Day: February 17, 2016
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Nothing says “I live in America now” quite like changing the tap on the transformer on your valve radio…
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“Boys need to be taught that it doesn’t matter if the girl next to them is in a bikini or a burqa, it’s their job to learn algebra regardless, and how she’s dressed has nothing to do with them.”
“Last Monday morning was a little colder than I expected, so I made sure that there was a warm change of clothes in my daughter’s backpack in case she wanted to change. She’d had her heart set on wearing her rainbow sun dress since the weather warmed up so I finally acquiesced and let her. Still it wasn’t too surprising to me to see her walk out of school that afternoon with her T-shirt on over the dress and her jeans on under it.
“Did you get cold, sweetheart?” I asked her.“No,” she said a little crestfallen. “I had to change because spaghetti straps are against the rules.”
I’m not surprised to see the dress code shaming come into my house. I have after all been sadly waiting for it since the ultrasound tech said, “It’s a girl.” I didn’t think, though that it would make an appearance when she was five years old.
Five. You get me? She’s five. Cut her hair and put her next to a boy with no shirt on and she is fundamentally identical. I guess you could argue that a boy would not be allowed to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps either, but the day they sell anything like that in the boys section of a Target I will happily withdraw my objections.
Have you ever stopped to think how weird a school dress code really is? I went and checked out the one for my daughter’s school district and it’s amazing in how hard it tries not to say what it actually means. There are literally no male-specific guidelines anywhere on that list. I mean prohibitions against exposing the chest or torso could hypothetically apply to boys except that they don’t. Not really. They don’t sell boys clothes that do that. There’s nothing that is marketed to boys that is in anyway comparable to a skirt or a sun dress. Essentially, a school dress code exists to prevent girls from displaying too much of their bodies because reasons.
I didn’t pick up my daughter’s dress at My First Stripperwear. It’s not repurposed fetish gear from a store for very short people. It’s a dress from a mall chain store in her size. It covers everything but her shoulders and a small section of her upper chest and back. She’s worn it to church, and in the growing heat she was looking forward to wearing it a lot because it’s light and comfortable.
You know what really grills my cheese about it? It’s not even the shirt they made her put on over her top, it’s the pants they made her wear underneath. It’s a full-length dress that she has to hold up to keep from getting wet in uncut grass. She even had a small set of shorts underneath because it was gym day. But because the top part of her dress apparently exposed the immoral sinfulness of her bare shoulders she also had to pull on jeans even though her legs remained completely covered as part of her punishment.”
“I swear to God and all his Alf pogs I really didn’t think that I would have to face that particular dragon before she even entered a numbered grade.
Now I have this child, the one that argues scientific points about everything from the top speed of land animals in Africa to the classification of the planets with me endlessly, wordlessly accepting that a dress with spaghetti straps, something sold in every Walmart in America right now, is somehow bad. Wrong. Naughty. And most importantly that the answer is to cover up.
Make no mistake; every school dress code that is not a set uniform is about policing girls and girls alone.”
Jef Rouner: The Apparently Immoral Shoulders of My FIVE-YEAR-OLD Daughter
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At $10 an hour you’d have to work 1,250 hours to cover the UW’s $12,500 tuition (more, once you take out taxes). In a 12-week summer, that’s more than 100 hours a week.
What really made me feel ancient is that the 1981 UW student guide shows the Med school charged only $1,029 a year back then. Today: $28,040!
Now, I didn’t go to the UW. But I’m going down Husky memory lane because last week The Seattle Times featured a crop of harried UW students looking rueful and broke. The story said skeptical state legislators often say how “they worked their way through college. And then they ask: Why don’t students do that today?”
Of all our delusions, we old farts cling to this bootstrap one the most. We worked our way up on sweat and chicken grease, we say. Can’t this generation? What’s wrong with them?
What’s wrong is that after we got ours, we cut it off for them.
The reason a summer at KFC could pay for a year of UW med school in 1981 isn’t that we were so hardworking and industrious. It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists.
Today, the public picks up only 30 percent of UW tuition, and dropping.
Danny Westneat, “Yes, summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap” (via emonydax)
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I am reasonably convinced
I am reasonably convinced that we had a teapot. Silly things make me think that, y’know, like memories of sitting down at breakfast on a Sunday with pancakes and tea, made from leaf tea, in a teapot. Photos. The gift registry from our wedding which has ‘Teapot’ on it.
y’know, silly, insubstantial things.
