Throwback Thursday! Sansa stealing James’ newsboy cap on Christmas morning.
This seems like a pretty big deal:
Iraqi engineers involved in building the Mosul dam 30 years ago have warned that the risk of its imminent collapse and the consequent death toll could be even worse than reported.
They pointed out that pressure on the dam’s compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir, bringing it up to its maximum capacity, while the sluice gates normally used to relieve that pressure were jammed shut.
The Iraqi engineers also said the failure to replace machinery or assemble a full workforce more than a year after Islamic State temporarily held the dam means that the chasms in the porous rock under the dam were getting bigger and more dangerous every day. A contract with an Italian construction firm for carrying out urgent repairs has yet to be signed, but behind-the-scenes negotiations with Baghdad continue.
The engineers warned that potential loss of life from a sudden catastrophic collapse of the Mosul dam could be even greater than the 500,000 officially estimated, as they said many people could die in the resulting mass panic, with a 20-metre-high flood wave hitting the city of Mosul and then rolling on down the Tigris valley through Tikrit and Samarra to Baghdad.
Kate Spade, a success story:
Her first sample was a square bag mocked up in burlap (her supplier was a potato-sack manufacturer she found in the yellow pages) and woven with raffia fringe. She produced a few more samples, all made of bright fabrics, and after brainstorming potential company names (“Olive” was a top contender), settled for “Kate Spade,” a mash-up of her and Andy’s names, although it would later become her own after the two married in 1994.
The duo evolved Brosnahan’s samples into a collection of black nylon bags priced between $100 and $400 and took them to to various trade shows around New York City. The night before her first show, Brosnahan told Forbes, she spent hours moving her black labels with their white “Kate Spade New York” logos from the inside of the bags to the outside after the idea wouldn’t stop nagging her.
A great interview with Mallory:
I really love your All About Women discussion topic, the Happy Feminist. What does ‘Happy Feminism’ mean to you?
It is the topic that was assigned to me when I agreed to do All About Women! I can’t take any credit for it, unfortunately. But the example I use when I talk about things like this is that there’s this character in Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil, who is sort of wonderful, and dresses like Father Christmas, and completely holds up the narrative–
I love Tom Bombadil.
Everyone’s super concerned about this horribly dangerous ring and all the terrible things that could happen, and he’s just mildly sinister but incredibly cheerful. He bellows around the forest screaming old songs, and he’s the king of the trees. He’s like, ‘Nice ring you got there, sounds like a real problem!’ and offers no assistance whatsoever. He’s a messy, chaotic figure, and I love that he’s included in the narrative as this guy who’s like, ‘Yup, sounds like a real bad problem, not myproblem.’ Here’s this whimsical, bewildering character, who sometimes decides to be helpful and sometimes decides not to participate. Nobody knows what he’s all about. I find that really fun, and a fun character to channel every now and again in my own life. So yeah, that’s my answer?
This is horrible and sad and opens with the murder of a kid:
Charles is one of 75 children whose remains lie buried, unmarked and virtually forgotten in a pair of mass graves at an Etobicoke cemetery. They were drops in the wave of British home children, sent in droves from the U.K. to build a fresh life on Canadian soil.
Now a research group has dug up their identities, giving new life to youths all but anonymous in death. The revelation unfolded as part of an effort to reclaim the pasts of more than 115,000 children shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants between 1869 and 1948.
“This thing at Park Lawn Cemetery was held under wraps for many years,” says Lori Oschefski, who heads the British Home Child Advocacy and Research Association.
oyyy:
My office is an older building and half of it is up on a small crawl space. Every winter around this time (late February to early March) is what we call the dead animal season. Something (rat, feral cat, mouse) ends up finding its way into the crawl space and perishing – for whatever reason. And then the smell begins to permeate the office. There are always one or two locations where the smell is worse – different every year – but the smell comes right up through the floor and is rank enough that people are nauseated and have a difficult time working. The smell will last for 2-3 weeks.
And nothing is done about this. The manager doesn’t usually notice unless it’s brought to his attention – he works in the part of the building that has a basement below it so he doesn’t often experience this. This has been going on for the eight years I’ve been working here, and the response every year is that we have no way to prevent animals getting under there and no way of getting them out. When we bring in air deodorizers or air purifiers (electric or natural) we are told that those emit a scent he can’t stand and we need to get rid of them – and we make a point to get ones that are fragrance free.
well, FUCK (this also brought back my own memories of fighting my way past protestors into a Planned Parenthood, and clinic escorts are heroes):
The hardest thing I’ve ever done is carry a sobbing 14-year-old rape survivor from the door of a women’s health clinic to the door of the van that would take her back to a women’s shelter, while a crowd of men stood around us and screamed that she could never be forgiven.
