We haven’t seen Carmella in a while! Let’s fix that.
I can’t stop watching the footage of the fires consuming Fort MacMurray (I had family members who were working there until relatively recently, and they’re watching friends and loved ones lose their home):
“We’ve had a devastating day,” fire chief Darby Allen said. “Fort McMurray has been overrun by wildfire.”
Allen said firefighters were “a little worried” earlier in the day, but with the 30 C heat and dry conditions, once the wind came up the fire became an inferno.
“It’s been the worst day of my career,” Allen said. “It’s a nasty, ugly fire and it hasn’t shown any forgiveness.”
Earlier in the day, the downtown area, and 10 of the 12 neighbourhoods in the oilsands city, were placed under mandatory evacuation orders because of the fire.
I have seen only a TINY bit of this, and I am sure none of you would go there, but you can have very strong negative feelings about the oil sands industry and still feel horrible for the families working there who are facing the loss of their homes, so let’s not.
I was a Marine, and I am considered 90 percent disabled by the VA for various things, including TBI, hearing loss, and tinnitus (IEDs). My girlfriend insists on calling me on the phone, especially while she drives. My state has a law where you need hands-free phones, so she puts it on speaker. I cannot hear anyone on the phone, much less when they put it on speaker. I stopped answering when she calls and she gets furious, and this has led to fights. My 70-year-old dad texts me, so why can’t she? She says I don’t care because I don’t answer or call her—no, I just can’t hear over phones, and I need to be in the same room and preferably looking at the person to hear/understand. How can I make her understand? She knows about my hearing problems.
Meet the first American climate change refugees:
Each morning at 3:30, when Joann Bourg leaves the mildewed and rusted house that her parents built on her grandfather’s property, she worries that the bridge connecting this spit of waterlogged land to Louisiana’s terra firma will again be flooded and she will miss another day’s work.
Ms. Bourg, a custodian at a sporting goods store on the mainland, lives with her two sisters, 82-year-old mother, son and niece on land where her ancestors, members of the Native American tribes of southeastern Louisiana, have lived for generations. That earth is now dying, drowning in salt and sinking into the sea, and she is ready to leave.
With a first-of-its-kind “climate resilience” grant to resettle the island’s native residents, Washington is ready to help.
“Yes, this is our grandpa’s land,” Ms. Bourg said. “But it’s going under one way or another.”
So why did Holmes and Theranos get such a break? Was she an anomaly who somehow pulled one over on the tech press in Silicon Valley? Not even close.
The system here has been molded to effectively prevent reporters from asking tough questions. It’s a game of access, and if you don’t play it carefully, you may pay sorely. Outlets that write negatively about gadgets often don’t get pre-release versions of the next gadget. Writers who ask probing questions may not get to interview the C.E.O. next time he or she is doing the rounds. If you comply with these rules, you’re rewarded with page views and praise in the tech blogosphere. And then there’s the fact that many of these tech outlets rely so heavily on tech conferences. “If you look at most tech publications, they have major conferences as their revenue,” Jason Calacanis, the blogger and founder of Weblogs, told me. “If you hit too hard, you lose keynotes, ticket buyers, and support in the tech space.”
I work for a very large Fortune 500 company. There is an HR policy in place regarding conflicts of interest for family members and opposite-sex relationships. However, there is not a policy regarding same-sex friendships.
In my department, my manager and coworker have a very intense personal relationship (non-sexual). They work out together during the week and on weekends, they attend all sorts of sporting events, they dine together, they take expensive vacations together (spas/vacations out of the country – one of which was financed by my manager), they text, they are in each other’s offices all day, they take selfies and post them on Facebook, and they share clothing. It is a very close friendship.
As a result, the coworker has a LOT of power in our group. She has unlimited access to our boss, and she is able to direct her own narrative. Our boss maintains that she can be objective. I disagree. There have been a number of instances where this coworker’s behavior was excused instead of addressed. She can act, essentially, with impunity. My bosses’ boss knows about this friendship, and either hasn’t or won’t address it. It could be that I have been existing in this dysfunctional environment for too long, but I’m starting to think that maybe I am wrong. Is this a conflict or am I off base?
My Dinner With Rasputin (always relevant to our interests):
“This Manuilov,” said Izmailov, “has suggested to Filippov that he should ask round some writers who’d like to get a glimpse of Rasputin. Just a few people, carefully chosen so there’s no one superfluous and no chance of any unpleasant surprises. Only recently a friend of mine happened to be in the company of Rasputin—and someone covertly took a photograph. Worse still—they sent this photograph to a magazine. ‘Rasputin,’ the caption read, ‘among his friends and admirers.’ But my friend is a prominent public figure; he’s a serious man, perfectly respectable. He can’t stand Rasputin and he feels he’ll never get over the disgrace of this photograph—of being immortalized amid this picturesque crowd. Which is why, to avoid any unpleasantness of this kind, I’ve made it a condition that there should be no superfluous guests. Filippov has given his promise, and this morning Manuilov came over and showed me the guest list. One of the writers is Rozanov, and Rozanov insists that you absolutely must be there. Without you, he says, the whole thing will be a waste of time. Evidently he has a plan of some kind.”
I am watching American Horror Story: Hotel, and I am ASHAMED of how much I am enjoying it, and especially how much I am enjoying watching Gaga just kind of posing and looking incredible and dead-eyed and great?
The fires in Fort Mac are awful, awful, awful, and I cannot imagine how horrific it is to be fleeing along with 50,000 other people. I know a bunch of people who are about to be deployed to help fight the fires but realistically they may be observing the end of a city instead. It’s getting worse, not better, and it’s going to be extremely hard for the residents to come back if half the place is burned down. Fort Mac isn’t known for its amazing availability of accommodations at the best of times, after all.
The photos and first-hand accounts are so awful. 🙁
A friend of mine lives (or, possibly, lived; she doesn’t know yet if her house is still there) in Fort Mac, and was essentially livetweeting her evacuation all day yesterday. It was awful, and I really really hope she and everyone else will be okay–or as okay as they can be, under the circumstances.
Mmhmm. The videos that people are posting of evacuating while the side of the road is on fire are terrifying.
I live in Southern California and have had vast swaths of my city under evacuations, but the photos and videos of this are HORRENDOUS. I think I have enough experience with wildfires to only know the tip of the iceberg of how scary this is.
Oh, man. Is there any news on the cause of the fire? (I swear I’m not looking to victim-blame. I’ve worked the majority of my professional career — all five and a half years! — in the oil and gas industry, and I’ve had loved ones who worked in extremely vulnerable areas.)
Not that I have heard, but it has been incredibly dry in Alberta this year. Anything could have have sparked it pretty easily.
Yes, to be honest we were expecting it to be a bad fire year because of how dry it’s been.
I lived there for years and still have friends and co-workers there. A few have made it to Edmonton, another is holed up in an oilsands worker’s camp north of the city. It’s terrible to look at a place I knew so well and see it destroyed. I haven’t heard there have been more fires IN the city today, so hopefully the damage will be limited.
Yesterday was the 115th anniversary of the Great Fire of Jacksonville, Fla., and it was really surreal to watch @jaxdotcom basically live-tweeting what happened that day based on eyewitness accounts and historical records and so on, and then to see photos/stories of Fort McMurray trickle in.
I hope Fort Mac is able to recover the way Jacksonville has, though we only lost ~200 blocks and maybe a few thousand displaced people, not the entire city/50,000 displaced. (it was so hot that cement structures glowed red? you could see the flames up in Savannah – it had been a particularly dry spring, too)
Wow, I can’t imagine concrete glowing red 🙁
The only time we ever got excited about the census was when all those people put jedi as their religion. Though having just looked it up, that little phenomenon made it the fourth largest reported religion in England and Wales, so that is some fairly impressive nerdery.
Plus 14 Sith in Scotland, so watch out.
14 Sith in Scotland is the Star Wars spinoff I never knew I wanted.
shut up and take my money
It sounds like a very, very strange romance novel.
Written by Alexander McCall Smith.
Well, Luke Skywalker is holding out with Rey in Ireland, so, it makes sense. http://www.techinsider.io/star-wars-luke-location…
We just had the census in Ireland and Irish Twitter was just solidly TICK ‘NO RELIGION’ DON’T PUT DOWN CATHOLIC UNLESS YOU’RE PRACTICING WE HAVE TO GET THE CHURCH OUT OF SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AAAAAGH for like two solid weeks.
I only learned about the situation regarding schools and the Catholic Church in Ireland recently and was horrified. So many schools are Catholic!
Yes, and there’s such a shortage of non-religious schools that people who abhor the church have no choice but to baptise their children bc in some areas it is literally the only way to get them educated 🙁
Hey, we lost the long form census so it is exciting to get it back. I was excited, anyway. But I got the short version so I didn’t get to list my religion as Jedi or Pastafarian or anything else.
Ugh, the Ask a Manager question about the boss who watches porn at work (and doesn’t realize it can be heard by others?!). What is it with people watching porn at work? And on work computers, no less!
I worked at two separate office jobs where I would always find porn in the browser history in the morning, meaning my bosses would stay late to watch it after I’d left for the day. I don’t want to know your porn genre predilections, people!
My first job out of college, I heard stories of the former exec (and this was a small company, so basically 1 of 3 top-ranking people in an org of ~30 full-time employees) who used to watch so much p0rn at work that IT was given a list of search terms to block on his computer – my co-worker saw multiple post-its with the filthiest things you could think of, and IT was like, “THAT’S NOT FOR US, IT’S BECAUSE OF [THIS GUY].” Especially awkward because he’s the husband of the owner’s best friend.
Plus, we both work elsewhere now and our new companies do business – he’s my account manager and I have to shake hands with him.
“Plus, we both work elsewhere now and our new companies do business – he’s my account manager and I have to shake hands with him.”
Eugh. *shudder*
A couple years ago one of my client contacts was arrested in a prostitution/bribery scandal. My first thought was all the times I had shaken his hand. Ew.
AAAAH. So gross.
I don’t even dare to do online swimsuit shopping at work because I don’t want someone to walk up behind me and be like “SKIN!!”
the other night, on a slow reference shift, I was googling korean skin care and ended up on a reddit with a huge banner saying ASIAN BEAUTY. Someone walked by and did a double take, and I realized it probably looked like I was googling sexy pictures of Asian ladies :(:(
I keep getting sites blocked on my work computer because it thinks it’s porn when it’s totally not. I hope nobody in IT is getting the wrong idea about me.
Some of it I can soooorta understand (I was blocked from the website for the coconut butter brand Sweet Spreads, so . . . I guess?), and some of it I don’t get at all.
At my first company, my boss handed me my computer with the disclaimer “I’m so sorry if you find porn on this. I think I’ve gotten it all off, but I’ve thought that before.” On the bright side, they had fired the guy who had that computer before me. And I never ended up stumbling across any porn. But I was always scared that I would.
I hope that the computer/keyboard had been thoroughly cleaned before you received it D:
I think I’ve gotten it all off, but I’ve thought that before.
No, I mean like…physically cleaned. Of fluids.
oh yeah yeah i know haha i was just contemplating The Horror of this line in a…physical…context
oh noooooooooooo D:
I can’t believe there are corporate places left that don’t have strenuous filters on their internet. Every day I’m grateful my workplace hasn’t determined the Toast is a naughty social place that simply must be blocked in order to ensure all its employees are thinking about and doing nothing but work for the eight-plus hours we’re in the office.
I work IT in a University department and we don’t filter anyone’s internet. They are expected to abide by university best use policy but we don’t police anyone. I haven’t really heard of any issues, but who knows.
It didn’t sound like a super-‘corporate’ place to me, from the letter. With staff that small, there’s probably no one dedicated to IT, so it makes sense that Internet usage wouldn’t be monitored.
That letter! Although I had never really internalized what Allison said: “People sometimes think that for something to qualify as harassment, it has be directed toward you (like unwelcome comments made directly to you), but the law also covers ‘conduct of a sexual nature when this conduct creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.'”
And… wow, it’s a strange feeling to realize that things that have happened to you at work and school that you always wrote off as a misplaced bad feeling were actually sexual harassment.
The letter writer’s situation is terrible and I hope they can move on to a better situation quickly. I’m beholden to them for writing in, though, because now other people know that that is not something that must be tolerated.
This week I had to retake the anti-harassment training (we have to do it every year), and yeah. It can be a coworker looking at something inappropriate on their computer! Or a conversation that you overhear! Anything that creates a bad environment, though to be actionable it has to be something small repeated a lot, or something bigger done once or twice.
I was just thinking that if it had been the boss using the computer before cait0716 and mentioning there might be porn on the computer that would count at least as a first instance. Thank goodness the poor boss wasn’t being a creeper just doing his best to be full disclosure.
How is that POSSIBLE?
Also, like do they just like porn as an aesthetic? Rather than using it for its, um, intended use? Or are they actually cool with jerkin’ it at their goddamn desks?
my husband likes to watch soothing, monotonous youtube videos while he works — like plane flights or desert bus — so maybe this serves a similar function?
Porn, but for fans of ASMR?
like…visual asmr?
My boss at one workplace was sending naked selfies to her lover while at work from the shared computer. I opened the browser to look something up and there she was… D:
nooooooooooooooooooooo
I have little else to add but that is pretty horrifying. Also, just use your phones! Except there is probably a weird “oh I could get caught” thrill thing isn’t there? Ugh.
it HAS to be that, right, because it would actually be kind of difficult to send a naked selfie from the computer — you’d have to take it with a camera and upload it, or take it with your phone and send it to yourself, unless you were naked photoboothing in the office?!
CRIPES
Also, IF you were to watch porn at work (which, don’t), why wouldn’t you use incognito mode or at least delete your browser history rather than LEAVING IT FOR OTHER PEOPLE TO SEE?
When I watch porn at home on my personal iPad, I STILL ALWAYS go incognito! I mean, this isn’t difficult.
At work, I see library users (who are barristers or law students so, one would hope, not completely dim) leaving personal stuff open – email accounts, CVs, confidential documents – on the shared computer and then leaving the library all the time. Apparently some people really don’t care about what other people see. (I know it’s not porn, but I would still never dream of leaving my Gmail logged in on a public computer and then leaving the building. But they do.)
As a lawyer, I can say from experience that a total lack of common sense doesn’t seem to preclude many people from entering the profession.
Indeed. For some people, a lack of common sense is the reason they went into the profession in the first place.
one of my co-workers — actually a great friend who had a porn problem for a while — got fired for said problem. he left the building with the best quote ever: “OK if you want me to go, but it’s going to take me the rest of the day to get all the porn off this computer.” ten years later, we still quote him and marvel at the utter forthrightness.
honesty, it’s such a lonely word.
omg I read your comment too fast and I thought he was warning everyone by saying it would take them ten years to get the porn off that computer!
thatssssssss a lotta porn!!
saaaaaame
My ex!boss was living in a small apartment/cubbyhole above the shop (illegally, I might add). Everything he did, he did in the office. The least awkward thing that happened as a result was that I got to work early one Saturday morning to have some extra time to finish a project before customers came in, and he was walking around in his pajamas.
The least awkward moment, I remind you.
Were you working for Cormoran Strike?
Sadly, my workplace did not have the advantage of being fictional. On the plus side, that workplace, now it is sans ex!boss, is a wonderful and happy place to work, and everybody respects everybody else’s boundaries and personal space.
Haha, was about to ask the same.
I have had this happen in libraries that I’ve worked in where I’ve been managing public-access computers and a) come across thirty open tabs, all porn, that could only have been left there by security or cleaning staff (we shut down all the computers at night), and b) made the mistake of checking out the browser history of public computers and had my supervisor walk up behind me when I’d clicked on the address of a site that in no way indicated its nature from the name. That was awkward, and led to the “nuke it from orbit” policy; don’t bother opening that site or file, just delete the sucker.
I also spent a lot of time trying to find a bulletproof way of setting up our public-access machines in “kiosk” mode that would allow for catalog and database browsing, but not access to other sites; for every method I found, though, there was always a (publicly-documented) way around it. Thanks, Peacefire! (Actually, I have a problem with a lot of censorware and the assumptions that it’s based upon, especially when it blocks some legit health-related info, and sometimes, when someone complained about the resident censorware, I’d say something like “Well, I’ve heard about this site called Peacefire, but I really wouldn’t know anything about that because I wouldn’t presume to second-guess my employer. That’s P-E-A-C-E-F-I-R-E.”)
