firehose

wickedwomenwarriors:

Ingrid Bolsø Berdal ~ Flukt (aka Escape) (2010)

Photo: Coast to Coast

Lady with a NYC subway map umbrella looking at a Muni map in San Francisco. Great photo!

(Source: the N Judah Chronicles/Flickr)

Lawsuit: Woman frozen alive in LA hospital died trying to escape Los Angeles Times The family of an 80-year-old woman is suing a Boyle Heights hospital after a pathologist determined that she was "frozen alive," "eventually woke up" and injured herself as she struggled unsuccessfully to escape, according to court records. Maria de Jesus ... and more »

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theatlantic:

There Have Been 57 Earthquakes of Magnitude 4.5 or Higher in Chile This Week

No one in the contiguous United States has ever felt shaking like what’s going on in Chile right now.

Read more. [Image: USGS]

This is what we call a “precursor.”

sexymetalarm:

nerdgerhl:

animateher:

science-for-a-star:

Gracia Scale Top

WHAT

GIMMIE

kellysue, is this what you had on at ECCC?

Yep! 

kateordie:

alexithymia-daily:

Because of Them, We Can

BEAUTIFUL

Just… Something in my eye…

~Jodi Dean

WASHINGTON—Saying they had awaited this day for decades, activists across the country celebrated yesterday following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision to grant full and universal suffrage to American currency. The decision from the nation...

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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A top Federal Reserve official who has expressed concerns about the possibility that U.S. central-bank policies could spark financial instability said on Thursday that he is resigning from his post on May 28. Jeremy Stein, a member of the Fed's Board of Governors and an economics professor at Harvard University, will return to Cambridge, Mass. to teach again, Mr. Stein said in his resignation letter to President Barack Obama. Although he didn't elaborate on his reasons for leaving, under university rules, Mr. Stein risked losing his tenure at Harvard if he remained at the Fed beyond May.

Mr. Gorelick, 57, lost his position at a large marketing firm last March. As he searched, taking on freelance and consulting work, his family’s finances slowly frayed. He is now working three jobs, driving a cab and picking up shifts at Lord & Taylor and Whole Foods.

UPS, one of the world's largest shipping and logistics companies, has decided to fire 250 workers who staged a 90-minute protest in February. The protest was organized after a long-time employee was fired over an hours dispute. Twenty of the workers were notified of their dismissal on Monday. The remaining 230 were told they would be fired as soon as replacements are trained. The workers, who are based in Queens, N.Y., walked off the job when Jairo Reyes, a 24-year company veteran and union activist, got in a dispute with the company over the number of hours senior staff could work, according to the New York Daily News. Reyes was fired on February 14 -- “that was my Valentine’s Day gift from UPS,” Reyes told the Queens Courrier -- and the ensuing protest occurred February 26. A UPS spokesperson confirmed the firing to the Huffington Post, referring to the protest as "an unauthorized work stoppage." "We simply cannot allow employee misconduct that jeopardizes our ability to reliably serve our customers and maintain order in our delivery operations," UPS spokesperson Steve Gaut wrote in an email to HuffPost. "For this reason, the company is releasing employees involved in the work stoppage."

Sigil is a free, open source, multi-platform ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format.

Svein Nordahl has no running water and not one of Svalbard's 31 miles of roads stretches as far as Bjørndalen, the small community of scattered shacks where he has made his home. But the isolated outpost has been fitted with some of the highest quality Internet available.

by Anne Helen Petersen

Let’s start with some statistics.

Cost of the average American wedding in 2012 = $27,000 (not including Honeymoon).

Cost of the average New York wedding = $65,000.

Median U.S. income = $45,000.

Dollars generated by the wedding industry every year = $30 billion.

That includes dresses, elaborate engagement photos, groomsmen gifts, monogrammed handkerchiefs, signature cocktails, bachelorette parties. The soul/love/capital crushing process has been dubbed the “wedding industrial complex,” a cold term that connotes just how effectively capitalism has insinuated itself in an institution supposedly characterized by love and other priceless emotions.

The wedding industrial complex is not without its detractors: Jezebel has entire category devoted to deriding it (recent headline: “Strapless Wedding Dresses, We Are On to Your Bullshit”); Rebecca Mead wrote a bestselling book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding about it; and dozens of websites (including Offbeat Bride, A Practical Wedding, and the now-defunct Indiebride) offer alternative—and significantly less expensive—routes to wedded bliss.

