Lagardner

Early in the morning on July 6, 2013, a train carrying crude oil derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.

The explosive train derailment that killed at least five people and left dozens missing in a Canadian lakeside town focused attention on North America's skyrocketing use of rail to transport its booming oil production.

In the realm of the popular mythology of the American West, food rarely comes to the fore. At most, we generally see a token saloon and the barkeep who keeps whistles wet but otherwise amounts to little more than set dressing. But the truth is, people who boarded a westward-bound train were able to eat pretty darn well. This was thanks to entrepreneur Fred Harvey, who launched a successful chain of restaurants (called Harvey House) along the Santa Fe railway and provided fortune seekers access to fine dining on the frontier. And at each location, patrons were served in the dining rooms by an elite force of waitresses known as Harvey Girls, a corps of women who helped settle the West and advance the stature of women in the workforce.

While the American West of the 19th century was a place for great opportunity, it lacked creature comforts, namely access to quality dining. Here, English-born entrepreneur Fred Harvey saw a chance to launch a business. Working with the nascent Santa Fe railway, he opened a lunchroom at the Florence, Kansas, train depot in 1878. The first location was so successful that additional locations were opened up along the line and by the late 1880s, there was a Fred Harvey restaurant every hundred miles—America’s first chain dining establishment. Strict standards ensured that a Fred Harvey meal was consistent at each location. Bread was baked on-site and sliced three-eights of an inch thick; orange juice was squeezed fresh only after it was ordered; alkali levels of the water were tested to ensure high-quality brewed coffee; menus were carefully planned out so that passengers would have a variety of foods to select from along their travels. Harvey took advantage of ice cars to transport highly perishable items—fruit, cheeses, ice cream, fresh fish—to the harsh environs of the southwest. For railroad towns eking by on fried meat, canned beans and stale coffee, the Harvey House chain was nothing short of a godsend.

Then there was the factor of the service. After the team of waiters in the Raton, New Mexico, location were involved in a brawl, Harvey fired the lot and replace them with young women. It was a radical idea. As far as respectable society in the late 1800s was concerned, a woman working as a waitress was considered to be as reputable as a prostitute. What else were the high-moraled society to think of single girls working in places that served alcohol, soliciting orders from male patrons? But this facet of Harvey’s venture could possibly succeed if the same structure and standardization used in the kitchen was applied to the serving staff. Placing newspaper ads calling for intelligent girls of strong character between the ages of 18 and 30, Harvey put applicants through a 30-day boot camp. By the time their training was over, they had the skills to serve a four-course meal within the thirty-minute meal stop a train would take at each station. The trial run at Raton was so successful that women replaced the male wait staff at all Fred Harvey establishments.

When working the dining room, Harvey Girls were forbidden to wear jewelry and makeup. They wore a conservative uniform: black ankle-length dresses with Elsie collars, white bib aprons. Waitresses lived in a dormitory supervised by a matron who strictly enforced a ten o’clock curfew. Working 12-hour-shifts six and seven day weeks, when a waitress wasn’t serving a customer, she was busy keeping the dining room spotless. In this way, the Harvey House functioned as a corporate chaperone that was able to provide the waitressing profession considerable social respectability.

Although being a Harvey Girl was hard work, there were considerable benefits. In terms of pay, they were at the top of their profession: $17.50 a month plus tips, meals, rooming, laundry and travel expenses. (By comparison, waiters made, on average, $48 a month, but have to pay for room and board. Men in manufacturing made about $54 a month, but all living expenses came out of pocket.) Not only were these women able to live and work independently, but they were able to save money, either to send home to family or to build a nest egg for themselves. And given that the West had a higher male-to-female ratio, they had improved odds of finding a husband. ”The move west in the late 1800s and early 1900s was, for men, a change to break with the past, look at the world beyone the family porch, and being a new life,” Lesley Polling-Kempes writes in her exhaustive study on the Harvey Girls. “Fred Harvey gave young women a similar opportunity. A sociologist could not have invented a better method by which the West could become inhabited by so many young women anxious to take part in the building of a new region.”

Women of loose morals and rough-and-tumble, pistol-packing mamas are among the stereotypical images of women that abound in the literature and movies. And so too did the Harvey Girls attain their own mythic status, fabled to have married business magnates and to have inspired the ire of the local dance hall girls. The waitresses even inspired poetry, such as the fllowing by Leiger Mitchell Hodges, published in 1905:

I have viewed the noblest shrines in Italy,

And gazed upon the richest mosques of Turkey—

But the fairest of all sights, it seems to me,

Was the Harvey Girl I saw in Albuquerque.

The idea of the Fred Harvey’s waitresses as a force of womanhood that civilized the West saw its fullest expression in the 1946 musical The Harvey Girls. With music by Johnny Mercer, it’s a perfectly hummable treatment of the wild west, although rife with its share of historical inaccuracies. And the musical/comedy treatment detracts from the fact that these women worked a long, hard day. But for the sight of synchronized table setting alone, it’s well worth a watch.