I had a classmate this semester whose final paper I had to peer review. His stance on computer filters (of any kind) in libraries was that they should be banned, as–and, dear lord, i have no idea how to put this nicely…as “children look at porn at home, therefore we should not have internet filters.”
I did not hulksmash him but I did tell him “you need sources for that, fucko,” and took great pleasure in giving him one point only. (He also used 17 commas in one sentence and did not even finish his final sentence of the paper.)
Also I wish I’d known about Peacefire while I was writing my paper on public access workstations!
This was a library school classmate? Jeez, there aren’t enough jobs for the people who are qualified.
It was embarrassing! (Aside from being disgusting and making me SO glad I had never had to actually see or talk to him in real life.) Like I should hope that if he and I are competing for anything, I’m the one who gets it–I think he’s unfit to be around any kind of electronics or people, to be honest.
(library school, where weirdos crawl out of the woodwork. at least it’s training for “weird patrons encountered at service desk.”)
Also, why is it always “oh but I can look at porn at home, why can’t I look at porn in public, IT MUST BE THE MORAL GUARDIANS” instead of “oh, right, because it’s inappropriate to look at porn in public and I should not subject others to my choice of viewing material and going to jail or making the library/office do increasingly expensive stuff to their computers to outwit me is NOT IN MY BEST INTEREST.”
I did a few document review jobs after law school, including one where we had to read through thousands of pages of pharmaceutical company emails for patent litigation.
One of my co-workers beckoned us all over one day– he had come across dozens upon dozens of emails between a corporate exec and a Russian lady from a mail order bride website. We got to read the entire history of their courtship, and all his “deep thoughts” about what a lovely person she was and how they were just PERFECT for each other.
So, don’t use your work computer for that, either. Unless you want a whole roomful of 20-somethings reading your intimate correspondence aloud and laughing at you.
Talking While Female: an expert guide to the things you should definitely not say.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/…
Proud to say I do all of these, except calling people bossy! And I use them as very deliberate communication strategies when I don’t want to be confrontational, and I have no intention of stopping, the end. {smiley face}
(I also use smilies in work emails.)
I did the thing a few years ago of actively getting rid of ‘just’ and other generally female-coded ameliorating conversation markers, and while it has been kind of useful for me, I now realise that instead of women conducting conversation more like men, men should conduct conversation more like women. Though it is fun to use mansplainy conversation tactics back at mansplainers and watch them sputter.
I also stopped saying “just” and am working on removing “sorry” except when I mean it. I do think my emails are stronger for it – I work in an office that’s probably 75% female, so it was less of a gender thing and more about asserting my position, which is constantly dumped on because of the company culture. It feels good not to defer to people when you don’t have to! I do use smiley faces, though – they’re useful when 90% of your communication is written.
In my work email, I use smiley faces (the ASCII emoticon kind, not the smartphone emoji kind) only when emailing other women. I haven’t made it an Official Askelade Policy or anything; I only realized it just this second.
I … don’t email men in my job.
(Not 100% true! But all my immediate team is female, now that the terrible interim manager has gone. I don’t think I could have got away with using smilies with him because he was so terrible that it would have been clear they were sarcastic. I did use tremendously upbeat and positive language to try and hide the fact that I was telling him he was awful at his job, though.)
I … don’t email men in my job.
The dream!
I *rarely* have any men to email at work (thank heavens). Most of my male email recipients are above me hierarchically (the Chair of my department; at my old job, my direct manager and HIS direct manager), but some are folks with whom I’m on equal footing. Also, my current direct co-managers are both women, and I smiley at them basically all the time.
Until a few months ago, when they hired a man (and promptly gave him a damn office despite offices/good cubes being based on seniority wtf), I almost never dealt with men at work. It was lovely.
Even lovelier is that the noob dude is profoundly weirded out that the office still acts like it’s 100% women. He cannot handle frank discussions of periods, but he’s learning to do emotional labor like the rest of us do.
You are doing the Lord’s Work, then. Soon he can also start to take on Feminine Speech Patterns. Dock his grade if he fails to use uptalk and vocal fry when they would be appropriate.
My bad habit is “If you could … that would be great!” which I sometimes go back and edit out, not because I think it’s a terrible womanly thing to say, but just because it looks silly when I’ve written it three times in succession.
ME TOO. I usually edit it out, not out of a worry over how FEMININE I sound, but because I’m always afraid of being too WORDY.
as someone who uses this ALL THE TIME what do you say instead? “Please do this by COB?” instead of “if you could do X by COB that would be great?”
I usually just say something like “Can you do X?” or “Would you be able to do X by this time?” And then “Thanks!,” always with that exclamation mark. If I’m really worried they CAN’T do X (i.e. it’s not a formality that I’m asking), I say something like “If you can’t, let me know” or “Does that wok for you?” or I will revert back to that “If you could do X that’d be delightful.”
For me, it depends on the relationship. For peers or superiors, I go with “In order for me to do X by deadline, I will need to receive Y from you by Tuesday COB”. I like this wording because I find it to be more collaborative, and gives them a sense of their stake in a larger project (upon which, hopefully, their professional reputation also depends). For people I outrank (admittedly, not many of them), I go with “Please send X by this time.”
“Could you please complete X?” is what I use.
If you’re looking for a little variety, try “I’d (really) appreciate it” and “I’d be much obliged”.
I have just recently embraced the fact that I actually am managing a team of people (I’m a lawyer, and we are generally lone wolves), and have found myself trying to flavor the full-on commands with a bit of humor. The e-mail I sent this morning regarding a deadline said “Drop dead is Friday the 13th, but Wednesday the 11th would be even better . . .”
Oh, God, I do that, too! I have to deliver so much bad/annoying news that I try to use it to soften the blow when it requires whoever to do something with a fast turnaround, but it probably doesn’t work. I also re-read emails and find that I’ve started 4 consecutive sentence with “Please” – which, I strive to be polite, but it looks ridiculous.
I do not uptalk or vocal fry, though – my parents corrected us when we were kids every. single. time. which was annoying but I’m now grateful for. That was my version of piano or Mandarin lessons.
My mother was absolutely brutal about the use of verbal static: “um”, “uh”, and “like” were BANNED at home. Instead, I learned to simply pause when I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to say, and I’ve realized that I not only sound more deliberate, I also feel more confident in what I say.
I wish I had grown up like this! I mean, it sounds tough, and both of my parents were very good speakers, but as much as they corrected my grammar, they never corrected my verbal static, and now I can’t imagine trying to catch it in others (I still have trouble catching it in my own speech).
At one point, my parents instituted a policy where if one of their 3 children said “like” inappropriately, whichever of the other 2 was closest could sock ’em in the arm.
Was there a clause in that policy that if someone was punched incorrectly (i.e. they did use “like” appropriately but sibling’s judgment was bad), they could appeal to a higher authority for a penalty of two punches back? Because that’s exactly the kind of bureaucracy I like to see 🙂
I trained myself to do this (starting when I was in law school), and it was very tough! It took a few years, but now I do it automatically.
Generally speaking, I think it sucks that women feel like we have to change the way we talk in order to be taken seriously. However, I do think that particular change made me sound more professional.
I do a lot of legal hearings over the phone in my current job, and I often have to think fast and answer unexpected questions quickly. Being able to do that without “umm”-ing and “uhhh”-ing a lot does sound more confident and persuasive to judges, I think.
My brother picked up an uptalking habit for awhile, but my dad had a talk with him about how annoying it was, and also how it was a subtle attempt to keep control of the conversation (because if you always sound like you’re pausing at a comma, people can never jump in to the conversation).
I try to edit that out too, because it inevitably reminds me of Gary Cole in Office Space.
That is actually how my boss sends out unpleasant requests: he makes it into an Office Space meme, saying “If somebody could [Do x unpleasant task], that would be great”.
Haha, same here! (My former boyfriend and I used to end all our sentences with that for a while– “that would be greeeeeeeaaaaaaaat”).
I avoid that language because then I feel like the boss in Office Space. That would be greeeeaaaaaat.
Ugh, me too.
I was reprimanded for NOT using smileys in e-mails (by the boss I wrote about in Open Thread a few weeks ago, of the phone list and the gaslighting). Because it was shockingly rude and insubordinate to ask the head admin “Is the version you opened this from the O:drive or the Portal? I know that [item she insisted was out of date] is included on the Portal version, which is where we’ve been asking people to download those materials from.”
(I use them almost exclusively with staff, though once in awhile I use them with some of the younger women attorneys–usually if they want to do something like swap out their headshot photos and it’s in an exchange of short back and forth one or two sentence e-mails.)
How on earth is that rude???
So what you’re saying is we should all replace “just” with “actually” and watch the shit show begin?
Aw yissss
I’m no expert, but I think that article is just too bossy, sorry.
*100 emoji*
YES! Thank you for that article. I am very tired of being told that the onus is on women to communicate in a way that makes it easier for delicate menfolk to take us seriously (but not too seriously, lest we be considered humourless or abrasive). I will say “I’m no expert but” as much as I damn well please. Harrumph &tc.
I do of all these things, too. And I’ve tried it the other way. As far as I can see, the difference between people not listening to you because you’re too deferential and people not listening to you because you’re too bitchy is merely stylistic. I’m looking for a reasonably priced Phallus of Authority on Amazon, which I expect will solve all my problems, but I can’t find one with free 2-day delivery on Prime and I am NOT paying for shipping.
In the meantime, I’ll talk however it suits me. Sorry.
Right? Replacement kidney, good condition…WHAT, NO PRIME?!? I don’t think so.
On the other hand, I definitely know some people with penises who absolutely lack male authority because they’re not men at all. (I get the joke and I did laugh, but also transmisogyny is a bad look, even accidentally.)
I certainly didn’t mean to be transmisogynistic! But also that’s why I said “phallus” and not “penis”–I don’t know, I’ve got a literary background, and I was taught a very definite distinction between a metaphor for/marker of masculine authority and a body part… but I forget sometimes that it’s not an “everyone” kind of definition.
I assumed it was unintentional! Trying to be more aware of my own language this way (internalized cissexism is hard to catch sometimes) is for sure what made that jump out to me.
Content-wise, I guess I don’t see much difference between penis and phallus because I lack that sort of lit analysis background. I grok the gist, but it took your pointing it out to do so.
Re: Phallus of Authority. There’s a female professor in my former field who is famous for (among other awesome things) reacting to having her ideas being ignored in meetings by 1) Buying a dildo 2) Smacking that dildo down on the conference table 3) Stating “Now that I have a dick, will you listen to me?”
Bless her, she is an inspiration.
I would like to know what these other awesome things are!
She was involved in a bar room bet which led to the creation of the most fantastically stupid name in quantum physics, the Penguin Diagram. (See the the “Origin of the name” section – thanks, Prof. Franklin!)
. . . Well, I for one will refuse to say “A man told me” instead of “I feel like” in order to get the rest of my statement taken seriously.
I said exactly that on the comments to the original article and a man told me that it was supposed to be a joke. 🙁
Aw I saw that, I hope you looked and saw some other people said nice things to you.
yeah obvs it is better to specify “A cis man” can’t believe she forgot that smh
I use smileys in work emails too.
I do so many of the things that women are always told not to do at the office, that I’m now wondering whether or not I’m an outlier with some unclear gender socialization, or whether or not men do all those things too, and it’s just that nobody notices it or complains about it when we do.
As I understand it – and I’m no expert, but I’ve read a couple of blog posts by Deborah Cameron – young women are typically the instigators of linguistic change, with older people and young men coming later. So you could be one of the men who’s an early adopter, or it could be that these things are actually making it into the mainstream now.
Poor democracy is TERRIFIED.
In part, yeah – but not all of these traits are characteristic of young women, but any women in the workplace (at least in the average Women Are Doing it Wrong article).
I think a lot of what’s criticized is relatively universal, at least among people who aren’t actively trying to be aggressive jerks. It’s just that people are Worried when it’s women doing it. Apologies, saying ‘just,’ etc.
Heck, sometimes (understatement!) men get praised for doing things women are told not to do. I know because it happened to me.
A trans friend of mine got praised for her aggressive negotiations before she began her transition. She now gets asked to soften the same statements, often made to the same people in the same context.
It’s a perception thing. Like that study that actually counted words spoken per day and found women don’t talk all that much, really, compared to the perception that women are chatterboxes. You can say, “Sorry, I know I’m no expert, but I just feel like Sherri is too bossy,” and no one will notice. Sherri can say, “I disagree, Mikey! :)” and the smiley has doomed her.
Also, I think Mallory is MARVELLOUS at this. I love when she responds to terrible people on Twitter with something like,
“I think {here is why I totally disagree with you}! @terribleperson”
She always ends with an exclamation mark and it is so upbeat and hard to argue with and I steal that technique all the time now.
Disagreeing HAPPILY instead of AGGRESSIVELY is a skill I have only lately-acquired but I am glad I have!
I appreciate the hell out of that, but I don’t have the personality to pull it off.
When I turned 30, I decided to stop apologizing for my own existence and opinions and worked “sorry” out of my vocabulary. I didn’t realize how much I did that until I tried to stop.
Not sure I understand why “I feel like” is wrong. Isn’t it better to separate emotions from fact? Anyway, my migraines tell me when weather is coming so for me “It feels like it’s going to rain” is true right now. 😉
The thing about ‘I feel like’ is it’s a completely acceptable thing to say, but I’ve found that men will often seize on it as an excuse to derail the conversation i.e. insist on ‘sticking to the facts’ or dismissing your response to something as ‘an emotional response’ as if emotions were always completely irrelevant. What they will do instead of saying ‘I feel like’ is to act as if their version of reality is the only one i.e. accord their feelings the status of facts, while yours are ‘just feelings’.
Isn’t this fun?
You are so right! Talking while female is the fastest way to get written off.
The other thing about “I feel like” is that men say it too! Seriously, before that idiotic NYT article came out I had been paying attention to the use of that phrase because I had noticed myself doing it more. I’m a graduate student, and I’m working on being able to speak more formally in that context, almost as though I were writing, because that’s a skill that will be necessary for my oral exams. I quickly noticed that the men in my classes use it just as much as the women. They also use vocal fry, “like,” etc etc etc. If they’re getting taken more seriously than I am, it’s because they’re men, not because of the phrases they use.
Ah now, next thing you’ll be suggesting that patriarchy isn’t women’s fault for just not being sufficiently … something.
Ugh, fuck that article so much. For a lot of reasons, but in my personal experience, also because of this:
During the late nineties and early aughts, while I was in elementary and middle school, my public school system had consistent and repeated lessons on effective and respectful communication. I seem to remember it was rolled into our health classes. Something that was DRILLED INTO OUR YOUNG BRAINS was how to use “I statements”: I think, I feel, I believe, etc. We were taught, repeatedly, that these kinds of statements were great ways to express ourselves and solve conflicts. I am very sure that for a lot of people, that simple and memorable tip is the only thing that truly sunk in from those courses. So of course millennials say “I feel like” all the time; YOU GUYS FUCKING TAUGHT US TO.
I was just coming here to note that. But it also makes me wonder whether part of the dislike of “I feel like” then comes down to the phrase being perceived as part of a whole touchy-feely–and hence girly–and hence pc–trend in society, and as we all now know, not pc is the now thing! Trump says so!
Oh, definitely. I feel like (ha!) the “Problem of Feelings Statements” is all wrapped up in seeing emotions as weakness, in conservative anger at “PC culture,” in deeply rooted sexism, in a manichean worldview, in fear of being wrong, in fear of vulnerability, in fear of change, in fear of powerlessness, in fear of the less privileged rising up…basically, this one little phrase can stand as a representation of everything the patriarchy hates and fears.
I called out my schooling as what particularly set me off, though, because for as much as that writer prizes logical thinking devoid of emotion, her educational privilege, her adherence to scientific-style reasoning, her adulation of “correct” speech, she managed to COMPLETELY MISS the fact that feelings-based communication was straight-up curriculum in schools across the country. Blaming the people who use those statements now doesn’t even make sense. It’s not logical.
