My iPhone has bricked itself.  T-Mobile could not unbrick it, so a new one is on the way, should arrive today.

My contacts appear to have not backed themselves up to the Cloud thoroughly, so I may be seeking phone numbers when the new device arrives.

I am getting a replacement, not an upgrade, which is good news because I just got this case for Christmas and it is the Best Case Ever:

This is just to say, then, that if you have called, texted, or snapped me, I am not ignoring you.  I am looking forward to the post-Ordeal-of-the-Phone snaps very much.

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1/20 '16 5 Comments
That is an awesome phone case.
Thanks! Most terrifying moment of phone restoration thus far - realizing that I could not see the sim card well enough to put it in the phone without my glasses and a lot of light. I used to read in dim light and get annoyed at my Mom when she turned on brighter light for me ... now in dim light all of the letters go fuzzy.
So you're looking for a smartphone at work?
No, looking for a mind at work. Clearly not mine tonight.
Mine neither.

I was thinking about doing the dishes and the laundry, and then realized I was carrying the dishes to the clothes washer in the basement.
 

Yesterday, I tried to explain segregation to Hunter, who just turned four in December.  Media has a large progressive population.  We have a strong arts community and a lot of local outreach.  If Hunter had a black girlfriend (or boyfriend) and they walked down the street holding hands, no one in Media would bat an eyelash - but most of the people they passed on the street would be white.

Hunter is one of the most privileged people in America.  He is male, tall, blond, white, well-spoken, intelligent, celebrates Christian cultural holidays as well as Jewish holidays, so even though he's Jewish, he can blend in with the majority.  He has 20/20 vision, he is fast, strong and thin, he is able in every way. He is charming and perceptive.  He learns quickly.  His family is not wealthy, but we are comfortable enough that he wants for nothing. His parents are not divorced.

Hunter needs to have a strong sense of justice, because he may never experience life being unfair.  He needs to understand that he is privileged, and become the kid who stops the bully instead of joining the bully, ignoring the bully, or, even worse, being the bully himself.

I think about this a lot, more than I thought about it with Archer, because Archer, though he is also quite privileged, did not have the Houser Viking genes and attitude, and also comes from a "broken home".  Archer saw firsthand what it's like to be outside the "norm" and Archer's response was almost always compassion (and when it wasn't, he usually got a lecture from his mother).  

Yesterday, I was determined to explain who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was to Hunter in a way that was meaningful and yet didn't lose his 4 year old attention span.  Of course, I started with music.  

When I was little, my brother and I had a few Sesame Street albums, including this one with Pete Seeger and "Brother Kirk".  At the time, "Brother Kirk" was this guy in a flat cap who talked funny and sang the Martin Luther King song.  I looked him up yesterday and found out that his real name is Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, and, in addition to The Ballad of Martin Luther King, he wrote more songs about black heroes (Harriet Tubman, etc.).

It's a great song, and catchy (I remembered it 30+ years later), so I played it for both kids, and I explained to Hunter who Martin Luther King was.  I said that in the United States, there were white people who didn't let black kids go to the same schools as white kids, who didn't let black people eat at the same restaurants as white people and who didn't let black people sit wherever they wanted to on the bus, they had to sit in the back.  Martin Luther King fought against those people, but he didn't have a gun, he marched and marched with so many people that they changed the world, and it got better.  It's still not right, but it got better.  Black kids were allowed into schools and restaurants and they could sit where they wanted to on the bus.

That, I figured, was enough for one preschooler's attention span.

He said, "The white people who wouldn't let the kids in the schools, they were the bad guys."

I said, "Yes, and Dr. Martin Luther King was a hero because he fought for the black kids to be able to go to school just like the white kids did."

I also explained (because I remember thinking about this a lot when I was a kid), that white people aren't really "white" skinned, our skin is closer to pink, and black people aren't really "black" skinned, their skin is closer to brown, those are just words people use. 