As airplane and automobile travel gained in popularity, business declined in the years following World War II. By the late 1960s, Fred Harvey restaurants were no more and the waitresses who kept the train passengers fed were the image of a bygone America. And while they were simply hard working women, their role as community builders is not to be underestimated. “Harvey Girls became women well educated in the needs, moods, affectations and habits of people from all over the United States,” Poling-Kempes writes. “Harvey Girls were among the most upwardly mobile women of the American West, crossing social boundaries in their daily routines, playing the role of mother and sister to travelers rich and poor, famous and infamous.”

Sources

Fried, Stephen. Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West. New York: Random House, 2010.

Henderson, James. Meals by Fred Harvey. Hawthorne: Omni Publications, 1985.

Poling-Kempes, Lesley. The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West. New York: Paragon House, 1989.

This comic is about a man and his apple.

1. It is interestingly ironic how yoga-folks and other Eastern-influenced-spirituality people always say things like, “Listen to your body” and “Your body knows what it needs.” Because aren’t you right back in the thick of Cartesian dualism when you start thinking that way? Huh? Huh, yoga teachers? (Excuse me, I have to go start a rumble at the yoga studio.)

2. I liked the Homeric dual and missed it when we moved on to the classical stuff in college. I only remember it ever being used to refer to oxen, though.

3. Speaking of oxen: Nora has a ton of stuffed animals on her bed, and they all have names and genders. We realized the other day that all of her ungulates (an okapi, a llama, a horse, a mountain goat, a buffalo) except one (a camel) are female. Something about hooves must read feminine to Nora when it comes to naming a new friend.

4. Blackhawks win! They won the thing! The big silver vase thing! I watched it at home and not at a bar, and on my computer and not on my television, but I still jumped around and high-fived everyone. “Everyone” was just LT and the cats, though, since Nora was in bed. Turns out neither LT nor the cats are particularly enthusiastic about sports-related high-fives, so I really missed Nora in that moment. Two goals in 17 seconds! Fuckin’ A!

5. (This horrified her, by the way. Very strong sense of sportspersonship in that girl. She is still talking about it.)

6. Besides not being a stupid tantrummy baby, Nora would never treat a hockey stick like that. She was annoyed that I did not get her entire stick in this shot, but I didn’t have time to take another one before class started. Deal with it, kid.

7. My house is a wreck right now because we finally got serious about saving our money and then handing it over to a general contractor. Goodbye, pink-green-white kitchen! Your Izod-esque ‘80s-golf-outfit colors will soon be no more. Goodbye, disturbingly scalloped window-thing, most likely lovingly made on someone’s basement table saw but seriously quite ugly! Goodbye fake laminate (“Hi, I’m a picture of wood glued on top of wood”) everywhere!

We adore this house, but the kitchen was always a bit hard to deal with mentally. After cooking in it for two years, I can say that the layout is basically okay, just the colors and the materials are displeasing. I have all these friends who say, “It’s really not that bad” and yes it is that motherfucking bad! Look at that picture! Look at the pink! Come on, son.

You can barely see them, but over the stove are two tiles that are not just pink, but decorated. One is a picture of wax beans, and one is a picture of grapes. What should I make for dinner tonight? *stands at the stove until inspiration strikes* I know! Wax beans and grapes!

8. Does anyone actually eat wax beans? As far as I know they are only in three-bean salad. Three-bean salad is disgusting and should not exist. As a long-time vegetarian I have many bad memories of three-bean salad at various BBQs where it and chips were the only things to eat. Dark days, the 1980s! Pink kitchens! Three-bean salad!

9. I have one good memory of three-bean salad, though. Can I put you down for garbanzo?

10. Sorry! Wax bean digression! And now back to your disaster porn.

11. This is a built-in pantry thing, which we actually like. We would like it a lot more if it weren’t green, so it’s just getting torn out and replaced.

12. Guess what is under the built-in! MORE PINK TILE! You can almost feel the despair coming off Demolition Bald Guy.

13. (I feel bad about including Demolition Bald Guy and his coworker in some of these pics, but I could not resist. Please don’t stalk random Demolition Bald Guys from Chicago.)

14. Death to scalloped window thing!

15. Here are the rest of the decorated tiles that turned out to be lurking under the cabinets. Probably original to the house or nearly so, based on this eBay listing found by LT.

16. “Hello, Franklin Tile Company, how can I help you? Yeah, we got birds or fruits and vegetables. Wax beans okay? How do you feel about grapes?”

17. The cats were locked in the basement while world-ending noises came from upstairs. This is Rocko, in the very farthest corner, behind a folded-up card table. He is almost dead of fright in this picture. Then he was released, found an entire room of his house destroyed for no reason, and now is even crazier than usual.

