Today I learned....

Two happier things. I love learning random weird stuff like this:

1, The breed of horses called Gypsy Vanners can grow mustaches: Horses with awesome facial hair.

I joked on Twitter: "Barber Groomsby confirmed IRL!" (Barber Groomsby is, you probably guessed, a My Little Pony character - a white stallion with a mustache. Though there are other mustachioed ponies, and Pinkie Pie even adopts one as a disguise. (It says in that article that mares can grow them, too, so Pinkie would not be too far off).

I find it just sort of wonderful and amusing. And yes, I am anthropomorphizing, but I imagine those horses as talking like the sort of harrumphing former-BEF-gentleman that used to be stock-in-trade in British-or-pretending-to-be-British movies, or the side characters in BBC mysteries. (Then again, at least one of those horses reminds me of Hercule Poirot, and I think a Ponified Hercule would be a pretty wonderful thing)

Some of the mustaches are a little ridiculous (and I wonder if the horse gets them dirty when eating), but others are quite dapper....and I find it delightful.

2. The Junior Birdmen of America: it was a real club. Sponsored by Hearst, so I suppose today some would say that was "problematic" but it did encourage kids (and it was for boys AND girls, despite the "Birdmen" name) in their dreams of aviation, and apparently the pledge expected them to be "good citizens," which, I suppose you have to define what that is exactly, but I am old enough to remember when "being a good citizen" was stuff like being responsible and polite to other people and not littering and telling the truth and all that kind of stuff that people once learned as a matter of course, and now, (apparently) some people think is Just For The "Little" People...

But anyway. I had known the hand-gesture (you'll see it in the video below) and a snippet of the song FOR YEARS, but didn't know what it was from. (I assumed it was from an old radio serial; I could imagine some serial about a pilot training youngsters about aviation...) I learned it from my mom but I am guessing she had to learn it from her older brother or an older cousin, as the club was largely defunct by the time she was around. (the song also existed as a campfire song, and my mom was an outdoorsy kid and a Campfire Girl, and that could be how she learned it):



I admit, I kind of love the idea of clubs like that, that encourage some level of "responsible" behavior but at the same time foster kids' dreams about stuff....I can imagine the dream of being an aviator in the 1930s would have been an incredibly exciting thing.


3. Also this article, which Charles retweeted on Twitter. I need to read that regularly because I have a lot of those traits: depending too much on others for "validation" and absorbing others' moods and over-delivering and generally feeling like the person who has to "fix" everything - because maybe if I fix everything for everyone, I will magically reach Good Enough Land, where I am eternally Good Enough and I can stop worrying about whether I am good enough (spoiler alert: that probably never happens).

But, yeah. At my best I can kinda treat myself the way I would have treated a younger, more geeky-but-interested-in-the-same-stuff girl when I was a school girl - kind of the "imagining myself as Mabel Pines and you would TOTALLY be Mabel Pines' friend when you were 12, I mean, if Mabel Pines actually existed and was 12 at the same time you were"

Anyway. Dropping the link here because I probably need to read that article at least once a week.