Real life continues to bustle with busy-ness but I did find some time to surf on Saturday night.
Baltimore
White-on-White loathsomeness.
Comedy
Decor
Found on the Mirror, not recently, where it was traced to somebody called Justin on Tumblr. Google has no further information. Supposedly nothing in the room had been replaced or updated since 1956.
Somehow I doubt this. Even if nobody noticed that the tiny 1950s television wasn't showing anything but that pale grey test pattern any more, they would've had to replace the light bulbs. The plant could be plastic, I suppose...
Anyway my point is: In the ordinary course of events, things in a house do need to be replaced and updated every few decades. Things get spilled on those lovely fabric-covered sofas. Nobody wants to encourage cigarettes in the house, so if an ashtray is still on the coffee table it's filled with something--useless glass beads, if nothing else. Carpets get downright nasty. The house my mother kept in Kingsport had all the original furniture, including the carpets, from 1967. We walked in and I sniffed the air and she said, "Yes, the carpet's gotta go." We took up the carpets and found patches that were solid black with Stachybotrys mold. It's possible to be too obsessed with keeping a house in perfect historic accuracy, just the way everything was on some day in the past.
But it's a triumph, I think, if even one room in a house looks just about the way it did in 1956, or in 1906, or in 1606. I don't like the idea of replacing things just because people can. Life's too short; there are better uses for money; and also the old things eventually become delightfully historic and interesting even to the visitor's eye. If you've been lucky, if the house and furniture have not needed replacement, I'd try to hold on to that time-warp effect. If anything can be kept, it probably should be kept.
Economics
If you frame "inequality" as the problem, you can still get an answer that is favorable to socialism! Socialists for Equal Poverty for All!
Glyphosate Awareness
Syngenta's paraquat is available as a replacement for glyphosate. Don't use it. PARaquat causes PARkinson's Disease. Carey Gillam summarizes the facts in an excellent ten-minute video:
Irony Overdose
Pfizer wants support from Trump? An appropriate answer might begin with a sound like the beginning of "Pfizer" and end with one like the end of "Trump," with as many onomatopoeic effects as the speaker can do, in between. If Trump doesn't invite Albert Bourla to the White House just for the fun of having the guards literally kick him down the front steps, Trump may reasonably be accused of having made progress in the direction of learning to act like a gentleman. How much deterrent value that will have for Trump remains to be seen.
Schumer Schutdown
In Swansboro, North Carolina, a farm offers boxes of fresh produce for people whose food handouts have been delayed by the Schumer Schutdown. This is produce only, not convenience food, and there's no guarantee that people who don't have traditional kitchens will be able to use all of the food in their boxes. They have more produce and will offer more boxes to more hungry people if people sponsor more.
Who's doing something like this in your town, US readers?
Trigger Warnings
Does the Bible need trigger warnings? Absobloomin'lutely. The "sexual violence" label does not really apply to the Gospels, which are all but sex-free, but it most definitely applies to the stories of Dinah and her baby brother Joseph in the book of Genesis. The Gospels contain gruesome violence--they all lead up to crucifixion, which was meant to give whole cities post-traumatic stress. And maybe, knowing students, we can hope that warning students that the Bible contains lots of graphic violence will motivate them to read it.
Women's Issues
I don't agree that Mrs. Obama's complaints about having a team of fashion experts constantly working on her "look" make her a bad human being. An example of bad timing? Maybe. Not being free to pick one of a set of what we classify generally as "clothes," within a subset of "...that are clean and not in very bad condition," is a nuisance. Other people may be up against more difficult circumstances but it may actually help those people to know that the rich don't necessarily enjoy having a bevy of professionals fussing about every detail from their overcoats to their eyelashes.
Fashion design is stereotypically a job for men who would rather look at boys than at girls, and prefer to dress boyish-looking girls. I suspect it attracts even more men--and women--who simply don't understand the engineering principles involved in designing clothes that flatter curves. One way or another, although haute couture fashion churns out lots of things designed for tall scrawny women, it is very weak on designs for tall, well-proportioned women. Fashion design also tends to favor blondes. Women who look like Mrs. Obama grow up hearing that people who are not their enemies like them, and like looking at them, well enough but they just are not and never will be the kind of fashion models Diana Spencer was. So they're still told, even today, that personality and character, talent and dedication, are more important than looking like a fashion plate. But still, even today, when young women go to the mall to look for jobs instead of only spending their parents' money, the ones who get the coveted store clerk positions are the ones who look good in the clothes the store sells. Still, if they apply and interview for jobs in which their education is relevant, the hiring decision is often based on looks. And still, even at the top...Americans want our First Lady to be a fashion leader. Mrs. Obama says nothing about her job coming with a team of specialists to help highlight her personality and improve her character. But it came with a team of fashionistas to give her a constant, and annoying, message that might be expressed in words as Why are you not Melania Trump?
