#bewareofdragon

[talesfromtreatment]

Is it true that ginger tabbies are more docile on average and is there a genetic/biological reason for that?

Truthfully... no. It’s more that humans perceive x-color to act like y and approach the animal from the beginning expecting and even encouraging y.

Torties/calicos are extremely beautiful, and people tolerate behaviours from beautiful animals they wouldn’t from more common ones. This is why torties/calicos have a reputation for ‘tortitude’- behaviour that would be corrected or trained out of a brown tabby is allowed to continue because “lol, calicos are always spicy”.

People expect the orange boys in particular to be extremely sweet and calm... so they approach calmer and encourage calmer behaviour. Does this mean it always results in a calm animal? no. But you’re more likely to get one that is calm if calm behaviour is what is rewarded.

My Sundew has his hyper moments, but he’s mostly calm and sweet. This is not because he’s orange. This is because, and keep in mind I love this cat with all my heart, he is incredibly stupid. He’s also not dumb due to being orange. He just happened to fit into a stereotype and bright orange is more memorable than brown tabby or all black.

But it’s a lot of fun to joke about orange boy cats all sharing the same braincell as it lets us show off our orange boys who DO actually share only one braincell.

[theverakeller]

Glynn Lunney (1936-2021) portrayed by Jackson Pace in The Right Stuff (2020).

requested by @bewareofdragon

[gusgrissom]

For the space tumblr ask: #5 and #17

5 - fave moment(s) of crew banter

Besides everything Gus ever said (that witty bastard), probably the time Frank Borman was about to lose his mind telling Jim and Bill to go to bed on Apollo 8

17 - the right stuff (cursed) does not exist. cast a movie abt the mercury 7.

Anton Shkaplerov is not an actor, he is a cosmonaut, but he looks TOOOOO much like Gus so I will force him into my Mercury 7 film adaptation. That is my only contribution to this production

[drferox]

What was your veterinary case that you're the most proud of? (Question tax: Coffee, tea, or other?)

That’s a tough question. Certainly repairing the face of Marcus the cat would be way up there. That story certainly has a happy ending. It was a challenging problem solving exercise that I had to manage as a new graduate, without support of nearby specialists.

In recent years, most of the cases that I’ve been really proud of have been Addison’s Disease cases. Partly this is because I’ve noticed, diagnosed and treated them effectively on my own, but also because I still remember a mentor through vet school insisting it was the most commonly misdiagnosed condition in veterinary medicine. It’s uncommon, but very rewarding to get right.

And I did once submit a case report for a very, very complicated Cushing’s Syndrome patient, which won an award. Specifically, her case won an award for ‘most concurrent conditions’ because in addition to her Cushing’s Syndrome she also had allergies treated with vaccines, bilateral cataracts, diabetes melitus, UTI, cruciate ligament tears and eventually seizures.

The case report won me $500 credit towards a conference, and won the dog a year’s supply of her expensive Cushing’s medication. In reality, she probably got a bigger prize than I did.

[sholiofic]

A (rambling) idea for a GotG fic: Meredith and Yondu meeting on Earth either before Meredith met Ego or maybe when Peter is too young to remember. Maybe Yondu is hiding from someone or maybe Ego sent him to spy on Meredith or something. Whatever the reason SHIELD gets wind of Yondu and Meredith has to cover for him (or not!). I'm not sure if the Agent Carter crew would have retired by then but you could turn it into a crossover for extra points. ;) Can be gen or not.

Ha, so, this is maybe not entirely the way this was meant to go, but it's the way my brain took it.

--

Aliens, Nick Fury thought. Aliens in a Missouri farm town. Yeah, right.

Still, he'd already seen things in the ten years since Pierce and Director Carter recruited him for SHIELD ... things that had shaken his entire worldview and upended his certainties about the world.

This it wouldn't even be the first UFO sighting he'd had to investigate.

