animals

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Which Animals Don’t Have Tails? (I Had To Google It)

January 19, 2014 at 9:10 pm , by 

3 years, 2 months.

Disclaimer/incentive to read this: May contain unintentional potty humor of a 3 year-old.

Dear Jack,

On the way to school Friday morning, you broke about 5 minutes worth of silence to announce:

“Tigers have tails, so they don’t poop. And pandas, too. They have tails but they don’t really like to poop. But pandas are not bears.”

I should point out here that you weren’t trying to be funny… you were completely serious, not smiling at all. Your tone was very informative.

As I listened to you teach me about the bathroom preferences of animals, I began (privately) processing your logic.

I began thinking about how if pandas specifically don’t like to poop, does that mean other animals enjoy it?

Also, I tried to make a connection between having a tail and not pooping. Why would having a tail affect that?

I began wondering about the alternative- where would the food go that animals eat?

Does the tail serve as a bit of a trap door to keep it all in?

This thought process occurred during an intensive 8 second period, before I decided to ask you a follow-up question:

What about fish?

“Fish have tails in the water, so they don’t poop,” you quickly answered.

For the first couple of hours of the day after I dropped you off at school, I was trying to think of animals that don’t have tails. No luck.

Finally, I Googled “animals that don’t have tails,” to find out the few exceptions to the rule.

Here’s the list of animals I found, according to the Internet, that don’t have tails:

Frogs (though they do when they are young), gorillas, apes, chimpanzees, orangutans, octopuses, clams, and starfish. Plus, certain spiders and insects; depending on a person’s definition of “animal.”

So if you rule out marine life, too, it’s pretty much certain primates that don’t have tails. I never realized so few animals, mammals in particular, have no tail.

Basically, your logic says that because humans don’t have tails, that’s why they poop.

In my 32 years on this planet, I’ve never thought how few animals have tails. I must thank you, Son, for bringing this to my attention.

Of course, you’re using the “tail concept” to say that’s why most animals don’t poop.

If only you had a tail, potty training would be a lot easier… according to your logic, at least!

 

 

Love, Daddy

 

Note: This is an opinion piece of the author (and his son) and does not reflect the scientific community. For example, panda bears really are bears; it’s red pandas that are not.

 

Photo Sources- Shutterstock.com:

Young Sumatran Tiger Walking.

Giant Panda Bear In Tree.

Old Silverback Chimpanzee.

(Memes created by Nick Shell.)

2 Comments Posted on Nostalgia, People, Spirituality, Storytelling, Uncategorized, Writing

The Curious Case of the Sports Agnostic: Some Guys Just Don’t Care About Sports and They’re Okay with That

Religion and sports are alike in that while they both consist of plenty of true followers (the sincerely devoted), they have their fair share of agnostics (the apathetic yet open-minded) and naturally, some atheists (the passionately opposed).

I was born into a family where sports, for all practical purposes, simply did not exist.  We never talked about them, never watched them, and really, never played them.  Of course there was my 2nd grade year playing baseball- turns out, I was pretty decent.  And my 5th and 6th grade years of basketball- not so decent. There was no lofty moral issue we had against sports; it’s just that virtually no one on either side of my family gave them any thought.  Except my Uncle Al.

My mom’s brother Al has always been a huge University of Alabama football team fan- for every year of my childhood, thanks to him, I never was without several Alabama t-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers, and whatever else kind of proper memorabilia I would need as a kid growing up in the state of Alabama, where deciding your allegiance to either the University of Alabama or Auburn was only second to whether or not you had accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior.

Even now, on the front license plate holder of my Honda Element, I have a University of Alabama fan plate.  Beyond knowing the coach’s name (Nick Saban; easy name to remember since it’s so similar to mine), I can’t tell you much about the team in recent years other than last year was good for them, as was 1992, and that Bear Bryant died in 1983, less than a month after he retired.  But I am an Alabama fan, as opposed to Auburn.  And even if I’m their worst fan ever, I’m still a fan.  But that is the extent of my affiliation with anything in the world of sports.

There’s no way around it: I’m weird for being a guy who doesn’t care about sports.  Guys are clearly supposed to care about sports.  Throughout my whole life, I’ve tried to convince myself that I’m missing out.  That all those Saturday afternoons and Monday nights when I’m spending my time and efforts doing anything else, I should be in front of the TV watching the game.  And that for all the games I miss, I should if nothing else, check the scores online to have something to talk about with other guys the next day.

That despite the fact that team players are traded every season, I myself should stay loyal to certain teams.  Despite the fact that sports stars are multimillionaires while school teachers often make less $40,000 a year, I should still worship sports figures.  And though the outcome of each game and each season doesn’t actually affect reality, it does in the minds of sports fans, so therefore it should matter in my mind.

My apathy towards sports has a lot to do with the fact in my mind, sports aren’t logical.  I do see how sports feed that human instinct to replicate war in some way when we ourselves aren’t actually fighting, similar to how most young wild animals “play fight” to prepare each other to eventually kill for food and defend themselves and/or family members.   But I can’t see how or why sports should be relevant or important in my life to the degree that they are for so many people.  Clearly though, I’m the odd man out here.  And clearly, it’s my view of sports, not sports themselves, that is irrelevant.

I am a sports agnostic, not a sports atheist.  In other words, I’m cool about it.  I just know that people have fun playing and watching sports, so I respect that.  I’m still invited to Super Bowl Parties- because despite not knowing the rules of football, I can still have a good time with people who are having a good time, no matter what they’re doing.  And who knows, maybe in the back of their minds, sports fans hope to convert me once I finally see what I’m missing.  Maybe one day I will finally “get it”.

