Troblems @chocyofsparta - Tumblr Blog

He realized his dogs have an unusual skill. Now he uses them to help save turtles.

By Cathy Free

John Rucker was a high school English teacher in North Carolina when he stumbled upon something interesting: Whenever he took his two dogs hiking, they would run into the tall grass and bring him back box turtles. Like a gift, his Boykin spaniels would gently lay them at his feet, unharmed.

He mentioned it to a few people, and soon, biology teachers from the University of North Carolina started reaching out to him and asking whether he would take their students out so they could put transmitters on the turtles to study them.

Several years later, the outings were so successful, Rucker was fielding calls from wildlife veterinarians and zoologists who were studying turtle populations.

“Because turtles aren’t easily detected in the wild by the human eye, I could see that I was on to something,” said Rucker, now 73.

Now, two decades later, Rucker’s spaniels are a highly in-demand, specialized team trained to sniff out box turtles by following their urine trails.

The dogs — Yogi, Ruger, Jenny Wren, Lazarus, Scamp, Skeeter and Rooster — travel across the country with Rucker helping to track turtle populations and identify threats and diseases.

homunculus-argument

I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.

The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don't have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.

And then there's the kea, straight-up titled "clown of the mountains", that has a specific vocalization for "playtime!". Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go "great idea, disembodied voice! it's TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!" and start wrestling.

Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he's shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.

roach-works

this is how vulcans feel about humans

shirecorn

Harbinger

shirecorn

PUPPY HAS RECEIVED SO MANY PETS AND IS ALL WARMED UP NOW

mainflopgirl

even when/if everyone gets vaccinated and we are able to reach heard immunity i am NEVER going to forget how selfish and ignorant and hateful some people were during the pandemic. i can’t look at some people or businesses the same way again and tbh i don’t want to. if your own feelings over the safety and health of others then i don’t want you anywhere near me idc if the pandemic is “over” which it’s not btw :)

delta-breezes

chocyofsparta

When I see pictures like these, I always want to wader down the path just to see what's around the corner.

365gleit

Point Reyes, CA

February 2016

theinturnetexplorer

Who wouldn’t want to sit with a baby crocodile for a bit?

speciesofleastconcern

crocodiles confirmed for cuter than human babies

beggars-opera

double confirmed

chocyofsparta

Dara O'Briain is the best

prokopetz

If you ever feel like you must be the most unobservant person in the world, remember: I once spent half a year failing to notice that my new favourite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the Ukrainian mafia.

(I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in retrospect, the fact that it was always dead no matter the time of day - I think the busiest I ever saw it was five people, myself included - well, that should have been a tipoff. Also, the waitstaff kept calling me “Mr. Prokopetz”, which I had assumed was just part of the restaurant’s gimmick, but given that “Prokopetz” is a Ukrainian surname, I’m now force to wonder whether they’d thought I was, you know, in the business. I just liked the pierogi!)

moonbelowsea

What I need to know is how on earth did OP finally realize his favorite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the mafia.

prokopetz

I’d like to say I put together the clues, but in reality, I just showed up one day to find that the place had been indefinitely shut down, and later learned it was because the managers had all been arrested.

andersonsallpurpose

What I really want to know is how good the food was?

prokopetz

Excellent, if your tastes run to the “heavy cream and too much garlic” end of the spectrum.

toloveviceforitself

Every crime front I’ve ever eaten at has had completely amazing food, honestly. I am pretty convinced that if you want to open a front, you don’t choose “restaurant” as your front-business unless you have a relative who loves to cook.

prokopetz

It tickles me that this is evidently a sufficiently common experience that people find it relatable. (Seriously, check the notes!) We should write reviews or something.

onewit-torulethem-all

did I just read the line “every crime front I’ve ever eaten at” with my own two eyes

toloveviceforitself

Look, I went to college and lived my early adulthood in a town whose entire thing was import/export, and we had a lot of restaurants that were suspiciously empty except when they were closed and filled with very serious men in nice clothes.

They were usually run by someone who was about the right age to be some adult’s parents or grandparents, and in the case of the two Korean restaurants matching this description, they didn’t speak English. Universally though, they were very pleased to see customers, very proud of their cooking, and very very interested in keeping us far away from the aforementioned serious men in nice clothes. And despite having huge dining rooms and never having more than a couple customers, they never went out of business.

