Hosted by a sand sculpture of the Yellow Brick Road and its travelers.
It's the Simple Things
Every year around the holidays, I get some emails from people asking if they can send me a little gift. Most of them have something in mind, often something they've made (yay!), but occasionally someone will ask me if I want or need anything. And I usually respond, extremely gratefully, by recommending a charity to which a donation can be made.
But this year, I am letting you all know now that if you want to get me something, please buy me the $4,739 gold-plated Easy Health Angel Juicer which Gwyneth Paltrow has included on her annual Goop Gift Guide.
"Absurd, but awesome."
And don't worry if several of you end up buying one for me haha! I know normally that would be a real OOPSIE, but multiples just means I won't have to lug my $4,739 gold-plated Easy Health Angel Juicer between Shakes Manor, our house in the Hamptons, and our gold-plated mansion on the moon.
You're all the best! Can't wait for my juicer(s)! *wink*
Whut.
[Content Note: Misogynoir; racism.]
I don't even know where to fucking begin:
The children's author Daniel Handler has apologized for an "ill-conceived" joke he made about the black American writer Jacqueline Woodson while hosting the National Book Awards.You know what? You fuck up this badly, on this vast a scale, "ill-conceived attempts at humor" doesn't cut it. Especially because it's not "ill-conceived attempts at humor" for which you need to apologize. It's vile racism directed at a black woman in her moment of professional triumph.
When Woodson collected her prize for young people's literature, Handler, who writes as Lemony Snicket, joked about her being allergic to watermelon.
"My job at last night's National Book Awards #NBAwards was to shine a light on tremendous writers, including Jacqueline Woodson and not to overshadow their achievements with my own ill-conceived attempts at humor. I clearly failed, and I'm sorry," Handler said on Twitter.
Woodson won her award for Brown Girl Dreaming, a poetic memoir about growing up in South Carolina and New York in the 1960s and 70s, and coming to an awareness of the civil-rights movement. She was the only non-white finalist in the category.
After she ended her acceptance speech, Handler returned to the stage.
"I said that if she won I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer. Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your minds," he said. "I said, 'You have to put that in a book.' And she said, 'You put that in a book.' And I said, 'I'm only writing a book about a black girl who's allergic to watermelon if you, Cornel West, Toni Morrison and Barack Obama say, 'This guy's OK.'"
After a few jittery laughs from the audience, Handler added: "We'll talk about it later."
Which, sure, created a controversy that has "overshadowed" Jacqueline Woodson, but, rather more importantly, demeaned her in the very moment, the one fucking moment, in which she was meant to be celebrated, honored, respected, admired. Not belittled by some racist jackass.
What a cruel, selfish thing to do. And how further cruel and selfish to try to pass it off as a failed joke.
Goddammit.
Jamie Oliver: Still the Worst
[Content Note: Child abuse.]
Jamie Oliver is basically a professional bully, who has, among other things, donned a fat suit as part of his eliminationist campaign against fat people, so I'm not entirely surprised that he's publicly bragging about being a bully to his own kid:
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver said recently that he secretly gave his 12-year-old daughter, Poppy, one of the world's hottest peppers in order to discipline her, according to The Daily Mail.That is not "discipline." That is child abuse.
At the recent BBC Good Food show, Oliver said, "Poppy was quite disrespectful and rude to me and she pushed her luck. In my day I would have got a bit of a telling-off but you are not allowed to do that. Five minutes later she thought I had forgotten and I hadn't. She asked for an apple. I cut it up into several pieces and rubbed it with Scotch Bonnet and it worked a treat."
"She ran up to mum and said, 'This is peppery'. I was in the corner laughing. [My wife, Jools] said to me, 'Don't you ever do that again.'"
How spicy is a Scotch Bonnet pepper? It ranks a whopping 100,000 to 350,000 on the Scoville heat unit scale; for comparison, a jalepeño has a score of 3,000 to 6,000 units.
It's an excellent lesson, though, if what he wanted to teach her was that she can't trust her father.
And, totally aside from the gross parenting issue, I'm pretty sure most professional chefs would find it appalling that any chef would want to instill in any child an association between food and harm.
