I was absolutely riveted by this excerpt from a new book about Samuel J. Battle, the first black police officer in New York City (I instantly pre-ordered it, I recommend you do as well!). He comes across as a time-traveling real-life Captain Ray Holt, and the cartoonish racist nonsense he put up with is pretty epic. His first arrest of a black person, by the way, was a crossdresser walking in the park minding their own business, so we’re hitting all the “some things never change” buttons today. The whole thing is a walking illustration of the idea that black people need to be ten times better at the same job:
Fetid air and all, the officers of the Sixty-Eighth Street stationhouse resolved that this was a whites-only domain. Cops carried a cot upstairs to a room on the second floor, where the precinct stored the American flag, and left the mattress and springs under Old Glory as the black man’s accommodations.
Without complaint, Battle went up to the flag loft. Several times, a captain named Thomas Palmer asked Battle how he was faring with fellow officers. Just fine, Battle reported. “I don’t expect the men to talk to me and take me in their arms as a brother,” he told the captain.
Inevitably, newspaper reporters caught wind that Battle was subjected to silence and isolation. They sought him out, but he held firm to voicing no unhappiness. Interviewed by the New York Times three weeks after he arrived at the stationhouse, Battle made sure to state that no officer had uttered offensive epithets, and he responded, “I have nothing to say about that, Sir,” when asked about his fellow officers’ refusal to speak with him.
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Towards a new Southern heritage:
If the past is a place we construct—one that says as much about us as it does the people we remember—then this South isn’t erasing history; it’s working to build a more truthful narrative of the Civil War for a broader, more diverse generation of Southerners. And the push against Confederate flags is just the beginning. With a vast landscape of monuments and plantations, Southerners of all colors will have to place this constructed past in its honest context before they try to build a more usable history for themselves and their descendants.
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I just now read this great Oliver Sacks piece about face-blindness from 2010:
At the age of seventy-seven, despite a lifetime of trying to compensate, I have no less trouble with faces and places. I am particularly thrown if I see people out of context, even if I have been with them five minutes before. This happened one morning just after an appointment with my psychiatrist. (I had been seeing him twice weekly for several years at this point.) A few minutes after I left his office, I encountered a soberly dressed man who greeted me in the lobby of the building. I was puzzled as to why this stranger seemed to know me, until the doorman greeted him by name—it was, of course, my analyst. (This failure to recognize him came up as a topic in our next session; I think that he did not entirely believe me when I maintained that it had a neurological basis rather than a psychiatric one.)
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WHAT KIND OF HOT ZONE HORROR IS THIS?
Last week, in its bulletin the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (really, it’s called that; great title, no?), the CDC said that a toddler traveling from India gave a Minneapolis man the disease when the two passed each other in a Chicago airport gate in April. The man was getting off a flight; the toddler and family were waiting to board the same aircraft after it was emptied and cleaned. There was no direct contact between the two, but there didn’t have to be: virus-laden droplets of moisture breathed out by a measles victim can hang in the air for up to two hours, long after the infected person has gone somewhere else.
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SUPER neat piece on Cosima Herter, the science consultant behind Orphan Black:
Herter is a historian and philosopher of science and genetics, and a driving intellectual and creative force behind, as the New Yorker writer Jill Lepore puts it, “the only show on television where you’ll hear the line,‘Enjoy your oophorectomy!’” Throughout production for each of the three seasons, Herter has been integral to both the science and the story. She’s responsible for the references to Sacred Geometry and Buckminster Fuller, and she also, according to her longtime friend Graeme Manson, who with John Fawcett is one of Orphan Black’screators and showrunners, “reads all the drafts and watches all the episodes and then it runs through her incredible brain.” She offers insights intended to refine and deepen the themes and the narrative, showing how science interacts with society, and discouraging simplistic dualities — pointing out, for example, “that religion and science are constantly intermingled throughout history.” We may have a “richer understanding of the science of heredity” than the eugenicists of the early 20th century did, but the idea of reengineering ourselves, of creating “perfect” people, is still very much with us.
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Cool profile of Daniel José Older:
Until 2014, Older worked by day as an emergency medical technician in Manhattan. He wrote mostly at night. And he sees himself, explicitly, as an outsider to the literary and publishing scene: “I entered the writing work clearly and strategically to do this thing, to write these books, to get them into the world and fuck with people, and to generally fuck shit up,” he says at a restaurant in Brooklyn.
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Stephen Harper has always been a real shitheel. This video is from 2005:
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Seriously, like flying is not terrifying enough, now I have to worry that I’ll catch some horrible disease on the plane?
oh dang though, you should have been worried about that the whole time, airplanes are cauldrons of disease
Another source of stress is I don’t even know what I’ve been vaccinated against. I got all the early childhood vaccines back in The Motherland but don’t actually know what was mandatory/routinely given back then, and my Canadian records just show vaccines for meningitis and hepatitis A+B. Should I just go to the hospital and say, “GIVE ME ALL THE SHOTS” in case someone’s baby sneezes on me during boarding?