18. Wait, I changed my mind! Can you guys put everything back?

19. No? Okay.

20. To sum up: dust, restaurant food, backyard grilling, making tea in the bathroom like a hobo. Looking at eight million stoves online, getting confused by countertops and tile, realizing I don’t care very much about kitchen faucets.

—mimi smartypants is a modern streamlined faucet that adds contemporary flair and convenience to your kitchen and life.

 

 

 

urjabhi:

Concepts for “The Lord of the Rings Online” by Wesley Burt.

Global warming, habitat loss, wind turbines, and cats are factors, though scientists say that some threats hog the attention.

Cross-posted to Shameless.

Two days ago, there were rumblings. First, I heard that the American Medical Association’s science council had advised them against declaring “obesity” a disease.

My initial feeling was one of mild surprise – hadn’t they declared it a disease already? I honestly didn’t know, but given the way our culture and our doctors treat fat people – as diseased, as a burden on society, and possibly doomed to explode of sheer fatness – I would’ve assumed they had.

My second feeling was lack of surprise that the science council, after examining the evidence, was recommending not to declare “obesity” a disease, because everyone knows that the diagnostic tool used for defining “obesity,” the Body Mass Index, is too blunt to be used in the absence of other health indicators, right?

And because everyone knows that there is a sizable population of healthy – by any definition – fat people, right?

And because we also all know that illness is largely socially constructed, right?

No, not right. Wrong, in fact, because the next day the AMA went ahead and did exactly what their science council had advised them not to do, and declared that “obesity” – measured solely by a height-weight measurement, and defined by an imaginary line in the sand – to be a disease.

Here is why I have a problem with that.

First, what is a disease? Why do we define certain physical conditions as “diseases” and not others? You would think the answer would be “incontrovertible scientific evidence!”…and you would be wrong.

Diseases are defined partly on the basis of evidence that they impact a person’s ability to function, or cause suffering and death, but also partly (perhaps mostly) due to social and economic reasons.

What counts as a disease also changes over historical time, partly as a result of increasing expectations of health, partly due to changes in diagnostic ability, but mostly for a mixture of social and economic reasons…This has consequences for sufferers’ sense of whether they are…’ill’, but more concretely for their ability to have treatment reimbursed by health service providers.

(Emphasis mine.)

And, from the New York Times article on the AMA decision – see if you can spot the similarity:

Still, some doctors and obesity advocates said that having the nation’s largest physician group make the declaration would focus more attention on obesity. And it could help improve reimbursement for obesity drugs, surgery and counseling.

(Emphasis mine again.)

Imagine red, blinking, reindeer lights circling that quote. This is what I believe this new definition is about: defining a market (fat people who don’t want to be fat) and making it easier to sell things to them (drugs and surgeries and diet programs that promise to make them not-fat.)

If you can label a condition as a disease, it naturally follows that someone is going to develop a treatment for it, and people who suddenly realize they have an honest-to-goodness disease, and not merely a quaint variation on the human theme, are going to want to buy it. In this case, “people” represents a full third of the U.S. population. That’s over 100 million people, most of whom desperately do not want to be fat.

If you truly believe, in your heart of hearts, that “obesity” is a disease, then this is not a bad thing. In fact, it would seem to be a very, very good thing. I mean, fat is killing people! There’s an epidemic on, people! We’ve got to do something! Besides, people desperately want weight loss drugs, and they want them now. Pharmaceutical companies are simply trying to give people what they want. Capitalism in action. The system works!

And that might even be all well and good, provided the treatments actually work and do not harm people, and provided there are regulations in place to ensure that before releasing them to the public. But let’s look at a little history, shall we?

Historical medical treatments for fat include:

–Thyroid hormone given to fat people with normal thyroids around 1900 – stopped being used for this purpose after causing hyperthyroidism
–2,4-Dinitrophenol – withdrawn from the market in 1938 due to causing fatal hyperthermia
–Amphetamines – addictive, with many unpleasant side effects; brand name Obetrol was removed from the market in 1973
–Fen-phen – withdrawn from the market in 1997 after it was suspected of causing heart problems
–Redux – withdrawn from the market in 1997 after it was suspected of causing heart problems
–Meridia – withdrawn from the market in 2010 due to risk of cardiovascular events and strokes
–Orlistat – still on the market; causes oily butt leakage, kidney damage, vitamin malabsorption, and modest weight loss

Maybe someday someone will come up with a safe, effective weight-loss drug, but since this experiment has been going on for over 100 years now, I’m not holding my breath.

In announcing their decision, the AMA offered up two seemingly reasonable options: either we define “obesity” as a disease so that fat people are no longer blamed for their condition and can receive appropriate medical care…or we don’t, and the stigma and lack of treatments continue.

