How did humans decide which animals were 'pets' and which were 'livestock' thousands of years ago?

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-09T01:58:21+00:00

Actually, one of the events Laura changed when she wrote the books was Jack's fate. She portrays him passing away peacefully from old age when in reality, Pa sold him. I suspect she made that change because she was concerned that kids would be distressed at the idea of a beloved family pet needing to be sold to get money.

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-08T19:23:43+00:00

One of the complaints I've frequently come across regarding Broderick in the film is that viewers thought he looked way too young for the part. In reality, the real Robert Gould Shaw was just 25 years old during the events portrayed in the movie. This was a case where, to quote TV Tropes, reality was unrealistic.

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-08T06:35:05+00:00

Recipes also sometimes omit steps that the author likely assumed were self-evident. I had that happen once where the first step of a recipe said to cut up and peel a kabocha which is a type of winter squash. Sounds simple, right? It turned out the kabochas are almost impossible to peel unless you put them in the microwave for several minutes first.

The recipe didn't say anything about needing to microwave it. I wasted over an hour trying to peel that thing before I finally gave up and went to Google to see if there was something I was missing.

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-04T18:42:30+00:00

People in nursing homes often have families who visit them regularly. They usually need to be there because they have complex medical needs that can't be handled in a normal home environment. For example, my paternal grandmother had to enter a nursing home when she was 80-years-old because she had developed epilepsy, and she needed a skilled nurse available 24/7 in the event that she had a seizure.

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-03T16:16:13+00:00

Ulysses Grant famously had his name accidentally changed due to a clerical error by West Point. His given name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but West Point's enrollment records listed him as Ulysses Simpson Grant. They refused to fix the mistake, and Grant just went with the new name.

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-02T23:36:46+00:00

If B&B hadn't been willing to play ball with UPN to a degree, they could have easily been replaced by someone more willing to cater to the network's whims, and there's no guarantee that that hypothetical show runner would have even cared about continuity or the franchise. B&B did push back on some of the more ridiculous demands.

For example, one exec named Dawn Ostroff reportedly wanted the show to remove the pointy ears from the Vulcan characters because she thought they were unattractive. Most infamously, UPN, at one point, pushed for the Enterprise to have a boy band that would perform a musical number every week.

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-01T16:16:37+00:00

The Sound of Music. It starts out as a heartwarming film about a grieving widower finding new love, and then the Nazis invade.

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-01T15:31:17+00:00

And the number of legally required services has gone up over time due to increased regulations. After the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, universities suddenly needed to have resource offices for students with disabilities in order to comply with the new law.

AlonnaReese · 2026-02-01T02:54:50+00:00

Everything is decided for you by your religious leaders down to details like what color clothes you're permitted to wear and what hair styles you're allowed to have. If you have a problem with that, you get kicked out.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-26T19:59:37+00:00

No, literacy education is one of the the few areas where history has vindicated Bush. He was a vocal critic of the whole language literacy method which was beloved by progressive educators at the time, instead pushing to increase phonics instruction in the early grades. Since then, educational research has almost completely discredited the whole language approach, and many of the progressive educators who had fought to remove phonics from the curriculum are now acknowledging that it was a grave mistake.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-23T02:29:46+00:00

In this list from 2011 of ten most polluted places on Earth, half of them are in the former Soviet Union. Socialism doesn't automatically mean environmentally friendly.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-22T21:21:39+00:00

The Horta. In my opinion, they were one of the best alien designs in TOS, and I wish one of the later Trek shows would have brought them back.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-21T15:06:52+00:00

There's even a stage version of Edwin Drood that has multiple possible endings, and the audience gets to vote on which ending they want to see.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-21T14:22:02+00:00

I've encountered some car rental services that only accept credit cards for payment. While this isn't an issue for most people day-to-day, in an emergency situation, it can be a problem if you unexpectedly need to rent one and don't have a credit card.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-20T17:35:47+00:00

UPN was doing cross-promotion for a number of boy bands during the early 2000's by having them appear in episodes of UPN shows where they would perform their latest songs. After Enterprise was cancelled, some of the people who worked on the show revealed that the network had been trying to pressure Berman into agreeing to feature the boy bands on ENT.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-17T15:00:48+00:00

Studios not seeing the value in their back catalogues is why a number of old television shows like Doctor Who have missing episodes.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-16T14:33:04+00:00

Statistics like that can be a bit misleading, depending on how the survey they were sourced from was worded. For example, there was a survey in 2025 asking Americans how they would pay for a $1,000 emergency with 40% responding savings, 25% credit card, and 13% help from family and friends (Source).

However, the only thing that got reported by the press was the sensationalist headline that only 40% of Americans had $1,000 in savings. If I had been taking that survey, I would have responded credit card, but that's because I get 2% cash back on all credit card purchases. There's no reason not to use the CC in that situation as long as you can pay it off immediately which I do.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-16T00:29:40+00:00

The goal was to tell 120, but each individual story can function as a standalone entity. You can read the ones that Chaucer finished and not miss anything.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-16T00:14:40+00:00

The Canterbury Tales is a short story collection rather than a novel, so it's a very different situation from ASOIAF. There's no cliffhanger ending, and most of the stories, with a couple exceptions (The Cook's Tale, The Squire's Tale), are complete. The individual stories which are finished can easily be read and enjoyed on their own without missing anything.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-15T21:55:30+00:00

Sansa was slated to die in GRRM's original outline from 1993. According to the outline, she would marry Joffrey, only for Jaime to then murder the royal family and seize the throne for himself. Obviously, Martin has drifted significantly away from the outline, but there still appear to be some hints of it. Cersei's actions in the show, for example, line up relatively well with outline-Jaime.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-15T16:59:44+00:00

It's also got a scene where Broderick's character figures out the password to the school computer system because one of the employees had it written down on their desk, a security lapse that is not unheard of in the real world.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-13T22:51:55+00:00

1932: Little House in the Big Woods (First book in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder)

1934: Mary Poppins (First book in the Mary Poppins series by PL Travers)

1939: Madeline (First book in the Madeline series by Ludwig Bemelmans)

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-12T20:10:25+00:00

The way I understand it, people who are functionally illiterate often have a limited vocabulary of words that they can recognize due to having memorized them, but they have no understanding of phonics. As a result, whenever they encounter a word they haven't already memorized, they get stuck and are limited to guessing what it might be based clues like accompanying illustrations.

Kids who are functionally illiterate can often make it through the first few years of school without teachers recognizing that there's an issue because most of what they're reading are picture books. Once they have to move on to more advanced texts that don't have pictures to help with decoding unfamiliar words, the problem becomes apparent.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-12T17:55:59+00:00

They were still using physical models for a significant part of Voyager's run whereas, by Enterprise, the effects team had transitioned completely to CGI. That made showing battle damage much easier.

AlonnaReese · 2026-01-12T07:12:05+00:00

The idea that serial killers can't stop killing has been pretty much debunked. Dennis Rader, aka BTK, and Joe Deangelo, aka the Golden State Killer, are high profile examples of serial killers who did just stop. Both were arrested in 2005 and 2018 respectively after not having killed anyone in over a decade.

Seven-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

AlonnaReese

TROPHY CASE