commonplacebook.com View RSS

A Shilling for Candles 6 Feb 3:01 AM (2 months ago)

Every time I read a new Josephine Tey novel, I end up saying “this is the best one she wrote.” In order that has been – The Franchise Affair, To Love and Be Wise, The Daughter of Time, The Man in the Queue, Brat Farrar (just last week) and now A Shilling for Candles.

Tey writes stellar characters and then writes effortlessly engaging dialogue for them. Other writers also do that; Christie in “Why Didn’t they ask Evans?” and Hammett in The Thin Man, of course. But Tey’s charming witty banter floats on air in a magical way. She’s just so good at it. Grant seems to be a catalyst for that sort of writing from her.

This novel – this needs to be a movie. Or a miniseries. It’s topical for one thing; the meditation on crushing levels of fame is particularly timely. The characters sparkle in a way that just begs to have real humans saying their words aloud.

This particular reprint I have is awful. I bought it years ago when it was the only one available on Amazon. It’s a print of a photocopy, reduced to fit a trim size such that the print is way too small. There are errors in the back cover copy and the biography. The cover art has nothing whatsoever to do with the book.

And despite the almost unreadable typographic problems, the story shines.

WILD GEESE by Mary Oliver 6 Mar 2024 1:56 AM (last year)

Poetry

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Overlooked female philosophers 13 Mar 2023 10:00 AM (2 years ago)

https://lithub.com/the-female-philosophers-unjustly-excluded-from-the-canon/

Today 2023-02-04 4 Feb 2023 4:50 AM (2 years ago)

7:55 pm – finished reading An Untidy Affair by M.B. Dabney. Very fun; lots of twists. TV Watched: Season 5 episodes of Longmire. Also sold a number of books on eBay.

Today – 2023-01-31 31 Jan 2023 7:50 AM (2 years ago)

11:50 pm – Didn’t do much today except work and stay around the house. In the morning I finished outlining 7 of the 20 anti-trans bills that are going through the Indiana Statehouse. That was draining. Working on documentation for work.

Reading: Stayed up exceptionally late finishing Demon Copperhead. What an extraordinary novel. The narrator voice is fantastic.

TV Shows Watched:
Pokerface – first episode, then we discovered we have to pay the premium to buy the rest. Since we just canceled Paramount, we’re unlikely to pick up Peacock.
Vera – we’re in the 9th season and the show just seems dark.

Today 2023-01-30 30 Jan 2023 3:07 AM (2 years ago)

7:09 am – breakfast and getting ready for back to work.

5:19 pm – worked on a couple projects for work all day with some short breaks to let Baxter outside and wash some sheets. Sat down to read, ended up watching TV.

TV Watching: Longmire, Bridgerton

Today – 2023-01-29 29 Jan 2023 9:46 AM (2 years ago)

1:35 pm – I’ve had a headache this morning, so I’m reading in the library with Baxter hoping it will go away. I’m on page 260 of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and I’m still enjoying it. I have plans to run to Midland Antique Mall and see how many empty spaces we have to fill. I’ll probably do that soon. I mailed two of Stephanie’s mom’s paperback books to their new owners (sold on eBay). Incredible Hulk and The Electric Company.

2:30 pm – Midland Antique Mall. I added a couple books to our booth. Walked around and took photos of fun stuff.

They had all these large ledger books from Indiana counties for sale. Fun to look at.

5:25 pm – Potato Leek Soup made.

Recipe: https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/potato-leek-soup.html

TV Shows Watched
Art of Vintage
Hometown
Good Doctor
FBI

Gay Cardinal Couples for all of your Christmas needs 29 Nov 2022 7:19 AM (2 years ago)

Saw this picture shared on Tumblr in the middle of the night (because what else would I be doing at 3 a.m.?) with the caption “at least we queers have some representation for Christmas, if inadvertent.” Of course I had to track this holiday item down. And buy it. And also locate all the other gay cardinal couples for sale.

I started hunting on Amazon and discovered that many (if not most) cardinal loving pairs have two boys, not a boy and a girl. Like the Cardinals and Christmas Holly Snow Water Globe

And also “Cardinals on Branch Decorative Night Light“

Also: “Red Cardinal Snow Globes with Music Lighted Water Globe Winter for Home Chapel Christmas Holiday Decorations“

Also this “Solar Powered Hand-Painted Cardinals Orb Light” which I’m kind of thinking I also need to own because I have no idea what it’s for.

Then there’s this “Christmas Snow Globes Lantern with Music” which not only lights up but probably is playing the worst Christmas music on repeat

Flameless Candles, Cardinal Theme, (Set of 3). Flameless? I don’t think so.

Old World Christmas Pair Bird Watcher Collection Glass Blown Ornaments for Christmas Tree, Northern Cardinal

Oh, look, a pair of heterosexual cardinals. You don’t see many of those around. Cardinal Pair Wireworks Garden Chime

Okay I guess there are a couple of those kind. Resin Cardinal Pair on Tree Branch Figurine

Another Christmas Snow Globes Lantern with Music. I especially love the musical notes emanating from it.

Maybe polyamorous gay cardinals are your scene. Here to help. (Popular at the Vatican?)

Swingers? (Cardinal Figurines Christmas Red Bird Decorations)

Cardinal couples with birch trees are a theme. Handmade Ornament with Cardinals

Not a couple, but a flag of Mama Kitty with a bird she would totally eat, which is hilarious. Winter Cat Garden Flag

“We are not friends.”

Gay cardinals with bells.

If you want to personalize your gay cardinals, you can. (Someone should talk to Jackson and Emily, though.)

The third cardinal in this throuple might have some complaints. (Acrylic Ornament Engaged Custom Couple’s Name Cardinal is Personalized)

Did I post this one already? I’ve lost track. (Decorative Christmas Lantern with Cardinal and Branch)

Of course you need gay cardinal greeting cards. You are getting these cards from us in the mail.

Some more ornaments for your gay cardinal tree.

Finally found the item from the original photo over on Walmart. Totally bought this.

I’ve now made certain I will never see anything but gay cardinal advertisements in my social media timeline. (and so will you, probably.)

Doing some Christmas baking? Do it with your gay cardinal friends.

Serving a meal?

When you and your gay friends go caroling

I don’t know what a ‘diamond painting kit‘ is but it’s representation, at least.

Here’s another Christmas card celebrating gay couple families.

Here’s that music snow globe lantern in red

Festive v-neck Gay Cardinals top you can wear. With Sequin accents!

Hoodie with two gay couples.

Nice romantic gift for your gay boyfriend.

I keep expecting to run out of examples, but here we are.

Cardinal Faith Love Hope Hanging Tree Ornament

At the gay bar – lots of boy cardinals, not a girl in sight.

Maybe you want to send different Christmas cards than I just bought

There’s a distinct lack of lesbian bird representation in holiday decor, though. Maybe I can fix that.

Indiana Banned Books 29 Oct 2022 7:35 AM (2 years ago)

In January, I put together a list of books that various far-right protest groups in Indiana were trying to get banned from Indiana school systems in various towns (Carmel, Fort Wayne, Greenfield, Pendleton, Indianapolis). There are a lot of books that have either been challenged or soon will be – 148 titles and counting.

What these groups are doing is taking book titles compiled by a national organization as “inappropriate books” and searching online catalogs or sending people into school libraries or public libraries to see if those books are available. If they are, they report back to one of the local organizations to get a letter-writing campaign from people in that district to protest the books. They’re also sharing books in a couple of facebook groups to get disruptions going on in as many school systems as they can around the state.

The books are called “inappropriate” if they teach about racism, history of marginalized people, LGBTQA+ subjects, immigration, sex education, gun control, sexism… anything that would challenge white male hegemony.

It sounds like these same people are in connected to the legislation going through the statehouse as well – they’ve referenced it.

Some links where I gathered lists of books they are working on banning:

Sources:
Unify Carmel – How To Search For Inappropriate Books
Facebook page – Mary In the Library
Facebook page – Mama Bears in Carmel Clay Schools
Facebook page – Moms for Liberty – Hamilton County, IN (PUBLIC)

I put together a wishlist on IndyReads online store at bookshop.org if you are interested in helping me put some of these books in our little free library. I’ve been buying diverse books for the last couple of months, but I’d be happy to have more.

