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VA Fails

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My father was in the Air Force for the Vietnam War, stationed in Juno, Alaska. He was a very handsome man, with a huge smile. I always adored the silver edging on his teeth, a testament to a hard life as a farm boy who'd had no childhood to speak of. Two years ago, he needed hip surgery on both hips. He was told he couldn't get it until he got all his imperfect teeth pulled out.  He was left with four. Now, my father's face isn't the same. The lower lids of his eyes droop, his face is caved in some, and he is shy about going out in public. Given that he lives in the far reaches of Northern Minnesota, his Disability payments from a hard life of literally back breaking work sometimes falls short of covering his heating. He receives assistance for an insufficient amount of food.  The man can't afford dentures, let alone the implants that would restore his face and sense of pride, and the VA says there's no money to help him. The hip surgery w

Two Ways Air Travel Impacts the Environment, and Three Things You Can Do About It

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Flying makes greenhouse gasses. Whether water vapor or just standard schmutz is the worst of them I don't know, but both of them contribute to the dirty and impermeable bubble we're creating around the planet. And sometimes they work together. As with all clouds, first you've got your little particle of dust, then you've got the humidity glomming onto it ( here's a snapshot post on how clouds are formed). But what's so bad about clouds?  Have you ever noticed that cloudy nights are often warmer? It isn't simply that heat makes clouds form – it's also that clouds trap heat from escaping at night. “A Penn State study compared regions of the United States where contrails tended to form more strongly with areas where they didn’t. The more contrail-heavy the area, the less the variation between daytime highs and nighttime lows tended to be.” ( Global News ) There's some debate about the cloud effect, but none at all about the stinky emission eff

Ginger bashing blahs

There’s always some reason humanity is a bummer.  This time, it’s because I’m a redhead. I’ve talked before about the heckling I used to get from kids at school - as well as from perfect strangers - because of my red hair.  That doesn't happen, now that I'm a middle aged woman. Thank goodness. But media still happens. A few years ago I started keeping a tally of how often the bad guy or gal in books and movies have red hair. Summary? Rates are way higher than the non-fiction ginger per capita numbers. Then I started noticing all the ginger bashing in comedy.  Of course, there's South Park ’s Kick a Ginger Day . That's not news. Amy Schumer and her line about reasons we need Plan B, like for cases of “rape or incest or with a redhead.”   Yamaneika Saunders on Jimmy Fallon's The Tonight Show talking about how this was the first time a black woman had ever wanted to marry a “ firecrotch .” (That term was new to me, actually.) Yes it

Accidental AI SciFi Gertrude Stein

Can't stop loving this! I tried text to speech on a section I was writing, and got SciFi Beckett: Hey Yellowbird yelled burn burn.  Cello stopped, hands on cold metal buckle.  Grab the lines, you idiot! Bon ben burn hollered. Cello did it.  He made it over to the cupboard. It took him less than a second to get there.  Push wish wish wish WHOOOSH. G forces are no joke. He pried open the cupboard,  and found a small cylinder inside. This it? He asked. Don’t know! Yelled castor. Does it look like it’s holding gas?  Experimentally cello Shockett shook it shook it. It was happy. There was a nozzle. Got the lights? He yelled back. Aargh! Yelled caster.  Blanca had a flint in her pocket. Blanca always had a flint in her pocket. She was right next to the cupboard, and cello took the flint out of her pocket.  He didn’t know how to use it.  Oh for dust sake exclaimed Blanca. She leaned over, And struck a spark while cello let out of tiny gasp of gas ounce there was fl

Oh, those pink pussy hats...

I have just spent the last two hours trying to navigate the issue of the pink ear hats, and why they may or may not be offensive to people, on Facebook.  I was trying to determine exactly how offensive they were or weren't, and felt bad that something that had been so fun and well intentioned was now the arbitrary symbol of white supremacy. I felt bad for all the older ladies who had been so happy to spend all their time knitting those hats, and then banding together wearing them.  I still feel that labeling pink pussy hats as white supremacist is a little extreme.  However, lots of other people seem genuinely offended by them, and not for my purely aesthetic reasons. The Facebook group got tired of my asking for precision – I've been in the position of having to answer the same questions over and over, on sensitive issues related to female oppression.  So, I apologized for asking a lot of questions, acknowledging that it can be exhausting to have to explain y

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