Equality starts with us.  Equality starts with understanding that people who look different, speak differently*, think differently, like different music, smell differently, know a different set of cultural norms - that those people are people and have the same rights as we do, and that if they don't, it is OUR JOB to make sure they do.

Equality is not about who you like or how you think people should look or behave, equality is about hiring the most qualified person for the job, treating each person who commits a crime the same way as every other person who committed that crime, about suspicion of wrongdoing based on actions, not physical appearance.  Equality is about understanding that if you yell at a kid every time you see him, he will put his fingers in his ears when he sees you coming, and other kids might too ... so a black man will be more inclined to run from a cop than a white man will be, and that doesn't mean the black man is guilty, it means that cops have a shitty track record with black people.

Equality is about understanding that in the Race race, we are not all on the same starting line, so we have work to do if we want to find out who is really the fastest to the finish.

Equality is a marathon, not a sprint.  The training plan is hard, and we will get injured, and after that marathon, there's another one, and another.

"Now, it's time for you to take a look
At that mirror on that wall
Did you pull that trigger?
Were you there at all?

And there's a sickness in this nation
And it seems to be obviously clear
Gonna kill a man with hate
Because he would not die from fear.

And I've been to the mountaintop
Today I have a dream
Don’t you ever forget
The words of Martin Luther King" -Rev. F. D. "Brother Kirk" Kirkpatrick

He sung that on Sesame Street in 1974.  It's 2016.  We have a black President, but we also have a high black body count and an incarceration rate that is the highest in the world (the WORLD, including China, Iran, Libya!).  If the current incarceration rate continues, 1 in 3 black men can expect to spend some time in prison in his lifetime.  NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet here.

Think about your three closest friends.  Think of one of them in prison - as a certainty.  Now, your three friends, they probably don't kill people, right? They might do some drugs, though, or get drunk and a little belligerent?  A lot of my friends do ... but I don't expect any of us to get arrested or go to prison.

One in three.

We have a lot of work to do, America.  Every last fucking one of us.  Every damn day.


* this is the hardest one for me.  I am totally serious.  People who do not use proper grammar are the second-easiest group for me to discriminate against without thinking about it.  The easiest group for me to discriminate against are those who discriminate against others.  As Tom Lehrer said, "I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that."  I am more motivated to work on my grammar snob problem.

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1/19 '16 14 Comments
I am the only one of my siblings to never spend time in prison. I am also the whitest looking one of the four of us. Yes, this includes my sister, even though she is the best and most thoroughly Adding To The World one of us. So, well, yep. It's still a thing.

Also, being well spoken, or nominally well spoken, is a privilege as well, and one with a lot of baggage among people of color. I had a boss who offered to pay for classes for a black girl who worked with us who spoke primarily with urban vernacular- now, we live in the South, so you might as well say, she had a southern accent, because poor whites and southern blacks sound awfully similar. But, well, she didn't have the genteel accent, and somehow, it didn't bug my boss with the poor white girl who worked for us. She was "just trying to be helpful," and didn't understand when the girl turned her down, although she did so very politely. But changing the way she spoke would have undercut all of her relationships with everyone she knew, even if it would have potentially helped her get better jobs in the long run. How does someone make a choice like that?

It's not like it helped Eliza Doolittle so much, in the end.
Actually, it did help Eliza Doolittle, it just didn't help her in the way we find acceptable.

She started out homeless and ended up in a nice home with heat and running water - it helped. She was dependent on men (either Hill or Freddie) for these niceties, so we think, well, that's not so great, but the upgrade from starving and freezing and filthy was significant.
So that's the message - to succeed you have to be someone else. That message is horrendous. It's a pile of imperialist shit. How you write, that's different. To have a professional job, you need to be able to communicate, but how you speak - it shouldn't be a glass ceiling, but it is, and it is a ceiling that I am uncomfortable with, both that it exists and that I have unconsciously contributed to it.

