A paleontologist on the wonder of life on Earth — and the ways that climate change will transform it.
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A paleontologist on the wonder of life on Earth — and the ways that climate change will transform it.
When Thomas Halliday was a young lad in the village of Rannoch, Scotland, he loved exploring the Caledonian Forest. The pinewoods were like living fossils, a remnant of the last glacial period and a bygone age when the west coast of Scotland was covered in trees. “It was such a diverse and wonderful place to explore as a 7-year- old,” Halliday told Vox. “I essentially had free rein to go and run about, and I became very interested in the natural world.”
Fittingly, the boy who explored the ancient forest went on to become a paleontologist. In his new book, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, out this week, Halliday writes about primordial history as though we could witness it first-hand, bringing life to prehistoric geese that were as ornery as their modern-day cousins, towering forests that transformed our planet, and dinosaurs that lived before the evolution of flowers.
“By visiting extinct sites with the mindset of a traveler, a safari-goer, I hope to bridge the distance from the past to the present,” Halliday writes. He dives into the fossil record and invites readers to “see ancient life forms as if they were commonplace visitors to our world, as quivering, steaming beasts of flesh and instinct, as creaking beams and falling leaves.”
I recently spoke with Halliday about the clues the past leaves for us. He told me that “temporal wanderlust,” or a hunger to understand eras that were different from our own, can teach lessons about the future of the planet and the grave dangers of human-caused climate change. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You describe this book as a travelogue through time. What inspired that idea?
When people think of paleontology, they tend to think of skeletons in a museum. It’s very separated from the living creature. And when it is presented as a living creature, it’s usually in some sort of monster film, out for human blood. This isn’t really how creatures behave in reality. The past isn’t this barbaric age, you know? It was a real, functioning, biological system. So I thought, “If we can visit the Cairngorms [a mountain range in Scotland] and talk about their wonderful biology, then why not interpret the fossil record in such a way that it becomes sort of like visiting those worlds?”
The chapters of your book read like vivid descriptions of a day in time — say, a Tuesday in the Pleistocene. How did you do that? How did you collect the details of the weather or the behaviors of animals?
The behavioral side of things and the climatic side of things are obviously not directly observed, they are inferred. If you look at sedimentology, there are patterns of grains in the rock that tell you something about the environment. For example, in the Miocene chapter, about 4 million years ago at Gargano [present-day Italy], the Mediterranean Sea has dried out and we’re on this island. There’s a giant, flightless goose there. It has a bony spur on its wing, which is an anatomical feature that you can directly observe [in fossils]. And we know birds today have this kind of spur on their wing for fighting. We can then reconstruct that this is a behavior that probably happened among these geese on Gargano. It’s probably something that is happening within the flock, between birds of the same species, rather than defense against predators, because of what we can see in today’s biology.
Many of your chapters are set on the cusp of disaster, either right before or right after. Why are these events so useful when you’re looking for stories in the past?
Part of it is because they are incredibly important in telling the story of life. There have been several mass extinctions, and the way that life responded to them is very important — not just for telling us what’s happened in the past, but what’s going to happen in the future. Everything in my chapter on the Oligocene is represented as fossils in what’s called a lahar, which is what happens when a volcano has erupted and you have this layer of ash that turns into a sort of slurry, which goes down mountainsides at horrendous speeds and buries everything. There’s little chance for things to escape. In Tinguiririca [present-day Chile], we see the remnants of mammals in this lahar, so I’m talking very specifically about particular individuals.
At one point you describe one of the earliest species that might have been lost to our human ancestors, or hominins. How far back can you see those impacts?
Right, so this is about 4 million years ago in what is now Lake Turkana. This is sort of a cradle of African fauna. There are several species of relatives of elephants, and there are a couple of giraffe species, and there’s early wildebeests, antelopes, and the ancestors of the domestic cat. All sorts of creatures that are very familiar to us now.
There are these bear otters, which are lion-sized otters that used to live alongside early hominins. And they have no living relatives, so this is a group that has gone extinct. Some people have suggested — although this is a little controversial — that because they had a similar sort of generalist diet to humans, perhaps the bear otters were out-competed and essentially sort of lost their place in the ecosystem.
We’re not talking about Homo sapiens. We’re talking about three-foot-tall Australopithecines. They’re some of the first species that we can confidently say are on the human lineage.
