SO in Britain all the swans may belong to the Queen, but lemme tell you about Hamburg:
Hamburg is built around a river, so there’s many many many canals (the 2400+ bridges put Venice and Amsterdam to shame), as well as a fairly sizeable lake (here the smaller section, innit precious):
This means a shittonne of swans
(stay away from the swans) (seriously don’t go sailing on the lake because they WILL chase you). Obvs swans aren’t made for cold weather (p sure they’re all Australian immigrants actually) so Hamburg has an official job position to take care of the issue.
This dude’s name is Olaf Nieß (trying to spell his name on non-German keyboards must be fun):
This guy’s job title is “Schwanenvater”, aka “swan father”, and his job literally consists of getting swans to safety before the winter chill sets in. How does he do this, you wonder? Easy: he goes up to EVERY SINGLE FUCKING SWAN in the city and sticks them in barges. I’m serious:
Look at this dude and his swans
Swans are like Satan’s personal pet and he paddles around with barges full of them like it’s nbd.
I fucking love this guy he’s braver than all of us and deserves some recognition for his absurd line of work.
My brother saved this document and everytime he gets angry at our neighbours for being loud he prints it to their wireless printer and you can hear the wife shout “Why the fuck would you print this AGAIN?!” to her son.
every time we serve chicken at work i think of this post
1. If you were wondering, you can type the numbers in the works cited into google and they appear to be medical journal articles about using medical imaging to detect and diagnose a rare form of Gastritis.
2. Please enjoy the offical powerpoint presentation of this paper at an academic conference by the original author, complete with Q&A:
THIS IS GOLD
oh m god please watch the video it’s some of the most contagious laughter on the planet
When I saw this cross my dash tonight, I smiled and thought “yess, the chicken chicken chicken post, I get to reblog it again and inflict it on all of the people that have followed me since last time”, and then I scrolled down more and to my utter delight there was A VIDEO, needless to say my night has been made
when i was a breeze i blew four dozen trees every morning to strengthen my gales and now that i’m grown i just raze them with ease, so i’m seven times bigger than wales!
wait do those tin can phones really work?? I thought this was all a myth.
I just looked up a video this is wild I’m making one tomorrow
in my high school Art 4 class while we were no doubt supposed to be getting ready for a Very important Art Show, two of my friends made one of these phones but instead of talking into it they would write messages and clip it to the string and slide it across the string to the other and when the art teacher asked why they said “we’re texting” and she could not BELIEVE it, this was the FUNNIEST thing she’d heard all year
so she got on her office phone and called the principal and said “two girls are texting in my classroom I need you to come take their phones and issue them detentions” and we all waited like assholes for him to show up and when he asked where they were she gestured at my friends “texting” on their tin can phone and my principal was already a pretty tired dude but that was the most exhausted I think he ever looked.
Don’t worry, guys. Carl is clearly a brachiosaurus, which lived during the Jurassic period. (And before anyone says our lil’ boy Steve is a velociraptor and therefore puts our comic in the late cretaceous, aka the time of the comet–that lil guy could easily be a compsognathus or a caudipteryx, both Jurassic-era species of small theropod dinosaurs. So the light getting bigger every night is going to pass by harmlessly, and Steve and Carl can go on enjoying the stars together until they die of old age, since Carl has very few natural predators at his size and I bet he’ll protect Steve, if he needs it (though small, fast and carnivorous as Steve is, he probably won’t).
So it’s all good!!
That entire response explaining how these two characters didn’t die a fiery death but instead lived long and happy lives literally made my day.
The amount of times I could have been that white girl in the horror movie could honestly be a movie in itself and it’s honestly a waste that my entire life isn’t constantly recorded on film because it would be HILARIOUS
1. That one time I decided to see what was past the old gate in the woods, but when got there it had been smashed in half and there was a decapitated sheep head with no skin just off the trail, so instead I just turned around and went home.
2. That time some friends and I went camping and we found a pile of bones wrapped in a garbage bag buried under a log, but the adult supervisor told us it was nothing, so we just put it back and didn’t talk about it again.
3. The time I was getting chased through the woods at night and I realized “wait it’s dark as fuck” so I just held still until the guy gave up and left.
4. The time this dude said he was in love with me and so he was going to cut my head off and dump my body in a lake, so I told him to grow the hell up, but then he got caught stealing girl’s underwear a day later and I never saw him again
5. That one time in college where I was taking a shortcut on my home at night and a car followed me into a dark alley, so I stared directly into the driver’s side of the window and walked towards it to psych them out
6. The night I was out on a walk and this old guy told me he’d locked his keys in his truck and that he needed someone my size to crawl in through the back window for him, so I told him “you know that sounds super suspicious right” and told him where to find a pay phone for a tow truck instead
7. The one time this random guy on the street said he was in love with me and so he was going to follow me home on my bus, so I clapped him on the shoulder and told him that if he got that close to my bus then I was going to throw him under the wheels, but then this really nice homeless man from Nigeria told the guy to fuck off and then checked to make sure he didn’t follow me onboard
8. That big cat with yellow eyes who I found in a well and brought home who used to put rotting meat in my closet and wake me up by chewing on my face, until I put him back outside and never saw him again.
9. My one cousin who used to come over for the summer who kept calling me ‘piñata’ and hitting me with sticks, until he went back home and was sent to juvie cause he finally got caught torturing animals
10. The time I got lost on the way to a meeting and wound up at a circus tent instead, and got followed by a full-out clown for three vacant street blocks
11. The pet hamster I had when I was seven who would scream all night and eventually escaped by ripping a bar out of its cage and wiggling through the hole. My mom caught it and put it back but it lived another year and a half until one night the screaming just stopped
12. The time I was whistling in the woods and something started whistling back, so I went home
13. That one night at summer camp where a group of girls got together to play ‘bloody mary’ in the lavatory and invited me to come with them so I said “no thanks” and stayed with the camp councillors and drank soup instead.
14. The old abandoned house I just moved into with the door that leads into a big empty room full of dirt and empty cooking pots that I just sort of… locked up forever and never go near
15. Once when I was at an ihop I saw a coffee mug do a full 360º spin with nobody touching it, so I said ‘that was neat’ and never ate there again
16. The time I took a photo of a big old raven sitting on the crucifix on top of the old town church cause it was the most goth thing I’d ever seen, right? But then it swooped down towards me, so I apologized immediately for being rude, and I felt a little silly for a while but the car that hit me on the way home didn’t even leave a bruise so idk be nice to birds
Sorry I know I bring this shit up a lot but sometimes im awake at night and I just. keep thinking
I think the secret to survival is to be good to animals, stay away from men, and say “no thanks” to everything else