February 22, 2020
For all the love we leave behind
There is a car, in the hospital parking lot.
It is a faded red, covered with dust.
Other cars have parked and left on either side of it, every day, but this car remains.
I pass by it, as I find parking, on my way in to work.
I know what it means.
Twitter | Threadreader
It is a faded red, covered with dust.
Other cars have parked and left on either side of it, every day, but this car remains.
I pass by it, as I find parking, on my way in to work.
I know what it means.
Twitter | Threadreader
‘What Am I Going To Do To Keep Her With Me?’
Turning to music for comfort was always a natural thing for Army 1st. Lt. Elizabeth Elliott, an officer in the Army Band. She turned to that familiar place on November 8 2018, when her daughter Madison was stillborn a day after her heart stopped beating.... This weekend, the U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own” will perform the debut of a new piece inspired by her experience, composer Brian Balmages’ Love and Light, at the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center in Alexandria.
Relax, Greg, it’s just a joke.
Jersey wuz here
Hi Haters: “Who let New Jersey have a Twitter,” a guy named Gary wondered, on Twitter, not long ago. “your mom,” the State of New Jersey responded. With moments like getting baited by the feds over Sentient Pork Roll, the realness of Central Jersey, dunking on Delaware, and declaring itself the Pizza Capital of the World, @NJgov is redefining what it means to be an official state Twitter account.
You Drank The Water? There's Nothing We Can Do!
A non-speaking 7 year old with mutant mind powers is used to shelter a population from nuclear war, and while being there, life becomes a psychic/technological surveillance nightmare. The newest HBO series? No, it's Planet P Project's [Wikipedia] 1984 rock opera album [Discogs] Pink World [Wikipedia]. The full album [1h19m] is a terrific 80s rock journey; the accompanying video album [2 songs, 8m40s] was nightmare fuel for many of the MTV generation. I'm not alone in loving this album. [Blogspot] Lyrics for the album from Genius. [more inside]
"Anything to declare?" *taps temple with finger*
You okay?
A man finds out how much his 1971 Rolex Oyster Cosmograph is worth. (SLAntiquesRoadshow)
“When my grandmother died I did not go to her funeral.”
The story of my grandmother confused people, especially Jewish Americans, who understandably assume that any story about escaping the war to the US is a happy one. But individual lives are more complicated than great sweeps of history, and while Sala was alone and frustrated in America, Alex and Henri went on to live gloriously successful lives in France.—I could never understand my grandmother's sadness – until I learned her tragic story by Hadley Freeman.
Emily Dickinson in 2020: "here we are, still living it"
Lynne Feeley writes: "It is impossible to read representations of Dickinson across the decades without noticing that she is always partially created in our own image, or in the image of the day. The literary scholar Virginia Jackson has chronicled these changing faces of Dickinson (Princeton Univ. Press) and their effect on how her work is perceived and treated: there’s the “aesthetic model” of the 1890s: the modernist one of the 1920s; the “professional model” of the 1950s, when male editors such as Thomas Johnson set out to revert the poems to their “original” forms; the feminist model of the 1980s; the queer model of the 1990s—and so on. The Dickinson of 2020, at least as far as Smith and Ackmann have portrayed her, is driven." Emily Dickinson Escapes (Boston Review) [more inside]
Iridescence as Camouflage
Iridescence seems like a straightforward tradeoff: Make yourself more attractive to potential mates, while putting yourself at greater risk of predation because you're more visible. It turns out, though, that iridescence can act as camouflage. Fake beetles with solid colours suffered more predation from birds than iridescent fake beetles, and humans found 80% of the solid-coloured beetles but only 17% of the iridescent beetles. Paper. [more inside]
You have seen the blurs. They are everywhere foregrounded in the news.
Rise of the Blur: A specter is haunting photojournalism -- an actual, visible specter (N+1): "But these blurs in your newsfeed are purposeful, perhaps even artful. They are being chosen, with notable regularity, by photo editors to illustrate our most serious political stories. Why?"
ADDing in NevADa
After the Republican Party canceled their Nevada Caucuses to prevent any challenge to President Donald Trump, today's 2020 Democratic Presidential Caucus is the only contest. [more inside]
The 2020 Fumble Invitational
Previously on the Fumble Dimension, Jon Bois and Kofie Yeboah introduced a golf game with a course designer that could be charitably described as "broken", and asked fans to design the Worst Course Ever.
This time, Jon and Kofie play that course. (SLYT) [more inside]
This time, Jon and Kofie play that course. (SLYT) [more inside]
Was this swaddle for a girl baby or a boy baby?
A century ago, we swaddled infants in basic gowns. Why is that so hard now? How we ended up in a culture so obsessed with the gender identity of infants turns out to be a complicated, century-long tale involving everything from Sigmund Freud to 1980s advances in medical technology.
We Can't Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family
To spend any amount of time with [Sophie] Lewis is to feel that the world she imagines is nearby. Whether we realize it or not, many of us are already familiar with her arguments for abolishing the family. When we talk about the prevalence of domestic violence and child abuse—when some of us find ourselves inside family units that perpetrate these crimes—we acknowledge that, in horror movie parlance, the violence is coming from inside the family. [more inside]
Private Riches, Public Squalor
Study: A year is too short for a U.S. worker to earn middle-class life - "The widening gulf... between what American life costs and what American jobs pay is a central fact of American political economy that the public appears to have understood long before economists." [The New Midlife Crisis] [more inside]
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