![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
life is really very complicated
Friday, 14 February 2014 08:55 pmI do not celebrate Valentine's Day, for varied reasons not entirely confined to ingrowing singlehood and dislike of both commercialism and gender stereotyping. But today Ursula Vernon is doing morally ambiguous honey badgers. This is an ongoing series which apparently started with snarky Twitter commentary on First Amendment rights and went rapidly downhill from there. If owls weren't already my personal totem I would be adopting morally ambiguous honey badgers forthwith. She draws them in a similar style to Digger, for which I have an unseemly passion.
Honey badgers are hardcore. We used to do family holidays in Mana Pools, which is an amazing game reserve in the Zambezi valley. I have no idea what it's like now, but when I was a teenager it was rendered moderately unique by being miles away from anywhere on dirt roads which required a 4x4 to navigate, and was only really patronised by hard-bitten Zimbo bush cognoscenti. The reserve apparently felt that their clientele were bushwise enough that they permitted you to get out of the car and walk to see game if you saw fit, which is how our extended family ended up being chased through the park by lion after stumbling on a kill. There was also no fence around the campsite, leading to interesting moments like sticking your head out of your pup tent in the morning to find that it was being straddled by an elephant.
The honey badgers arrived one night to raid the rubbish bins. My late Uncle Roldy, characterised by being a 6'2 hardbitten Zimbo bush cognoscente who had survived the Rhodesian war with moderately unruffled calm, climbed out of his sleeping bag to chase them off, at which point they emerged from the bins, gave him a dirty look and went for him. He backed down.
I should point out that my late uncle Roldy had, earlier in the same trip, faced down the five charging lion we had disturbed on their kill, and caused them to skid to a halt in front of him. He continued to face down the pride until the rest of us had removed ourselves from the vicinity at some speed, at which point he backed away slowly and the lion went back to their kill, probably shuffling their feet a bit and muttering about not really being hungry, anyway, after all that eland. If my late uncle Roldy didn't want to tangle with honey badgers, you can take it from him that they're hardcore.
(I should probably add for posterity that all of the above is absolutely and literally true, although I should clarify that the elephant and pup tent thing wasn't me, it was a friend. Interesting facts about me: I have run away from a lion charge and am probably lucky to be alive, as they're bloody big cats and tend to chase small running things in a spirit of malevolent inquiry. My late uncle Roldy was also hardcore.)
Honey badgers are hardcore. We used to do family holidays in Mana Pools, which is an amazing game reserve in the Zambezi valley. I have no idea what it's like now, but when I was a teenager it was rendered moderately unique by being miles away from anywhere on dirt roads which required a 4x4 to navigate, and was only really patronised by hard-bitten Zimbo bush cognoscenti. The reserve apparently felt that their clientele were bushwise enough that they permitted you to get out of the car and walk to see game if you saw fit, which is how our extended family ended up being chased through the park by lion after stumbling on a kill. There was also no fence around the campsite, leading to interesting moments like sticking your head out of your pup tent in the morning to find that it was being straddled by an elephant.
The honey badgers arrived one night to raid the rubbish bins. My late Uncle Roldy, characterised by being a 6'2 hardbitten Zimbo bush cognoscente who had survived the Rhodesian war with moderately unruffled calm, climbed out of his sleeping bag to chase them off, at which point they emerged from the bins, gave him a dirty look and went for him. He backed down.
I should point out that my late uncle Roldy had, earlier in the same trip, faced down the five charging lion we had disturbed on their kill, and caused them to skid to a halt in front of him. He continued to face down the pride until the rest of us had removed ourselves from the vicinity at some speed, at which point he backed away slowly and the lion went back to their kill, probably shuffling their feet a bit and muttering about not really being hungry, anyway, after all that eland. If my late uncle Roldy didn't want to tangle with honey badgers, you can take it from him that they're hardcore.
(I should probably add for posterity that all of the above is absolutely and literally true, although I should clarify that the elephant and pup tent thing wasn't me, it was a friend. Interesting facts about me: I have run away from a lion charge and am probably lucky to be alive, as they're bloody big cats and tend to chase small running things in a spirit of malevolent inquiry. My late uncle Roldy was also hardcore.)
My subject line is, of course, quoting morally ambiguous honey badgers. Relax! Wear the bodies of your enemies! It's really very soothing. Words to survive registration by, I suspect.
