If you go far enough back I'm pretty sure they were actually called "chubby" sizes, but I do seem to remember there being another designation somewhere along the way. Can't recall it.
I do, however, recall how very badly I wanted to fit into the "slender" Jordache jeans.
Watching my mother with my niece (12 years younger than me), I realized that she (an exact contemporary of Betty Draper) has a bit of that young-woman-in-the-50s passive-aggressive attitude toward food. "Really? Are you sure you want more?" I never saw a hint of it, because I probably weighed 100lbs soaking wet in high school (a metabolic fluke that alas no longer abides). I really dodged a bullet there, because, based on my reaction when it was pointed in my direction recently ("Cheese? No, you can't mean that."), that would have done a fucking spectacular number on me.
To be fair, slender Jordache jeans look really great.
Off to drag my sorry tired ass off to teach.
Judging from what I just heard at the park, "fat bitch" is the contemporary term.
I've had some thoughts about that, because Sally's always been a solid, sturdy kid, and I worry (worried -- at this point I'm not sweating it much) that she was going to confuse not being delicate with being overweight, and beat herself up for not being frailer.
Things I did: (1) Explicitly talked about models (when something related came up) as a particular and unusual body-type, and made it clear that for most people being skinnier had nothing to do with looking more like a model (this was aided by the fact that we've got an extended family member who's 5'10 and probably not 110 lbs. Models are 'pretty people who are built like [X]', not something to emulate.)
(2) Talked to her about anyone getting analytical or disapproving about a kid's weight as a lunatic, given how much body-type changes as kids grow up. Also pointed out that anyone getting judgmental about anyone else's weight is hellishly rude and intruding into something that's none of their business.
(3) Sat on myself hard about actually worrying about her bodyfat level, and quietly bit the head off any other family members headed in that direction. She had a chubby couple of years that turned into a growth spurt a year or two back, and as a neurotic American I was tempted to stress about it, but did not allow myself to.
(4) Avoid getting judgmental about anyone else's weight/bodyfat, including your own, in front of her (manners would, as above, dictate not doing it at all, but you do what you can). I sweat about my body occasionally here, but try not to do it at all at home.
(5) Sports, generally valuing strength and fitness, and pointing out that anyone can get fit/good at a sport if they work at it. You're/she's not going to change a basic body type through exercise, but that's not what exercise is for, it's for being able to enjoy using your body. This is also good for channeling any neuroticism about your own body that you're having trouble keeping a lid on.
Somehow I shifted into phrasing this into the imperative, which I didn't mean, it's just what I tried to do. But she seems to have made to eleven without being unhappy or self-conscious about her body at all, and she doesn't talk about weight as if she thought it were an important issue for herself or her friends much; I don't know if my actively trying to keep her from being exposed to craziness on the subject has helped, or if she's just been lucky.
I have thoughts about this; let me tell them to you.
I don't know if my actively trying to keep her from being exposed to craziness on the subject has helped, or if she's just been lucky.
I am not a parent but I suspect there's a significant element of luck involved.
I don't know what the basis for my intuition is, but I would expect that when it comes to heavily culturally loaded topics that parents can attempt to model a sane perspective but that some kids will have more baggage than others regardless.
I'd like to raise her so that she has a different interior monologue about her body than I had about mine.
You're/she's not going to change a basic body type through exercise, but that's not what exercise is for, it's for being able to enjoy using your body.
The latter seems a pretty good prescription for the former, if my experience is anything to go by: my ambient thoughts are, if not entirely different, at least in a different key when I am exercising and thinking of the relevance of the exercise to being faster, and more comfortable, while hiking or whatnot.
On the other hand, a girl's or woman's internal monologue might be harder to change.
7: I think on weight, specifically, a lot of craziness comes from the home. It's not so much modeling sanity, as really making an effort not to model the standard, ordinary insanity most of us have kicking around on the issue.
8 last: ... because the traditional Attract and Adorn! story about women and their bodies occupies more of the relevant space than the same for men,* I'd guess, not because girls' or womens' minds are less mutable or anything.
OT: I mentioned this on FB, but I read the new William Gibson on a plane the other day and didn't leave it in the seat pocket as I often do. If anyone would like it, send me a mailing address, first come, first served, etc., etc.
* The counterpart for men might be Toughr Than Leather, Strong Like Bull! As Indicated By Goatee and SUV.
There's always this.. Just saying.
Threading the needle of: exercise and diet are good/different body types are attractive/you don't need to be the best at exercise to do it/don't let the culture make you either give up on your body or obssess about unrealistic goals is incredibly difficult for men or women, and must be about 50X harder for women.
I don't know if my actively trying to keep her from being exposed to craziness on the subject has helped, or if she's just been lucky.
In my experience, parents can be a major channel for this craziness, e.g., my friend's dad who put his daughter on dexies at the age of nine, the ex of a friend of mine who ranted to her about how she was making "his" six-year-old daughter fat by not putting her on a diet, a woman I knew who weighed all her food and taught her daughter to do the same.
I think you've probably made a big difference.
...e.g., my friend's dad who put his daughter on dexies at the age of nine....
!
?!
?
7: I think on weight, specifically, a lot of craziness comes from the home. It's not so much modeling sanity, as really making an effort not to model the standard, ordinary insanity most of us have kicking around on the issue.
That may be true, as I said I have no basis for my assumption.
I have just been thinking recently about (a) how there are ways in which I am clearly crazy which do not appear to have been inherited, as far as I can tell, from my parents/upbringing and (b) as somebody who tends towards anxiousness at times I know that I will frequently find myself with a certain free-floating anxiousness which will attach itself to something at hand that is unrelated to the original source of my distress. I just assume that things that are highly charged topics in the culture are easy magnets for any general anxiety.
On preview: 12 is also correct and, it goes without saying, that the behavior that you are describing sounds entirely laudable.
LB! Do not let Halford put your child on a paleo diet!!!
We already feed her mostly on pigeons that we make her run down and catch herself. This is wrong?
IANAParent, but in trying to become one as someone who's fairly unhappy (but trying not to be) about the amount of weight I've gained the past few years and who also was anorexic for way too long, I've been doing a lot of reading on how to parent in a healthy way when food is involved. I know heebie doesn't want/need advice, but I've been helped tremendously by Katja Rowell's blog based on Ellyn Satter's strategies.
I'm actually looking speculatively again at a Crossfit gym, for the winter when I'm not biking. Largely because the pullup component of the whole thing isn't as intimidating as it was.
16: As a vegetarian, I have to say that, ethically, she should limit herself to the ones she finds dead in the gutter.
We already feed her mostly on pigeons that we make her run down and catch herself. This is wrong?
Rats with wings!
18 -- do it! Seriously, it's great, and you actually don't need to be able to do pullups (or anything else -- everything is scaled to the level where it is doable, if difficult, for everyone there).
My efforts to paleo up my kid's diet have mostly consisted of getting her to like bacon.
So, how much time do you put into it? How many workouts a week, how long is a workout?
On the other hand, my gym does have this written on the wall:
Fat is not Beautiful.-unless you are an elephant, in which case we should eat you.
My old gym had "No judgements!" written everywhere. My Sharpie was not kind to their signage.
22 - 1 hr or less per day, between 3-5 times per week. Weeks with more than 3 sessions are way more productive than ones with only 3. There's about 30 minutes of warm-up/stretching (which is pretty close to most people's moderate exercise), but the actual workout is ususally between 10-30 (insanely intense) minutes. It's actually really well designed for busy people who want to get out of there quickly.
we've got an extended family member who's 5'10 and probably not 110 lbs
Jeebus, that is extended. I hope her time on the rack wasn't too painful.
24:
Was it in England?
neb doesnt seem to be bothered by spelling mistakes anymore. It used to be so easy.
I love Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
Sports, generally valuing strength and fitness, and pointing out that anyone can get fit/good at a sport if they work at it. You're/she's not going to change a basic body type through exercise, but that's not what exercise is for, it's for being able to enjoy using your body.
This is a great lesson.
I started running with a group in the last couple months. I absolutely love that feeling you get after a hard workout with a group of people. I've thought that Crossfit brings a similar benefit.
Seriously, though, I'm bookmarking LB's 5 for reference in raising possible future daughters. I was the skinny daughter, so I didn't come in for the hectoring my incredibly fit but unskinny sister got, but boy did I internalize a lot of those messages all the same.
My old gym had "No judgements!" written everywhere. My Sharpie was not kind to their signage.
Because of the first e? But that's an accepted spelling! I know, because it cost me a spelling bee victory in eighth grade, and I'm still bitter about it.
Dictionaries say it's an accepted spelling, but they're wrong.
It's in dictionaries (as a variant). It's not acceptable in the style guide of nearly every US-based publication.
The gym had hired a British ad agency, who hadn't really bothered, it seemed. They soon had all the signage reprinted without the e.
It's definitely not acceptable, at all, for any American lawyer.
re the husky/chubby issue
Buy her boy's jeans. That's what we do for our kid. (1) boy's jeans are much better made and (2) then you can have the whole heteronormative discussion at a charmingly early age and get it over with.
President Ford used to pronounce that "e" in "judgement", after he stopped walking and spit out his gum.
Oh, I thought Oudemia meant she had written "No judgements!" with a Sharpie on all the signs that said things like "Fat isn't beautiful".
38: Ooooh. No, no. I wrote ^- on all the signs.
On Crossfit: be careful, it varies a LOT across affiliates. I'd also caution against their attitude towards injury, but then again...varies widely across affiliates. The stuff they do can be very intense, and if not monitored correctly, dangerous. You're trusting your body to them, to some extent.
On girls: The luck component seems directly related to who their friends are. And friends matter, often waaaay more than parents, particularly as kids get older. So if her best friend is that poor kid who's been on dex since she was 9...I dunno. I like the whole teaching them to value their bodies for what they can do, as opposed to what they look like, but...watch who their friends are.
This was way more depressing than I meant it to be.
Puppies!
watch who their friends are
Mmm. Yeah, I've encouraged eyerolling at particular friends on this issue (in a warmly supportive "[Y] is fine just the way she is, her body's growing the way it wants to, and if she thinks there's a problem she's really getting bent out of shape when she shouldn't. Anything you can do to reassure her would be good." kind of way.)
On the Crossfit thing, I'm pretty cavalier about injuries -- generally, I don't get hurt doing things (not counting cuts and bruises, of course. I'm durable, not made out of adamantium) and my family members don't either. We seem to be way over-engineered joint and connective-tissue wise.
I think on weight, specifically, a lot of craziness comes from the home.
This is probably the issue my parents did least well on. Their standard line in conversation to me was "Well, you certainly don't need to gain any weight," by which I think they were genuinely trying to be diplomatic. There were lots of conversations about calories and fat content in a given portion of food. Plenty of comments about other people's bodies that I could extrapolate to my own pretty easily.
Really pretty run-of-the-mill American Neurotic, but a lot of habits that I'd like to not do with my own kids. LB's 5 is really good and I might print it out.
Given the nature of the city and the rent situation, it's pretty likely that any reasonably well-established Crossfit place in NYC is going to be run by good people and not yahoos. But you can always show up and if they're not emphasizing technique or seem incompetent, then you can go someplace else.
We seem to be way over-engineered joint and connective-tissue wise.
That must be nice. If my connective tissue was engineered at all, it was by the hapless, terrorist kind of engineer.
(3) Sat on myself hard about actually worrying about her bodyfat level, and quietly bit the head off any other family members headed in that direction. She had a chubby couple of years that turned into a growth spurt a year or two back, and as a neurotic American I was tempted to stress about it, but did not allow myself to.
This is particular relates to what set off this post. At open house yesterday, it became pretty clear that there's a steady stream of goldfish crackers that Hawaiian Punch eats at daycare. She's also very active there - runs around outside to exhaustion.
I shouldn't give a shit about snacking on goldfish crackers, but instead I had a giant internal debate with my internalized version of my own mother.
it cost me a spelling bee victory in eighth grade, and I'm still bitter about it
My crushing loss was in seventh grade. I'm sure I've spoken about it bitterly here before. The word was "haggard", and I blame the ruthlessly southern accent of the WTVR Channel 6 Richmond CBS news anchor who was reading the words. (Not that I'm still upset about it! Puppies!)
For years my dad loved to tell about my fourth grade spelling bee reader's mispronunciation of the word 'debut'. He would always lament that the kid hadn't asked the reader to use the word in a sentence.
I am a little inconsistent about this, because I do think carrying large amounts of excess fat is unhealthy and not pleasant for the people who are, the trend toward greater levels of obesity in Americans is a lousy thing and public health measures (ending corn subsidies, replacing them with truck farming subsidies, encouraging bike commuting and such) should be taken to try to stop it. But I also think pressuring kids about it, even if they actually are somewhat overfat, isn't effective and just makes people crazy.