FWIW, here are the CDC’s recs for adult vaccination. You might need to bring those in to a GP and/or be ready to be sent to a second facility, but if you’re in doubt about what you’ve had, it sounds like getting a “just in case” round of jabs won’t put you at any risk of injury.
But I’m really scared of needles so I would definitely be at risk of emotional injury .__.
True story about being a-skeert of shots: A few years back I needed a tetanus booster and went to my GP, who had a family practice. I’m not a fan of needles and was having a rough day for other reasons, and when the nurse walked in with the tray I unexpectedly burst into tears. She sat down in front of me, patted my knee, and said, “So let’s figure out what we can do to get this done. Would it help if I gave you something to hold?” And that’s why I ended up clutching a stuffed toy tiger while she administered the vaccine. Adulting! We are all just making it up as we go!
I’m having a rough day (week), and somehow this lovely nurse of yours, and the picture of you with the stuffed tiger, made me tear up. Awwwwww 🙂
I have a weird issue with needles and nurses are almost always super understanding about it. (I need to be distracted. Often they let me read a page of my book, once during a flu vaccine thing they were talking to me about it when a nurse came up behind me and gave me the shot unexpectedly, which was perfect for me.)
FYI in Canada for a while they only gave one round of MMS so if you were born before the early 80s or so, you should get a booster.
Yeah, basically. There are, so far as I know, basically no negative consequences to getting a vaccine twice, and you have to get a booster shot for a lot of them anyway.
Especially these days, it’d probably be a pretty good idea to get another measels shot, just in case.
I think they can check your blood for immunity against a lot of diseases- I got titers drawn when I came to my lab job that confirmed immunity to certain bloodborne stuff. And then they can catch you up with anything that’s missing.
they can do blood tests to show if your immunity for certain things is high enough that you can avoid getting vaccine boosters, but if you don’t like needles, then it’d probably be better to just get the boosters.
MrChouffe did this when he came to the States permanently. It was far easier for him to get re-vaccinated than to have his UK immunization records dug up and sent over. No ill effects!
oh dear, yes, definitely get boosters for numerous things! Tetanus, duptheria, measles, Hep A & B, at a minimum. (Some of it can be done in a single shot — the d-tap). It’s not so bad if you get a good nurse who is really practiced — it is amazing what a difference a really skilled nurse can make. That and I think adults are just less pain-sensitive (or else needles have improved since I was a kid — but how?). Adult vaccinations are way less painful/scary than childhood ones – it will be better than you remember!
For me, I think it helps that I’m choosing to do a thing that will cause me pain, rather than being required to by other people. It’s like how it’s less painful to remove your own slivers. Or bandaids. Though I think bandaids have actually gotten better, so that might be a bad example.
(Obviously this doesn’t mean that my parents were wrong to vaccinate me.)
Alternately, maybe it’s because the same amount of fluid in your adult arm doesn’t affect as much of your arm, because of how your arm got bigger.
Some vaccines really have improved. I had to get a TDAP booster recently, and it was a million times less painful than the last tetanus shot I got.
Provided you’ve had chickenpox, I think there are just two main boosters you probably want to get: Tdap and MMR. That said, you could probably find out online about the vax schedule in your country of origin during the right time range, and see what you’ve likely had.
Truth. It seems like nearly every time I fly long distances, I get sick. The only time that hasn’t happened is when I’ve been fortunate enough to fly business class, where you’re not right on top of each other. Some of my most vivid memories of trips to Europe, especially, involve being really sick 🙁
I have always suspected that part of the reason people get sick during travel is dehydration. They take your water away and give you only tiny cups for the next several hours, in addition to sort of encouraging you to drink booze. Ugh. The day I realized I could bring my giant water bottle through security *empty* and then fill it later was a revelation.
That, and the fucking stress of traveling in the first place.
I actually think it’s being exposed to all the germs you were not exposed to in your home-location. When I lived in the UK, and I would fly back to NL, I’d get Ill every time. Simply because I had UK immunity, but no NL immunity. (Plus it was holiday = relaxing = less adrenaline = your body finally allowing itself to be sick)
Oh, is that why I always got sick after finals in college? Interesting.
My spouse and I also got sick after our wedding. I would get sick after plays in high school too.
But also, you should temper that worry with a reality-based understanding of germ theory. Fear the surfaces more than the air; it’s much easier for most buggies to get to your sensitive bits via your hands than the air. Which is why this measles stuff is NO GOOD.
Also, don’t be the woman five rows ahead of me who felt the need to stop by and chew me out for “getting everyone sick right before christmas” because I had a lingering, dry cough from a cold multiple weeks earlier.
NO DON’T LISTEN IT’S A TRAP NEVER TEMPER YOUR WORRY
NEVER
CORRECT. I have late-onset asthma and have to fly frequently for work. Which means I catch every damn thing and work sick a lot.
I know someone flying overseas in a week who will be taking her children with her. They have lice. So, yeah.
D:
Great, now I’m itchy.
Can’t you get rid of lice in a week, though???
I think it only takes like an hour, if you don’t mind leaving all the dead nits.