It's bad enough this guy continues to have show after show after miserable show, without the media cheerily passing on his "cute" anecdotes about betraying the trust of his own kid.
The worst, this guy.
Daily Dose of Cute
Earsies.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today...
House Republicans have passed legislation that forbids scientists from advising the Environmental Protection Agency on their own research: "In what might be the most ridiculous aspect of the whole thing, the bill forbids scientific experts from participating in 'advisory activities' that either directly or indirectly involve their own work. In case that wasn't clear: experts would be forbidden from sharing their expertise in their own research—the bizarre assumption, apparently, being that having conducted peer-reviewed studies on a topic would constitute a conflict of interest. 'In other words,' wrote Union of Concerned Scientists director Andrew A. Rosenberg in an editorial for RollCall, 'academic scientists who know the most about a subject can't weigh in, but experts paid by corporations who want to block regulations can.'" Perfect.
[Content Note: Guns; death] Three students at Florida State University were wounded during a shooting on campus, one of whom is in critical condition. The gunman was killed by police. So far, there are no additional details about the shooting.
[CN: Sexual assault] Another woman has disclosed that she was sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby.
[CN: Extreme weather; death] Areas already hammered by massive snowfall have been hit again: "A second band of lake-effect snow pounded the cities and towns near Buffalo, New York, on Thursday, heaping more misery on people whose cars and even houses were already buried. Authorities confirmed an eighth death blamed on the storm, a 60-year-old man who had a heart attack while retrieving his snowblower. The storm had already dumped more snow than many places see in a full season—even in wintry western New York. Some homes had the equivalent weight of two or three pickup trucks bearing down on their roofs." Fuck.
The US Senate takes a small (and thus insufficient) step to improve childcare for low-income families by reauthorizing the Child Care and Development Block Grant.
RIP Mike Nichols. I just watched Working Girl for about the billionth time last weekend. Sigh.
The Associated Press FTW: "Two presidents have acted unilaterally on immigration—and both were Republican. Ronald Reagan and his successor George H.W. Bush extended amnesty to family members who were not covered by the last major overhaul of immigration law in 1986. Neither faced the political uproar widely anticipated if and when President Barack Obama uses his executive authority to protect millions of immigrants from deportation." Seriously, go read that whole article. It's amazing.
The universe is huge and we are very tiny.
This video of grandmas smoking weed for the first time is my new favorite thing. Spoiler alert: They do know what dildos are. They do not know what queefing is. ...Well, they do now.
Russian photographer Ivan Kislov, who works in Russia's remote north-eastern Chukotka region as a mining engineer, spends his spare time photographing local wildlife, and foxes are some of his most amenable and photogenic subjects. Adorbz!
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Class warfare.]
"The Republicans have a pretty simple philosophy: They say if those at the top have more—more power for Wall Street players to do whatever they want and more money for tax cuts than somehow they can be counted on to build the economy for everyone else. Well, we tried it for 30 years and it didn't work. In fact the consequences were nearly catastrophic. We tested the Republican ideas and they failed; they failed spectacularly."—Democratic Senator from Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren, being awesome. As usual.
Today in Fat Hatred
[Content Note: Fat hatred; eliminationism.]
There is an absolutely breathtaking article in Fortune today, accompanied by an image of Chinese children stretching poolside at a "fat camp," because the pathologization of fat children (who are often merely children about to have a growth spurt) is all the rage these days.
Actual Headline: "Fat-the $2 trillion burden on the world's economy." Note how profoundly othering that is: Fat is a burden on the world. As if we are not part of the world. This is a common rhetorical device I've highlighted before, often in discussions about how "taxpayers' money" is being somehow wasted on fat people, as if fat people ourselves aren't taxpayers.
Actual Lede: "Obesity is now a threat to the world economy to rival war and terrorism, according to a new report published Thursday."
Holy shit.
This is what I'm talking about when I say there is an eliminationist campaign against fat people. We are compared to fucking terrorists.
And that heinous demonization is done on the basis of studies on higher healthcare costs and lost productivity which are total bullshit. They are based on correlations and "obesity related diseases" that not only fat people have, and not all fat people have.
