Denim Blunders, Reflections and General Nonsense.

[Double 0 Soul]

19 minutes ago, Geeman said:

Cats themselves are bastards.

I know mine is.. please don’t tell him I said that!

[AlientoyWorkmachine]

As a start, you can blame the cat owners who let them outside for playing a not insignificant role in the declining bird populations. ☺️

 

[Duke Mantee]

4 hours ago, MJF9 said:

It's good that you're taking the lead mate 🐶

That kind of humour gives me paws for thought

[MJF9]

^^ and mice too

We had a cat when we were growing up. Lovely, lively tabby moggy me Dad brought home from the pub when he took my little sister after school. Lots of stuff came from that pub. She was a prolific hunter (the cat, not my sister). Often we'd come home from school and she'd have a row of dead mice lined up neatly on the window sill while looking up at us all proud. She also loved to lay in wait, catch the bird / mouse, then torture it by letting it escape then catching it again, then repeat. We'd do all we could to help the poor animals but alas, most often, it was too late. 

In contrast, my mother later got a fancy persian cat. Polar opposite. More Garfield that one. Sitting snoozing and eating all day. But, unlike Garfield, not much fun.

[Double 0 Soul]

Same with Len

..cept he eats the mice

..he'll eat the entire thing.. crunching and swallowing the head whole but he always leaves a bit of dangly entraily inards

What the heck is that bit they won't eat.. surely it can't be that much worse than any other part of the mouse

[MJF9]

^ such a cute thing as well

Ours would sometimes eat its prey. My mother used to scream on the few occasions the cat had snuck a mouse or bird in and you could hear it cracking bones behind the sofa... nothing pleasant ever came of those episodes... or even when it brought a canary in and the feathers were everywhere... it even hid a mouse in one of our shoes... other than that she was a nice cat... honest...

Edited November 1, 2023 by MJF9

[oomslokop]

9 hours ago, Maynard Friedman said:

I agree with this (especially as I am one) and am thinking of having ACOAB tattooed across my knuckles.

i'll be on the lookout for a denim-clad man with six fingers in one hand next time i'm in london tawn. 

[Maynard Friedman]

^ I’ll give you a high-six if we bump into each other Ooms.

[Dr_Heech]

12 hours ago, Double 0 Soul said:

... but he always leaves a bit of dangly entraily inards

What the heck is that bit they won't eat.. surely it can't be that much worse than any other part of the mouse

There's something about the toxins left in the gut which can be too acidic for digestion? Anyway l remember as a youngun we had a big old ginger Tom cat and he'd leave plenty of those bluish innard thingy's lying around after mouse  consumption. The worst bit was, next day when you came into the kitchen or lounge half asleep in the mornings with bare feet, only to get a cold mouse intestine stuck to the bottom of one of them. Yeesh

 

[Double 0 Soul]

Yep that's it.. It's mind blowing how they even know

 

Their understanding of anatomy must be more advanced than the ancient Egyptians!.. even if they can distinguish this small bluish worm from any other part of the mouse's digestive tract how do they know that's the part they can't digest without many trials and errors.. some people have food allergies for years without getting to the bottom of it, i can only assume it gives off a smell even worse than the rest of the mouse intestines.

 

We need to give them the benefit of the doubt, I reckon.. maybe they're not the lovable little killing machines we once thought they were.. maybe they're doing animal autopsies to further their understanding then eating their research for dinner.. I've already come to terms with the fact that the cat is my intellectual superior

[Hopethisoneisnttaken]

^ some actions can be costly enough that the avoidance is genetic. However in this case I think it’s a combination of social learning and individual learning. (i.e mommy won’t eat it and that one time you felt rebellious and tried to nibble on it you got a severe stomach ache). It’s also been showed that there’s a very quick and strong tendency to avoid foods if you think they caused you some disturbance in the gut even once. It’s different with food allergies since the reaction is usually not gut related. 

[Maynard Friedman]

Dogs>cats.

Fin.

[Double 0 Soul]

We got our cat as a 6 week old kitten @Hopethisoneisnttaken like most domestic cats, he wasn’t allowed outside for the first 4 months so there was no social learning .. by the time he was 6 months old he was out catching mice and avoiding the toxic blue worm.. not so much a learning curve than a learning right angle

There was a case in the UK in the early 80s back when I was a kid and Duke was still in his 40s .. we had a severe winter and most folks got their milk via doorstep delivery.. blue tits having never exhibited this behaviour previously started pecking through the silver foil milk cap to get to the cream.. the behaviour was instantly learned and it spread through the country.. so we all awoke to holes in our milk tops.

We started to get plastic milk caps in the years following.. that’ll teach the little bastards!