Probably, if you follow all the directions and make sure everything in the house is taken care of as well. I’m not convinced they’re being as thorough as they could be.
They already flew domestic once they found out about the problem.
You are most likely to catch a cold, if that makes it better.
Probably more in the airport, where (as in the example) you’re going to come in close proximity to a lot of people in a short period of time. Flu season is when it is because people spend more time inside in cold weather, and are more likely to run across someone with it; it’s also the explanation for “con crud”, which is just a cold that’s been spread among nerds who don’t usually spend a lot of time with that many people.
I really wish I was confident enough to wear one of those surgical masks when I fly. Not sure how much they help, and I’d look ridiculous, but maybe no airborne illnesses for me?
Bree Newsome has made an amazing, powerful, statement about taking down the flag, why she did it, what it means, and where we need to go. I recommend it heartily. It brought tears to my eyes.
Yes yes yes. I was going to post this if someone else hadn’t. Her words are as powerful and beautiful as her action.
The part about her ancestors being sold at South Carolina slave markets.. oof. Imagine how proud they’d be of her.
I’m imagining a long line of ancestors now, stretching out in a ghostly line like at the end of Return of the Jedi, all just so damn proud and happy, watching her climb down that flagpole.
The Girl Scouts of Western Washington recently had to return a $100,000 donation because the donor (bigot) refused to allow their money to help transgender girls. They are currently running an Indiegogo campaign to try and recoup the funds – GSUSA is pretty much the polar opposite of the Boy Scouts, and they are definitely a cause I can throw some money and lots of support behind.
I’m a lifetime Girl Scout and if they keep ensuring that Girl Scouts is “for every girl,” they’ll have my continued support for years to come.
I am also a lifetime Girl Scout! I love them so.
Gold Award fistbump?
Scout camp counselor fist bump!
Nah, by the time I was in high school I was too busy with music- and theater-related extracurriculars to be able to devote the time to a Gold Award project. I feel like I got my Silver Award but I honestly can’t remember?
I got that too, fistbump anyway!
ps I owe you an email, I am a v. lazy communicator, I am so sorry D:
No worries! I’m going on vacation next week so I won’t be around anyway.
Golden fistbump from a fellow lifer here!
HECK YEAH
Thanks for the info! I just donated. I’ve been a member of both the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts (camp counselor), and having known a number of queer Boy Scouts who were really great contributors to the organization, it kills me that they are dragging their feet while the Girl Scouts are moving ahead into the 21st century. Get it, girls!
I did a lot of work with the Boy Scouts when I was in scouting (my leader’s husband was a BSA leader), and it really tears me that they aren’t keeping the pace. Two of my exes are Eagle Scouts and I’m pretty sure at least one of them returned his medal.
The various folks within the BSA (like Scouts for Equality, who had a huge, awesome presence at Chicago Pride this weekend!) are a credit to everything that is good about the BSA. The official forces who are holding the line against integration are everything I hated about being a scout. I really want the BSA to get better, because I know I’m a better person for having been a scout, but right now I can’t imagine sending my own kids to the Scouts.
As I understand it, the hardline anti-gay forces in the Scouts are mostly the Mormons, who have a disproportionate influence in the organization; read this write-up which includes the astonishing fact that black Scouts weren’t allowed to be leaders in LDS-dominated troops until the NAACP sued them–in 1974.
Thanks for posting this!
Oh man, this is relevant to my interests. Thanks for the post.
“The Girl Scouts of Western Washington recently had to return a $100,000 donation because the donor (bigot) refused to allow their money to help transgender girls.”
I just… what the hell is wrong with this person?
I just checked the indigogo page (12:30 EDT) and they have already exceeded their goal.
how wonderful! the thought of all those girls learning that good people outnumber crummy people…<3
Yessss. And this is only just starting to make the rounds on my facebook here in Seattle, so I expect they’ll continue to do well 🙂
Since they’d hit their goal, I went ahead and set up a monthly donation to my local girl scout council.
If other Toasties would like to do the same (you can find your local council through the GSA page, here). The quality of the Girl Scout experience can vary quite a bit, but I think they really are a great organization that believes in supporting and encouraging ALL girls, and they can really provide opportunities to girls who wouldn’t otherwise have them.
Samuel J Battle 1883-1966
Samuel Battle, a man well-named
first black man on the New York force
a shame that he is not better-famed
for standing up and staying the course
in what must have been a terrible front
of racist cant from his fellow cops
He stood up proud and faced the brunt
in tenements and dirty flops
and saving one of his fellow men
earning their respect, “Big Sam”
first a sergeant, then lieutenant
he made his way through each exam
And paved the way for others later
he already endured the worst
there is no sacrifice that’s greater
because someone always must be first.
I don’t watch Orphan Black (although I know I should), but I have to say that the clone dance party embedded in the Cosima article is just so utterly charming. That actress is a genuine genius.
She is fucking amazing. She should have all the awards.