Mostly, I think kids are pretty self-regulating in terms of eating what they need, calorie-wise.
"I'm going to debut it," Tom said with great certainty.
I think I had more examples planned for the first sentence there, and then something shiny distracted me. I'm a sucker for a rolled up ball of tinfoil.
Mostly, I think kids are pretty self-regulating in terms of eating what they need, calorie-wise.
Is there a qualifier to this? Like, "when they've got healthy choices available"? What sprang to mind was the little 1 1/2 year old last night who is pretty dang fat already.
mispronunciation of the word 'debut'.
An acquaintance was somberly reading a newspaper clipping about the funeral of a teenager we were loosely connected to, and mispronounced 'epitome' in the middle of a sentence. I worked very hard to keep myself from seeking eye contact with anyone else who might have been amused.
This morning in my German class we were practicing verb conjugation, and I asked if there was anyone who works out. Turns out that in a class of 14 students, I, the teacher, am the only one who does any kind of sport or exercise regularly. Fucking college student metabolism.
(And then I found 5 DM.)
...e.g., my friend's dad who put his daughter on dexies at the age of nine....
!
?!
?
Because she was chubby. Her brother too, actually.
52: Is that word pronounced differently in British English? Because the snooty, Cambridge-educated, asshole prof from my department said it the three-syllable way in a seminar once, and while I laughed heartily inside, I was too unsure to call him on it.
(Not connecting snooty and Cambridge-educated; this guy just happens to be both.)
German class
"I am Blume, and this is Franz, and we want to PUMP YOU UP"
Is that word pronounced differently in British English?
Not according to the OED it isn't.
What sprang to mind was the little 1 1/2 year old last night who is pretty dang fat already.
Lots of kids grow like accordions -- wide, then tall, then wide. Sally was distinctly chubby at eight, and now is distinguishable from a leopard only in that she lacks spots. By which I mean to say, I'm not looking at the kid you're looking at, but I think there's a fair shot they're just fine, and in a chubby place on their growth trajectory.
But also, self-regulating if they're allowed to self-regulate. Not so much with the 'having healthy choices available' if that means restricting the available food to only wildly healthy stuff, but not forcefeeding them like foie gras geese, which a surprising number of parents do, or being totally controlling about what they do eat.
mispronunciation of the word 'debut'
A very smart girl in my sixth grade Language Arts class (she went on to become valedictorian) gave an oral report where she repeatedly used the phrase "whores devour". The very puzzled teacher later taught us how to spell a phrase we were all familiar with but no one had ever seen written down. You guessed it: Hors d'œuvre.
48: Yes, I'm not sure it was that great that my struggles with my weight (which really started in earnest when the kids were ~3,5 & 8) played out during my kids formative years. I would always try to couch it in terms of ability to do things like sports, canoeing, hiking* etc., however. Turned out all of them were rail-thin as kids, although I worry that my eldest has the same food grazing habits as I did (he refuses to believe he could ever have a problem--just wait a couple of decades, dude).
*41: We seem to be way over-engineered joint and connective-tissue wise. As am I, but I must have really come close to breaking my wrist a couple of weeks back given how the course of its healing has gone (there may actually be a scaphoid fracture but I hate seeing the doctor). More reinforcement for not getting too heavy.
I've confessed here, I think, to thinking there were two synonyms for 'rubble': debris (prn DEB-ris), which I'd seen written but never heard, and debree, which somehow I'd never seen written down.
This morning in my German class we were practicing verb conjugation, and I asked if there was anyone who works out. Turns out that in a class of 14 students, I, the teacher, am the only one who does any kind of sport or exercise regularly.
I'm always surprised at how active the gym threads on unfogged are.
As I've mentioned before, I just started going to a gym semi-regularly a year and a half ago. But before that I had barely set foot in one, and that seems pretty common among my friends -- plenty of people who are generally active but most don't go to gyms as far as I know.
It's one of the topics for which I react to the unfogged discussions as if they're vaguely hectoring.
But I assume gym membership is more common/more of a topic of conversation in larger urban areas and unfogged is, generally speaking, more urban than my group of friends.
It's also something that's interesting to you if you do it, like cooking. So you can get a lively discussion going with the people who do work out, and it's not immediately apparent what a large percentage of the readers have no interest.
So, who wants to talk about protein?
If I'd been allowed to self-regulate I would have subsisted on ice cream, doritos, and bologna. My hippie lesbo mom wouldn't let me have bologna. At five or so I would crawl under the table at extended family gatherings, tug on a random adult's pantleg, and hiss, "boooloooooooogna."
It became kind of a thing. I didn't even like it. Still don't.
Evidently, five year old donaquixote.
"I am Blume, and this is Franz, and we want to PUMP YOU UP"
We have an in-class exercise we do in which the body builders Hans and Franz are introduced as opposites in all things, so when one says something, the students have to come up with what the other one would say. They never have any clue who Hans und Franz are.
58: I was looking at my "first day of kindergarten" and "high school graduation" pictures last weekend -- my mom has them in a frame together because it is the same three kids in the same post in each pic. The decidedly chubby neighbor boy in the kindergarten pic is a 6'3" rain thin drink of water in the graduation pic. I basically look the same -- just wearing less calico. (My mom was *all about* the calico and the rick-rack in the 70s.)
Oh man, this is a struggle for me on the modeling sanity fron. Both because I have gained an inordinate amount of weight in the past 6 months and because I've noticed Rory getting a bit of a gut herself. I absolutely don't want to telegraph even a little that I have any concerns about her tummy while at the same time wanting to make sure this isn't signalling flaws in my menu planning as of late. (Oreos are a food group, right?) And it is really hard to conceal my own frustrations, especially when I can't fit ito that favorite pair of jeans.
On the plus side (no pun intended), she caught me getting frustrated the other day and volunteered, "Don't worry Mama. It's just a summer tummy. I got one this summer, too."
Yeah, the self-regulating thing isn't well supported or anything. I believe it's true, but my reasons are mostly anecdotal: people I know who allowed self-regulation, or were raised self-regulatedly, seem to be less likely to have eating issues than people who were raised with a lot of control around food. And what I think of as 'self-regulating' does include a certain amount of "Leave some pie for everyone else", not absolutely unlimited access to junk. (I made the best Concord grape pie this weekend -- the recipe seemed really fussy, but it wasn't all that bad, and the pie was spectacular.) Sort of applying reasonable dietary controls at the grocery store end of things, rather than nagging about food that's in the house already.
But this is not science or anything, just things I believe are true.
68: Oooh, rickrack. I wore a lot of rickrack bedecked dresses at that age too.
We have an in-class exercise we do in which the body builders Hans and Franz are introduced as opposites in all things,
And then you have them do logic puzzles!
there are real advantages to being skinny, though. more attention from guys, easier time w/social acceptance in general. trying to think if I know any heavier girls with good body image. only athletes. then again, it's not like I know a lot of *thinner* girls with good body image...
I wish! I would love to teach logic. But alas, I am in the wrong field for that.
This is a subject about which I am wont to rant. Let's place the weight of a normal otherwise healthy (privileged, if you will) teenaged girl on a scale from 1 to 10 (no, numbers are convertible to pounds, but to pounds on the frame) with 1 and 10 presenting actual health risks. Friends (and apparently parents -- I've no experience with this) play for 2, and start assholery at maybe 4 or 5. Guess what: you (they) are wielding a blunt instrument, and you'd have a tough time getting someone to 2 and not 1.
That wasn't very articulate, but I'm too hungry to concentrate. Off to eat!
there are real advantages to being skinny, though.
Yeah, I don't know what those fatties are thinking.
"whores devour". The very puzzled teacher later taught us how to spell a phrase we were all familiar with but no one had ever seen written down. You guessed it: Hors d'œuvre.
There were a bunch of cartoon devoted to this fractured franglais which were then turned into cocktail napkins.
http://pollyvousfrancais.blogspot.com/2008/04/fractured-french.html
argument against fucking up your kid's body image, altruism/Econ 101-stylezzz: being skinny has negative externalities. if everyone weighed 9/8ths as much, everyone would be at the same place on the attractiveness hierarchy as they are, while eating 9/8ths as many Cheetos. conclusion: we should tax treadmills and subsidize pie.
You could have them do logic puzzles as a way of getting them to learn the subjunctive! ("Franz, If I asked Hans whether this was correct path, what would he say?")
One thing that you definitely don't want to do is send all sorts of negative messages about body fat, and then keep all the junk food in the world in the house and let the kids eat it whenever they want. This is essentially what my mother is doing to my nieces, and it really bugs me.
My mom does a lot of parenting of my nieces, because my sister in law is an irresponsible nutcase, and my brother has to leave the kids with her a lot. My parents have always run a very junk food friendly household. My brother and I had a lot of junk food as kids, and now that we both have kids, visiting Grandma is a time when our kids get more junk food. Yes, at grandma's you can eat Chocolate Coated Sugar Bombs for breakfast. Since my nieces are over there more than my kids, they are getting an awful lot of Chocolate Coated Sugar Bombs. Its more sugar than Mrs Fat President and I want our kids to get, but its not the end of the world.
Lately, though, my elder niece has been putting on weight, and this has led my mom to start projecting all sorts of crazy body anxiety on to her. She even ran out and bought a book about how to get kids to diet to lose weight. AND YET, this is still a house with an unlimited stream of Chocolate Coated Sugar Bombs. This is just the worst of both worlds: all the anxiety about body image, and all the bad diet habits that come from the constant availability of empty calories.
Ok, I don't really think you need to be warned against this. It doesn't sound like HP is getting conflicting messages at all on this issue. I just wanted to vent.
dietary controls at the grocery store end of things
seconded. I don't like choosing what to eat to be a complicated balancing act, while opting against soda and dingdongs at the store is simple.
I think that a corollary is throwing away food sometimes-- snacking on fruit and avocados is great, but the half-life is short compared to cheetos, so overbuying 1 week out of 5 or 6 is inevitable.
Eaiting shitty food and not exercising leaves me with less energy and more crankiness, so in my mind there's more than just aesthetics involved.
Yeah, the self-regulating thing isn't well supported or anything. I believe it's true, but my reasons are mostly anecdotal: people I know who allowed self-regulation, or were raised self-regulatedly, seem to be less likely to have eating issues than people who were raised with a lot of control around food.
I'm only picking at this because I'm trying to air out all the arguments my internalized mother would use here. This morning I was ready to throw out all the sugared cereals and implement all the rules I never hold myself to, but are straight out of my parents' playbook.
Note to self: A steady stream of goldfish crackers is no big deal. She also eats fruit, sandwiches, and cheese. (Although that's about it.)
80:
I could have written 80 about my ex's parents. They believe in shoving food down the kids throats.
It was not uncommon for them to have a snack of a couple pieces of pizza and cookies after school.
Ack, JP! I fractured my scaphoid in college. That sucker takes *forever* to heal!
76: no well yeah, true. just felt like no one's talking about how, you can parent as enlightenedly as God, but there still doesn't seem to be a stable heavy/happy equilibrium, at least through college.
A steady stream of goldfish crackers is no big deal.
We used bunny crackers, for the organic goodness.
82: It's very hard to make yourself less neurotic (or at least I have no success reducing my own neurosis levels). I tend to work on trying to channel craziness into harmless (or less harmful) channels, like the covering up body anxiety with sports/fitness boosterism.
Which is to say, if you're freaking about food, maybe go all Mark Bittman (or moderately Mark Bittman), and start being fussy about having too much packaged stuff in the house. It's troublesome enough to soak up a fair amount of freaking out, probably actually beneficial health-wise on some level, and distantly enough related to body composition that it's probably not contagiously crazymaking.
So, who wants to talk about protein?
You know what rules? Variety boxes of Chobani yogurts from Costco. 140 calories, 14 grams of protein, and they taste like dessert.
85: I dunno about that, I can think of at least a few honest to god fat women I've known who didn't seem to be any unhappier about their bodies than most average-weight women are. Everyone I'm thinking of was above-average pretty, of course.
Chocolate Coated Sugar Bombs
Chocolate FROSTED Sugar Bombs.
Sackcloth.
(...was my spelling bee downfall. I had never heard the word and kept hearing it as "sackloth.")
87: Bunny crackers have an inferior texture! They have that dissolve itself into a paste thing going on like Ritz crackers that Goldfish avoid. (The whole wheat Goldfish are good, too!)
93: I've been amused by the Flavor Blasted line of Goldfish crackers and have a theory that Pepperidge Farm picked up some laid-off Doritos flavor developers.
Favorite mispronunciation ever: bourgeoisie as BURR-gee-OH-see, by a college freshman.
95: That's what I say in my head when I have to spell it.
A student reading a text aloud in class a few years ago had no idea how to pronounce glasnost or perestroika (much to the amusement of the Romanian and the Russian students in the class). In her defense, maybe she was confused to find a non-German words in the middle of a German text, but come on! They're prounouced pretty much just the way they look!