This is a false dichotomy. There is a third option that has been conveniently left out of the discussion, though a vocal minority of fat people have been arguing for it since the late 1960s: what if fatness is neither a disease nor a cause for blame and stigma?

What if there are so many different reasons people are fat that it’s impossible to boil it down to “personal responsibility” and moral failure?

What if being fat is just the way some of us are, and while we deserve appropriate medical care for whatever actual diseases we might have, we don’t need blame, shame, or a cure for our very existence?

What if fatness is not a disease, let alone an epidemic? What if fatness is part of human biodiversity – yes, a trait that intersects and interacts with disease, just as other traits like sex, skin colour, and height do – but not something to be eradicated at all costs?

Well, then we might have trouble selling things to people. For the weight loss industry, this would be a very big problem indeed.

Though I don’t share their goals, I would prefer that, for people who want to lose weight, safe and effective weight loss approaches were available. But those treatments should be optional, not mandatory, and they should not be the only treatments offered to fat people who go to the doctor for a medical issue. Losing weight should not be a prerequisite to receiving medical care.

Another problem is that we’ve been trying, with increasing desperation, to find those approaches for the last hundred years, and we have failed. People are not thinner. Attempting to lose weight may even cause some to get fatter over time. And the stigma attached to being fat has gotten worse.

I don’t think this stigma will be helped by calling fatness a disease. The doctors who seem to believe it will apparently don’t live in the same world I do, where HIV, Type 2 diabetes, mental illness, and lung cancer – to name only a few – are all officially recognized as diseases, and have all been incredibly stigmatized.

They also don’t seem to think doctors are taking “obesity” seriously enough, despite numerous reports from fat people of health care providers providing weight loss advice over and above actual care, and evidence of considerable weight bias among those who treat fat patients. Again – apparently the AMA doesn’t live in the same world I do.

In my world, my body and I are an indivisible unit. I am an embodied self, not a problem to be solved – and I happen to be fat. My fatness is part genetic heritage, part cultural identity, part vital organ. And it is not going anywhere, no matter who decides to call it a disease.

buy this print!

Well the garden did change everyone's lives right

The Twitterverse was, uh, aTwitter with news about a Superman/Wonder Woman book. Really, DC? This is the best you can do? Sure, the promo art is pretty, but, really? Wonder Woman? With Superman? And relegated to second billing, at that?

Supes belongs with Lois. Period.

To DC Comics, I say:

You want to give Diana a second book, great! Good for you! About time! More than about time! But this is not how to do it. It's so not how to do it. It's.... well, it's everything that's wrong with females in comics, especially DC comics these days. Wonder Woman has been around for decades. She was born out of mythology that dates back centuries, millennia, even. She's part of your trilogy of Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman. She's iconic. And you're reducing her to playing second fiddle to her boyfriend (something I find ridiculous, that she's second fiddle to anyone, and that she's his girlfriend)? No. Just. No. I don't have enough words for how wrong this is. 

See, I get that you want to appeal more to female readers, but this is so not how to do it. You do it by creating more female characters who headline their own books and are so interesting, males as well as females want to read about them. You do it by respecting and showing that respect for your female characters on the level that you respect your male characters (though with how you've treated a lot of male characters in recent years, perhaps you are treating the females equally, now, or at least, treating the males the way you have the females for far too long). You do it by respecting female readers the same way you respect male readers (well, at least the fanboys who are your target demographic, because I fully understand that, along with being a female comics reader decades before that was fashionable, I aged out of the target age demographic a lot of years ago).

This is why I'm glad I haven't been reading either the Superman books or Wonder Woman in the New 52. I want Wonder Woman to be a big success. I want her to finally get a movie -- a great one! -- and/or a TV show (one along the lines of the amazing Arrow). I just don't think this is the right path to achieve that. It's wrongheaded and backward thinking, and not what Diana and her fans deserve. This book sounds like the sort of thing a well-meaning but clueless man would come up with.

This comic was all queued up, ready to be posted, and we dropped the ball!  We have no one to blame but ourselves…and maybe you guys.

Big news!

Pusheen’s first book is coming out this October, published by Touchstone / Simon & Schuster! We’re celebrating by holding an awesome pre-order giveaway (details below).

I Am Pusheen the Cat features some of the most popular comics from the website, including Reasons I Love Fall, Career Options for Your Cat, and Christmas To Do List, as well as a healthy serving (25 percent) of never-before-seen material that is sure to delight Pusheen’s fans.

You can pre-order your copy at the following locations:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

BAM!

IndieBound

★   PRE-ORDER GIVEAWAY  ★

Update: The giveaway has finished! All of the winners have been emailed.

Mars reveals its secrets, a powerful Midwestern storm is viewed from orbit, and a new type of star is discovered in this week's best space pictures.