When you begin to talk about humans directly impacting ecosystems, that comes much later. There’s good evidence for people managing fire and using fire to clear ecosystems and to change the forest layout tens of thousands of years ago. And even in what we would today think of as relatively undisturbed ecosystems, like the Amazon jungle, there’s been thousands of years of very active management by people. Even though it’s not been done in the sort of open plantations we’re used to in Europe and North America, it’s a landscape which has been highly modified by humans.
Throughout your book, you write about animals evolving to adapt to changes. Why can’t the natural world adapt to what’s happening to the planet now?
The simple answer is that it’s far too fast. Some degree of warming and cooling is absolutely a natural cycle, but the way we’re doing it now is entirely unnatural. When we talk about the changes that occur on geological timescales, they’re typically extremely slow. The fastest-known increase in carbon dioxide concentration is happening now.
When you get rapid changes in climate, however temporary, you often then get a big transition in what life is doing. At the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, was what’s known as the Great Dying. It is the worst mass extinction that has ever happened. There was a huge outgassing of things like methane and other greenhouse gases from volcanic activity. In Siberia, 95 percent of life was wiped out by this radical change in global climate. There were huge problems with ocean acidification, with these gases going out into the atmosphere, and a loss of oxygen in the oceans. And a lot of these things are problems that we are seeing now.
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Lucas Heinrich (cover design) and Chris Wormell (cover illustration) for Penguin Random House
Are there any other organisms that have changed the biosphere in the way that humans have?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the classic stories is the first photosynthesizers. Photosynthesis is the process that turns carbon dioxide and light into oxygen and sugar and energy. This was first done by single-celled organisms billions of years ago, and before then there wasn’t really much oxygen on Earth. When the photosynthesizers started producing oxygen, it completely changed the atmospheric composition. Most of the microorganisms that lived on Earth were not really able to tolerate oxygen, and so it caused problems for them.
More recently, 360 million years ago or so, we have the scale trees. This is in the period that’s called the Carboniferous, when we really get the first big plants. These scale tree forests formed in sort of swampy conditions, there’s a huge growth in plant material, they’re absorbing lots of carbon dioxide from the air. All of this carbon that was in the atmosphere was absorbed by growing plants, the plants that died fell into the swamp, and their bodies were converted into peat and then into coal and then buried, and so all of this carbon was captured. All of this served to change the global climate. It made the world cooler.
Very shortly after, you get what’s known as the Carboniferous rainforest collapse. The plants have changed the world’s climate such that swamps are no longer a common ecosystem, and scale trees and their kin go extinct. In a sense, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction.
How are humans different from the other organisms that have changed the planet?
Well, we as conscious beings are able to reflect on our actions. We are able to predict what the outcome of our actions will be, and therefore to choose an appropriate path. The first experiments that showed that carbon dioxide caused air to warm faster were done by a woman called Eunice Foote in the late 19th century, about two years before the first oil well was dug in the US. And for various reasons, despite having known about the warming effects of greenhouse gases for well over 100 years, little has been done so far.
I am always hopeful, though. There is now a movement to choose the right path and to recognize what we’ve already lost forever, and what we can salvage. Every day we go on without changing things, things are going to get worse, but there’s never going to be a single point at which all is lost. We can always, as a society, choose the right path.
In your last chapter, you write that human-induced change is not new, and can even sort of be considered natural. How is the intervention natural? And how should we think about it going forward?
It’s natural in the sense that we are part of the biological world and that we should not try and consider ourselves apart from it. We have been part of this world as a species for 200,000 years and as a genus for 2 million years. There are so many species that we have evolved alongside. We depend on that biological world that we are tightly integrated into. It’s a very unusual time in Earth’s history, in that all the ecosystems of the world, from the bottom of the sea to the tops of mountains, are affected by the actions of this single species.
Are there periods in the past that you think are particularly important parallels for us to pay attention to as we look to the climate-changed future?
If we’re talking about climate change, the important periods are the five major mass extinction events. The Ordovician is the only one which was caused by global cooling, and I think is an important parallel here. People have an assumption that warmth is somehow what is bad here. But in fact it’s not the warmth itself, it’s the rate of change.
At the end of the Ordovician, you get this onset of glaciers that expanded out across the whole of Africa and South America, which at that time were joined. And when that happens, we see a big extinction event in marine organisms as they are forced into deeper water, which perhaps they can’t survive in. But then you get this rebound, and the world begins to warm again. The ice begins to melt, and there’s a second pulse of extinction.
