its so ridiculous it has to be a joke, and yet the author sounds 100% serious (and infantile, bringing up things like ecoli and how delicate their feet are)
Copy-pasted article below cut:
Shoes are one of the things that separates us from other species. Not only are shoes fabulous, but they protect our soft and not-very-well-designed feet from threats both foreign and domestic. Every single toe that I ever broke got that way while I was not wearing shoes.
Despite their incalculable value to the human race, many people maintain a shoeless home. Some of them believe that forcing people to remove their shoes before entering will help keep their floors clean from the various things that exist outside.
Now, I’m not a barbarian. If I am entering the home of someone from a culture in which wearing street shoes inside is a sign of disrespect, or if my shoes are covered in snow, mud, blood, condiments of any sort, lava, excrement, concrete dust, or biomedical hazardous waste, I’m of course going to take them off. And I don’t really need to be told to do so.
But barring shoes outright just to keep your floors clean is bringing a gun to a pillow fight. Turns out there’s already an effective old-fashioned way to achieve your goal of a clean floor while neither insulting my hygiene habits nor endangering my delicate, vulnerable, long-suffering feet: It’s called a doormat.
In other shoeless homes, it isn’t the dirt that owners fear. It’s the germs. For these folks, shoes are superspreader events. They likely got freaked out by a 2008 study by scientists at the University of Arizona that found that 96% of shoe soles have fecal bacteria like E. coli on them. Gross, right? Shoes are the devil.
Oh, wait. Turns out E. coli is EVERYWHERE ALREADY. You’re probably sitting in a big pile of it right now. “When people see [the Arizona study] they just are horrified,” says Elizabeth Scott, professor of microbiology at Simmons University and a founding member of the International Forum on Home Hygiene. “For me that’s no surprise at all. E. coli is everywhere.”
So what about babies? They are fecal bacteria machines. I asked Dr. Scott if having a baby in your house is actually more dangerous to home cleanliness than my shoes. “Don’t quote me saying that,” she says, “but baby poop sure is.”
What about pets? Think, if you dare, about what comes in on the bottoms of their already-shoeless feet. Yet, I don’t see these homeowners forcing their guests to leave their babies and dogs out on the front stoop, do I? Hypocrisy, thy name is [insert name of person with shoeless home here].
Instead, shoeless-home owners prefer to do the easy thing, and point at my shoes and deliver the unspoken message, “Kris, welcome to our home, where your filth is filthier than the filth we already have all over our floors.”
To add to the ignominy, next comes the physical challenge of actually taking off the shoes. Unless there is a thoughtfully placed stool, bench or chair at the entrance to the shoeless home, shoed visitors are required to lean against a wall to take off the shoes. What if the visitor is elderly or infirm or just has bad balance? Due to my broken toes and related joint maladies, it is difficult for me to take off my shoes even in the best of conditions. What if I topple over and injure one of my few undamaged body parts while complying with your ridiculous shoeless-home diktat? Once you stop laughing, you’ll feel really guilty about it.
Once shoeless, feet are utterly vulnerable to myriad household threats: chair legs, bed posts, door jambs, dropped knives, random Lego pieces, and God forbid anyone has been playing jacks.
Also consider the not-small threat to hosiery. No nylons can survive a night shoeless. Why don’t I just leave my shoes on and give you the amount of money I would have spent replacing the shredded Wolfords? You can use it to hire a housecleaner to mop up after my shoe detritus. Keep the change (there will definitely be some).
Please don’t offer me a pair of guest slippers. Do I look like I want to wear a pair of nasty slippers previously worn by potentially tens of strangers before me? There’s dried-on foot sweat and dead skin in those things. I’ll stick with the E. coli, thanks.
