kind of stared in shock – I mean I love my lady villains. I love nasty female villains. I love sneaky and clever female villains. I love female villains that wrap themselves up in what the patriarchy expects of them and uses those expectations to smash someone upside the head.
I tried to explain my hatred of Umbridge isn’t that she’s full of traditionally feminine attributes.
It’s that she’s lawful evil.
If you did an alignment chart, no one would represent lawful evil more than Umbridge. I don’t think there’s ever been a character that better sums up lawful evil.
And, to me, lawful evil is the most terrifying and disturbing evil there is.
To me, lawful evil is the shit that gets thousands of people killed while the person responsible walks away feeling like they did their duty.
Evil forces like Bellatrix and Voldemort are fairy tales. They’re the bad guys a good guy can chase away with a sword or wand.
Umbridge is that evil that really does lurk in the hearts of men (and women). The realness, the plausibility of it, makes her amazingly uncomfortable.
So, yeah, I can’t get as excited about her as a fantasy book creation as easily as some other female villains. Not because she’s a woman, or because of her gender presentation, but because she represents a sort of evil that’s far, far too close to home.
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