The first link doesn't really say. Is it just that the indigenous women are in a violent, neglectful environment with no protection or is it that plus actual serial killers?

Also, it really should be the "National Center for Missing or Exploited Children" unless they really don't care about exploited children they can find.

It also created an "emotionally intelligent" app that sends parents weekly reports and automated push notifications detailing their children's internet searches and browsing histories,

This is literally the idea I suggested on this very website a few years ago as a joke, a terrible unethical way of exploiting parental anxiety about their kids' online activity.

http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_13474.html#1656899

Here. Except it was 2014 and so I suggested email rather than push alerts.

Calling an app "emotionally intelligent" is truly Orwellian.

2: Right, Moby. We'll let you answer the phones.

Moby: National Center for Missing or Exploited Children. How can I help you?

Caller: I'm being exploited! My parent are making me do the dishes!

I should know but don't whether Canada has the same kind of tangled up jurisdictional stuff we do wrt First Nations.

I know it is shocking, but it seems that completely exempting a class of criminals from the jurisdiction of local law enforcement ends up leading to exempt criminals committing crimes. Who could have guessed? Is it actually causal? I think it might well be: the impunity in widely known.

Did I talk about my Xmas Vacation project at the time? I worked with some activists to put together a resolution on the MMIW issue for the county Democratic party calling out specific public officials to to specific stuff, and supporting some specific bills. Response was pretty good, and maybe even helped some bills got passed: which required some real work by our (non-Native) local legislators, as well and the Native members. The sheriff hired some extra people and is eager to report back to us on his progress. (The county includes a slice of the CSKT Nation, and of course we have Natives from various Nations living in town.) We're not really situated to push Sen. Daines on this, but he's smart enough to know that his only (slim) chance of losing is massive Native turnout against him, so he's got incentive enough to support common-sense measures that don't alienate any but the hardest core racists.

In the summertime when the weather is hot
You can stretch right up and touch the sky
When the weather's fine
You got women, you got women on your mind
Have a drink, have a drive
Go out and see what you can find
If her daddy's rich take her out for a meal
If her daddy's poor just do what you feel

7.1: Apparently yes. Also apparently short tours and rapid turnover for RCMP and other police at remote locations.

I probably can't go to a yoga class, because I'm afraid everyone will think I'm there to look at butts. There's a new pilates studio by me, maybe I could try that. But really I should just try stretching at home for 15 minutes a day.

Get right up at the front of the class, by the instructor. You'll be the butt everyone sees.

Archery. Looking at butts is the norm.

I'm also super stiff and feeling as if I should do something about it. My experiences with yoga have been uniformly miserable, but I'm eyeing a business that has coached stretching sessions, which I'm hoping will be more about "what should I, as a deeply inflexible person, do to improve that" and less about "just gently relax into this position that you have no hope of getting into, but on no account strain yourself", which always makes me want to snarl at the yoga teacher.

Related in Washington state. Canadian op-ed.

Archery is all about controlled overcoming of stiffness.

I probably can't go to a yoga class, because I'm afraid everyone will think I'm there to look at butts.

Atossa loves swimming, and the best option for swimming classes turned out to be the YMCA, so while she's in the water I'm usually in the gym working out. I usually start by running on the treadmill for a while for general cardio. I always take a treadmill on the back row. It's both closest to locker rooms and closest to the pool, so I can easily see how class is going. The fact that there are butts in yoga pants front of me is a minor bonus I'd never admit openly.

Topic 2. I suggest two experiments. They could be run simultaneously:

a. Every time this idiotic system comes up with a false positive, randomly pick one of the company's executives (or the school system's administrators), and s/h/o/o/t them. Either they will improve their system or they will run out of idiots. Either way, problem solved.

b. For every person monitored by the system, an employee of the company (or an administrator of the school system) has to also be monitored. Any hits must be publicly disclosed.

Any false positives and Pfizer has to run a clinical trial to see if the kids can cure a disease.

For mobility:

I re-started exercise after four years of no exercise, and my complaint was the same. "I move like a fused robot" was my phrasing.

My friend and I purchased an online class (too pricey, probably, but after the years I spent paying for a personal trainer, that and a gym membership feel relatively cheap) from GMB fitness. We spent eight months doing their 8 week session on animal movements, because we weren't working at it daily and took long breaks.

I didn't ever like it, really, but it did what it was supposed to. It was an awful lot of non-linear, side to side motion, broken into small daily chunks. I wouldn't call it a workout, exactly. But it made me confront my knee problem and go to a real PT, who fixed it. Between that and frequent moving in ways I wouldn't spontaneously move, I think it restored some grace to my motion.

Anyway, we spent a year on two of their programs, then thought we wanted to just get strong again. Now we're back to lifting. Today I deadlifted my old warm-up weight!!!!