It was, however, the first time he'd found multiple witnesses who had seen more or less the same thing: an aerial dogfight between two bright, strangely shaped objects, followed by at least one of them crash-landing in the cornfields out beyond the town limits. It hadn't been too hard to find the spot. The trees were torn up, corn stubble scorched and blackened. Something had crashed here, something damn big.

And it wasn't here now.

Which, Nick thought, was fucking weird. He stood back and surveyed the field as his team cordoned the area off, took photos, and dug up soil samples to be sealed into bags and analyzed back at the SHIELD labs. It would've taken a helicopter or a fighter jet to do that much damage to the trees, and nothing that'd crashed hard enough to set the field on fire could have just flown away.

And yet, something had.

"Did we get the name of the owners yet?" he asked Agent Radshaw, who had just turned up from a quick trip to check in on the satphone with HQ.

She checked a clipboard. "Quill. Gregory Quill. It looks like he owns a big chunk of farmland in the area. Quill and his daughter live right on the other side of those trees."

"Now, I'm not a farm kid myself, to say the least," Nick remarked, looking back at the fields and the charred swath through the trees. "But I'm thinking, something like this happens on your back forty, you'd notice. Don't you think?"

"Yes, sir," Radshaw agreed.

"And I don't know much more about small towns than I do about farming, but here's one thing I do know. Everyone's damn curious about anybody new. We saw that when we were interviewing the locals back in town. But you know what, I didn't see any sign of anyone coming over from that farm to see what we're doing on their property. You see anything like that?"

Radshaw shook her head.

Yeah. Nick figured their next stop was the Quill farm. He had a few questions.

[talesfromtreatment]

Do you often have to deal with exotic pets at your shelter?

Not really because we are limited intake. We do take rodents and lagomorphs and I’m one of the go-to techs for dealing with those because a- I’m not afraid of them and b- I have *some* knowledge of normal and know how to check teeth and can correctly distinguish between ‘respiratory distress’ and ‘extremely nervous rabbit’.

Sometimes we end up with stray chickens for a while that people found, and we’ve had some reptiles left on the doorstep (iguanas, chameleons, feral red-eared sliders, rarely snakes). I also have a corn snake that I got from a gentleman who was moving back to australia. Jeffrey/Pard is a wonderful addition to my pets.

[gusgrissom]

Hearing you talk about Werner von Braun made me curious: What's your opinion on Guenter Wendt - who was after all a member of the Luftwaffe and fought for Nazi Germany?

Ah, tbh Guenter had slipped my mind! I guess my feelings are similar to how I feel about von Braun... so, not great. I think there is a pretty big difference though, in terms of their legacies?

One of the things I’ve been looking for in my research is how people (Jews, NASA coworkers, WWII vets, etc.) felt about former Nazis in the U.S. Among a pretty wide variety of reactions, one that I found particularly interesting was that of Yves Béon, a survivor of Dora (where von Braun built his V-2s). What bothered him was not the fact that former Nazis were working in America -- but the fact that they were celebrated, rewarded, decorated, hailed as heroes.

And I think that’s a place where you can make some kind of distinction between people like von Braun (he’s a pretty singular character, though) and others like Wendt. von Braun is fairly well-known, maybe even famous, and widely celebrated for his contributions to rocketry and the American space program. I think Wendt is really only recognized by the spaceflight history community, which is a relatively niche group. Both Nazis, both complicated, but I think I feel more frustration towards the veneration of von Braun. Wendt’s lack of recognition is a more appropriate legacy. There’s no easy way to handle this topic.

[mercurygray]

bewareofdragon replied to your post  I have a beer, a bowl of popcorn, and Les Pacte...

I remember that movie, it’s entertaining if nothing else. :D

I’ve seen it before! It is totally entertaining, which is why I am watching it again. Plus it’s nice to have the French rattling around in my head. If someone has more 18th century period pieces they want to recommend, I am all ears. Poldark just came in for me at the library.

(And speaking of Poldark, I’m rewatching that because a certain Lavinia wanted a go with a certain redcoat. As I was watching tonight i realized Monica Belucchi’s character is is totally part of where I got the idea for Lavinia.