Earth has two roughly stable states. You’ve got the icehouse world, which we are in at the moment, where there is permanent ice at the poles. And then you have greenhouse Earth, where there is no permanent ice at the poles. Life is currently not really adapted to a greenhouse world. Humans — and I mean all hominins, all great apes — have never experienced the greenhouse world.
You write that we shouldn’t become despondent, which is easy to do when you’re faced with forces that affect life on a planetary scale. What should we do instead?
The problem with despondency is it leads to inaction. There’s a poem which I really like by Piet Hein:
Eradicate the optimist
who takes the easy view
that human values will persist
no matter what we do.
Annihilate the pessimist
whose ineffectual cry
is that the goal’s already missed
however hard we try.
The point is that we cannot sit back. It’s never too late. The sooner we act, the more we save, but there’s always something else to save.
If this is a mass extinction that we are causing right now, life will rebound and eventually be as diverse as it is today. But this is our world. We are here, and there are wonderful creatures around today. There are wonderful landscapes and wonderful plants. And I think it’s a shame to throw it away. If we undergo a huge period of transition, usher in a new age where life is fundamentally different, then we’re less likely to be a part of it. So we should protect the world that is our land, our part of geological time.
Xiomara Castro needs her own government behind her to enact the reforms she promised.
Vice President Kamala Harris visited Honduras last week for the inauguration of its first woman president, Xiomara Castro, a reform-minded, self-described democratic socialist who has promised to address key factors driving mass migration from the country.
Harris’s attendance wasn’t just a show of solidarity with Castro’s agenda — it was meant to signal a new era of US-Honduras relations, one in which American leaders work alongside Honduran officials to reduce northern migration.
Partnering with Castro might not yield as much progress as the Biden administration hopes. Castro’s agenda is ambitious. She’s promised to address endemic corruption and a lack of economic opportunity in one of the poorest countries in Latin America, a place where more than half of citizens have expressed a desire to leave.
Realizing that migration doesn’t start at the US-Mexico border, the Biden administration has looked for ways to give would-be migrants a reason to stay in their home countries.
But there is an ongoing leadership struggle in the Honduran Congress threatening her mandate and US interests in the country. A rival faction of Castro’s party is trying to replace her pick to lead the Congress. If that faction succeeds, it could effectively kneecap Castro’s agenda, along with the Biden administration’s efforts to address the root causes of migration from the country and others in the Northern Triangle.
“[The fight over who’ll lead Congress] makes people wonder who’s in charge. It raises questions about to what extent the government is committed to the rule of law and to separation of powers. It cuts confidence. It creates a wait-and-see attitude on the part of anybody who would spend money to create a business or to invest, or to help Honduras with assistance,” Lisa Kubiske, the US ambassador to Honduras from 2011 to 2014, said in a press call.
Honduras is in a tenuous political moment. It has operated as a narco-state under the right-wing National Party since 2009, when a military coup ousted Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, the former president. Persistent corruption, weak government institutions, climate change, high levels of violent crime, and rampant poverty have driven hundreds of thousands to flee the country in recent years, with many Hondurans seeking asylum in the US.
Change seemed to be on the horizon last November. Voters turned out in droves to elect Castro in a landslide win against the National Party’s Nasry Asfura — an ally of the outgoing president Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been accused of taking bribes from narcotraffickers. Castro promised to create a coalition government to bring together the National Party’s political opponents, including her own center-left Libre party, under an agenda of combating corruption and promoting economic development.
As part of a joint initiative with the US government, American companies pledged to inject more than a combined $1.2 billion over a multiyear horizon into Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Those funds were meant to help reduce migration by providing new economic opportunity in the region. In Honduras, Castro’s incoming administration was seen as a reliable partner that could ensure the investments worked as intended.
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Inti Oncon/picture alliance via Getty Images
That approach isn’t entirely new; then-Vice President Joe Biden pursued similar economic development programs in the region under the Obama administration. But it’s a marked shift from the Trump administration’s strategy of slashing aid to Northern Triangle countries and forcing migrants to apply for asylum in those countries before they can do so in the US.
In her meeting with Castro last week, Harris expanded on the Biden administration’s existing economic development plans, committing to sending a senior-level trade mission and business delegation led by the Department of Commerce to generate business opportunities in Honduras. Harris also emphasized that Castro’s election signaled an opportunity to advance shared interests.
“Our perspective as the United States, in terms of our relationship with Honduras, is one that we believe our nations, as are most nations these days, [are] interconnected and interdependent,” Harris told Castro in their meeting. “I look forward to many areas of partnership, including the work that we can do to address the economic prosperity of Honduras.”