The hardest question I’ve ever been asked is, “Why are they doing this to me?”
I don’t know.
L.R.: In addition to rap, the Hamilton score has R&B, some jazz, and ballads. Is the Mixtape album going to be as musically varied? Who’s going to be on it?
Q.: So far, Busta Rhymes, Ben Folds, Regina Spektor, Latifah, Common, Chance the Rapper, and others. People are coming out of the woodwork, knocking on the door. Half the songs are cover versions of songs in the show, and the others are interpolations—we’ll take some of this, some of that, and make something new out of it.
L-M.M.: I’m not going to be on it because for me the goal is to keep this inspired by the original. But it is funny that this was my first idea, and now it’s come full cycle and coming after the show.
Q.: Hamilton is the balance that hip-hop needed. It’s changing the conversation. The amount of people in my apartment building treating me different now … This is a key moment for Broadway and for music.
For those who watched last week’s very special episode of Black-ish, the opening of this week’s The People vs. O.J. Simpson feels exquisitely timed. In the Black-ish episode, titled “Hope,” the family gathers around the TV as the police shooting of unarmed black man fails to yield an indictment and the community rises up in protest. All parents of small children are naturally inclined to protect them from the terrible realities of the world, but the news forces Dre and Bow to face a difficult question specific to African-Americans: How (and when) do you tell your kids about racial injustice and police brutality?
In the early ’80s, Johnnie Cochran had already had that conversation with his girls — or at least the part about how to deal with the police. As “The Race Card” opens, we flash back to 1982, when Cochran, then an assistant district attorney, gets stopped for the offense of being a black man driving through an affluent white neighborhood. This is the third time in a week he’s been pulled over, and we see it as a ritual humiliation.
Okay, maybe we should all watch this Nina Simone documentary instead of the Zoe Saldana movie:
Simone’s courage was undeniable, but it was also a shield, even a mask, designed to protect her from hostile forces, real and imagined. White supremacy was not the only hellhound on her trail. She suffered from bipolar disorder, a condition that remained undiagnosed until the 1980s, when her demons had all but taken over and a Dutch fan saved her from near vagrancy. She had a weakness for tough men and hustlers: “A love affair with fire,” as her daughter Lisa Simone told Garbus. (Lisa Simone is an executive producer of the documentary.)
Simone was also deeply tormented about her desires for women. “I have to live with Nina, and that is very difficult,” she confessed in an interview. Just how difficult is the story of Alan Light’s biography, What Happened, Miss Simone?, which was “inspired” by Garbus’s film and based on the same archive of source material, including Simone’s diaries and letters. Light’s prose is often hackneyed, but he provides an even more probing account of Simone’s inner struggles than Garbus. Far from detracting from her civil rights heroism, it makes that achievement all the more astonishing.
This is something I see a lot on DWIL, and it causes so much pain within families. No one is suggesting that your in-laws have to love your kid from a previous marriage like a grandchild, but while those kids are minors and living with you, your in-laws DO need to practice fairness around birthdays and Christmas, in my opinion:
Q. Inconsiderate in-laws: I have been with my husband for five years. I have a daughter from a previous marriage who is now 10 and a 4-year-old daughter with my husband. Every year, his parents and other extended family acknowledge my younger daughter’s birthday. Last year on her birthday, when an aunt asked for our address so that she could send money, I requested that she not send anything because our children are noticing and it causes hurt feelings. We requested they treat the girls the same because they are sisters. She promised to include my oldest. Well, that didn’t happen. Again, we are sent a card and money for our younger and my older had received nothing. I would like to cut these people from our lives, but my husband feels torn. What do I do?
No, I’m Not Glamorizing My Autism:
For one thing, abject tragedy is not my truth. I do struggle with autism on a regular basis, and I would go so far as to say that I often suffer from some of its most common comorbidities, like depression and anxiety. But even on my worst day, it wouldn’t occur to me to define my life by them. Good things happen to me despite and because of autism. Neutral things happen, too, and they’re as much a part of my true story as the rest. And even if they weren’t, what good would it do me to represent my disability entirely in terms of the misery it causes me and the people I love? Everyone deserves to believe that their life is worth living. In fact, this belief is integral to a person’s very survival in this world. Autistic people face enough suicidal ideation without being asked to think of themselves as nothing more than burdens to their loved ones, and I can’t support or contribute to any conversation that increases that risk.
