I had roughly 89 feelings while I read this “bail bond queen” piece. The dead first husband! The pictures! The structural inequality and systemic racism! The prison-industrial complex! The opportunity for redemption! That one guy named Hollywood! Her weird blend of self-determination, contempt for others, and the fact that she talks like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas (“Esquenazi lost interest in school because, as she put it, she had ‘places to go and people to see’”)!
I’ve dealt with a bail bond company exactly once; the woman was incredibly kind and incredibly responsive and the entire situation was incredibly predatory and fucked up.
***
OKAY: 5 Denver Spots Perfect For Pretending To Be A Cowboy
***
“Wait, what? Yes. Naomi Campbell.” Roxane keeps recapping Empire for the Wall Street Journal, and I am continually here for the reading of it.
***
I will read every single article about every single major plane crash that anyone sees fit to write. I have to know how every single plane crashes, that I might be more accurately terrified every time I board a plane (“But Mallory, flying is statistically safer than –” IT’S FLYING DON’T COME AT ME WITH STATISTICS, THE SKY IS WHERE THE GODS LIVE AND THERE IS NO REASON FOR ME TO BE UP THERE). Anyhow, it turns out that stalling is different from engine failure, so there are at least two ways for a plane to fall entirely out of the sky without warning.
***
“They act like they care, but they don’t.” Soft on Segregation: How the Feds Failed to Integrate Westchester County
***
Oh my God, I wish this article was a billion words long:
Not so before the 18th century, when smiling widely in portraits meant that you were probably destitute, indecent, or mentally ill. As Colin Jones shows in a new book, “The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris,” most European smiles of the time were hardly attractive—rotten teeth and empty gums gave even royalty sunken cheeks. In the context of art, the gesture often indicated condescension or scorn; a painted smile could make viewers pout. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that social custom relaxed and dental hygiene improved enough to make the smile popular, creating a “revolution” in expression between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Physically, the smile is simple. It comes from the contraction of the zygomatic major, a muscle in the face. Babies smile soon after birth, some say hours after delivery, and engage in social smiling by the time they’re a few months old. People have always used a smile to communicate across linguistic barriers. Even animals, from apes to dogs, produce expressions similar to the smile.
But, as Jones describes, what the smile means changes with the mood of the time—and can even be different for men and women in the same culture. In France, for instance, Jones identifies a split that came at a specific moment in history. Whereas both men and women might have smiled in the free-spirited salons of the Enlightenment, after the Revolution, smiling became a primarily female function, along with childrearing and housework. “Men in dark suits would keep teeth and smiles out of their public repertoire,” Jones writes, “making the benign, white-tooth smile a quintessentially female attribute, best indulged in the domestic calm of the home.”
***
Never listened to Bjork! Have no strong feelings either way, but I know you’re all going to keep sending me links to that “female auteur” quote in her Pitchfork interview, so here it is.
After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned—the hard way—that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they—men—had the ideas. I became really good at this and I don’t even notice it myself. I don’t really have an ego. I’m not that bothered. I just want the whole thing to be good. And I’m not saying one bad thing about the guys who were with me in the bands, because they’re all amazing and creative, and they’re doing incredible things now. But I come from a generation where that was the only way to get things done. So I have to play stupid and just do everything with five times the amount of energy, and then it will come through.
When people don’t credit me for the stuff I’ve done, it’s for several reasons. I’m going to get very methodical now!
***
“We’re in the rectangle of what?” he asked, his voice rising.
“War!” his players shouted in high-pitched unison.
“That’s right!” he said. “We’re in the rectangle of war, and we’re in it to win it!”
Undefeated fifth-grade all-girls basketball team.
***
If you don’t follow her then you’re a damn fool.
The only 2 responses my tweets receive pic.twitter.com/aIe7GInM14
— MissyElliott circa97 (@sailornegro) January 22, 2015
Tags: link roundup, the internet
When I took flying lessons (only the first two hours, nowhere near a license) one of the first things they cover is a plane engine stalling because you’ve done some stupid maneuver that planes aren’t meant to do. I wish I could remember the physics behind it to describe in all its terrifying detail, but maybe someone else can fill in.