BUT EVERYONE SHOULD BREATHE SOME SIGH OF RELIEF BECAUSE THE CALIFORNIA LEGISLATURE JUST PASSED A BILL REPEALING THE PERSONAL BELIEF EXEMPTION FOR VACCINES
Now brb I have to go write to the Governor telling him to sign the damn thing.
p.s. I desperately want real!Cosima’s job I know stuff about science and brains and sci-fi pls hire me
Oh, excellent news about the new vaccine law! I hope Brown signs it. Someone has to save these unvaccinated kids from their narcissistic monster parents.
He signed it. YAY SCIENCE!
I just pitched an article at work about Orphan Black and how it’s great but really wrong about how patents work… but it got rejected because the website “shouldn’t become a reflection of my hobbies” and none of my colleagues had ever heard of the show.
This job is making me feel like I’m the only one who’s into pop culture at all. It also occasionally feels like I sold my soul. Good thing they paid a pretty penny for it.
I would love to read this article!
Well, I’m probably not going to write it, but someone else wrote something about Orphan Black and patents which is in the same neighborhood of what I had in mind: http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2014/05/01/orphan-…
Thank you!
Pitch it here??
Hmmm… now that’s an idea.
You could also pitch it to your local patent bar magazine or blog? A former colleague of mine wrote frequently about the probate of Darth Vader’s estate and estate planning sections love it.
I am not at all interested in estate planning, but I’d read articles about the probate of Darth Vader’s estate.
Ditto!
Do you have a link for this?? As a fellow nerd/ lawyer, it would make my week (or possibly month).
In the hope that I don’t somehow accidentally dox myself, here’s the link: http://www.willamette.com/insights_journal/13/aut…
It may be too law heavy for regular nerds, but law nerds will like it 🙂
Thank you!! This is terrific. 🙂
I have too many books to read, and I am still going to go buy Shadowshaper by Older as soon as I get a chance. That and Between the World and Me, the new TNC book, when it comes out.
Ohhhhhhh I just put Shadowshaper on my list of things to read – thanks for the recommendation! Looks awesome!
“Last week, in its bulletin the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (really, it’s called that; great title, no?)”
It is a good title, because it is accurate. And everyone should get vaccinated, it is true.
Oh goodness, one of my profs in college was face-blind, and it was amazing. He’s a staunch conservative at a super-liberal institution, which ordinarily would have been okay, I suppose, only not all of his arguments were well put together. Hilariously, many of my classmates would try to argue his logic, which was silly, because that part of his argument was actually solid. But he often was working from incorrect assumptions (ie, he argued something that relied on HIV being primarily a disease found in and spread by gay men in the US, and he made this argument around 2006.)
If his classes had been graded based on participation, or if we thought that he might match name to face to exam paper, we might have been hesitant to argue with him. As it was, we got to have fun : )
I rented out my spare room a few years back to a friend who has face blindness. One day I got my head shaved, and when I got home I scared the everloving shit out of her because I forgot to warn her ahead of time that my hair would be changing, so she didn’t recognize me. (Hair is the primary way she identifies people.)
I remember one other time we were dicking around on the web on our respective laptops, and she suddenly turned her screen towards me and said, “Can you explain this gif to me?” This was the gif in question: http://38.media.tumblr.com/30cfa91b676af2dcda9a68…
She couldn’t see that Hugh Laurie and Peter Dinklage have similar faces, and was incredulous when I told her that they do indeed look similar. I imagine that, because she probably identified them by their hair and their height, they didn’t look remotely similar to her.
I had never noticed how similar Hugh Laurie and Peter Dinklage look. Wow.
Jonny Lee Miller looks like a Hugh Laurie clone.
oh my god they have the same face
I don’t think of myself as having particularly bad face blindness now, but allegedly I was once very dubious about the person collecting me at preschool because my mom got a perm between dropping me off and picking me up. Yes, my mom.
Epigram
Stephen Harper
hates the gays
wants his life Arcadian
Give him credit
he’s in his way
the first rude Canadian
Sheesh! Talk about doggerel! This one has a tail and wags.
” All the people infected in these accidental encounters either declined measles vaccination themselves, or had that decision made for them by family members. Because they forewent that safe, routine, long-established protection, they contracted a potentially perilous disease, and they put others—who were so far from the original case they had no idea of the danger—at risk.”
*DINGDINGDINGDINGDING*
Seriously, this should have been the lede. And in bold red letters.
Jesus, that measles story is terrifying. There’s a measure called basic reproductive ratio that says how many people one person with a disease can infect. One person with the flu will infect 2-3 others. One person with polio could infect 5-7 others. One person with measles? Infects 12-18 others. And if you don’t have immunity to measles, there’s a 90% chance you’re going to get the disease.
All this makes me particularly nervous because (a) I’m immunosuppressed (b) I’m not sure if I have full immunity, because of the vaccine used when I was a kiddo, and (c) I can’t get a measles booster, because it’s a live virus and immunosuppressed folks can’t get live virus vaccines. >:( anyhow California and other states, please continue to clamp down on personal belief exemptions for vaccination, k?
Oh man, that sucks. And the infuriating part is that anti-vaxxers pretend you don’t exist, or at least clearly don’t give a fuck about people like you. They’re all about imagined fears for their own holy kids, with no concern for others whatsoever.