But the pull is strong. The more people have elaborate weddings, the more pressure for others to have similarly elaborate weddings—pressure applied by friends, mothers, mother-in-laws, and even groomsmen as they become accustomed to a certain lavish matrimonial standard. We could think of it as simple peer pressure, but I think something a bit more complicated—and insidious—is going on. Take the engagement iPhone case, dozens of which are available, in highly personalized form, on Etsy:

On the most basic level, these cases are part of a phenomenon that one friend, deep in the trenches of wedding-planning, referred to as “buy all the things.” At few other times are we given a sizable, ever-expanding budget and told to spend it on whatever makes a day “perfect,” even if that means spending outside our means. I imagine it somewhat like the shopping sprees on Nickelodeon’s Super Toy Run, when you just manically run down the aisles shoving things in your basket. Maybe that’s how some brides feel on Etsy today, especially the ones who haven’t been meticulously planning their weddings for years: just put all the things in your basket and press purchase.

But the “buy all the things” mentality doesn’t completely explain these covers. If our phones have become our primary mode of engagement with the world, then our phone cases (or lack thereof) communicate something about ourselves in the same vein as our choice of eyeglasses. An indestructible Otter case = a dad or very sensible; bedazzled = teen girl or irony; covers that suggest a book, cassette tape, or other analog technology = rhetorical hipster resistance.

So what does your engagement phone cover say about you? That you’re taken, sure. In that way, it functions like an amplified engagement ring: I am coupled; do not hit on me. But the case is less of a man repellant than a broadcast system to other women: I won. You may not be the first to get married, but if the overarching task of a 20- or 30-something American female is to have a guy “put a ring on it,” then you won. The phone cover functions as an odd form of surveillance, propping up the validity of the “game” and the inclination to visually celebrate its victory.

But this somewhat aggressive pronouncement is often packaged in passivity. The “He asked; I said yes” suggests just how little agency the (presumably female) partner has in engagement scenario. She may get to plan the wedding, but she has little control over whether or not it’ll happen in the first place. She has decorating power, in other words, but no actual power. In this way, the cover functions as a precise condensation of postfeminism, in which the politics of feminism are traded for the bounty of consumerism—when the freedom to choose becomes the freedom to consume or, in this case, choose the color and design of wedding dress, floral arrangements, and engagement phone cover.

As for the “Soon to Be Mrs. [Insert Husband’s Last Name Here] covers, they’re just straight-up regressive, less postfeminist than pre-feminist. I’ve seen rhetoric like this before, but only in one of two places: on tank tops made especially for the night of the Bachelorette party and designed to be barfed on; and in classic Hollywood melodramas. Regardless of context, it figures marriage as a traditional sublimation of the woman under the man’s identity.

Granted, millions of women still take their husband’s names, but there’s something different about the phone cover announcement—something territorial, even defensive. In proclaiming yourself the future “Mrs. Courtney Cole,” you not only broadcast your status, but his. Much like Peggy Olson’s “Mark Your Man” campaign for Bel Jolie lipstick in Mad Men, these covers provide a means for socially and politically impotent women to use what’s available to them—namely, commodities—as a means to control men.

It’s easy to think that these covers are just an exponent of Etsy and Pinterest culture, where the postfeminist rhetoric of “having it all” blends with the traditional feminized pursuits of crafting, collecting, and “nesting.” And that’s certainly where these covers—and dozens of other products like them—thrive. Yet that’s an easy way of compartmentalizing a trend that is actually far more widespread, isolating the problem to a group of people “not like us” or, at the very least, “not like me.”

But you can find the same ideology, albeit slightly modified, all over the bourgeois and hipster internet:

These covers are from Society6, a site once described to me as “Urban Outfitters + Threadless + Phones.” Both Urban Outfitters and Threadless are perfect examples of commodified indie taste: why go to the thrift store for a weird message tee when you can buy it for $22 online? Most of the phone covers hover between the cool (Bill Murray’s face), the ironic (Taxi Lllama), and the abstract, but dig a little deeper, and you’ll not only find the the covers above, but their little sister as well: the “I Love My Boyfriend” cover.

It’s nestled between covers that broadcast “I’d Rather Masterbate” and “Netflix is My Boyfriend,” but the message, a sort of postfeminist starter kit, remains. Over at Nordstrom, you can buy a Kate Spade cover, part of the designer’s “publishing series” that, in theory, evokes literary sophistication by reproducing the cover of a famous novel. But in practice, it replicates the same rhetoric as the Etsy covers.