But Castro will be in no position to help advance shared interests if she can’t unify her government, and her ability to do so remains in question.
Castro’s proposed reforms could be transformative for Honduras, a country where corrupt economic elites have long ruled. She has vowed to institute an anti-corruption commission backed by the United Nations, similar to one that was shut down in Guatemala in 2019, and to convene a National Assembly seeking to rewrite the country’s constitution to guarantee social democratic rights. And she has promised a “new economic model” that would reduce inequality and the cost of living, and would involve building an environment more conducive to private investment.
But the future of that agenda is in flux due to a constitutional crisis wracking the Honduran Congress.
A group of 18 newly elected Libre party lawmakers recently defied Castro’s decision to install Luís Redondo, a member of the centrist Savior Party of Honduras, as congressional leader. They argue that a member of the Libre party — which has 50 lawmakers in the 128-seat Congress, compared to the Savior Party’s 10 — should instead hold that title. These 18 Libre lawmakers did not attend a meeting of the Congress in which Redondo was elected leader; instead, they gathered separately at a private venue to elect their own rival leader, Jorge Cálix, with support from the opposing National Party.
Castro saw it as a “betrayal” and expelled the rebel lawmakers from her party. The National Party has offered to take them in, which would give it the highest number of lawmakers in the Congress and effective control over the congressional agenda.
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Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images
The leadership crisis remains unresolved and is now before the Honduran Supreme Court, where the odds don’t seem to be in Castro’s favor. Four of the five judges who will be deciding the case were appointed under the previous Congress, where the National Party held the majority. Should Cálix prevail, he could torpedo Castro’s agenda, as Honduran congressional leaders have the power to prevent her political initiatives from even being considered.
Foreign policy experts have speculated that the rebel lawmakers were operating under the influence of the outgoing Hernández administration and his National Party allies, who hope to regain power and hamper reform. It’s not clear whether they would suffer any consequences. As of now, however, there’s no concrete proof that this is the case.
The US isn’t intervening in Honduras’s congressional fight. A senior administration official told reporters last week that it is up to Hondurans to reach a resolution in a way that is consistent with their constitution and laws.
As the US waits, Hondurans will also need to wait for the reforms they voted for. That means already low confidence in government might continue to plummet and support for a military coup could remain high. Poverty and lack of stable employment and educational opportunities could persist without a robust social safety net. Corrupt elites could continue to evade taxes and exploit their workers. These sorts of issues have driven more than 680,000 Hondurans to the US in the past three and a half years. If Cálix remains the head of Congress and Castro can’t institute her reforms, the US will have to find other ways to pursue its goals in the country, including via the private sector investment it is already pursuing.
That investment is no quick fix. It’s set to come in tranches, so even if it reduces migration, it may be years before its effects are seen. And that assumes the companies follow through on their pledges. Profit might motivate those companies to continue investing in the region, regardless of how Honduras’s political situation resolves itself. But if profits aren’t good, the companies are likely to pull their investments — and, continued political instability in Honduras could scare away future investors.
The US does have some other options. It could also work with civil society groups and withhold foreign aid if there isn’t marked progress on anti-corruption efforts, as a means of putting pressure on the Honduran government, the senior administration official said.
Still, it would be a lot easier to pursue that agenda with buy-in from the Honduran government. For now, though, the Biden administration is asking for patience.
“The strategy has always been clear, and we have been clear the work we need to do is going to be work that will manifest over a long period of time,” Harris told reporters last week. “Hopefully not too long, but certainly not overnight. The problems that we need to address are problems that did not occur overnight, and the solutions that are going to have any impact will not occur overnight.”
Wireless providers will shut down 3G throughout the year, leaving an unknown number of devices without service.
It’s time to say goodbye to 3G, the wireless technology that gave our phones near-instantaneous access to the web and helped make everything from the Apple App Store to Uber an everyday part of our lives. More than two decades after its launch, wireless service providers are shutting down 3G to clear the way for its faster and flashier successor: 5G.
The expansion of 5G is welcome news for the growing number of people with 5G-enabled devices, and it could be a critical step toward more advanced technologies, like self-driving cars and virtual reality. But the 3G shutdown will also disable an entire generation of tech: everything from 3G phones to car crash notification systems. For the people who rely on these devices, this transition will cut off a cellular network they’ve depended on for years, and in some cases, disconnect crucial safety equipment.
