A racist woman is not a feminist; she doesn’t care about helping women, just the women who look like her and can buy the same things she can.
A transphobic woman is not a feminist; she is overly concerned with policing the bodies and expressions of others.
A woman against reproductive rights — to use bell hook’s own example, and an issue close to your heart — is not a feminist; she prioritizes her dogma or her disgust over the bodies of others.
An ableist woman is not a feminist; she holds some Platonic ideal of what a physically or mentally “whole” person should be and tries to force the world to fit inside it.
Last semester, I hit a guy who grabbed my butt, after continuous warnings not to touch me in that way and even an explanation of “I have PTSD, I don’t handle random touching, especially random sexual touching well”. His argument was that he was gay so…
Toronto-based editor Lyndsay Kirkham has started a firestorm this week after overhearing what was apparently an incredibly sexist conversation between IBM executives at lunch — and live-tweeting it.
Unaware that they were transmitting sexist nonsense to cyberspace, the IBM executives openly discussed “why they don’t hire women.” If you take Kirkham’s account at its word, it actually gets way worse.
Toronto-based editor Lyndsay Kirkham has started a firestorm this week after overhearing what was apparently an incredibly sexist conversation between IBM executives at lunch — and live-tweeting it.
Unaware that they were transmitting sexist nonsense to cyberspace, the IBM executives openly discussed “why they don’t hire women.” If you take Kirkham’s account at its word, it actually gets way worse.
Toronto-based editor Lyndsay Kirkham has started a firestorm this week after overhearing what was apparently an incredibly sexist conversation between IBM executives at lunch — and live-tweeting it.
Unaware that they were transmitting sexist nonsense to cyberspace, the IBM executives openly discussed “why they don’t hire women.” If you take Kirkham’s account at its word, it actually gets way worse.
Toronto-based editor Lyndsay Kirkham has started a firestorm this week after overhearing what was apparently an incredibly sexist conversation between IBM executives at lunch — and live-tweeting it.
Unaware that they were transmitting sexist nonsense to cyberspace, the IBM executives openly discussed “why they don’t hire women.” If you take Kirkham’s account at its word, it actually gets way worse.
So sometimes I wonder about why I keep e-mails forever. And then as I’m trying to work out why I’m so very broken up about someone I’d not spoken to for years dying, I flick through.
And there, at one of the most awful points in my life, are a stream of e-mails between me and her. She’d broken up with her partner, I was at best a car-crash of a mess. And we talked. A lot.
I’d forgotten.
So that explains the hot mess I am this evening.
I think I’ll stop posting now and try and find something…less…share-y for a bit.
So, many years ago I ran a mailing list. I’m still friends with / in contact with quite a few people from it. Indeed, several of my closest friends came about through that list.
But there were tens of people on it (it was a small list) that I’d lost contact with. Years ago I mailed a friend – and got a bounce message – she worked at ARM when I knew her and I just assumed that she’d moved on and that mailing address had gone. I was saying that I’d be over in Cambridge and if she wanted to meet up that’d be cool. It had long ago reached the level of friendship of people who’ve little in common anymore but who knew each other and could probably manage a reminiscing over coffee happily.
And today, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I decided to just search for her name.
And up popped google with the answer – a just giving page. She died. Probably before I e-mailed her back then. I knew she had some cardiac issues – or at least had some vague notion (back then I probably knew more, but it was one of those vaguely lurking in my head issues), but it wasn’t something we’d deeply discussed.
I don’t really know what to say about it all. It has, unsurprisingly, left me feeling somewhat sad. It doesn’t achieve anything, but I’ve donated some money to the cause chosen by the company at which she worked – which was probably a cause she’d support. Really, what I want to do is gather all my friends around and let them all know how fucking awesome they all are.
So, we’ve had a couple of friends staying for the last two days. They’re over from the States and a while back asked if they could drop in sort of on their way home, before visiting a family member / London. They’d clearly heard how awesome Bristol is and wanted to visit :)
Anyhow, to prepare for their visit meant finding the bedroom again. The front bedroom (ironically the ‘master’ of the house’s bedrooms and also the one we use least (it faces the road rather than the woods)) had been gradually filled with crap. Crap for the charity shops. Crap for e-bay. Crap that should have gone in the bin, and boxes and boxes of stuff we’d not unpacked, but that we’d also declared would not go into the attic to just sit there until it had been sorted.