[Hopethisoneisnttaken]

Nice, I never thought a discussion on a denim forum would venture towards my masters thesis. The blue tits thing started in the 20s as far as I know, but in any case you’re right about that. Although the learning curve might be similar in that case, there’s  a key difference between gaining something very valuable (like the cream of the milk) and dying - you only die once, so it’s relatively rare to genetically act in a death preventing manner without learning at all. But as I said before There are other mechanisms that almost guarantee that you avoid poisonous natural foods, so it might be that just a very small lick of the stomach made your cat understand that it’s not for him. It’s a common thing throughout felines I think. I know tigers and leopards also avoid some stomachs or other organs. Sorry if I bored you to death 😄

[Double 0 Soul]

Not at all.. it’s the core ethos of general nonsense thread!

Regarding avoiding foods.. when my missus was a kid she used to eat fish finger sarnies regularly.. we ate them occasionally as adults then one day I made one for the both of us.. I was fine, she was really ill and accused me of giving her food poisoning.. months passed and we went out for sushi.. when we got home she was super-ill ..  exorcist style total body rejection, she had to take 3 days off work, I was fine.. we continued to eat tuna and smoked salmon so it couldn’t be fish?

Months passed and I got fish and chips from the chippy.. again I was fine and she spent the night on the bathroom floor and 2days in bed.. so she came to the conclusion that it was caused by cod.. her body must have developed an intolerance to it at some point for some reason? .. but the effects are so severe so couldn’t narrow it down to just cod.. maybe she’s fine with coley, pollock, halibut and other white fish or maybe not? which I think is how a cat would react if eating a mouse whole made it ill.. it would still kill the mouse for fun just not eat them.. but for a cat to start dissecting them and removing parts of their innards just confirms they’re evil geniuses!

Edited November 2, 2023 by Double 0 Soul

[Hopethisoneisnttaken]

That’s interesting. I have something similar with shrimp, but also my throat gets shut. It was actually pretty mild when it started and later on became more and more severe. Started when I was 21. But I didn’t have a whole lot of shrimp growing up. But yeah cats love dissecting. Ours eat the crickets body but leave the legs as trophies on the front porch. 

[chicote]

I'm really looking forward to further advancements in humans' understanding of some of the things other species seem to have already learned well regarding tolerances for certain kinds of foods. It's really interesting to me how so many people my age, including my partner and several of my close friends, have developed severe intolerances to foods that they were generally able to eat as children. Obviously, there are individual cases, such as my partner, who learned after some testing that they have a rare mutation in their enzymatic system that prevents complete digestion of a pretty wide variety of foods (wheat, most legumes, most eggs, and some starchy or fibrous vegetables) while handling others with no issue whatsoever. But I have noticed a broader, gradual development of digestive and nutritional issues among younger people, which could (and probably does) have many causes: nutrient deficiencies in soil (or bacterial and fungal imbalances in soil, depending on who you ask); nutrient deficiencies in foods themselves; overuse of chemical fertilizers OR improperly processed organic additives; residue from pesticides, insecticides, fungicides and defoliants accumulating in the foods we eat; overuse of antibiotics weakening and destabilizing our microbiomes, and so on... i'm not a real scholar of this stuff but have done a bit of reading over the past couple of years, and notice that people seem to be starting to make connections between all of these emerging fields of research. The news site Civil Eats is a really amazing source of long-form agricultural and food journalism, I've linked to a couple of their articles above for anyone who's interested. I hardly read paywalled news these days but it's been really worth it to me to subscribe to them.

As an aside, when I was working in the Amazon in Ecuador years ago, I spent several days on food-and-medicine gathering trips with Walter, the síndico or political/spiritual leader of the community I was staying in. He would bombard me with information about the medicinal plants we were looking for, much of which I sadly no longer remember, but one thing that stuck with me was his recounting of the process a shaman takes to familiarize themselves with a new species they come across in the jungle. Upon coming across it, the shaman will approach it, study it visually, remember where it is, but mostly leave it alone. They will return home and spend some time thinking of what they found, where it is in the ecosystem, what it's around, and perhaps searching for information about it during a spiritual journey, if they can contact an ancestor or friend of another species who might tell them something of its use. Then they will come back to the plant, and touch it. Then, days later, they will come back and smell it, maybe crushing a leaf or stem in a mortar, but not making any skin contact. Several further trips will get them to the point where they will touch the plant, taste it, infuse it in water, dry and burn it, and so on, to get a sense of whether it is safe to proceed with further experimentation. This process is how, over time, and dozens of generations, humans at least in this part of the world came to such esoteric cures as squeezing the juice from a mushroom into your ear to cure a sinus infection, placing tiny bugs that live in the eyes of toucans into your own eyes to enhance the clarity and intensity of your colour vision, or crushing the berries and leaves of a plant called barbasco and dumping it into a small river to stun (but not harm) fish downstream when hunting. I like to think of our own scientific explorations in the West as a continuation of that same cautious curiosity, and am hopeful that as we move forward into the future, that we gear our findings towards the healing and advancement of ourselves as a species, and as an important but singular link in an endlessly complex and endlessly interrelated web of physical and spiritual life that is, for the most part, struggling towards the same understanding of one another and themselves.