I still hate twangy southern accents. I admit it - yeccch. It's like listening to someone scraping at a violin very badly. I wish those people would learn to speak something closer to "Standard English", or whatever it is they call the English they teach actors. "Received Pronunciation"? This is what I have to work on - I genuinely hate the way that accent sounds, but it's my job as a human being to not be biased against or demeaning toward that person because I don't like their accent.

Your sister was in prison? That's fucked up. That's like putting away an angel because she hit someone with a harp.
considering that it was a domestic dispute, that's pretty much right.
So fucked up. I am sure she was a danger to no one other than the asshole she had the fight with.
Funny, my boys and I were talking about the way people speak only the other day. Mostly accents. It could be simply that I am ultra sensitive to the issue, but if you listen to Indigenous peoples talk, there is a slurring to our accents. And that slurring can sometimes make us sound inebriated or ill-educated.
My whole life, I have made a conscious effort when I speak. Of course, if I am angry, upset or around my sister...the accent comes out in full force.

I am a big enough snob to actually care about that. (My family accuses me of airs and graces because I believe in bettering myself, but what evs) This is my weird way of saying, I understand. I too have a ridiculous prejudice that I ned to rein in on a regular basis. Worse of all, I suffer from the damn thing I am prejudiced against. I just really hate sounding incompetent, stupid or like I am drunk or stoned. Intonation, pronunciation, they are there to be used people, so use them.

Ah yes, I am a massive bitch.
I do too - I have some elements of the "Philly" accent. We say "wooder" instead of "water", for example, and I hate it when I do that.

I love the sound of your voice.
You are kind. I sound like a muppet. On crack.
A friend once told me I sound like the love child of Nicole Kidman and Cathy Freeman. I am still unsure as to wether or not that was a compliment!
(PS. I love listening to you talk too.)
your voice is comforting and delicious.
True. And so is yours, O my Rabbit, but in an entirely different way.
Folks have tried teaching "business English" as a second language, rather than "the only right way to speak," with a surprising amount of success. I wish it were done more often. It's a much less patronizing proposition.
I concur. Teaching it as something that can be put away-- I tell you, I get a _lot_ more vernacular when I talk to my brothers-- helps a lot.
Well, none of us are who we really are at work (at least not at most jobs). I like that "business English" idea - it changes the parameters from changing one's identity to changing how one communicates at one's workplace.
Yes. My professional self and my personal self are two very different beasts. 'business english'...I like the way it's framed. It's like using your phone voice, or your inside voice.
 

TL:DR - Book recommendations needed, Coven, please comment as soon as you get time to breathe!  I know you are all busy as busy can be!

Today, I am sacrificing my post to boost the signal.

Lindsay  wants this:

"The Bechdel-Wallace (as Ms. B has said she thinks it should be called) Test is more important than I've realized. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Han Solo, so I could save Luke and kiss Leia.  Try to find any story where a woman does that. I'll read it or watch or listen to it, and praise you for leading me to it.

Here's her whole post.

My first response is, "Hey, I wrote that!  Twice!"  One was a story about a pirate mom rescuing her kid from other pirates.  It may not pass the Bechdel test, but the badassery was all hers.  Well, the kid too.  Also, I wrote a Three Musketeers-esque novella where the D'Artagnan-analogue was female.  Of course she had help from her friends, but that's how the three musketeers stuff works.

I am trying to think of books like that, but even my favorite books about women have them winning by sacrifice more than by kicking ass, Han Solo style or kicking ass up to a point and then the man steps in, or at least they collaborate.  Also, I have a shitty memory and I am sure I am missing a bunch of great books I read and loved.

So, let's talk about the Hunger Games.  Katniss is a fucking victim.  She is traumatized through the whole book.  Gale is the strong action hero.  Peeta is the gentle soul with the spine of steel and the mushy bedroom eyes.  Prim is actually pretty brave and sensible throughout, but she's a secondary character and she's the cleric, not the warrior.  Katniss is not a hero, she's a figurehead who can shoot a bow, but internally, she's a mental patient who is able to function with a large support staff and she's manipulated by them over and over.

