My son’s job takes him to some different places. Guess where?
Every time I talk to him, I remind him to get me some camel spiders, but he always just talks about camel camels. I hope he doesn’t come home with one of those.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It must be Colorado
Could be Australia. We got lots of camels here.
There used to be a Saudi blogger, on Blogspot, who called himself “The Religious Policeman” (and no, he was never one of those, he attacked and ridiculed the Saudi Muttawas, religious police, whatever they were officially called, in nearly every other post). He posted lots of cute/amusing photos of camels, sometimes sitting in the beds of pickup trucks.
(He also had some pics of cute stray kittens, with a little note that said “Incidentally, I cannot be traced from these cats. They are long gone.”)
I was going to say China but those are one-humpers (I forgot the name). Got to be Australia.
Is that what Minnesota looks like in summer?
Considering how widely feral dromedaries are distributed nowadays, it’s interesting to note that before domestication the species was apparently restricted to a small region on the Arabian peninsula. The reason there were no horse or camel-headed gods in Ancient Egypt is that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom period that built the famous pyramids didn’t know these animals.
lasius
What pulled the chariots?
@7 Mummies in joggers.
@angoratrilobite, # 4: Dromedary
@ lasius, # 6: Or maybe they just weren’t considered divine enough to represent gods.
gijoel @8
This made think of mummies pulling rickshaws.
Walter Solomon @ #7 — I think this answers that question. Definitely horses pulling those chariots, but no camels.
The gods were invented before Egyptians knew about horses. Chariots were invented after Egyptians knew about horses.
christof @10: Egyptians used donkeys as beasts of burden. This required creating caches of water ahead of time for desert-crossing caravans. (No idea about war chariots, or even when horses arrived in Egypt.)
@4: The easy way to remember how many humps a camel has is that the dromedary has one hump, like the letter D, and the Bactrian has two humps, like the letter B. Unusually, the domestic Bactrian camel and wild Bactrian camel are two distinct species that had diverged naturally roughly one million years ago
i heard tell domestic bactrian and dromedary can cross-breed and significant camel populations are all hybrid. one hump, but shaggier and bigger than usual.
This vista makes me remember when Dybya, Cheney and the bastard Rumsfeld said we did not need to worry about a Vietnam situation, because Vietnam had jungles but the dusty, muslim places were deserts.
Then -as the troops were about to mop up the last taliban- they were diverted to Iraq to destroy ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
You may recall a certain Hans Blix trying to make himself heard above the roar of the propaganda machinery.
Then, Dubya dismissed the whole Iraqi police force. While museums and everything else got looted, assorted religious gangsters grabbed those shiny Kalashnikovs and artillery shells that were left everywhere…
My guess is, your son is going to the peninsula sprouting out from another peninsula: Qatar.
Run by a somewhat less vicious dynasty than Saudi, but with an old emir who had a daughter kidnapped and brought home because she wanted to live a life with agency over herself.
The least vicious gulf kingdom is the sultanate of Oman. Run by an absolute monarch, but a relatively free place (unless you are one of the East asian migrant workers).
They have a big sect of a puritan, but relatively tolerant sunni group whose name I have forgotten.
If PZ’s son is at a base there, he has won the jackpot.
There are even some montane forests fed directly by the moisture in the air, just about the only forest south of Kurdistan.
It might be Jordan. A huge shortage of water, but not like the gulf kingdoms. And a smidgeon of liberty.
Since your son is in the Middle East, I’m guessing he’s assigned to either Camp Arifjan or Camp Buehring in Kuwait. Kuwait also has plenty of flat desert and camels, so that’s my guess for the location captured in the pic posted at the top.
As an aside, my son was deployed to Kuwait last year, and hated practically every minute of it. Hope your son is holding up – last year, the daily high temperatures from June – September ranged from 105 – 120 degrees F.
Sorry, should have written “If” rather than “Since,” because I don’t know for sure that he’s deployed/on TDY there.
My son spent a year in Iraq and two years later spent a year in Kuwait. To say he hated both places would be a generous interpretation of how he said he felt.
@7 Walter Solomon & 12 robro
There were no chariots in the Old Kingdom. Horses and chariots were introduced in the early Middle Kingdom.
Pine Gap? There’s plenty of camels around there.
With the end of the Egyptian – Hittite wars, and a signing of a peace treaty between the two empires, the Hittites sent Rameses II a gift. Chickens. Then unknown in Egypt. Valued in Egypt for their egg laying abilities. There were no chicken headed gods either.
Looks like the surface of Mars – at least in terms of absence of vegetation and any form of life – apart from the camels!
The blue rather than salmon coloured daylight (presumably? Unless very bright meteor, solar flare or stellar eruption of some variety at time of photographing) sky rules that out at least without a time machine to very early Mars but again, camels so no. Unless we have camels transported by some time machine.. Which is implausible – highly so. Make a great SF story tho’.. (Stephen Baxter did have mammoths on Mars in one novel..See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mammoth_Trilogy#Icebones )
Wrong species for China and Mongolia from what I gather ’bout camel species distribution and ranges so would be somewhere in Southwest Asia or Oz. Context of deployment of USA military indicates most likely somewhere in SW Asian region.
.. But does not rule out Oz specifically near Pine Gap as noted by #25 Atticus Dogsbody
reads news
He’s in Chechia!
@29 seachange
He’s inside a headgear?
If he is in Kuwait he will have plenty of time to study the desert topsoil and see if the very sparse vegetation has recovered from all the soot and gunk deposited as Saddam burned all oil fields.
There’s a whole batch of camels that live near Wichita Falls, TX or at least there were 20 years ago.