Ritz are flaky and synthetically buttery and delicious, up there with tube biscuits and bacon-fried pizza leftovers.
Ritz crackers make a delicious apple pie.
I remember a classmate pronouncing the name of a famous National Park in California as "Yoosmight".
Some toddlers are just chubby. My eldest was short and chubby at HP's age, and then between 2 and 3 she grew - has been tall and not chubby ever since. Kid B was a chubby kid until 18 months or so ago when the prepuberty growth spurt hit, only she stretched rather than grew. None of my kids are stringbeans though and we've had many conversations along the lines of LB's post above over the years.
and start being fussy about having too much packaged stuff in the house
Paleo!!
For the longest time I thought "cacophony" was pronounced CACK-O-PHONY.
When my step-brother was little he pronounced pseudo as suede-o and wound up calling someone a suede-o-intellectual.
suede-o-intellectual
I like! This should be a word!
What could it mean?
pseudo
Also not an easy word to get a handle on if you were young when Phil Collins's "Sussudio" came out.
105: Something to do with those tweed jackets with the suede elbow patches?
When a beard & corduroy's career is sufficiently advanced he becomes a suede-o-intellectual.
Uncovering unconscious bias: until reading this thread, I presumed everyone on Unfogged who has a daughter, has a skinny one. While writing this post, I was writing it from a stance of "most of the people with daughters won't be able to relate". Jeez, Heebie.
105: Someone who uses fuzzy logic?
105: It puts me in mind of the "Suede Denim Secret Police."
Oh, does worcestershire fuse pronouncing and eating properly? What about gimlet, the only way this word is pronounced anymore is as a drink name, right? Geoduck, mangosteen.
Is there anything non-obvious about the proper pronunciation of gimlet? Because if it's gim-LAY, I've been making a fool of myself for years.
HP is way too young for you to know what her body type will be. Keegan was downright porcine until he was three or so. Really, the biggest kid in his daycare class by a honking huge margin. Then it was like a switch flipped, and ever since, he just keeps streeeeetching right on out.
tweed jackets with the suede elbow patches
I'm reminded of the tale of the professor who wanted to affix suede patches to the elbows of his jacket but was unsure how many stitches to use. Anyway, he became known as the professor who tried two per suede. (Sorry, heebie.)
109: We're also all startlingly beautiful, aside from those who would prefer to be ruggedly handsome. And hyper-fit, while still being near-professional class cooks.
Or at least I firmly believe all of this.
My daughter has definitely alternated from being chunky and being bone-skinny. She has been on a bone-skinny bit for a while. A lot of it really has to do with her grandparents havent been keeping her as much.
109 - That is quite strange. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/mazportico/ for plenty of evidence of non-skinny children.
Startlingly beautiful - well, I'll have to admit to that one.
115: Oh, my, the two of them are appealing: they both got your hair. How old is Keegan? He looks practically grown up.
two per suede.
"Suede" is a mass noun, not a count noun, Stanley.
109: Yeah, the whole topic is fraught. As a cultural we've lost our way to body image. As I said, all my kids were whippets including my daughter. This summer she came home from college more filled out and despite ourselves, my wife and I found ourselves discussing it (just the two of us) in a kind of stupid way*. She has more of my bone structure than my two boys, she's naturally going to be a bit solidly built.
*Annoying! I blame it on my wife and I having been bottle-fed.
115 -- Wow, those are super cute kids.
109 -- Aren't all roughly two year olds chubby, with maybe a few exceptions? Definitely too soon to tell anything about adult body type. Anyhow, I was rail-thin and lean as a kid, bu was not blessed with that shape after about age 15. Which in many ways sucks more than starting out round and getting leaner.
Keegan's 13 (going on 30) and in the 8th grade.
Good lord. Newt's nine. That's only four years difference.
HP is way too young for you to know what her body type will be.
Oh, definitely. This is all just projecting my baggage onto her. Or more charitably, trying to check my baggage at the door so that I don't dump it on her.
That is quite strange. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/mazportico/ for plenty of evidence of non-skinny children.
I've even seen photos of them from time to time, on your blog and probably facebook. Probably just blinded by their cuteness.
119: I'm not sure which kid is in the top photo, but she's a dead ringer for you, except for that gorgeous red hair.
We're also all startlingly beautiful, aside from those who would prefer to be ruggedly handsome.
Some of us max out at ruggedly startling.
I will confess to often wanting to be more like asilon as a parent.
77: [ Hors d'œuvre.] There were a bunch of cartoon devoted to this fractured franglais which were then turned into cocktail napkins.
Here's the whole set of napkins. There was a book with some additional ones, was looking for and could not find, "Hors de Combat".
We're also all startlingly beautiful, aside from those who would prefer to be ruggedly handsome.
I've seen pictures. Apparently, you'd all prefer to be ruggedly handsome.
I would have gotten my comment up before will's except that I had to reach around my cat to get to the keyboard. Cats, they ruin your timing.
Gorgeous DYED hair, SK! That is Kid B, ex-fat-kid. Yeah, as her face has got less round, now everyone tells me she looks just like me. Which I am taking as a compliment.
Cats, they ruin your timing how the fuck do they work?
134: You'll never figure out my cleverly disguised flickr suede-onym.
Kid B got Apostropher's hair too!
My daughter is known as the "Crazy Cat" in our household. She grins broadly when I shout it. Or when I sneak up behind her and meow!
I think that I have mentioned that BR's hair has lost its bright-red color. She is sad.
My mom is in the extreme 'don't be fat, if you are it's horrible and means you're a bad person' camp. Not really an issue for me growing up, since I could have been used for anatomy class (me, age twenty - tons of exercise, 187cm, 65kg), but these days she's constantly on my case since I've gained about ten kilos and no longer spend every summer doing serious hiking every weekend interspersed with tons of biking. She herself is absolutely ridiculously fit, about 165cm and about 50kg. On the other hand, the complete ban on junk food and making sure I got plenty of exercise was a good thing. To the extent that being overweight is a genuinely bad thing it's because it correlates with a poor diet and lack of activity.
OT: I was sad that I never got to say "dude! Youve got no Quaran!" to anyone.
84: Ack, JP! I fractured my scaphoid in college. That sucker takes *forever* to heal!
Well so far my diagnosis technique has been limited to the time-honored tradition of "man reading things and looking at pictures on the Internet while wiggling his wrist around."
149: So was the meetup in February with or without the extra 10kg, Ichabod?
looking at pictures on the Internet while wiggling his wrist around
"Diagnosis technique" is an interesting euphemism for this.
187cm, 65kg
Like this means anything at all to the American commentariat.
"I'm four cubits tall, and 61,250 pennyweights!"
153 He's just preparing for the upcoming Lex O'Donnell
You can say it to me. I don't have a Koran.
Like this means anything at all to the American commentariat.
Mais chui Americain, moi.
bacon-fried pizza leftovers.
Is that a real thing?
155: Tall and quite skinny, even with the extra 10kg.
...but you knew that because you're a Islamo-Eco-Liberalfascist.
My soon to be teenage girl was always a little round, but is definitely changing with the onset of puberty and playing water polo. Her ten year old brother was always more athletic and thinner, and would tease her as little brothers are wont to do. But, O. Henry, here's where things get interesting. As she is thinning, he is getting chunkier. A real pot belly. But he still calls her the fattie, even though he is rounder. Probably due to his playing more baseball over the summer. Now that they are both back in the pool, I expect he will thin out also.
microwaved leftover pizza is soggy. Take bacon grease, put in pan, heat the slice that way instead; it doesn't absorb much and also crisps up a bit. Not a light breakfast, though. Also, I can never remember hard g or soft g for gimlet, looking it up doesn't help me to remember the next time.
Well so far my diagnosis technique has been limited to the time-honored tradition of "man reading things and looking at pictures on the Internet while wiggling his wrist around."
Heh. That's what I was doing after I read 60, because I had a nasty sprain that might have been a fracture last winter, and fuck did it take forever to heal. I didn't go to the doctor then because I just didn't want to, and I don't want to go to the doctor now because I fear the word "re-break".
Are you alive again, Ernst? How many times do I have to kill you?
looking it up doesn't help me to remember the next time.
Good god, that girl gulped that gimlet. Does that help?
The skateboarding Koran stealer: "I want to be in High Times."
Few people know this, but the name of the gimlet actually comes from gin + lime + omelet, so the proper (but rarely deployed) pronunciation is actually JIME-let. Also, nowadays most bartenders leave out the eggs.
Oh, bullshit, Stanley.
My mom is in the extreme 'don't be fat, if you are it's horrible and means you're a bad person' camp.
This is my dad, completely. In fact, a central feature of his oppositionto universal health care was/is that his taxes would get raised to pay for all the health problems of those obese people. He points out who appears to have gained or lost when we all get together (gee, I wonder why the recent weight gain is freaking me out?), then points out the "fatasses" out in public who just upset him so very much by being fat. Especially awkward what with my uncle and UNG's girlfriend being obese -- half this crap is said in front of the Uncle and plenty in front of Rory who surely has noticed that the gf is heavy. The best I can come up with as far as Rory being exposed to that is "Grandpa is full of crap and it's pretty much your best bet to ignore everything he says."
Not only is judgment not pronounced with three syllables in any Britisher dialect that I know of, housestyle in most of the upper upper British publishing outlets is no e.
no e
They make an exception at the annual company raves, though, right?
My grandfather, so judgmental a man that he choose to become a high-episcopal minister, was really uncomfortable with fat people (also jews, but that's not the immediate topic of discussion). This did not bode well for his relations with my aunt, the youngest child and the only girl (of four), who has always been on the bigger side. He just could. not. figure. out. why she didn't do something about it. Needless to say, he was in fit fighting trim until his mid-90s or so, when he let himself go a bit. Once swam across the whole of Providence, RI in a hurricane, once built a stone two-car garage by hand. "Yeah, but he was an asshole," sez my aunt.
My mom was pretty significantly crazy about weight issues when we were growing up. I got off way easy, because I was the "skinny" daughter, which meant that my sister, who was marginally heavier than me, was considered the "fat" one. She developed some significant weight-related neuroses in her teen years -- like, she took appetite suppressants all the time and once fainted at her afterschool job as a result of one of her constant fasts. Even after that, my mom continued to criticize her weight and encourage her to diet.
(To make it clear how crazy this is, my sister is 5'8" and maybe 130 pounds, and has always been around that range.)
Anyway, she's alright now (well, she still refers to herself as chubby -- and hilariously, refers to me as skinny, even though we for the most part wear the same size clothes. Also, she continues to have some odd eating habits), and if we survived okay, HG, your kids will be totally fine.
I got somewhat fat for a year when I was 13 or so, but I don't remember my parents pointing it out much. That was nice of them.
Since this is the exercise thread, tonight I ran 1.7 miles in 18 minutes, which brings me very close to my goal of running 10 minutes miles. I ran the second 1.7 miles in 19 minutes, which is not much slower. (I feel I should add that this is a fairly hilly route.)
My almost-4 and almost-6 year old weigh just about the same, very different body shapes even though we offer them the exact same food. They have very different eating habits- the younger always wants whatever other people have, and always wants to have "the last bit" of whatever we're eating (even if he has the same amount overall as everyone else.)
At the end of the first year of public school for the elder, they sent home a height/weight/BMI thing. He was 9th percentile for BMI. The form said talk to your doctor if your kid is 95 percentile so they seem pretty tolerant of a wide range, although I though BMI was pretty useless in kids anyway.
Once swam across the whole of Providence, RI in a hurricane, once built a stone two-car garage by hand.
"But you fuck one sheep...."
Shit, tags:
talk to your doctor if your kid is <5 or >95 percentile.
My Dad remains pretty slim, he was 60 this year and, last time I noticed, still had visible ab muscles. Ironically, despite being a _lot_ fatter, I'm much fitter than he is. Which I suppose you'd expect given the age difference, but not necessarily just from looking at our body shapes.
The person in my family who likes to point out everyone's weight is my maternal grandfather; who is 96 and still pretty fit. He could beat me at tennis when I was 16, and it didn't really occur to me at the time that he was in his 70s. These days walking is about all the exercise he does, but up until he was in his 80s he used to get up and do press-ups and sit-ups and other callisthenics every morning [I think he started when he was in the RAF and never stopped]. I remember him playing football with me and my brother when he was about 86 or 87. As a result he's pretty damned judgmental about other people's weight, especially mine. I think I'm the only overweight person in my family, come to think of it, and since I only really put weight on in the past 6 or 7 years, it remains a topic of conversation.
Like this means anything at all to the American commentariat.
If you could do long division you wouldn't have a problem.
18: FitnessAnywhere makes this suspension thing called the TRX which can be challenging. I tried a class at the Y. I honestly think that I'm not ready for some of these yet, that I actually need to do machines so that I can isolate muscles, because some of my arm muscles are so weak. I don't want to wind up hurting my back.
