When asked, Ms. Frizzle denies that she “knows everything”
However, Ms. Frizzle always knows what her students are up to, knows the answer to every question they ask her, and never shows fear even when in extreme mortal peril, as if she’s experienced this all before
Although we know she was in a rock band called the Frizzlettes and was a Shakespearean actress, Ms. Frizzle’s childhood remains mysterious
Ms. Frizzle is EXACTLY the sort of person to travel back in time to teach herself, and is in fact the most likely fictional character to do so
Nobody is ever named “Valerie Frizzle” at birth
Ms. Frizzle dresses queerly and laughs at her own bad jokes
A lot of the series is about Arnold learning to take chances, make mistakes, and get messy – that phrase is more or less targeted at him as a student
Ms. Frizzle looks a lot like a grown-up Arnold
Holy shit???????
She literally has a giant storeroom full of barrels of pickles because she loves pickles so much what more evidence do you need
What relation do pickles have with the transgender community?
One of the medications used in hormone therapy for trans women (spironolactone, which counteracts testosterone) has the side effect of, putting it crudely, making you have to pee all the goddamn time. That causes dehydration and loss of electrolytes.
Pickles and pickle juice turn out to be a fairly convenient and flavorful way of satisfying an electrolyte craving. Those who’ve been on spiro a long time can develop a nigh-spiritual bond with ‘em.
dope
holy FUCK i knew ms. frizzle wasn’t straight but i never THOUGHT to consider that she wasn’t cis how could i be so BLIND
Alright, this may be out of line, but there’s an elephant in the comically-undersized room and it’s high time we addressed it. Simply put, breed standards have become stringent to the point where inbreeding, and all the health issues that come with it, is rampant in the clown-showing circuit. Confused? Let me show you an example.
This is what a Belgian Spurthigh looked like in the late 1800s. Like most breeds in the Japing group, it was bred for function over form – those distinctive bony spurs on its hips, for example, protected the pelvis during particularly intense pratfalls. But over the last 100 years, we’ve exaggerated these features to a grotesque degree – take a look at the modern Belgian Spurthigh.
A single-minded focus on aesthetics has turned the breed into a warped caricature of its past self, and a veritable time bomb of health issues. Cataracts and hip dysplasia are so common that newly-hatched chucklets have to be tested for them, and the hip spurs are so pronounced in utero that they run the risk of puncturing the egg sac. Let me emphasize that again: in their current state, they cannot lay eggs naturally – to prevent the eggs from puncturing themselves, you have to give the mother a C-section and pull the strings of egg sacs out like a bunch of handkerchiefs tied together. This is not a state any living thing should exist in.
But how did it get this bad, you ask? Blame clown-showing authorities like the American Kook Club. The breed standards they set defining “ideal” clowns have gradually called for more and more pronounced features. When individuals win big events like Jokesminster, every breeder of that breed wants to to have the winner sire a litter with one of their clowns. When everyone is focused on a single, homogeneous ideal, inbreeding runs rampant and the breed’s gene pool shrinks dramatically.
So what do we do now? Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy solution. Preserving high-risk breeds may require crossing over with related breeds (in the case of the Belgian Spurthigh, we’ve seen some success with Andalusian Fool mixes). Clown breeders must continue to put pressure on the AKC and other authorities to prioritize health when defining breed standards. The clown breeds we know and love are in danger, but I believe that if we work together, we can continue to have happy and healthy clowns for generations to come.
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