I think (there it is again — I’m truly not even trying, this is just reflexive), now that I’m chewing on this again, that I also disagree with her argument that feelings statements shut down intelligent debates because you can’t argue with what another person feels or has experienced. Well, sure, you can’t say, “No, you really don’t feel that way; no, your experience does not exist” (except, uh, you can and people [men] do it all the time, so) — but you can say something like, “It’s interesting that you feel that way. Why do you think that is?” and start sussing out the thought process behind the statement and, potentially, work on changing their opinion. You can both acknowledge a person’s feelings and experiences AND debate with them about something that you oppose. You just have to go at it from a different angle. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I think like this, because it seems SO OBVIOUS, the human brain is an incredible thing, how could this writer not understand that?!
Absolutely 100% agree.
It’s as in, “I feel like Hillary won’t win because…” Obviously, you should state an opinion or an unknown as a FACT (“Hillary won’t win BECAUSE!”) because that is how Men do it and all of human history shows that men are better at communicating than women.
I’m super late to this, but I remember – years later – having an argument with an ex where I made this exact point. To me, it was an important realization I’d made, that women always couched their points in subjective phrases that made it clear they knew they weren’t stating an objective fact, where men always acted like they were, even on subjects they didn’t know much about.
I was convinced I was onto some important information about how we were raised differently and thus saw the world in different ways, and he responded by getting defensive, suggesting I was seeing something where nothing was, and managed to make me feel like a total idiot.
Years later when I started to encounter women on the internet talking about this stuff, it was a breath of fresh air. A man had tried to make me think it was all in my head, but it’s not.
I’m so glad we keep having these conversations 🙂
I’ve had co-workers use “I feel like” when giving me the answer to research questions. I don’t have a problem with “I feel like” generally, but I want something more definite when I’m relying on you to tell me what the law is.
Oh, that is not good. There is no crying in baseball…or law.
I mean, yes, that is ridiculous. If there is a definite answer, then the phrase crosses into bad habit/unhelpful territory; no one wants to hear that you feel like two chemicals won’t explode when you combine them. I refuse to go back and read that article, but I got the impression that most of her students were using the statement to express their opinions on far more nebulous and subjective topics, and in those cases I think it’s perfectly reasonable to preface your statements in such a way.
Especially true in a friggin’ classroom setting, no? People are there to learn and engage in that whole Platonic dialogue-style of learning. To just come out making definitive statements left and right isn’t going to completely stifle the conversation, but it definitely puts a bit of a damper on it.
Didn’t we all agree not to be That Dude in class anyhow? The one who makes pronouncements instead of opening up discussion points. No one really likes That Dude.
I generally use “I feel like” sarcastically, while referring to things we all agree are known facts. Yesterday’s example, when being told about a Christian thrift store volunteer suggesting that her large donations to the store ought to entitle her to steep employee discounts on items: “I feel like Jesus had something to say about this exact situation.”
Hold up – about half the things in this list are legitimate communication tactics. Implying that a task is someone else’s idea or under their discretion makes them more likely to do whatever it is.
I understand that if you want them to do it “’cause I said so” you’re asserting authority over them, but if you feel the need to assert that you’re in charge in every single email then you’re not actually in charge. They shouldn’t need coded verbal enforcement to remember your authority over them.
I can’t help but see this as one of those alpha male bullshit things. “You must assert your authority in every interaction.” If you’re a good leader people will do what you tell them. If you’re not, yeah, you may have to strong arm them. But men need to stop being so fucking proud of themselves for being shit at communication and relationships.
(I know if you are a woman people may not be giving you your due authority because they’re biased rather than poor leadership skills, and in that case these may be useful tools to cultivate. I’m just saying we need to stop lauding ‘male’ workplace behavior as automatically better, because as often as not it’s just a method of boosting the individual over actually creating a functioning and productive team. Men need to stop patting themselves on the back for this shit.)
Related: I am so fucking tired of the premise “Women are less respected than men. Here’s why that’s totally the fault of women not behaving enough like men and not at all the result of our entire society favoring stereotypical male traits. Good luck being more manlike, women! We’ll be back next week with more reasons you’re still fucking it up.”
Cosigned. It’s an utterly no win situation because women speaking in the manner of men are often written off as overly pushy and unpleasant, so…
“Implying that a task is someone else’s idea or under their discretion makes them more likely to do whatever it is.”
Yeah, this is pretty much Dale Carnegie 101 who, as far as I know, was a cis het dude writing to others of his ilk in How to Win Friends and Influence People. People still teach his business interaction practices! Pick a lane!
“You need to Lean In, ladies. No, not that far, now you’re rudely invading people’s personal space and being overly aggressive to compensate. Stop being so pushy, it’s off-putting. But you have to demand the respect you deserve, otherwise who will know that you deserve it?”
This is totally derailing, but my brain supplied “they don’t love you like I love you” immediately upon starting to read your post. ♥
Your post is really great tho – men DO need to stop patting themselves on the back for being bad at womanly things. Like being clean, and communicating.
Thanks for this. When I give my employee a task, I always start it with “hey, when you get a minute, do you mind…” I have wondered if I should be more assertive, and maybe with another type of employee I would need to be, but she knows I’m her fucking boss. I ask nicely because that’s my style, and anyways, I know she’ll do it.
As an employee, I know I respond way better to requests than to aggressive demands. Fortunately, my boss is a requesting type of boss, rather than a demanding type of boss.
(and if he does demand something, the demand takes the form of “when you get a minute, I need you to…”)
Oh how I love the softening effect of “when you get a minute,” or its cousin “I know you’re busy but would you be able to accomplish Y by tomorrow?” (this is the MO of my current supervisor, and I love her.)
Related to “do you have time to work on this today,” the implication being “or is this something I need to work on instead, because your plate is full?” I like and respect my boss very much. Also, I can normally find a way to fit the requested tasks into my schedule, so if I’m genuinely too busy, he respects that.
both of these are [good!] techniques I talk about when I’m running courses on assertiveness!
(Note: I’m thinking about how respectful and even-tempered my current boss is, and I’m actually tearing up a little bit thinking about how not-terrible my job is.)
I have never met anyone who finds it upsetting to be asked to complete a task nicely. Met plenty who find it belittling and demeaning to be barked at, or told to do things without so much as a “please” or a “could you”?
My boss is always really nice when he asks me to do things, and I respect the hell out of his authority. It would never occur to me NOT to do what he asks in any case, but since he asked nicely, I am happy to do so, and we have a much better working relationship.
Isn’t it amazing when employers don’t impose authority or demand respect, but simply assume that everybody understands the office hierarchy already, and instead focuses on actually getting things accomplished?
Yes, thank you. I will bang this drum every time the topic comes up, but showing deference to others and an openness to others’ ideas is a *very good strategy for getting your way.* It makes workplace interactions so much more pleasant, too.
The “like” business is A Thing in my house. My mom constantly badgers my siblings and I for using it too much, and it is so. frustrating. That she is also a speech pathologist who is hyper-aware of people’s speech makes it somewhat more tolerable, but it disheartening to know that one’s own mother buys into all this “you must constantly be paying attention and editing your speech, lest someone hear you slip into a common speech pattern and *gasp* not take you seriously.” Language is not a goddamn finishing school.
My tater tot and I are reunited! The circumstances aren’t great, but the upshot of it is that I have a small fluffer lying on my legs right now and I have missed him SO MUCH. My mom (not usually a big animal person) is calling him “bub” and apparently is jealous of his crinkly hair.
I’m about four or five hours south of Fort MacMurray and I am incredibly glad that none of my friends are working up there this season.
What a tater! So glad you’re reunited, and I hope the circumstances improve for you both soon.
I’m so glad you are once more with your one true tater. Last week the cover of Maclean’s advertised an article about “The Best Potato Ever” and I was so excited for Charlie. It did not even occur to me that it might be about an actual potato (it was)
But … which potato WAS it???
The “posh” Yukon Gold. Apparently “the average Canadian is not aware of the Hollywood status of this potato.”
Here is a link the article
HELLO POTATO!
ChloeKEvil, I hope that circumstances improve for you and that you and your Potato are never again separated (except for, like, a run to the grocery store or something).
Happy Hashbrowns reunited with his human!
YES HELLO I AM HAPPY TO SEE YOU CHARLIE.
Waaaaaaaaaaait just a minute. That means I probably live in the same city as this unreasonably cute creature! Potato watch starts now!
no lie, I realised I’m just one province over and immediately started planning a road trip. TATERS FOREVER.
Same! Eee Edmonton area meetup to visit Mr Charlie!
You, ChloeKEvil and the fabulous dog/spud are together again. As life should be. People and dogs can snuggle properly.
The whitewashing thing is so bullshit. And is it just me, or do they (on purpose?) often make it something they can excuse as being good for gender diversity?
I mean, yay for Scarlett Johansson getting to be the star in an action movie! Boo for it not being a long-awaited Black Widow movie, but a role that should have gone to a Japanese woman. Yay for casting Tilda Swinton in a Marvel movie! Boo for it being a role that should have gone to a Tibetan (or, since they changed the location to placate China, Nepalese) man.
But then of course with Iron Fist it’s all like: he’s white in the comics! We can’t make him Asian-American, that wouldn’t be true to the source material!
Gah.
This is why we need MORE movies with female leads (or more women in ‘team’ movies). When you have 5 characters to cast in a movie, suddenly you can have your one ‘star’ and make everyone else diverse and interesting without having to pull the “but we need name-recognition!” line. When you have one woman in a movie, yup, it is going to end up being someone like ScarJo, regardless of the race/age of the character she is playing. It really isn’t that hard. Short of a movie I watched about Catholic priests, and movies that are strictly Based On A True Story, there are few where changing a male character to female would disrupt the story. We have money, Hollywood, and we want to see a diverse variety of women on screen!
I mean, if you want to avoid the trope of Wise Old Asian man then subvert it! Or, you know, actually work on some characterisation. Changing the character to be a white woman is a) racist whitewashing and b) lazy. They could easily have cast an Asian actor in the role, especially when they’d already cast Whitest of the White Men Benedict Cumberbatch as the lead. Marvel’s ‘Oh, she’s a ~Celtic~ Ancient One’ is such eye-roll-worthy bullshit that I can’t even begin to think of it as an excuse. If that’s the case then why the fuck is she in Nepal?
If you’re going to have Tilda Swinton as a Celtic Ancient One, she better be a full on “I’m hanging out in Avalon, occasionally painted in woad, crescent moon tattooed on my forehead and rolling through the world with a sickle knife” full on Viviane-from-Mists of Avalon Celtic Ancient One. That would’ve been acceptable.
Damn, I was already pissed about this, but now I’m doubly mad, because I want that version of the movie very very badly.
You know she would be amazing in that role.
It’s ridiculous. The director’s excuses for casting Tilda Swinton are so transparent–he claims he didn’t want to upset China by having a Tibetan character in the movie.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/26/docto…
Shaun of No! Totally does a great take down of how much bullshit is involved in that excuse, as well as the rest of the excuses.
George Takei had a good response to it also.
One good/infuriating observation I’ve seen about ScarJo and GITS: she apparently doesn’t have the pull to be the action lead of a movie in the MC fucking U which makes gobs of money hand over fist but she has enough pull to successfully buoy a very popular but ultimately niche franchise with a much smaller cult following?
Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. >.<
I am so terrified that, after we all don’t go to see movies like Ghost in the Shell and Nina (and Ghostbusters) because of racist casting decisions, movie producers are going to double down on their whole “movies starring women don’t sell” bullshit.
This is not going to make me go see these movies, I am just pissed off at having to choose between supporting female-led films and not supporting whitewashing.
Exactly! That’s what’s making me wonder if this is not a purposeful attempt to play white women and poc against one another – which especially sucks for woc, of course.
Everything is an attempt to play white women and POC against each other. It’s fucking awful, and it keeps working.
Let’s be real, the racist/misogynistic fuckwits that make these movies are going to use the “movies starring anyone but cishet white men don’t sell” excuse no matter what you do, so feel free to boycott away with no fear. That excuse has always been used pretty independantly from actual facts (see the treatment of Melissa McCarthy’s career, analysis of the profitability of movies with non-white leads). Also, its not like supporting movies with white women as leads does jack shit for women as a whole, so I’m pretty meh on the idea of “well, at least they cast a (white) woman” as being progress.
While Hollywood continues on trying to make whitewashed schlock like Gods of Egypt happen. :/
Yup! A movie that barely made back its production budget (which means it lost money), but blaming the fact that it stars white men? Well that couldn’t possibly be it, of course.
I find it doubly insulting that Scarlett Johansson got cast in GITS because of Lucy. White woman goes from indiscriminately slaughtering Asians to replacing them!
Even as someone who was a fan of the original Iron Fist (starting around the time he teamed up with Luke Cage), I would have been totally behind an Asian-American Iron Fist.
Hey! Ted Cruz isn’t going to be president!
Yay?
All of us are making Lin’s face right now.
Actually I’m a little more Daveed rn.
Toggling between both, tbh.
I knew exactly what this was going to be before expanding the thread.
My only regret is that we will no longer get to watch in awe as he tries and miserably fails to act like a human being in public. I don’t know how to embed a gif but this one is magical: http://gawker.com/failed-candidate-ted-cruz-elbow…
I feel like that gif is straight up on par with this gif: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/carly-fiorina…
He is just utterly unsuccessful at convincing us that he is a human being.
I will miss u so much, Ted Cruz memes :'(
http://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com
My love and thoughts go out to Fort MacMurray and all the people there. My aunt and her family had to evacuate their Colorado home a few years ago; we were so lucky they were safe, but it was scary in a magnitude that I still can’t wholly wrap my head around. I hope everyone stays alive and unharmed and can find a safe and comforting place to stay for a while, and then that the community can be rebuilt with minimal trauma.
I’ve seen some links for Canadian donations, but if anyone has a good place for USians to donate, would you let us know?
I think you can donate to the Canadian Red Cross.
Yes, Kate Beaton tweeted out a way to text donations: “text the word REDCROSS to 30333 to send $5”
She used to work right on that location. 🙁
That photo of Nicole’s dog bud, Carmella, reminds me of a Renaissance Jesus painting. I wish I was more familiar with such things so I could put my finger on which one specifically.
Her person thought of Rembrandt: https://twitter.com/CAAF/status/72587514672936141…
Oh my God, that’s awesome. Makes me want to go look for paintings of border collies and cocker spaniels.
Caravaggio, or Vermeer (my art history major is getting all tingly, it’s been so long) thank you for thinking this, too!
I was heavily thinking Caravaggio too. The dark background, the strong single source of light…
Not an art history major tho, just someone who took twelve credits.
There’s an evac/relocation group for Fort MacMurray here: https://m.facebook.com/groups/1616840568638530/
Transportation is on offer for large and small farm animals: 780-717-2813 or 403-741-2014
These (and other resources that people find) might be good to share, in case you know anyone who’s there and trying to reach safety. If anyone finds good places to donate to, that’d be good to know as well.
I’ve mostly been seeing recommendations to donate to Red Cross.
I’m bitter that I wasn’t selected for the mandatory long-form census. Take all my data, StatCan! I want to contribute to your better understanding of our beautiful nerd country!
I was bitching with a friend last night that we had the stupid short form. I want to do the long form! I would have happily answered a census ten times that length!!! I wish I could volunteer for it.
But that was the problem with ending the mandatory long form – a pretty specific group self-selects, and it skews the data 🙂
That was exactly the argument I was using yesterday to console myself about not getting the long form. There’s always the hope next time!
We got the short-form too, which was disappointing, but it led to a sweet moment of reaffirming our common-law status. Yay census!
I got the short form too, boo 🙁
A friend of mine was selected to complete the long-form census, and I was WILDLY jealous. I wanted to be special! I want to tell StatsCan all the mundane facts about my life! LET ME LOVE YOU STATSCAN!!!
I got the long form census! I have yet to finish filling it out but I was so pleased to discover I was doing the long one.
Thought I should just leave this here…ooooh….an evidence-based policy-making tool! http://www.cbc.ca/punchline/not-the-news/experts-…
My roommate and I were part of the lucky few that got the long form census! How many rooms are in our apartment? What language do we use to communicate at work? What year was the apartment built? It was WONDERFUL!