Someone practically begged me to explain a throwaway sentence from a few entries ago, where I promised/threatened to explain why vegans are terrible at measuring things. If cooking bores you, bail now. I will be wearing a virtual apron for the next few paragraphs, as well as attempting to bitch about food blogs without naming names. (I consider that unsportsmanlike conduct.)

A very long time ago, I had an amazing vegetarian “meatloaf” (should I call it “deceit-loaf”? “Shamloaf” sounds weird) for Sunday pub lunch in Surrey, England. Since then I have been on-and-off obsessed with making one myself. I’ve tried several loaf-like recipes: this one is okay (I don’t really fuck with the flax seed, and I have been known to stick in Parmesan instead of nutritional yeast), this one was kind of crumbly and eh, and then there was the one that shall not be named, although I really need to go leave a (polite) blog comment on the page because it was such an epic fail in some basic ways.

First, the recipe made enough goop for a billion vegan meatloaves. It was like Jesus feeding the multitudes with loaves made of lentils and oats and no fishes anywhere. The mixture did not fit in my largest bread-baking bowl and I really should have known something was up once I had cooked THREE cups of lentils, added 2 cups of oats, 2 cups of walnuts, and a pound of thawed frozen vegetables, and miscellaneous other seasonings and things. That is a lot of STUFF.

In the comments of the can’t-measure-for-shit vegan blog, someone had even asked, “Does this just make one loaf?” and the author answered, “Yes, one loaf!” I don’t know what size loaf pans you have on Planet Vegan, but here on Earth there is no way. I smashed as much in as I could but still ended up putting a bunch of it down the sink, and I did not feel guilty because (a) I was pretty dubious about the single loaf even before it went into the oven, and (b) that was about sixty cents worth of lentils and oats, most likely. I know there are hungry people in the world but I do not know if they would appreciate this loaf. It was not good. My family was kind about it, even Nora, and I hustled to make sure-fire side dishes that we all enjoy (buttered orzo and roasted Brussels sprouts), but yuck.

If you have a palatable faux-loaf recipe, you can send it to me. Bonus points if it’s not vegan. I have nothing against eating vegan but I also have a sneaking suspicion that a vegetarian meatloaf could be greatly helped by an egg or a handful of cheese. It might help mitigate the sadness and overwhelming lentil-ness of said loaf. And it might also make us feel less like we are trapped in some dreary 1970s cookbook world, mashing up mung beans under our hanging macramé plant holders.

As long as I am crowdsourcing, does anyone else think I should worry about how I no longer seem to be able to fall asleep without my tiny little Ativan dose? It is hardly Trainspotting over here, but I will make a obsessive and fretful list anyway. (Go with your strengths!)

WHY IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL

1. I never take it in the daytime—any daytime anxiety seems to be handily managed by giving myself a stern talking-to.

2. I have never upped the dose. One 0.5-mg pill shuts up my brain and worries enough so I can read until I get sleepy, and then sleep.

3. Besides being a prescription substance, not that different from folks who “have” to take Benadryl or melatonin or chamomile tea, right?

WHY I’M BECOMING A LAZY IMMORAL DRUG ADDICT

1. See above: prevailing attitude toward mama’s little helpers, particularly in my bootstrappy organic-foods self-actualizing social circle.

2. (Side note: how did my friends get like this, anyway? This is the same social circle that 20 years ago was debating whether it was a “waste” to take a second tab of acid if you’ve already had 3 beers.)

3. I somewhat dislike the feeling of “having” to take a drug in order to achieve a normal bodily process like sleep. And it may be becoming a circlejerk of anxiety*—I am worried about getting so worried that I won’t be able to sleep, the drugs preempt that worry, etc.)

*Least fun circlejerk in history! And it takes forever. No one can relax enough to actually enjoy their handjobs.

(Nighttime sex doesn’t help me, by the way. LT will be naked and in dreamland afterwards and I will be climbing the walls and eventually reaching for the pill bottle. I enjoy his penis very much but apparently it is stimulating, not soothing.)

(Oh and I’m hardly drinking these days, so no one has to worry about me doing some kind of Edie Sedgwick thing.)

NOT AS ADVERTISED

TiVo suggested I record something called “Drug Kingpin Hippos,” and how could I say no. Before it actually got recorded I liked picturing hippos wearing fat gold chains and sunglasses, lounging around in smoky black rooms, playing poker surrounded by stacks of cash. HIPPOS GOT MONEY/MONEY THEY GOT/HIPPOS RUN NEW YORK. But LT and I watched it last night and it was actually about a Drug Kingpin’s Hippos, not Drug-Kingpin Hippos. Pablo Escobar apparently bought a bunch of exotic animals back when he was alive and rolling in cocaine cash, and all the animals have since been relocated except for the hippos. The hippos have multiplied (ohhhhhh yeah, hippo sex, hippos gonna freak you real slow, doin’ it hippostyle) and now there are hippos everywhere and Colombia is like “whoa fuck, too many hippos.” One big male hippo in particular took himself downriver and apparently is menacing innocent villagefolk and looking for a lady hippo, so the slightly-insane plan was to capture this hippo, dart it, castrate it, and airlift it back to Escobar’s old ranch, which is now a wildlife park. What you doin’ today, Oscar? Sedatin’, castratin’, and transportatin’ a hippopotamus, dawg. Ain’t no thang.

