GOP: We think that abortion is the worst thing you can do and want to stop it at all costs.
GOP: So we are going to limit your access to birth control, then we're going to close the clinics down that provide cheap/free birth control-related services, THEN we're going to make it so your insurance no longer covers birth control. And while we're at it, let's have some abstinence-only sex education. That should put an end to all that abortion that we hate so much.
Other anti-choicers: BRILLIANT! Make 100% total sense to me.
one of the most brilliant exchanges ever written for television tbh
I mean as story decisions go, giving Data a cat and the screentime to try to logically reason with the cat with very little success, thus letting the robot embody Every Cat Owner Ever, was A+
I love the Gwendoline is a) taller than everyone and b) still wears high hells to make herself EVEN TALLER than everyone. (Example: She’s only one inch taller than NCW but she’s like, “Nah I want to tower over him so he knows who is in charge.”)
Watching this (and fearing broken ankles with each loop) I can’t helping thinking about that old quote Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.
But no, if you watch closely you’ll see she doesn’t even step on the last chair. That means she had to trust that fucker to lift her gently to the ground while he was spinning down onto that chair. That takes major guts. I’d be pissing myself and fearing a broken neck if I were in her place. Kudos to her.
Okay so this is true, but a tiny part of a wider truth.
Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…
Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him.
Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…
Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!
Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)
This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it.
Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….
Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.
The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins…
So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.
She did everything Fred Astaire did backwards, in high heels, wearing a 20 pound dress, exhausted, injured and standing in a pool of her own blood. And watching her perform, you would never know.
@gallusrostromegalus I tried searching for the chincoteague horses and vernal ponds, but was unable to find anything useful. Will you enlighten me, please?
So Chincoteauge National Wildlife Refuge contains Assateague Island, which is basically a glorified sandbar of an island off the coast of Virginia, and a really nice park* to visit if you’re not deathly afraid of ticks. The thing the area’s really famous for (besides the Moneypit) is The Chincoteague Ponies, which are these very strange feral horses that are just cute as all get-out:
To keep the population stable and healthy, all couple hundred ponies are rounded up once a year and vaccinated/some of the animals are sold off to private persons/farms (they’re insanely popular as pets and work animals becuase they’re tough lil shits). It’s a whole party. Most of the animals are names and some have celebrity status.
The WEIRD thing about these horses is that they’re pretty much turning into kelpies, minus the hand-eating thing.
There aren’t any permanent sources of fresh water on Assateague island, only Vernal Pools that exist for maybe a couple months a year. The horses live there year-round, minus the three days in roundup. They drink oceanic water, eat super-salty plants grown in said water, consume salty dirt for minerals, and regularly swim around the island to get from graze to graze. Their kidneys and internal systems have undergone some really strange rearrangements to cope with the added salt, and even though most horses can swim, the ponies are extremely comfortable in the water, to the point where if startled, their FIRST inclination is to run into deep water to avoid pursuit.
The park ranger that explained all this to me says they also seem to supplement their diets with shellfish and crabs, which given that pasture horses already snack on bugs and the occasional lizard doesn't’ really surprise me. There are other places with feral horses on similarly small islands but those have access to fresh water and haven’t developed the Chincoteague Pony’s affinity for ocean life.
Here’s another cute fucking pony:
*The park was actually established to protect THE BIGGEST, FATTEST FUCKING SQUIRRELS I’VE EVER SEEN. They’re called Delmarva Fox Squirrels. Fatass on the left, regular fox squirrel on the right.
Did any of y'all ever read the Misty of Chincoteague books? Those things were my CHILDHOOD and what planted the festering Horsegirl Virus™ and it’s always been a dream of mine to visit one pony penning day.
If you visit Assateague, bear in mind that the ponies are protected–and they know it. They are feral; they are not shy.
Also, they cruise the campsites at night. They can and will open coolers.
Having a hard day? Turn up the sound and let Max lull you.
In case anyone else was worried about why this cat is looking so domestic, here’s the video description:
Max Lynx, the educational animal ambassador takes a moment to get some good scratchin’ before he sits down for his meal. He was born at a zoo in May 2011. He’s not completely domesticated but not wild either. He educates the public on the endangered Canada Lynx in hopes that people will be driven to conserve our environment and protect our wildlife.
WHAT A WONDERFUL SOUND. WHAT AN EXCELLENT CAT.
(And wow, just commentary on body language, whoever this human is, Max trusts them ENTIRELY. Not only is he nuzzling and purring, he’s showing his belly and giving them his throat for pets and scritchies. That is a HUGE “I Love You” in cat language. Also the paws directing where the scratchies need to go is just adorable.)
A Georgia sheriff and two deputies have been charged with groping teens’ genitals during a drug search earlier this year at a high school. Worth County Sheriff Jeff Hobby was indicted Tuesday on sexual battery, false imprisonment and violation of oath of office charges, reported The Atlanta Jo...
“As someone on the autistic spectrum, my life is constantly punctuated by moments where my consent is not prioritized and my personal boundaries are considered too obscure. The irony is that I am the one described as stubborn and unyielding — all while I organize my entire life around meeting the rigid societal norms created by allistic (non-autistic) people. Every day I walk on eggshells to avoid offending others. I make eye contact; I shake hands; I make awkward small talk — all done solely to make allistic people feel better. Meanwhile, my boundaries are considered both too unimportant and too “weird” to be accommodated.