Also, because I am very, very stupid and sometimes don’t think before I talk, I once said loudly, over the phone, while sitting in one of these places, “Hey! Yeah if you want to meet us, we’re eating at [place]. You know…[place]? You totally know it. The Front, on Warwick st!”

The looks I got from every single employee were amazing and then I left.

cat--77

We had a corner store/deli-place near our apartment in college. Everyone knew they were in on something and no one cared because they looked out for their customers and their neighborhood as a whole.

They started stocking my favorites because I mentioned them within hearing range once, would tell their “vendors” to move out of the way if we stopped in. I walked a different route home and got harassed one night and they asked after me. When they found out what happened, they declared “Consider it taken care of, you should never be afraid around here.” Never happened again.

Everyone needs their friendly neighborhood crime lord.

friendlyfrankenstein

This is both my favorite and makes me fondly remember home. Less of the eateries, more of the mysterious retail joints that never seem to close despite no one ever buying anything, though. Well. Aside from the juice bar. Didnt last, though.

jupiterjames

I found these places everywhere I lived. My favorite was an omurice place near my home in Japan, and a mother/son officially ran it. The food was incredible, and one night I was there and there was a boisterous crowd of BLATANTLY yakuza men eating and drinking. They started talking to me, and were super nice. Said they wanted to “practice their English,” and paid for my food and drinks and then said they wanted to take me to karaoke. That was a little alarming, but the mother/son, who seriously looked after me as the only foreigner in the area, said I should go, and the son came along. So we piled into a white landboat Cadillac and partied until dawn.

One of the older men at the party took me to my neighborhood and dropped me off out front (the car was literally too big to fit down the small neighborhood streets) and said that I had his blessing.

Which was confusing, but I was drunk, so whatever. Then I went back to the restaurant about a week later and the mother said, “the family approves of you. You may marry our son if you wish and be welcomed.”

I did not marry him, but wow. There were no hard feelings, either. They still helped out if I got harassed by the cops (which happened a lot in these smaller towns with no foreigners) or anything like that.

And to this day, no omurice has ever compared.

not-so-terrible

@temari-i-i

probably-voldemort

Not a restaurant story, but when I was eight a hapkido studio opened in my town. I live in the kind of small, Canadian town where you have to drive for the better part of an hour to buy anything more than basic groceries (or to go to high school for that matter), and the biggest things to happen are someone occasionally getting busted for growing and selling pot, or elementary school being cancelled because a cougar had decided to take a nap outside the front door.

So no one really questioned the motives of this large Korean family that moved to town and had a martial arts studio built. I mean, maybe we should have, since no one ever moves there, but we didn’t. (Or maybe we did, but I was eight so idk)

Anyway, the kids’ class had about a dozen of us, which was a lot for any sort of organized extracurricular, ranging from my brother at five to me at eight.

It was great. Hapkido was a lot of fun, and the older man who ran it made sure we had a class at least once a month or so where we learned self defense well enough that we’d actually be able to apply it if the need ever came up. Occasionally his “friends from Korea” would come to “visit him” and they would guest teach a class.

By the time I was thirteen, I had made my way through quite a few belt levels, and he gave me a part time job helping teach the new under five class. A few of them had joined the volunteer fire department, the moms helped with bake sales at the elementary school, my sister was really good friends with the daughter that was her age, and they were all a pretty big part of the community.

Until one day when we’re in class. At this point, I was still in the kids’ class, despite an offer to be moved up to the adults’ one, because I’d finally managed to convince some of my friends to join and they were in the kids’ class.

So, picture this. An older-boarding-on-elder Korean man teaching martial arts to a dozen or so kids. Parents sitting in the adjoining room, watching through the one way glass and gossiping over tea. The door slams open, and a half dozen police officers come in, guns out and yelling.

We all dropped to the floor, freaking out, because nothing like this happens ever. One time, my neighbours got high and lit their car on fire and drove it into a ditch, and the fire fighters had to wait around for three hours before the police finally showed up, that’s how much they hate having to drive out to our town from one of the near-ish cities.

But here they were, interrupting our class.

And the teacher? He booked it out the back door as soon as they entered.

