A king has no sons, no daughters, and no queen. For this reason he must decide who will take the throne after he dies. To do this he decides that he will give all of the children of the kingdom a single seed. Whichever child has the largest, most beautiful plant will earn the throne; this being a metaphor for the kingdom. At the end of the contest all of the children came to the palace with their enormous and beautiful plants in hand. After he looks at all of the children’s pots, he finally decides that the little girl with an empty pot will be the next Queen. Why did he choose this little girl over all of the other children with their beautiful plants.
The seeds were all dead (burned, fake, etc.). The other kids cheated and got different seeds and planted them. The little girl didn’t cheat and was not able to grow anything because the seed was dead. She was the only one who didn’t cheat.
damn
Nothing like original fairy tales!
i get the moral it’s trying to convey but that king is an idiot and the kingdom’s doomed. you don’t appoint an honest kid who will forthrightly admit a failure like that to leadership of a country, you put that kid in charge of like… the army, or something. the department of agriculture.
i’d send out dead seeds, then appoint the kid with the biggest and most beautiful plant anyway. ideally the same kind of plant as the dead seeds were from. and ideally a kid with a really good pokerface. that kid knows:
a) how to perceive failure early (a well developed second plant means they knew how soon the first seeds should sprout and didn’t fuck around when they didn’t)
b) how to fix the situation (a second plant of the same species means they got someone to help them identify the seeds and plant more, or are observant enough to do it themselves)
c) how to get the best people for a job in to do it (kids aren’t great gardeners. a beautiful science project probably means mom did all the work— just what you want from a child ruler and their regent)
all around, that kid (or their mom) is the kind of devious results-oriented bald-faced liar you want to go toe-to-toe with the lords of your country and the rulers of your neighbors. not a little kid who admits defeat so early and in a situation with such high stakes. ‘whoops i didn’t grow a plant’ sounds a lot less sweet when you phrase it like ‘i give up on ruling my country’.
you know, i think i’d also send agents out to encourage the kids to destroy each other’s plants. let’s see who’s good at seige warfare, too.
In the spring of 1943 in Germany, my grandfather, who had been separated from his company and had lost his dogtags (therefore was fundamentally alone and terrified he would be shot on sight) had finally had enough.
And punched a Nazi off his motorcycle.
To have heard my grandpa tell it, “I just suckerpunched that man right off his bike and took off down that road screaming, “What the hell! What the hell!” and I don’t even remember how fast I was going.”
a cute girl casually came out to me the other day and I handled it so gracelessly that I might as well have just stuck my entire foot in my mouth instead
anyway we’re dating now and the first time she kissed me I said “thanks for that, I appreciate it” because I have no idea how to function
I proposed to her twice (with & without a ring, the first time it was without a ring because I was worried she was gonna propose first) and she cried both times
Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
did u actually punch a nazi in a food lion tell the story please
i call it the time that @flaminganakin became my lawyer and spent an amount of time panicking. here it is, the highly dramaticized because it is not actually that impressive story:
so it was one of those days, you know the ones. where you’re just having a bad existence, and you’re not about to stand up for any bullshit, no siree, not on this here day. the kind of day where you just really want to choke people for chewing too loud, seriously, lady. or strangle people for eating pork rinds. they’re too loud, and the smell makes me nauseous, and i’m not about this life, but i procrastinated on the grocery shopping so there i am, suffering my way through food lion. fucking pork rinds, hate that shit, just eat pringles
anyway, i grab my hamburger helper, and i’m in the aisle waiting for the moment i can not be here. i knocked over a stand, earlier, and it sucked, and i just wanted to leave.
the dude in front of me pulls out this galaxy - the kind you can land airplanes on, and i’m caught up for a minute thinking about what an ostentatious phone that is. it’s huge. no one needs a phone that huge, i can see what you’re typing from three stories away - wait. what is that. so i lean around him to peer closer, and you know what i see? the fucking stormfront website. i’d know that stupid gray face and the ‘boyle’s law’ shit anywhere, that’s the fucking stormfront website, i’m losing my mind here. stormfronters are supposed to be, like, the moon. they have no business being out during the day, and yet, here they are, using up perfectly good air boy please go apologize to some plants for wasting their hard work
so this guy, he’s reading. intently. he puts his shit on the conveyor, mostly ignoring the cashier, a lovely black lady. you can see where this is going. but, as it is, she’s not going fast enough for him, and then this bitchass starts yelling slurs at her. really awful shit, like ‘go back to the circus if you can’t work a computer monkeyass ‘n****r’! i lose it the second he yells ‘n****r’ at her and i turn him around with his shoulder and clock him in the face. it was totally worth the sore hand, i can verify that the look on his face was the best thing i had ever seen in my life. the cashier nods to the door, i got a free box of hamburger helper, personal pride, and i haven’t been to jail yet
he may have not been a full nazi, only a racist, but it was worth it anyway
Student: “Miss, my little brother in your 4th grader class says you speak seven languages. Is that true?”
Me: “Yes.”
Student: “He says you speak Mongolian. Is that true?”
Me: “Yes.”
Student: “Can you say something”
Me: *explains, in Mongolian, that although I speak Mongolian, being that this is an English school, I am supposed to teach classes in English, so I have to speak English, sorry*
Collective Students: “Wow! Amazing!!!” *cheering*
One student slowly raises hand: “Miss, does that mean that you can…understand us when we speak Mongolian?”
Me:*Slowly leans over desk and puts on an evil grin. Single nod*
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red
one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the
number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War,
and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on
the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in
December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a
small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His
children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was
annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then,
Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized
that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him,
ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your
mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper
yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad
looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had
children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the
phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You
know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering
Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and
Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam
says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was
a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,”
Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re
sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’
Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called
the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat
Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks
like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour
and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people
saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor.
And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a
briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she
says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s
known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
he made my wife and i (i’m a woman) a giant banner for our one year anniversary
when i was pregnant, the baby was kicking and when he touched my belly, the baby stopped and he called him a little shit
he once called and left a voicemail asking how to spell styrofoam
he flipped a table bc he saw someone hit a dog
he beat skrim in 4 days
he served in the korean war and when he came home, he learned korean so if he ever ran into a korean vet, he could “give them the same respect he’d give an american vet”
my son has two moms and there was a “special guy in your life” day at his school for father’s day so my grandpa went and showed up in dress pants and a pressed shirt bc he “didn’t want to embarrass him”. also, there was a little boy who didn’t have anyone there and grandpa asked if he could be his “special guy” and the little boy beamed
he knows all of the secrets to the zelda games
he’s had 4 open heart surgeries and can still kick your ass
my grandpa is having another major surgery so those of you who love him as much as i do, please keep him in your thoughts. i’ll try and keep y'all updated
his surgery is scheduled for the Jan 13th of this year. wish us luck
this couple is the cutest couple i’ve ever seen on house hunters i’m yelling
it got better
all they wanted was a spacious home for their future kids, a big window to put their xmas tree and a staircase they could take prom pics on w/ their future kids??? and they got that!!! i’m so happy for them