This visit was, thankfully, arranged with enough time that we actually did it. We went through the boxes. We threw out, recycled, charity-shopped and charity-furniture-group’d so much stuff that the room now looks incredibly spacious. I can actually see myself being able to recover the chaise* in the space up there.
There’s a few boxes, but they’re things that shouldn’t be chucked, things that can’t be unpacked here because the desk in the office isn’t quite big enough, and still a box of stuff to go on ebay when I get the time / chance.
Anyhow, we had a very nice time with our visitors – took them to the Roman Baths, out to dinner at ‘Same, Same, but Different’ on their first afternoon here, and then on a whirlwind tour of Brizzle on the second day – breakfast from Hart’s Bakery, a visit to the M-shed, the Harbourside, a quick look at Bristol Central Library (so pretty inside the reference room and entry way**) up to Clifton village, on to the Downs (for a picnic and a chat), then down to the river near where we live… fed them Bristol’s best Fish and Chips with some nice cider whilst relaxing on the deck, and then back into the house for a quick episode of Miranda as the evening faded.
It’s difficult though. I mean, there’s so much we didn’t show them; Stokes Croft, the Cube, the Arnolfini (which we just wandered past), the Watershed, Gloucester Road… it’s so hard to cram what we love about Bristol into one day. Still, without making it all running about the place, it was a nice day and I think they had fun, which is really the point.
So all good really.
Now we just need to keep the house as tidy as it is now – and I need to get back to decorating.
* which I note I’ve never got a picture of, so I must do that before I start…
…although I still don’t strictly understand what is original structure on it, and what is later additions, and how the hell it originally looked
** Really sadly, the Book Hive exhibit had finished:
I realized “Hey, I can do incline push-ups on the counter in the break room!” (which was marvelous because it’s easy to motivate myself to exercise for a few minutes at work ‘cause it’s not work)… and then my left elbow reminded me that it does the same thing my left hip does when I try sit-up…
I would presume you’ve had all the information and advice you can shake a stick at, but if you’ve any particular physioterrorist questions, I could ask the one at work. I mean, he’s an Emergency Physio Practitioner, so this might be a bit out of his ballpark, but he’s very into evidence based practice so probably would have potentially useful stuff.
Doubt it’s a terribly useful offer, but it’s there :)
So, our poor old media server dates from 2004ish. Although most of the hardware in it I think dates from 2003 (apart from the selection of hard disks). Last night, for reasons that have yet to be explained, the power supply circuit which feeds the upstairs and the ‘outbuilding’ tripped. I’m yet to work out what caused it because everything I can see is still working. Everything I’ve tried has come on without complaint…
Except the aged media PC which perked up and switched on but declined to join the network. It has no attached screen (nor keyboard) so this afternoon I pulled it into the house and lugged it up the stairs. It’s fairly hefty being a midi-tower basically filled with cheap hard disks.
I plugged it in and it passed POST and then sat at detecting hard disks. Attempting to coax it into setup made it just sit there more. Muttering dark curses at the lack of a UPS I rebooted it and just as I was about to give up, up came all the hard disks and lo it sat waiting cheerfully at a ‘I failed to boot last time, would you care for me to try a recovery mode’ prompt. A quick cycle through and check of the hard disks and it was back up and running.
I suspect what happened is this:
– Power went out causing a shutdown of an unfriendly variety.
– Machine came on and went URK! I must check my disks!
– Tried to check disks before booting but because there is a lot of storage in there and it’s not a very fast machine it takes a loooong time.
– I gave up trying to access it because it wasn’t appearing on the network, powered it down… and then the rest is tedious.
– First time I turned it on I was expecting failure so didn’t apply as much patience as I should have waiting for disks to be detected.
Still, it’s making me go back to thoughts of buying a UPS. Even a dinky one that basically has enough power for the computer just to shut down politely, that’d be nice.
Stacie B. London with her 1969 R60US BMW motorcycle filming, “Way of Life” in Lancaster, CA.
Stacie is a lovely lady, intelligent, an amazing host, and a great ambassador for motorcyclists and women riders. Photo by Paige Craig (iampaigecraig.com).
The big problem with these photos is they make me miss my motorbike so much. Then I end up browsing ebay and carandclassic and having bad, bad thoughts.
I don’t even dig motorcycles and I love that era of bike. So much so that I came up with a convoluted reason to have bikes styled after that era in a bit of futuristic fanfic.
The 1960s really was an awesomely good period of automotive design. Not in terms of safety or efficiency, no, but in sheer bloody good looks.