1. This stupid show couldn’t decide if it was about Pablo Escobar or a Colombian hippo problem. There was about twice as much archival footage of seized cocaine and cartel members riding around on dirtbikes, and I was continually fast-forwarding and saying GODDAMMIT, MORE HIPPOS.

2. What exactly is Colombia’s problem with having hippos? So what, you have a lot of hippos in your rivers. Charge people money to come look at them, teach your little kids to stay the fuck away, and be proud of your hippo plentitude. Africa has twice as many hippos that kill about 200 people a year, and you don’t hear them complaining. (Well, hippo victims can’t exactly complain. I meant that you don’t hear people who live in hippo-rich African countries going OH NO HELP WE HAVE SO MANY HIPPOS.)

3. Plus: baby hippos are SO CUTE. Make more! More hippos!

4. Okay, so when the show FINALLY got around to the big hippo tranquilizing scene, it took the veterinarians about six tries to get the darts to actually pierce the hippo skin. And get this, each time they missed someone had to wade into the swamp, avoid the charge of an (understandably) pissed-off hippo, and retrieve the unused tranquilizer dart, because the team had not brought enough of them. Really, Colombia? This is how you plan for a hippo castration? I am not impressed.

5. During all of this, the Colombian army stood around with machine guns over their shoulders, thinking, “Damn, this is the weirdest day ever.”

6. Once the hippo was finally unconscious, the vets got in there to take out its testicles and sew up the wound. Then the team used an earthmover to sort of shovel the hippo into a cage, which was airlifted (quite precariously) by an army helicopter.

7. Poor hippo.

8. Hippopotamus means “river horse” in Greek, but you already knew that. A hippo looks nothing like a horse, but the Greeks were kind of weird.

9. Like for instance Herodotus, who knew a guy who knew a guy who told him that there were big furry ants in India who dug up gold from the sand. Uh, okay dude. Herodotus is the ancient equivalent of that guy who refuses to check things on Snopes.

10. No word on what the Colombians did with the hippo testicles. (Ebay?)

—mimi smartypants, all alone, calls two hippos on the phone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world is on track to dangerous global warming, but some solutions could be implemented quickly, says International Energy Agency.

A seal in a kelp forest and lionfish on the hunt are among winning pictures of the University of Miami's annual underwater-photography contest.

feminspire:

alyssakorea:

Tumbling over the past year and a half has made me see the problems of gender roles that exist in media, but sometimes it gets to the point where I over analyze every single piece of television or film that I come across. (However this in no way means that I think feminist media criticism is wrong, or should be avoided!) Mostly I just over think everything.

I’ve thought about this a lot and I think the answer is MORE, and MORE DIVERSE female characters.

We’re used to having one or two female characters in a cast of mostly men, and hold them to a higher standard because of that. So all of feminism is resting on the shoulders of one female character - and that DOESN’T WORK. Because there isn’t one right way to be a woman.

If casts had more diversity of gender, we could have warrior women and non-warrior women, sexual women and non-sexual women, feminine and non-feminine, and mixtures of all of the above…all are completely legitimate ways to be a woman.

We’re used to seeing a lot of hypersexualized, scantily clad, one-dimensional stereotypes of women without stories or motives of their own. We respond by asking for characters that AREN’T THAT, but we may end up pushing too far in the opposite direction, and demonize traits like sexuality, conventional attractiveness, and traditional femininity as “sexist.” That’s why the most popular female characters are the ones that are most similar to male heroes - the Arya Starks - emotionally distant, unattached, solve their problems with violence, not remotely sexual. That’s fine too of course. I love Arya. It’s just not…the only way to be.

I don't usually post about this sort of thing. This is a blog where I review comics and sometimes chat about comics in general because reading and collecting comics is one of my hobbies.

But I'm a middle-aged, liberal feminist who has seen too much shit slung online and offline  that sometimes, I have to not ignore it the way I usually do. Some people will never get it and you'll never be able to convince them that they're bigoted douches. Yet sometimes, a person just has to try. Maybe someone might see themselves in my words and think next time before saying something stupid.

There's a war going on these days, and women are in the crosshairs. The post that inspired this post is on Stars and Garters and is about Kelly Sue DeConnick, a writer I know little about, though I did read her story arc in Supergirl a few years ago. It is a sad state of affairs that too many people, mostly male people, assume a woman's success is due to the men she knows.