They fail utterly, utterly, to account for prejudice against fat people in medical care: Major illnesses missed because symptoms are misattributed to weight; fat people discouraged from seeking preventative care because of bias. They frequently do not address or control for systemic factors contributing to weight gain.
These numbers are totally cooked, and they're being used to compare us to motherfucking terrorists.
Obesity in and of itself doesn't kill. But fat hatred does. And this, right here, is some rank fat hatred.
Jim Webb Launches Exploratory Committee
[Content Note: Misogyny; racism.]
Former Democratic Senator from Virginia Jim Webb has launched a 2016 presidential exploratory committee:
Webb became the first well-known Democrat to launch an exploratory committee to run for president on Wednesday night, saying the nation is at a "serious crossroads."Many knowledgeable people have told him to run. No doubt many of the same knowledgeable people who advise Democrats to run further to the right if they want to win elections.
"I have decided to launch an Exploratory Committee to examine whether I should run for President in 2016," Webb said in a four-page letter on his website, Webb2016.
"I made this decision after reflecting on numerous political commentaries and listening to many knowledgeable people. I look forward to listening and talking with more people in the coming months as I decide whether or not to run."
...Webb, who was Ronald Reagan's Navy secretary and who has held centrist views on a number of issues, has been bolstered by progressive news outlet The Nation as a potential challenge from the left to Hillary Clinton, the dominant front-runner who hasn't yet said if she will launch a second national campaign.
Webb, a former Republican, wrote an essay for the Washingtonian in 1979 titled "Women Can't Fight," in which he argued that there was no place for women in combat and therefore no place for them at the Naval Academy. By 2006, he had changed his mind about women in the military, and chuckled as he said he regretted saying "the Naval Academy is a horny woman's dream."
What Webb has not, to my knowledge, been asked if he regrets, from the same essay, is asserting that changing gender roles (i.e. feminism) is responsible for increased violence against women:
The United States also has one of the most alarming rates of male-to-female violence in the world: Rapes increased 230 percent from 1967 to 1977 and the much-publicized wife-beating problem cuts across socioeconomic lines.Emphasis mine.
These are not separate issues, either politically or philosophically. They are visible peaks in what has become a vast bog. They are telling us something about the price we are paying, in folly on the one hand and in tragedy on the other, for the realignment of sexual roles.
More recently, in 2010, Webb penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about "the myth of white privilege."
So, basically, he's a dreamboat candidate for liberals who believe that a winning strategy for Democrats is to go after conservative white men.
Anyway. Now that Webb has officially entered the fray, maybe we can call a moratorium on think pieces about how Hillary Clinton's failure to announce her candidacy is ruinous for all the menfolk who want to run.
Looks like men can make their own decisions independent of Hillary Clinton after all. Imagine that.
Transgender Day of Remembrance
[Content Note: Transphobia; violence.]
A candle burns at Shakes Manor.
Today marks the 16th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is "set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. The event is held in November to honor Rita Hester, whose murder on November 28th, 1998 kicked off the 'Remembering Our Dead' web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999. Rita Hester's murder—like most anti-transgender murder cases—has yet to be solved."
The official TDOR website has documented the killing of 81 trans* people this year. Which is only a small picture, as it turns out: Transgender Europe's Trans Murder Monitoring project is reporting 226 cases of reported killings of trans* people in the last year, across 28 countries.
Two hundred and twenty-six people known to have been killed as a result of hatred and ignorance.
Julia Serano, a trans activist and author of the oft-mentioned Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, has noted that transphobia kills not just by violent action, but apathetic inaction.
Trans people are often targeted for violence because their gender presentation, appearance and/or anatomy falls outside the norms of what is considered acceptable for a woman or man. A large percentage of trans people who are killed [work in the sex trade], and their murders often go unreported or underreported due to the public presumption that those engaged in sex work are not deserving of attention or somehow had it coming to them.The 2001 documentary Southern Comfort details the last year in the life of Robert Eads, who died of ovarian cancer after two dozen doctors refused him treatment.