How are autistic people meant to negotiate boundaries and provide consent when they spend the vast majority of their lives having their own boundaries ignored, trampled, or ridiculed?”
When I was a very small child, my mom used to bury coins in my sandbox, leave huge boot prints in the sand, and tell me pirates had come in the night and buried treasure. I would be out there happily for hours, with my little sieve, and my mom got a quiet morning to herself for the price of a handful of pennies.
I was always kind of skeptical about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, because visiting every kid in the world did not seem reasonable. But the pirates only visited me, so they were probably real.
So that’s the story of how I ended up being an archaeologist. How about you?
Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will; her fight against this violation went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed her rights with the remark that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Dearest Mrs. Berry, Will write to you this A.M. This leaves me real well and getting along just fine. Mrs. Berry I have wrote to Dorris several times since I have been here and haven’t gotten any answer from it. I guess there are lots of girls going away now. I had a letter from mother here several days ago and said for me to send her some things. Will it be o.k. for me to do so or not. Will you please let me know. Give her my love and tell her I will write to her later as I haven’t got time to write now as I have got some work to do. Give Miss Vian (?) my love and all of the girls. Well I must close for now. With Love, Carrie B., Bland, Va.
That’s perfectly normal, an average human being with average human concerns having a conversation with another person. These are also scans of her letters, so you can also see that she had remarkably clear penmanship — not that penmanship is the mark of a worthy human, but it does show that she had normal skills and values.
What we did to this woman was a tragedy and a crime.
Do any of the following words sound familiar to you?
Me every time: “Should I spend ten minutes completing this task now or stress about it for four days first? The latter seems good.” — Kelly Ellis
My most reliable hobby is spending an hour putting off a task that will take two minutes to complete. — Josh Gondelman
An hour is amateur. I’ve gone months. Years. — Helen Rosner, replying to Gondelman
I just cleaned my cat fountain, a task that just takes a few minutes but which I’ve been putting off for weeks. I finally did it because I knew I was writing this blog post.
For me, the most useful way to avoid procrastination on tasks of all sizes is to have a deadline or make a public declaration of intent. Last week I wrote about figuring out which of my keys are the ones I need, so this week I finally went to The UPS Store and determined which one opened the store’s front door. I’m in a book club, which gives me a deadline for reading at least 12 books per year. I just volunteered to host the next book club meeting, so I will definitely give the house a good cleaning before then.
Tim Urban did a TED talk on procrastination where he says that even though he’s a master procrastinator, things work out for him. As deadlines approach, his “panic monster” shows up, frightens off the “instant gratification monkey” in his brain, and he meets those deadlines. It’s not a pretty system, but it works. The problem comes with things that don’t have deadlines, so the panic monster never appears.
I wondered if maybe that panic monster can be activated for good even when there’s not a deadline. Those of us in earthquake territory, watching the news about the horrible hurricanes lately, might get inspired to begin creating or updating our stash of emergency supplies since we have no idea when the next major quake will strike.
Eric Jaffe, writing for Co.Design, says that some studies indicate that self-imposed deadlines don’t work to overcome procrastination, and this matches the thinking of scholars in the subject.
Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University, one of the leading scholars of procrastination, isn’t surprised that self-imposed deadlines don’t resolve undesirable delays. Procrastinators may need the tension of a looming deadline to get motivated, but when that deadline is self-imposed its authority is corrupted and the motivation never materializes. “The deadline isn’t real, and self-deception is a big part of procrastination,” he tells Co.Design.
Jaffe goes on to say that Pyschyl and other researchers think procrastination isn’t actually a time management issue. Rather, the problem is the following: “Procrastinators delay a task because they’re not in the mood to do it and deceive themselves into thinking they will be later on.”
I’m not sure that’s why I procrastinate, but I do know that private self-imposed deadlines frequently don’t work for me. If I find I’m procrastinating on something important that has no hard deadline, I might need to create one by making that commitment known to someone else.
The war on drugs is rooted in racist policies . The failure of the war and drugs is obvious. We need to find a better solution, because people of color should never be the victims of racist policies. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely to go to prison for marijuana, which is not a hard drug. Moreover , even when white people get caught , they get less time in prison.
Plus you know Nixon’s aid admitted all this too:
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
And that’s a real quote.
The War on Drugs is a cruel, ongoing, profitable system that disrupts and destroys lives, families, communities, futures. It’s needed to end since before it began.
But can we also talk about the justice system, prisoner treatment, prison labor, ex-prisoner rights (and prisoner rights!), and prisoner solidarity?
We don’t have to talk about them all at once, but at the very least, this already brings up ex-convicts’ rights… jobs, housing, loans, financial aid, voting, many services and resources and important aspects of life, including socially.
Our prisons are set up as punishment. Not justice. Not crime deterrent (or else we would have a lower recidivism rate). Not rehabilitation.
The moment someone is convicted of a crime, they cease to be human in many ways in the eyes of the law and society.
The way we look at and treat crime and criminals from the very beginning is more than flawed, it’s sick, cruel, dehumanizing, oppressive, violent, and dangerous. Just something to think about.
“My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love.
When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay.
Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure.
It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening.
‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention.
‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already.
He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him.
He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence.
It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist?
I asked him what happened on his adventure.
‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me.
‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look.
‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see?
‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’
‘And so I did.
‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.
‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better.
‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me.
‘'Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said.
‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life.
‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me.
‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’
I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter.
What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye?
‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’
My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale.
‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’