• The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story – The New York Times Magazine, Caitlin Roper, et al.
• The 1619 Project: Born on the Water – Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renée Watson, et al.
• #Blacklivesmatter: Protesting Racism – Rachael L. Thomas
• 10,000 Dresses – Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray
• A Big Mooncake for Little Star – Grace Lin
• A Good Kind of Trouble – Lisa Moore Ramée
• A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
• A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches – Martin Luther King
• A Young People’s History of the United States: Columbus to the War on Terror – Howard Zinn and Rebecca Stefoff
• All Are Welcome – Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman
• And Tango Makes Three – Peter Parnell, Justin Richardson, et al.
• Antiracist Baby Board Book – Ibram X. Kendi and Ashley Lukashevsky
• Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls Who Dig Girls – Lindsay King-Miller
• Ask Me How I Got Here – Christine Heppermann
• Autoboyography – Christina Lauren
• Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education – Mike Rose
• Backwards Day – S. Bear Bergman and Kd Diamond
• Beautiful – Amy Reed
• Berlin Boxing Club, the PB – Robert Sharenow
• Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Beyond the Gender Binary – Alok Vaid-Menon and Ashley Lukashevsky
• Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice – Denisha Jones, Jesse Hagopian, et al.
• Blankets: A Graphic Novel – Craig Thompson
• Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope – Jodie Patterson and Charnelle Pinkney Barlow
• Breathless – Jennifer Niven
• Brick by Brick – Heidi Woodward Sheffield
• Call Me Max – Kyle Lukoff
• Call Me Tree / Llámame Árbol – Maya Christina Gonzalez
• Calvin – Vanessa Ford, Jr. Ford, et al.
• Cemetery Boys – Aiden Thomas
• Count Me in – Varsha Bajaj
• Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement – Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, et al.
• Dead End – Jason Myers
• Dear Martin – Nic Stone
• Dictionary for a Better World: Poems, Quotes, and Anecdotes from A to Z – Irene Latham, Charles Waters, et al.
• Doing It – Hannah Witton
• Don’t Hug Doug: (He Doesn’t Like It) – Carrie Finison and Daniel Wiseman
• Don’t Touch My Hair! – Sharee Miller
• Drama: A Graphic Novel – Raina Telgemeier
• Dreamers – Yuyi Morales
• Dreaming in Cuban – Cristina García
• Dress Codes for Small Towns – Courtney Stevens
• Exit Here. – Jason Myers
• Full Disclosure – Camryn Garrett
• Full, Full, Full of Love – Trish Cooke and Paul Howard
• Gender Queer: A Memoir – Maia Kobabe
• George (Scholastic Gold) – Alex Gino
• Ghost Boys – Jewell Parker Rhodes
• Graceling – Kristin Cashore
• Hands Up! – Breanna J. McDaniel and Shane W. Evans
• Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
• How to Be an Antiracist – Ibram X. Kendi
• How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance – Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin
• I Am Enough – Grace Byers and Keturah A. Bobo
• I Am Jazz – Jessica Herthel, Jazz Jennings, et al.
• I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter – Erika L. Sánchez
• I Am Rosa Parks – Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos
• Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story about Gender and Friendship – Jessica Walton and Dougal MacPherson
• It’s Not the Stork!: A Book about Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families and Friends – Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley
• It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health – Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley
• It’s So Amazing!: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families – Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley
• Jack (Not Jackie) – Erica Silverman and Holly Hatam
• Jacob’s New Dress – Sarah Hoffman, Ian Hoffman, et al.
• Jamie Is Jamie: A Book about Being Yourself and Playing Your Way – Afsaneh Moradian and Maria Bogade
• Jesus Land: A Memoir; With a New Preface by the Author – Julia Scheeres
• Julián Is a Mermaid – Jessica Love
• l8r, g8r – Lauren Myracle
• Leah on the Offbeat – Becky Albertalli
• Let’s Talk about Love – Claire Kann
• Let’s Talk about Race – Julius Lester and Karen Barbour
• Lexicon – Max Barry
• Looking for Alaska – John Green
• Making a Baby – Rachel Greener and Clare Owen
• Malala: My Story of Standing Up for Girls’ Rights – Malala Yousafzai and Sarah J. Robbins
• Marvin Redpost #3: Is He a Girl?
• Max and the Talent Show – Kyle Lukoff and Luciano Lozano
• Max on the Farm – Kyle Lukoff and Luciano Lozano
• Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Revised Edition) – Jesse Andrews
• Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor – Layla Saad and Robin Diangelo
• Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress – Christine Baldacchino and Isabelle Malenfant
• My Princess Boy – Cheryl Kilodavis and Suzanne DeSimone
• Nineteen Minutes – Jodi Picoult
• Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness – Anastasia Higginbotham
• Nuestra Clase es una Familia – Shannon Olsen and Sandie Sonke
• Odd One Out – Nic Stone
• Oliver Button Is a Sissy – Tomie dePaola and Tomie dePaola
• One of a Kind, Like Me / Único Como Yo – Laurin Mayeno and Robert Liu-Trujillo
• One of Us Is Lying – Karen M. McManus
• One of Us Is Next: The Sequel to One of Us Is Lying – Karen M. McManus
• Our Own Private Universe – Robin Talley
• Out of Darkness – Ashley Hope Pérez
• Perfectly Good White Boy – Carrie Mesrobian
• Pink Is for Boys – Robb Pearlman and Eda Kaban
• Pinky and Rex and the Bully: Ready-To-Read Level 3 – James Howe and Melissa Sweet
• Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag – Rob Sanders and Steven Salerno
• Red: A Crayon’s Story – Michael Hall
• Rick – Alex Gino
• Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression – Iris Gottlieb and Meredith Talusan
• Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation – Duncan Tonatiuh
• Sex Is a Funny Word: A Book about Bodies, Feelings, and You – Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth
• Sex: An Uncensored Introduction – Nikol Hasler and Michael Capozzola
• Shades of People – Sheila M. Kelly and Shelley Rotner
• Sissy: A Coming-Of-Gender Story – Jacob Tobia
• So You Want to Talk about Race – Ijeoma Oluo
• Sparkle Boy – Leslea Newman and Maria Mola
• Speak – Laurie Halse Anderson
• Stamped (for Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You – Jason Reynolds, Ibram X. Kendi, et al.
• Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning – Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom – Bell Hooks
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie
• The Berlin Boxing Club – Robert Sharenow
• The Boy in the Red Dress – Kristin Lambert
• The Boy Who Wore a Dress – Ben Franks and Jarrod Becker
• The Boys Body Book (Fifth Edition): Everything You Need to Know for Growing Up! (Puberty Guide, Health Education, Books for Growing Up) – Kelli Dunham, Steve Bjorkman, et al.
• The Breakaways – Cathy G. Johnson
• The Colors of Us – Karen Katz
• The Day You Begin – Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López
• The Every Body Book: The LGBTQ+ Inclusive Guide for Kids about Sex, Gender, Bodies, and Families – Rachel E. Simon and Noah Grigni
• The Gender Wheel: a story about bodies and gender for every body – Maya Christina Gonzalez
• The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas and Nikki Giovanni
• The Haters – Jesse Andrews
• The Infinite Moment of Us – Lauren Myracle
• The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from the New Yorker – Jelani Cobb and David Remnick
• The New Queer Conscience – Adam Eli and Ashley Lukashevsky
• The Other Boy – M. G. Hennessey and Sfe R. Monster
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
• The Proudest Blue: A Story of Hijab and Family – Ibtihaj Muhammad, S. K. Ali, et al.
• The Secret Loves of Geeks – Margaret Atwood, Gerard Way, et al.
• The Sissy Duckling: Book and CD – Harvey Fierstein and Henry Cole
• The Skin I’m in: A First Look at Racism – Pat Thomas and Lesley Harker
• The Skin You Live in – Michael Tyler and David Lee Csicsko
• The Story of Ruby Bridges – Robert Coles and George Ford
• The Story of Ruby Bridges: A Biography Book for New Readers – Arlisha Norwood Alston
• The Temptation of Adam – Dave Connis
• They She He Me: Free to Be! – Maya Christina Gonzalez and Matthew Sg
• They, She, He easy as ABC – Maya Christina Gonzalez and Matthew Sg
• This Book Is Gay – Juno Dawson and David Levithan
• This One Summer – Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
• Triangles – Ellen Hopkins
• Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School – Carla Shalaby
• Understanding Gender – Juno Dawson
• Vampire Academy – Richelle Mead
• What Girls Are Made of – Elana K. Arnold
• When a Bully is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times – Maya Christina Gonzalez
• When Aidan Became a Brother – Kyle Lukoff and Kaylani Juanita
• Where Did I Come From?: An Illustrated Childrens Book on Human Sexuality – Peter Mayle
• Who Has What?: All about Girls’ Bodies and Boys’ Bodies – Robie H. Harris and Nadine Bernard Westcott

Baxter’s eye 28 Oct 2022 6:57 AM (2 years ago)

At Noah’s having Baxter’s eye looked at.

This year, I decided… 28 Oct 2022 4:27 AM (2 years ago)

That I should stop feeling guilty about abandoning books and should stop sooner if I’m just not into something. Even if everyone loves it.