Some trans people are killed as the result of being denied medical services specifically because of their trans status, for example, Tyra Hunter, a transsexual woman who died in 1995 after being in a car accident. EMTs who arrived on the scene stopped providing her with medical care—and instead laughed and made slurs at her—upon discovering that she had male genitals.
That's the kind of hate crime that doesn't make headlines. Or even federal hate crimes statistics.
We remember all the victims of violence and apathy today.
A day that I wish, that we all wish, didn't have to exist at all.
I hate that there are trans* people who die, because of hatred and neglect and ostracization, and I hate there are people who have to document each and every one of those deaths, committed to an important project the best possible result of which would be that it ends because we don't need it anymore. Because there are no more deaths to document.
Gwendolyn Ann Smith, the founder of TDOR, writes movingly here about the history and import of the day. About why we need it still.
No oppression has ever been eradicated by a careful, polite, diligent deference to pretending it doesn't exist. That is the importance of a day of remembrance.
No oppression has ever been eradicated without meaningful inclusion and visibility, either, which slowly chips away at the privilege that underwrites marginalization. That is the importance of vigilance in community every day of the year.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Desert Rose: What are the five books you've read that have most stayed with you?
Of Course
[Content Note: Anti-immigrationism.]
President Obama is scheduled to unveil his immigration plan tomorrow evening during a primetime address. "While exact details of his announcement aren't yet public, the basic outline of the plan, as relayed by people familiar with its planning, includes deferring deportation for the parents of U.S. citizens, a move that would affect up to 3.5 million people."
So naturally: "Texas Gov. Rick Perry says that his home state may lead the charge against President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration by suing his administration. 'I think that's probably a very real possibility,' Perry said of a Texas-led lawsuit against the president over the deportation relief Obama is expected to announce Thursday evening."
Sure. "Lead the charge." The charge against decency. Terrific job as always, Republicans. Superb leadership, Governor Perry.
Another Domino Falls...
US District Judge Brian Morris ruled today that Montana's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional:
Morris ruled that Montana's constitutional amendment limiting marriage to between a man and a woman violates the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.YES! Effective immediately. That means no stay.
"This Court recognizes that not everyone will celebrate this outcome," Morris wrote. "This decision overturns a Montana Constitutional amendment approved by the voters of Montana. Yet the United States Constitution exists to protect disfavored minorities from the will of the majority."
...He said his ruling was effective immediately.
"The time has come for Montana to follow all the other states within the Ninth Circuit and recognize that laws that ban same-sex marriage violate the constitutional right of same-sex couples to equal protection of the laws," the judge wrote.
Woot! Congratulations, progressive-minded people of Montana! And congratulations to every same-sex couple who will be getting married EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
An Observation
One of the things that people say, in order to discourage people who fight for social justice, is that the world will never change and will always be terrible.
And, despite bits and pieces of progress, here and there, the nagging suspicion that might be true is one of the things that can demoralize people who fight for social justice.
Maybe they're right. Maybe the world will always be terrible, in one way or another.
But this is the thought that sustains me, always: Maybe what we're doing is making that world tolerable for individual people in it. And that's no small thing.
To care about other people is always important.
It might be the most important thing. Especially in a world that cares about so few.
So what if they are right? That only urges me to care harder.
It does not give me reason to care less. And it certainly does not give me reason to stop expecting more.
The Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by potatoes.
Recommended Reading:
Aura: Want to Know When the Wilson Indictment Decision Comes Down?
Andreana: On Revolutionary Communism. Or, A Love Letter to Leslie Feinberg
Angry Asian Man: [Content Note: Racism; violence; death] Man Arrested in Connection with Fatal Subway Shove
Libby Anne: [Content Note: Misogyny] Mattel's Computer Engineer Barbie Leaves the Computer Engineering to the Boys
Carolyn: Woman Graduates from FDNY Academy 13 Years After Her Firefighter Father Died on 9/11
Sean: Jason Collins, First Openly Gay Player in the NBA, Retires
Brittany: Frozen's "Let It Go" in Latin
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
Daily Dose of Cute
"You look this way and I'll look that way!"
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