My dad has his pilots license and an ex of mine is a professional pilot, and allegedly stalling is not the scariest thing that can happen to you in a plane! Although that leaves A LOT of room for other horrible things, though.
According to both of them the worst thing that could happen would be if your plane was on fire.
Yes, stalling mid-air is not an unrecoverable thing. But if you’re dumb enough to stall, you might not be smart enough to save yourself after stalling. That was the message imparted to me for $200 an hour, anyways.
When I started studying Classics in undergrad, my dad told me sadly that he had always nurtured a secret hope that I would study aeronautics and become a pilot, because it has been his own dream to be a pilot but like all good Romanian men he became an engineer instead. I guess his faith in me blinded him to the fact that I was terrible at math and physics and also terrified of being a passenger on a plane, never mind the person in charge of keeping the thing in the air.
I’m a flight attendant, and I’m just here to second the “plane on fire” being the worst possible scenario. Generally I’m a nice and chill flight attendant, but if I ever catch a passenger smoking in the lavatory I will put that goddamn cigarette out on their eyeball because I am NOT going out like that, you hear me?
In my dad’s plane, there is a sticker that lists the requirements for acrobatic maneuvers. The entry speed for some of them is listed as “stall,” and every time I’m sitting in the plane, I stare at that sticker and wonder why the HELL you would want to do a trick that required that!
I can do zat! Aerospace engineer to the rescue. ^_^
A stall is what happens when you’re going at such a speed and/or angle that the air over your wings no longer provides lift. Think about your hand out the window of a car – if you change the angle, the direction your hand gets blown changes. For planes, you want a nice, even, UPWARD force to be generated.
The reason some aerobatic tricks require stall speed is so they can do a slide or a reeeeally tight flip. If you know what you’re doing, a stall is not the end of the world at all. But as you mention, if you’ve stalled accidentally, you probably don’t know what you’re doing and you might be too freaked out to recover.
So my bro-in-law has a pilot’s license, and when he was taking his lessons, he invited me to come along one day. That was the day that the instructor decided to teach “what you do when the plane stalls.” So, as I sat in the back, getting increasingly motion sick, the instructor purposefully stalled the plane, I don’t know, ABOUT 1,000 TIMES IN THE COURSE OF AN HOUR. I was not once scared for my life, and my bro-in-law did not once get into trouble, but it did get old after a while. And then, when landing, we almost got killed by a rogue helicopter. Good times.
“We’d walk in, and all the boys would be like, ‘We’re playing girls?’ ” said Anne Rupnik, a point guard. “Then we’d beat them. Some of them cried.”
SHUT IT DOWN, this is the best thing I will read today.
Was just going to post the same thing! Amazing.
Yes, but did the girls bottle and drink the tears of the the boys after they conquered them? Fuck Gatorade, this is the way of the future!
electrolytes are important! GET THOSE SODIUM-FILLED TEARS.
but no, the article overall is very interesting – I love the details on the kind of terminology/strategy those girls are being taught, because a paucity of skill at lower-level coaching has historically been a big problem for female athletes. /nerd with a woman’s hockey blog
As a sports nerd myself, I would not be opposed to a link to your blog. And yes yes yes, to what you said.
http://www.watchthishockey.com
Right there – enjoy.! We mostly cover the CWHL/Team USA, but we’ve started getting pieces from other writers as well, that focus on more specific players/topics. Sports nerds gotta stick together, and all that.
This is fantastic (from a hockey nerd who loves women’s hockey but know embarrassingly little about the CWHL)!
😀 Awesome, thanks! @Philosophy_of_E on twitter is actually running a CWHL watch party over the NHL All-Star break – you might want to check that out. It’s $15 for live streaming of CWHL games (for the whole season), but there will hopefully be lots of people with various levels of familiarity with the CWHL tuning in, if you’re looking for an entry point.