YES. And I am relatively healthy! I want to have antivax parents think REALLY HARD about their kid giving the measles to a wee baby, or an elderly person, or someone in the middle of cancer treatments. NOOOOOOOOOOPE
One alternative I’ve heard suggested that I like would be personal insurance- like, ok, you can choose not to vaccinate your child, but if they pass a vaccine-preventable illness onto someone else, you then have to pay for that persons’ medical care/lost time at work or school/pain and suffering/a settlement to their family should they die due to this illness, etc. (this would of course only be folks opting out of vaccination for reasons that aren’t medically legit)
Similar idea: if you decline vaccines for yourself or your kids, and one of you gets a stupid 19th-century disease, it is not covered by any insurance (i.e. you are paying for treatment out of pocket or at least you have to get a special, separate insurance policy to pay for it). Herd immunity from vaccines and pooled health insurance are very similar concepts: risks and benefits are shared across a community to decrease the burden for any one individual. So you don’t get to opt out of one and reap the benefits of the other.
Aw man, I just want to come and stand in front of you and physically block germs from your body with some kind of awesome shield.
oh no, that stinks. I hope you don’t live in California?
My mother was immune-suppressed for 3 months, to the point that she was in an isolation room with positive air pressure at the hospital (so, a little more severe in degree), and I was amazed what jerks everyone was about wearing (actually, not wearing) a mask around her. People are terrible! They would wear a mask slung around their neck symbolically, but they wouldn’t pull it up over their mouths (and my mom felt bad about asking them to). That was in the beginning, anyway – by the end we were all encasing ourselves in masks, gloves, and surgical robes to visit her. I think people just have a very difficult time psychologically imagining themselves as vectors of disease — it’s everybody else who is, not them.
As someone who caught measles as an adult (I had the old vaccine and no booster too), I will fight anyone who argues in favor of personal belief exemptions. I’m in California, so I get to tell my story a lot to people who have no concept of how bad it gets.
On b, you could get a titer to see how immune you are, which could be scary, but could at least let you know how worried to be???
(I have two family members who have autoimmune things. I get every vaccine anyone will give me, including recent boosters for MMR and Tdap.)
Seconded! My healthcare related jobs have started having me get titers first and re-immunized if needed – which has happened like twice, apparently my immune system becomes over-confident and lazy. Not that it is necessarily a definite protection but kind of nice to know!
Fascinating piece on what defines a species and how that could change the way we think about endangered ones.
Oh my godddddd Richard Dawkins shut upppppp foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Broken link 🙁
Weird. Try this one.
But I mean, does it really matter exactly what he said at this point? He’s just the worst and should shut up until the sun burns out.
Thank you for helping me focus my hatred!
I’m…I’m not even offended by this tweet because I have no idea what it means. I’m just laughing heartily at “greatest civilisation ever.”
Yeah, I don’t know how to take offense at it, because it sounds like something that came from a child. Perfectly acceptable for someone who’s, say, 10 to refer to something as the “greatest civilization ever” without any sort of context or explanation for why…
Yeah, that’s it exactly, it sounds like someone who’s just learned the 5th-grade history version of the Civil War and doesn’t yet know how much they don’t know.
OMG all his replies. “It was a work of SPECULATIVE HISTORICAL FICTION, jeezus nonexisting christ it’s a RECOGNIZED GENRE therefore no criticizing me!!!”
Right?! It’s like he’s just putting together words and is so convinced of his brilliance that he assumes the make sense.
And obviously he shelved it in the fiction section of Twitter, so it should have been obvious that he was writing fiction. If it had been in the non-fiction section, then people might have had reason to complain.
Twitter is exactly like a library or bookstore, right?
I think a “#speculativefiction” might have helped him out there. Are we supposed to be psychic?
At this point I was to anger pee on his Twitter account
Legit did my fuck you dance (that is usually reserved for old white men making decisions about my body) at the news this morning when I heard some mom defending her right to not vaccinate her kid.
decisions about other people’s bodies: just as reprehensible when it’s not old white men making them!
Remember when the Conservatives were voted in back in 2006 and they spent about ten seconds considering trying to repeal same-sex marriage before they decided it would kill their approval ratings and backed down? (I also assume that John Baird yelled everyone down with his scary anger face on because that seems like a thing he would do.)
Canadians! Do you know how many Stephen Harpers there are in the US?! We are swimming in them! It’s like a flood of stupid.
Lots of them are running for president as Republicans, but there are an infinite supply it seems. My own state (Texas) seems to have a never ending parade of people who are terribly anti-intellectual.
Are we sure we can’t just give them another planet to go to?
Oh man, I got it: we hold an election for President of Mars, and tell them that they have to establish Martian residency to be eligible to run.
Oh man, I love this. And you know they’re all the kind of guy who will see the first ten candidates die upon exposure to the Martian atmosphere and conclude that they’ll live just by bootstrapping harder.
Here is my $2 for the kickstarter.