Today in (Feminist) History!! [Archive]
On this day in 1974, an all-female Japanese team reached the summit of Manaslu, which is the eighth highest mountain in the world, located in Nepal as part of the Himalayas. This successful expedition made them the first women to climb an 8,000 meter peak. The team was led by Kyoko Sato and the full expedition included Mrs Tsune Kuroishi, Mrs Naoko Nakaseko, Michiko Sekita, Mrs Masako Uchida, Mieko Mori, Masako Itakura, Mutsumi Nakajima, Teiko Suzuki (who died during the expedition), Tomoko lto, Shizu Harada and Naoko Kuribayashi, along with a group of Sherpas. The first actual group to reach the summit, however, was Kyoko Sato, along with Naoko Nakaseko, Masako Uchida, Mieko Mori, and Jambu Sherpa.
There’s unfortunately not a lot of information about this journey outside of the bare sketch of facts (side-eyes internet), but I did manage to find a first-hand retelling by one of the expeditionists, Naoko Nakeseko. Her story tells of the entire journey, from the planning to the failed attempt and later successful attempt, where she reaches the top with her group of women, and says: “What could be the fascination which has gone on drawing us up here, enduring severe wind and snow, for nearly 20 years? Relief welled up in my heart. […] How could I express my delight that I had climbed and come as high as this place where my countrymen first trod.”
Despite the group’s success, they did lose one woman later the next day. Teiko Suzuki was attempting to climb from camp 4 to camp 5, despite the strong snow, when she was lost. They did not find her body and were forced to retreat due to the weather, but erected a cairn in her memory on a hill with a view of the mountain she had climbed with them.
Also on this day:
• In 1898, the birth of Captain Joy Bright Hancock, one of the first women officers in the U.S. Navy. She served in both World War I and World War II. She was commissioned in the Women’s Reserve, and her promotion to the rank of captain after just 6 years of service was one of fastest progressions to that rank in the history of the Navy.
• In 1907, the birth of Mary Hallaren, who was the first woman to officially join the US Army (prior to her, women had joined in secret by pretending to be men). She was director of the women’s Army Corps, as well as the recipient of the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star and the Army Commendation Medal. She was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.
thank you for doing these!
You’re welcome!! Thank you for enjoying them!
That’s so amazing! Thank you so much for sharing the story of the Japanese mountaineers.
I know, right? I was like WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARD OF THIS (which for the record is me 95% of the time I’m researching these.) Thanks!
This is fascinating! Thank you for posting.
It’s also Jane Jacobs’ 100th birthday!
She’s today’s Google Doodle!
Oooh, I think that one was on the list but I thought the mountain climbers were SO COOL and also, there was a nice theme with the two extra military lady birthdays. But nice!
This is relevant to so many of my interests and is SUPER INTERESTING for anyone into colonial history http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/04/ca…
Also I could do with some OT advice but I know this isn’t the place… I ran into an old friend yesterday and it was so lovely, but it has brought a lot of unresolved feeeeeeeeelings back. I am seriously confused by myself – I hadn’t seen this person for about five years, but it felt like we picked up exactly where we left off, and in case you couldn’t tell I have a huge crush. Oh dear.
If it helps, it’s confirmed science that when you reunite with people you knew from a previous stage in your life, you tend to revert to the same state of mind you had when you knew them. It can also be seen in how guys reuniting for a high school reunion start acting like adolescents again.
Or how when you go home as an adult, you immediately begin acting like a teenager. [sigh]
OMG YES. That is a way more pertinent example I will use next time.
I keep berating myself for caring too much about my parents’ opinion on things, but at least I know WHY I keep reverting to that angsty hypersensitive mindset.
Yeah, that does make sense. Thank you. Argh.
I dreamt about my early teens crush last night. I saw him last year for the first time in at least fifteen years – probably closer to twenty – and I was so prepared to be lofty and disdainful in a kind of, “Yes, as a mere youth, I did fancy you, hahaha, how ridiculous” way (sorry, younger self!) Then he was 100% charming and fun and excited to see me, and now I’m totally 13 again.
Slightly OT question for AHS fans.
I enjoy a good horror story (ghosts! curses! monsters! bring it!) and loved AHS season 1 until the last episode when it suddenly (and ineffectively, IMO) attempted to morph from a haunted house story into The Omen. Very disappointed. So disappointed it was several months before I could give AHS: Asylum a try. I had to stop that because serial killers are my squick (thanks, Se7en). Should I continue attempting the other AHS seasons that are on disc now (that’s the only way I watch TV since streaming television isn’t allowed in our house), or just wait for season 3 of Penny Dreadful to come out on disc?
Asylum is the best one, so maybe not, but perhaps you’d enjoy Coven? It has issues, but it’s a lot of fun. So much witches. Defo don’t bother with Freak Show, I haven’t watched Hotel so can’t comment on that.
I can deal with issues (I watched seven seasons of Supernatural) if I like the general plot enough. And I love witches. Thanks for the advice!
I really liked Coven other than being v uncomfortable with the character based on a real person (trying to avoid spoilers!) as it was a bit grim and graphic for me.
Based on these Toastie recommendations, I feel safe giving Coven a try. Thanks!
Yeah, that part was icky, but I enjoyed the fact that no one was like “IT’S OK, TIMES WERE DIFFERENT BACK THEN.” It was more like “No, you’re a terrible person, you were terrible then and terrible now.”
Definitely – the way the show handed it was fine: for me, it was the feeling of ‘this person was real and actually did stuff along those lines’ that I had trouble dealing with.
History is filled with terrible people who were real, unfortunately.
Fortunately, spoiler alert for history, they are mostly dead now.
I’m not having that person go to Miracle Max for a pill, they’d better be more than mostly dead…
Well, there’s always Dick Cheney.
Oh shit, I actually forgot about that. Yeeeaaah that was not great.
Season 3 is SO MUCH too witches and is awesome. I suggest watching that while you wait for Penny Dreadful.
Cool! Thank you!
American Horror Story has a tendency to have an interesting first few episodes and then the plot/characterizations rapidly crumble into a nonsensical shitshow. But, it is generally pretty fun to look at and bitchy-funny throughout. As long as you don’t mind the first bit, I’d definitely recommend giving the later seasons a go.
Oh, so that’s A Thing for all the seasons? That’s…disappointing. Bleh. Hm.
It gets a lot worse in the later seasons. I watched all of the first two seasons and enjoyed them, but couldn’t make it more than halfway through Coven and gave up after the first few episodes of Freak Show.
It’s a Ryan Murphy show! Interesting first few episodes ==> rapid crumbling into nonsensical shitshow is pretty much par for the course.
Ugh, well okay now I’m reversing my decision to try the other seasons. I have limited time (and tolerance) for TV-watching and don’t want to waste my time on something where the plot falls apart for me.
After season 2, I’ve only watched the first 1/3 to 1/2 of each season then given up.
Thanks for weighing in. Pretty sure I’m reversing my decision about giving more seasons a try. Sadness.
Penny Dreadful, on the other hand, is great so far! (and I don’t anticipate this changing)
I heart Penny Dreadful, am not sure whether I want to be Vanessa or kiss Vanessa. Hoping the new season is available in the UK soonest.
Penny Dreadful is soooo gooood and I don’t think I know anyone watching it other than my brother, so glad to hear others sing its praises here.
I’m trying to decide if I want to dive into AHS: Hotel and the new season of Penny Dreadful now, or save them for fall.
Murder House – pretty damn good
Asylum – totes wonderful ’til it jumped the shark in the last few episodes
Coven – SO WITCHES. SO WONDEFUL.
Freak Show – i bailed after a few episodes.
Hotel – the best seasn IMHO. Gaga was born for this role.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll wait for Hotel to come out on disc and give it a try. I am not encouraged by the comments that say the narrative issues is a common thing with Ryan Murphy…
You guys, this woman is fierce AF: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3571113/T…
Don’t read the comments, tho. Never read the comments.
“I normally stand with a raised fist at demonstrations, this is not new to me.” BADASS.
That picture is amazing.
I’m thinking about setting it as my workplace desktop. You know. Because I need more reminders of the struggle 🙂
I would be proud to have even a sliver of her fierceness.
Tess Asplund for the WIN.
One of the neo-nazis looks like a cliched hipster barista
BAMF.
(And why is it that I only read the comments when I’ve been specifically warned not to read the comments? Am I that much of a masochist?)
It’s the big red DO NOT PUSH BUTTON syndrome.
Wow. This reminds me of another iconic photo from Sweden called “A Woman Hitting a Neo-Nazi with Her Handbag”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Woman_Hitting_a_N…
Not exactly non-violent, but just as badass in its own way.
YAS! I have 2 years before I am of an age with that woman #lifegoals
Re: Ask a Manager. This is precisely why I left my old job of 5 years and it seems even though I’ve been gone for 18 months, I’m still angry about it. I hate those sort of work cliques and I hate that they’re excluding my one friend who is still working there. They will not promote her because she’s “not a team player” nevermind that the office would fall apart should she ever leave that place because she picks up so much slack.
Cliques are the worst. They can be really arbitrary, and even within the cliques there are usually people who are being ostracized or isolated.
I keep thinking of one of those demotivational posters, which stated “none of us is as dumb as all of us.”
SAME. But when I calmly, politely confronted my manager about it, she put me on a workplan and gaslighted me into quitting before she could fire me. It was 9 mos ago and I’m also still fucking angry as hell. All of my coworkers that I liked have also left, so that’s some small consolation.
Ooooooo ouch! I’m sorry. You have every right to be angry after that. The gaslighting is all too familiar from Oldjob. I would have sworn that I had some sort of ministroke or something that blocked my ability to read social situations for a time. Took me 9 months at Newjob to rebuild the confidence that I wasn’t constantly misinterpreting social cues and wasn’t actually on the verge of being fired at any moment. I still have moments where I have to seriously talk myself out of automatic bad assumptions about people.
Same, plus bonus levels of nepotism. There was the one clique with one boss, and then another boss who is in a ltr with his subordinate (like they just had a kid a year ago and bought a house together 4 years ago kind of ltr). No chance either way, both gross and demoralizing.
I’m proudly wearing my Canadian tuxedo today. The return of the long census (and other nerdy good news like the beginning of reinvestment in government environmental science institute jobs) is making me feel so so good about Canada…and I’m one of those damn separatists.
I’m happy to be the one to ask this question and potentially sound foolish, but I must know:
wtf is a Canadian tuxedo (and how do I get one)?
You probably already own one! A Canadian tuxedo consists simply of wearing denim on denim. However, I feel the closer the two pieces are in wash the better the effect and that half black denim/half blue barely qualifies. Some might argue that a jean jacket is necessary to the ensemble but I believe the best version consists of a fitted denim shirt (tucked in) and jeans, both in a darkish wash. This pairs nicely with a thin belt and cute practical boots.
Hee, that’s what I thought you meant, but didn’t want to assume in case that was rude.
For bonus points, consider a denim vest and denim jacket if you can figure out how to make it fit.
Gosh, I thought that was a Texas tuxedo. Maybe denim is the great north-south unifier.
Friends, old T. Cruz’s campaign is dead in the water which is good because he is a nest of wasps in a skin-suit, but bad because that means all that’s left is Donald Trump and HE is a fairy-tale ogre in a skin-suit.
I got real worries these days — not so much about Donald Trump himself, I think that he is still too widely-despised to actually win an election — but because next time around, there is no reason to think that the GOP isn’t going to run someone with the exact same policies who is only like, 15% less of a buffoon, and then there’s a good chance that everyone is going to be fucked.
I share your discomfort, no wait, mine is more like terror. Just…wtf?
It’s not going to be Trump 2.0, though, it’s going to be Cruz 9.3.2. I agree with TPM here. Siiiiiiiiiiiigh.
I’m not sure about this — I think it puts a little too much weight on the influence of party mouthpieces in the nominating process. It’s true that Trump had unusual advantages, but he also thoroughly shellacked the other candidates, with votes. I’m not sure that the major chunk of the electorate that broke for Trump this year is going to be easily convinced next time around that they should vote for Scott Walker’s boiled-potato-charisma.
I think the GOP is going to continue to field increasingly conservative candidates until one of them actually achieves the nomination and THEN fails in the general. So we may have our entire lives to watch this horror show every four years (except, wait, primary season starts two years early, so…. basically constantly).
well, maybe, except it’s also possible that the GOP will keep *trying* to field increasingly conservative candidates and having them lose to populist demagogues — one thing that Trump’s candidacy has shown is that a surprisingly small number of Republican voters actually give that much of a shit about Republican orthodoxy, so it may be that next time around some smart guy tries to give the Donald Trump lane another shot, thinking he’ll have a better chance against an incumbent Democrat whose agenda was blocked at every turn by a GOP congress.
Also, it’s possible that they will run Cruz 2.0, and possible that they’ll just run actual Cruz, and I don’t know, maybe we can just give him the nom and let him lose and we can get this over with comparatively early.
I am terrified that Mitt Romney is going to come out from the shadows on a white horse and everyone on the red side of the street is going to be so relieved that they all come out and vote and he wins in a landslide. TERRIFIED.
I saw “red side of the street” in your comment and thought immediately, “Wait, why is that side of the street bathed in blood?”
Well, foreign policy for starters…
I mean, Obama did refer to the Red Wedding in his WHCD speech. Perhaps he was trying to warn us of the tribulation to come.
That’s basically impossible *this* time around, I think — there’s just not enough numbers for it — but I wouldn’t put it past 2020.
Oh god 2020 is only four years away. Less than. Jesus, that’s as terrifying as the politics.
But the white demographic is shrinking all the time as minority populations increase! This is why the GOP had a Hail Mary moment after the 2012 election, with many party leaders saying they HAD to grow their appeal outside of white people, or there was literally no future for them (and then Donald Trump came stomping in, favorite cartoon).
Even if they get every single angry white racist to vote in 2020, that won’t be enough to win the electoral college (barring, of course, everyone else just staying home on election day — and that hasn’t happened the last two elections, no reason to think it’ll happen this year or in 2020).
sure, sure, next you’ll tell me it’s impossible for Trump to get the GOP nomination in the first place
I’M SORRY I DID SAY THAT. (Well, I never said “impossible,” just that it wouldn’t happen. At least I’m not PAID to think about these things.)
But honest to God, the blackest outcome is not automatically the most accurate. There ARE plenty of reasons to have hope that the tire fire that’s become the GOP is not going to be winning the presidency anytime soon.
I’M BACK WITH AN ARMLOAD OF STATS. STATS HELP ME SLEEP AT NIGHT.
Courtesy of Jamelle Bouie’s twitter feed, thank you so much for the rec above:
“There are 10.7 million more eligible voters now than in 2012. Most of that growth is nonwhite voters.”
“There are 6% more black eligible voters, 17% more Hispanic ones, 16% more Asian ones, and just 2% more white ones.”
“In 2000, 78% of eligible voters were white. In 2008, 73%. In 2016, it’s 69%.”
“Looking at trend since 2000, white turnout is *going down*. Hispanic, Asian, and black is slowly growing.”
yeah look, I don’t disagree that it’s a long shot, and that the Republicans probably haven’t even found the bottom of the demographic hole they’ve been trying to dig for themselves, but you know, things happen. A lot is going to hinge on how well Hillary’s first term goes, and you know for sure that the GOP-controlled congress is going to be a NIGHTMARE about that. I’m optimistic but I’m not ruling anything out; anyway, it’s probably better to retain some concern over it so I don’t feel like I can stop working.
Oh, I’m definitely not advocating complacency. I’m going to be white-knuckling it through the next six months, no matter how many stats I line my bed with.
Yes, anything can happen, my mission here (like Jamelle’s) is just to reassure people we don’t need to give in to blind panic and fatalism just yet.