But if you can split the cost with someone (by using a shared login), I found their mobility program did increase mobility. I kept fantasizing that my kid would want to do it with me, but he wouldn't focus for long enough. Maybe next year I'll repeat it and he'll join me.

At the beginning, the only way I could move freely was the pitch direction. If I needed something off to the side, I'd have to turn my whole body to face it, and then reach forward to it.

I'm better now, but it did take me a year to get to 'ready to start' working out.

Sounds like your yaw is pretty good too.

From that link, the straight-legged bear crawl, sideway monkey crawl, and frogger are all moves that they have us do at my gym, especially (but not exclusively) during warm-ups. But we never break them down into components, assess weaknesses, and build them up systematically. I'm just noting that I recognize them.

I will say that for the rest of the day, yesterday, my neck and traps felt completely smooth and creak-free. Pre-PT, I was having a lot of pain and reduced mobility. Post-PT, I am pain free and feel like I have decent mobility in my neck, but it still creaks and squeaks in general, and all that disappeared. (The PT doc once described to me how our cartilage develops nicks and tears as we age, and now that's my visual image for the creaks.) They are totally back today, though.

I found the kind of stretching I did for kickboxing worked pretty well for increasing my mobility, or at least my lower body mobility.* Gentle joint loosening, then dynamic stretching, then some kind of exercise that gets you sweaty and hot, then some relaxed passive stretching (taking your time, but not pissing about,** it shouldn't actually be that easy), followed by some active/PnF stretching, if you want it.

That said, I am now seeing a PT about a long standing hip problem, which she thinks is basically caused by a massive knot of tension/trigger points/pain etc in my left hip that relates to that period, which has messed with my movement patterns. But, it wasn't the stretching that caused that, it was throwing my leg*** in the air hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, every week, for years, and basically spending hours with one hip slightly cocked (to throw front leg kicks, basically). The PT is new, but, she seems pretty great. Lots of really deeply painful trigger point stuff, but when she was doing it, I could genuinely feel my hip shifting. Also, paying proper attention to what I was saying, rather than just looking to chuck me out the door with a worksheet and a glib diagnosis.

* upper body mobility is harder, and I think yoga or the sort of animal movements (I've also looked at the GMB stuff that Megan links) is probably better for that. I need to work on thoracic spine and shoulder mobility, which for me, is not great.

** I think this is the blocker for a lot of people. 1) it takes quite a long time for your muscle to relax and lengthen (we aren't talking a few seconds), so you are holding the stretches for quite a long time, and most people are quite lazy about it, 2) it will hurt, somewhat. By hurt, I don't mean the kind of acute injury that causes damage, but there'll be an uncomfortable feeling and tension (which you should be able to distinguish from actual injury). Most people really don't stretch with the kind of intensity and focus that actually works.

*** while physically quite heavy and old for that sort of thing.

"The PT is new"

New to me. She's a stern old lady type.

Were one vastly more extroverted, philanthropic and diligent, one would be dangerously close to becoming one of those top-knotted, linen-trousered lunatics who encourages others to practice yoga. As it is, one's native faults limit one to the bare statement that, after 5-6 years of yoga, one feels pronouncedly healthier and more flexible than one felt 20-25 years and innumerable daring, stupid and/or clumsy injuries ago.

it takes quite a long time for your muscle to relax and lengthen (we aren't talking a few seconds), so you are holding the stretches for quite a long time, and most people are quite lazy about it

because it's insanely boring oh god how many more seconds do I have to count.

Actually, that's probably the best argument for the hot yoga for me, in that it got me to work on any individual stretch for much longer than I could possibly stand to do, otherwise. The heat probably does help. It certainly makes it feel like you're earning your keep.

Maybe I will try to go weekly.

25: so what's the bare minimum frequency one would need to do?

Heh. I could move in yaw by, like, taking steps. Not by rotation or twisting.

We had to do them at my old gym too and I completely hated them. It surprised me that after a four year break, those were the things I did first, without being told to by a trainer.

Also, Flip! You may have missed an earlier thread where a meetup for 6/19 at Fresh Salt was arranged. Barry, Ajay, and possibly a llama will be in attendance.

27: I attended no more than 2 "fundamentals" or "basics" Iyengar yoga classes per week for a good 1.5-2 years before I worked up the guts to try anything else, and even those made a difference pretty quickly (3-4 months before I felt "different" in a good way?). The ignorance and clumsiness of the first few months feel awkward, but most yoga teachers, especially in basic, fundamental or "gentle" classes, practice a "kind, welcoming and nonjudgmental kindergarten teacher" style of engagement.

What's wrong with linen trousers?

re: 26

Yeah, that's why doing it when already hot and sweaty from some kind of workout is good.