Edited November 2, 2023 by chicote

[Double 0 Soul]

@chicote there is a mushroom in the Amazon called ophiovordyceps unilateralis (Dave would be easier to spell) which can infect ants and control their behaviour remotely like Big Track, during the incubation period they go back to the nest, if ants sense another ant is ill they’ll eject them but not in this case.. once the fungus has taken control of the ants behaviour.. it leaves the nest like a zombie and searches for a climate with perfect humidity for fungal growth, it climbs to a vantage point of exactly 10” from the ground, secures it’s jaws into a leaf on the north face of a plant and waits for its death.. at which point the mushroom sprouts out of the ant and the cycle continues.. it’s how they colonies different areas.. what’s remarkable is the fungus doesn’t affect the ants brain only their muscles so the ant is an unwilling zombie controlled remotely by a puppeteer.

[indigoeagle]

2 hours ago, Double 0 Soul said:

@chicote there is a mushroom in the Amazon called ophiovordyceps unilateralis (Dave would be easier to spell) which can infect ants and control their behaviour remotely like Big Track, during the incubation period they go back to the nest, if ants sense another ant is ill they’ll eject them but not in this case.. once the fungus has taken control of the ants behaviour.. it leaves the nest like a zombie and searches for a climate with perfect humidity for fungal growth, it climbs to a vantage point of exactly 10” from the ground, secures it’s jaws into a leaf on the north face of a plant and waits for its death.. at which point the mushroom sprouts out of the ant and the cycle continues.. it’s how they colonies different areas.. what’s remarkable is the fungus doesn’t affect the ants brain only their muscles so the ant is an unwilling zombie controlled remotely by a puppeteer.

And that's how we get back to cats.
Might explain your propensity to get close to vicious dogs 😉

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/toxoplasmosis-risk-wolves-cats-mice

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022395614002866

 

[Double 0 Soul]

Same with hallucinogenic mushrooms.. the psilocybin has no benefit to them.. altering the pespective of other creatures isn't a defence mechanism, they predate mankind by millenia, it's not a simbiotic partnership so why?

I've read where they've given people a controlled dose of psilocybin and scanned their brains using MRI.. even though it feels like you're brain is working overtime processing thoughts and perspectives you've never previously considered.. according to the research, what is actually happening is a massive reduction in brain traffic .. in other words, the brain stops thinking about bullshit.. what am i having for tea, what jeans am i going to buy next?, i've got to get the kids to school, send those emails ect.. allowing your brain to process thoughts through pathways which wouldn't ordinarily be connected.

[indigoeagle]

1 hour ago, Double 0 Soul said:

 a massive reduction in brain traffic .. in other words, the brain stops thinking about bullshit.. what am i having for tea, what jeans am i going to buy next?, i've got to get the kids to school, send those emails ect.. allowing your brain to process thoughts through pathways which wouldn't ordinarily be connected.

As it says in the Yoga Vasistha:
 

"Even the slightest thought immerses a man in sorrow; when devoid of all thoughts he enjoys imperishable bliss."

Edited November 3, 2023 by indigoeagle

[indigoeagle]

Couldn't find a thread on denim movies/documentaries (there was only one with photos to be posted), so putting it here.

This movie, Denim Hunter, looks pretty entertaining.

 

[tg76]

15 hours ago, Double 0 Soul said:

@chicote there is a mushroom in the Amazon called ophiovordyceps unilateralis (Dave would be easier to spell) which can infect ants and control their behaviour remotely like Big Track, during the incubation period they go back to the nest, if ants sense another ant is ill they’ll eject them but not in this case.. once the fungus has taken control of the ants behaviour.. it leaves the nest like a zombie and searches for a climate with perfect humidity for fungal growth, it climbs to a vantage point of exactly 10” from the ground, secures it’s jaws into a leaf on the north face of a plant and waits for its death.. at which point the mushroom sprouts out of the ant and the cycle continues.. it’s how they colonies different areas.. what’s remarkable is the fungus doesn’t affect the ants brain only their muscles so the ant is an unwilling zombie controlled remotely by a puppeteer.

Stuff viruses its gonna be the mushroom spores that shakes us off the earth. (the girl with all the gifts.)

I read way too many dystopian future books

But I haven't started prepping, live at the top of a hill, haven't installed zombie stopping spikes, basement not full of food or water, torch has no battery, vege garden is not planted for the season. But I do have clothes and art. Oh and a cat called SPUD (better than a pug) and giant carnivorous snails.

This thread is good for my procrastinations.