“The number of 3G devices has been decreasing steadily,” Tomasso Melodia, the director of Northeastern’s Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things, told Recode. “Now it’s at the point where carriers are starting to say, ‘It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to continue to use these precious frequency channels for 3G. Let’s turn it off.’”
Ideally, wireless providers could keep both 3G and 5G networks up and running, but the physics of the radio spectrum that cellular technology relies on means that companies have to make a choice. The radio spectrum includes a wide range of frequencies, which are used to connect everything from AM/FM radios to wifi networks, and is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Because there are a limited number of frequencies the agency sets aside for cellular service, wireless providers have to divide up the spectrum that they’re allocated to run multiple networks, including their 3G, 4G, 5G, and eventually 6G, services.
The FCC does make new bands of frequencies available to wireless providers through spectrum auctions, during which wireless providers can bid on rights to specific bands. But winning bids can be in the billions of dollars, so providers try to use the spectrum they already have as efficiently as possible. By turning off older generations of cellular technology, companies can repurpose the frequencies in order to improve newer networks, like 4G and 5G. AT&T will go first and shut down its 3G network on February 22, followed by T-Mobile in July and Verizon at the end of the year.
Not everyone will be affected by the 3G shutdown. Many of the cell-phones manufactured in the past few years include hardware that can connect not only to 3G networks but also to 4G and 5G, so they won’t be impacted. But there are still some phones that only work with 3G networks. Once 3G goes offline, these devices won’t be able to connect to a cellular network, which means they won’t be able to send texts, make phone calls, or access the internet without wifi. Any emergency alarm service that depends on 3G will also stop working. These include certain medical and security alarms, as well as some voice assistants, navigation software, and entertainment systems built into cars. Older Kindles, iPads, and Chromebooks designed to connect to 3G networks will be affected, too.
While the 3G shutdown will come with its own set of consequences, the expansion of more advanced networks should bring better speeds and reception to customers with 4G and 5G devices. 4G is 500 times faster than 3G, according to Verizon, and 5G should be even faster than 4G once it’s fully turned on. 5G will also come with lower latency, which means you’ll have very little lag when you’re connected to the internet. This lower latency will make it easier to use your phone for complicated tasks in real time, like playing an online video game or participating in a live telehealth session.
In the meantime, 3G device owners need to brace for the imminent 3G shutdown. Some may not even know their service is about to go offline. Depending on their provider, these customers may only have a few weeks or months to upgrade their tech. Right now, it’s not clear they’ll be able to make the switch in time.
When your phone connects to a cellular network, it sends and receives signals on the frequencies to which that specific network has been assigned. Those signals travel over those frequencies to transmission stations, like cell towers, which are connected to the internet cables that provide your web connection. This is similar to the way a laptop connects to a home wifi network that’s powered by an internet router.
In the US, 3G generally runs between 850 megahertz and 1900 to 2100 megahertz frequencies. These sections of the spectrum are useful for both digital voice and internet data, which is what made 3G so exciting when it was first introduced in the late 1990s. Wireless carriers have since developed new equipment and better technology, which they’ve used to launch their 4G and 5G networks. Because these networks can carry more data at a faster rate, wireless providers want to run them on the frequencies they currently use for their 3G networks. And that can only happen if they turn 3G off first.
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WireImage“It’s a one-or-the-other choice,” said Kevin Ryan, a professor who researches wireless systems at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “It would be analogous to trying to have two FM radio stations broadcasting at the same frequency.”
Aside from the logistics of how radio spectrum works, wireless providers are also reallocating 3G spectrum because it makes more financial sense for them. Verizon and AT&T estimate that less than 1 percent of their service still runs on 3G networks, while 90 million 5G devices shipped in the last year alone. Once 3G is finally turned off, wireless providers can devote more resources to expanding their 5G networks and convincing customers to upgrade their service plans.
“Operators are spending a lot of money for the spectrum, and they have to pass those costs on to the consumers. That’s why we pay a very high price for cellphone service,” explains Sundeep Rangan, the associate director of the NYU Wireless technology research center. “Those operators, for that amount of spectrum, want to send as much data, or serve as many users, as possible.”
While the 3G shutdown may feel sudden, it isn’t surprising. Carriers stopped selling 3G devices years ago, and many have spent the past several months notifying their remaining 3G customers that it’s time to upgrade their tech. 3G isn’t the first network to go offline, either. 1G, the cellular network that supported analog voice devices, like the brick-sized cellphones in ’80s movies — hasn’t been operational for decades. Though T-Mobile still supports 2G devices, Verizon and AT&T both shut down their 2G networks several years ago. By the end of 2022, 3G will be gone, too.