I know they're out there, these books, these stories.

Grania was a good one (historical fiction about Grace O'Malley), but that was written in the 80s.

I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write for JaNoWriMo.  I think I'm starting to figure it out.


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12/11 '15 4 Comments
I will happily read your work any time. I might be slow, but I will read it.
I feel like Gail Carriger's books seem to fit the bill. Her Finishing School series is all about teaching young women (in stempunk victorian times) to become spies and save themselves. She has boys in it, but she doesn't really rely on them as much as she relies on her female friends.
_Three Parts Dead_, by Max Gladstone. Bonus because the main badass women are both of color. I haven't read the others in the series yet, but I just got them from the library.
OMG, seconded on Max Gladstones books. I have the 4th one staring at me from the bookshelf (it is my bribe for finishing this term). THEY ARE SO GOOD OMG.
 

Let's get this party started!

Archer and I were disappointed by the Muppet Show reboot.  In fact, we almost stopped recording it, but we decided to give the second episode a try ... and we were still not thrilled.  The third was a bit better, but we were still not enthused, and we're HUGE Muppet fans.  Come on, Muppets, give us something!  We're your biggest fans!  We're oscillating over here!

In Episode 4, Pig Out, they gave us something. That something is glorious and totally worth waiting for.  You don't have to slog through the first three episodes if you don't want to (though episode 3 has some charming Kermit and Fozzie moments), because you have your humble Muppet curators to present the best part of Episode 4.  It's not the bear.  I've had bunions that were funnier than that bear! Heh heh heh.

It's the Swedish Chef karaoke-ing "Rapper's Delight".  The video's only 55 seconds long, and they may be the best 55 seconds of your day!


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10/29 '15 6 Comments
Mwahahaha. "If it happens outside of work we don't owe an explanation."
AMAZE.
Love this.
I'll save my extended commentary for later. It could be a book.
It's all in the hands.
my take on this exactly. i was just extolling praise about the rapper's delight bit the other day :)
 

Ever watch a video and think, "They captured my essence in this short film!  This right here is the expression of my soul!" I felt that way when I watched the following video, which you should watch, especially All of You.

Herein we shall all be unsurprised that my soul is pretty violent and loves books.

Safe for work with headphones.  Safe for older kids but not little guys.

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10/24 '15 17 Comments
I love Axis of Awesome.
Every time we hear a car go past blaring loud music we start singing Axis of Awesome...
Matt loves to walk around and randomly scream at people gushing over the show,"I READ THE FUCKING BOOKS".
(He's a little bit nutty. He wanted to be a history teacher, and he told me he really wants one of his students to walk up to him and say "Mr. Bowerman, I would do anything for an A" and he'd reply "Anything?" and she would say "Yes Sir. Anything." then he'd lean in real close and say very loudly in her ear, "YOU CAN FUCKING STUDY"

I told him his career would be epic and short lived. )
Archer and I laughed so hard at this comment. It was the laughter of people who are totally on board with Matt's history teaching plan.

I READ THE FUCKING BOOKS!!!
I wish I had liked the books well enough to have done, but I couldn't stand them. They read too much like, well... TV Show treatments with a lot of excess digression. I mean, they start with a cold open.

Harry Potter: the books were better inversely with the movies. Goblet of Fire hits equilibrium.

Hunger Games: The books are unreadable.
The Hunger games were awful. I really hated Mockingjay the most though. I haven't read Maze Runner as friends have said the same thing to me. That the books were awful. (Haven't seen the movie either.)
I do love both the books and movies for HP and GoT.
(But I am hearing you on those two books in GoT Leah. I still haven't finished Dance with Dragons yet. I keep losing interest around the 300 page mark. And it gets to the point that every time I see Tyrion say "Words are wind" or "where the whores are" I want to throw the book really hard at GRRM's face.)
I really like the Hunger Games movies-- it helps a LOT that we are not in Katniss's head the whole time.
YES. Being in Katniss's head is so depressing. Also, the actors in the Hunger Games movies are all so talented and easy on the eyes too ...

