You should read this for 9/30/2017:
Art
How Bewitched Was Written as a Gay Allegory Robert Pela interviewed Elizabeth Montgomery in The ADVOCATE on July 30, 1992: “Bewitched is sort of a gay allegory: the story of a different person in this case, a witch who’s being told that she can’t tell anyone who or what she really is. It’s the ultimate closet story?”
Elizabeth Montgomery responded:
Don’t think that didn’t enter our minds at the time. We talked about it on the set certainly not in production meetings that this was about people not being allowed to be what they really are. If you think about it, Bewitched is about repression in general and all the frustration and trouble it can cause. It was a neat message to get across to people at that time in a subtle way.
Books, Writing, and Language
Via BoingBoing: The Visual History of Type author Paul McNeil selects and dissects his six favourite faces
America needs the humanities more than ever. So why have we a abandoned theme?
Identifying high-quality information (and knowing what makes it high-quality) and communicating complicated or abstract ideas from multiple perspectives are at least as important to our digital future as the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) have been to the industrial age.
I’m part of the world’s oldest living culture, but could I kill a zombie with a boomerang? “No matter what your tribe is, if you haven’t noticed the wattle flowering in this season or can’t remember what that indicates about the fish in the river, then you’re going to have a bad apocalypse.”
Seattle Needs to Ask Itself: What is the Point of a City?
To boldly go for it: why the split infinitive is no longer a mistake. Not, mind you, that it ever was wrong to split an infinitive; we don’t actually have an infinitive verb form in English; we use the proposition to + verb to create one. But Latin has an infinitive form, so Victorian idiots gramaticists decided English must work the way Latin works, and made up silly rules to support their fetish.
Journaling for Writers Journaling is a fabulous way to relieve stress, freewrite, and prepare yourself for later writing. Consider starting a journal now as prep for NaNoWriMo.
Food and Drink
How to Make the Best Tomato Sauce From Fresh Tomatoes. This really is about fresh tomato sauce, not sauce meant for eating later and thus canning or freezing.
History and Archaeology
Archaeologists uncover ancient trade network in southern Vietnam
We knew some artifacts were being moved around but this shows evidence for a major trade network that also included specialist tool-makers and technological knowledge,” Catherine Frieman, lead researcher and an expert in ancient stone tools, was quoted by [Antiquity] as saying. “It’s a whole different ball game.
Law, Order, and The State
The DOJ’s new anti-gay legal posture just got shut down in federal court. On Tuesday the 26 of September in Zarda v. Altitude Express. The case involved a now deceased former employee (Don Zarda; his estate is continuing his suit) suing his former employer for sexual orientation discrimination in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights act (Title VII). The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are on opposite sides on the case; the DOJ, in it’s current anti-queer rights stance is opposed by the EEOC who support including sexual orientation under the umbrella of Title VII. In July the current DOJ filed an amicus brief in the Zarda case, opposting the EEOC’s position (and that of the previous administration). Here’s a sample of the attorney for the DOJ’s argument:
Judge Gerard Lynch, who asked if it is “sort of OK” to discriminate on the basis of gender, Mooppan said that employers are allowed to fire employees for out-of-work sexual behaviors, such as being promiscuous, and that there are “real, physical” differences between men and women.
“The critical difference, your honor, is that discrimination requires treating people who are similarly situated differently,” Mooppan said.
In this case, as in the earlier case involving a baker and a cake for a same-sex wedding, the DOJ was not consulted or included in the original suits; the DOJ inserted itself via amicus briefs into both cases.
This is important because if the case, or any of the several other similar cases hinging on sexual orientation and workplace discrimination being brought by the EEOC do appear before the Supreme Court, the DOJ would represent the government.
This Slate article does a good job of explaining some of the problems with the DOJ’s approach (and their attorney).
President Obama’s Final Numbers
The numbers are nearly all in now. What they show about what really happened during the eight years that Barack Obama was president is sometimes different from what politicians claimed.
But now we have a reasonably complete statistical picture of the Obama years, which began in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and ended with the highest level of household income ever recorded.
Pay It Forward
How you can help hurricane victims in Puerto Rico
Target raises minimum hourly wage to $11, pledges $15 by end of 2020
Science and Technology
Folks, It’s Time to Delete the Facebook News Feed
Introducing Genie: The powerful new digital ‘friend’ Deakin University will give to every student
Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars
Boedaspis Trilobite
Study Shows That Women Can Retain And Carry DNA From Every Man They Have Sexual Intercourse With
💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰
10 Months After Election Day, Feds Tell States More About Russian Hacking
Trump calls Colin Kaepernick a ‘son of a b*tch’ during Alabama stump speech. Keep in mind that the initial protest by former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, which involved him sitting on the bench during the national anthem, was in protest of police brutality against black communities. As 49ers teammate Eric Reid explains, Reid joined Kaepernick in taking a knee during the anthem “we came to the conclusion that we should kneel, rather than sit, the next day during the anthem as a peaceful protest. We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy.”
