Comments on: To Whomever Is Missing Two Cows Near Johnson City

By: Kowhead

Kowhead — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:14:20 +0000

I find it demeaning when women are called cows. Actually cows are beautiful so it doesn’t make sense to me. Not that I would use it to complement someone though I could.

Are we sure that is a cow there?

Could be a maverick steer.

But it isn’t ugly.

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:49:58 +0000

I can’t resist weighing in on the grammar, two years later and with no new post for over a month. The title is wrong. The object of the preposition “to” is the phrase “whoever is missing two cows near Johnson City.” It is not parallel with “to whom it may concern,” because in that phrase, “whom” is the object of the verb “concern.” “It” is the subject of the verb “concern.” The object of the preposition “to” is the phrase “whom it may concern.”

Just for fun, here’s a way to render the title correct with an extension: To whomever: is missing two cows near Johnson City a fun way to spend your vacation?

Thanks to my 10th grade English teacher, Paul Lamar, and also to all those who helped me learn Russian, a language in which the who/whom distinction is preserved by all, not just by a bunch of wonky blamers.

By: R. Mildred

R. Mildred — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 12:20:28 +0000

Iâ€™m sorry but the Crystalline Entityâ€™s job is to suck out the planetâ€™s life energy, you included, not go around examining things. And to conspire with positronically-brained people.

Oh yeah, just because an entity is made out of crystal you impose all these presumptions about behavior and identity upon it.

What if it’s a caring, loving crystalline entity, an entity that loves the universe and wishes to make love to, and take scientific observations of, the universe in all its myriad glory and complexity?

It’s bad enough when you see this kind of bigoted stereotyping being thrown at the Large, green and bug-eyed (Oh just because they’re “bug-eyed” they’re monstrous? just typical of the corneacentric attitude I encounter so often in our fucked up society) at DKos, or LGF, but at twisty’s pad?

I have to say I’m disappointed.

P.S. Maybe the cows are their own “master”, maybe they were sick and tired of being locked inside the corporate cage man, maybe they were lesbian cows, trying to escape to the heady freedom of massechussets or toronto, where a lesbian cow can marry who ever it wants, whenever it wants and buy vibrators and stuff, free from the oppression of the dildo hating homobigots of texas. Maybe these lesbian cows just wanted to go where they can be the best damn lesbian cows they can be, but oh no, you had to sick the establishment on them.

Twisty is a fink! Admit it, you hate these cows for their freedom!

By: Joanne

Joanne — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 14:43:32 +0000

That cow’s mine. It wandered over from the tiny English village of Devon.
Please send it back by airmail, along with a stamped address envelope, and I shall fully re-emburse courier costs. Ta.

By: Sylvanite

Sylvanite — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 12:30:24 +0000

I guess having the chromosomal complement of females is one general way (in humans XX, in ants and bees, being diploid). Having female genitalia helps, though in hymenopterans the ovipositor is altered into a venom-injecting stinger. Males hymenopterans can’t sting; they lack the modified female parts that comprise the stinger. So I guess having a stinger comprises femaleness in hymenopteran species that have them (yes, not all hymenopterans have stingers). I’d guess the sterile females also have the withered remnants of internal female anatomy (ovaries and what-not).

Of course reality is messy, and there are, among humans at least, pseudohermaphrodites that are XY, but are androgen insensitive. They develop as females (usually rather beautiful females), but their vaginas just dead-end. They don’t have a uterus, and they have undescended testes in their abdomens. They’re infertile, and never menstruate. The testes usually become cancerous, and have to be removed.

I guess it is of little value to assign gender based on fertility. A sterile female fire ant is still a female, even if she’s only capable of stinging the hell out of you with her genitals, rather than laying eggs with them.

By: darkymac

darkymac — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 05:59:09 +0000

Mandos, have a look at the Family Syngnathidae, with the better-known genera being Phycodurus, Hippocampus and Syngnathinae - the Sea Dragons, Seahorses and Pipefish.
The males gestate. Only the males. Moreover, in the case of Hippocampus, that gestation involves salinity regulation of the egg-pouch and makes it, for all definitions of gestation, a basic womb.
Syngnathidae males look more or less swollen when gestating.
The sexual dimorphism is otherwise insignificant.
A bit like the apes.

By: Mandos

Mandos — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 02:08:41 +0000

What defines “female” anyway, in a biological sense. My own definition is that an organism in a species that uses sexual reproduction that has the capacity to produce and/or gestate eggs, or will have or has had this capacity or would look to the untrained eye that it does is female. I was under the impression that ant queens were rather more swollen than worker females and that you could tell nonreproducing “females” and queens easily apart.

By: Mandos

Mandos — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 02:05:32 +0000

I’m sorry but the Crystalline Entity’s job is to suck out the planet’s life energy, you included, not go around examining things. And to conspire with positronically-brained people.

By: R. Mildred

R. Mildred — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:56:21 +0000

I thought that most ants and bees donâ€™t have the capacity to reproduce and canâ€™t be mistaken for ever having any capacity. Is male vs female even relevant there? Ant hills and bee hives are more like single hermaphroditic organisms. The sole reproducing female and the bunch of males are really just the gonads of this organism.

It wouldn’t be hermaphroditic either, it’d be asexual in nature, reproducing via fission (which is what happens when ants and bees form new nests, the new queen takes workers with her.

Human social constructs do not reproduce at all, behaving more like bacteria colonies than any sort of single organism.

The crystal entity type thing might however mistake this bacteria colony like system of a single entity much like itself, but made out of steel and glass and concrete, if it stayed around long enough to actually observe the totally non-reproductive nature of those constructs might eventually realise that those concrete entities are made of people!

Then it could take us back to where ever it came from in a giant glass sided thing full of silicon, steel and leaves, all the substances we apparently need to maintain our bacteria like civilisation.

The idea of us farming stuff will probably not be a concept that would make any real sense to the entity, and all those taken back to its home will promptly starve to death, and our bodies will be stuck through with pins and displayed in crystal entity museums as a rare oddity found in a backward section of the galaxy.
Until the relativistic bombs destroy such things, obviously.

By: Sylvanite

Sylvanite — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:56:14 +0000

Well, yes, Mandos, the queens are the only reproducing females. However, the workers are all sterile females. I would still be biologically female, even if I were sterile, and the same is true for bees and ants. The males (drones) are all capable of reproduction, but in honeybees and ants at least, are not capable of work. I’m not sure about other bees (other than bumblebees) or wasps. Termites, on the other hand, have both a reproducing female and a reproducing male (her mate-for-life), and the worker and soldier castes consist of sterile members of both sexes. The big difference seems to be due to Hymenopterans (ants, wasps and bees) being haplodiploid (males only have single copies of chromosomes where the females have the standard pairs of chromosomes). Isopterans (termites) are standard-model diploid critters. Being haplodiploid seems to strongly select for marginilized males. If it’s any consolation, if you see a bumblebee, it could very well be a male. Apparently, the females don’t tolerate them in the nest, but they aren’t helpless like honeybee males, and spend the summer being rugged outdoorsmen.

Entomological pedantry over.