Not only is judgment not pronounced with three syllables in any Britisher dialect that I know of, housestyle in most of the upper upper British publishing outlets is no e.
Good thing I never use that word because "housstyle" really looks weird.
I actually need to do machines so that I can isolate muscles, because some of my arm muscles are so weak. I don't want to wind up hurting my back.
I don't know from the suspension thing you're talking about, but my understanding is that this is backwards. If you're doing free-weights or bodyweight exercises that don't isolate your muscles, you can lift less because you're limited by your weakest stabilizing muscles, but you're less likely to hurt yourself because you're necessarily working on whatever's weakest. Isolating muscles lets you (accidentally) bypass the weak muscles and build unbalanced strength, which is how you can really mess yourself up.
I think LizB is right about this. Using the free weights helps a lot more with the stabilizing muscles that let you actually use the strength in real licef.
I insist on hausstijl since we went into Europe.
This thread is only making it more apparent to me that I've totally failed to get up early enough to run any day this week. Damn you, thread. You're going to make me take the stairs at work.
come on! They're prounouced pretty much just the way they look!
It's really irritating when people respond to every word they haven't seen before by saying "Okay...I'm sure I'm going to butcher this..." You think you're going to butcher the name "Sorrentino"? How many possible ways can you imagine that it would be pronounced?
I feel bad for people who were scarred early in life by an incident early in life involving the word "colonel" or "Wednesday" and ever since then have acted as if there are absolutely no spelling rules of any sort and every word basically has to be memorized.
re: 187
Particularly when most languages using the Roman alphabet have much more regular spelling/pronunciation than English.*
* with Gaelic and Welsh special cases, since there all bets are off ...
You're going to make me take the stairs at work.
Run down and get us a bagel, sloth boy. The regular cream cheese, not light.
I had a bad experience with "guillotine" in third grade, but it didn't cure me. There are still words that I've primarily experienced in a written context that I mispronounce. Thank god I settled those issues I had at age 11 or so with "analogy", though.
187.1: My grandma was the only person in town with an Italian last name. Nobody ever pronounced it correctly, despite the fact that it was a very simple name. The final syllable was 'a.' This was pronounced like the 'a' in 'a', but everybody would pronounce it like it was 'ia.'
There are still words that I've primarily experienced in a written context that I mispronounce.
Yeah, also, if you're a fairly literate person who reads in a lot of subject areas it's quite possible to regularly come across words that you've never knowingly heard another human utter aloud. You can usually guess the basic pronunciation, but the stress is often hard to guess.
192: I have mentioned that one day in grad school it hit me that the "Weber" is kept reading about was the same as the "Veber" I kept hearing about. I spent probably three years without drawing a connection.
"is kept reading about" s/b "I kept reading about."
Sometimes I wish we still translated people's names into our local dialects, like they did for much of European history and still do for, e.g. saints. When I hear someone who speaks no language other than English pronounce "Walter Benjamin" in some way extremely different from the English words "Walter" and "Benjamin" it sounds like the much-derided liberal tendency to leap into a Spanish accent for words like "horchata" and "Peru".
re: 195
With the latter you are into gaelic spelling, which has a very regular orthography but is often wildly at odds with English orthography. I can't understand Gaelic, but it's around a lot [on Scottish TV, place signs, etc] and the orthography is always a source of surprise.
I know what a sidhe is. That's the thing the Grim Reaper carries.
190, 192: In early adulthood I had a lot of vocabulary only encountered in written form. Adding that to my lazy Midwestern speech patterns and my wife's hyper-correcting New York family (mother-in-law was an English teacher), and I almost had a complex about just talking for a while. So I said "fuck" a lot.
You think you're going to butcher the name "Sorrentino"?
I worked with someone who I think must have been somewhat dyslexic, because we would have arguments like this all the time. To use your example, I would say "did you see the new paper by Sorrentino?", and he would say "who? oh, you mean Sonterino?" And I would say "what? Sorrentino", and he would say "well I never met the guy or heard it pronounced, but I'm just going by how it looks, and it looks like Sonterino." This happened for lots of perfectly clear pronounced-as-they-are-spelled names.
196. I'm all for using English pronunciations where there's an English word, but if there isn't, you should try not to butcher the Ruritanian more than you can help. "Peru" is the English for the country who Spanish name is also Spelled "Peru". I'm cool with pronouncing it as English. I spell the capital of France "Paris", but I don't pronounce it "Paree".
There isn't an English word for Horchata any more (used to be Orgeat, but that got borrowed for something else), so by all means pronounce it in Spanish, because you're dropping into Spanish when you say it. Put imaginary quotes round it if you want.
If we're ever in Leghorn at the same time, let's meet up.
200 - my 9 year old does this a lot. It's quite irritating. He doesn't argue about it, but I do find myself wondering why he doesn't just look at the actual letters that are there.
184,185: There still is a place for isolation exercises, particularly those focused on muscles involved in joint stabilization. I'm in a similar situation as BG in that I've found certain upper body exercises limited by weakness in my rotator cuffs (especially my right shoulder, where some kind of old injury allows the various components to travel alarmingly in somewhat independent directions).
Maybe after I get my running a bit faster, I'll try the 100 push-ups thing. I've tried twice before and I always get stuck at week 4.
Week 4's pretty good. I should restart that -- I've been focusing on chinups (three in a set now!), but I haven't been doing pushups and I'm probably getting unbalanced.
I am a little depressed today. I had to stop my run last night due to sharp hip flexor pain and deep quad pain.
I'm afraid to find out if I can do a chinup or not.
I keep making plans to work on upper body strength. My strength-to-weight ratio is utterly woeful: really, really embarrassingly poor . I've thought about trying the 100 push-up thing also.
I've been successful recently at moderately increasing my cardio work -- resting pulse back into the 50s -- and I've recovered enough from some minor niggling injuries to be training at full-tilt in my weekly martial arts session [or as full-tilt as it gets when one has to teach], so maybe now is the time to try and work on the upper body again. Like eggplant, though, I have one dodgy shoulder -- tore a muscle falling of my bike -- which means that I find push-ups tricky.
-- resting pulse back into the 50s --
Even if I sit perfectly still, I never go below 65 bpm.
Exercise doesn't seem to affect my resting pulse at all. All the biking has got to be having some kind of effect on my cardio fitness, but my pulse stays right at 72 bpm. I am annoyed by and insecure about this.
Since I went back to running, I've noticed that my pulse goes back to resting rate much sooner, but I don't think the resting number is getting lower. Of course, I drink coffee pretty much constantly all monring.
||
Wow. I don't know if this was mentioned here already, but the Portland (ME) Press Herald published an apology to readers this week after receiving numerous complaints.
What was their terrible violation of the tenets of good journalism? Running a story, on September 11, about local Muslims marking the end of Ramadan.
|>
212: I recently went to the doctor for a regular checkup and the doctor freaked out and wouldn't let me leave (and I had an EKG blah blah) because my pulse was 133. They also ran blood tests. I was trying to explain, "I ran here! And just had an enormous fight with someone!" But I had to lay down in a dark room until I dropped below 100.
re: 211
If you are measuring resting pulse you are really supposed to go and sit down or lie down somewhere quiet and take it after 5 or 10 minutes. I use a pulse monitor, and just hook it up and relax on the sofa for 10 minutes.
Mine, sitting at my desk, heavily caffeinated, is in the high 60s. Taken with a pulse monitor after a 10 minute rest it's more like 56 - 58.
You know what you should all do? Go swimming!
What, and leave Unfogged commentless?
re: 218
Yeah, I'm just following the guidelines on some training sites I read, re: the proper use of a HRM to measure resting pulse, set training zones, etc.
re: 212
I found that when I was doing a lot of speed-walking* -- I just got back into it recently, but it's been over a year -- my resting pulse dropped by about 10 bpm over a month or so of regular training, but then sort of plateau'd in the low-50s. I think it dropped below 50 one morning, but that was a one-off. I wonder if I'd need to have either upped the intensity a lot, or increased duration to make it shift any more.
It might be that your resting pulse would be less if measured while really resting -- rather than while actively working, drinking coffee etc?
* not in any formal sense, just walking fast to avoid the knee and shin pain I get from running ...
Isn't pulse rate at least partially determined by size (inversely correlated)? I know it is as far as inter-species comparisons, but I don't know about intra-species.
I worked with someone who I think must have been somewhat dyslexic, because we would have arguments like this all the time. To use your example, I would say "did you see the new paper by Sorrentino?", and he would say "who? oh, you mean Sonterino?" And I would say "what? Sorrentino", and he would say "well I never met the guy or heard it pronounced, but I'm just going by how it looks, and it looks like Sonterino." This happened for lots of perfectly clear pronounced-as-they-are-spelled names
I used to do that a lot, and still do it sometimes. I was, in fact, diagnosed as dyslexic as a child, although sometimes I think that I only got shoved in that slot because it was a trendy diagnosis at the time. Had I been born 15 years later, it would have been ADHD.
A big problem for me is that I don't look at letters and words in order. My eyes dart around a small area on the page the page until meaning is assembled like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. (Maybe teo or ttaM or someone with knowledge of these issues will say that everyone actually does this, in which case I simply do it badly.) "Sorrentino" and "Sonterino" are both plausible ways to assemble those letters so I wind up reading them either way. The main way I have had success overcoming this problem is slowing down and forcing myself to look at the syllables in order.
Many years ago I read an article in Scientific American that said that dyslexia does not stem from visually reversing letters, but from errors in the phonological system. This really resonated with me. I think this was the article.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/t18425433625752v/
It's positively correlated in humans, mostly, it seems. So no, fatties don't get lower resting pulse rates.
222, 224: I didn't quite follow the abstract, but was it only talking about fat, rather than body-size not accounting for fat? Because I'd always believed that bigger (taller, more lean body-mass) people were expected to have slower pulses than small people.
226: Looking only at the summary, it seemed that they had one set of analyses that accounted for body size without fat. They did expected weight, based on height and age. However, I did not see the results for that in the summary.
The tables in the paper seem to include both measures.
227: Right, that was what I saw as well -- that those results were in the study somewhere but didn't make it to the summary.
I only skimmed the paper. Due to extreme sloth [which _is_ correlated with body weight].
You know what you should all do? Go swimming!
Not sure that's going to go over well with the injured shoulder of ttaM.
I'm thinking about switching from running to swimming, come winter time, though. Maybe not. I'm making good progress on my running goal (20 minute 5k).
I'm making good progress on my running goal (20 minute 5k).
You suck.
re: 231
I do swim now and again, I'm just crap at it. Slow and get tired/bored after a couple of lengths.
233: Have you tried breast stroke? Leaving aside the obvious joke, I find it much easier than the crawl.
In 232, "You suck" s/b "You are much faster than me and it hurts my feelings."
re: 234
I swim breast stroke, side stroke or back. I can't crawl at all; well, one of those scruffy random front crawl strokes with lots of mistimed breathing and the like, which is slower than the other strokes.
Come to Virginia for Unfogged swim lesson!
Of to go swim eat half a chicken and a pile fries.
Yeah, breathing feels so unnatural doing crawl, which is a problem if you're looking for an aerobic workout. I end up trying to do entire lengths face underwater.
239: I was one of those insane kids who trained 13x week in the pool, complete with a coach with a comical accent. If you do it hard enough, breathing every 3rd or 5th stroke is waaaaaaay aerobic enough. It's the only exercise I can do where my heart / lungs give up before anything else breaks. (Which actually speaks to the crappiness of connective tissue / ligaments etc., but whatevs.)
I actually really miss swimming.
No doubt I've complained about this before, but the one thing I really, really dislike about living in Austin is that walking isn't built into my daily life. In D.C., I walked more than a mile a day just to get to and from the Metro (and walked up and down the escaltors, or stairs at the stations that had them), and often added another mile or more for errands or meeting friends. Weekends often meant at least 3 or 4 miles a day. It was easy to add in more when I had time by walking in one direction knowing I could take the bus home.
That's not enough exercise, to be sure, but it's something I did every day without having to set aside time for it or drive somewhere to do it or get myself motivated. To do anything similar here requires actually Going on a Walk every day, which is just so much harder to make myself do.
Whinge, whinge, whinge, I know, but it gets me down.
Now I am curious about where you swam DQ!
That was me too.
Sir Kraab:
We really enjoy walking to dinner near our house, but our city isnt really designed for walking to work. I do miss that aspect of living in a large city.
240: I have no doubt it gets better with dedication and good cardio. I don't list either of those among my strengths.
242: Sally's going down that road, looks like, which is a major hassle in terms of getting her to the pool. (3 1 1/2 hour practices a week this year, and I figure it only gets worse.) Still, she seems to like it.
I really, really dislike about living in Austin is that walking isn't built into my daily life.
