Also now I'm self-conscious about how middlebrow my entire list of post topics is.
How is he supposed to know what he's going to be when he turns 20?
I assume half of them will interpret it as career, and half of them will be of the "You will be loving! Caring! Strong! Kind!" variety, which may ring a bit hollow if he is not feeling particularly loving/caring/strong/kind.
You don't think this topic likes Malcolm Gladwell and NPR?
3: No, but heebie's anxiety about being perceived as middlebrow is totally middlebrow.
Unless he's fairly unusual, most likely when he turns 20 he will be drunk.
It's hard to picture being twenty and not finding such predictions completely empty and a little annoying. Or being 35, except people don't make rosy predictions about life at 35 for fear of drawing attention to the gap.
Maybe they could predict he'll be a total failure so he looks good by comparison. Dear Jonah, if you're reading this you unexpectedly stayed out of prison- congrats!
I'm sure you've all seen it, but the thread needs a link to this for completeness.
"By now, you've been dead for seven years."
Jonah,
Looking back on all the terrors of the last 19 years, you may wonder, how did it all go so wrong? Why has it come to this - that each and every survivor of those of us who attended your first birthday party has sworn that we will have our vengeance?
If only, by some chance, you had stumbled across the warnings in this time capsule before the appointed time, and heeded them. How dofferent the world we would live in - and how many more of us would live in it!
Jonah,
Extrapolating based on past experience, you will not be able to read this at age 20. You will still wet yourself regularly and cry inarticulately when your physical or emotional needs are not met.
Based on your birth weight of 7.5 pounds, and the fact that it tripled in your first year of life outside the womb, by now you are a 26-billion pound monster. Please bear in mind that your slightest sudden movement could level cities, and behave with commensurate caution.
I can only hope that you have no younger siblings.
The link in 10 is very good. I even watched the making-of.
Both 10 and the making of video are great.
I want more in the vein benquo is mining
Dear Jonah,
Your lease is about to expire.
Sincerely,
your loving parents
Jonah Who Will Be -12 In The Year 2000
Jonah,
If you're reading this note, you're now an avid scuba diver. Congratulations! That sounds fun.
We're all really sorry about the global warming thing. We tried, I swear.
20: in the more sad/serious line of global climate change, my producer is making some film for malaysia's tourism agency and he had to film an interview with a woman who studies tigers and is in her mid-thirties. she's spent countless days deep in the jungle (you do actually have to hack your way along with a machete) finding tiger tracks, tiger shit, various other indications tigers have passed by (severely traumatized civet cats who have unexpectedly voided their bowels? score!). she has never seen a tiger except at the zoo. not even one time. I seriously feel bad for my kids when I'm like, here's this probably-irrevocably-fucked-up planet, sorry about all the awesome stuff we destroyed, later haterz!
Is 21 sad because global warming makes tigers shy?
No, it just makes it more uncomfortable to hang out in jungles looking for them.
If I had to spend countless days in the jungle for any reason, not encountering a tiger would count as a plus.
On a more serious note, it is actually really difficult to see anything very much in jungle, and tigers in particular. Best estimate (from India, but anyway) is that there are generally 6-10 tigers per hundred square kilometres.(http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-2110.1)
Visibility, in a jungle, is about 5-20 metres (based on my extensive experience of jungles).
So even if tigers simply wander around randomly without heeding humans (or vice versa), at any given moment in jungle there is roughly a 100,000 to 1 chance of a tiger being within sight of you. (And it could be behind you. Or it could be dark.)
Your chance of seeing a tiger is of the same order as your chance, if you live in Washington DC, of recognising a Supreme Court Justice walking down the street, assuming that you are extremely short sighted and don't wear glasses.
A fellow student got a PhD place studying the hunting behaviour of predators on the East African savannah. Sounds awesome, right? Driving around the Masai Mara, following lions and jackals and cheetahs around watching them take down antelope?
No.
Turns out that following predators around and watching them is extremely inefficient and uncertain. The best way to study hunting behaviour - what they hunt and kill at what time of the year - is to look at their faeces for bone fragments. And you don't have to go to Kenya to do that.
She spent three years in a windowless lab in Birmingham, receiving regular airmail packages covered in Kenyan stamps and full of frozen lion shit, which she would then defrost and sift through with tweezers.