How about ‘President of the Sun’ – then there’s no way we’ll be seeing them again. It’s OK – they can go at night.
I’m afraid I wrote off Texas when I read that the textbooks there were listing Moses as one of the “Founding Fathers.”
Haha! Moses Austin, one of the founding fathers of Texas. Although I am sure someone somewhere has proposed the Biblical Moses as well.
No, I’m pretty sure they meant the biblical moses: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/22/…
Oh god. Literally.
I saw that bit on the daily show about Marco Rubio saying that the gay marriage/Obamacare SCOTUS decision was “the saddest day in our nation’s history” or somesuch, and I think my brain genuinely shut down trying to comprehend that level of sheer, stubborn inhumanity.
Then can we ship him down there? You wouldn’t even notice him! 🙂 He wanted Canada to join the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq. My thought was, if he wanted to go to war so much, why didn’t he just go himself? Go to a U.S. Army recruiting center and sign up? I don’t know how it works but I bet they could find a way to take Canadians.
I’m mildly face blind but I am pretty good at places. More like Jane Goodall than Oliver Sacks.
That book about the first black police officer sounds great. Related, British Movietone had a film in one of their issues in 1968, “First in the Force” about Sislin Fay Allen, the UK’s first black female police officer, which is quite a nice watch!
NB – uses the outdated language of the time so they laud her as Britain’s “first coloured policewoman”.
Face blindness is worst for me in movies starring a bunch of white guys, and this is particularly egregious in movies set in boarding/prep schools. The only student I could instantly tell apart from the others in Dead Poet’s Society was Robert Sean Leonard, mostly because I had a crush on him.
I am struggling with the BBC’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, because they’re overwhelmingly white and wearing the same stringy, mousey-brown wigs and it’s IMPOSSIBLE!!
YES. Movies from the 40s and 50s are awful for this, because not only is everyone a white dude, they’re all wearing suits and have short hair, depicted in black & white. Or even worse, they’re wearing hats and any hope of distinguishing them by hair shade is gone.
don’t worry too much: i am not faceblind (i don’t think – I do have a habit of thinking everyone looks like my sister or my dad, but i doubt it’s propognasia), and I still can’t tell the difference between most white guys in movies, unless there’s a specific hat/voice/mannerism associated with them.
Same – I’m pretty sure I’m not faceblind, but white men in films (especially if they’re all wearing suits) are impossible to keep track of.
Definitely if someone is making a movie about white guys in suits, each should be required to wear a different and striking hat.
YES! I talk about this enough that my friends and I refer to any situation where it’s hard to tell people apart as a “white men in suits” situation.
Yes! I was just saying this the other day and everyone thought I was joking. Period pieces and old movies are the worst. No, I literally do not remember which middle aged beard guy that is. The worst was the Thin Man, where everyone had slick hair, a tiny mustache, and a tuxedo. Hopeless.
I have face blindness, too, which makes the dramatic reveal of the killer in any mystery program a big anti-climax. (“Wait, which one was he again…?”)
I have the same issue! Except I think I primarily identify characters based on clothes/context so if the character changes their outfit I will think they are a different person alongside not being able to distinguish them from similarly dressed characters. It remember it taking me an embarrassingly long time to realize that there weren’t just 5 different remarkably similar looking men in Outkast’s Hey Ya video.
Or that movie about the FBI (?) a while back where it was all white dudes in black suits talking intensely? Mmmhmmm, this movie makes perfect sense and is interesting, yes indeedy.
I thought I was the only one with that problem!!! I couldn’t get anything out of The Godfather because I couldn’t tell any of the actors apart except for Marlon Brando. To this day I have no idea what was going on in that film.
The University of Virginia is like this in real life. By second semester of their first year, half of the students become one great mass of Emily and Tucker and Tanner.
I’m not face-blind exactly, but I have a hard time telling apart brown-haired white American teenage boys. They just all look the same to me. Sometimes I wonder if it is from not growing up in the US but rather in other countries with a different ethnic mix — a reverse version of people who can’t tell Japanese people apart. Even though I myself am a white American too. Or do other people have this problem — do semi-formed 17-20 year-old brown-haired white American boys just really really look (and dress) alike??
It is an extra problem since I teach at the college level. Those are always exactly the kids whose names I mix up or can never use because I can’t tell them apart. Unfortunate. :/
I think it’s the haircuts! Boys have few enough haircut options, and “brown-haired white boy” is a big enough category, that you end up with like a dozen brown-haired white boys per class with the same haircut, which is catastrophic if you use hairstyles to recognize people. (I had this problem when I was student-teaching. I got them sorted into haircut-based groups pretty quickly — I would not have called one of the Disheveled Mop Boys by one of the Crewcut Boys’ names — but within groups, jeez, I got them wrong all the time.)