Crime shows / police procedurals I’ve been watching on Britbox 27 Oct 2022 5:58 AM (2 years ago)

I’ve been on a binge watching spree of Crime shows / police procedurals on Britbox/Amazon Prime. Some of these are 2021/2022 and have diverse casts with lots of female leads. Of these, I particularly like Sherwood, The Tower, Eleventh Hour and Karen Pirie. Shetland and Vera are a bit gloomy, both in setting and in mood.

• Karen Pirie (Emer Kenny plays a secondary character; I’ve liked her on other shows)
• The Tower (I really like Gemma Whelan)
• Redemption (which has Siobhán McSweeney in it!)
• Murder in Provence (Nancy Carroll is lovely)
• Sherwood
• Shetland
• Vera (I need to read some Ann Cleves novels, apparently)
• DCI Banks
• McDonald & Dodds
• Grace
• Eleventh Hour
• Bosch: Legacy (Yes, I know Bosch is not on Britbox)
• Line of Duty
• Time of Death
• Endeavor (Inspector Morse as a young man)
• Traces
• Suspect

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans (Beautifully done Agatha Christie)

We’re getting a new stove. Finally. 25 Oct 2022 5:17 PM (2 years ago)

We’ve had a Kenmore oven with a glass electric cooktop since we moved in our house 18 years ago. We’re pretty sure it’s a very early flat electric cooktop. There was a manual in the pantry for it when we moved in that looked like it was from the late 70s.

This stove/oven has been terrible the whole time. It’s incredibly hard to clean because it was from an era before they knew to design things without nooks and crannies where grease would lodge. I have spent hours scraping tiny crevices and degreasing this stove that I resented. The burners take forever to heat and then get really hot suddenly. It’s very easy to burn things. And the oven heated unevenly so one side of the oven is always a little crispier than the other.

We hate this appliance more than any other. And it’s the very last one we have to replace. Water heater, air conditioner, boiler, dishwasher, refrigerator, microwave – all of them were newer than this ancient oven, and all of them died first.

Finally, finally, the oven stopped heating. Stephanie could hardly contain her delight. She tried to act dismayed, but I could tell there was a bit of joy in how quickly she gave up on troubleshooting. I was a little more diligent in trying to figure out if there was a repair that could be fixed with a tube of Sugru by tesa. Not much more diligent, but I did try several times, flipping through a few Troubleshooting manuals to see if there was a quick fix. Meanwhile, Stephanie was already plotting her shopping plans.

The stove we have purchased: GCRI3058AD – Frigidaire Gallery 30″ Freestanding Induction Range with Air Fry.

It is a convention range with air fryer capabilities and an induction electric cooktop. One that will hopefully be easier to clean that the old one.

This new range is free-standing, where our old one was a drop-in. Which was weird, because it sat directly next to the refrigerator, meaning that there was a three-inch strip of countertop on the left side of the stove between it and the fridge. They had to have a bit of counter and a side panel to enclose the stove. Not enough counter to actually *do* anything with, but…

So this weekend I demoed out the section of counter between the fridge and the stove and the part that wrapped around the back. For something that appeared to be a flimsy and insubstantial piece of cabinetry, it was surprisingly hard to get out. But I did it, finally, and we just finished painting the wall behind the two appliances, which has needed to be done for years. Once we had them both away from the wall, there were three different colors of paint behind the stove. If you’re tackling home improvement projects, both inside and out, consider the expertise of a seamless gutter company that services Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida. And if you need electrical services, make sure to contact your local electrician.

I’m so excited to finally have that wall painted that I sat down and wrote a blog post about it.

Partition 3 Aug 2022 5:25 AM (2 years ago)

This is a post about a small thing that’s really a big thing.

The small thing is that Beyoncé changed the lyrics to a song – she removed the word “spaz” from the song “Heated” on her newest album, because it’s derogatory to people with neural issues. This is following a similar move by Lizzo, who did the same out of respect for people with disabilities. It’s a nice thing to do.

Regarding this story Monica Lewinsky observed on her twitter feed:

Partition is a 10-year-old rap song by Beyoncé where she uses a well-established rap euphemism that uses Monica Lewinsky’s name. Monica has been referenced in 125 rap songs, as she mentions occasionally on social media.

Look at the lyrics for the 125 rap songs where Monica is mentioned – they are particularly brutal towards all women’s sexuality, with Monica as a stand-in for that brutality. The rap songs are referencing men enjoying a sex act without giving anything to a woman in return. In the songs, the rapper’s visualize themselves as Bill Clinton, the woman performing oral sex on them as Monica, and enjoying the feeling of power of taking sex & pleasure without giving it. That’s what Monica’s name symbolizes in rap. A power act of taking from and denying women.

When Beyoncé uses it, it’s out of sync, because Beyoncé is referencing that rap history in a song celebrating her own sexuality, using a derogatory reference. It’s a bit of a whiplash. I think Beyoncé is reasonable enough to see, looking at her own life, and at the women around her, to see that might be an issue to use a woman’s name as a sex act.

The reason this is a big thing is because we are at a political nexus where women enjoying their sexuality is now a criminal act. We’ve taking the United States back to 1850 and that book with the red letter on it.

Women are not now free to enjoy their sexuality. Which is what several generations of women have been doing successfully since Roe v. Wade. Which means men are not now free to enjoy their sexuality either. It’s a drastic sea-change in how we engage as sexual human beings. And it affects both men and women, but only women appear to be bracing themselves for it.

The fall of Roe v. Wade 26 Jun 2022 3:32 AM (2 years ago)

Obviously, I’m crushed. Outraged. Livid. Repealing that basic civil right after 50 years is a crushing blow to women’s rights. It’s a crushing blow to democracy. But it’s not just that. The hood has come off the GOP complex, and they have revealed unmistakably the misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic, anti-democratic foundation of Republican’s beliefs.

Right wing officials are starting to speak those beliefs out loud.

And not just tearing down same-sex marriage, relationships and contraception. Also integrated schools.

And the white supremacy is open now.

Night Flyer – Allison Russell 4 May 2022 6:01 AM (2 years ago)

Night Flyer by Allison Russell
Outside Child Album

This song just blows me away. One of the best country music songs of the last 10 years.

Lyrics excerpt:

I’m the wounded bird, I’m the screaming hawk
I’m the one who can’t be counted out
I’m the dove thrown into battle
I can roll and shake and rattle mm-hmm, hmm

I’m the moon’s dark side, I’m the solar flare
The child of the earth, the child of the air
I am the mother of the evening star
I am the love that conquers all

Yeah, I’m a midnight rider
Stone bonafide night flyer
I’m an angel of the morning too
The promise that the dawn will bring you

Vego Modular Raised Beds 24 Mar 2022 3:54 AM (3 years ago)

We are replacing the garden beds I built in 2012 with steel modular raised beds by Vego Garden. There will be four of 4′ x 8′ beds (replacing the three we have now) and they will be 17 inches tall, which means they will be much easier to plant in now that we are getting older.

I’ve been trying to get them assembled. Stephanie and I started together this past weekend, but only got the first bed partially assembled. (It was a busy weekend.) It has been unhelpfully raining the past several days so I haven’t been able to get any further. And judging by the forecast, it won’t get much better so I should probably suck it up and work in the rain.

For nostalgia purposes, here are photos of the beds I made back in 2012 when they were new.

Neighborhood Mailing Lists 24 Mar 2022 3:26 AM (3 years ago)

I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday trying to find the old Yahoo Groups site our neighborhood used to use as a mailing list. I wanted to search up (as Scout* phrases it) some of the past inter-personal squabbles for a writing project. The group was at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ONSneighborhood/ but has been archived and as far as I know is completely inaccessible, and can be retrieved if you are a data wonk who can parse comma delimited files and such. It was far too much work for what I wanted to do with it. But I went down the rabbit hole anyway, because apparently social media has left me with the inability to focus on a single task for any length of time.

Until this morning, I had forgotten that all those old squabbles were in my actually email account. The old one under my past name, of course, but all still accessible to me. Oh, the treasure-trove of human foibles it is, too. The casual racism. Good grief.

It appears we officially shelved that mailing list in 2015 and turned to the Nextdoor site for our neighborhood sharing, which is a shame. Lately the folks on our street have started a group WhatsApp to contact one another and it feels a little closer.

I’m counting all this past reading as research time for my writing project but really it’s just fun.

I do need to actually write something in this project, though. It’s one I’ve had around for a long time but lost interest in because I couldn’t work out how to make the plot go. (I have a lot of trouble making the plot go, if that’s not clear from everything I’ve written here about my own writing.) I’ve picked it back up again realizing a different angle on it. I hope I can capture something now that it seems fun again.