Turns out the studio was a front to smuggle drugs from Korea.

I was only thirteen so nobody really wanted to give me all the details and it may have been 2010, but the elementary school was still the only place with internet, so I couldn’t even look it up.

From what I remember, though, the police caught the hapkido teacher pretty quickly. I’m not sure if they got everyone from the family or not, but I do remember that one of his friends was supposed to be visiting and teaching a class later in the week, so I’m pretty confident they caught him too. I’m pretty sure they were some sort of mafia, because I remember overhearing a conversation between my parents about the amount of paperwork and meetings my dad had to do to convince the higher ups that he had no idea he was letting mafia members into his fire hall.

I also had to go to a couple of interviews with the police since, technically, I worked for them. It didn’t take them long to see that I was just a nerdy little thirteen year old, and that there was no way I was actually involved in this mafia. I got some serious street cred, though, and when I started grade eight in the neighbouring city that fall, I got a lot of questions about what it was like to be in a mafia.

I still don’t know how the police caught onto them, or why it took them five years. I definitely would have kept my job at the studio through high school if they hadn’t been arrested (it was infinitely better than working as a cashier at the tiny grocery store), and I sometimes wonder how much that would have gotten me mixed up in their real business over time.

So yeah. That’s the story of how I was taught martial arts and self defense from drug smugglers and accidentally worked for a mafia. It was also definitely the most interesting thing to happen in my town ever.

iguanamouth

REALLY good

maplefiasco

TikToker @bdylanhollis exuding Chaotic Pre-Serum Steve Rogers energy.

lunetta-suzie-jewel

I was gonna reblog anyway but that caption took me out

neil-gaiman

I’m hoping I didn’t run into you at work today becuase there’s no way that the real Neil Gaiman suddenly showed up to a wintery Ohio store to ask about ground lamb only to find none due to franchise options available... I hope it was simply a British imposter shopping. Otherwise I apologize. Also I’m still waiting for authors casually in my falafels and drinks to remind me to get back to drafting scripts.

Not me, I hope -- currently I'm in New Zealand.

bunjywunjy

Why is the American opossum apperently the most relatively ugly? Some are downright cute! But the aquatic one and the ones in Australia are so much prettier and skinnier! Why ours so funky?

fun fact, marsupials actually originated in South America, which used to be connected to Australia via Antarctica.

marsupials colonized both antarctica and australia, but about 30 million years ago the three continents broke up and went their separate ways, ending up where they are today.

obviously things didn’t end well for the antarctic marsupials, who died out, but australian marsupials pretty much had it made! they were the first mammals to colonize the continent and they didn’t face competition from placental mammals until much much later, in the modern era.

south american marsupials, however.

when south america eventually drifted north to slam into north america like a wayward bowling ball, the Great American Biotic Interchange happened! which is a fancy way of saying that animals who had before been limited to a single continent now had the run of the whole western hemisphere, and entire species rampaged back and forth over the new central american land bridge for millions of years in an intercontinental evolutionary war.

and unfortunately, it was a war the south american marsupials lost. they were outrun, outgunned, and just all-around outcompeted by the north american placental mammals, who took their place in the south american ecosystems as things finally began to settle down.

all but one, anyway!

in the confusion, opossums had managed to move north and establish a foothold for themselves in north america, making them the sole marsupial survivors of the Great American Biotic Interchange war. today, they can be found across all of the americas!

they’ve been out of contact with the rest of opossum-dom for well over 30 million years, and that’s why they look so different from the modern australian possums. show some respect to these tenacious survivors!

#raspy voice *yar*

angeltiddies

this came to me in a vision and i felt compelled to put it out there: *cas voice* we experience gender very differently dean. i enjoy being a man because that’s how i have come to think of myself and it makes me feel connected to humanity, but i do not hold important nor really understand the performance of upholding the societal constructs that indicate manhood. you, however, are so wrapped up this performance that i believe you have never stopped to consider if you like being a man. do you? is there anything about being a man that you like that isn’t wrapped up in how you experience your self worth as approval and acceptance of others? i’ve been reading gender theory it’s really quite interesting. *dean voice* uhhhhhh

snorlaxatives

people who can just plop their sweet lil heads down on their pillow and quickly fall asleep don’t know how lucky they are… i gotta construct a whole ass cinematic universe in my head with dramatic plot twists and in-depth characters to help me fall asleep

hogwartsaheadcanon

I was genuinely stunned when I realised not everyone told themselves elaborate internal bedtime stories every night without fail, inclusive of occasionally having to get back up out of bed to figure out a blocking issue in the mental scene that’s fucking up your ability to concerntrate on the narrative. It’s honestly only in the last few years that I’ve realised the amount of time I spend in various paracosms is not necessarily that normal, and for the life of me I cannot figure out what the fuck people who don’t do this spend their time thinking about?