[Maynard Friedman]

Living in NZ, you don’t really need to fear anything, other than excessive lockdowns 😆

[tg76]

I kinda liked the lockdowns, but I'm in a position of privilege 

Also glad i was protected from the first strains cause the so called lighter / later one that i got at the start of this year has kicked my arse. Most stuff is back to normal 6 months later but my heart is a bit mental now.

Also, I fear the 3 headed monster that is about to be in the boss seats. ew politics.

 

Jeans related one of my ex students is now living in Okinawa doing a weaving and natural dying intern thing, she sent me a whole lot of links to do with ROY saying I feel like you would appreciate this guys work, she's super cool, I might send her my old ROY's for Christmas. 

[Double 0 Soul]

6 hours ago, tg76 said:

This thread is good for my procrastinations.

..and my therapy

I've managed to avoid covid so far.. i spotted an article a while ago which read.. "So You Think You're a Superdodger" .. Oooh! this is me I thought .. I bet i'm like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable..  it went on to say that i've probably got no friends and/or social life.. Huff! that article did nothing for my self esteem

 

There is a young couple who live on the corner of our street with a Cornish Rex called Tofu.. judging by the half dressed manaquins around the house, i think they work in the fashion/garment industry.. one girl is chinese, her partner is white..

They have a drop-box in front of their house and receive a lot of deliveries.. (like most of us nowadays) one of the old geezers who lives on the other side of the road to them (he spends his day gazing out of his window and chatting to passers-by) said to my wife.. "they get a heck'ova lot of deliveries don't they.. do you think they're drug dealers?"

..Y'know, Amazon Prime dropping off your meth.. Hello Fresh delivering your weed?

'Foreign, lesbian, cat loving, vegan, drug dealers'..? that's what you call a minority group!

[Cold Summer]

I like how the stats at the top of every thread has just confirmed that this thread has essentially been Double 0 and Maynard's pub for years now.

Some of these stats are interesting. b_F is king of Resolute and Denime just like we all know. Volvo is captain of TCB. I'm a couple posts shy of Ben in the Flat Head thread but once you include the 250 or so posts from when I had a semi-official Flat Head presence with another account in that thread I'm easily in first place.

It's interesting to go back and read old posts in threads where 95% of the people posting haven't been by here in many years. Internet forums are such a seemingly outmoded thing in the age of Reddit/Discord/Instagram/Facebook/etc. but I hate other platforms for these kind of hobbies. I guess I'm just old school like that but a nice, slow-paced internet forum is still my favorite type of online community. It's easy to build a large, accessible knowledge base in a way that more modern "optimized" platforms pretty much disregard.

Maybe I'm just hanging around because I'm a complete maniac. I still love fading jeans, I never get tired of the "hunt" of trying to achieve the perfect fade, raw denim still endlessly fascinates me. I've had so many hobbies come and go, I don't really care about video games at all anymore and I don't even really enjoy playing/listening to music much nowadays, but for some dumb reason specialty denim and all the associated style never stops being fun.

Weirdly, unlike a lot of people who've been around the denim nerd scene since the late 2000s my taste hasn't really moved that much toward repro brands (though I have a couple Warehouse pairs I really like) or associated hyper-specialty makers like Conners, Ooe, or Roy. I still find third-wave Japanese brands like Flat Head, Samurai, Pure Blue Japan to be my favorites, and aside from preferring straight cuts and a somewhat more relaxed fit in general my sense of style hasn't changed much in over a decade. If anything I'm even more into the general Japanese amekaji style that sort of syncretizes various aspects and eras of vintage Americana into its own thing and feels different to me than how a lot of these brands get worn by occidental denim geeks.

What's funny is that I hardly buy anything and have essentially just a specialty denim geek capsule wardrobe. Most of what I bought this year was from Yahoo Auctions Japan. I'm sure I would be oh so popular and well-loved by denim nerds everywhere if I could just stop being so lazy and post some pics, or follow my wife's advice and start a YouTube channel where I just nerd out about the buttons on my Flat Head western shirts or cotton stitching snobbery. Or even just update my sadly-neglected blog for the first time in years!

[smoothsailor]

'Foreign, lesbian, cat loving, vegan, drug dealers'..? that's what you call a minority group!
 

that’s what I call a Netflix serie, including the neighbor 

[Double 0 Soul]

3 hours ago, Cold Summer said:

I like how the stats at the top of every thread has just confirmed that this thread has essentially been Double 0 and Maynard's pub for years now.

'General Nonsense' is my specialist subject!..

You're right tho.. i was laughing at the stats of the SC thread recently.. one of the main contributors is some curmudgeonly troll who only tuned in to create arguements about everything other then SC .. why isn't my contribution recognised?.. oh wait, that wasn't here

Edited November 10, 2023 by Double 0 Soul

[Geeman]

This thread is 8 years old WTF!

Where has that time gone.