We don’t know exactly how many, but millions of operational devices throughout the US could be left unconnected when 3G sunsets. Many of these devices include hardware that can’t be adapted to connect to 4G and 5G networks. If you have one of these devices, you should have already heard from your wireless provider about your next steps. But if you want to double-check, you can research your specific device or reach out to your wireless provider. You can also try checking your phone’s settings or user manual, or just keep an eye out for a 4G or 5G connection on your device as you go about your day.
The 3G technology systems that are built into cars are generally supported by a major wireless provider, and they’ll stop working whenever that provider officially shuts down its 3G service. CNBC and Consumer Reports have released lists of known affected car models, but there’s no reason not to check with your car’s manufacturer just in case. Cars built in the mid-2010s appear to be the most likely to be affected by the 3G shutdown, but even some cars released in 2020 may need an upgrade.
There are also 3G devices that are meant for emergencies. Along with some medical and security alert systems, prepaid 3G phones and deactivated 3G phones, which can only call 911, will go offline. Elderly people, people who live in rural areas, low-income people, people experiencing homelessness, and survivors of domestic violence are more likely to rely on these devices. Because people only turn to these devices in extreme circumstances, they may not realize until long after 3G shuts down that they need to be replaced, creating a potentially critical safety issue.
That’s why some think that 3G should stay online for a while longer. AARP says the pandemic has prevented many older people from updating their tech, and wants the shutdown pushed back to the end of the year. Alarm companies, including those that manufacture fire and carbon monoxide detectors and home security systems, have also asked for an extension. They say that the computer chip shortage has gotten in the way of their efforts to produce and install replacement devices.
But you shouldn’t bet on a delay. If you have a 3G device, the best time to upgrade is now. If you know someone who uses one of these devices, it’s worth checking in and seeing if you can help them find a replacement.
Inevitably, history shows that cellular networks come and go. The next cellular network, 6G, may be less than a decade away and could be used to introduce everything from 3D holograms to internet-connected clothing. At that point, 5G won’t seem so new and exciting anymore, and 4G’s time will likely be up.
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A lady walks into a store and asks where the XL condoms are kept.
The manager sends her off to the family planning section.
After ten minutes, the manager takes routine a walk around the store, to check on things. He finds the lady still in the family planning section, humming to herself, just looking around. The manager goes up to her.
“Hello, did you find the condoms?”
“Oh, yeah”, says the lady, pointing in the direction of the condoms and then goes back to humming.
The manager is confused, “umm, is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Oh no,” the lady said, “I’m just waiting to see who buys them”
submitted by /u/DerApexPredator
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“Helen,” he said, “We’ve been through so much together. Do you remember when the shop burned down, and we lost everything of value we had in this world? We had to start over from nothing, but you were by my side.”
His wife solemnly replied, “I remember, dear.”
“Helen,” he continued, “when our son was killed in that terrible car accident, I was heartbroken. I didn’t think I could go on, but you were by my side.”
His wife began to softly cry, “I know, dear.”
“And now,” the man went on, “I’m about to leave this world. In my final moments, where are you?”
His wife sobbed, “Right here by your side, dear.”
“Helen,” the man said, “I’m beginning to think you might be bad luck.”
submitted by /u/Arl107
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Because they probably don’t like each other.
submitted by /u/Ambientpissnoises
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Boob: I produce milk for babies and I am attractive to the opposite sex.
Vagina: That’s nothing, I give birth to babies and can accommodate the opposite sex.
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. . . . . . Why are you still scrolling down? It’s your turn to speak.
submitted by /u/Buddy2269
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One day, they get stuck behind the slowest group of players they had ever seen. They were hitting the balls all over the place, getting stuck in just about every trap and patch of rough, and missing just about every putt.
Finally, the group gets frustrated and heads to the clubhouse to find the manager.
“What’s with that group of players? They’re the worst I’ve ever seen! They’re holding up the course!”
The manger looks sheepish. “They’re retired firefighters, they lost their eyesight running into a burning orphanage to save the children. They love golf, so I let them play for free for charity.”
The priest looks ashamed of himself. “As a man of God, I feel terrible for getting angry at those men. At my next sermon, I’ll see if I can get a collection going for their families.”
The lawyer likewise looks chagrined. “Same here, I’ll check with my firm and see if we can’t open a case to get them awarded restitution for their pain and injuries.”
The engineer says, “why can’t they play at night?”
submitted by /u/nitrokitty
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