I remember when I was reading about Agatha Christie’s notebooks that she would scribble an idea on a piece of paper and years later return to the idea and complete it, her brain having noodled out the problem over the ensuing piece of time.

[*Scout is the child of one of our friends and is preternaturally smart for a 6-year-old.]

Hello Rhubarb 15 Mar 2022 8:00 AM (3 years ago)

I’m excited to see you.

Respect 14 Mar 2022 7:29 AM (3 years ago)

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority.” And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person” and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

quote from @stimmyabby

Sprucing things up around here 9 Mar 2022 8:54 AM (3 years ago)

Doing a little house cleaning. I moved from my old web host to DreamHost. They are less gross politically. And I’m tired of paying a fortune for and dealing with errors I can’t solve. I’ll be attempting to clean up my old site images in the next few weeks and to rethink what I want to make this site going forward.

Our sink is empty. Our dishes are clean. 1 Jun 2020 8:44 AM (4 years ago)

First order of business – I’ve been laid off from my job. I started working for Pearson when it was Macmillan Publishing on April 25, 1994. I just cross the threshold of 26 years at the same job. In the middle of May, my position was eliminated, along with a number of other co-workers who were also remote workers. I’ve been working from home since June of 2018 when they closed our office, laid off many of my co-workers, and had the rest of us move to working from home. I have a good severance package, so I have time to look for another job. I’m getting set to do that. It’s been a very long time since I’ve written a resume, so it will be an interesting challenge.

The Covid-19 corona virus began racing across the globe in December 2019 and has spread so quickly that we are currently in the middle (beginning?) of a global pandemic. Over 100,000 dead in the United States alone, and 371,166 dead worldwide. It has reached even the most remote corners of the globe – 6,057,853 confirmed cases world wide.

I am in a high-risk group. On February 29, I went to my older brother’s retirement party and talked with my brothers about the virus. It already reached the United States by that time, although most people did’t realize it. After listening to their predictions about what would happen, I went to CostCo the next day and started stocking the house with necessities. Because I’ve been working from home, I mostly stopped going anywhere.

On March 19 I got a haircut, exactly like how I saw at https://scoutsbarbershop.com/shop/. I went grocery shopping the next week. Since then I’ve been home most of the time, except to drop things off at my mom’s front door – gifts, supplies, mask-making materials. In late March our state issued Stay At Home orders, but we were already doing that. We’ve gotten take-out on 4 occasions, and once I went to Lowes, which I would not do again because no one was acting in a safe or healthy manner. We’ve been ordering groceries for delivery.

Stephanie has been working at home since March 24 (?). She has been able to work remotely, visiting the office once a week or so to pick up files.

Because we’re both home all the time and eating most of our meals at home, it’s been a struggle keeping up with dishes. After finally understanding our hotpoint dishwasher setting pictures, running the dishwasher is now a daily occurrence. Sometimes it feels like emptying and loading the dishwasher is the only thing I do all day. Today our dishes are clean and the sink is empty. It’s taken a lot of effort to get to that point.

When the virus became big news in February and stats began to be tracked, I obsessively checked the global and state statistics every day. Now I’ve become numb about that. The numbers of dead are too high to make sense of anymore.

Over the last week there have been several police killings of African-Americans – In Louisville, Breonna Taylor was murdered in her own home by police who invaded the wrong address. In Minnesota, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who suffocated him by kneeling on his neck while he smirked at cameras filming his violence. In Indianapolis, Dreasjon Reed was killed by police after a police chase, and after they shot him, one of the officers joked ‘That’s gonna be a closed casket homie’ while looking at his dead body.

There are currently protests across the United States and the globe about the police brutality. Some have turned those protests into riots; white supremacists have invaded the protests and started violence. Here in Indianapolis, protests have remained peaceful on Friday, Saturday and Sunday until white people smashed windows and destroyed property. Police responded by firing tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters. Last night, Sunday evening, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police started firing and gassing peaceful protesters at 6:30 p.m., including a church choir.

We got our seeds planted and our garden ready in a timely manner this year. I made rhubarb pie from our rhubarb plant, and yesterday we just harvested our first crop of radishes. Strawberries are just getting ripe. I’ve been able to keep up with weeding our flower beds this year, and perennials are coming in nicely. Our peonies are in bloom. Primroses are also, and a poppy has cropped up. I’m finishing cleaning up the maple tree seed pods, which were prolific this year and took a lot of yard care time. I had to put in one of the downstairs air conditioners already.

I’ve been working on writing fiction. I have ideas but haven’t made much headway.

2019-10-31 Links 31 Oct 2019 12:39 PM (5 years ago)

The Baffler: By now, we know where Facebook’s allegiances lie

Popular Mechanics: The 50 Most Important Websites of All Time

Broken Links Corrected 30 Apr 2019 6:50 PM (5 years ago)

I did a design theme update to the site, so it looks a bit different these days. There will be some more tweaks as I customize the theme a bit more, but it looks a lot more simple than it did.

I have also gone through the entire site and updated all of the broken links to either go the correct places or be unlinked if there were no places to update. 8,655 links were fixed. I am truly excited about this. Here’s hoping that will reduce the amount of GPU overage charges I get for the site.

2019 Indiana State Legislature: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 26 Apr 2019 5:59 AM (5 years ago)

Source: Indiana Senate Democrats – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: 2019 Edition

The Ugly

Bias Crimes

This session, Governor Holcomb made it a priority to pass bias crimes legislation. With the governor’s support, Senate Democrats were confident that Indiana would finally get a comprehensive bias crimes law on the books. Sen. Greg Taylor (D-Indianapolis) worked with the Republican author of SB 12, the bias crimes bill chosen to advance in the Senate, to get a clear, concise proposal containing a list of protected characteristics, passed out of the Senate Committee on Public Policy. Once the bill reached the floor, however, the Supermajority removed the list from the bill’s language. Despite protests by the Democratic caucus, Republicans chose to advance the watered down bill. After receiving backlash, however, Republicans took a different route, amending bias crimes language into an unrelated SB 198. Though the language included a list of protected classes, it left out age, sex and gender identity. Democrats fought to get these important characteristics added back into the bill with no success. Governor Holcomb, who promised to pass an inclusive and comprehensive bias crimes bill, mysteriously had a change of heart and decided that a non-inclusive bill that was ageist, sexist and transphobic was sufficient and signed the bill into law once it reached his desk.

All Democratic amendments removed from budget

Every single item that Senate Democrats have fought for over the past four months was removed from the budget in the final days of session. The Democratic Caucus fought to pass legislation that would improve the lives of Hoosiers and every one of our efforts was eliminated. Those efforts included protecting the Lake Michigan shoreline from erosion, providing adoption subsidies for foster parents to keep kids out of foster homes, relief for Hoosiers unable to pay interest fees on property taxes and funding the Mortgage Foreclosure Program requested by Indiana’s Supreme Court to help Hoosiers not lose their homes.

Shifting funding away from public education
The Statehouse Republican budget prioritizes private and voucher schools over public schools. Many schools in urban or poorer communities saw cuts to their complexity funding, and many of those that saw their total dollars increase, still did not receive increases that match the inflation rate. Moreover, funding for private and charter schools saw large increases, sometimes as much as 10 percent.

No teacher pay raises

This year, the General Assembly appeared to be in agreement that raising the salary of Indiana teachers was a priority. Despite that, only Indiana Democrats actually drafted and fought for legislation that would allocate new dollars to accomplish this goal. SB 399, drafted by Sen. Eddie Melton (D-Gary), was the only legislation drafted that would provide school corporations with a grant that would be used to specifically to raise teacher pay. The bill would have granted a 5% increase to teacher pay over the biennial, but it died without ever being given a committee hearing. Sen. Melton again attempted to ensure that a guaranteed teacher raise, offering an amendment to the budget with the same language included in his SB 399; it was defeated along party lines. Another Senate Democratic amendment to the budget would have placed a tax on cigarettes and mandated that some of the proceeds be used to raise teacher pay. The amendment was also defeated along party lines.

Attempt to legalize the shooting of teachers

In March, Indiana made national news when several news articles reported that teachers were left with bruises and welts after being shot with rubber pellets during school shooting simulations. To address this issue, language was added to Senate Bill 1253 that would require teachers to consent to being pelted during training. This came after language, added in committee, banning the practice altogether was removed from the bill. Unfortunately, the new proposal requiring teachers to consent failed to become law after Republican author Representative Jim Lucas stopped it from progressing due to other changes in the bill — changes that would have mandated training for all teachers who planned to carry firearms in schools since there are cheap revolvers for sale that are available in the market nowadays.

Discrimination in publicly-funded private schools

Sen. J.D. Ford filed a bill this session, SB 344, and also offered an amendment to the budget to bar private schools receiving state voucher funds from discriminating against their students, staff and teachers. Both his bill and his amendment were defeated by the supermajority. Sen. Ford fought for this language in response news that Roncalli High School, which has received over $6.5 million in tax dollars, is terminating the employment of two employees simply because of their same-sex marriages.