At a time when men in Congress are trying to control the female reproductive system, and even a few women holding political office seem to have no clue how the female body works -- did they stop teaching basic biology in high school at some point? -- it seems silly to fuss over idiotic comments on social websites, but those mean-spirited, spiteful comments are symptoms of something bigger.

The internet allows for anonymity and it, like alcohol, strips away people's inhibitions. What they might be too cowardly or polite to say to someone's face, slips readily out through fingers on keyboards and touch screens, things I doubt they would say to their mothers. Now that male politicians and legislators are saying these stupid, hateful things, more men likely will feel encouraged to speak up in real life, too. And that's what really gets me. Every man and boy was born of a woman's womb. Even if that mother wasn't part of their life as they grew up, a woman was as responsible for their life as was a man, and to disrespect women is so very wrong on so many levels. The amount of hate and ignorance driving these people is mind boggling, especially when you add in the people who do it to fit in with their so-called peers. This is bullying, folks, plain and simple.

Some men who spew this sort of idiocy don't realize how hurtful their words can be. They're laughing and cyber bumping elbows with other idiots who share their immature, locker room mentality. They've never experienced the anxiety a woman might feel walking into a subway car full of men. In the same situation, they wouldn't be thinking "I could get raped tonight," but it's always in a woman's mind. They haven't had to deal with the discomfort of having men whistle at them and call obscenities at them. Those men think they're flattering the poor woman, but to the woman, those catcalls can feel like an invasion or worse, a prelude to something more, something worse, a threat or possibly a physical attack. Sure, there might be men who have experienced this -- the rise in gay bashing will attest to that -- but I doubt many straight men know this particular fear.

So, too, do the lewd comments feel like an attack, be they sneers at a cosplayer at a con or smack talk in a blog post's comments. Men take liberties with women, trying to put them in their place. But they'll do it to men they perceive as weak, especially the men who dare post in support of a woman.

To too many men, it is inconceivable that women are capable, competent, and talented. They can't believe a woman could rise to a high level success on their ability and talent alone. Sure, sometimes, it helps to know someone to open a door, but that's true for men, too. It's despicable for anyone to imply that anyone got ahead for who they know or who their relatives are, but it's an easy bet that this happens more to women than men.

All a true feminist wants is equality. Equal treatment. Fridge male and female characters equally. Objectify equally. ;) But also, more importantly, treat people, and characters, with respect. As you would want to be treated. Men can be feminists, too. Everyone has a stake in equal treatment and equal opportunities. And no one should be treated like a second class citizen. Certainly, they shouldn't be treated the way Kelly Sue DeConnick has been treated by the idiots, just because she happens to make a living writing comic books.

Today is 4th June 2013: exactly one hundred years ago ardent suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under the hooves of the King's horse at Derby Day. Her death four days later ensured her legacy as Britain's most prominent suffragette martyr. The Guardian reported today that MPs have called for a statue of Emily Davison in parliament. But I would question whether paying this type of homage to her is right?

Forty-one-year old Emily was a committed member of the WSPU, even concealing herself in the Houses of Parliament on census night in 1911. We still do not know whether her suicide was planned or on impulse; intriguingly she had bought a return train ticket. But there was also another side to Emily. She drew attention to her political views by throwing stones, committing acts of arson, and even violently attacking a stranger she had mistaken for an MP. 

Emily Davison depicted as an angel on the cover of The Suffragette. Do we risk excessively idealising her?

Emily Davison and militant suffragettes like her were affectionately nicknamed 'Outragettes' by the WSPU. In 1913, when lunatic and criminal men - but no women - were able to vote, many felt that words were useless; smashing windows, or their bodies was the only way to make their point. Dozens were arrested and irreparably damaged their health after force-feeding during prison hunger strikes. Their actions gained publicity, but were twisted by politicians and the press, as evidence that women were too hysterical to vote. 

A century after Davison's death, it has become fashionable to praise all suffragettes, without criticising the brutal means some women employed to make their point, and without recognising that there were many different women's suffrage societies, only a minority of whom used violence. We can still admire the courage of their convictions, if not always the means they used to publicise them.

Frank Meeres's new book, Suffragettes (Amberley, 2013) alludes to Edith Cavell's death in 1915 affecting the famously anti-women's suffrage Prime Minister Asquith far more than any actions of the suffragettes. 'She has taught the bravest man among us a lesson in supreme courage...a year ago we did not know it,' he commented. Only after the First World War, when women died for their country alongside men, did women finally gain the vote.

On the centenary of her death, I perceive Emily Davison as a committed and in some ways admirable figure, yet ultimately ambiguous. There is a difference between throwing stones at windows, daubing walls with slogans, and planting bombs, or, like Davison, sacrificing a life. No legislation, however important, should be bought with blood.

