so quite a lot of people expressed interest in a guide to lion dance! and since the lunar new year is coming up in a couple weeks, which means everyone’s exposure to lions is probably going to increase, i figured i’d go ahead and make it! right click + open in new tab to fullview, etc etc, i hope it’s helpful, although if you only take one thing away from this powerpoint, it’s this: lions are not dragons
disclaimer: i learned fut san style at an american university, and the senior members of the troupe were almost all from hong kong and taiwan, so most of my knowledge is drawn from what they taught me. lion dance varies widely depending on the style and the country of origin, and many schools do things differently! this is just an attempt to establish a baseline and give you a really basic intro to one of my favorite art forms. :)
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.
cis people who legitimately questioned their gender and decided they were cis are cis, but theyre not cis about it. i respect that.
exactly!! even if youre cis, examining your relationship with gender closely like that is only gonna help you understand yourself and grow as a person!!!
gender is a social construct. You get to inspect your own construction site to make sure it’s up to code.
see, unlike almost every other bird of the planet, toucans are completely unable to grow down feathers.
that might sound a little nonsensical, but down feathers are the fluffy underlayer that other birds have between their regular flight feathers and their skin! this layer of fluff provides the birds with extra insulation and shock absorption, and are so damn good at their job that humans regularly steal them for use in jackets and pillows.
oops?
and since toucans just straight don’t have this layer under their body feathers, you can actually see their translucent skin under there if you hold them right!
(most bird skin is translucent, you just can’t see it like this because there’s down in the way. unless the bird in question is a toucan. weirdos.)
but more importantly, down USUALLY serves as insulation for vulnerable chicks, and is replaced/covered up as the chick’s body feathers grow in!
BUT NOT TOUCANS. baby toucans are born completely naked-o, and they stay that way until their body feathers decide to show up.
which looks really weird, actually.
in timelapse, it looks like a chorus of tiny old men spontaneously grew their own tuxedos.
but anyway this really has no bearing on your day-to-day life, but the next time you see one of these:
just know that they’re hiding a REALLY WEIRD secret under there.
Anonymous