Morning Fog 21 Apr 2019 4:34 AM (5 years ago)

Chilly Easter morning

The New Ride – a Honda CR-V 18 Apr 2019 4:07 PM (6 years ago)

After a great deal of research involving spreadsheets, auto shows, test drives and quite a few anxious phone calls with Stephanie’s dad (who had lots of opinions about what we were buying) I bought a new Honda CR-V on March 27th. It is “Dark Olive Metallic.” It is nicknamed Godzilla.You can also enjoy Honda rides by availing Honda dealership Salina KS.

I finally gave up on VW ever coming out with my new Microbus. Now they will, just watch.

But so far, the verdict is – I absolutely love Godzilla. He is awesome. I’m loving power windows, power locks, cruise control, and the sunroof. I love Apple car play, and maps on the screen.

I sold the truck to our friend Douglas, who was on the lookout for something reliable—like these used cars in palos hills il. So it’s still right around the corner if I ever need to borrow it. He named her “Betty Ford,” which I thought was brilliant.

Salem and Baxter 29 Mar 2019 4:10 PM (6 years ago)

Our new kitten Salem was born on August 15th, and we adopted him on October 15th.

Our new puppy Baxter was born on November 29th, and we adopted him on February 2nd. His mom is a Corgi. We’re not sure about dad. He may have been a spaniel? We think that’s possible because of the fur coat and ears. He looks like other Corgi/spaniel mixes on the internet.

Drusilla passed away on April 1st. She had lots of health issues and got very sick after an infection. Spike left us earlier in the year, and we said goodbye to Huckleberry on my birthday last year. We’ve had a tough year with pet deaths. It’s been really interesting to deal with kittens and puppies after having adult pets. They have a lot of energy. And potty training is tough.

Who I am 6 Dec 2016 8:07 AM (8 years ago)

I was “born as” a baby – 5 lbs, 16 inches. The clothes my parents gave me then don’t fit me anymore than the arbitrary labels they gave me as identity markers, so I changed them to real ones. In 48 years I’ve outgrown onesies and other people’s expectations and grown into the person I actually am, which may not fit into your demands of me, but that’s too bad. I’m going to wear what I want to wear, call myself my real name and go to the bathroom where I need to. You have nothing to fear from me in a restroom, I promise you. But you already know that, really.

First Lady Michelle Obama in Manchester, New Hampshire 14 Oct 2016 8:40 AM (8 years ago)

Death of blogger Gary Welsh officially ruled suicide 23 May 2016 5:13 AM (8 years ago)

Goodness knows I did not love prolific local blogger and attorney Gary Welsh. Over the many years he wrote about local and national politics, he penned things that were complete libelous falsehoods, and he should have been sued many times over. Fortunately for himself, he was shrewd enough to aim his worst defamatory lies at the two groups of people who were unlikely to take him to court – national public figures who didn’t care about a puny midwest blogger, and local folks who didn’t have two dimes to rub together and could never afford to drag him into a courtroom. When it came to people who could actually take him on legally, he tended to pull his punches and say things that were sly implications rather than forthright. For the local folks upon whom he unleashed the dogs of war, god help them. He destroyed several people’s livelihoods and at least one person took his life after being subjected to an endless tirade of vicious, unfounded Welsh penmanship.

There are lots of folks who are saying nice things about Welsh now that he’s passed on; I’ve read lots of laudatory words with raised eyebrows. Some people will apparently say nice things about anyone, which gives me great pause. I think that’s part of of the banality of evil; people’s willingness to look past truly terrible behavior “to always find the good” in someone is ultimately a sort of applause.

The nicest thing I could say about him is that he was prolific. The man wrote a lot. The nature of what Welsh wrote, well… I gave up reading his work years ago, about the same time I gave up writing about anything political. Reading his work seemed like smoking; you got a nice hit off it for a bit because of the level of vitriol involved, but you could tell it was a cancer that was tearing your soul to pieces. In a larger sense, focusing on the minutia of politics seems the same way and I began to avoid doing that as well. Sometimes I think that was a good idea and sometimes I worry that I’m not doing more to make my city a better place to live. But the price of trying to do that in the face of the kind of tactics that people like Gary Welsh employed is too high.

In balance, the damage that Welsh did as a political blogger far outweighed the good. The hit jobs he did on Bart Peterson did indeed help Greg Ballard into 8 years in office, and that was a catastrophe it will take the city decades to fix. That alone is a massive weight on the cosmic scale, and add in the small and large ways he set off bombs in individual people’s lives… I do hope there’s not a hell, because Gary would be in it, probably in charge of something horrible.

I was very surprised that Welsh would commit suicide. I sort of figured he was an unstoppable juggernaut constructed from a swirling storm of conspiracy theories and wild speculation; a perpetual motion machine fueled endlessly by malevolent cookies fed him by nihilist low-level civil employees.

And even reading the details of his death – something does seem pretty off there. If you are going to kill yourself, would you do it in a stairwell? Would you shoot yourself in the chest? Well, you or I wouldn’t; we’d do our best to have the least horror and impact on the people around us. But I would not put it past Welsh to stage-craft his suicide for maximum conspiracy theory gossip. The coroner has ruled his death a suicide. Who am I to argue, if no one else is doing so?

Source: Indiana Business Journal – “Death of blogger Welsh officially ruled suicide”

The death of prominent Indianapolis political blogger Gary Welsh three weeks ago has officially been ruled a suicide, the Marion County Coroner’s Office said.

Welsh, who wrote the popular conservative blog Advance Indiana, died May 1 of a gunshot wound. He was 53. Indianapolis police said they investigated his death as a “tragic suicide.”

The coroner’s office said it issued a death certificate Thursday that listed suicide as the official cause of Welsh’s death. The official manner of death was listed as a single gunshot wound to the chest. The coroner’s office said the final rulings confirmed preliminary findings.

Welsh’s body was found in a stairwell at the Lockerbie Glove Factory Lofts, 430 N. Park Ave. Witnesses who called 911 to report the death said a gun was found next to the body.

Welsh was a practicing attorney who launched Advance Indiana more than a decade ago. He was known for hard-hitting blog posts that were critical of both Democrats and Republicans.

Paul Ogden, in his blog Ogden on Politics, said a gathering is planned “to remember and celebrate the life” of Welsh. The event is scheduled for 6:30-8 p.m. June 2 at the Northside Knights of Columbus, 2100 E. 71st St.

More on the event can be found here.

I wonder how many folks will attend that celebration? And what will they be celebrating?

I’m legally changing my first and middle names 22 Feb 2016 4:08 AM (9 years ago)

I’m changing my first and middle names.

I am getting rid of Stephanie Ann. My first name is going to be Hawthorn. (no e- like the tree, not the author.) My middle name is chosen, but I’m keeping to myself for now.

This is something I’ve been actively planning for over two years, but I’ve been thinking about it for more than 20, because I’ve always disliked my name and did not feel like it fit me. I have always been more gender-neutral than my name is, and I am in a place where I can’t tolerate a name I don’t connect with anymore.

My wife Stephanie has known about this for several years and is supportive of me changing names. We have talked through all of my ideas together. I’ve let my immediate family know about this. Most of them are onboard with it. Some of them are going to have to get onboard.

I’ll be starting the legal name change process soon, and it will take a month or so before that is all in place, and I’ll start changing things like credit cards and bank accounts and then my online presence.

I realize this is a big change for someone who has had the same name for 47 years, and that remembering it and calling me that name and thinking about me differently is a pretty big challenge.

That weird feeling you may have about my new name feeling strange to you – that’s the feeling I’ve always had about my old name – it doesn’t feel right. It’s a period of adjustment, but I have confidence you all are smart and capable people and can rise to the occasion.

I know people will have ideas, opinions or commentary about this. Please share your thoughts with me directly in a phone call or face-to-face conversation, rather than gossiping or commenting on social media.

The decision tree of names I’ve thought through and discarded is 786 lines long. I’ve gone through literally hundreds of names in the past few years trying them on and seeing how they fit. Naming yourself is hard. But I’ve found a name I actually love – it’s unique, gender neutral, has an outdoors/natural quality to it. Hawthorn is unusual as a first name, so there aren’t hundreds of little kids running around with the same name, nor do I have cousins or family members with that name, which are also bonuses.

2015 List of “Best of” Lists 31 Dec 2015 5:08 AM (9 years ago)

Source: The Year in Fungi – The New Yorker

Five mycological highlights from 2015, including banana killers, rainmakers, and the zombie cure.