It's really not a walkable city. Also, I really wish I could get around on trains.
I've never been to Austin, but I was on a swim team. I really sucked.
Unless you propel yourself via siphon. Are you a cephalopod, by any chance?
I once did the 200 meter butterfly. I got disqualified in the first link.
223: The main way I have had success overcoming this problem is slowing down and forcing myself to look at the syllables in order.
Just about everything you describe applied/s to me (except the actually slowing down part). This of course added to my reading-only vocabulary pronunciation problem. Don't know about you, but it almost seems too "boring" to actually slow down and read words (and names in particular) at the level of detail necessary to be able to sound them out later. It's certainly short-sighted on my part and almost kind of selfish.
actually slow down and read words (and names in particular) at the level of detail necessary to be able to sound them out later
I've never had a problem with reading, say, "Sorrentino" as Sonterino (though quite a few people seem inclined to pronounce my own surname with a similar swapping of consonants, which I've never understood, it being a pretty straightforward name).
It may be related, though, that I often want to have, and preferably, see an unfamiliar spoken word or name spelled out -- when it's not immediately clear how it's spelled -- or I'm unlikely to retain it. I've vaguely thought this indicated some kind of preference for the visual, but I actually have no idea. Point, though, is that being able to sound out written words later isn't an issue as much as being able to recognize a word/name when spoken again in future. Sort of a mirror problem.
It results in some odd conversational quirks on my part: a discussion of this or that is moving right along, and I suddenly interject, "How do you spell that?"
Attempted walkability/swimming subthread join:
I recall going to visit my sister at her largish college campus while I was in high school and therefore in pretty good swimming shape (although .. sprinter). and how surprised I was by all of the walking involved. Even got a bit tired. I do think exercise of any kind that you can get as part of your daily routine is much more effective than set aside exercise activities (other than "play").
I probably walk a couple of miles a day when I'm working at the university. There is no good parking near my office and most of the places to eat are a quarter mile or more from my office.
I have a bad habit of glossing over names in reading, so that I get confused about characters (real and fictional). It's particular problem when the names have a number of letters in common even if they're not that similar. I'll realize I've just put a placeholder for "H" in my head rather than really noting that the character's name is Howie. Three pages later I'll wonder why Howie is wearing a pale blue robe à l'anglaise with a daring décolletage (I'm reading a bunch of Georgette Heyer) when in fact it's Hortense, that hoyden.
We may have discussed this here before, but did anyone go through a speed-reading course in which you learn, gradually, to take in written text word-by-word, then phrase by phrase, and finally line by line?
A subgroup of kids in my 6th grade did this: it involved an overhead projector which put up a single line of text at a time, then flipped to the next line, and the next, increasingly quickly over the course of the semester, followed by comprehension tests. You had to stop reading one. word. at. a. time. ... and move to taking in a snapshot, sort of, of whole chunks.
No idea how this affects spelling, except that it seems to speak to a recognition-function, recognizing groups of letters. Or something. It seems to me that I came out of it able to skim text pretty quickly, and scan fast for occurrence of a particular word on a page.
255: I am you. Even when I'm not confusing characters, this makes it hard to talk about books because I don't retain the proper names: everyone's 'that guy who'.
256: That's more or less how I read. It has its uses for scanning and skimming, but it's fucked up the way I actually read, whether for work or pleasure. I have to work hard to slow myself down and not jump to the next line or paragraph before I've finished the first one. I sometimes take to putting a piece of paper under the line I'm reading so that I can't constantly scan ahead.
256, 258: Yeah, this too. When I'm tired or stressed, I speed up and skim, which really affects what I'm willing to read for pleasure (especially given that I'm usually tired this last decade or so). I can read genre nonsense, and for some reason dense eighteenth/nineteenth century prose works, but I have a tendency to bounce off modern literary fiction, which is very un-skimming-friendly.
242: The Marlins. And then later at Asphalt Green. But I quit pretty early because scary coach made me miserable, and my talent was more for pushing myself than actually swimming.
Anyone do Bik/ram yoga? I know it is bullshitty on the actual yoga front, but it's what's near me now, and...I dunno. A good friend did the 30 classes in 30 days thing after her break up, and trying to become the buddha seems a better alternative than drinking? But: wondering about how gross / safe it is.
258: I find myself doing that scanning/jumping ahead thing for texts that aren't very dense, yeah. If it becomes clear that any given paragraph is going to be saying more or the less the same thing in different words, I take the paragraph in a chunk, jump ahead, decide maybe I should jump back and read that last paragraph more closely after all, etc.
(I pickup up E.J. Dionne's Souled Out, on the religious right in America, this morning, and became slightly impatient in the reading by halfway through the Introduction. It's not badly written; just written for a slower reader.)
But I don't have a problem with that when reading most philosophy or political theory, say. The moves are intricate enough to require more attention. For fiction, it differs widely.
I am you.
This reminds me of my first interactions with Frowner, when I found in her a compatible inability to watch James Bond movies without worrying about the fruit stand vendor in some colorful third world country whose stall would inevitably get knocked over during a high-speed chase. That's a small family business you've just wrecked! Probably a family's whole hand-to-mouth income! It's not like they're going to have insurance or capital to repair the stall, buy new inventory, etc., you jackwad.
Add Frowner to the roll call of missed commentors.
260: I wouldn't do it myself, but that's because overheating and overexertion aren't smart for my particular type (back problems, Scandinavian blood, and just midlife rather than late 20s/early 30s).
At a guess, if you're in good cardiovascular and nutritional health, and assuming the yoga organization is suitably accredited in whatever way, with staff to assess whether something is too much for a given participant, well, I've known a couple of people who've done it and loved it. I tend to suspect that whatever buddha-like state you might achieve is similar to what might be achieved through any heavy-duty, sweating work-out, not really yoga-like, no.
245: a bit puzzled about this, since you also mentioned another Sally-transport thing recently--I thought you lived in the city? Isn't the whole advantage to that, that once the kids hit, I dunno, 8 or 9, you just give 'em a metro card and figure anything that happens builds character?
260: the real problem with Bik/ram yoga isn't authenticity but awfulness re: patent/copyright/trademark law abusiveness. Err, I guess I don't have any useful advice to add. Except that yoga is fantastically awesome, and even better than most exercise in terms of mood-boosting. If you're near Park Slope, PSYC / Devi are awesome, but, uh, if you were you wouldn't have posted that, I guess.
257: this makes it hard to talk about books because I don't retain the proper names:
I have no idea what I did before Alta Vista/Google/Wikipedia.
And in high school I actually took a short speed-reading class using the light system (it was that or typing--since I'm a bad-judgmentalist I chose the BS one). For me it just turned into yet another opportunity for stupid macho competitiveness, blowing everyone away by "reading" at some incredible rate and still passing the comprehension quiz (which you could do half the time even if you were completely innocent of the content).
the real problem with Bik/ram yoga isn't authenticity but awfulness
Is there anything not awful about that nonsense? Seriously, an hour and a half of posing in a room at over 100 degrees? Lead us to sweaty enlightenment you magic foreigner you!
Me as well. It made reading Unfogged a bit difficult for a while, until I figured out you were all sock puppets of some basement dwelling middle-aged man.
Do I have a problem, then, that I mostly recognize most of you people? I still don't know whether Eggplant is male or female, but that may not be important.
Seriously, an hour and a half of posing in a room at over 100 degrees?
Yoga or the shoot for an American Apparel ad?
It made reading Unfogged a bit difficult for a while
Yeah, I have a tendency to see that a commenter's name starts with 'f' and assume it's fake accent when it turns out to be foolishmortal, or see something written by emdash and think "wait, I didn't write that!"
262: I'm pretty sure that Frowner has not withdrawn in disgust or anything. She's just been hella busy with work and activism and stuff.
269.1: No. It taxed my personal Dunbar number but I think I know everyone here.
269.2: This is surprising. I bet if you guess you'll be right.
Sir Kraab, I am you! I had no idea that other people also ranted and shook their fists about the property damage and general thoughtlessness that's absolutely the norm in chase scenes. This is so exciting, as is the fact that the next movie on our Netflix queue is Wattstax.
DQ, I've done bikramesque yoga and maybe it's me being bogus, but particularly because of my scoliosis and resulting muscle wackiness I thought it was a better fit than regular yoga. It was too expensive for me to stick with it, but my experience was much more like stretching on a heating pad than being in the sort of jungle inferno others describe. Where I was, it was a dry heat and not at all uncomfortable, though there was sweating.
255: I am you. Even when I'm not confusing characters, this makes it hard to talk about books because I don't retain the proper names: everyone's 'that guy who'.
DAMN YOU DOSTOEVSKY
273.2: I have you as male now, but I'm not entirely sure, because the name suggests female to me. There are a couple of other commenters like that as well, whose names suggested something different from what they are. It shouldn't make a difference anyway.
I'm pretty sure that Frowner has not withdrawn in disgust or anything. She's just been hella busy with work and activism and stuff.
Yeah, that's what I was assuming.
the next movie on our Netflix queue is Wattstax
You will love it! I've really got to get my copy back from the person I lent it to who is apparently never going to get aroung to watching it, the fool.
275 reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon about Linus reading The Brothers Karamazov.
276: It shouldn't make a difference anyway.
I don't even see aubergines.
I don't know how nuanced the Peanuts cartoon was, but with Dostoevsky, it's not necessarily the names, it's the "the guy who" differentiation. They've become completely melded in my mind, which may be a function of the fact that I took a Dostoevsky course sophomore year of college: reading 5 novels back to back resulted in some intensive reading and writing, but also in a unified mental space called "Dostoevsky."
OT bleg: I'm involved in the selection process for a big-deal fellowship. I've only seen data for the last decade, but in that time, we've had a 50-50 male-female split among applicants and about a 60-40 split among the people selected. (I haven't seen data that would let me address the question of whether, say, a general bias against humanities applicants is manifesting as a bias against female applicants, but this is obviously an important question.) Notably, our 60-40 is more slanted than the outcome for comparable fellowships. The problem is at the paper review; there's no additional imbalance introduced at the interview stage.
So making the paper review gender-blind seems like a no-brainer, yes? I'm running into some resistance to the idea from (older, male) colleagues, one of whom says that he's never seen any sign of discrimination and that asking applicants to write personal statements without referencing their gender would put women at a disadvantage because they wouldn't be able to discuss how they've developed into the people they are. (Whereas, presumably, gender plays no role in men's growing up, what with the default gender being male and all.)
Anyway, so I need to call bullshit, but I need to avoid marginalizing myself/my position in the process. This is playing out over email with ~10 people I've never met. I am quite junior. Help?
Maybe we should just sign Eggplant up to coach applicants on their personal statements.
283: Are personal statements a significant part of the package? Maybe there could be a gender-blind paper review minus the personal statement, then look at the personal statements? Save them to accompany the interview or something.
So making the paper review gender-blind seems like a no-brainer, yes?
Yes.
a unified mental space called "Dostoevsky."
One of my greatest reading experiences ever was immersing my 14-year-old self in Crime and Punishment, which carved out that mental space for good.
I was never able to write a personal statement without mentioning my testicles. That might just be me.
285 seems like an excellent answer.
287: Wow! I was 14 too, when I read it, and it was my favorite novel, and nothing I'd read before even came close.
285: Unfortunately, yes, they're a huge part. (There's already a pre-screening phase which just makes sure applicants are appropriately qualified.) The applicant's gender needn't come up there and often doesn't, but there are certainly cases where it's deeply relevant.
What about the idea of adding a checkbox to the application: I _wish _do not wish the committee to consider my gender in reviewing my application. Then we could run the _do not wish folks' applications through an auto-redacter to get rid of gendered pronouns/titles in their recs, and foreground gender only for those candidates who want us to.
Huh. Genderblinding a personal statement does seem really tricky -- not that it would systematically disadvantage women, but that an informative personal statement would probably reveal gender for lots of people even without pronouns.
OTOH, handing a fellowship out on the basis of a personal statement as anything other than a minor tiebreaker seems distinctly peculiar to me. How does that make sense?
Then we could run the _do not wish folks' applications through an auto-redacter to get rid of gendered pronouns/titles in their recs
That would result in recs reading "person" (or some such) where a natural gendered pronoun would be placed, which would probably signal to the readers that the applicant is female. Who else would like their gender not to be considered?
It is a conundrum. If auto-redacting is possible, why not automatically redact all applicants' gendered pronouns, without any check-box option, and just have "applicant" in all those places?
I gather that your fellow reviewers don't think this a problem in the first place, however.
Don't we have a rule here that anyone getting a fellowship has to buy drinks at the next meetup?
294: It's a "this is why I am passionate about studying what I study" statement. Everyone who makes it past pre-screening has a really impressive record; we need to filter out people who are just looking for another shiny credential, and to make sure that the scholarships we hand out aren't just a reward for good performance but will actually facilitate worthwhile research that wouldn't otherwise happen.