My mum says she just thinks about real world stuff? All the time? Like jobs she has to do and the like?

I can remember lying in bed when I couldn’t have been any older than six mentally constructing self-insert Lord of the Rings AUs, I reckon a solid 90% of my waking life is spent with at least a background noise of some fictional scenario running through my mind, and I just find it completely fascinating how different people’s brains work because it had genuinely never occurred to me that that wasn’t just How Humans Functioned.

Brains are weird. Also I still can’t figure out what I’d do with all that time and brainspace, I can’t comprehend it at all.

curator-at-large

Oh yes and mine lasts for weeks. When I do fall asleep it’s like a “To Be Continued” and then the next night it starts “Previously on”

ourladybinxthings

I end up replaying the same five or six fictional self inserts for months. Until I find a new one

antique-scarecrow

my impression is that this is way more common among neurodivegent folks!

I know for me adaptive/maladaptive daydreaming was a huge way of managing both my sensory issues (by acting as a buffer between me and my physical environment), and the constant low dopamine levels of ADHD (by having an imaginary storyline giving me constant little mental ‘reward’ in the form of comfort and joy).

For me, daydreaming in order to fall asleep serves both purposes: it helps my mind tune out environmental distractions (noise from the fan, the wrinkles of the bedsheets) and allows my brain to relax into a mental state that is final calm and safe enough for sleep. The downside is, when I can’t find a compelling storyline, my routine gets disrupted and sleep issues ensue.

So yes, for some people it can be another thing they didn’t realize was related to being neurodivegent!

charmmycolour

For real though, the idea of going to bed and just… sleep, is so alien to me.

hypersonicjd

I can feel this sentiment! It happens to me so many times

chocyofsparta

When I was little, I had this tiny, quite realistic white bunny soft toy. I'd pretend she was real and we'd go on adventures together. I can't remember what they were, beyond my bed was my burrow and I was safe and warm in there (I liked the dark). This must have been before I was old enough to read, because it eventually, shifted and evolved into me inserting myself into the stories I read or things I saw on telly or movies. P.S I thought everyone did this....I still do this, now within my own stories. Sometimes the stories take over, and I'll do this instead of watching a movie.

homunculus-argument

Things I remember reading online that I wish I had screenshotted: Story of a trans guy, estranged from family, who got an invitation to his sister's wedding, but their parents had specified that he'd better come in a dress or not come at all. But they hadn't seen him in almost 7 years and didn't know that not only was he on T and had surgeries, he's a passionate weightlifter.

So if I remember right he sent the sister a heads-up beforehand and the sister was like "holy shit do it", and he showed up in a pink, frilly dress, and sneakers. No makeup, jewellery or anything, just this bulky, hairy dude in a dress for no particular reason.

Their parents, naturally, still got mad despite of him following their exact, specific instructions in order to "not embarrass the family", and after the wedding the sister made sure to pick as many photos of the wedding as possible with the brother visible in them, because it was now a funny family story of bringing the family together by pissing the shit out of their parents.

chocyofsparta

awesome

4x01

just had to take a fucking second and close my eyes because i remembered that on the night of november 5th tumblr had convinced me, an outsider, that this was an actual gif of Castiel Supernatural being sent to mega fruit hell

oobsie-daisy

We all learnin’ today ig...

the-sapphic-raven

Its from the 1997 movie 'Spawn' if anyone was curious

chocyofsparta

I thought it was from the Fellowship of the Ring and was Gandalf falling or fighting the Balrog, oops.

i-will-help-you-swim

Reblog if you think asexuality is a real thing that actually exists.

I'm trying to prove something.

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