It’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on with this particular cover—who’s the ideal consumer? Does Kate Spade and, by extension, Nordstrom, think this is a cute play on romance novels? Does a man buy this cover for his beloved? Does a college student buy it aspirationally? The answers to those questions matter less than the covers’ very existence: if Kate Spade sells it at Nordstrom, people are buying it and brandishing it in public.

When it comes to the wedding industrial complex, it’s tempting to blame the brides who are its most visible exponents, breaking down on Say Yes to the Dress or posing ridiculously in yet another set of engagement photos on your Facebook feed. But this is what happens when modern capitalism meets patriarchy, and the last 200 years have been a slow march to this logical conclusion.

In the end, the engagement phone cover says less about our specific cultural moment and more about the unyielding resilience of patriarchy and the industries that support it. The solution isn’t to ridicule these cases and the women who buy them, but to continue the much more difficult, frustrating, yet absolutely necessary work of challenging—and illuminating—the often invisible systems that produce them. Alternately, get on Etsy and start designing the feminist phone case of your choice: you may have to put “I asked, He Said Yes: Soon to Be Life Partners in the Eyes of the State” in smaller print to get it to fit on the case, but just think how loudly it would speak.

 

Previously: Suri's Burn Book and the Celebrity Offspring Economy

Anne Helen Petersen mostly writes about celebrity, feminism, and media, and will soon do all of those things for Buzzfeed. Follow her at @annehelen. 

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Gin by Brockmans Brockmans Gin, a new style gin from the U.K., is now available in the U.S. Launched in England in 2009 and expanded to Switzerland & Spain in 2010, the London-based brand is now available in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Breaking away from the London Dry style gin, Brockmans is designed to be consumed neat or over ice. Brockmans is made with ingredients such as angelica, coriander from Bulgaria and juniper berries sourced from Tuscany. These botanicals is steeped in grain spirit for up to 24 hours to release their flavors. After steeping, Brockmans is distilled in a...

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It’s time to talk about some changes that are going on at Fire Hose.

Today on the 19 bus

To celebrate 30 years, Widmer Brothers Brewing announced the first three beers in the anticipated 30 Beers for 30 Years Series, the brewery’s most ambitious effort to date and one of the most elaborate series of beer releases from a brewery in the United States. The three releases – Altbier, Weizenbier, and Hefeweizen – were the first three beers that the brothers brewed, and each represents one of the first three years of Widmer Brothers’ existence: 1984, 1985, and 1986, respectively.

The three beers each hold a huge place in Widmer Brothers’ history. Altbier was the first beer brewed and sold by Widmer Brewing Company. While development of the beer began in 1984, Altbier wasn’t actually released to the public until 1985 after the brothers brewed and dumped the first twelve batches. They wanted the beer to be just right, a value that’s evident in every Widmer Brothers beer and one that has helped drive the brewery’s success since the beginning.

“Looking back at these three releases puts our early days and growth of Widmer Brothers Brewing since then in perspective. Like many young entrepreneurs, we were flying by the seat of our pants, and it’s truly surreal to revisit that time in our lives when Altbier, Weizenbier, and Hefeweizen were our only three offerings. I suppose it’s an understatement to say we’ve come a long way.”

- Rob Widmer, Founder, Widmer Brothers Brewing

 

1984 Altbier

"Drawing inspiration from traditional German beers, Altbier was the first beer Kurt and Rob brewed when they opened Widmer Brewing Company. Often described as “ahead of its time,” Altbier was named The Oregonian’s “Beer of the Year” in 1985 by celebrated beer writer, Fred Eckhardt. The beer is still brewed in small batches and is a favorite at the Widmer Brothers pub. 5.0% ABV, 35 IBU"

 

1985 Weizenbier

Inspired by German-style Weizens, Kurt and Rob’s take on the filtered wheat beer features a pronounced American hop profile. Weizenbier was the brewery’s second release and became the starting point for the unfiltered version, Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen. 4.9% ABV, 30 IBU

 

1986 Hefeweizen

When Portland’s Dublin Pub asked for a third beer offering from the Widmer Brothers (at the time, they were only brewing two styles) Kurt and Rob didn’t have the capacity to brew another new beer, so they improvised. Leaving a portion of Weizenbier unfiltered, they were able to offer a third beer, and Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen was born. 4.9% ABV, 30 IBU

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Yep. Definitely.