The one major advantage I believe that Hillary has over Obama is that she’s less of an idealist (and this is also Bernie’s biggest weakness as a candidate). Not to say she has a magic wand to smash the GOP’s obstructionism, but her campaign isn’t riding on the same wave of optimism about unifying the country and breaking down ideological barriers. And I think her experience around Washington will enable her to find how to get shit done, if there’s even one tiny way it’s possible.
yeah it could be; I’m skeptical of this — though I also accept that’s basically moot, and if I’m wrong, a lot of good will come out of it — which is why I was less bothered by some of the impracticalities of Sanders’ idealism, since I figured if no one is getting anything done, we might as well not get some really big, exciting stuff done so everyone knows what they’re missing out on.
BUT I agree, this is tense but we don’t need to panic just yet.
I mean, all indications are that the GOP’s obstructionism is starting to backfire, and i hope that if they try it again with Hillary (but probably double, because if there’s one thing Republicans hate more than the word “Socialism” it’s the name “Clinton”) it will backfire even more spectacularly, but you know.
This is a messy business, and weird shit happens.
Geez, I hope you’re right.
Me too! Let’s all breathe into our paper bags until November 9th.
Trump is getting close to 50% of all GOP delegates and he’s set to secure all of them in the states yet to vote, give or take early or protest votes. That means he’ll win on the first ballot at the convention and that’s the end of the story. There’s not going to be a chance for Romney or Ryan or anyone else to swoop in because there’ll be nowhere for them to swoop to.
This is reassuring, thank you.
Fear not. If that happens, Trump will not be able to handle the slight and he will absolutely run as a third party candidate, and his most fervent supporters will be incensed and absolutely vote for him, fracturing the vote. And although I am quite sure he would run as a third party candidate, even if he did not I believe his strongest supporters would be so angry they would refuse to vote for anyone else.
I appreciate the calming words. This is honestly very helpful, thank you.
The relief I felt at seeing my Republican FB contacts posting “I guess I’m voting Libertarian this year” was quickly cancelled out by my BernieBro friends (Bros of various genders) posting virulently anti-Hillary stuff and insinuating they wouldn’t vote if things didn’t go their way 🙁 And I hear what you’re saying about 2020… I wish we were out of the woods but I really don’t think we are.
I think the BernieBro concern is largely exaggerated by the fact that the most committed of those guys are also the loudest and most annoying.
Well, I hope it anyway.
I been hoping a lot of things lately.
I know a couple of people (like, two, as opposed to the vast majority of people who have more sense) are in a big huff about “Bernie or bust” right now, but we’re still in the primary stage. I imagine that in a couple of months, with an actual Trump nomination in full force, people are going to set aside their differences.
Ugh, I hope so. There are a bunch of very vocal people on my social media feeds who have repeatedly expressed the opinion that there’s “essentially no difference” between voting for Hillary and voting for Trump, which is…I can’t, you guys. I can’t.
I think it’s a tiny, tiny section of humanity that will look at the actual possibility of a Trump presidency and say “well, my candidate lost 6 months ago and I’m still pissed about it, so I’m going to let this happen on principle”
I KNOW! I mean, I’m a lefty and Clinton is not my favorite on many issues, but people who honestly claim to not see a difference between her and Trump? Blows my mind.
Well, yeah, only one of these people has made invading Syria and shooting down any Russian jetfighters that get in the way a campaign plank.
I had people over for Shadowrun at my place last night and at least one (maybe 3 of them) are BernieBros. I did my best to tune out the politics talk and talked loudly about whether my troll should use her stun baton or her kitchen knife on the orc guard in front of her. It annoyed me that politics were seeping into my safe space of silly tech future shenanigans.
Is it wrong of me to wish that Bernie would drop out now, or not? I don’t know enough to know if it’s good for him to stay in, but I definitely have this strong desire to go “all aboard” and think about the general now.
I don’t think it’s wrong. I don’t think he will–not until after California, based on what I’ve read–but he has no path forward and it’s not clear to me that it’s worth his still spending donor money on a campaign.
It’s not wrong, of course. I don’t think he’s doing any significant harm right now, but he better not try to actually cause a contested convention. I think the math will be super-clear before we get there, and the pressure will be there too. With Trump as an opponent, there’s no room or time to fuck around about unifying the Democrat/progressive/non-fascist base.
If Bernie doesn’t pool his energy and funds into campaigning hard to turn out the vote for the Democrat nominee and all the down-ballot candidates, I will regard him as nothing more than a shyster.
This^^^
Yeah, putting money toward down-ticket Dems is 100% the most helpful thing he could do right now, but I have little to no expectation that he will. It took him ages to even start voicing support for them, and even then it was only like three people.
It’s like he only started affiliating with the Democrat party last year to take advantage of their organization and fundraising for his presidential run!
SAME. Look, Clinton currently has more of a lead in delegates (I know there’s the super delegate thing, but in delegates!) than Trump has over Cruz. And, in 2008, Obama had only a 4% lead in delegates over Clinton when she bowed out (and then nominated him from the convention floor!) as opposed to Clinton’s now ~10% lead over Bernie.
Look, I liked Bernie when he wasn’t running for president and at the beginning of this race, but now this has gotten very very sexist. I’m still hoping he can let go of his ego and allow Hilary to win! He needs to bow out, now. He needs to back Hilary vigorously, or else the end of the republic Obama talked out in his WHCD is going happen.
Because if Bernie doesn’t drop out, we’re looking at a world were Cruz is more reasonable than Bernie is.
He just released a statement today that he plans to take it all the way through June, so…
well, you can’t rake in those desperate BroBucks if you aren’t running. I hope he runs them into abject poverty so they can’t afford an internet connection and can stop seeing a million links from usuncut every time I open social media.
UGH, USUncut.
I called the nomination (and the presidency) for Trump when he first declared. But part of me is still like “this is actually happening? This is real? A good chunk of primary voters decided they wanted a racist cartoon character to be president?”
Yeah, me too, and all the Republicans I know kept saying that was crazy, they just had to narrow the field and then he would definitely start losing, so part of me (like 3%) is like, “Ha! I was right!” but mostly I really didn’t want to be right. 🙁
I don’t think he’s going to win the presidency. I’m going to stand strong on that until the poll numbers (analyzed by organizations like Five Thirty-Eight) indicate otherwise.
He’s still massively unpopular for a Republican nominee, compared to all the recent predecessors. And there’s this from Dave Wasserman:
“Those tempted to believe the Trump phenomenon will usher waves of new voters into this fall’s electorate may be right — except, those may be waves of anti-Trump voters. Ever since Trump began dominating the 2016 news cycle, Democrats have been salivating over the prospect of record engagement among young voters and Latinos. Now, there’s some evidence that surge may be arriving, with potentially disastrous consequences for the GOP.
“California political data guru Paul Mitchell sounded a siren late last week, observing in the Sacramento-based Capitol Weekly that new voter registrations doubled among Latinos, rose 150 percent among young voters and tripled among Democrats compared to this point in 2012. Consider that Trump’s favorability/unfavorability has recently been pegged at 17/74 among millennials and a mind-boggling 9/87 among Latinos.
“Sure, Republicans never had a chance to win California to begin with. But if we begin to see similar registration numbers in many other states, Republicans could be headed for the electoral apocalypse many Democrats have predicted.”
Oh yeah, I’m no statistician but I’ve been reading a bit about how Trump is going to affect Latino turnout. Texas might be distinctly more purple in this election than it has been in the past, for example, and even if it doesn’t turn blue at the presidential level, it could still help a lot of Democrats in down-ballot races.
I’m so excited about that! I grew up in Texas, only moved out last year.
Do people not know of all of the terrible things Trump has said on the Howard Stern show, or do they just not care?
Buzzfeed has a handy primer: https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/donald-t…
If the DNC is even partly functioning, they’re going to make sure the entire nation knows them by heart by November.
“If the DNC is even partly functioning”
I think I see the fatal flaw there…..
They got Barack Hussein Obama elected and then re-elected, even with a sluggish economy in the last cycle. They’re functioning.
David Axelrod got BHO elected, the feuds between Obama for America and the DNC are still being fought.
Mmm, Axelrod is not a superhero who single-handledly defeated the RNC to elect Obama. Many from the original Obama team are now assisting Hillary, as can be seen by how many times Obama’s name appears in the descriptions of her team. Jon Favreau, Obama’s speechwriter who was pretty gross towards Hillary after the 2008 election, most prominently wrote an article about how electing Hillary now is even more important than electing Obama was in 2008.
Whatever bickering may be going on between Obama for America and the DNC, I highly doubt it’ll matter much after the conventions, when the general election is seriously underway.
I think Romney might have pulled it off if that “47%” video hadn’t surfaced right before the election.
Hmm, your comment made me curious (I wasn’t quite as embedded in the nitty-gritty of the election season in 2012), so I went to check. Nate Silver, of course, did a write-up of the effect of 47% that shows Romney was already on a downward trend before that happened. Chart included.
But somehow none of that sticks? Like, he just says “oh, yeah, that happened, but it doesn’t matter,” and his supporters just listen to him. I don’t know if it’s necromancy, or if being a rich white man can genuinely take you that far if you let it.
It didn’t stick with the Republican primary voters, but that is NOT the same as general electorate voters. It would be a huge mistake to equate those two groups. Trump is at 65% unfavorable ratings nationwide — which makes him the least favored presidential nominee in thirty years — and this is BEFORE the DNC has launched any attack ads against him. The RNC and other GOP candidates never really went at him with full strength, because they were afraid of alienating all his racist supporters.
But yeah, it’s true that his supporters don’t care how terrible he is. Or rather, they find it a feature. Fortunately, I believe they are a minority in this country, and the polling should continue to bear that out before election day.
I can’t recommend enough to all of you that you join me in reading Jamelle’s Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/jbouie
And deep breathing. It is genuinely comforting. Not that there isn’t cause for concern. But his observations are really helping me manage my anxiety right now.
Very soothing. Thank you!
Honest to god, he is my number one voice of reason on Twitter right now.
Ooh, I didn’t know about him! Bless all those stable minds delivering facts and numbers.
I can’t believe I wasn’t following him – I keep searching out his voice because it keeps me sane. Thanks for the reminder.
Hey, there – completely unrelated but I thought of you when I found this on Tumblr the other day and wanted to share. (: http://thefederalistfreestyle.tumblr.com/post/143…
I still have not recovered.
you are an EXTREMELY kind person, and I honor you.
To everyone here whom I assured that Trump would not be the nominee because the party leaders would never allow it: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
This is the best way I can describe our situation now:
it’s gonna be fine, they say. the comet may be coming in the direction of the planet Earth but it certainly won’t strike us.
okay, the gap is a little narrower than we first predicted, but it will still be a definite miss.
not to worry. just sit back and watch it continue to approach for the next six months. we will all wake up on November 9th just fine with the world as we know it. definitely.
anyway, if you want a good time but to also gross yourself out, every time one of these guys talks about how they’ll “support the nominee” or they’re “making an alliance” or something, just think to yourself, “Well, politics makes strange bedfellows.”
Will someone please tell me why I SHOULDN’T move to Canada (you know, with the tragic exception of the wildfire – how awful)? Every time I read something about Canada – the Trudeaus! moose the size of monster trucks! it’s full of nerds! national healthcare! – I just picture this utopia of overly polite people and it seems like a balm to my NYC-hardened little heart.
I could also just be panicking about Tr*mp.
Because our immigration laws are actually kind of awful?
Yup. Just did it and immigrating to Canada is expensive, time-consuming, invasive, and while I fucking love this country it’s extremely far from a utopia.
I went to college in Canada and even getting my student permit took forever.
Also, I’m gonna say having winter that lasts from November to April is a big downside.
Sign me up for that winter, actually. Maybe there’s a Canadian who looks just like me and yearns for the balmy winters of the Upper Midwest with whom I can trade places?
Would you mind elaborating, please? I only personally know one Canadian, I think, and he immigrated here a while back,
Would that I could. I don’t really know, as my family immigrated before my time. I’ve heard horror stories though – about the expense, about being tied to toxic workplaces for visa purposes (this from an educated cis white dude, so it is not all about temporary foreign workers, which in Canada is code for “people we pay shittily to do jobs we don’t value and hold their easily-deportable status against them”), about the unceasing, underfunded, and therefore interminably bureaucracy…
My other argument would be that Canada has already elected our version of Trump. His name was Harper, and he was in power for a decade, during which time he managed to undermine our healthcare system (it still exists, but barely, and not if you are a refugee!), gut our national postal system from the inside, and make our immigration policies even MORE classist and racist. This is a man who ran on a policy of setting up a creeper agency for people to inform on their neighbors for “barbaric cultural practices” and who had enough support that people were TERRIFIED of him winning, so much so that the other party (yes, there are more than 2 here, but first past the post means there are effectively only 2) won with more votes than anyone thought possible.
And let’s be real – Trudeau is handsome, yes, and says things like “because it is 2015” when asked why his cabinet needed gender parity instead of giving any kind of real response, but is still paying his nannies less to work off-peak hours, and WAY less than his other staff (they make $15 per hour! That is barely more than minimum wage!!!)
Re: Canadian politesse – yes, that exists. But also dudes who literally tried to push a woman wearing hijab under the Toronto subway also exist. As well as dudes who physically assault women wearing hijab in public, trying to expose them. so, you know. We’re not perfect.
Moose: actually super terrifying, ESPECIALLY the ones that are monster-truck sized. Were you here, you would not actually want to see many Moose (that caribou in the church was really great tho. I cannot find the vid, sorry)
Come visit, tho! We are terribly friendly, and NYC is not so far away 🙂
Trudeaumetre says that there’s healthcare for refugees again now, though it sounds like it’s not the greatest.
Agreed that moose are terrifying.
I’d like to stick up for the moose. Ex-Alaskan, not Canadian but growing up I was a stone’s throw away from a lot of moose and they are mostly just the gawky too-tall kid in class.
Also I do mean a stone’s throw. We kept a bucket of rocks by the door for the specific purpose of discouraging moose and bears from eating our lilacs.
I love this. I love that you did this, and I am delighted by the term “a bucket of rocks.” I don’t know why. But I will be finding reasons to say it from now on.
The main problem with moose is that they are just as terrible as any other wild animal at crossing the highway; they seem to wait until the worst possible moment and then spring up out of the ditch, usually at twilight. But unlike most wild animals that cross the highway badly, they are the size of cars. And since they’re tall with spindly legs they’re fairly likely to go through the windshield, possibly antlers-first.
Current Alaskan, and even though I know mentally that those giant dorks could stomp me into a pile of jelly, I still can’t think of them as anything other than a charming nuisance that block my path to the outhouse or to my car.
They are delightful! They’re just a bunch of oars haphazardly lashed to a canoe with a fur coat draped over them.
And their little ol’ beards! I also love that they seem to have two facial expressions: don’t give a damn, and surprised!
We’ve had a mom with two yearlings hanging around this year and they make me so happy.
This may not be seen, but I really wanted to say that as someone who has lived in the US for 10 years with no path to citizenship, while Canada granted me a permanent residency based on nothing more than my skillset, I vehemently disagree. Also, my husband and I paid twice as much just to extend our non immigrant status in US over the last 5 years as Canada charged for express entry. Moreover, EE is a completely transparent process than can be navigated without lawyers, a complete contrast to trying for EB1 PR in America. We are really excited to move there next year, especially given the current anti immigrant sentiment here.
Because people who don’t have the option of moving to Canada need people who are on their side to help fight with and for them.
I know–I have been seriously considering, through our vast national primary nightmare, whether I should move from reliably blue California to a purplish state to help start tipping the balances.
also because America is a global superpower that has profound effects on every other country in the world, and at least if you live in America you might have some, however tiny, influence on it.
Yeah, it’s practically impossible to move to Canada. I mean, unless you get a job in Canada before moving there, which is also difficult, and then your workplace has to pay the significant cost of getting you a work permit. Canadian immigration is several degrees more labyrinthian and expensive than US immigration – I’ve worked in both.
I spent like half of last year working in Canada though, and it was pretty awesome and I’d move there (also from NYC) in a heartbeat if someone would just pay for me to do so. Hey, you could always marry a Canadian! (Doesn’t work for me, I’m already married.)
Marriage immigration is also incredibly long, tedious, expensive, and draining. And horrid.
You don’t have to leave the US to see moose. Just visit rural Maine. 😉
We’re also polite.
On the flip side, our governor is an infantile spoiled brat, we (obviously) don’t have universal healthcare, and I think there are more old people here than nerds.