Yeah, I’d think all things being equal, you’d expect fifth grade girls to be better at basketball than fifth grade boys – aren’t girls generally taller at that age? – so it’s interesting to hear what happens when someone actually coaches them seriously.
They also did well against teams of older girls.
I don’t know if you can make that kind of statement re: height, because while it’s true that on average, girls tend to hit puberty/growth spurts before boys, basketball itself is something of a self-selecting activity. So you’re not really looking at interference-free averages, if that makes sense? They could definitely be bigger on average, but I wouldn’t say without data, because I honestly don’t know how much the simple fact of “taller people tend to play basketball” is in play. And then of course, there’s the fact that people tend to over-privilege size – to take hockey as an example, Sidney Crosby is really far from being the tallest guy in the NHL. Even in the WNBA, you’ve got people like Diana Taurasi successfully outmaneuvering Brittney Griner, who’s 8 inches taller than she is. (Taurasi is a point guard and they are actually usually shorter than other players even in the NBA.)
HAVING SAID THAT, yeah, even as I try to avoid it, I end up in a lot of conversations about Women Being Athletes and If They Can Compete With Men and so on. There are so many factors people don’t consider, like the fact that any league is going to have a variation in body types, including height/weight, even if the league isn’t coed. And the early development stuff is so often passed over, even though it’s really important. IIRC girls are, on average, receiving inferior coaching by the time they hit middle school – they’re not encouraged to work out/practice as much, their coaches themselves & the systems they’re in aren’t as elite, they face less skilled competition, and so on. So yeah, it’s super exciting to see someone who’s looking for people he can really drop knowledge on, because at that point you’re looking at a very different environment than a lot of girls encounter as younger athletes.
I’ll say it again: the bail bond queen is a real-life, non-journalist incarnation of Freddy Lounds. I agree with everything Mallory said about her work being part of something quite awful, but I’m still in awe at how she’s owning it.
The physical resemblance in that last photo is a bit spooky. You slice the ginger.
When I took flying lessons I only took two, then my mother put a stop to it, because I was only 17. “Small planes crash more than airliners; it’s not safe.” she said. She was right, which was even more galling. MOMS
I love the basketball article! I fell in love with basketball in 4th grade playing at the Jewish Federation (We were The Six Point Stars!!) because at that point in time it was co-ed.
But I was horrified to learn that, although the boys had a 4th and 5th grade basketball team at our elementary school, the girls didn’t because there was no coach. So my dad, awesome and dadly man that he is, volunteered to coach basketball even though I don’t think he’d ever watched a game in his entire life before. He filled an entire notebook with drills he got out of a basketball coaching book, and watched every Celtics game with me, and would keep score and a detailed roster in another notebook, set up to make sure that each girl on the team, no matter the skill set, played for an equal amount of time. He was The Best! And, at the end of the year, my parents got me an “I’m not a tomboy – I’m an athlete!” t-shirt.
We only won one game, and I wasn’t good enough to play on the middle school team, but I went back to the Federation team made newly awesome by my season as a Wildcat. And, since I was still approximately the same size as the boys, I made them cry and it was delicious.
Great Dad, great story, great team name, great all-around.
A+ Dad. Really great work, Diana_monkey’s Dad.
That was so heartwarming and your dad sounds awesome! Thanks for sharing.
What a great story! Thanks for sharing.
Björk is really amazing in that interview, especially when it comes to who gets credit for music: “I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this—I’m not dissing him—this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second. If whatever I’m saying to you now helps women, I’m up for saying it. For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats—it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn’t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. [Matmos’] Drew [Daniel] is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don’t even listen to him. It really is strange.”
This sort of thing makes me unbelievably angry and it needs to be called out all the time. The number of times I have heard dudes casually, seemingly unthinkingly discredit a female artist’s ownership of her work is shocking. So happy to read this.