Last night I got to tell Archer that President Snow's kid is Ace from Stand by Me. :)
I liked A Feast For Crows, but A Dance With Dragons was tough to get through. If you compare the descriptions of the landscapes and castles in AGOT to ADWD, they are so much sharper in AGOT and rambling in ADWD.

I tried to watch the Game of Thrones show, but it didn't hold my interest, and then after I heard about some of the reinterpretation (Jaime rapes Cersei in the show, he does NOT rape her in the books, and that interpretation not only tears down his motivation for all his bad acts and makes him seem like a mustache-twirling villain instead of a complex character, it makes Cersei seem like the weaker of the pair, which lessens her and also changes the power dynamic between the two of them from intricate to yawn - man overpowers woman with force), I wasn't motivated to go back and try again.

That said, AGOT through ASOS rocked and I have read them more than twice!
They seem to be kind of embarrassdly trying to forget that thing ever happened-- I mean on the showrunner level.

Personally, I adore the show. There's some problems, yes, but it's really well done television. I could watch nothing but the Arya and Tywin at Harrenhall bits pretty much forever (I know it's Roose Bolton in the books, but damn is it awesome with Tywin), and I love that Sansa actually makes sense and it not a complete twit in the show, but she's an abuse victim with PTSD from dealing with Joffery.

tl;dr-- they collapse the cast a lot in the show, but it makes a lot of sense that they do. The fact that Bran has a chance to let Jon know he's north of the wall, and chooses to go to the Children of the Forest instead is kind of neat as well.

That said, Dany struggling with people being idiots while she tries to hold Mereen together is exhausting in whatever medium.
More Tywin is never a bad thing for the audience (readers/watchers), even though it usually sucks for the characters. Also, what's his name? Charles Dance? The white suited bad guy in Last Action Hero (one of my favorite movies that I always forget about and then am super excited when I find it again) - perfect casting choice!

I'd watch that, probably. And maybe I will try to watch the series again, but speaking as the woman who is four episodes behind on Criminal Minds (my favorite show on TV right now, though it's in close competition with The Good Wife) ... not inspired to pick up the AGOT DVDs any time soon.

We are also watching The Walking Dead (also episodes behind there), but Walking Dead has never been my favorite show because it's inconsistent. Some episodes are gripping and exciting and fantastic to watch and some are just slogs, it's very bipolar.
<3 The Good Wife <3

We are bad Atlantans and are not watching the Walking Dead.
It's good, but you don't have to watch the show to enjoy the BLR videos, which both you and Brandes will LOVE.

Watch the first four in order on this list:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bad+lip+reading+walking+dead

You can't handle the flow, son.
I already love 'em.
La jiggy jar jar doo.
"GET A FUCKING LIBRARY CARD!"
I know, right! It's like they bugged my house!!!!
Damn friggin right. Although I wish my kid wouldn't insist on waiting to read a book he won't actually get around to reading and therefore doom us to not seeing the movie in the theater together...
Sometimes it's better to see the movie first, or at least not worse. Sometimes the movie is like a teaser for the book.
 

The Good Husband award goes to Mr. Jack Houser, who spent most of his day today scanning photos of his in-laws for their 50th Anniversary party slideshow (party is in September).  We have miles of photos to go before we sleep.

The Great Husband award goes to Mr. Jack Houser who did the above willingly and with a generous heart, despite losing his own father to cancer this year.

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8/23 '15 4 Comments
Outstanding!
<3 my first Hanukkah! <3
What a good man. :)
I believe it's called love. <3
 

I have loved Richard Avedon since I lived in Pittsburgh and found his photos in a magazine (Rolling Stone, maybe) and felt like I was in the room with the subjects and they were looking at me.  I bought a huge coffee table book of his work and hauled it around for years before sadly decluttering it (I don't like coffee tables because they collect stuff, and coffee table books don't fit on bookshelves).