And no jobs 🙁
I fled from Maine to Alaska, where we also have moose and now have a decent governor, and until recently had lots of jobs. I’m running out of places with winter, moose, and jobs to run to!
Salt Lake City.
Minnesota seems to have run out of moose, it’s very sad.
Oh noes!
I am actually planning to visit Maine soon! I was looking at Memorial Day weekend, but I’ve been procrastinating so it might be Labor Day instead. I’d stay near the coastline, but I’m totally fascinated by the 100-Mile Wilderness – maybe a camping trip is in my future too.
As Hari Kondabolu points out, there’s no special Canadian visa for American liberal cowards. So that’s a hurdle. 🙂
Well, I don’t like the term coward, and it doesn’t apply to me. I’m more angry about potentially losing my human rights – or watching my friends lose theirs – than I am scared. I’m also not JUST considering moving abroad because of the political environment here.
Oh gosh, I didn’t mean to imply that you were one! Sorry! It’s a specific line from this stand-up bit by Hari Kondabolu, about the many Americans making empty threats to move to Canada, especially during the Bush years. He was just pointing out that the actual process is complicated and Canada isn’t exactly falling all over itself to accept American immigration applications based solely on the reasoning of “well, I just really hate my government!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYwcb9Pclo
CARMELLA, you sweet puppy!
Oh, Toast, I am Too Witches today. I’m terrified of the election and the person who was going to take my room in the apartment fell through so I’ve got to run back after work do very fast cleaning, then be charming to more strangers coming to see it (“Heh-heh, sorry about all the boxes, in the middle of moving out, doncha know…”) and my family needs my help in a financial thing that I’m ashamed to ask for advice about, so I keep going over worst case scenarios in my head about it instead. All of which is stressing me out so I’m getting even less sleep than usual.
Toast hugs, if you want them.
Thanks! Much appreciated. 🙂
If I must be replicating a situation out of a sprawling Victorian novel, I suppose “spinster with moderate income is sucked into sticky situation involving relations and money” is better than smallpox.
Oh dear. As a similar spinster involved in a likewise situation, I send you all the good wishes and a reminder, should it help, that there’s no shame in asking for advice and also looking after yourself first, the better to help others if you decide that’s what’s best. Or not!
Thanks so much. <3 Good wishes to you, in your sticky situation, as well.
I’m honestly not sure if it’s something for the advice of a financial planner, a therapist, a group of kind and intelligent people who may have experienced something similar, all of the above, or if I should just write a bitter drawing room comedy about the whole thing and pitch it to local theater companies in an effort to turn it into cash. Because small-cast, mostly women plays that don’t need too many special effects or set changes are in DEMAND.
Thank you! I would throw money at a Kickstarter for that drawing room comedy, you bet. It certainly sounds more entertaining than my approach, which is basically to pretend I’m Gail Vaz-Oxlade and I’ve been tasked with logistics for the Normandy invasion.
I firmly believe in the power of LARPing your way out of unpleasant situations. My brother posted to FB the other day saying that was his new fitness plan: LARPing as a healthy person until it stuck.
Hugs if you want them, and a brief, awkward arm pat if you don’t want hugs.
I don’t know if anyone here could give you advice, or if you want it, but there must be enough people here who know what they’re doing if you do want advice?
Seconding those encouraging you to share it with us, in whatever level of detail you’re comfortable with! No one should have to struggle alone with that kind of burden, and I bet someone will either have personal knowledge or a link that will help at least a little.
Thanks! I ended up setting the whole thing down below. I may delete it later in the day, but if you’re curious, there it is!
the letter writer who is offended because his Chinese girlfriend won’t introduce him to her ancestors, though. oh my
That was a woman though, wasn’t it? She thought it meant her girlfriend was ashamed of her on some level, even though her (living) family are apparently fine about her being gay. I still think she should be fine about it, but that does put a different spin on it.
I somehow missed that… ugh
Part of me is thinking, it’s hard enough to find a partner whose living family isn’t homophobic and if you find that, who cares about the ancestors?
It’s a lady LW in that one, it’s about the possibility of homophobic ancestor spirits.
ah, my bad
I get that she’s worrying about her girlfriend not truly being comfortable with her, but at the same time there was a comment on Slate along the lines of “You’re mad because you haven’t been introduced to the homophobic ghost of your girlfriend’s grandma, which you don’t even believe in?” and I laughed pretty hard. Life advice: Don’t pick homophobic ghosts as your relationship hill to die on.
This is definitely a let it go moment. I mean, even if lw converted to girlfriend’s religion, would she be part of the relationship with gf’s family ancestors, or would she be expected to honor her own family ancestors? This really seems like the sort of occasion when you really, truly can’t share someone else’s experience.
Normally I would agree, but when part of your SO’s religion is based around ancestor worship (and it’s not just the Western tradition of visiting loved ones’ graves to pay respect), and your SO is dedicated to that religion, I’d worry that longterm it would cause problems. That letter brought to mind the Captain Awkward mental exercise where you think “how will I feel if X doesn’t change in a year? 5 years? 10 years? 20?”
I also think that LW’s girlfriend will HAVE TO eventually resolve the cognitive dissonance between her sexual orientation and her religion, and her reticence to do so even though she appears to be in a stable, loving, long-term relationship is a little troubling.
All of this exactly, and also: LW doesn’t say whether she’s religious or not herself, but if she is, what if the idea of homophobic dead ancestors conflicts with something fundamental in her own beliefs? Maybe this doesn’t represent an insurmountable difference in their philosophies of human nature, but then again, maybe it does, and if it’s an ongoing source of conflict it’s absolutely worth at least a serious conversation, especially if there’s any chance they’ll end up raising kids together.
Being half Chinese I want to say that I don’t think there is a cognitive dissonance here. It’s the same as not wanting to introduce a girlfriend to a racist uncle or something. There is nothing in ancestor worship that is against homosexuality; it’s about what you feel that specific relative would have been comfortable with. (I’m also kind of iffy about calling it a “religion.” We don’t tend to describe it as a religion ourselves, in my experience; it’s just What Decent People Do. Further, there’s no “converting” because it’s not a formal religion. There are flexible social guidelines about how practices are done but there isn’t really a creed or anything to sign on to.)
I do a lot of respects-paying in terms of burning offerings etc for my family and I tend to make it clear to my s/os that they are not welcome as part of that process because my family is my business. Like, I don’t want them doing emotional labor about my living family, and I don’t want them doing it for my dead family either.
Man, the more I think about this the more annoyed I get, esp with how this discussion has been framed, but I just want to say:
When it comes to ancestor veneration, what we perceive as what our family member would have desired is paramount. This is one arena in which the wishes of the dead override the living. That’s what makes it paying respects.
See, this is why I think the LW needs to chill out, beyond my flippant comment above. She’s got to learn that she can’t be part of every aspect of her SO’s life, and I think it’s pretty clear that the girlfriend is perfectly comfortable with herself and the relationship. The only effect this has on the LW’s life is she doesn’t get to participate in rituals that she doesn’t even believe in. It seems really pushy to me. Let this be your girlfriend’s thing and leave it alone.
Ooh, thank you for explaining this! Very helpful for framing – I think I thought of it as more formal (mostly because of the LW’s tone in the letter, plus I know very little about Eastern religions beyond the one Buddhism class I took in college).
So, AHS– I’m afraid of slicey dicey horror and body horror (I could not go see The Witch after watching the trailer) but loved The Shining and David Lynch weirdo pretty-film psycho horror– Is American Horror Story worth watching? All I know about it is that some of my goth friends loved the witchy coven season and my disability rights friends were rightfully very upset about the circus/”freak show” season. What on earth is this show?
A Ryan Murphy shit show.
(Also, all the seasons have some degree of slicey/body horror, with Coven probably having the least overall (?), but when it does, OH BOY FUCKING HOWDY does it).
You might enjoy the first season? That one is most cohesive and plus features the always delightful Connie Britton.
IDK, I watched for a while out of inertia mostly and also because every season had SOME good points and it’s often really beautiful to look at in a macabre way (Coven was the most beautifully-designed season). But it’s largely just a narrative mess and paced weirdly. I abandoned ship on Hotel because sexvampires are boring AF to me and I’m getting my beautiful macabre from Penny Dreadful, which is a much better show.
There is quite a bit of body horror and gore in Coven, less so but still some in Asylum and Murder House (though I haven’t watched those two seasons in a while so my memory is a bit fuzzy). Quality wise, I wouldn’t really recommend anything other than the first two seasons (Murder House/Asylum) since Ryan Murphy’s ability to keep a story together for an entire season is shaky at best and he tends to treat his female characters more as bitchy (though fun, and spectacularly well-acted) caricatures of what he thinks women are like, which can get pretty grating after a while.
This is OT, but I won’t be here (I’ll be outside, yay!).
If you were to receive a scouts-style badge, what would you want it to be for and what would the badge have on it?
WITCHES
as in the “Too Witches” badge
I’d go with Bitch Wizardry, myself.
Titviolence here. With spiky boobs like Vulvatron.
Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll
Bench Press A Man -I haven’t earned this one yet, though
Beat Impostor Syndrome
Deadlift A Man, which I’m much closer to earning than the Bench Press A Man badge.
My first thought was that I should earn a badge for Impeccable Use of Commas, but then I realized I’d rather have a badge for a skill I had to master through hard work. So I’d like a badge for Consistently Poaches a Mean Egg.
The graphic design possibilities are limited, but obvious, and aesthetically-pleasing.
Somebody gave me a patch a while ago that says “Asshole Merit Badge” and I’d like it to be a legit recognized badge.
The Cooked Something Intimidating and It Turned Out Great Badge that has something notoriously complicated and/or time-consuming like a croissant or souffle on it.
Cat Herding. Would have cat hair on it. Would in fact be woven of cat hair.
Sleep Champ, which would be soft and fluffy in some way
Honestly I very badly wanted to do all kinds of scouting things as a kid but my girl scout group sucked and pretty much just hung out in the library conference room making crafts out of construction paper. So my answer would be all of them? Like regular scout badges. Knot-tying, fire-building, survival camping. I did manage to get a tree identification badge on my own initiative, so at least I’ve got that.
I volunteered with a local Brownie pack for years (out of inertia – I did not like it), and I hated how little they did. Any badges were just very basic craft things with the kids basically being coached through step-by-step and having half of it done for them; nobody learned anything and it all felt pointless. Teach them how to tie knots and put up tents!
Assembled An IKEA Dresser Without Murdering Anyone Or Burning Down My Apartment! …or anything to that effect. I just finished a 7-HOUR (!!!!!!!) assembly of an entertainment center and it very nearly destroyed me.
I think that this deserves more than a badge. Probably a ceremony with a steak dinner.
I will buy things from IKEA with no more than four parts, especially if I will need assistance with assembly. I still have managed to take apart, re-slipcover, and put together my full length Kivik three times with no help from my husband (and while he’s been out of the house), because I recognize the weak spots in my marriage.
I also took apart and re-slipcovered my IKEA couch recently! It was all fine till I managed to strip one of the bolts and needed to call my dad for help.
I’ve been putting IKEA furniture together for almost a decade now, so I’m decent at it (every time I move, I dissemble and reassemble my bed frame, so I’m old-hat) … but the entertainment center was actually from Overstock, not IKEA, and the directions were AWFUL. Just terrible. I was wishing simultaneously for IKEA and for death for all 7 hours. Very happy now, but I will shake my fist at it a few more times before I get over it.
RAINBOWS. There would be a rainbow.
EYESHADOW. There would be an eye wearing rainbow eyeshadow.
SPACEWITCHERY. There would be an eye wearing sparkly galaxy eyeshadow with flourishy winged eyeliner.
Tempering chocolate, and it would have homemade peppermint patties on it.
I wish it were for something that uses my brain or for mastering a bad habit or something, but I don’t feel like I’m badge-worthy in that area. But I’m pretty consistent at cheat-tempering chocolate.
Flipped 12 eggs in a pan simultaneously with out breaking a yolk. The badge would be a bunch of fried eggs in the air with motion trails and an OK hand gesture to one side.
Fictional Historian. It’d be a clock with a pen and pencil as the hour/minute hands, and motion lines indicating that the hands are moving backwards. Alternatively, Convention Planning, which would have a Dr. Scratch-n-sniff-esque bust of a person screaming and ripping out their hair in big chunks.
I may be exceeding the limitations of what scout badges are capable of depicting in all of their embroidered low-resolution glory, but OH WELL.
Yew Bush Removal (not a euphemism).The badge will be a giant pyramid of yew branches with a victorious lady stick figure standing on top, brandishing a shovel.
How do I come to terms with the Ghostbusters trailer being so disliked on youtube? I’m so saaad you guys
Just think about how popular it will be when it comes out, and how all those whiny dudes will probably either go see it anyway despite their whining, or will sit at home whining still even as it sells tons of tickets, I’m sure.
Never read the YouTube comments?
I am glad to see two articles about our poisoned weather. (I realize that the wildfires may not be directly caused by climate change, I am not a climate scientist, I do think the increase in wildfires is somewhat attributable). I will read them later when I have time and the energy, since whenever I think abut climate change part of me wants to put my head in the sand cause it is so overwhelming.
Climate change can indirectly exacerbate fire seasons — drier land from shifting rainfall patterns means fires can spread more quickly.
OT: But I got my Neuropsych results yesterday.
The following things were noted: I have mild ADHD, yes, the HD part as well since I pretty much vibrate in any given situation because I can’t seem to stop moving something. I also have severe anxiety and my doctor recommended I do CBT therapy for that. I am, however mildly smarter than the average human, significantly smarter than the average bear, and with the fine motor skills to match the bear (AKA: great if you’re an actual bear, not great if you’re a human) so I’ll be doing occupational therapy for that.
Also, I didn’t fail the tests. Which you can’t, but I was seriously freaking out about it on Monday because I freak out about everything so why not this too?
I just went with my mom to take her tests yesterday. The whole process was fascinating.
Just here to say CBT changed my life, and that is not an overstatement. If you can find a provider you trust and generally like, it can make a significant difference in your everyday life.
I’ve done it before for my crippling anxiety. Now it’s limping anxiety.
Kate Beaton (of the webcomics and books Hark, A Vagrant!) has a great series of comics about her time working in the tar sands at Ft. McMurry. I highly recommend it!
Link: http://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-…
That’s such a beautiful, thoughtful series.
Oh my word, thank you for linking to these. I’m crying now, for all those gruff kindly men who sound like my brother and uncles and dad, for Kate, for the ducks, for Fort McMurray, for Earth. THE FEELS.
Kate Beaton is a national treasure.
Also for the sex worker who does not seem to have been treated kindly and who I fear has nowhere to go right now.
Wow, thanks for that. I was working in the tar sands in 2008 too! (reads first one) She got that right, those bird cannons are really loud and alarming. And don’t work.
GinnyQ9! I got your toastcard but it did not include a return address. If you see this, I’d like to be pen pals but I’m not sure how to get in touch with you.
I’ve also gotten a few Toast Post postcards which are lovely but do not include return addresses. Was the point of the Toast Post to just send one card/note to say hello? Or start an exchange?
I think it could be either, but this one specifically mentioned the possibility of being pen pals, so I think it was just an oversight.
I included a return address on all of my toastcards, Just In Case.
I’m sorry, Toastmatches, I did not, because I wasn’t sure if you got mine in your list already? But maybe I will put them on the next mailing, just to be sure.
I got a list of names, but the people on my list did not get my name in their lists (if that makes any sense). I’ve already gotten two toast posts from people who were not on my list, so if they did not give me a return address I have no way of replying.
Oops, I did this too. Sorry, toastfriends who got postcards from me with no return address. Guess I’ll just have to send out another round pretty soon.
I’d strongly recommend Kate Beaton’s Ducks to anyone wondering about the tar sands situation in Northern Alberta. It’s about her time working in Fort Mac, and as she puts it “environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans”. It’s the most sensitive take on the subject I’ve ever seen and I hope she expands it into a book some day:
http://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-…
Yes oh my goodness. Expanded on my feels above in my reply to Thedabarasghost but thank you too for this recommendation.