I first ran into this quote on Twitter because Rainbow Rowell was talking about how John Green wrote a positive review of one of her books and then people (let’s be real, men) started saying he was her “mentor” and crediting him for both her work and her success. They didn’t even know each other! Like the Matmos guy, he has been like “lol NOPE” about it, but that doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. Truly infuriating.
oh man, that article is so wonderful. Not only in her overall support of female artistry and calling out the bullshit she sees around her, but also how incredibly vulnerable she allows herself to be. I mean, shit, I was tearing up at my desk.
Bjork is such a treasure. When I was in middle school, I started getting really into her music and it was my first experience with true originality, really. She taught me you could do something wacky and weird and it can be beautiful and powerful and evocative.
If a woman makes an album, and a woman produces it, can anyone truly take credit for it? Isn’t it kind of like no-one making an album? If there are no men involved , then nobody gets credit. That’s how this works, right?
Does it even really exist at that point?
It could, really, have been made by anybody, but also nobody at all, which might be the greatest praise of all (?)
Smiling in paintings was pioneered, of course, by THIS MOTHERFUCKER RIGHT HERE:
Oh, whoah, that image was bigger than I thought it would be, sorry folks.
Nope, I think that size is really pretty perfect.
Joseph Ducreux is not shy about announcing his presence.
Joseph Ducreux is HERE for the PARTY.
I think Frank Sinatra went and stole his fingersnap.
It’s okay, the life-size effect makes me feel closer to the individual portrayed in this painting. We are bros now, and we’ll be moving in together soon.
If you ever want to size down an image on the fly when posting, you can add height=”” and width=”” and a pixel size inside the img tag (like height=”300px”). But agreed, this size is appropriate for this picture.
I have gotten slightly better at managing my fear of flying (thank you, Ativan; thank you, OTC sleeping pills) but it doesn’t take much to set me off again. If the plane rolls even a fraction of a degree to one side I tense up instinctively because I think we’re going down. I know that noise is just the landing gear coming out, but I can’t shut up that voice that says, “PARTS OF THE PLANE MUST BE FALLING OFF.” On a recent flight, the captain announced that takeoff would be delayed because the plane had to be de-iced and I was like, “LET ME OFF, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE. HE JUST SAID THERE’S ICE ON THE DAMN PLANE.”
I had a brief stint working at the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. I had a lot of downtime, which I unwisely filled by reading airplane incident reports. This opened my eyes to the wide variety of things that can possibly go wrong during a flight (even if the odds are very very low, there’s still so many factors, auuugh). It’s been years but I still remember a sentence from the report on Swissair 111 – “The force of the aircraft’s impact with the water was such that human remains were fragmented.” I think it has been permanently seared into my brain. I can’t really process the idea that you can hit a surface, especially a fluid surface, so far that your body breaks apart into tiny little pieces.
If we’re posting horrifying plane crash articles, this one has stuck with me mostly for the VERY vivid description of the recovery of remains. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_New_Zealand_Flig…
Arrghhhh I’m flying out this weekend to visit family and I should not read that article but my curiosity compels me!
We felt relieved when the first resupply of woollen gloves arrived because ours had become saturated in human grease
Naturally I clicked and read through the entire thing.
D:
Not a crash, but OMG OMG – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flig…
WHAT
THAT IS INSANE.
So… my job involves spending a lot of time sitting at a desk next to a giant TV showing 24-hour news coverage.
I started the week before the MH17 disaster.
Yep. All those stories about (not necessarily intact) “bodies raining down on the sunflower fields”) GAH.
All those strict de-icing regulations (in Canada) are due to a major plane crash that happened in the place I grew up (but before I was born).
Air Ontario Flight 1363
Side note: does anyone love the show ‘Mayday’ as much as I do? I somehow always end up watching it on planes, but I don’t have any flying anxieties beyond my bags being lost so it works out fine for me!
I do! For some reason it’s called Air Disasters in the US but it is appointment viewing for us. We just saw the Air Ontario one the other day. If anything, it makes me feel better about flying because like 15 different things need to go wrong to crash a plane.
Ugh God, I can’t stop myself from reading about plane crashes even though I shouldn’t since my fear of planes (which started three years ago) has not gotten better, even though I have had MULTIPLE people explain to me how planes work and the statistics. DOES NOT HELP.