When Avedon took portraits, he stood next to the camera, not behind it, so that the subject was looking at a human, not a lens.  He fixed them with his intense gaze and got back an intimate portrait, a view of their soul, if you will.  He got a genuine engagement, not just a pose.  This is one of his most famous portraits - Marilyn Monroe, except not looking like a glamour shot, looking like a vulnerable human:

I found out recently that Avedon was Jewish (he died in 2004), and that an exhibition of his portraits was in Philly at the National Museum of American Jewish History, which is around 8 blocks from my job.  The exhibit closes on Sunday, and I was determined to get there, so I took off half an hour early from work and speedwalked there in the rain so I could get half an hour in the Avedon gallery.  The exhibit lives in Israel normally and Philly is the only United States location where it will be seen.

Entitled Family Affairs, the exhibit featured portraits that Avedon had taken of Allen Ginsburg and his family.  Relevant to our other conversations, Ginsburg's father was a poet. The other part of the exhibit was a set of 69 portraits entitled, "The Family."

Rolling Stone tasked Avedon with election coverage leading up to the 1976 Presidential Election and paired him with a writer to do so.  What he did, instead of illustrating articles, was to take 69 portraits of the people who he thought were relevant to the election, including many faces the public never saw.  As an example of his perspective on history, of how visionary he was, he clearly did not take pictures of every politician, but he did photograph Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (though Bush makes sense since he was the director of the CIA at the time).  He photographed Jules Stein, the head of MCA Records, Donald Rumsfeld, Pete Rozelle (head of the NFL, creator of Monday Night Football), Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader, the head of the teamsters union, the head of the mine workers' union, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm ...

Anyway, he photographed the power and the power behind the power.  He saw the wheels turning inside the machine, he didn't just see what came out on the conveyor belt at the end of the line.  My father also has that perspective, he looks at world events and sees the underlying issues and what is really at stake.  I admire them both.

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7/31 '15 2 Comments
that was fun to read.
thank you.
I would love to see that exhibit. He's an amazing photographer.
 

When Archer was born, Jason gave me a necklace with a peridot in it (Archer's birthstone) and five tiny diamonds.  Before Hunter was born, I told Houser that I wanted him to take that necklace and combine it with a blue topaz, which was going to be Hunter's birthstone, because I never wanted to have to choose which necklace to wear.

Houser went to Beardsley and presented him with the original necklace and his new design.  He drew a front view and a side view, which Beardsley really appreciated because people design jewelry in their heads all the time, but rarely do they render it on paper with dimensions/proportions.  Both Beardsley and Houser actually went to the same art school, but not at the same time.

There are many styles of birthstone necklaces, a lot of them look like this:

Sorry for the image-heavy post, but for those who have not seen the typical stuff, I wanted to contrast it with my necklace, which is exactly what I wanted and one of my favorite pieces of jewelry.  This is it:

It looks better in person, but photographing jewelry is haaaard.

Hunter calls it "the me and Archer necklace".  

Anyway, I have no engagement ring, my wedding ring is pretty plain (by design, I always bang my hands into things and I wanted a ring I couldn't wreck) - this is the piece of jewelry that represents my marriage and my family more than any other.  I am very happy with it.

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6/3 '15 6 Comments
Powerful.
That necklace is really amazing.
That is lovely! It looks talismanic, like the key to an ancient temple.
Oh that is the perfect description!
It is beautiful and so meaningful and I just adore it.
It is lovely, indeed!
 

So, I was going to post a lovely selfie of this great t-shirt I got from the swap, but my phone was co-opted by an enterprising Beeble.

You can almost see the shirt - it's black with gold flowers and stylized birds, but the Beeble face is much cuter.

This is a terrible picture of me - my hair makes me look like I have an alien head, but with Hunter in the picture, none of you are really looking at me anyway, right?  RIGHT?

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3/13 '15 2 Comments
Hunter is singing I'm Too Sexy. Even though he hasn't learned it yet.
He looks very diabolical. You look rightfully alarmed.