Thursday, November 24, 2016

Explain

    If the radio silence didn't make it obvious, things have been particularly busy. I'm about to be swamped in student papers again, but in the meantime I thought I'd share the lighter side of having a niche research area.

    I'm used to being the go to person when someone stumbles across an equine reference in their own research. What is a grulla? How big is a hand? What does "a freno" mean? We ask questions of others when we stumble into their specialties, and it enriches our understanding. I'm also used to the standard conference questions that nearly every equine historian gets about who ate horses and when. Lately, however, one of my colleagues has effectively turned this into a meme. I get sent assorted horse pictures, with often just the word "explain" attached. And while occasionally they're still serious questions, for the most part they are absurd and entertaining.



They really are good prep. You never know what sort of off topic threads will come up.







    And sometimes you learn new things even from truly oddball questions. I wouldn't have glanced twice at this "book," which looks like a cheap romance but doesn't come up on any book searches. But having been sent this, I did look twice, at the horse somehow jumping a house. And then I realized what was really wrong here. It was supposed to be a "story of the first thanksgiving," and I was pretty sure there were no horses on the Mayflower. So I had to check. 





    Handily for this one, I had a photo of the Animals in War Memorial memorial I'd snapped from the bus in London coming home from Leeds.





And sometimes, you just need something to lighten your day.