I started to notice just how much brown-haired white boys look alike after my little brother– who is not even a teen anymore– got a crewcut. I see other early-20s white guys on the street and think “wow, you look just like my brother!”
the article talks a little bit about having more trouble with other ethnic groups! it says that babies start out recognizing any faces, but narrow down their facial recognition skills to the types of faces they see most often within the first few years- so if you weren’t seeing white boy faces as a baby, your sensitivity to their differentiating characteristics would be lesser.
but also, white teenage boys don’t make it easy on any of us, re: hair/style/posture/gait and other markers, and I think their faces are still a sort of mushy-pliable not-yet-defined stage that resolves itself as they get into their 20s. I was watching the NHL draft this weekend and can definitely confirm that there are not many differences to begin with.
Yes, exactly — lots of people are semi-formed and sort of “mushy” at that age — their faces are still pliable/unwrinkled, and often their characters/personalities too!
I was around white Americans until age 1.5, and then apart from my family I was mostly around Senegalese for several years, so maybe it is partly that too. Huh.
Nope I grew up amongst them, they’re really all just identical. It’s unnerving.
ok, thanks, everybody! I am relieved — sometimes I worry it is a weird empathy failure or something, and I do want to treat everybody well and in an individualized fashion as much as possible. But the brown-haired white boys make it difficult!!
They deliberately dress the same, so don’t worry. 🙂
YES, I have had this problem! Part of it is that they are, in fact, larval.
My solution was to take a little video at the end of the first class session where I would go around the room and video each student saying their full name. It worked great for me, because their voices are all so different, their little shifts and tics (and sometimes giggle-fits) really made them all become obviously different personalities to me. [Also, that worked for me because I never had more than 20 students in a class. YMMV if you have large lecture classes.]
I have that problem with brown-haired white WOMEN, and I am one! There’s several of them at a separate office of my company, and I’ve known them for years, and I still have trouble telling them apart.
I always love reading about prosopagnosia. I don’t have severe recognition problems, but I have just enough face blindness to occasionally embarrass myself. Here’s a couple of good recent examples:
Went solo to a wedding, started chatted with a young couple who were waiting in line for the bar with me. Only when we started talking about our jobs (all various forms of publishing) that it dawned on me–one of the couple had interviewed for a job at my press just a few months earlier. I had talked with her extensively and had a very favorable impression of her, but apparently no impression of her face.
Level of embarrassment: Fairly embarrassing. Once I made the connection I felt compelled to apologize, because I thought she was a good candidate for the job even though she was not hired, and I didn’t want her to think I was pretending not to know her, and then my apology embarrassed her, and we both got very red in the face.
Was checking out a guy on the subway, and realized he kept looking over at me too. Wasn’t sure what to do in this situation but then he got up to leave the train at the next stop, and on his way by said hello to me. Turns out we had met at a party several months before. I must have thought he was cute then too, because we had exchanged numbers and everything.
Level of embarrassment: Not too embarrassing… right? It was like I was too chill to remember him. That’s cool… right?
Through a window, I saw a man walk past the theater where I was managing the box office, and thought he might be someone I used to work with, but I wasn’t completely sure. Later, when I was walking home, I passed the same man (I think?) and felt reasonably confident that I knew him, so I said my former coworker’s name. He shook his head no and walked on.
Level of embarrassment: Pretty embarrassing! I really thought that was him. So either it wasn’t and I just randomly accosted a stranger, or it was and he was pretending not to know me (which, due to not entirely professional circumstances, is a distinct possibility).
On the plus side I am very good at recognizing places and hardly ever get lost, even away from home.
I have about this level of face blindness, in that if I meet an acquaintance repeatedly in the same setting, I’ll recognize them, but the first time I encounter them in a new environment, I am thrown completely for a loop, and I have to go through the process of “Oh god…they clearly know my name. How do I know this person? I guess they’re kind of familiar, maybe? Are they in one of my classes? Maybe a friend of a friend I met at someone’s party? Should I say something generic like ‘what’s new with you?’ and hope they give me enough clues that I can put it together? HELP.”
Also, I’m pretty bad with names, so basically I’m screwed when it comes to casual social interaction.
My son got his measles vaccine a few weeks ago and I have never breathed a harder sigh of relief.
“Stephen Harper has always been a real shitheel”.
God, I’ve forgotten HOW GOOD the word “shitheel” is, especially for those who deserve it (it rolls off the tongue so perfectly: ssssssshhhhhhh…starts soft, quickly followed with a hard “TUH” like a sharp, hard slap then a hissed “eeeeeeeel”).
By the way, did I completely miss the True Detective Ep. 2 post or has it not happened yet? I am so ready for it!
Toasties! There was an update to that sex-club AAM post!
Just coming here to post! I also literally pumped my arms in the air and yelled “yes!”
I literally was just coming here to post that!!
Okay, read it now. It’s definitely fake right? Like I believed the first one, but this is just insane?
…yes? That’s my best guess. What company/manager reacts this way? It’s ridiculous!
Also with the “kids will be kids” vs. “we’re all high performers” stuff, like is everyone a student worker? But a high performing student worker? The details aren’t adding up. I think you’re right that it’s fake.
But there are so many other spectacularly incompetent bosses out there, on AAM, in the news, in friends’ anecdotes…this one’s not beyond my capacity for bad-boss belief. It just sucks so much that he put OP in that position, I’d be looking for a new job right away but in the meantime it’s going to happen again, right? I’d see something or have something reported to me and then what, do the right thing or do what the boss said? Ugh.