The last flight I was on, some guy in a Southwestern uniform was telling the guy in front of me that he needed to squish down his carry-on since “this is a really old plane and we’re already overweight”, which sent me into a full on panic attack before we even got off the ground, and then we were landing the plane and had to pull up in the middle of it, so that was another one. It was fun.
As someone who has spent far too much time obsessively reading plane crash stories, I think the fairly recent Air France crash was a stalling issue as well. I’m pretty sure this article about it (which is amazing, and took up half a work afternoon to read – time well spent) http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/10/air-fr… was in one of Nicole’s link roundups once upon a time.
William Langewiesche writes a lot of really good articles about plane crashes. They don’t usually make me feel safer, but they are fascinating.
Based on my extensive experience playing on computer flight simulators as a child, I think it’s like when the wings aren’t “cutting” the air efficiently anymore, creating more drag which causes the plane to slow down which causes it to fall out of the sky, somehow, because of Bernoulli’s principle.
(reply to allanaaa above)
SO EXCITED ABOUT THE NEW BJORK ALBUM. Every album of hers has been increasingly more complex in a good way. I have to start listening to them gently, almost tentatively, to digest them. As time goes on, I get more comfortable with them, and eventually hear completely different things in the music. It’s like they’re living organisms. I think she’s a magician.
MEEEE TOOOOOOO. I just find her fascinating, and her music is, as you say, delightfully layered and complex. You really have to let yourself get immersed in an album to hear everything. But I also like putting it on at work as background music, partially because I think it weirds out my coworkers. Oh Björk.
That’s a perfect way to describe the process of listening to her stuff. There’s no simply putting it on in the background; her albums are total immersion experiences and are never the same twice.
If, say, I read this interview with Bjork and thought, she is saying interesting things but I have never given her music a chance and have no actual idea whether I would like it–if that happened, is there a song or an album you would recommend to a beginner?
you’ll probably get a different answer from other people, but I say start at the beginning with Debut… her music was then more poppy, and has become more eclectic and layered as time has gone on. But even with those first albums, I needed to listen to them a number of times before they aged properly and I “got” them. I mean, I was in high school at the time, but still 🙂
All her albums are magnificent, but the earlier ones are generally the most listenable, in my opinion – easier to put on as background music and let it soak in.
(ETA: Post may also be a good album to start with, as it’s a little less poppy and thus slightly less dated sounding than Debut)
I always heard her stuff AROUND because I grew up in the 2000s and had friends with Cool Older Siblings, but I only relatively recently got into her stuff and it was through someone sitting me down and saying “no you really have to listen to Vespertine.” So I did, with a glass of white wine, and I haven’t been the same since, so give that a try. Homogenic might also be a good place.
Medúlla, for whatever reason, is the album that drew me in most and quickest. I dunno if you like music that sounds doomy and cavernous, but if you do I would check that out.
But ‘Who Is It’ from Medulla is quite joyful and the video is a delight 🙂
And yes Post might be a good song and you might even know some stuff from it without realising you do.
I LOVE WHO IS IT. I’ve never known quite how to categorize it, emotionally, because the verses feel different from the spacious, joyous chorus, but you have a point.
*ugh, a good START, not song.
I LOVE that Roxane is recapping Empire for WSJ. You totally know the editor meeting went like:
“We should have that Roxane Gay lady write for us to show we’re hip with the young colored people.”
“Yeah but what would she write about? Feminism? The Black Lives Matter movement? Intersectionality?”
“Lol what are those words. What about that black show with the guy from Crash?”
While we were watching…something with a plane crash (Agents of SHIELD? I want to say it was Agents of SHIELD, but I could be wrong), my girlfriend casually informed me that her uncle’s girlfriend (Linda) has been in–and survived–two pretty major plane crashes. Now I can’t decide if I never want to fly places with Linda, ever, or only fly on planes with Linda in the hopes her crash protection extends to others.