But I’ve now been through the boxes in the garage marked ‘K-Ware’ twice, and I can’t find the bloody thing.
Gaaah.
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Source: http://m.imgur.com/a/hB6kz
And he stood up for all of these positions years before Hillary did.
Actively fought for them in the face of conservitard obstruction.
Hillary changed to these positions after Bernie’s poll numbers started going up.
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Britain’s Biggest Secret – The Black Victorians
Pictured above is the Higdon family. This photograph was taken in the year 1898 in Britain. That is all we know about them.
Who were the Black Victorians? Mainstream history has virtually erased them from our minds and history books. We have been filled with images of slavery in America and across the world, but why is it that this chapter in black history was skipped? Why isn’t it equally common knowledge that in the midst of all of that darkness there was light, also.
Never before seen photos were uncovered, giving us over 200 images of glances into our past. Many of the photos did not include names or any details whatsoever, cloaking these people in mystery for all of time.
At one point in history, people of color were included in high society and walked the cobbled streets of Britain. The women wore intricate, voluminous gowns and wore their hair in curls and chignons. The men in suits and fair business. This may not have been the case for all black people in Britain, but for some it was.
The Victorian Era was ruled under Queen Victoria, an era that is described as an opulent culture, although there were underlying bouts of poverty and child labor. History would like you to believe that black people didn’t arrive in Britain until 1948 during “The Empire Windrush”, when many Jamaican descendants entered the country, but that is not so. There has been proof to suggest otherwise. There is documentation that proves that it wasn’t uncommon to see black faces at a Shakespeare show. We’ve been there all along, humming softly in the background.
These images prove that you can’t take mainstream history at face value. Take the time to look behind the curtain and uncover OUR history. It’s as if our ancestors are just waiting for us to seek them out.
Who were the Black Victorians?
To see more of these images check out this video reel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwrYUzPqI
Happy Black History Month.
Tldr: there were high class black people in British society as early as at least 1898. History has erased them and we have no written record of their names.
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Yay! Unyay!
I turned on my RiscPC and lo, “Thwooop” it went.
Up popped:
RISC OS 4.02
And then things went a bit wrong as it ran out of memory (it used to have 64ish meg, now I think it’s got 12 thanks to death-of-battery), but it made it to the desktop.
And then I discovered that like many modern LCD monitors, the one I’m borrowing to test things has little to no knowledge of ancient ‘puters. I think I may need a VGA to HDMI converter that’ll handle any input, because I suspect it’s switching to something like 50Hz 640×480, or some other hideous mode, and the monitor just cheerfully says “Mode not supported”.
After a few abortive attempts to play games I thought “ah, but what about Xenon 2! That might work”.
*Splutch*
Oh well.
Still, the 115v mode on the power supply seems to work, there were no hot or burny smells, I think that one counts as a win.
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$tone Cold Killa
New fave
SAVAGE
Sadness – I can’t (quickly) find any sources, and whilst not being one to hugely trust reddit, lurking in the comments was:
“I googled it in Chinese and it appears to originate from Chinese sources, not Taiwanese ones, and certainly not reputable ones. I’m going to take a wild guess and say it was made up on Chinese message boards by users who looked down not only on her progressive lifestyle (and I did see comments like that – “she should be starting a family” and whatever) but also on her politics, with her being the first Taiwanese president to support Taiwanese independence, or at least, to not be of the “One-China Policy” KMT party.”
…and gizmodo seem to agree.
It *is* interesting that something that’s made up to make someone look bad in one bit of the world, can make them look empowered in another bit, though. :)
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Casual reminder that working off the clock is illegal. Unless you’re salaried or authorized for overtime there is no reason for you to stay late. None. Your employers know this, too.
Coming over here from Europeland one of the things that’s most bizarre is this concept people seem to have that they need to be working all the damn time. For nothing. If I’m working I’m damn well being paid. I don’t mind the odd 10 minutes here or there, but if you want me to be doing work, you are damn well paying me.
I am super interested in my job, but [company] is being reimbursed for my effort by [customer], and I am having some of that money for myself, thanks*.
* When I want to feel like I’m purely giving back to society, that’s what volunteering is for.