296: Everybody handing out money wants that and it makes life a pain.
294.1: That's a good point. So maybe we want opt-out rather than opt-in? Again, there are some candidates (including both men and women) for whom it's entirely appropriate that gender should be in the foreground, so just redacting across the board won't work.
But 294.3 is more of the issue. How to convince them?
295: If there were ever a meetup near me, I'd be happy to comply.
That sounds like a really intractable problem -- if the committee is reading a more common male style of responding to the prompt as preferable, blinding the pronouns isn't going to fix it. Like, I'm making wild guesses here based on no data, but I wouldn't be half surprised is that you're losing women who were modestly self-effacing to an extent.
My apologies for whatever happened to the last half of that sentence.
295/300: Evidently that's what I read anyway. Certainly is a good thing I'm the one to assess all these personal statements, isn't it.
285 makes perfect sense to me. If both. Are reviewed without names, will it be obvious nevertheless which paper goes with which personal statement? Can you keep the review of each completely separate and then look at the ratios to see whether (or to what extent) personal statements are helping or hurting women? Of course, doing it that way makes it easier to pinpoint any potential bias -- which wqould seem really helpful if you are trying to remedy the bias, but maybe a little. Risky if you are worried about someone suing you.
I am interested in how you approach this, as I am now on a committee at my firm addressing associate development and what steps they need to hit on their way up the ladder, and how do we make sure they are able to do so? Informally, there is a perception that the main reason men are rising faster and further isn't a question of of men getting promoted over women with equal achievement but men getting more opportunities for achievement in a culture where the kind of work you get depends pretty heavily on the buddy system. But it's my impression that the powers-that-be are a little nervous at the idea of looking too closely at why numbers don't come out equally because once you've put it on paper, it's potentially discoverable evidence. Which isn't a completely unfair concern
299: Could be that, could be the opposite problem, in which case redaction seems good.
298: So maybe we want opt-out rather than opt-in? Again, there are some candidates (including both men and women) for whom it's entirely appropriate that gender should be in the foreground, so just redacting across the board won't work.
That seems a good approach.
But 294.3 is more of the issue. How to convince them?
Mm. I realize this is extraordinarily problematic with people who don't see a problem in the first place, but you've kind of sketched the approach here yourself: there are any number of cases in which the gender of fellowship recipients is, or should be, irrelevant, but there are a few for which it is. Let's make consideration of gender an opt-in arrangement, in order to protect against unknown gender bias on the part of the reviewers, and trust the applicants to tell us when when they feel it should be relevant, since otherwise it should not be.
I don't want to be glib here: this is difficult stuff. The auto-redacting thing would make for really strange reading, and some additional expense on the part of the committee, but if nothing else it would keep them on their toes? A constant reminder?
a compatible inability to watch James Bond movies without worrying about the fruit stand vendor in some colorful third world country whose stall would inevitably get knocked over during a high-speed chase. That's a small family business you've just wrecked!
In theory the fruit stand vendor does benefit, in a small way, from James Bond preventing WW III, so the loss isn't completely pointless.
It does make me think, however, that somebody (k-sky?) should pitch a TV show in which a team of "disaster recovery" specialists perform follow-up work in the wake of the super-spy in which they:
(a) try to cover up the stories in the local media
(b) deal with whatever is left of the criminal cell that was trying to kill the super-spy (either by avoiding it if it's too powerful or going in and recovering whatever additional evidence is available if possible)
(c) Try to wheedle expense money out of the agency for informal restitutions to afformentioned fruit vendors, et al.
I would totally watch that show.
Oh, I like Di's idea in 303.1. I don't think we could put off review of the personal statements until after shortlisting, but we could certainly run statement-based shortlisting in parallel with resume/rec-based shortlisting, and see what shakes out.
The idea of liability hadn't occurred to me. Yeesh. But we can hardly justify saying that we had to keep doing it wrong because we'd get sued if we demonstrated that we hadn't been doing it right.
Di, if you drop me a line at the linked address, I can keep you posted as we sort our approach out.
306: Bruce Sterling imagines something similar (super-spy clean-up crew) in Zeitgeist. But more as a one time source of deep wrongness than as an ongoing thing.
OT: I'm thinking of buying an iPod Touch and I'm rationalizing it by thinking of all the money I'll save by not buying a phone that requires a data plan. That kind of makes sense, right?
306: Don't we kind of see that show every day in the news media?
306: Don't we kind of see that show every day in the news media?
I was thinking of something a little less grim.
309: Without a data plan, you need to be somewhere with WiFi to get to the internet with you iPod Touch. I don't know how those Cricket WiFi plans work or if they are cheaper than a data plan. But you still should get the Touch. They are nice.
306 sounds good. I feel this way about action movies too.
I seem to think "Bad Boys 2" was the first movie in which the super-heroic heroes are just allowed to destroy whoever and whatever they want, including who knows how many deaths, just to get their mission done as fast as possible. Before that it was the bad guys who did that. The good guys took insane risks but got lucky by not actually causing chaos and mayhem (e.g. "The French Connection"), or they tried as hard as possible to avoid chaos and mayhem and showed serious remorse for it.
136
I had to reach around my cat
Please tell me I'm not the only person who misunderstood that.
158: I wouldn't have expected anyone here besides me to understand that. I know lots of people speak French, but who in America reads French comic books? (Because I figure that's the only place one would see dialect or slang French written. After all, you don't see "ain't" or "y'all" written down except in lowbrow fiction. Well, not very often, and especially not with more modern ripped-from-the-headlines slang. And besides, um, French comic books often have $5 bills in them.)
172
My grandfather, so judgmental a man that he choose to become a high-episcopal minister, was really uncomfortable with fat people (also jews, but that's not the immediate topic of discussion).
I thought this was really funny. It's nice to have some common, old-fashioned bigotry small-mindedness rather than the oh-so-SWPL "fat people suck, but being mean to fat people also sucks, but..."
283
Anyway, so I need to call bullshit, but I need to avoid marginalizing myself/my position in the process. This is playing out over email with ~10 people I've never met. I am quite junior. Help?
I'd be inclined to take refuge in the science. That is, quote and/or link to some study about this, and how sexism doesn't have to be conscious malice to exist, and how blindfolded judging actually does get gender-blind results, and so on. They can't argue with that, and a study of the first type would hopefully mean they won't take it as a personal attack either. I'm too lazy to find a link to that kind of thing (and I'm about to run out the door and finally go home), but maybe someone else is more industrious and/or has the link saved somewhere?
Re: exercise, I suck about it. My regular consists of the four-block walk that's part of my commute and my dietary habits... wouldn't be decent, not great and not horrible, if I didn't drink so much beer, with all the empty calories and stuff. All things considered, I don't look that overweight right now, but that's pure luck and metabolism, no particular industriousness. I don't feel too self-conscious about that for reasons that I'll try to explain later (really am running out the door), but if anyone else here is feeling guilty or intimidated by this discussion, well, you aren't the only slob here.
I find 313.2 implausible, but maybe I'm wrong. Is there not, like, wanton destruction by the heroes in Terminator 2, for instance?
The Matrix: fake things got blown up. Maybe real people died, but they were batteries in gooey pods anyway.
Terminator 2: I seem to recall most of the evil destruction was done by the liquid T-1000 dude (2000? My geek is failing me). Well. Except for Sarah Connor completely fucking up those dudes in the beginning, but that established her character, so more of an exception that proves the rule.
Does this track with the rise of the whole gaming thing? Remember the Modern Warfare where you could play as a terrorist? Or had to go undercover w terrorists and kill an airport or something? How much $ did it make?
312: I just did. Just to be clear, I wasn't thinking an iTouch could replace a cell phone. Just that I was going to keep my cheap cell phone.
Anyway, they had the old kind on sale, so it was cheap (for Apple).
306: this (the post-superspook clean up party) actually happens in Luc Besson's wonderful Nikita. Wrongness deeper than you can imagine ensues, with concentrated hydrofluoric acid. Chairman Bruce may have had a leg up to the idea.
318: Rory used the metronym ap to rehearse her viola last night. I used it to comment on Unfogged.
306: this (the post-superspook clean up party) actually happens in Luc Besson's wonderful Nikita. Wrongness deeper than you can imagine ensues, with concentrated hydrofluoric acid.
I'm not saying that the idea hasn't been used, in some for or another, before just that it's seems like an idea that offers sufficient potential to create a wide variety of problems for the protagonists that it would be a good hook for a series.
thinking of all the money I'll save by not buying a phone that requires a data plan
I eventually broke down and went for a data plan, so now I end up carting around a smartphone and an iPod Touch. (I've been tempted to tape them together, like that "camera phone" on Flight of the Conchords.) The data plan really is convenient in many ways, but it takes me like twice as long to grocery shop because I now do things like Google ingredients/recipes and refresh blog comments right there in the produce section.
321: I noticed a very consistent rhythm to your comments.
321: I thought your comments last night seemed particularly well paced.
Although the 5/8 time signature was a bit jarring at first.
metronym ap
The Big Apple?
(or is that just a nickname; I find all the rhetoric distinctions baffling)
I just happened to look while installing iTunes. What was I supposed to do?
I had to reach around my cat.
Please tell me I'm not the only person who misunderstood that.
You, sir, are depraved.
I would totally watch the movie in 306 (or better yet, a cable show), especially if it had a lot of Sandbaggers/Le Carre-esque internal politics going on. Maybe Greg Rucka's Queen and Country.
313 is crazy. Total Recall is the most counterexample that comes to mind. (One of the things I really liked about Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, which later went completely splodey off-the-rails, was the early sense that Morrison was really interested in exploring the ideology of the action movie, in which some people count and some don't. There was an entire issue, "Best Man Fall", devoted to the life of one of the nameless goons gunned down by the good guys in the first issue.)
Besides me, who has a wireless network named 'asdf'?
332: Ooh, I use that one, too!
334 --
We're all waiting for some casino-blogging. How about tonight? Your kids and wife can do something else, right?
I think Moby should alter his pseud slightly (say, all lowercase?) when commenting from the iPod, so that we can determine whether this new toy affects his commenting quality and quantity. You know, for science.
Like a week ago, Rory had an epiphany. "Oh! Now see why they call it a qwerty keyboard!"
Maybe neB can write a backend script--the server knows if you're using an iPhone, etc. Smartphone comments could get a little asterix! Think of all the judgments that could be made!
So, while stealing music, I see that my wife has all the Garfunkel and Oates stuff. I'd never heard of it until yesterday or the day before.
Maybe your wife should be the one commenting here.
342: Comments? No. You're supposed to be sending me a dollar for each one you make.
I meant the songs. Because, otherwise, that would be like 8 bucks.
306: I would also watch that. Even with all the regulars having entertaining little quirks.
344: If your wife already has them on her computer and she's disposed to doing something nice for you, there are ways for you to acquire them with little or no additional financial outlay. But I've probably said too much already....
his (the post-superspook clean up party) actually happens in Luc Besson's wonderful Nikita. Wrongness deeper than you can imagine ensues, with concentrated hydrofluoric acid.
Also in the recent Polish film, Rewers. Not a masterpiece, but it's pretty good and the post-spook clean up party is very fun.
346: I'm more concerned about the 8 bucks, because I didn't get a form on those.
Sort of re the title, apparently a guy in Sweden is currently being prosecuted for rape and assault for S&M sex. If the article is accurate, there is no dispute that it was consensual - they carefully worked out a written list of what was and wasn't acceptable before hand, and the girl says everything that happened was completely consensual. But her relatives filed a criminal complaint because she had whip marks and the prosecutor is arguing that hitting someone during sex is a felony regardless of consent.
I'm more concerned about the 8 bucks, because I didn't get a form on those.
Far be it from me to pass judgment on how anyone orders his or her household's finances, but requiring financial-disclosure forms for individual mp3 purchases? That's a very, um, detail-oriented approach.
Certainly no one could argue with that.
Apparently, I don't know how to make a tag that says "close sarcasm" such that it can be seen without looking at html.
352: one can serve both God and Mammon, but the TPS reports are unbelievable.
I would love a well enacted cable series following the idea in 306, especially if it really did include a substantial dose of the fruit-vendor restitution kind of thing.
There was a comic along those lines years (decades?) ago, that followed the team hired by the city of New York to clean up after superheroes' giant, block-leveling brawls. This comment left almost totally uninformative thanks to my shoddy memory.
I once watched an insurance adjuster deal with a farmer who'd just lost most of his equipment and all of his buildings except his house*. It wasn't much fun for either of them. I had some fun, because I got to use a blow torch.
*There were dead chickens because the coop flew.
It turns out that much of what they say about tornadoes is true. This guy had a metal farm building, very sturdy, collapsed on his tractors and his grain bins were up to a quarter mile from their starting points, but there was no damage to his house (as far as I could tell).