An open letter to President Trump addressing his comments about football players truly originated with astronaut and former NFL player Leland Melvin.
Michael Hayden, a four-star general who served in the military for 39 years and went on to serve as national security adviser and head the CIA : “I know something about the flag … put me down with Kaepernick. The op-ed is persuasive and points at 💩🔥💰’s exploitive rhetoric before concluding: “As a 39-year military veteran, I think I know something about the flag, the anthem, patriotism, and I think I know why we fight. It’s not to allow the president to divide us by wrapping himself in the national banner. I never imagined myself saying this before Friday, but if now forced to choose in this dispute, put me down with Kaepernick.”
How Trump is helping to save our democracy
“Millions of people are without food, water, and electricity and [💩🔥💰] is tweeting about what’s owed to Wall Street. FFS.” Puerto Rico is in a state of devastation; 💩🔥💰 is <ahref=”https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/26/trump-puerto-rico-crisis-massive-debt>going on about Wall Street and massive debt, instead of expediting aid and support for the future to repair completely destroyed roads, bridges and other infrastructure, in a U.S. territory inhabited by U.S. citizens.
And of course 💩🔥💰 has refused to waive the Jones Act, which places a surcharge on goods and service sent to Puerto Rico or requires that “hat goods transported between U.S. ports be shipped on vessels built, majority-owned and manned by Americans. Think of it as a legally sanctioned shakedown for U.S. shipping interests.” This act should be repealed; it’s protectionism, and it’s exploitive. John McCain has tried to have it repealed.
“It is unacceptable to force the people of Puerto Rico to pay at least twice as much for food, clean drinking water, supplies and infrastructure due to Jones Act requirements as they work to recover from this disaster,” McCain wrote.
“Now, more than ever, it is time to realize the devastating effect of this policy and implement a full repeal of this archaic and burdensome Act,”
Finally Mr. “Let’s screw over the world to benefit me, my friends [sic] and family” has decided to waive the Jones Act.
Instead of blaming hurricane-damaged Puerto Rico for “debt” 💩🔥💰 could pay what he owes: “Instead of using Puerto Rican families as scapegoats and bargaining chips for the disastrous Republican budget process that will likely lead to a government shutdown, he should pay back the nearly $33 million he owes Puerto Rican taxpayers after yet another one of his businesses defaulted on the island.” That’s right, he defaulted on 33 million dollars in taxes he owed when yet another Trump business failed.
USNS Comfort hospital ship, supposedly ‘on the way,’ is set to deploy Friday:
[💩🔥💰] devoted the entirety of his limited intellectual capacity this weekend to pouring salt on the festering wounds of America’s culture wars when he should have been thinking about saving American lives in Puerto Rico.
That’s what the popular vote loser was doing while the woman who won the popular vote was already anticipating a crisis in the making Sunday morning and urging Trump and other administration officials to deploy the hospital ship.
💩🔥💰 invites the NBA champions the Warriors to the White House. Warriors guard Stephen Curry on Friday, 9/22/2017 said he wouldn’t go, and would vote “no” at the team meeting.
That we don’t stand for basically what our president has — the things that he’s said and the things that he hasn’t said at the right times — that we won’t stand for it. By acting and not going, hopefully that will inspire some change when it comes to what we tolerate in this country, what is accepted and what we turn a blind eye toward. It’s not just the act of not going, there are things you have to do in the back end that you have to push that message into motion.
You can talk about all the different personalities that have said things and done things — from Kaepernick to what happened with Michael Bennett to all sorts of examples of what has gone on in our country that has led to change. We’re all trying to do what we can using our platforms, using our opportunities to shed light on that. That’s kind of where I stand on that. I don’t think us going to the White House will miraculously make everything better, but this is my opportunity to voice that.
After Curry’s statement, 💩🔥💰 on Saturday the 23rd of September, 2017 💩🔥💰 withdrew the invitation via Twitter. The invitation, 💩🔥💰 tweeted, “has been withdrawn” because, “going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team” and, “Stephen Curry is hesitating.”
Curry wasn’t hesitating, he was exceedingly clear about his “No.” 💩🔥💰 isn’t going to waste a perfectly good opportunity to lie. As Warriors coach Steven Kerry notes “Steph wasn’t “hesitating”. He made it clear he wouldn’t go. Second, as I joked to the media Saturday, it was like the president was trying to break up with us before we broke up with him.” Yep; pretty much exactly that.
“But the emails!”At Least 6 [💩🔥💰] White House Advisers Used Private Email Accounts, including Jared Kushner and Ivana Trump.
