Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • A friend said that “being trans and voting Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.” I’d add to that.. claiming to be a cis ally of trans folks and voting Republican is like eating at KFC and then claiming that you want no harm to come to chickens…

  • shadesofmauve:

    tinierpurplefishes:

    pyoorkate:

    askawelfarecaseworker:

    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.

    The US attitude toward work and work ethic is honestly really weird, and pretty unhealthy and dysfunctional.

    Yup. Thank you, puritans!

    I’ll never forget the WSJ article I read on the plane back from Japan, talking about how France might “finally” raise the hours of it’s work week. The article just assumed that this was a good thing in every way, and that not doing so was holding the country ‘back.‘ It totally ignored why the 35 hour work week was initially instituted (to combat unemployment), but even more, it seems to ignore what seems to me to be the defining mark of the march of civilization: human beings having to spend less time working for subsistence. Seriously, all the ‘great leaps’, like agriculture and automation, have basically made huge societal change by reducing the working hours necessary to live. ‘Free time’ is when you get arts and innovation. We ALL want to work less, right? Or at least, to do less work that feels like, well, work?

    AND YET.

    My aim is to get to a point where I only have to work a little. Or ideally, I don’t *have* to work, it’s just something to keep me from getting too caught up in building some device to sink Australia and ending up some kind of supervillain… 

    Course the tricky thing is that I also want to get to that point without doing too much work, or anything hideously unethical. Which has spoilt the plan somewhat.

  • Bonus yay/unyay

    I think I may, just may, finally, have trimmed enough material off the back of the turntable mat that I can actually play most records. I will have to get a new mat at some point, and I’m slightly confused by the fact that pictures of the thing show it with a massive-great-thick mat which clearly won’t work at all on mine.

    For example:

    Picture of an SL-6 Turntable that's not mine

    Mine has had to be created, more or less, by turntable mat beam epitaxy. I’ve trimmed it so bloody thin you can barely see it in places.

    Still, the turntable is now working. So yay.

    Of course, I’ve now discovered that it can’t play one of the albums I own without covering the sensor – it can’t cope with the pale pink Taffy lixiviate album at all – scanning the disk and then giving up completely.

    Also yay/unyay:

    Lots of waves and smiles for Rebecca today…

    …but she’s still leaking. I’ve tightened up the wiper spindle onto the rubber, but I think I’m going to need to buy some silicone sealant to run around the base of it.

  • Without question the Supreme Court should be at the center of this election, and a new vacancy puts it there. Americans deserve to know what kind of justices a candidate would appoint, and the 2016 elections will have an enormous impact on the Court’s future. But what this election will not decide is who gets to replace Justice Scalia. That happened in 2012, when the American people elected President Obama to another four-year term that still has 11 months remaining. Once the president nominates, the Senate must take seriously its constitutional obligation to give that nominee a fair hearing and a timely vote. They owe it to Justice Scalia and his philosophy of obligation over outcome. And as stewards of our democratic institutions, they owe it to the American people.

    ? We Already Had an Election to Decide Who Gets to Appoint the Next Supreme Court Justice. It was in 2012.

    Elections have consequences. As Scalia was so fond of saying after he halted the Florida recount and installed George W. Bush in the presidency: get over it.

    (via wilwheaton)

  • Untitled post 9831

    We are all made of stars… on Flickr.

  • Untitled post 9834

    Nothing says “I live in America now” quite like changing the tap on the transformer on your valve radio… on Flickr.

    Nothing says “I live in America now” quite like changing the tap on the transformer on your valve radio…

  • Untitled post 9837

    kateoplis:

    “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 

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • eviltessmacher:

    berniesandersdaily:

    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.