The article about the girls’ basketball team is making my entire day:
When Mr. Toran started coaching the Xpress two years ago, he viewed it as an opportunity to get involved with his daughter’s athletic development. At the time, he said, he was an assistant coach with a semipro men’s team and was eager to escape what he described as the “whining and complaining” of players who were resistant to coaching.
In search of a more mature audience, he turned to a group of 9-year-old girls.
“You can actually teach them basketball,” he said.
Dying in a plane crash actually seems like a pretty good way to go. A few moments to reflect on your life, then it’s all over.
Yes! Watching my parents age and become more and more helpless and (sorry Mom and Dad) decrepit, I am reaching this exact conclusion.
I’d agree, but I also know I’d spend the entire death spiral wishing I knew how GAME OF THRONES was gonna turn out.
Man next to me: WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
Me: But is Tyrion? I really want him to make it.
Man next to me: O GOD GOD O GOD WHY?!
Me: I know, right? And I’ll never know if R + L really = J. I mean, PROBABLY? But there’s also the chance that [MASSIVE FIREBALL]
Oh fer sure. Reflect on whatever you’d like, no problem.
I would like to hear about Mallory’s dealings with a bail bond company.
You will not hear more details about it, I’m afraid!
Anyone wanna read a horrifying and rather graphic account of a man essentially being cooked to death in a sauna?
D: D: D:
…also, yes.
ETA, post-reading: EWWWWWWWWW
OH JEEZ. So this reminded me of a book I read pretty recently by a forensic pathologist who worked as an NYC medical examiner (I think it was her fellowship, I’m blanking on the title and author). Anyway, APPARENTLY the most haunting death she saw was a guy who was pushed into a steam vent and steamed to death. Because in a fire your nerve endings get burned off but the steam wouldn’t have damaged the nerves enough to prevent the excruciating pain, and it took some time for him to die as rescue workers tried to reach him and failed. SO. I don’t know, I hope this guy had passed out from a heart attack or something.
I haven’t read it yet but it sounds like WORKING STIFF? It’s on my list!
Nope! Nopety nope nope nope.
Understandable.
On a completely different topic, did you ever get my huge and obnoxious singing Valentine’s Day card?
I DID! And then I opened it five million times for the pure joy of it, while my dogs looked on in confusion (you know that cocked head, what is going on here look? that). I have a card for you that I just need to sit down and write, but sadly it is nowhere near as amazing.
The basketball article is MY FAV THING but *WHY* do they feel the need to end it on this note: “Not that the Xpress, with their ponytails and fluorescent sneakers, set out to crush gender barriers.”
You just described some bad ass young women who compete methodically and expertly against an all-boy league, and the fact that they love bright colors and wear their hair up… negates the crushed gender barriers? GETOUTTAHEREWITDAT
BUT THEY STILL HAVE LONG HAIR! Is it not just *crazy* that they are tough and competitive and athletic and determined, and yet they have not shaved their heads in elementary school like tiny little Navy SEALS, but instead wear their hair LONG like GIRLS?
Also, ponytails and fluorescent sneakers both rule, that guy can suck it
That makes me sad. I wasn’t reading closely enough and I read that sentence as “Now the Xpress….” I’m going to stick with my reading, it’s way better and less rage inducing.
I also read it that way initially!
I am cackling with amusement that a book called “White Man’s Problems” is showing up as an ad here today.
In regards to airplanes, has anyone read Code Name Verity? I’m a little more than halfway through and it is actually making me want to learn to fly a plane, despite no previous interest. The description of flight maneuvers and flying talent is just so cool. I have a really good instinct for driving cars and I want to know if it would translate to planes! Someday when I’m rich.
I suspect you’ll find that many, many Toasties luuuurve Code Name Verity, probably because it’s pretty much the greatest book of all time.
The Toast comment section is the sole reason I read Code Name Verity. (Thank you, Toast comment section.)
Yup. Adore that book.
I am unsurprised! It is a very Toast-friendly book. I just hadn’t personally seen discussion of it, probably because I am late to reading it.
That book is SO GOOD!