It's a problem a lot of women find relatable, however far below Mrs. Obama's wage level their jobs may be. The male writer who thought it made Mrs. Obama sound like an awful human being might do better to ask his wife how awful the fashion industry has been, for her, in her lifetime. Then he'd know why it's acceptable to express scorn for any "fashion look" that brings high-heeled shoes out onto the street, for any elaborate hairstyle or "makeup" effect, for any assembly of more than a half-dozen pieces including shoes, while affirming that pressure to conform to "fashion looks" harms women in every socioeconomic position.
Then there's that video Youtube has been promoting about "vocal fry." I'm not saying anyone needs to watch it. Long story short, the Kardashians called national attention to a speech pattern some women have--no, it's not only rich young women--of speaking mostly in a shrill whiny voice and then dropping at the ends of sentences down into a low raspy sound. Apparently this annoys some people; according to the video it's not the sound they hate so much as the people who make it, which raises the question why the bleep those people watch the Kardashians. They could just turn off the television and talk to one another. Anyway the sound of these women's voices does not make me angry, the way people on the video claim it does them, but it is distracting; it sounds to me as if they have colds.
In view of which, instead of giving young women yet another thing to feel selfconscious about, the expert on the video might have done better to offer help to people who say they hate women with "fried" voices. How can those people feel less envy and resentment of the Kardashians? How can they work on their fundamental dislike of women?
A related question might be how women can have fewer colds, and how, at the same time, they can avoid the chemical pollution that produces allergy-type reactions that look and sound like colds. Neither the partly-blocked-sinus whine nor the fully-blocked-sinus rasp is pleasant to listen to; both are even more unpleasant to find ourselves doing when we're not consciously imitating television characters but actually have blocked sinuses.
Historically the Kardashians' speech pattern spread up from the ghetto, where Black American young women used to be consciously trying to reverse the influence their grandmothers' smooth, melodious, non-nasal, Southern States or Caribbean Island accents had had on them. Where their grandmothers spoke slowly, the "Baby Girls" of the 1990s and 2000s jabbered fast. Where their grandmothers had cultivated a well modulated, non-nasal sound, the Baby Girls embraced a shrill, nasal sound. Where their grandmothers had shown upward social mobility by enunciating consonants, the Baby Girls seemed to be trying to invent a language without consonants. Fads for piercings and jewelry in places where North Americans have not traditionally had them definitely encouraged this way of speaking.
This speechmode can still be heard on a few rap videos. Only a few--it doesn't sell; nobody likes listening to it. (Young men who liked the Baby Girls usually seemed to want them to stop talking.) Guuurrhh, it dah' slurruh sowngh widou' da congh-si-nunghs da' meg you sowngh so geddo an' so stoobi' an' so easy naw da wanna be arowngh. Your grandmother's voice was probably beautiful. And I'm sorry, but stereotypes do attach themselves to the ways people speak. If you want me to think you're intelligent, you need to practice making it easy for people to hear not only the difference you make between "what" and "would," "when" and "went," but the difference you make between "which" and "witch." There are symptoms of illnesses people would probably not choose to have, which I don't want to allow to annoy me, and then there is a fad for speaking sloppily, which annoys enough other people, as well as me, that I think it's worth advising the young to avoid doing it.
Lips and tongues are not for hanging jewelry on. They are for enunciating all the nice crisp consonant sounds that allow the English language to have such a wealth of different words. They are for making sure that nobody is ever in any confusion about whether you're saying "crisp" or "Chris's," "going" or "gone," "list" or "lisp." Old speech textbooks used to have lists of tongue twisters, often memorably silly phrases, people used to practice enunciating sounds properly. It's worth working with things like "She sells seashells by the seashore" and "Which white witch was which?" until, regardless of any colds you may or may not have, you can at least make your words understandable. We can't clear our sinuses by an immediate act of will; we can enunciate our words.
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