I have been asked since my first year of high school why it is that I can name any celebrity’s height or ethnicity, what year any song or movie came out, or why I have such a vivid memories of trivial conversations and events that no one else would ever care to remember.  Here’s why:  Most men occupy a good amount of their passion and their memories to sports.  I don’t.  I have to fill it with something.  My passion is writing, and those odd details and stories are the magic stuff of what I write.  If I cared about sports, this website wouldn’t exist, and you would have spent the last couple of minutes doing something else, instead of reading this.  Like watching sports.

4 Comments Posted on Spirituality, Uncategorized

The Modern Day Tower of Babel, Perhaps (The Internet and Online Social Networks)

If twenty years ago someone had tried to describe to us what the Internet was and how drastically it would change our lives, we would be as lost someone trying to watch LOST for the first time starting with Season 4. In 1993, Time magazine did a cover story about predictions of future technology involving the way people would share information. Vaguely, they were seeing a glimpse of the World Wide Web. But the way they presented it was more like a form of cable TV that would have at least 500 channels.

Instead, a year later in 1994 my 8th grade science teacher Bill Martin showed our class this weird way he could use the classroom phone line and his computer to talk to other scientists across the country, instantly. That was my introduction to the Internet. Three years later, the Internet became less of a weird thing that I could only observe from a distance, as some of my friends with Internet let me aimlessly wander through thousands of websites at their house. By 2000, I had my own hotmail account and my own daily access to the Internet.

But even ten years ago, the Internet was much more primal. For casual users like me, all I really did was catch up with distant family and friends through e-mail and use MSN’s search to look at websites that had trivia about the ‘80’s. And I didn’t know any better; I thought it was awesome.

Now in 2010, life on the Internet is completely different. More concise. When I need a good picture, I’ve got Google Images. When I need knowledge on any subject, I’ve got Wikipedia. When I need a video clip, I’ve got YouTube. And to keep in daily contact with family, friends, and people I had one class with in college and barely remember, there is facebook. Those four websites ARE the Internet to me.

The building of the Tower of Babel has for some reason always interested me: After Noah and his immediate family survived the world-wide flood, and waited almost a year inside the ark for the water to recede from the land, they were told by God to “fill the Earth” and for the first time ever, to kill and eat animals (the first ten generations of people were vegetarians). In other words, move to a new land and have large families to repopulate the world (Genesis 9).

Instead, within a few hundred years most of these people were still living in the same area they started in. They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” Then, in an act that reminds me of myself as a 10 year-old boy dragging a rake through a giant ant bed, God decided to “confuse” the language of the people (Genesis 11). From there, it appears to me that the people of each of the same language regrouped and moved to a new land, eventually forming new countries, as God originally wanted to them to do.

Several thousands of years later, mankind has successfully filled the Earth. We now have almost 7,000 different languages, while English is arguably the most universal. But with the capabilities and practicality of the Internet, we have formed an abstract, intangible form of the Tower of Babel. Technically. Sort of. Maybe. It’s at least got me thinking.

Every time I’ve seen any sort of worldwide system of anything in the Bible, it’s always been a bad thing. When mankind finds a way to harness too much knowledge and/or power, God doesn’t like it- as people tend to depend more on each other and themselves. From Adam and Eve’s eyes being opened to the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis, to the end of the world involving the mysterious “mark of the beast” (some sort of universal personal ID providing a way for people to pay for goods and services) in Revelation.

Then again, what better way for the fortunate to bless the less fortunate then by using the communication of the Internet to give and set up help for the needy.

Maybe I’m the stoic eccentric man holding the sign with the phrase “THE END IS NEAR”. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence. But I still love technology.

Leave a comment Posted on Nostalgia, Storytelling, Uncategorized

Animalspeak Volume 3

Twenty-two years ago (November 1987) in our first grade class, my teacher Ms. Sparks gave us all a blank sheet of paper and told us to draw a picture of something we were thankful for.  I was excited.  Thirty minutes later, our teacher walked by everyone’s desk to see the art we had accomplished.  As she came closer to me, I heard her reading off what each of my fellow students said they were thankful for.

“My family.”  “My friends.”  “My parents.”  “My sister.”  “My brother.”

Those were the things I was hearing.  As I looked up from my drawing, I started to realize that maybe mine was a little bit different that everyone else’s.  Ms. Sparks looked down at my picture.  “Animals.”  I was six year-old at the time, but I somehow was keen enough to notice that she that my drawing was weird.

“Yes, animals.  We can be thankful for the animals.”  She went on to the next student, trying to hide the confused look on her face.

I had drawn a picture of a picnic table.  On top of the table were several live animals: a fox, a raccoon, a cat, a bird, a dog, a possum, a squirrel, and I want to say… a horse.  (I really liked the Nick at Nite reruns of Mr. Ed back then.)  At the top of the page, I appropriately titled my masterpiece with an orange crayon:  ANIMALS.

 

Not necessarily animals that I ate.  Just animals.  I had a pet goldfish that I had won a few weeks before at the fair that I named Nippy.  (It was cold outside when I tossed the ping-pong ball in the goldfish bowl.)  But that was really the only exposure I had to animals.  No other pets than Nippy the Goldfish.

I’m still trying to figure out why all these random animals would show up on a picnic table and why I was thankful for them.  Kids are weird.

 

Animalspeak Table of Contents

Volume 1 http://wp.me/pxqBU-f2
Volume 2 http://wp.me/pxqBU-f8
Volume 3 http://wp.me/pxqBU-gu