Bobby Broccoli recently did a whole series on how his brother came to power and what the dynamics at play are. It’s like 5 hours long, but worth a watch if you’re interested: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAB-wWbHL7VvVT1LbcOIkqkowoZry6Rfd

Affirmative!

Getting rid of excess rupees is the real strength of the Malo Mart magic armour.

Hmm, this looked like a canyon to me at forst blush, was it supposed to be a mountain?

I’m not much of an artist, but I’m an astronomy nerd, which means I’ve seen my fair share of photographed craters. Oftentimes, if the light is shining from the bottom of the image, craters look like mountains and vice-versa. So maybe some extra shading at the top for craters and at the bottom for mountains might help sell the illusion of depth?

It’s not as red as Palestine. Israel has been killing more journalists than the dark red countries combined, yet still gets to be medium red.

What the hell is this metric? Israel has been killing journalists in Palestine, but those stats mostly influence Palestine’s score, not Israel’s. 0 journalists killed in Israel, while true, hardly paints a correct picture of the situation… Basically, if you can export your journalistic suppression, you’re in the clear.

Ravens are equally close relatives, as are parrots.

Doesn’t make him not ace.

Definitely Flemish. It’s a Flemish cartoon and the -ke ending is very Flemish, the Dutch would say “Boertje”.

A bit late, but the “oe” in “boerke” is the same sound as the “oo” in “moon”. The last e is a schwa sound (a short uhh). It means little farmer.

Sure, but I was responding to someone who was defining wasp (the common word) based on clade (using scientific words).

I’m fine with common parlance words for things. What I had issue with was arbitrarily restricting the definition of wasp to a specific clade, which would exclude ants and bees, and also a whole host of at the very least wasp-adjacent animals which would now be stuck with no real way to describe them.

(Also, yes, fish is a rubbish scientific word. We’re far closer cousins of salmon than sharks are. By any reasonable definition of fish, at least biologically, we are fish. You could redefine “fish” in the same way we define “tree”, i.e. based on structure and not on ancestry, but by that definition whales should still be fish. The word “fish” shouldn’t be allowed within 50 metres of cladistics.)

Just to confirm, you don’t think of jewel wasps, spider wasps, sand wasps, and flower wasps as wasps, since they’re not part of the Vespidae, correct?

I’ve mostly seen wasps defined as basically “Apocrita but not the ones we don’t think count as wasps because there’s too many of them, specifically bees and ants.” Which leads to the same weird reasoning that would somehow make legless lizards lizards, but not snakes. I’ve seen velvet ants referred to as wasps, but not ants, even though true ants are far closer cousins to Vespidae. That just isn’t a viable scientific definition. I’m glad we’ve mostly moved on to grouping avian dinosaurs among the dinosaurs, but it feels like a lot of similar groupings are still lagging.

I’m willing to accept Vespidae as a synonym of wasps, but that excludes a ton of wasps. It also erases the very wasp-like nature of ant ancestors, which is what makes cladistics so fascinating. So why not just open it up to include all Apocrita and be done with it?

I’m also fine with a morphological definition of wasps, like how “tree” isn’t based on ancestry but on structure, but you were the one pulling in the scientific names.

Except many non-Vespidae, both living and extinct, would readily be considered wasps. Look at this thing and tell me it’s not a wasp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eusapvertic.jpg If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees, in the same way that we are apes and birds are dinosaurs. You wouldn’t call a zoo to deal with a loose human and you wouldn’t call dr. Grant to deal with a pigeon, but biologically it makes a lot more sense to deal with ancestry then with how a species interacts with humans.

The aye-aye is also doing much better, mostly because the population size was severely underestimated at the time of writing.

And yeah, the book is amazing. I usually describe it to fans of his other works as somehow being his weirdest book, despite being non-fiction.

I had to use one of those hex wrenches to fix my shower a few months back. It definitely felt like vindication.

Weird comic, why put the punchline in the penultimate panel?

It’s a small part on the German border which we got as compensation for WWI. It has a population of roughly 80.000 people, less than 1% of the Belgian population. The two main languages are Dutch (60ish %) and French (40ish %), but German is technically a national language.

I suspect that people in Flanders encounter way more Germans than German-speaking Belgians.

Can’t speak for the Netherlands, but here in Belgium the first thing anyone thinks of when you speak German is the war. I know I’m not supposed to mention it…

That being said, German usually sounds like angry Dutch to us, so I guess we both agree on where we are on the funny-angry spectrum.

Also, most of your examples are more common in the Netherlands, which are definitely further along the funny axis.

To be fair, based on the (lack of) spelling and grammar in his e-mails, that might actually be how he writes letters.

Haha! That one’s for the champion, where it should hopefully be a bit less of a surprise.