I just read it. I was working at Syncrude in 2008, where the ducks died. This hit home.
Toasties! I woke up this morning at 6:30 to the dulcet tones of Dwayne The Rock Johnson going BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP and did yoga! I feel so healthy and self-satisfied and full of possibility!
Me too! Well, the waking up to the Rock saying beep bepp, anyway, I did not do yoga. But it was a great start of the day, and my partner (who I’d not told about the app beforehand) loved the surprise.
It was not such a great surprise for my partner, who mumbled “What the fuck is that?” while shoving his head under his pillow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I showed this app to my spouse, and he accused me of wanting to run away from home with The Rock. I told him I could not handle that much cod in my life.
Re: The Rock Clock – has anyone found a way to make alarms recurring? Or do I have to turn mine on every night before I set the app to sleep mode?
I haven’t had time to fiddle around with it yet, but does the “No End Date” toggle on the date-selection page work?
Living. The. Dream.
I did too! …but then I set my other alarm so I could sleep in for 10 more minutes. Sorry, Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
You guys, I am so glad we have this place where we can share our love of both The Rock *and* cartoon foxes. This truly is a magical time to be alive.
Lovely Flute was my choice. No snooze option + Dwayne The Rock Johnson=the best.
i LOOOOOOVE that we also get a lil’ video from him each morning. i…enjoy???… waking up now.
I saw The Huntsman: Winter’s War last night (alone, because EVERYONE ELSE bailed on me (*sad violins*)), and I highly recommend it paired with bourbon. It was very entertaining and dumb. There were a pair of Thelma and Louise-style dwarfesses who were delightfully misandrist. (Apparently dwarf society in this world is entirely homosocial.) Emma Stone rode around on a bearcat.
I have never heard a better endorsement for anything. Time to fill up the flask!
I will have to make sure I see it with booze!
I hadn’t planned to see it but now I might have to change my mind.
I just googled bearcat, and while my life has definitely been enriched with adorableness I am pretty confused as to how a full grown human could ride one? Were they scaled up to horse size in the movie?
It wasn’t a real bearcat. It was like… a mix between a polar bear and a snow leopard? Viz:
Oh man, that’s even better than what I was imagining! And the armor she’s wearing is just absurdly amazing.
Her dresses were made of plate and chainmail and swooshed and clinked when she walked and it was SO. AMAZING.
I’m still digesting the climate change refugee article, but my first thought was Beasts of the Southern Wild, and how I did not realize it was such a real thing already.
Yeah, I read that yesterday and was just floored all over again at the number of people in this country still insisting that climate change isn’t a thing. IT IS LITERALLY HAPPENING, YOU GUYS.
Also I’m worried, because while it looks like the people on that one island are getting resettlement grants from the government, that is not a feasible policy given the number of people who are eventually going to be displaced (hello, Miami?).
I’m now blanking on where I read it, but there was a great piece a while back about folks who are calling to replace the Louisiana outline that appears on state highway signs with an outline that actually reflects the current coastline, The difference is pretty staggering.
That would (probably!) be Brett Anderson’s “Louisiana Loses Its Boot”, which is an excellent piece by a similarly excellent dude! He came to one of my classes to talk about this piece.
Can we talk about this horrifying Woody Allen interview? I am getting full-body revulsion shudders.
Love that the interviewer calls him on it, though. Not that it helps it be less gross. But still.
Dear lord. He is at the top of the list of People Who Should be Recluses but Continue to Interact With Humanity.
I find him so creepy. I can’t watch his movies. My parents will quote Annie Hall and laugh, and I can’t even go there.
When Blue Jasmine came out I had a ton of people trying to tell me to watch it because of Cate Blanchett, but I was like, no, fuck it, there are any number of movies I can watch Cate Blanchett be excellent in without having to give tacit approval to this nightmare of a person.
It’s astounding to me that people choose to work with him, especially female actors. I know they claim that the experience they get is invaluable, but by working with him they’re basically giving unspoken approval of him as a person.
Steve Carell and Kristen Stewart are in his new movie and I am disappoint.
KSTEW NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I really think that all Hollywood actresses are totally inured to creeps like him. God knows he’s not an anomaly in that industry, and I think it’s something you have to be able to endure without missing a beat, in order to succeed there.
Also, he may reserve his overt creepiness to people close to/related to him, and reserve his creepy tendencies on set to just the plotlines and themes of the movies, rather than his actual behaviour. A lot of actors have talked about how they enjoy working with him because he listens to them and promotes a low-stress working environment and everyone gets to knock off by 6pm. For many actresses, who have probably dealt with directors openly abusing, harassing, demeaning or assaulting them, WA’s creepiness being “at a distance”, so to speak probably makes it OK for them. Whether that’s OK on *principle*, however, is another matter.
And anyway, Cate Blanchett – is she good at acting, or is she just tall?
(This is A Reference btw, not a genuine opinion)
I saw Blue Jasmine on a plane, and…I didn’t like it. It’s clear that Woody Allen has no idea what blue collar life (or whatever he was trying to represent with Jasmine’s sister) looks like. The fact that they were trying to pass that apartment off as “poor looking” was hilarious. And by hilarious, I mean I was rolling my eyes.
I know right? The Bobby Canavale character was straight out of West Side Story. And how was Jasmine supposed to be able to work on a dentist’s reception without a computer??
I do think there’s a danger there, in conflating artist and work. The impulse to go “he’s a garbage person so he can’t possibly have made anything worthwhile” is related to the one of “I love those movies so he can’t be that bad”.
Personally, I love Annie Hall, though you can definitely some of the grossness that’s also in this interview in it (Annie Hall is depicted as someone Alvin teaches a lot too, though in the end she opts out). Manhattan is a hard watch because it’s about a relationship with a(n older) teenager, but it does have some fantastic elements and some absolutely gorgeous cinematography.
It’s impossible to fully separate an artist and his art, especially with someone as autobiographically inclined as Woody Allen. But I do think it’s important to acknowledge that it’s possible for one person to be gross and terrible and to produce some worthwhile art, too.
ETA: of course, boycotting his films because you don’t want to make him any money is a completely valid choice. But that’s different to me than denying there could be anything worthwhile in the films.
I don’t think his movies are bad from a technical or artistic standpoint (although some of them are)! I will grant you that the cinematography in Manhattan is really stunning, and I remember really liking Match Point when I first watched it.
It’s more that the autobiographical nature of most of Allen’s work, combined with the increasing public awareness of his creepiness, makes it so that I can’t watch anything he’s made without a little voice in the back of my head going “oh, ick.”
There are other people for whom I can handle the artist-work separation a little better, but it’s hard for me to do it when he makes movie after movie that are different shades of “white man struggles to find meaning in life until he meets a much younger woman who inspires him.” (Incidentally, the films of his I’ve enjoyed most from an artistic standpoint also tend to be the ones that deviate from this formula.)
I watched Manhattan when I was about 17, and found it creepy without even knowing about anything Woody Allen had done at that point. Without having anything to do with him as a person, I felt the whole man-in-his-40s-has-relationship-with-teenager thing was an artistic flaw, because it just didn’t ring true. That it also has something to do with his own moral failings (to put it mildly) is another matter.
I remember thinking it was weird that his couple friends seemed to have no major issue with the fact that their 40-year old friend’s girlfriend was 17, and just accepted that she would be there with them drinking in bars or whatever. It seemed unrealistic that the woman of the couple of least wouldn’t be like ‘ehhh wtf are you doing’
Exactly, his nastiness and nasty world view aren’t separate from his art, they’re present in it, and they bring the quality down. It’s not realistic that people would be totally fine with him having a 17 year old girlfriend. I find that’s usually why you can’t separate the art from the artist when the artist is that terrible.
What decade was this, though? I’ve recently been reminded of how totally accepted it was that a successful older man would date much, much younger women. In the nonfiction book Operation Mincemeat, one of the British counter-intelligence masterminds sent his wife to America at the start of the war, then started flirting with his 20-year-old secretary. He kept a risque picture of her in a bathing suit by his bed, took her out to dinner and a show (on a double-date with another colleague and his secretary)… And the secretaries were excited about the attention, dressing up for the occasion (not blaming them). It was just a totally different culture and reaction to the idea of your boss taking you out while his wife’s away.
Anyway, I know Allen wasn’t doing this in the forties, but that attitude certain pervaded until quite recently. Remember that Anita Hill introduced the whole notion of sexual harassment in the workplace.
To be clear, though, it was absolutely wrong then as it is now, but I’m just not surprised that no one around him raised an eyebrow.
I could see a 20 year old being NBD back then, but a teenager who’s literally still in high school would *have* to at least raised an eyebrow, even in the 70s.
Man, I hope so. Was he honest about her age?
Yup – there’s references in the movie to her having to leave the bar because she has ‘school in the morning’, IIRC.
He literally picks her up at high school which is when I noped out of there.
*throws all small, moveable objects across the room*
*screams forever*
There’s also the sub-genre of “unlikeable man whines about how unlikeable he is, how fully aware he is of this, and how difficult it makes his life and the lives of the people around him, while doing nothing to change.”
My favorite!
Woody Allen really is the king of this genre.
Yes, when I first saw Vicky Christina Barcelona, I loved it and didn’t know anything about Allen’s personal life or his other works (I grew up pretty sheltered). I still own the DVD, but I don’t know when I’ll be watching it again. :/ And it wasn’t even one of his age-difference movies.
His last few movies have had the exact same plot recycled over and over, it’s incredibly TIRED but they just keep letting him do it because his name still sells. Bring down the patriarchy.
I used to feel this way, but the cumulative effect of his monstrousness, topped by Dylan Farrow’s confirmation of her abuse at his hands, and the echoes of that monstrousness in his choice of themes, means that for me, at least, boycotting his material is a moral necessity. And that includes films that I still think have merit, like Manhattan, Mighty Aphrodite and Purple Rose.
Agreed. It is absolutely ok to conflate the creator with their work when that person is a terrible person who did terrible things to people. Marion Zimmer Bradley meant a lot to feminists a couple of decades ago. She meant a lot to me, when I discovered The Mists of Avalon in particular, and I read it over and over again. Then I found out about her history of child abuse and condoning her husband’s serial child abuse, and put her down forever.
I agree. I also think that most of us have a line – possibly difficult to define, but still, a line – past which the terribleness of a creator makes it no longer possible to enjoy his or her creation. What’s hard is that since terribleness exists on a multi-dimensional spectrum, it’s impossible to be pure or consistent about that unless you exclude everything or include everything.
It’s certainly possible, and I think that that Moral Event Horizon [TVTropes] is probably different for each person, and may depend on both the nature of the offense and the artist’s work, although the latter can be trumped by the former, no matter what they created. Roman Polanski, for example, who was and is a talented filmmaker, but you literally couldn’t pay me to watch his movies now. (Not even Chinatown.)
Yes, but Roman Polanski as a cultural issue is different. His wife was Sharon Tate! She was violently stabbed and killed by Charles Manson and co while she was pregnant with his baby!
I remember when I learned that Tate was his wife…it put two threads I’ve always known about together. So, I think Polanski as a person more brings up what we, as a culture, will tolerate when you (or your wife, which is a another patriarchy issue) has been through incredible trauma and tragedy.
It’s like for Polanski we as a culture decided Tate was killed so violently that Polanski can have sex with children. Which is not by any means okay!! It’s horrifying! But it’s a different cultural issue than Allen, I think. I think the context is important.
But Polanski was a massive entitled predatory arsehole long before Tate’s death, during their whole marriage in fact. Whether he was ‘raping children’ level of asshole is up for debate I guess, but it certainly seems likely.
The You Must Remember This episode on Polanski and his treatment of Tate for basically their entire relationship made me nearly incandescent with rage.
Me too! He was (is) a monster.
I don’t think sympathy over Tate has all that much to do with why people defend Polanski; lots of Hollywood people do it because he was friends with plenty of them and people tend to believe the best of their friends, and lots of non-Hollywood people do it because he really is a brilliant director and if I like his movies but I don’t like rapists that must mean he’s not actually all that bad rite guyz????
It’s hardly just Polanski (nobody murdered, say, Cosby’s wife), people don’t wanna deal at all with the notion that someone can do monstrous things and still be good at anything, or be witty and personable to the people they aren’t abusing, so if you know the one thing to be true the other must be untrue even if you’re standing there watching it.
Yeah. I think Polanski’s a terrible human being and have no interest in defending him in any capacity, but I very inconveniently find Rosemary’s Baby to be both one of the best horror movies ever made and one of the most feminist ones. A lot of what makes it good is the performance of Mia Farrow and the source material, so it’s not all about Polanski, but I am still really bothered that I love it 🙁
Or people would denigrate the victim and say she made it up/tricked him into it/was an Awful Manipulative Woman so really, he can’t be *blamed*, guyysss
Personally I love love love so many of his movies, but a couple of years ago (before Blue Jasmine came out) I made the decision that I am not going to toss any money his way, even in indirect ways like renting a DVD from the library. If justice is ever actually served, and he serves a sentence, then I will maybe reconsider. But I can’t contribute, even in my tiniest of ways, to this man’s wellbeing.
(This is probably over-convoluted and it’s possible that it’s less about Woody Allen [and Roman Polanski] and more about Phil Spector, whose work I adore and have not deleted from my iTunes and continue to put on mixes for other people – all the while telling myself “well, he’s serving his sentence so that’s different.” NB I am aware that his sentence is for murder and not for all the abuse he piled on Veronica Bennett, or all the shit stunts he pulled on artists/writers/producers he worked with, but … here we are.)
I hovered over the link, read the title, and immediately made the choice to ignore it altogether. Woody ruins everything, but he cannot ruin my morning!
There is no greater side-eye than for those who continually work for this shit museum of a human being.
Ughhh, okay last week I saw “Bullets over Broadway” (the musical version that’s touring). I knew nothing about it and if I’d known it was a Woody Allen project, I would have made sure that my friends and I saw a different play. I only found out it was Woody Allen after it was over.
At least I thought it was mediocre and the house was only half full?
I’ve always thought that Soon-Yi could publish the most eye-popping tell-all autobiography of the century one day, should she choose to.
The headline alone is like…
This is off-topic to the thread, but on-topic to that amazing .gif — where exactly is that cat going? Is there a wormhole betwheen those cushions? Or an actual hole where the cat drops out onto the floor on the other side of the couch?
It might be a fold-out/hide-a-bed/whatever. They usually have a pretty good sized cavity underneath.
A secret pathway to Cat Utopia, maybe?
Onymous is likely right, though.
That reminds me of another recent interview which included the following haunting quote:
“she deferred to me, and I was happy to give her an enormous amount of decision making just as a gift and let her take charge of so many things.”
Oh my god you sound like a fundamentalist cult leader can you hear yourself?!
Woody Allen is a garbage person.
Free will is not a gift, for Pete’s sake…
OH PLEASE LET HER WRITE AN ANGRY TELL-ALL AFTER HIS DEATH
Oh god yes please.
That woman looks so exhausted in every picture. She has to have lost so much for this relationship. Does she have friends? She doesn’t look like she’s okay.
I feel like she was unlucky enough to be stuck between the Scylla of Mia Farrow and the Charybidis of Woody Allen from a young age. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a Righteously Rageful Soon-Yi yet to reveal herself.
I became half-deaf last January when my right ear lost all hearing (except for persistent tinnitus… lovely that). And it has been a real struggle to both adapt to only hearing with one ear and having people around me adapt to me only hearing with one ear. Friends and family are understanding, but in public I’ve had people get mad at me because they think I’m oblivious or ignoring them when really it’s just that I can’t hear them.
All of which is to say, yes, that girlfriend sucks and thanks Mallory/Prudie for her answer to that letter.
My mom is half-deaf (now more than half, I think? It’s degenerative hearing loss) and it’s incredible how many people seem to think that I am lying about this, because she is fine in a face-to-face conversation.
Yeah, I’ve discovered it’s a strange disability because you’re still mostly functional, hearing-wise, so most people don’t even realize you have it. But there’s a lot I miss that people don’t realize I miss and I have to constantly move around to position people to my left, and I basically can’t function in noisy spaces anymore.
Yes, mine, too!