The really unbelievable part to me is that people are willingly ducking on that gross, gross couch. It’s like a college dorm lounge couch but for people who presumably have actual private bedrooms they could use instead.
Anyway I can’t stop refreshing the AAM comments and laugh-cringing.
It must be, right? With the boss being thaaaaaat cavalier about it? Like even if he was in on it, the company is liable for condoning criminal actions like breaking into cars on their property, so he’d at least make some polite noises about it being wrong / not sanctioned / we’ll look into it rather than quacking at the letter writer.
The details in the second letter sound really fake to me. I also believed the first one, but a secret condom dispenser? Breaking into coworkers’ cars for sex? ….seriously?
I find it hard to believe that people reporting that their cars had been broken into wouldn’t be a cause for concern. (Argh, if people were breaking into my car to have sex in it I would be so angry.)
Yeah, the condom dispenser is what pushed it over the edge for me. Seriously? That’s just too pat.
Jesus Christ what even. Has got to be either fake or an extrordinarily naïve letter writer.
I BELIEVE IT’S REAL *Creed arms into a sea of work sex couches
ewwwww
This thing here on I Believe You, It’s Not Your Fault is excellent and brave and heartbreaking, and I want to send it to all the teenage girls out there, because of reasons. http://ibelieveyouitsnotyourfault.tumblr.com/post…
But there are so many other spectacularly incompetent bosses out there, on AAM, in the news, in friends' anecdotes…this one's not beyond my capacity for bad-boss belief. It just sucks so much that he put OP in that position, I'd be looking for a new job right away but in the meantime it's going to happen again, right? I'd see something or have something reported to me and then what, do the right thing or do what the boss said? Ugh.
The really unbelievable part to me is that people are willingly ducking on that gross, gross couch. It's like a college dorm lounge couch but for people who presumably have actual private bedrooms they could use instead.
Anyway I can't stop refreshing the AAM comments and laugh-cringing.
I saw that bit on the daily show about Marco Rubio saying that the gay marriage/Obamacare SCOTUS decision was "the saddest day in our nation's history" or somesuch, and I think my brain genuinely shut down trying to comprehend that level of sheer, stubborn inhumanity.
Someday Stephen Harper will die, and when that happens, I will run a charity drive based on donations per number of times people want me to piss on his grave.
I think I’ll offer the proceeds to Tides Canada. Or Oxfam. Or any of the other charities he’s attempted to bully into silence by yanking their funding and accusing them of money laundering while he allows Focus on the Family to trundle merrily on.
(I work for a nonprofit that mostly operates in developing countries, so of course I get a lot of people asking me why we don’t help the poor kids who live in Canada. The answer I always want to give them is “because then Harper would cut our funding.”)
I bet you could get a rotating group of volunteers to help you with that. Because you can’t be there all the time with a full bladder, right?
Fuck that guy. Seriously. And the 5 million people who voted him in.
Okay, so, I’ve been applying for jobs and three of the opportunities I’m interested in are in NYC. So, my question for NYC Toasties is, how horrible is it REALLY to live in NYC? (I’ve heard terrible things.) I’m currently in Denver, and although I’d like to stay, it seems that there is a solid possibility I’ll have to go elsewhere for a job I’d actually enjoy.
Background: Completely academic. Just finished my master’s in (pure) mathematics. Would ideally like to find a job in a STEM not-for-profit organization with the mission of empowering young women (or young people in general).
I mean… very few of us NYC Toasties are going to be like IT’S AWFUL because…we live here. I will list a few qualities that will make you a successful resident:
– independent and enjoy spending time on your own. Introverts can do very well here.
– enjoy new and diverse experiences, whether an unfamiliar cuisine or having to interact with a weirdo stranger
– wry sense of humor and ability to laugh at yourself/the ridiculousness of life
– don’t regard being in nature regularly as utterly vital to your happiness
– enjoy reading or listening to podcasts/music for an extended period of time while you commute
– like to get shit done and get to the point, not in a rude way but in an efficient way
– enjoy food and/or art. This isn’t vital, but you need to have one or two things that you remind yourself of every time you’re like “why the fuck do I put in all the effort to live here?” Art and food are mine.
Honestly, there isn’t that strong a STEM presence here, though you could look for jobs at NYAS and MoMath. I would htink California might give you better chances. There are a lot of STEM entrepreneurs who’ve made their cash and now want to “give back” (I work at a nonprofit here so we are trying to nab some of that sweet philanthropic money!). Bonne chance!
I find the last line of the Oliver Sacks quote really unsettling “This failure to recognize him came up as a topic in our next session; I think that he did not entirely believe me when I maintained that it had a neurological basis rather than a psychiatric one.”
So Oliver Sacks is a very smart, presumably well educated, and presumably self aware (old, white) guy. AND YET his psychiatrist who went to medical school and everything, didn’t totally believe in his experiences of his own mind and body. It kind of sounds like he thought it was all in his head. /o