Realm: Memes - Subrealm: ...etc.

About the Interview Meme: Religion

Various people have asked various other people: “If you had to choose some other belief system, what would it be?”
This is such a cool question! So cool that I want to answer it:
I would be Zoroastrian. (No, they don’t take converts, but we’re talking theoretically here, anyway. Because it goes along with everything you think is true:
The Universe was built as a cosmic battleground for good and evil, in which you are intimately involved…
There’s a supreme deity, but also lots of intermediate divine beings…
You get to worship fire.
Yeah.
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Realm: Those wacky animals – Subrealm: Cuteness

The Sparrow hath found her an house…
The sparrows in our neighborhood have, for some reason, only recently discovered the air conditioner that’s affixed to the side of the neighboring house right outside our kitchen window. You never used to see them there, but now it seems like there’s always one hanging out there, or a bunch squabbling over who gets to perch on the windowsill.
Or over the old sock.
You see, whoever installed this AC apparently noted that it didn’t completely fill the window frame, creating drafts in winter and inefficiency in summer. So they stuck an old sock in there to block the gap. Trouble is, the sparrows have now discovered it, and think that it would make ideal nesting material. Unfortunately for the sparrows, the sock seems to be well-constructed, so you not infrequently see a sparrow pulling in vain at a bit of the fabric, and ending up hauling around a dirty sock several times its own size. In the grungy way of the sparrows themselves, its kinda cute.

Squirrel
So on Tuesday I went to an anti-casualization rally, and had persuaded Miti to come along as well. There were a hundred or so of us sitting on folding chairs on Church Street. In front of us was one of the speakers, who was clearly also a major camera nerd, since he’d brought along an old-fashioned video cam that must have been older than me. The thing was, about half way through he started filming my backpack, which was sitting on the ground. I eventually realized that this was on account of the adolescent squirrel who was investigating it. Having grown up on the Yale campus, he had little fear of humans, and was presumably following the scent of a peanut butter sandwich.
He wandered around the chairs for the rest of the rally, until we started to leave. At that point, though, we all got up and started making a lot of noise, and taking away the chairs. With his universe dissolving and cover disappearing, he ran for the only piece of cover available…
…which happened to be Miti’s skirt.
So we had this terrified little squirrel clinging to her shoe and refusing to let go. In the end, she had to pick him up in her skirt and carry him to the nearest piece of shrubbery. “I just hope I don’t get fleas,” was her only comment.
From fleas we went on to talk about lice, and thence to the Great Freshman Louse Epidemic of 1997. Good times.