It turns out that much of what they say about tornadoes is true.
They hate farm buildings?
There was a comic along those lines years (decades?) ago, that followed the team hired by the city of New York to clean up after superheroes' giant, block-leveling brawls.
And some friends of mine do an online comic that is premised on the idea of cleaning up after major spy operations (Castro was a very fruitful figure for them).
360: They couldn't find a trailer park.
Why did the tornado cross the road?
To make dead chickens lay around the farm like the Far Side where they had a "boneless chicken ranch."
I love the boneless chicken ranch! There are certain cat poses that invoke that image for me regularly.
I think we've proven conclusively that there's a vast audience* for "But What About the Fruit Vendor?" (working title). I know we never got that joint music project done, but surely we can collaborate on a web series, right?
*Potential sponsors, please note: An over-educated and highly privileged audience.
The Brooklyn artisan shops are lining up already.
*Potential sponsors, please note: An over-educated and highly privileged audience.
Now, now, Sir K, the real variable to highlight is An over-educated and highly privileged audience with discretionary income.
The Brooklyn artisan shops are lining up already.
Capable of turning out three Brooklyn artisans in just one month!
371: Demand is questionable. So they'll really need to advertise a lot.
370: But everybody has discretionary income, don't they?
I'm privileged to report that 373 was me.
But everybody has discretionary income, don't they?
The newspaper where I went to college used to regularly run an ad bragging about how much monthly discretionary income the average undergraduate reader of said paper possessed.
The idea was to get other companies to advertise in their pages. Thinking about it still makes me irrational levels of angry.
So, yeah. Everybody does, for some definition of "discretion."
(Oh lord. I just typed "everybody dies." Well, that too. Eventually.)
Oh lord. I just typed "everybody dies." Well, that too. Eventually.
Not everybody truly lives.
Thinking about it still makes me irrational levels of angry.
Neat. How can we bring it up unexpectedly? Any trigger words?
You guys are so supportive. But I'm in a blithe mood tonight; able to recognize anger through a glass foggily, but not actually feeling it.
There was a comic along those lines years (decades?) ago, that followed the team hired by the city of New York to clean up after superheroes' giant, block-leveling brawls.
There totally was! I remember it. Though not clearly enough to know the name or anything.
Could it have been this from Marvel?
When the superhuman community throws down in a neighborhood, the damages can be astronomical. However, the Manhattan based engineering and construction company, Damage Control, are here to clean up the mess and rebuild the property to the way it was. Considering the amount of superhuman battles there are, and with virtually no competition, Damage Control is a definite money maker.
Damage Control is a definite money maker
How would they make money? Do state and local governments pay for their services? I'm confused. I guess I could go read the wiki entry.
In order to pay for their services, individuals and private companies go through their "super hero insurance" or Extraordinary Activity Assurance. However, if one isn't covered, they can always apply for funds from the Federal Disaster Area Stipend from New York City to pay for Damage Control's assistance.
One plot line has them trying to increase the number of superhero battles.
Now I really want to track this one down.
The wiki entry is puzzling. It says they're an effective monopoly - surely fixing damage from super-squabbles isn't much different from regular construction work. And if there's a federal fund to draw from, why would anyone buy private superhero insurance?
388: Ha. Awesome. Is there a super-hero-insurance mandate? How about a public option? Non-rescission provisions?
I wonder if anyone important was reading these comics.
Don't superheros all have pre-existing conditions?
390: My link is to a Marvel site. They say, Damage control uses engineering techniques that are much more advanced than the competition which enables them to perform their job in remarkably short periods of time
392: In a similar vein following links at the Marvel site was bit weirded out to come across the story of the Baxter Building (the Fabulous 4 & Damage Control's home) being knocked down in a battle and replaced by the Four Freedoms Plaza. Not sure how close you could build a mosque.
I feel sorry for whoever owned or rented the other floors of the Baxter Building. All the constant invasions from the Negative Zone or stray Doombots wandering in must be quite stressful, not to mention expensive.
OT: I guess there was a tornado, or near tornado touch-down, in the Brooklyn and Queens area earlier this evening. Apparently real damage mostly in Queens, though that's just from random reports.
Off-topic, or attempted cover-up of a supervillain attack?
the Manhattan based engineering and construction company, Damage Control,
Wow, never heard of it. But I am proud ashamed to say that I read most of limited series about Steelgrip Starkey (And The All Purpose Power Tool).
394.1: Ah, I must have skimmed over that bit. It's still weak.
394.2: Yeah, I remember reading (maybe in Acephalous?) about how for ages buildings were destroyed for drama in the comic universes with little afterthought, then after Sept. 11th they ginned up a parallel event (huge and occupied building destroyed in a superbattle) so all the heroes could agonize over how they could have allowed it to happen.
331: devoted to the life of one of the nameless goons gunned down by the good guys in the first issue
And, of course, there's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
I've wanted to write something on the same theme for awhile, except that the protagonist would be more along the lines of a security guard in a A-Team style fight, where no one actually gets killed. So he'd just get beaten up, not hospitalized, and the secret microfiche or whatever would be gone, and then he'd be out of a job, and he'd have to go home with his head aching from a mild concussion, and explain to his wife that he'd been fired for letting the heroes get into the secret lab, and his wife would be sad, and comfort him, but secretly be really depressed and hopeless because now they were really broke and where was he going to get another job that paid as well as the mad scientist security gig? It would be depressing and make people doubt their ideas around subjectivity.
396: I hope the grain bins weren't badly damaged.
397: Nah, I was just a little surprised, since tornadoes in Park Slope don't seem usual, but apparently it was so this evening, though it moved on and messed up some areas in Queens and, um, Flushing Meadows? (Just don't think of these areas as tornado-prone, that's all, and a startling time was probably had by all.)
396 I was in Manhattan during the thing and it was just your standard issue short, intense downpour. Then I exited the subway at home and there were branches everywhere. All weather is local.
It looks pretty nasty, from the pictures on the NYTimes site. Reminds me of the crazy localized windstorm that tore down trees all over campus here a few weeks ago, except that in New York it's obviously much more damaging, and it was probably more intense.
396: Some pictures from Park Slope here.
400: make people doubt their ideas around subjectivity.
Their ideas around subjectivity? About subjectivity? With respect to? Regarding? Concerning? subjectivity.
Sorry, the "around" locution bugs me sometimes. I remember it coming from social services / psychology work, and it's generalized now, and it's weird!
Didn't "about" originally have the same locational meaning?
406: No, I mean when they're at a party, and there's some some subjectivity present, they'll start to doubt their own ideas. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Further to 406: Er, sorry to harp on that, as though the rest of 400 has no substance. Naw.
Yeah, I remember reading (maybe in Acephalous?) about how for ages buildings were destroyed for drama in the comic universes with little afterthought
There was a post at acephalous recently on a similar theme, but the a point was different than your summary.
408: I'm obviously tired, because I can't tell if you're serious.
Off to bed!
There's a blog that frequently talks about "superhero fight insurance" and all kinds of similar issues. I think this was the first post I read there.
Each mutant possesses a special skill which has its own inherent value. Because of this, a mutant can be viewed as a craftsman or a skilled laborer. Mutants with enhanced strength can work in construction, demolition, or even transportation. Storm could irrigate the crops of all the suffering farmers in the midwest and California when the droughts of summer are destroying their crops. Quicksilver could sort the daily mail output of the United States in 3 hours. And the extraordinary power of these abilities would only make the economic effect of using mutant powers that much more extraordinary itself. Time, labor, and machinery costs would all be cut dramatically. Tragically, most mutants use their powers to either save the world or terrorize it. At least this is the popular depiction in Marvel Comics. Imagine what Magneto could do if he worked in construction. For one thing, all of those New York City public works project would have their completion dates moved up from 2018 to roughly five minutes from now. But instead, he spends his time sinking Russian submarines and making asteroid bases to live in. For the love of God, the man has the power to build himself a high-tech home in space. He could repair the Hubbell telescope with no trouble whatsoever.
I don't think the 9/11 attacks happened in the DC universe - I'm not sure, but I doubt it, because the most famous city in that world isn't New York but Metropolis, and both New York and Metropolis had local heroes who could be relied on to catch planes safely. Instead, there were banners and icons in each comic commemorating "real-life heroes" around the time of the attacks, and the following major crisis crossover event had more scenes devoted to innocent bystanders and more quasi-authoritarianism by the president than it probably would have had otherwise. Note that in the DC universe's America, George Bush was never president; the winner of the 2000 election was Lex Luthor, which puts everything since then in a very different light.
In Marvel comics, the 9/11 attacks did happen - Marvel seems to have relatively fewer characters who plausibly could and would have prevented them - and there was a special issue of Spider-Man devoted to superheroes trying to help with the recovery, with many villains even helping out, in a "we're all in this together" or even "this is beyond the pale" sense. That comic itself was pretty tasteful and intelligent on its own, but it's harder to take seriously in light of stuff like the link in 410, because those villains actually did stuff like the 9/11 attacks (or tried to, or were cavalier about the risks) all the time. Juggernaut himself was among the people helping clean up, for example.
Marvel seems to have relatively fewer characters who plausibly could and would have prevented them
Way to let the country down, Thor.
Marvel seems to have relatively fewer characters who plausibly could and would have prevented them
Really? I'm pretty sure when I was 12 I could have given you fifty or more names off the top of my head. I mean, isn't it mostly just an issue of whether they would have known about the problem soon enough? Susan Storm (Richards?) could easily divert a plane, for instance.
414: Admittedly I didn't read it at the time because I couldn't believe it would possibly be tasteful, but Dr. Doom's eyes brimming with tears were what most of my friends took away from that comic.
Because I'm reading Runaways with Caroline and Joey, and getting more into Marvel comics than I ever have since middle school. I know this is going to end badly though, because soon I'm going to start being frustrated by all the things that drove me away from them to begin with.
I'm getting more into Marvel...
I really wonder if my generation represented an all-time low in the actual reading and following of comic books by kids, compared to before and after. Watching The Simpsons in the early nineties, Bart and Milhouse's interest in comic books seemed like one of those anachronistic details that the writers retained from their own childhoods, like the use of slingshots or something.
421: That is also my view. I used to read comic books when I got my hair cut, but I'd never purchased one until my son developed an interest in Batman and I discovered they make G rated kiddie comic books.
But, I think I'm older than you by a bit.
I don't know, maybe it's a geographic thing, too. But yeah, I'm in my 30s [although admittedly at the closer to 40 end], but I can only think of one person I knew growing up who read comics. It was so much a minority interest it was on a par with, I don't know, brass rubbing or macramé or something.
By "all-time" I of course mean "the last 70 years".
brass rubbing
You and your Scottish euphemisms.
424: What about all those Beano type things? I suppose they barely count.
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Is anyone in NYC potentially interested in two tickets for Pavement on Sunday night on the Williamsburg waterfront? I will be away for the weekend and may not be able to come back in time (and am going to the Wednesday night show in any event). I'll know for sure by tomorrow, and I can email the tickets.
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re: 427
The only thing my friends read was Oor Wullie, which is, I suppose, a national institution. But they'd usually read it in the form the Annual, received as a Christmas present from an elderly relative.
http://www.thatsbraw.co.uk/Oor%20Wullie/Wullie-Street-Fighter-Strip.htm
http://www.thatsbraw.co.uk/Annuals/The-Annuals-2.htm
426: But that's not a minority interest!
I read a huge number of comics (like, in the neighborhood of 20 new issues a month) from when I was, eh, 6 or so until I was 16 or 17, when I stopped pretty abruptly because I just didn't have the time. For most of that time I knew a lot of other people my age who also read them (though I put a lot more effort into digging up back issues from the 60s and 70s than anyone else I knew). It was always considered pretty dorky, though, so maybe ned, Moby, and ttaM had cooler friends.
429: Ahahaha. Yes, and every Xmas from CA's parents to their grandkids. (CA actually has a bookcase of, like, Biggles and Doctor Who novelizations in the bedroom.)
I thought you were around my age (42) Ned.
Comics are definitely big now for people under 30. I assume it is because of all the superhero movies Hollywood started making in the 90s. If you were 10 in 1995, you would have gotten a serious jolt of superhero movies that might still be keeping you excited about the genre.
One of the first things I noticed about Last Chance Community College was that t-shirts for comics characters and horror movies were just as popular as band t-shirts, and band t-shirts are as popular among my students as they were for my peers in high school.
432.1: Then Ned is roughly my age.
432: I don't often see folks reading them (or graphic novels) on the subway. On the metro in Paris, every male under 60 has a Blueberry or whatever in his hand.
I though Ned was a young'un. Younger than neB. But what do I know?
I thought ned was slightly older than me.
I'm the right age to remember people actually buying all 9 embossed-hologram-chrome-wraparound variant covers of Todd McFarlane's latest opus, "because they're collector's items!"