In answer to the OP, the best message for the capsule would of course be something along these lines.
http://abitoffryandlaurie.co.uk/sketches/a_word_timothy
21: When we went to the beach, we saw a nice program put on my a woman who studies sea turtles and their nesting. Even though her main job is to find all the sea turtle nests in her area and study them, she'd never seen them lay eggs except in another state.
I felt vaguely bad that I'd previously asked her what a turtle egg omelet tasted like.
And still a little curious because I didn't get an answer.
I learned three things from the turtle biologists. First, it turns out that turtles don't always find their way back to the beach on which they were born. Second, they know this because every single turtle nest gets dug up by a turtle biologist and they DNA test one egg (outside and inside, so they can separate mom and dad). Third is that you can go to prison if you dig up a turtle nest unless you are a federally-certified turtle biologist.
I also learned that if the turtle gets too lazy to put the nest high enough up the shore to keep it safe from the highest tides of the summer, your friendly neighborhood turtle biologist will move the nest to higher ground. In the interest of partisan balance, since 2011 the biologist is required, after moving the nest, to leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged on top of the nest and give the eggs of 15 minute lecture about the damaging effects of a culture of dependency.
Also, calling someone a turtle egg is a really serious insult in Mandarin.
Jonah,
I'm sure that by now your mother has told you that I'm your real father.
If not, well, now you know.
Love,
Uncle Frank
32: Does it matter what type of turtle? Because sea turtle eggs seem more interesting.
Jonah- You can go to Nineveh if you have to. It'll be just fine in the end. Also, avoid sea travel.
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Holy Jesus Fuck, conservatives! This is how you want fight Obamacare??? Seriously????
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A child born in 2013 will have never known a time in which most political ads didn't consist of a puppet staring at a woman's crotch.
36 is indeed extraordinary. "Brand ambassadors"??
36 -- Really, in a bunch of states, Blue Cross should be advertising 'don't let them issue you an Obamacare card, buy Blue Cross.' It would probably work.
22: no, more that we just killed all the tigers generally. ajay: I know they're really rare, but my uncle sonny managed to fucking shoot one at some point in the 1950s. this gives me a sneaking suspicion that they were easier to find when there were more of them. now, I know everyone will say it was a canned hunt and that he was duped by villagers who had caught it with the body of a drugged orangutan, but my uncle sonny is hardcore. he forged documents so he could lie about his age and join the marines at 16 in WWII. up until 4 years ago he would still go into his montana ranch in winter, and they had to snowshoe in! I can't help but feel other people would have used snowmobiles, but that's not the uncle sonny way! he is a wizard cocksucker trout fly fisherman. there is no way in hell he would gave gone for some 'livingston sahib, we have anstounding tiger hunt possibilities here' bullshit.
this is a man who probably got up to go hunting or fishing a good tenth of the days of his life, at 4:30, exactly as cheerful as you can imagine a person like him to be, with a thermos of coffee prepared by his loving wife their cook, ready to go kill something. if you have every watched a hollywood movie from the 40s and wondered, did people talk like that then, or did they just pretend, for movies? --uncle sonny talks like that. but he was a conservationist! he and my g-dad and bouvier beale and some other dudes donated land they used to hunt on that's in bridgehampton to be a wildlife refuge! I can only imagine they had shot every pheasant there.
36: sweet jesus!!! I...they...but??/? interpret this for me, people, I must sleep.
I know they're really rare, but my uncle sonny managed to fucking shoot one at some point in the 1950s.
This, obviously, is no more than I had expected from al's family.
But also the point about a tiger hunt is that you don't just wander around in the vague hope of stumbling across a tiger: you go to an area where there's known to be a tiger and you stake out a kid in order to lure it with deceptively tempting bleats while you, the shikari, hide up a tree in a machan with your bundook and wait for the tiger to come into view so you can shoot the blightah. Probably ups your odds quite a bit. But not really an option for a biologist who just wants to see one going about its business.
Either that or you do it with 800 beaters with cymbals and fireworks and you on the back of an elephant.