I’ve always thought it’d be fun to fly a plane, alas I am colorblind and therefore I don’t think I’d be allowed.
Code Name Verity = one of the great books of the last decade. I WILL TAKE ON PEOPLE WHO SAY OTHERWISE.
I have a relative who married a woman from the “wrong town” in Westchester County, and I never understood why his mom didn’t like her. She’s smart, has a great job, very friendly, loves her husband, her dad is a genuine 9/11 hero, etc. She’s white so it had never occurred to me that racism might be a factor. Hmmm.
My favorite thing about the basketball article was the nicknames, and especially how simple/clearly invented by 5th graders they were. I sent this to my dad, who should be a Dad Magazine subscriber and used to coach my soccer team and my brother’s hockey team. He also required all players to have nicknames (mine was, very simply, Kate the Great or just Great).
Highly recommended: The Hunting of Billie Holiday, about Billie Holiday, drug addiction, racism, and the drug war.
Here is a fun, accessible, and informative NASA page about lift and stall on airplane wings, for anybody wondering about the physics: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/incline…
(I totally love that whole section of their website, but I’m also an aero nerd.)
ETA: Argh, these were supposed to be in the reply to allanaaa too…
My dad used to coach girls’ basketball in that age range! He coached my brother when my brother was little, and then once my brother got to high school and more advanced playing/coaching, my dad asked the league if he could still coach because he liked it. They asked him if he minded coaching the girls’ league because the boys’ teams always had tons of parent volunteers and the girls’ teams never had enough, which I found really sad. He kept on coaching 11-year-old girls right up until he got sick!
DAD COACHES. My dad ended up coaching my 5th grade soccer team, because if they couldn’t find someone the league was going to fold (of course the boy’s league didn’t have this issue). His trepidation was due to the fact that he knew nothing about soccer, but damned if he was going to let me miss a sports season I wanted to play in.
Although this makes me think, of the years of my life, I only had two seasons where my head coach was a woman. I started sports in 1st grade, and still play today in a rec soccer league. And many of those years I was playing 2-3 seasons of sports a calendar year. Need to go find me a team to coach!
My hometown in Westchester County is one of the worst offenders. The town is attempting to integrate by building a single apartment building on about 1/3 of an acre between the railroad tracks and a highway entrance ramp. This, in a town where the vast majority of residents live in large, single family homes on quiet streets. From what I’ve heard the developers are being stalled by the fire department.
I’m always shocked to learn that ANYONE doesn’t like Bjork, but I guess I can’t judge you because I’m a queer who doesn’t understand the appeal of Tegan and Sara.
When did Denver become cool? Denver wasn’t cool when I lived/grew up there. What is going on?!?!
People Kept Denver Weird.
Main thing is probably the craft brewing explosion (now encompassing grain alcohol is well). But you can’t really discount the fact that flush (with cash or debt or both) white college grads have had to start looking for cheaper places than Brooklyn and Portland, and have been forced to demean themselves by opening up to the possibility of not living on a coast. Colorado gets 300+ days of sun a year, we’ve got a great dry climate, the mountains are gorgeous, it’s outdoorsy, you can get high in public on First Friday. What’s not to love?
So yes, the city is rapidly gentrifying. Savvy investors have duped the city government into believing in Richard Florida’s horseshit so we have “art districts” now with cheap commercial rents and lots of beautification to attract whites. Denver’s experimented with charter schools for awhile, too. Some neighborhoods, like Capitol Hill, are already as expensive as any in NYC. I’ve toured new apartment complexes for a friend looking to move and they’re the sorts of places with reservable poker rooms, communal Wii stations, free on-site yoga instruction, and organized weekly social events for pets of tenants. There are 2,000+ new apartments and condos hitting the market this year and I wouldn’t be surprised if the city council was stupid enough to believe that ballooning the supply will lower prices. In 4 months I’m almost definitely going to get priced the fuck out of my neighborhood – A Trader Joes literally opened two blocks from me. In a year this neighborhood will be all graphic designers and young professional families. Park Slope under the mountains.
