Funny foolish family facts?
Sexually Ambiguous Alligators Rocking in Florida
My large family can only agree on targeting transgender people
The first in a series of stories exploiting the Cabbage Patch Family’s antics.
Mom is a faithful Christian who starts each day reading the Bible and dreams of being Amish. Dad’s a philandering drunk who eats small children and counts shiny beads. We hate transgenders.
My parents are a little like North Korea and the Netherlands. They kind of balance out the human race.
Naturally, my siblings all claim to speak different languages to eliminate the possibility of meaningful dialogue.
I don’t remember who suggested we all learn Morse Code. I try not to consider how that was possible with a single shared instruction manual — written in English.
We avoid topics like sex, religion, and politics at family reunions. We also don’t bring up the day Dad brought a skunk home as a good substitute for the dog he ran over. Ditto on the children abandoned in a mine shaft, Grandma being exiled to Paraguay for no discernible reason, and $27,829 magically appearing after a local gas station was knocked over.
I deny my parents ever had sex, and my 12 siblings do too.
There’s not a lot to talk about.
One thing we all agree to agree on — transgenderism is BAD.
Like, really despicable. Wrong. Unfavorable.
🎃🎆😮🥵🤯😞👿🐗🦚🖤🈷♍
❌♻🏴☠️🚧🌊🌰🥤🍤🍼🥼🎡⛑🎾
🎯💰✂📌🎅🦹♂️🤔☢😨😈🐊☣⬇🙄
Celebrated in hell.
Contra-bor-iffically-mal-dis’d.
As a mental construct, it’s as bad as the taste of battery acid on the hottest day ever when you’re stranded on I-15 in Death Valley with sandals melting into the asphalt while bugs bite your private parts as you flee a mob boss who kicked your dog.
No bueno.
Why do we believe this after spending 13 years debating our actual birth connections?
We have to agree on something. We need a common enemy and butt for our jokes. A tiny minority we’ll likely never recognize with unrelatable problems is ideal!
Brother Gigalo James found an online post by a transgender person in London who wrote things we all could disagree on.
Conspiracy-loving Luci said, “They’ll kidnap our kids and make them gay.”
“Karen shouldn’t be allowed to wake up Tuesday and decide to be Kevin. She might change her mind on Thursday! Then change his mind again Friday!”
Dan’s a cop with an alarming arsenal of weapons in his shed. He says little boys should be exterminated the first time they look at their sister’s dolls.
Naminka mumbles something about “changing gender roles” and gets hit with flying food from all sides.
Gigalo James doth protesteth too much IMHO, and Dakota — who identifies as “molecularly misaligned” — is too curious.
I’m just sayin’.
Calpurnicus sits quietly in the corner rocking, eyes rolled to the back of her head. It’s a good trick, but I worry someday those eyeballs will get stuck.
I had to call Mom to discuss guests at Cabbage’s Bat Mitzvah in Tulsa, so turned to ChatGPT.
Prompt: What’s the name of the town that starts with “D” in Florida without a decent Italian restaurant? It sounds like “Dulan”. I fly into Tampa when I visit.
It identified Bellevue near Ocala.
Prompt: No. It starts with “D” and has a lot of retirees from New York. I think there’s a golf course and alligators.
ChatGPT:
Alligators mate in the spring, and females construct nests made of vegetation and soil near the water. After laying eggs, the female alligator guards the nest until the eggs hatch, which typically takes around 60–65 days. The temperature during incubation determines the sex of the hatchlings, with higher temperatures resulting in more males and lower temperatures producing more females.
Prompt: Offspring is determined by warm eggs? A male and female are required to reproduce — the species would die if alligators were moved to an air-conditioned dorm in Deland. There’d only be females!
ChatGPT:
I apologize for the incorrect information in my previous response.
For American alligators, studies have shown the temperature during a specific window of incubation affects the sex determination. Within a certain range, cooler temperatures during incubation tend to produce more female hatchlings, while warmer temperatures tend to result in more males. This phenomenon is known as temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD).
I don’t trust everything AI writes. The Tammar Wallaby, Three-striped Night Monkey, and Leopard Gecko sound suspicious. I’m pretty sure geckos are advertising gimmicks.
According to Wikipedia’s Temperature-dependent Sex Determination,
A 2015 study found that hot temperatures altered the expression of the sex chromosomes in Australia’s bearded dragon lizards. The lizards were female in appearance and were capable of bearing offspring, despite having the ZZ chromosomes usually associated with male lizards.[18]
In 2018, a team of Chinese and American researchers showed that the histone H3 lysine 27 (H3K27) demethylase KDM6B (JMJD3), an epigenetic modifier, activates male development in red-eared slider turtles by binding to the promoter of the dominant male gene [DMRT1]. Knocking down the expression of this modifier at 26 °C triggers male-to-female sex reversal in most of the surviving embryos.[19]
Research from 2020 identified the timing of gonadal commitment in the American alligator to understand the effects of estrogen-signaling in TSD. It was determined that a main factor in gonadal fate is the level of testicular genes and estrogen signaling. The study found that critical commitment in testicular development is during stage 24–26, which is later than a known TSP for promoting males in TSD. Additionally, earlier estrogen signaling induced development of parts of the ovary.[20]
Uh-oh. Things won’t be Okie-dokie in Oklahoma.
I removed the battery from my phone and threw it away.
Note: Indented responses from ChatGPT and Wikipedia are real but cut. Family data isn’t exactly right but the skunk really was a problem!
Thanks to editor extraordinaire Andrew Rodwin — always a pleasure.
Thanks for reading!
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