Apparently there’s genetic early-onset hearing loss to look forward to, because she and her sister both developed it in their late 40s/early 50s and I’m already starting to notice the tinnitus when my ears are like “whoa, this environment is too quiet, that must be wrong”. I already have auditory processing difficulties (though I can hear just fine so far), it’s going to be really tough when the actual hearing loss kicks in on me.
I already get way more ear infections than any adult should, and I have occasional tinnitus, so I’m pretty sure it’s coming for me. My mom started losing hers in her late 30s.
yes, mallory hit it out of the park (as usual) with her answer.
my father has bad hearing loss and my whole family understands that his hearing aids can make talking on the phone incredibly difficult. so guess what? we don’t talk to him on the phone! we find other ways to communicate with him! this makes us all a lot more comfortable, because when you have a communication barrier, it’s no fun for either party. what is the girlfriend’s deal?!
Right?! Our world is FULL of ways of talking to people that don’t involve the phone. Text, email, SMS messaging, twitter! She can even talk to her phone and have that be sent as text. Her attitude is baffling.
So many emojis! She has opportunities here.
Yeah, that one really enraged me, because I’m completely deaf in one ear and often have to request particular accommodation for it, especially in really noisy environments, and it particularly pisses me off when people either act like its a huge deal or do this passive-aggressive thing where they “forget” about it (sometimes even speaking more softly or mumbling in a way that they didn’t do before I told them!). I’m like, what do you want, documentation of it going back to childhood? Because I’ve got it.
My partner is deaf in one ear, and just today he failed to notice a nearby woman on his deaf side saying “bless you” when he sneezed, so did not acknowledge her. If people don’t realise, it’s so hard not to look rude, which is shit – people make so many assumptions.
Hearing loss runs in my husband’s family–he’s partially deaf, and so is his father. Sometimes it gets a LITTLE annoying when I have to repeat myself, but I know it’s nothing personal so I say it again and try to enunciate better. (The worst part is when I’ve said something kinda stupid, like a joke that totally dies upon delivery, and he didn’t hear it so he wants me to say it again, and my first instinct is to say, “Never mind.” I’ve learned that that phrase is one of the worst things you can say to someone with partial hearing loss, so I’m retraining myself to say, “It’s not worth repeating, sorry,” or something so he knows that I’m not upset with him.)
Anyway, my mother-in-law thinks that both her husband and her son are faking their hearing loss, and she takes it personally when they don’t react to her saying something. Never mind that it’s harder for them to hear when there’s a lot of ambient noise. Never mind that she wasn’t facing them or looking in their direction so they had some sort of visual clues about what she’s saying. If she’s calling to get their attention and they don’t respond, she gets all dramatic about how they “always ignore” her. From their point of view, though, she’s going from zero to enraged without any warning. No wonder my husband has issues.
Ugh that’s awful. I do get that it can be frustrating. Sometimes my wife gets a little frustrated because it’s hard for her (and me TBH) to know when and how it will make hearing difficult. But she doesn’t get frustrated *at me.*
But I can’t imagine dealing with someone like the LW’s girlfriend or your mother-in-law. That’s just toxic.
OT issue re: representation of women in tech in reply
I’m considering investing money through a new start-up. Right now they are just under 20% women, for a small company. I asked them via email if they are planning to keep in mind and try to remedy the underrepresentation of women in tech as they grow, and the response was:
“[thank you for your thoughtful question] Your question definitely feeds into our core philosophy at [redacted] of being an equal opportunity employer and constantly striving for ways to cultivate a fair, nurturing and diverse culture. [note about having daughters & being happy this is something I take into consideration when investing]”
I feel like it’s kind of a hedge? What do you think? I was hoping for something unequivocal like, “yes, we know underrepresentation is a problem and it will be a focus as we grow.” Am I being too picky?
Not at all! I would want to know what actions they are taking to develop and sustain such a culture, particularly what steps they are taking to hire more women.
“Yeah, but like, what are you actually gonna, you know, do about it?”
“Our core philosophy includes obeying the law”.
Kind of pointless to have a “core philosophy” of diversity but not actually putting it into practice.
Woman in tech here! That is totally an industry-standard hedge. It’s not necessarily a sign that they are Totally Bad and Evil, but if you’re in a position where you can ask them more detailed questions (or if you run into a similar situation in the future), you might want to ask them some more specifics about their hiring policies and HR practices. Some things to look for/suggest: reviewing resumes with names removed (good for avoiding bias both for gender and ethnicity), having more than one interviewer, having a woman on the hiring team, offering code challenges/technical challenges as part of the interview (makes it more about ability than sounding good), having a formal HR process in which people can confidentially express concerns/complaints, annual sexual harrassment training, etc. You could also reference this NYT piece that discusses adjustments that Google has made to their hiring process to try to hire more women.
Nah, not too picky. I’m a woman in tech and put a lot of effort into recruiting women and I know it’s difficult, but companies need to have clear plans for hiring, or else nothing changes. Sometimes (most of the time) the clear plans don’t work, but it’s better than saying, “yeah, diversity! great! we like it!” and then sending out the same old white guys to do interviewing over and over.
If you wanted to suggest some things:
– Partnering with colleges and universities and their diversity initiatives to get resumes
– Encouraging (i.e. PAYING) those 20% women to recruit
– Sponsoring local women’s tech conferences
are all steps in the right direction, and concrete things rather than hand-wavy, “i looooove diversity” policies.
Everyone should read this amazing piece on Chris Evans where ScarJo calls him a delicate flower and he looks like perfection: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/capta…
Really, he’s more of a Georgia O’Keef painting of a flower. Both make me think dirty thoughts while admiring beauty and skill.
EDIT: he has a golden retriever puppy OH MY GOD That couldn’t be more fucking perfect.
Thank you for giving me an excuse to “spoil” that there’s an amazingly beefcakey shot of him in Civil War that practically made me drool in the theater.
THANK THE HEAVENS. This is a perfect “spoiler” and now I just can’t wait for tomorrow evening. (no, I can, I’m not at all emotionally ready for Civil War, but here we are, one day away)
Half an hour away! (well, an hour by the time the adverts are over…)
THIS IS WHAT I PAY MONEY FOR AT THE THEATER.
He has a golden retriever puppy.
He knows classic musicals by heart.
He wants to go back to the theater.
How can this ridiculous bro that makes me melt like this? This is not who I am, it’s concerning.
He’s hunting for a wife because he loves kids. He keeps his captain america shield shoved in a closet. he directs linklater movies. he’s close with his family. I dunno… he might be the devil.
Ugh I KNOW.
I hope he meets a nice woman who is totally un-Hollywood and unimpressed by it.
I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE
I mean yes, I wish him the best of luck in all his endeavors.
Lady Gaga is AMAZING in American Horror Story, I also couldn’t believe how much I liked her, but honestly an immortal fabulous vampire is really the best possible first TV role she could have chosen. I’m kind of obsessed with her weird velvety speaking voice now.
Re: the census thing, I’m not entirely sure if it means that all Canadians are nerds so much as the Canadian government is that bad at making functional websites. It is pretty easy to crash almost any government site. I couldn’t even Netfile this year because for some reason the Revenue Canada site thought I am dead.
Toasties! Here is a delightful story about a Canadian grandmother who is in a grindcore band and goes by the name Grindmother: http://www.npr.org/2016/05/04/476508139/this-aint…
Well, I just found the name for my Trivia Team tonight!
She is only in her 60s and it occurs to me that people in their 60s now really would have been the young folks who innovated shades of punk in the first place. Imagine when emo and electroclash hits retirement age how much fun that is gonna be!
Not really Link Roundup relevant, just a question regarding Season 2 of Sense8.
What happened with the guy who played Capheus? That actor was awesome and I can’t imagine a reason to recast the role!
Deadline claims they had to recast because the actor left. This was the first I heard of it :/
Yikes, the vague description of the conflict between him and Lana Wachowski does not fill me with hope. I hope the “creative differences” in this case isn’t a euphemism for “actor of color refuses to perform racist characterization written by white producer”.
Yeah, I’m really worried about that, too.
The word around all of Tumblr was “black guy must have been transphobic, we have literally no evidence and Jamie Clayton says he was always a sweetheart but it’s easier to blame him than admit that a Wachowski sister can do wrong.” Even the fandom is racist as shit.
I’m pretty sure that he would not have accepted the job in the first place if he were that transphobic?? C’mon fandom use your brain.
Yeah, my first thought was that maybe he was transphobic (because that’s my knee-jerk reaction to hearing of someone disagreeing to the point of quitting a job with a trans person, which is not a kind or accurate reaction). But then my immediate next thought was that it is just as likely that Lana was at fault because being trans does not inoculate you against being wrong/mean/a jerk/a bad boss/etc.
What I’m wondering is, what changed? Same actor, same people, so what happened between last season and this one? I’m sad he’s gone. He was so good in that role.
I got super upset that I didn’t realize the second season had dropped. And then I realize it hadn’t. Phew!
They replaced him, yes, but the new guy is from my alma mater (University of Evansville), so there was a lot of excitement on my FB feed! Our theatre program ROCKS! (We also produced Kenny on 30 Rock)
Oh hey U of E person! I did not go there, but I have a ton of family in Evansville and many relatives/friends who did. It’s such a cool school to be stuck in that town, haha.
Lol, yes. Hey there! Absolutely no college life around the campus, but I’m glad we didn’t have a football team.
It’s such a tiny school, but I happened to run into an alum at new church in Wilsonville, Oregon — she graduated there in the ’60s and lived in Moore Hall the first year it was built, which is also where I lived as a freshman. And she was the only woman in her graduate classes.
Sensitively written article about Britney Spear’s conservatorship http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/arts/music/is-b…
Gotta say, the fact that her family and lawyers are making such money off her situation gives me the creeps
I truly did not realize that the conservatorship was still in effect. How awful! But it seems like she’s doing so well in the last few years and I bet she’ll do just fine on her own now. 2007 seems so far away…
Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that. Being a conservator can be very time-consuming, so I’m totally fine with compensating them. Being a conservator/guardian comes with such serious obligations that, as a lawyer, I wouldn’t do it even for what they were paying out. And if you have very experienced practitioners acting in that role, well, they charge a lot, so that’s what you have to pay. That said, I just really feel like she’s being taken advantage of. If she were broke, I don’t think this conservatorship would still be in place. I think she’d have been somehow magically become able to take care of herself.
Thank you for the link.
Is the image of Carmella just… a painting? Because that dog looks like a painting.
Yes, I thought that too!
Toasts! For anyone interested in gender and the workforce, I was lucky enough to see Myra Strober speak last night at an anniversary celebration for a labor archive at a university and she blew my mind. If you’re aware of the situation in which seemingly inexplicably, a job switches from being composed of almost exclusively men to almost exclusively women, and if you always attributed that switch to employers pursuing women employees because they can pay them less because pay equity has historically not been great, she says no, that’s not it! It’s that men stop wanting the job for whatever reason and then women rush into fill the vacancies because the job is better than what they’ve previously had available to them.
She gave the example of bank tellers, whom she studied. In the 1930s, bank telling was among the better paid and more advantageous jobs for a man with a high school education. Then came WWII, and women moved into those spots. When the war ended, and many women were pushed out of other jobs, bank-telling remained largely female. Why? Because the GI Bill allowed men returning from fighting abroad to increase their education, and if they were interested in banking, they entered the field at a much higher level. Bank telling, therefore, became the provenance of women.
There was also a study a few years back showing that the more women enter a profession, the more it is devalued, and then men don’t want it. Like, if a lot of women do it, it’s a lowly profession lacking prestige and not for the men. Self-perpetuating circle, I guess.
Something similar happened with computer programming I believe, but the other way around?
OT: I spent most of today at the National Railway Museum and then had the surprise opportunity to hold birds of prey (a peregrine falcon and an eagle owl). Living the dream!
RAPTORS
!!! You are truly living the dream.
LOOK AT THIS CAT WHAT WAS COTCHED BY THE SAN JOSE SHARKS: https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/…
oh my god, in the lead picture she just looks so angry, I love it
I have been loving this story so much, particularly the Sharks’ embrace of it. Here’s a delightful photoshop of Brent Burns and a cat from their twitter:
OT: You guys, my friend sent me a link to the most awesome looking book – it’s a YA book about a trans teen by a trans author with a trans cover model and (from digging around a bit) SPOILER ALERT: it has a happy ending.
I live in NC. I want to make everybody I know read this.
OT, but it’s “garden while sweating profusely” season here in VA, which means it’s also sodium deficiency season, which means I have to eat these tortilla chips in order to avoid dizziness and confusion. It’s science!
Totally! My sister and I manage our low blood pressure with tons of salt and caffeine. YOU CAN’T ARGUE WITH RESULTS, PEOPLE.
Last summer, I did not remember to increase my salt intake with my gardening schedule, and I had a very confused couple of weeks.
It’s national naked gardening day inthe UK on Saturday, which might help?
No, that just means it’s also sunburn season. And I get enough mosquito bites on the skin I have exposed as it is.
This WaPo piece on Trump’s presumptive nomination is pretty fucking brilliant.
ALEXANDRA PETRI IS THE ONLY VOICE I WILL LISTEN TO.
ALEXANDRA.
I draw comfort in this dark time from the fact that we are all united in our soundless screaming into the void.
*screams*
GOD DAMN IT KASICH, YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO STAY IN THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE UNTIL THEY PRIED IT FROM YOUR LIFELESS HANDS
If someone is already on this, sorry, but I need the Toast collective to weigh in on the Man Book Club. There are so many things going on here I’m not sure where to start. (By “weigh in,” I do mean, mock wildly until mysterious bouts of insecurity and ennui become sex-linked hereditary traits in their great-great-great-grandsons.)
“She asked how we knew each other, and when we said, ‘book club,’ she was like, ‘Wait, are you gay?’” Mr. Nawotka said. (He added that he and the woman ended up dating.)”
BUT OF COURSE.
THAT ACTUAL MAN WAS MY BROTHER IN LAW. UNTIL MY SISTER DIVORCED HIM AND THEN HE TURNED TO THE MEN IN HIS BOOK CLUB FOR DIVORCE ATTORNEY ADVICE. I WISH LIKE HELL I WAS KIDDING.
(His poor daughter. One day she will google her name, and this’ll come up. Thank goodness he’s too busy reading man books to parent her.)
*silent screaming*
Your poor niece. Tell her that the Toasts are here for her.
“Silent” is not the kind of screaming this engendered in sis & me when Mr. Daki texted “There’s an article about men’s book clubs” yesterday. We knew before opening he would be in it – just not that he would be quite that gross.
Fortunately my niece is so far more into Legos and wild animals than the Internet.
My sincerest congratulations to your sister on getting the hell away from him. May she and her daughter find peace in books with female protagonists.
“‘We do not read so-called chick lit,’ he said. ‘The main character cannot be a woman.'”
I was kind of digging it till then. I like the idea of men having a book club! I think it’s really silly that they won’t just join a regular book club, but whatever! You do you! And then I saw this barfy sentiment and my eyes rolled out of my head.
I am pretending that if my ex-brother-in-law’s book club wasn’t featured in the context of the NO GIRLZ ALLOUD book club and the Hand Grenade Ranking book club, he might not have come off as the douchiest person in the universe.
(I’m only pretending that for my niece’s sake. He is, in point of fact, a douche.) (Who picks up women at his book club meetings. Because he is not gay.)
I’m from a different part of Alberta (and currently living in BC) but the fire in Fort McMurray is horrifying and I can’t stop thinking about it. But I’m also feeling incredibly amazed and grateful? At least 88,000 people have been evacuated by now, and there are no reports of injuries or deaths. None. How is that possible? My respect and admiration for my fellow Albertans and Canadians is through the roof. It kind of selfishly makes me feel a little safer, too.
We so often don’t fully appreciate what we have… I haven’t been worried that my friends in Fort McMurray will go without food, water or shelter (after the first night) because I know they’ll be taken care of. Not everyone in the world has that security.
That picture is really well composed. It’s like an oil painting.
Definitely some Rembrandt vibes. Those eyes! With a dash of Vermeer – window and candle, very domestic…
Nicole, you seem to have lost all of us with the Marge Simpson. Many of us would love to see more of Carmella in addition to your dog, who we love.