Just what the title says. I’ve foolishly enrolled in a graduate diploma for high school teaching as long as I’m here in New Zealand not working on my PhD (and, uh… to be honest I’m less than enthusiastic about going back to the US in August for the start of the next academic year), and I’m a bit embroiled in course work at the moment, especially since I’m technically in seven different classes that are all responding independently to New Zealand’s third lockdown and we’ve all completely lost track of what we’re supposed to be doing. Hopefully there will be an episode next week, along with part 2 of this thing.
No “A Pokémon Trainer Is You” this week
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Pokémaniacal 
An earthquake also occurred, you ok?
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…y’know what, this is the first I’ve heard of it and I may need to look into that myself
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So far Auckland appears to be safe; the earthquake itself was way out in the Kermadecs, and I think Great Barrier Island and the Coromandel Peninsula make it difficult for tsunamis to reach the city
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Sounds like you have a lot on your plate. Take as long as you need!
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Response to Twitter: the immortality of the crab… carcinization? Has that been a thing long enough for idioms to be built around it? And if not, why did Spaniards think that crabs are immortal when they are regularly killed and eaten by humans?
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The ultimate perfection of crabs is an immutable truth which has been self-evident since the earliest days of human philosophy
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Ok, I can tell that Chris is joking but I’m not sure if you are, and, like, dude? You know that this isn’t serious?
I’m brazilian, and we have a very similar saying- “thinking about the death of the sheep*.” It’s less odd, but it doesn’t make sense either, and has similar enough sentence structure I think it’s inherited. And suffice to say, it doesn’t mean we believe sheep have particularly interesting deaths to mull over, it means you were thinking about something dumb or un-noteworthy. (Do americans believe they can actually stretch their neck all the way to have their head in the clouds? Why, when anyone who tries fails?) It’s meant to sound funny, brute slapstick with a funny word.
Plus, evolution has only been a concept for around 150 years since Darwin, widespread to the public in significant manner for less than that, and trivia about convergent evolution in marine biology still isn’t something most laymen (especially those with poor access to education, such as older demographics) would even be guaranteed to understand, let alone know about. Carcinization is nerd shit.
*note- just in case someone gets curious, I’m mostly sure the shift from immortal crab to dead sheep wasn’t a christian reference to The Lamb who Died For Our Sins, as using the word “bezerra” in religious conotation would be about the same as praying “our pops who art in heaven…”
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So what you’re saying is that the only thing dumber than thinking about the immortality of the crab is thinking too hard about the phrase “thinking about the immortality of the crab”?
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Yeah mostly. Also engaging in Brazil’s only popular form of patriotism, which is showing up out of nowhere when we’re even tangentially acknowledged and yapping about our country.
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