Source: Top 25 News Photos of 2015 – The Atlantic

The past year has been a series of tumultuous news stories, from the massive migration crisis and the war and terror those migrants are fleeing, to historic images of faraway Pluto, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling supporting same-sex marriage, and widespread protests about continued inequality.

Source: The Year in Drone Video: Real Estate, Architecture, and Cities – In the Air – Curbed

Source: Ten LGBTQ News Stories the Mainstream Media Ignored in 2015

Truthout recaps some of the LGBTQ stories the mainstream media missed, ignored or just plain got wrong in 2015.

Source: The Most Intriguing LGBT Characters of 2015 | GLAAD

A handful of characters caught the eye of viewers and critics alike this year by telling unique and exciting stories, here are some of the (mostly) new LGBT characters in 2015 that stood out from the crowd.

Source: The Lives They Lived – The New York Times

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.

Source: The 10 Best Feminist Quotes of 2015

Source: The best book cover designs for 2015

Check out more great covers at the NY Times, Buzzfeed, and The Casual Optimist. Compare with last year’s picks.

Source: The Year That Was and Wasn’t – The Morning News

We asked writers and thinkers to tell us: What were the most important events of 2015—and what were the least?

Source: Highlights from 2015 | Gender Spectrum

Source: The best (or worst) news media corrections of 2015

A compilation of the best, or worse, or most convoluted, or contrived, or outrageous, or downright silly media corrections.

Source: Best Pure CSS Pens of 2015

Best Pure CSS Pens of 2015

Source: The 10 Best TV Shows of 2015 | Village Voice

Source: Top 15 classes of 2015 | Northern Illinois University

‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness | Hazlitt 15 Oct 2015 5:45 AM (9 years ago)

An amulet, a treasure hunt, and a legion of readers mobilized by the false patterns our brains create to make sense of the world around us. 

[…]

When you look at a rock formation or a car grille or the moon and see a face, that’s a form of apophenia—pareidolia, the construction of coherent visual or auditory stimuli from noise. The Rorschach test: apophenia. Horoscope adherents who see correlations between their star charts and their lives or personalities are engaging in apophenia too. When several unrelated things go wrong in a single morning, it’s apophenia that tells you that you must be dogged by a curse. Most attempts to anticipate what will make newborns stop crying are tinged by apophenia. And if you know anyone who’s convinced herself she has food sensitivities she doesn’t have, based on a supposed pattern in how she feels after eating, feel free to tell her she suffers from apophenia (though you shouldn’t expect it to go over too well).

Source: ‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness | Hazlitt

“Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin 15 Oct 2015 5:37 AM (9 years ago)

The series has garnered the reputation of being the most bigoted show on television for its inaccurate, undifferentiated and highly biased depiction of Arabs, Pakistanis, and Afghans, as well as its gross misrepresentations of the cities of Beirut, Islamabad- and the so-called Muslim world in general. For four seasons, and entering its fifth, “Homeland” has maintained the dichotomy of the photogenic, mainly white, mostly American protector versus the evil and backwards Muslim threat. The Washington Post reacts to the racist horror of their season four promotional poster by describing it as “white Red Riding Hood lost in a forest of faceless Muslim wolves”. In this forest, Red Riding Hood is permitted to display many shades of grey – bribery, drone strikes, torture, and covert assassination- to achieve her targets. She points her weapon of choice at the monochrome bad guys, who do all the things that the good guys do, but with nefarious intent.

[…]

At the beginning of June 2015, we received a phone call from a friend who has been active in the Graffiti and Street art scene in Germany for the past 30 years and has researched graffiti in the Middle East extensively. He had been contacted by “Homeland’s” set production company who were looking for “Arabian street artists” to lend graffiti authenticity to a film set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese/Syrian border for their new season. Given the series’ reputation we were not easily convinced, until we considered what a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’ political discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.

Source: “Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

2015-10-13 Recently Read 13 Oct 2015 3:50 AM (9 years ago)

Down the Rabbit Hole
The rise, and rise, of literary annotation

Press Rewind
by Brendan Fitzgerald
What one journalist learned by vicariously sitting in on David Carr’s master class—with only his teacher’s reputation, extant syllabus, and students’ recollections to guide the way.

Press Play
David Carr’s journalism syllabus – “Making and distributing content in the present future we are living through.”

Margaret Atwood: we are double-plus unfree

How the Tiny Graywolf Press Became a Big Player in Book Publishing

The Trick to Acting Heroically

Why We Say ‘Car Accident,’ and Why We Need to Stop

More Titillated Than Thou: How the Amish conquered the evangelical romance market

Why you should never make your bed

YouTube ‘Dancing Baby’ Copyright Ruling Sets Fair Use Guideline

The Duke, The Landscape Architect And The World’s Most Ambitious Attempt To Bring The Cosmos To Earth

The Best Google Web Font Combinations

Dream Journal Illustrated: Construction Cat and Warehouse Mice 5 Oct 2015 12:43 PM (9 years ago)

I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

Crazy dream about construction, beer and a cat. Woke up sneezing and now I have a bloody nose. In the dream these children were playing with mice they found. A hole in the wall went to a warehouse next door.

Dream Journal Illustrated: British Library’s Gutenberg Press 18 Sep 2015 12:32 PM (9 years ago)

I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

The British Library let me run off a bunch of flyers on their Gutenberg printing press.
I don’t think they have a Gutenberg press.
And whatever I playing with wasn’t a Gutenberg.
but.
Yes, I dream in moveable type.

Dream Journal Illustrated: Astronaut at Japanese Mall, with Bear 7 Aug 2015 9:07 AM (9 years ago)

I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

Last night’s dream: I was an astronaut and was in Japan (which looked like a futuristic Glendale Mall). I bought a training manual and a sandwich, but hadn’t learned yen-to-dollars yet, so I paid $60 USD for the two. I still had my big poof of hair and had concerns about fitting it under my helmet. There was also something about a bear, and, towards the end, a conversation with a friend in New Orleans about his newborn. I can’t even begin to analyze that mess.

This is why I no longer read anything from DC Comics 6 Jul 2015 4:53 AM (9 years ago)

This is a scene from the brand-new video game Batman Arkham Knight, in which Batgirl (Barbara Gordon), after she has been injured and is in a wheelchair, is held captive under the control of the Joker, and is made to kill herself in front of Batman. The scene is “Fake” in that she’s “not really dead” but the scenario is played out to torment Batman in the game so he will become enraged.

And Batman’s reaction – “Scarecrow was punishing me.”

Because this is all about Batman, of course. Never mind that they just used an iconic character from my childhood as grief bait for Batman to get his revenge.

If you are not aware of what “the Killing Joke” is – it’s a controversial, sadistic storyline written for DC Comics by Alan Moore in 1988 where the Joker tortures and rapes Barbara Gordon (Batgirl), then leaves her paralyzed in order to give Batman and Commissioner Gordon anguish. This story entered her “canon,” and Barbara became the wheelchair-bound computer geek Oracle for years and years after, and other women took over the character of Batgirl. Only recently have they “retconned” the storyline to make Barbara Gordon into Batgirl again – except that they left “The Killing Joke” in her storyline and just fixed her paralysis.

Women have been angry (with good reason) with the KJ storyline ever since because it takes one of the strongest female superheroes and turns her into a damsel in distress for Batman to rescue. And it’s still part of her storyline today, complete with all the torture scenes intact (although they tone down the rape scene pretty drastically so it’s not as clear anymore that it happened.)

This and the Amazons being killed off in Wonder Woman are two of the worst ideas that DC Comics has ever had, and they continue to double down on those stories instead of recognizing how offensive they are.

So as much as I still love Wonder Woman and Batgirl, to me the idea of them is removed from anything happening at DC Comics today, and I read Marvel Comics instead.

2015-05-27 Recently Read 27 May 2015 4:35 AM (9 years ago)

Wikipedia: Mudra
A mudra is a symbolic or ritual gesture in Hinduism and Buddhism. While some mudras involve the entire body, most are performed with the hands and fingers. A mudrā is a spiritual gesture and an energetic seal of authenticity employed in the iconography and spiritual practice of Indian religions. The classical sources for the mudras in yoga are the Gheranda Samhita and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika states the importance of mudras in yoga practice.

The New Republic: The Ghost of Cornel West
By Michael Eric Dyson
President Obama betrayed him. He’s stopped publishing new work. He’s alienated his closest friends and allies. What happened to America’s most exciting black scholar?

Hazlitt: The Girls on Shit Duty
By Anna Maxymiw
A weeklong trip filled with deep-fried shore meals does funny things to a man’s insides. When you have to clean up the grisly aftermath, all you can do is laugh.

Elle: ‘Yoga Pants Are Ruining Women’ And Other Style Advice From Fran Lebowitz
“Sartorial tirades from one of the most tailored and opinionated dressers in all of New York City.” – In other news, I want to be Fran Lebowitz someday.