The Smile Revolution looks like my favorite kind of history/anthropology book ever–the kind of thing that makes you realize how something you take so totally for granted–something that is currently assumed to be completely biological in origin–is actually socially determined. Just ran over to Amazon and bought it. And while I was at it, the “other people also bought” How to Be a Good Victorian. And now the weekend cannot come fast enough.
I am a stratotheist. My level of belief in a God who responds to prayers — specifically those promising to thereafter lead a virtuous and charitable life — is directly correlated with how many feet of empty space there are between *my feet* and *the ground*.
the prayer of the stratotheist
*clasp hands*
i’m not praying. i just like to hold my hands this way to help me focus inward during meditation and while i try find my happy place. meditate, happy place. meditate, happy place. but if, you know, there IS any interventionist deity out there, like, listening in on my internal dialogue and who sees fit to ensure that i make it safely to the ground in one living, uncharred piece, that’d be GREAT. i mean, i’m not promising anything in return but my immediate and fleeting gratitude but if that’s a deal you’re willing to accept, Oh Possibly Existing Deity of Non-Crashing Planes, that’s be totes awesome. i’ll just be here mediating and searching for my happy place. ooohhhhmmmmmmm…
!!BJÖRK!!
If you guys want to delve further into the world of women being overlooked for their roles as producers, especially in electronic music, the ladies of The Blow started a tumblr womanproducer.com and here is an interview about why they started it and what it is http://www.chartattack.com/features/2015/01/20/qa…
Mallory have you ever watched one of those Discovery Channel shows that tries to link plane crashes and disappearances to UFOS because I feel like you’d be into it.
SPEAKING OF UFOS, if anyone is interested in browsing through a database of declassified UFO sightings recorded by the Air Force from the 1940s-1960s, that is a thing you can do now.
Dare I admit it? Resident airline pilot here. I have issues with the BBC article but you know, media. Gah. So yeah, the stalling thing. When the air hitting the front (leading edge) of the wing gets sinks lower on the underside of the wing you’re not going fast enough for the air to smoothly meet up on the back side (trailing edge) of the wing. So the air just burbles away from the top of the wing, separating off and bam….stall. It doesn’t matter if the plane is pointing straight up or flying straight and level: a stall can happen *any time* the air going over the wings slows down enough to not be able to meet up on the trailing edge of that wing. (Regarding Mallory’s comment, the good news is that losing an engine never makes you fall out of the sky: you just turn into the world’s largest glider. Why? Because if you point the nose of the plane down slightly, air is *still* flowing over those wings. Of course, you can only do that until you’re out of altitude, but hey, it beats falling out of the sky, right? Maybe.)
It’s so sad reading about Bjork not being able to get credit for her ideas!
Main thing is probably the craft brewing explosion (now encompassing grain alcohol is well). But you can't really discount the fact that flush (with cash or debt or both) white college grads have had to start looking for cheaper places than Brooklyn and Portland, and have been forced to demean themselves by opening up to the possibility of not living on a coast. Colorado gets 300+ days of sun a year, we've got a great dry climate, the mountains are gorgeous, it's outdoorsy, you can get high in public on First Friday. What's not to love?
So yes, the city is rapidly gentrifying. Savvy investors have duped the city government into believing in Richard Florida's horseshit so we have "art districts" now with cheap commercial rents and lots of beautification to attract whites. Denver's experimented with charter schools for awhile, too. Some neighborhoods, like Capitol Hill, are already as expensive as any in NYC. I've toured new apartment complexes for a friend looking to move and they're the sorts of places with reservable poker rooms, communal Wii stations, free on-site yoga instruction, and organized weekly social events for pets of tenants. There are 2,000+ new apartments and condos hitting the market this year and I wouldn't be surprised if the city council was stupid enough to believe that ballooning the supply will lower prices. In 4 months I'm almost definitely going to get priced the fuck out of my neighborhood – A Trader Joes literally opened two blocks from me. In a year this neighborhood will be all graphic designers and young professional families. Park Slope under the mountains.
It's gristly and very, very salty.