I got really into comics because the older kid at the family friend's house where I was warehoused after I aged out of the free afterschool program had a huge collection of Marvel (and, oddly, Casper and Richie Rich) comics. I bought some, but could never really afford to follow more than one or two titles (of course I picked The New Mutants, so even giant nerds could mock me for something) so most of my experience with, say, the X-Men chronology is from the '70s.
438: And I have no idea who Todd McFarlane is.
Due to Unfogged continuity errors, the Earth-2 Ned is much older.
When I was about 10 I traded Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man #1 (for the unitiated: 1990, a stupid spin-off series, not like an actual first Spider-Man comic or anything) for something random from the 70s that I wanted to read (Warlock #13?), at a time when they were both valued at around $30. The 30-ish comic-book-shop guy I traded with clearly thought he was ripping me off and even seemed to consider telling me I was making a mistake, and that Spider-Man #1 would someday be worth zillions. I'm pleased to learn that it's basically worthless today.
... and then I found five dollars.
I have exactly one comic that's worth more than $10, I think; it's probably worth like $80?
440: A co-founder of the Image Comics line, a mostly very grim & gritty (but creator-owned! Which means it's independent! Or something) company, of which McFarlane's Spawn was a good example. Before that he was best known for drawing Spider-Man with really big and inexplicably expressive eyes that have since become part of the character's image. This is Spider-Man pre-McFarlane, this is McFarlane's version, and this recent art, while not quite as extreme as McFarlane's, is definitely closer to it than to the original.
Obviously, I'm a comic book geek. I've read them since I had the money to buy them for myself, around the early- to mid-90s. Mostly Marvel, some DC, but I've been losing interest lately. The only title I've bought regularly in the past year is Invincible, published by... Image.
394: Speaking of which, I knew the Fantastic Four lived in Four Freedoms Plaza since around when I started reading comics, but it wasn't until this reminder of it that I realized what that name must have been an allusion to. Wow, Marvel comics was/is full of crypto-leftists. Good for them.
I really liked DC war comics as a kid, then Marvel superheroes. I think that there's a lot to be said for comic art; DC had a few that still seem nice. Joe Kubert and George Pratt are both quite good
Artistic genius Steve Ditko was an objectivist. Some of the stuff he wrote was just nuts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shade,_the_Changing_Man
Quicksilver could sort the daily mail output of the United States in 3 hours.
Yeah, and is Quicksilver going to provide jobs for thousands of suddenly unemployed postal workers? Huh? Is he?
Quicksilver? Might as well call him Job Destroyer, that bastard.
Chalk up another vote for 438 -- I'm in my mid-30s, and I was just about the right age to have a bunch of friends in junior high who were sketching terrible Rob Liefeld knockoffs at lunchtime (which, to be fair, weren't much worse than the originals).
I did know one kid who was into comic books. And I bought a few issues of the X-Men after the TV show piqued my interest. Probably this is nothing more than another manifestation of me having no friends.
Or maybe just...there were (and are) no ADS for comic books on TV. This made me think "Comic books? Those really exist?" when seeing them in stores, since nobody ever mentioned them at school.
445: I didn't know McFarlane was responsible for that shift. Joey's Spider-man gear comes in a huge range of eye sized. Some of the coloring books give Spidey eyes the one's the PowerPuff girls have, freakish things that take up most of his head.
I had just guessed that the bigger eyes were on the products aimed at littler kids.
449: GOD I remember this douche! I would spend hours looking at my art books and then looking at various Image comics, and simply failing to comprehend. I guess I experienced my first tulip mania at a fairly young age? Wasted basically all of my allowance for, like, years.
Artistic genius Steve Ditko was an objectivist.
Now that link is an example of exactly what I like about comic book art (seriously, I wasn't expecting much but as soon as I looked at the image I had a strong tactile memory of the feel of comic book paper).
I'm pretty sure I own a comic or two from which the art in 449 comes. In my defense, I was 10 at the time of publication and can't have been much older when I bought them. I blame my parents.
447, 458: Ever see the Watchmen movie? Remember the Rorschach character, that badass vigilante who just happened to be a fascist, and so crazy he literally carried "the end is nigh" signs around? He was a deliberate homage to a Ditko hero. Ditko wasn't all bad, but he sure was crazy.
183: The TRX is basically a strong nylon do-hicky that just hangs. You vary the difficulty by moving your position. There were a couple where I couldn't do even the modified, easiest version which were supposed to be upper-body exercises, but I used my back too much.
They're starting to offer this at a lot of YMCAs.
Basically, you're using the weight of your own body for the resistance.
449 really depresses me. snarkout--except for the fact that you guys just had a baby, I'd have thought that you were older, maybe 45 based on the age of the blog.
based on the age of the blog.
What?
A young person would have the energy to post more than once a year, perhaps?
463: Some people have been around for 4 or 5 years. I try to think back to how someone appeared when s/he first appeared, and then I add about 4 years to that. So, maybe I'd have said 37-39 back then. My guess was that snarkout was around 42.
449 really depresses me.
What exactly is depressing about snarkout being younger than you'd thought?
Maybe it makes BG feel closer to death.
Maybe Rob Liefeld's career is what's depressing. Not very hard to imagine!
A young person acting like an old person is arguably depressing. Sort of. I guess.
467 and 470: My birthday is coming up, and I am feeling "old." I think somebody wrote a comment a while ago about ceasing to be a bright young thing and not living up to whatever potential people thought one had etc.
473: Yes. Yeeeeesssss. Although I find that, outside the fields of competitive sports and theoretical mathematics, potential-living-up-to actually happens much later in life than most people think. Has something to do with getting old enough to stop caring about stupid stuff, and young enough to do something about the things you still do care about. 30s and 40s, and now 50s. Keeps getting revised upwards.
Well, I'm clearly not going to do anything impressive in my thirties, unless finally getting the hang of pie crust counts. So I'm hoping for my forties.
476: Front page poster on a long-lived and influential blog!
We influenced something? Was it cool?
I was predicting what you were going to do in your forties.
I learned how to cold-brew ice tea, so in that sense the blog was influential. But I can't remember if you were responsible for that post.
No, that was Meekins' only post. I tried that a couple of times, and decided I didn't like it -- the tea gets a nice deep color, but it doesn't taste like tea.
Oh god, that's right. How could I forget Meekins? The cold brew tastes good if you load it up with mint.
Can we just reveal Meekins' secret fucking identity at this point (I mean as a commenter, not a real person) -- that would help to resolve one of the open questions on my open question list.
Meekins fucks under a secret identity?
The problem is that he's not a commenter, and the only non-Meekins name he has is, AFAIK, real. Email me and I'll tell you, but despite the utter lack of scandalous Meekins posts I probably shouldn't put his name up. (Offer open to anyone else, and comes with free bonus fact about someone who didn't end up posting here.)
Oh, that resolves the question. I figured it was just Tweety or some other regular stepping into the dangerous world of ice-tea blogging and wanting to make sure he'd covered his tracks.
484 -> Post title.
(And no I did not set that up on purpose.)
Well, I'm clearly not going to do anything impressive in my thirties
You did write that memo.
We influenced something? Was it cool?
The hottest media type (off-air) 2007 probably has something to say about that.
486, 487: Meekins was Standpipe? Why would that be, since Standpipe also had clearance as a frontpage poster? Standpipe wanted a pseud for the pseud? That is possible, I guess.
I really liked DC war comics as a kid
Baron Hans von Hammer was my favorite. And Conan the Barbarian. And Thor, but only in Aesgard. Donald Blake can suck it.
Interestingly, there was a speculative bubble in comics collecting from 1987 to 1993. Essear's experience in 443 would have been right in the middle of that bubble.
The relationship between commerce and storyline in comics is fascinating to me. Who would have thought that telling stories in a market driven fashion would lead to absurdly complex plot lines?
Well maybe that outcome seems obvious to you guys. But for people of my generation, the paradigm of mass art were the three TV networks producing shows with virtually no multi-episode story arcs. Comics, if they were on anyone's radar, would have been the exception to the mass appeal --> simple rule.
But for people of my generation, the paradigm of mass art were the three TV networks producing shows with virtually no multi-episode story arcs.
Except for tv soap operas. Comics always vaguely reminded me of the soaps in that way. Or rather, the reverse: soaps seemed vaguely like comics, though treating of much more mundane subject matter.
495: Ooh, good one. I didn't think of that one. I wonder if there is something in common here--niche marketing, maybe? Tween boys and housewives don't have much in common, but in each case you need to create a narrow, dedicated fan base.
Tween boys and housewives don't have much in common
Sez you.
496: I'm not sure you need to go beyond just the desire to create a dedicated fan base; all programming has a target audience in mind, doesn't it? Why non-soap television programming didn't move to multi-episode story arcs sooner than it did is a bit of a mystery to me, since it's so obviously a winning formula. We now have prime-time tv dramas like that that successfully appeal to almost every market you can think of, so I'm not seeing why/how you necessarily need a niche market in place before you can launch such a thing.
That wasn't very coherent, was it?
There's probably quite a bit of study of the historical development of these things out there, so I feel a little dumb speculating, actually. I mean, comics *created* that niche market, didn't they? And soaps -- I don't know about the history there.
Sez you.
The conjunction of a teen boy and a housewife isn't a third thing which they have in common.
494, 495, 496: also, pro wrestling.
I would have thought both comics and soap operas had precursors in serialized fiction in magazines, and maybe more relevantly in film serials.
Wait - what about early radio programming? Weren't there shows with continuing story lines? The Lone Ranger, maybe? Was The Shadow continuous?
I'm wondering whether self-contained episodes in tv were the exception rather than the rule. I could look some of this stuff up.
Also, considering that soap operas date back to the radio era, it's not clear that they postdate serialized stories in comic books. (In fact, I think the really soap-opera-ish aspects of comic books, i.e. the extended plotlines and multiple concurrent stories that occasionally intersect each other, mostly date to the Marvel era of comic books in the 60s. Older comics were mostly one self-contained story (or even multiple such stories) per issue.
Why non-soap television programming didn't move to multi-episode story arcs sooner than it did is a bit of a mystery to me, since it's so obviously a winning formula.
I think it's about reruns -- you could sell a free-standing episode more easily than an element of a continuing story.
Why non-soap television programming didn't move to multi-episode story arcs sooner than it did is a bit of a mystery to me, since it's so obviously a winning formula.
But is it? It seems to work for cable where keeping a niche audience is good enough, but it's something that the networks can get very disgruntled about, because it makes it harder to get new viewers who come in mid-story.
Also what 501 says. Serialized magazine stories would have set the stage, I guess.
503 - Captain Marvel had two-year-long serials in the '40s, although I think you're right that those had died out entirely before being revived by Marvel in the Silver Age.
considering that soap operas date back to the radio era
Yeah, I'd forgotten that. (My remark in 495 about soaps resembling comics was strictly biographical: I came to the soap opera after I started reading comics.)
I'm still thinking that the self-contained episode is the exception rather than the rule, and the explanations in terms of reruns make sense.
Throw in the difference between comedies and dramas and I don't know what to say: the former are almost always single episodes. Which came first in radio, the comedy/variety, show? Maybe there's nothing helpful to say about the difference there except that they're different genres, and don't particularly cast light on one another.
503 - Captain Marvel had two-year-long serials in the '40s
From the link: "Mister Mind is a two-inch alien worm of high intelligence. Mind usually carries out his villainous plans through an organization called the Monster Society of Evil"
OMG want. Doesn't look like there are any easily accessible reprints, though.
yeah, when you look at the big picture, suddenly it is the TV shows with mostly stand alone episodes that need explaining.
A note here says that the idea that all of DC comics occurs in a shared universe began in the 40s, when Superman and Batman started appearing together. That's clearly the beginning of all of the problems with hyper complex story lines in comics.
Christine O'Donnell obviously knows all about Mister Mind, and has dedicated herself to his defeat.
Apparently there isn't a new reprint because there was too much racism in the old comics.
511: Maybe. It opened the door to it, at least. But I don't think DC really had hypercomplex storylines for a long time after that. During the Silver Age, they threw together characters in random and often crazy situations, and then continuity would just reset at the end of every issue. (Lois Lane & Jimmy Olsen couldn't stay married for more than one consecutive issue, after all; if they did, the writers might actually have to try to justify it on grounds other than a surprising cover to sell the issue.) I could be wrong, but I think it was mostly Stan Lee who started writing the kind of story where panels would need footnotes to remind the reader of previous issues needed to make sense of what was going on.
514: Huh. I haven't read much of the Silver Age, but this sounds about right. I don't think of anything I'd really call hypercomplex story lines until the late so-called Bronze Age, mid-80s, which is around when I stopped reading comics, with a few exceptions.
But I was reading mostly X-Men and Swamp Thing (and related), so I'm not familiar with whatever was going on with, say, Superman.
