The reasoning behind the name: My friend got really drunk and told his cab driver that the reason he could afford to live in such a nice neighbourhood is because he's a world famous archaeologist, when, in fact, it's because he still lives at home and it's his parents' house. He then went on to describe the various dinosaur digs that he'd been on, and I interrupted him to tell him that archaeologists don't dig up dinosaurs, that's a paleontologists job (I'm an anthropology major, and a huge nerd, hence my extensive penguin knowledge).
We were talking about the penguin (West Ed is home to a tiny little penguin - I believe it to be either of the Magellanic or African variety) and a friend had apparently never seen a penguin before asked The Archaeologist if our penguin was a baby, and he responded that that's what size all penguins were.
When she told us this part of the story, we interrupted with "Um, no that's not quite right. There are tons of different kinds of penguins and they range in size from 15 or so inches to like 3 or 4 feet tall"
We laughed pretty hard that she had fallen for his story, especially after the factually inaccurate archaeologist story, but we were more surprised that she'd never seen a penguin, or learned about them in school.
She made me look up species of penguins when we got home, and we laughed when we saw that one of the sites google had directed us to was intended for students in grades K-5.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
One of my best friends used to be an archaelogist and is currently doing some archaeology work part time. It's a good thing you were there to keep your friend straight.
Also, glad to know you took the time to find out about penguins. My boyfriend and I are interested in penguins sort of, mostly because the first movie we went to together was "March of the Penguins" last year and this year we bought the DVD. But because of the movie last year we investigated more about penguins like you did and they are really quite interesting.
I used to tend bar--you wouldn't believe the types of crap drunk people have tried to convince me of.
technobabe - that was such a good movie. I'm going to make my friend watch it
serra - I used to work at a bar (well technically I still do, I just haven't taken any shifts in months) so I'd believe it.
My fave line was when I was kicking this drunk girl out of the bar, her friend reassured me that it's ok, because "she's been drunker before"
Uh, how comforting...
Post a Comment