Lil Nas X — Montero (Call Me By Your Name)
Stay tuned for a “fish in a ditch” story
So we’re on a walk in a nearby park with a river and I see movement in the ditch that says somethings alive in there. We check it out and El goes “that’s a fish!”
I’m like. A fish???
“That’s a fish”
So I pull a plastic bag from my shoulder bag and hand it to El who jumps across the ditch. Now it’s been raining and the problem is this ditch is VERY low on water so like, we can’t leave this fish in distress (which it is, because it’s stranded in very shallow water in a drainage ditch). But also El is an invasive species expert and we’re like “oh fuck that fish mouth says carp but the colouring says ???”
Also a man with a dog stopped to watch and I was laughing while we explained what was going on, because, yknow, a feral American Biologist in a plaid jacket HOLDING A FISH THE SIZE OF THEIR FOREARM IS GONNA DRAW NOTICE
So we get the fish into a pond so it doesn’t, yknow, die, and now are emailing experts with the photos I took like “????? What is this??”
It was a full grown adult so it’s definitely not the only one out here but if It IS here to cause problems we need to inform the city re: location size etc.
ANYWAYS
We can’t go anywhere I STG
WHO IS THIS MAN
So I’m an AIS researcher but my actual background is plants and not fish randomly stuck in drainage ditches, and I need to key this thing out when we get home but I don’t like the look of him. For now I smell like fish slime... the work never ends....
Update: our mystery fish is a white sucker (Catostomos commersonii), which is native! I actually know embarrassingly little about native freshwater fish species and simply knew this was something I hadn’t encountered before — frequently when you find an aquatic species in a place it’s not supposed to be (like a rapidly-drying ditch) it’s an invader, since they’re generally hardy bastards, but I feel better about not immediately recognizing it now. Time to brush up on my native freshwater stream species, clearly.
Look, if you’re going to send me recommendations for comedy media, you need to understand that I’m the sort of person who can sit through an exquisitely crafted half-hour standup routine and barely crack a smirk, then stumble across a Tumblr post where the entire joke is somebody grotesquely mis-spelling a common word and lose it for like a minute straight.
Like, this right here? According to the gremlin that lives in my brain, this is the funniest damn thing I’ve ever seen:
This image is now funny for a different reason.
The fact that 2021 begun with a sea shanty renaissance and three months later ships are back on the 1700 trade routes is, actually, extremely funny.
between the cloudy tint of my face shield, the total lack of air conditioning in this gym, the way everything sounds muffled in the gym, and the literal actual pig that was at the entrance, I feel like I’m dreaming
I thought “oh I guess some guy brought a pig” but then it wasn’t his, it had just wandered in
know what actually. ajj was right. you parasympathetic nervous system does react