Admitting I get all my knowledge of tiger hunting from murder mysteries, aren't hunted tigers either baited in (young goat under a tree or, probably not super common, using someone you want to kill) or hunters go out to where there is a problem tiger eating goats/humans? I don't think it's a random search/transects like I imagine tiger biologists do. So as a biologist your odds of seeing a tiger are much lower than if you're a hunter (insert fancy modelling here).
And all the old conservationists used to be crazy hunters. I love those old guys.
you go to an area where there's known to be a tiger and you stake out a kid
Other parents are so much more imaginative than I am in coming up with ways to threaten their kids.
I pwn hydrobatidae with added Hindustani. Jai Ajay!
Admitting I get all my knowledge of tiger hunting from Bungalow Bill, I think 43.1 is mostly right.
43.2 is wrong though. My father once had to entertain the late unlamented Julian Amery when he visited Pakistan to shoot peacocks with some aristocrats. Dad said he was the most unpleasant person he had ever met (and Dad had been a German POW), and I imagine the tiger hunters were much the same only more so.
I get all my knowledge of tiger hunting from Stalky & Co. "The bleating of the kid excites the tiger."
46.2 Valid point. I'm sure they'd hate me as a person and as a scientist and the feelings would be mutual. But I love reading about them (they're such characters) and that they protected great swaths of land.
You have to be at least a little unpleasant to get the aristocrats loaded into the gun.
I have a friend who married into this family of super wealthy aristocratic (US version) hunters, and what's striking is that they're training the kids to do it. Lots of Facebook pics from tr ranch with the 10 year old girl, bow or gun, and downed antelope.
People who aren't very aristocratic do the same thing with kids, except shooting deer instead of antelope.
Anyhow, to see a tiger all you had to do was to go to that guy's apartment in Harlem, and avoid being eaten by the alligator in the other room. Until the Man shut down the fun with stupid rules about not having a tiger and an alligator in your apartment.
40: But did he know all there was to know about subtropical jungle and tigers? Other skills being wizard cocksucker granted, but I imagine he'd have had to rely on some people.
I was just reading Three Cups of Deceit by Jon Krakauer about David Mortenson and was treated in the footnotes to the fact that the main guy who showed Mortenson around Pakistan was a con artist who was, among other things, selling him a lot of counterfeit money to do his shopping / souveniring with, knowing the merchants wouldn't suspect cash coming from a foreigner.
he visited Pakistan to shoot peacocks with some aristocrats
Who the hell shoots peacocks? Why not stab a unicorn while you are at it
Who the hell shoots peacocks?
I grew up near the LA County Arboretum, which is full of peacocks, and they're annoying as hell. Seriously, they do that call all the damn time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWTABEOFYoY
||Is anything better than this? No, there is not. FUCK YOUR POOL! FUCK YOUR POOL BITCHES!.|>
That is sort of funny. Also wow the NL West stank this year.
Who the hell puts a swimming pool in a baseball stadium? Might as well hunt peacocks.
I hadn't really known about that pool before. That's fucking stupid. Way to make the Marlins stadium look classy, Arizona.
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Last minute biz trip to Germany next week. They have, like, beer and stuff this time of year, right?
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.. because, you know, it's possible you're going to the part without beer.
What's worse is the pool is in a luxury box. So it's not even regular fans with tickets, it's used for corporate schmooze events. Still it's marginally less stupid than the Marlins' in-stadium nightclub and tropical bird colored firework shooting machine.
Hm, the nightclub also includes a pool, so yeah, that might be stupider. Sounds like more fun, I guess, and god knows anything's better than watching the Marlins play.
More breaking news re this story that no one here but me cares about. Fuck you John McCain! Fuck your pool!
42, 43 etc: OK, this answers one of the main questions I had about tiger hunting, which was, if you're close enough to the tiger to kill it, isn't it totally able to kill you too, what with the jumping 3 meters or whatever and weighing like 600lbs? even if you shot and successfully killed it as it sprang, its lifeless body would still kill you. so, OK, on a platform, right.
I saw a tiger in India (Bandhavgarh National Park). We had a guide who drove us around in a jeep listening for animal distress calls that indicated that a tiger was around.
Then when we got close, we got on an elephant that took us deeper into the jungle, off the road. They said that the tiger wouldn't attack the elephant. We were probably less than 20 feet from it.