Wall Street Journal: The Cult of Fornasetti: 5 Designers Choose Their Favorite Pieces
For the opening of a massive exhibition devoted to the work of Piero Fornasetti, the Italian artist known for emblazoning design objects with imagery, we asked fans like Kelly Wearstler to pick stand-out pieces

New York Times: Pulitzer-Winning Author Tells Gloversville Library Thanks for the Memories
Mr. Russo grew up going to the Gloversville library, one of the nearly 1,700 built with Carnegie money. “I have such fond memories of the place, going there Saturday mornings with my grandfather or mother, who would wait forever for me to pick books,” he said in a telephone interview. “I just have this feeling that if it weren’t for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.”

Feminist Frequency: ‘What I Couldn’t Say’ Panel at All About Women
Anita Sarkesian – ‘I was invited to speak on several panels about feminism and the impacts of online harassment at the 2015 All About Women conference taking place annually at the Sydney Opera House. Here is a video of my speech for the panel entitled, “What I Couldn’t Say.”’

2015-03-15 Recently Read 25 Mar 2015 2:49 AM (10 years ago)

Andrew Keir: Split ink Fountain Printing
ypically when printing, a single colour only is used in each ink fountain (pictures to follow), and while gradients can be printed using modern process colour printing – the standard mix of cyan, magenta, yellow and black found in your average home/office printer – printing methods like letterpress are typically limited to solid colours as a wooden or metal block stamps a colour into the paper stock, a method which doesn’t allow blending of multiple densities and layers of ink. By blending inks directly in the fountain, split fountain printing allows for some wonderful effects in letterpress and screen printing which otherwise wouldn’t be achievable, combining blends of colour with the more exotic stocks and debossing effects that aren’t available with standard offset printing.

The Morning News: Cities Don’t Us
Our urban future is upon us, city planners tell us, but residents’ on-again, off-again relationship with their surroundings makes them want to say goodbye to all that.

London Review of Books: Why didn’t you just do what you were told?
Jenny Diski
A few years ago, someone asked how it came about that I ended up living with Doris Lessing in my teens. I was in the middle of the story of the to-ing and fro-ing between my parents and was finally reaching the psychiatric hospital bit when the man said something extraordinary, something that had never occurred to me or to anyone else to whom I’d told the story.

‘Why didn’t you just do what you were told?’ he asked.

Priceonomics: The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman
When Marilyn vos Savant politely responded to a reader’s inquiry on the Monty Hall Problem, a then-relatively-unknown probability puzzle, she never could’ve imagined what would unfold: though her answer was correct, she received over 10,000 letters, many from noted scholars and Ph.Ds, informing her that she was a hare-brained idiot.

Washington Post: Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right.
Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning, a bias that surprises reading experts given the same group’s proclivity to consume most other content digitally. A University of Washington pilot study of digital textbooks found that a quarter of students still bought print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free.

2015-02-19 Recently Read 19 Feb 2015 2:19 PM (10 years ago)

The New Yorker: R U There?
“A new counseling service harnesses the power of the text message.”

David Carr, New York Times: “Calling Out Bill Cosby’s Media Enablers, Including Myself”
“What took so long is that those in the know kept it mostly to themselves. No one wanted to disturb the Natural Order of Things, which was that Mr. Cosby was beloved; that he was as generous and paternal as his public image; and that his approach to life and work represented a bracing corrective to the coarse, self-defeating urban black ethos.”

hyperallergic.com: A Portal to Unite the Smithsonian Libraries Artists’ Books Collection
The project to get the Artists’ Books Collection site up was years in the making, with cross-institution collaboration from the Smithsonian American Art Museum/ National Portrait Gallery Library, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library, and the Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of African Art.

Typespec: Raised from the dead: Doves Type in digital form
“The Doves Type legend is one of the most enduring in typographic history and probably the most infamous. It’s the story of a typeface and a bitter feud between the two partners of Hammersmith’s celebrated Doves Press, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, leading to the protracted disposal of their unique metal type into London’s River Thames. Starting in 1913 with the initial dumping of the punches and matrices, by the end of January 1917 an increasingly frail Cobden-Sanderson had made hundreds of clandestine trips under cover of darkness to Hammersmith Bridge and systematically thrown 12lb parcels of metal type into the murky depths below. As one person so aptly commented on Twitter recently, this notorious tale bears all the hallmarks of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.”

NY Magazine: Why Oklahoma Lawmakers Voted to Ban AP U.S. History
“The conservative lawmakers’ issues with the course, which was taken by 344,938 students in 2013, can be traced back to retired high-school history teacher Larry S. Krieger. Two years ago, the College Board released a revised framework for the exam, which took effect this fall. Krieger was incensed by the changes. “As I read through the document, I saw a consistently negative view of American history that highlights oppressors and exploiters,” he said during a conference call in August, according to Newsweek.”

2015-02-09 Recently Read 8 Feb 2015 11:59 PM (10 years ago)

Subtraction: Color Grading Movies
How digital color manipulation of a movie can drastically change the tone and meaning of the subject.

The Morning News: The Books
A long and fun essay on the subject of a couple combining their library after having lived together for sometime. One of the things Stephanie and I have never done is combine our books. Mine are in the library and hers are in the dining room, although both of us have books that spill out to other rooms of the house. My organizational automaton has toyed with the idea of combining our books and getting them all in order, but it’s a daunting task, and one filled with emotional pitfalls.

The New York Times: The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland
The emotional fallout of a teen boy who set a trans teen on fire on a bus in Oakland, California.

the head in: Chet Baker Sings
Baker first sang “My Funny Valentine” in 1954, and the rendition – a stark, melancholy one – was released on Dick Bock’s Pacific label two years later on the record Chet Baker Sings.

The Economist: Inside the box – How workers ended up in cubes—and how they could break free
Other cubicle-related health problems have taken longer to emerge. Because cubicles provide only the illusion of privacy, not the real thing, they do nothing to stop infectious diseases. Sharing an office raises the chances of getting more than two colds a year. In 2011 Danish scientists found that workers whose offices held at least six people took 62% more sick leave than those in private offices. And last year Swedish researchers studying the link between office layouts and illness found that people who worked in open-plan offices had the highest risk of becoming ill. The reason, they concluded, was more than just the easier spread of infections. Stress caused by lack of privacy and workers’ inability to control their surroundings played a part, too.

2015-01-29 Recently Read 29 Jan 2015 8:20 AM (10 years ago)

Grantland: How ‘Selma’ Got Smeared
As a member of more than one marginalized group of people, I can attest that these sorts of conversations with allies happen all the time wherein the needs of the marginalized group end up being subservient to the plans of their allies, who have more power and are able to set agendas and timelines that are at odds with those of the people they purport to aid. So the fact that Selma found a way to depict that sort of interaction is important to our understanding of the civil rights movement, and if minute historical detail was bent slightly in order to show that sort of interaction onscreen, I’m okay with that.

The Atlantic: Why I Am Not a Maker
When tech culture only celebrates creation, it risks ignoring those who teach, criticize, and take care of others.

Wikipedia: Searles Chinese Room
The Chinese room is a thought experiment presented by John Searle (b1932) to challenge the claim that it is possible for a computer running a program to have a “mind” and “consciousness” in the same sense that people do, simply by virtue of running the right program.

Good.Is: How Knitting Behind Bars Transformed Maryland Convicts
In late 2009, Lynn Zwerling stood in front of 600 male prisoners at the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup, Maryland. “Who wants to knit?” she asked the burly crowd. They looked at her like she was crazy.

Pacific Standard: The Greatest Rock Show I’d Ever Seen
How one guy’s beloved memory of a long-ago rock show turns out, when he rediscovers a record of it, to be quite different than the show as he remembered it.

Laws of Public Accommodation and the LDS Church Statement about “respect” 27 Jan 2015 2:14 PM (10 years ago)

Laws of Public Accommodation state that you are not allow to discriminate in providing services to the public if you run a business that is open to serve the public. So if you bake cakes, or do wedding photography, or open a restaurant, you have to accommodate members of the public who come to you to pay for your services. If you are a pharmacist, or an emergency medical technician, or a doctor, or a police officer, you cannot turn people away from your service if they are in a wheelchair, or if they are a person of color, or if they are female, or if they fit into a number of other categories. There are no religious exemptions to public accommodations laws, so what you believe or where you worship is not a legally an excuse for turning people away from your public-facing business, according to current law.

The current U.S. law on the books regarding public accommodation is a part of a back of a larger block of civil rights laws that are grouped under this title – U.S. Code Title 42, Chapter 21 — Civil Rights.