If you do keep a shoeless home, you should also know that you are probably endangering your family’s health, not just their feet. Exposure to low-level filth, like that tracked in by friends who refuse to remove their shoes, actually helps bring a little bit of the outside in. Engaging with outdoor microbiomes is, Dr. Scott says, one of the ways that human immunity is developed. You love your children, the little fecal bacteria bombs, don’t you? They gotta eat some dirt in this life, so why not get them started at home? They’ll grow up healthy and strong and go on to get great jobs and make lots of money and support you in your old age.
My shoe policy for our home is this: Unless there is something seriously nasty visibly stuck to the bottom of your shoes, they should remain on your feet unless you personally desire to take them off. And then, my friend, you’re on your own.
Boomers are like you couldn’t make Seinfeld today bc the woke mob would cancel it meanwhile every five seconds I see a tumblr post that’s like here’s my idea for an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry starts going by They/He. Idk what point there is to be made here but it does suggest something
Sometimes when I'm high I like to imagine arguments in the far future about what kind of milk or eggs were in our recipes. I hope the main opposing factions would be divided over whether the milk was from dogs or cats because "what other mammals were in the vast majority of households back then?"
One of the details that has stuck with me from Bill Bryson’s book about domestic history is how, in early salt-and-pepper shaker sets--from around the time Europeans first started putting salt and pepper on the table--there is a third container, and nobody is entirely sure what it was for.
There are some highly plausible guesses--sugar is one of them; I forget the others--but the extant textual references to these items just say, “salt, pepper, etc.”
Back to the original post, in Poland we still say 'Everyone can plainly see what a horse looks like', and it means 'there's nothing to discuss here, everything is clear and obvious'.
Benedykt Chmielowski, the venerable priest who wrote the compendium of knowledge, also provided this very brief definition of a dragon:
"It is difficult to defeat a dragon, but one must try."
you vaccinate your kids ? i squirt lemon in my son’s eyes to make him stronger against viruses . i activate his fight or flight response . he is so powerful he can now eat entire lemons , peel included .. tell me again how your vaccinated child isn’t inferior ?
Omg… your antivax mentality is so deluded that i cannot even begin to explain how you cannot eat polio because your tiny pinhead mind wouldnt be able to process it. Also, literally everything you have said qualifies as child abuse. I hope someone takes your kid away from you so they actually get a chance to live a decent and normal life free of debilitating diseases.
He has mastered laying eggs while your child learns the ABDs , don’t think for a second that they are the same . Your son is 2 ft getting no hoes while my son is 6’4 getting chicks daily . Don’t ever call my head a pin again
I think it’s really important, for non-Vancouverites, that you know some additional layers of the joke to this, because this shit’s got history:
One of our parks has an abstract statue in it of someone reclining.
In Nov 2012, an artist made a sign as a joke, “Dude Chilling Park”, which looked exactly like our official Parks Board signs (except for the official park boards seal).
The Vancouver Parks Board removed the sign but, after a whole lot of petitions, they put in an official one a year and a half later, also “Dude Chilling Park”, but now with the proper seal attached.
Fast forward 7 years later. We have horrible floods. A barge washes up on Sunset Beach and gets grounded there. It has yet to be removed.
The Vancouver Parks Board, unprompted, adds a “Barge Chilling Beach” sign.
Honestly rude customer interactions at craft stores go down pretty easy because when someone acts like a jerk there's always three older women in line behind him who disapprovingly tell me "well THEY weren't acting very nice" and commiserate about how no one knows how to behave in public anymore
I think people would be less inclined t throw tantrums at Joann Fabric if they knew that all the grandmas in the county will be talking shit about you for the rest of the weekend
People on twitter are always like 'there's still people on tumblr?'... As if Twitter wasn't full of stolen text posts, gifs and art originally posted here
They think that they’re doing an archeological dig but really they’re just walking into our houses picking up random stuff and saying “Wow, what a beautiful post! Shame that the people who made it died a long time ago :(((” While we stare at them from our dinner tables
as much as i love myself some pining and yearning and repression, if the end result isn’t a happy ending and if the whole point isn’t love then i’m not interested, thanks
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