So there’s this 32-year-old Russian multimillionaire named Dmitry Itskov who wants to build robotic avatars for the human body that will contain an individual’s consciousness and personality. He was profiled in the New York Times over the weekend because his organization, the 2045 Initiative, is about to hold its second annual 2045 Global Future Congress on June 15–16 in New York City.

My first reaction when I read the NYT profile was: Are you serious? Really?

Yes, he’s serious. Here’s an excerpt from the 2045 website’s FAQ:

What are the main phases of the Avatar Project?

Among the featured life-extension projects, the first is to create a humanoid robot dubbed “Avatar”, and a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface system. The next phase consists of creating a life support system for the human brain and connect it to the “Avatar”. The final phase of this project is to create an artificial brain in which to transfer the original individual consciousness into.

There is a fourth step that we hope to attain, but is not part of our main goals right now. This fourth step is to create a hologram body, or a body of light.

If this sounds totally hokey and way too sci-fi to be real (and yes, the FAQ also references sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke), here are some of the initiative’s rebuttals:

History is littered with misconceptions professed by both laymen and great scientists. For example, “No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free”, stated King William I of Prussia, on hearing of the invention of trains, 1864. “That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced” (Scientific American, January 2, 1909). The physicist Lord Kelvin said in 1895 that, “flying machines heavier than air are impossible”.

Itskov and his initiative might have a point here, and I think his project could have some benefits. Funding scientific research into brain science, for one thing, is valuable.

But one question that pops up for me is this: What is consciousness? I think it’s no accident that transferring human consciousness into an avatar is “the final phase” of the project, because right now science doesn’t exactly know what consciousness is, biologically speaking. Yes, there has been plenty of research (and there will be plenty more) into the brain and consciousness, but there’s so much undefined about consciousness still. (For a really fascinating account of the science of consciousness read Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio.)

Secondarily, I was struck by the fact that Itskov’s 2045 Initiative and its conference are basically dominated by men. (Only two of the 34 speakers at the Global Future conference are women.) This isn’t unusual. Many of the sci-fi-seeming movements around the future, including cryonics, futurists such as Raymond Kurzweil, and now apparently this avatar thingie, are spearheaded by men.

I wonder: Do women care less about being “immortal,” which is partly what this avatar project is aiming for? Are women simply too busy taking care of their families to have time for this stuff? The FAQ and other information on the 2045 website do seem, to me, to have a particular perspective that is found in very specific circles of men: engineering, old-school science fiction, etc. It can be very hard for women who aren’t conversant in those cultures to become part of the discourse about the future.

I find it fascinating because I just wrote two novels for which I researched human consciousness in an effort to consider how it could evolve. I think the way I wrote about it is, honestly, rooted in a particularly spiritual and maybe even traditionally feminine way of looking at the world. I wonder if my perspectives would totally clash with the way Itskov sees things.

Anyway, I have no answers to these questions, but they still fascinate me.

Can a potato pancake melt in your mouth? I dunno, but this one did. Staropolska in New Britain makes me really, really happy. To tell you the truth, I’d never been to a Polish restaurant despite growing up with a Polish mother who didn’t even come to the US ’til she was in her 20s. [...]

WILL SHE EVER LEARN NO I DON'T THINK SO.

Introducing, pocket penguin! Everyone should have a pocket penguin. ^u^

Image: Vampire by Edvard Munch

Here is how I know that all of the writers of the world have run out of ideas: Vampires in High School. In this marvelously fucked up age that we live in, we've apparently all collectively decided that the story we want to tell each other, and the story we want to hear, is how if we were granted eternal life in the body of a hot 16 year old, we would probably spend that eternal life in high school. Listening to inadequate and confusing versions of what World War I was all about. Showering with other 16 year olds after gym class or football practice. Facing lunchroom seating dilemmas. That is what we have decided we would spend hundreds of years doing.

Right after I read a horrible short story about a vampire in high school, I went and saw the new Neil Jordan film, about a vampire who goes to high school. I kind of yelled at my film-going companion for a while, about how we all, excitingly and terrifyingly enough, get to decide, the first generation ever, with some limitations of course, what we want to do, where we want to do it, and for how long. And our writers are responding to that by putting supernatural creatures, always the exciting deviants and margin-dwellers, into that symbol of neverending conformity, fucking high school.

Jesus Christ, people.

Speaking of non-conformity, Patton Oswalt has supplied the best blurb for crazy deviant Mary MacLane's memoir I Await the Devil's Coming. It:

"is a mind-cracker. It's basically the diary of a bisexual, rebellious, punk-rock aesthetic teenage girl -- written in Butte, Montana in 1902. Truly, a time-displaced rarity in a cold, cruel landscape. Required reading."

Scientists say they've learned why penguin wings, now used for swimming, no longer get the birds off the ground.

These six scientists were snubbed for awards or robbed of credit for discoveries … because they were women.