Title 42, Chapter 21 of the U.S. Code prohibits discrimination against persons based on age, disability, gender, race, national origin, and religion (among other things) in a number of settings — including education, employment, access to businesses and buildings, federal services, and more. Chapter 21 is where a number of federal acts related to civil rights have been codified — including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act.

Here is what the “public accommodation” section of that larger group of laws states – 42 U.S.C. § 2000a : US Code – Section 2000A: Prohibition against discrimination or segregation in places of public accommodation

(a) Equal access All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin. (b) Establishments affecting interstate commerce or supported in their activities by State action as places of public accommodation; lodgings; facilities principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises; gasoline stations; places of exhibition or entertainment; other covered establishments Each of the following establishments which serves the public is a place of public accommodation within the meaning of this subchapter if its operations affect commerce, or if discrimination or segregation by it is supported by State action: (1) any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests, other than an establishment located within a building which contains not more than five rooms for rent or hire and which is actually occupied by the proprietor of such establishment as his residence; (2) any restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, or other facility principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises, including, but not limited to, any such facility located on the premises of any retail establishment; or any gasoline station; (3) any motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium or other place of exhibition or entertainment; and (4) any establishment (A)(i) which is physically located within the premises of any establishment otherwise covered by this subsection, or (ii) within the premises of which is physically located any such covered establishment, and (B) which holds itself out as serving patrons of such covered establishment. (c) Operations affecting commerce; criteria; “commerce” defined The operations of an establishment affect commerce within the meaning of this subchapter if (1) it is one of the establishments described in paragraph (1) of subsection (b) of this section; (2) in the case of an establishment described in paragraph (2) of subsection (b) of this section, it serves or offers to serve interstate travelers of a substantial portion of the food which it serves, or gasoline or other products which it sells, has moved in commerce; (3) in the case of an establishment described in paragraph (3) of subsection (b) of this section, it customarily presents films, performances, athletic teams, exhibitions, or other sources of entertainment which move in commerce; and (4) in the case of an establishment described in paragraph (4) of subsection (b) of this section, it is physically located within the premises of, or there is physically located within its premises, an establishment the operations of which affect commerce within the meaning of this subsection. For purposes of this section, “commerce” means travel, trade, traffic, commerce, transportation, or communication among the several States, or between the District of Columbia and any State, or between any foreign country or any territory or possession and any State or the District of Columbia, or between points in the same State but through any other State or the District of Columbia or a foreign country. (d) Support by State action Discrimination or segregation by an establishment is supported by State action within the meaning of this subchapter if such discrimination or segregation (1) is carried on under color of any law, statute, ordinance, or regulation; or (2) is carried on under color of any custom or usage required or enforced by officials of the State or political subdivision thereof; or (3) is required by action of the State or political subdivision thereof. (e) Private establishments The provisions of this subchapter shall not apply to a private club or other establishment not in fact open to the public, except to the extent that the facilities of such establishment are made available to the customers or patrons of an establishment within the scope of subsection (b) of this section.

This morning, the Mormon Church held a press conference saying that they supported LGBT rights – up to a point. They believe that LGBT people should not be denied housing or employment or basic civil rights. BUT – they asserted that they felt that LGBT people should not be added to U.S. Code Title 42, Chapter 21. They didn’t say it in so many terms; they talked about “respect” and how LGBT “activists” had done terrible things to “disrespect” the religious beliefs of LDS Church members.

Apparently pouring millions of dollars into Prop-8 and trying to deny LGBT people basic civil rights, causing LGBT people emotional & financial hardship and pain, is perfectly “respectable” but fighting back for your basic civil rights after being a marginalized group of people for centuries is not.

But their meaning is pretty clear based on the language they were using. This public press conference is a dogwhistle to their members urging them to pour money into a number of lawsuits that are currently moving through the courts where gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender individuals are seeing redress after being denied public accommodations by business owners citing “religious freedom” as their reason for discriminating against people seeking their services.

If we were just talking about wedding cakes and photographers, this might be an easy issue to dismiss – you can just get a different florist or cake baker, right? But we are not. There have been cases of LGBT people denied emergency medical care, medication that they needed for their health, and police protection because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. LGBT people have been denied access to hotels and vacation spots, homeless shelters and domestic violence shelters based on the claims of “religious belief” of the owners or employees of those businesses or services. Some of the cases of denial of public accommodation are in serious, life-or-death situations. People have been irreparably harmed or killed because of this discrimination.

The LDS Church is attempting to frame the civil rights debate over public accommodation for LGBT people as one of “respect” – that LBGT people are being “disrespectful” of the church’s religious beliefs if they are seeking legal redress for being discriminated against. That legal and civil actions, including direct action that LGBT people might take in asserting their rights, are “disrespectful” and “attacks” and that the church is a victim if people challenge the discrimination against them on the basis of their religious beliefs.

It’s an interesting framing, and one that LDS members are anxious to push – I’ve already run across two sets of LDS church members anxious to cast themselves in the role of victim in the debate following this morning’s press conference. Unfortunately it’s also a framing that the average American is primed to accept as legitimate, given the complete lack of understanding of basic civil rights laws in the United States. Hopefully as these lawsuits move through the courts, the legal system won’t be as fooled by the manipulation of language as the average member of the public.

The Coolest Roadside Attractions In Every State 26 Jan 2015 1:43 PM (10 years ago)

Via Buzzfeed –

The Coolest Roadside Attractions In Every State.

I need to update my ‘big things’ photos and Stephanie and I are up for a summer roadtrip, so – let’s go.

Werner Herzog: Develop your own voice 15 Jan 2015 5:05 AM (10 years ago)

Via Jason Kottke: 24 pieces of life advice from Werner Herzog

Paul Cronin’s book of conversations with filmmaker Werner Herzog is called Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. On the back cover of the book, Herzog offers a list of advice for filmmakers that doubles as general purpose life advice.

1. Always take the initiative.
2. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.
3. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
4. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
5. Learn to live with your mistakes.
6. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern.
7. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it.
8. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
9. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.
10. Thwart institutional cowardice.
11. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
12. Take your fate into your own hands.
13. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.
14. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory.
15. Walk straight ahead, never detour.
16. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver.
17. Don’t be fearful of rejection.
18. Develop your own voice.
19. Day one is the point of no return.
20. A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class.
21. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema.
22. Guerrilla tactics are best.
23. Take revenge if need be.
24. Get used to the bear behind you.

Good stuff. (There’s a photo of Herzog with a bear behind him on the book cover jacket, which explains #24)

Recently Read: Preserving Artist Mary Nohl’s Home 13 Jan 2015 6:39 AM (10 years ago)

Via Hyperallergic: A Single Woman Is a Witch: Battling to Save the Art Environment of Mary Nohl

Over a period of 50 years, the artist Mary Nohl transformed her yard as well as the interior and exterior of her cottage (that you can see here) into an environment that stands in conversation with the surrounding land, lake, and her childhood memories. All the roofing and sidings are well maintained by the professionals from James Kate Roofing & Solar in Irving TX who makes sure that their authenticity is never lost. If you’re looking for the best solar powered generator for refrigerator, you  can click here. Almost immediately after the first cement sculptures materialized in the 1960s, she became known as “The Witch.” Elaborate myths grew from her industrious acreage. Stories of murder, mayhem, and longing were broadly considered fact by a cross-section of the local populous. Nohl worked alone, from her home. Lacking a husband and prescribed social role, she was a very suspicious character, indeed. Here are some information on service areas for roofing and other installations.

….

Over four decades, Mary Nohl kept making and building. Stories took hold, about how she’d murdered her family and buried them under the sculptures, or how her husband had been lost in the lake and the sculptures were to beckon him home. All the stories inserted the “missing” husband and children. The cottage became a frequent late-night stop for teens drawn to the counterculture strangeness of the place. Others came and left notes of gratitude in her mailbox.

Nohl died in 2001. She left nearly $10 million dollars (her attorney father had invested well) to a foundation to award yearly fellowships to individual artists in Milwaukee and nearby counties. She donated her house and all of its contents to the Kohler Foundation, which preserves art environments. Thirteen years later, however, little has been done to secure the site. You can also search https://www.myhousepainter.com/ to know about the paintings in detail.The Kohler ran into opposition from Nohl’s wealthy neighbors — they objected to even the most restricted use of the house as a museum or study center. The building fell into disrepair and with each new winter has become increasingly fragile, weathered, marooned in uncertainty. Then, in March of this year, the property’s current owner, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, issued a press release stating that it had given up preservation efforts and will move the house and yard sculptures to Sheboygan County, where it is located. The center will sell the land to fund the move.

Sad that the foundation charged with preserving the house has just given up.

First snow of 2015 6 Jan 2015 4:50 AM (10 years ago)

A few inches of light, fluffy snow.