I'm rubbish at that, these days. I do a bit of gentle passive stretching in front of the TV, and "muscle memory" (or the equivalent thereof) makes it a bit easier than if I'd never done any stretching before, but I don't work anything like hard enough on upper body flexibility, which in my case is pretty terrible. I can fake very good lower flexibility, but certain movements I fake (because of the bad hip) and the faking makes the hip problem worse.

I have oddly made some fairly significant flexibility gains by doing a lot of weightlifting and not stretching at all. I've always been super stiff, but most impressively so on anything involving folding forward. I can't, e.g., sit upright comfortably with my legs stretched out straight in front of me, and folding my body down toward my legs really isn't happening at all. After a couple of years of doing squats three times a week and deadlifts once, I'm noticing that my range of motion in sort of everyday life things is noticeably better -- getting things out from under the sink, I'm spontaneously bending over to reach them rather than squatting the way I would have in the past. But a noticeable improvement still leaves me pretty terrible.

I should probably both lift and stretch. Or go back to swimming.

The deer is right there again. I opened the blinds and she stared at me until I shut them because I could see she was annoyed.

I have less than no time today. Thanks for the links in 14: part of my brain wants to draft a thoughtful response, another part is viscerally (it's that mental health/gut biome thing, surely) disgusted by the white fragility that underlies the (reasonable, if IMO incorrect) concern about the word "genocide". Look, here's a genocide you can do something about! That's great! That's a fucking rare opportunity! Just take it as a freebie, white people.

||

"The military is launching [a] fierce offensive, and its policy is to crush us, so we have concerns," he added.

33: I have a pet theory about this! Actually I wish my dancing/co-working friend who just left was here right now because I've tried to expound my pet theory to him before but without a ton of success.

I think gaining flexibility is as much or more about strengthening the muscles that have to contract to allow the motion as it is about lengthening the muscles that have to release. I have heard (maybe Dr. Oops knows whether this is true, or some other doctor around here, or maybe I should actually just check with any of the doctors I know for once) that people are super flexible under anesthesia when their brain isn't automatically contracting their muscles in response to extreme positions to protect them from injury. So if you think of flexibility as training your nervous system to accept that the movement is possible and safe, one part of that is making the muscle that directs the movement through contraction strong so you can get experience with the movement bit by bit. And maybe counterintuitively even the muscle that inhibits the movement through contraction helps flexibility because it makes you feel safer by providing stability.

This is a little bit of an expansion of that, because it's not your middle back muscles that have to contract to bend down, but I could really imagine that deadlifts, by allowing you to contract your middle back and bend down in a way that subconsciously feels way safer than it would have before you had that back strength, can increase flexibility without any active hamstring stretching.

I'm trying to gear up to increase my strength training. Just recently I faced facts that if I make myself do pushups so that my chest comes near to the ground I can do very few of them and I've been lying to myself for years by doing push ups without full range of motion.

I had to move a refrigerator (with lots of help) and I realized I'd been kidding myself about staying in shape also.

Is it just that the indigenous women are in a violent, neglectful environment with no protection or is it that plus actual serial killers?

The former. The whole "MMIW" thing is largely a (very successful) campaign to draw public attention to a problem that's been around basically forever.

I guess that's good to know. I was thinking it was like that one killer in Alaska.

I thought it was both? A quick check says that three serial killers have been charged for multiple murders on the Highway of Tears: Brian Peter Arp, Edward Dennis Isaac and Cody Legebokoff. Able to do so because of uncaring institutions, of course. Other men are suspected of doing so.

If multiple serial killers have been caught and people continue to disappear that seems like more of a symptom than a cause of the overall phenomenon.

38: That's interesting. My subjective experience of trying to stretch is that yes, it's an intense muscular effort pulling against something that's absolutely not going to move. One of the things that happens if I try to stretch and hold a forward fold (which if I'm not curving my back is more of a forward right angle) is that I will often end up with painful abdominal cramps from pulling too hard against an immovable object. But I don't know if more abdominal strength would help, or if it would just mean tearing something.

@40 - from following some indigenous authors on the topic, it would seem that the first has to be qualified somewhat.

The oft quoted statistic being that FN men are responsible for 70% of murders, but it appears that this statistic is based on a very tiny amount of cases.

The report accepts that there are high levels of domestic violence in such communities, but concludes that is being used as a blanket explanation.

Everything above suitably qualified, I've read a small amount of commentary and a few extracts from the report.

The oft quoted statistic being that FN men are responsible for 70% of murders, but it appears that this statistic is based on a very tiny amount of cases.

That sounds plausible to the point of being on the low side of what I'd expect, in that people generally get murdered by their family and other people they have a close personal relationship with. I'd have to look it up, but racial matching between murderers and victims in the US is very high generally.

That is, you could have a huge problem with people outside the community preying on vulnerable FN women and still have 70% of murders be intra-community.

This is a pretty easy call, I think, when it comes to deploying WMP in a support capacity. Justice for murdered/kidnapped people -- victimized by colonialism racism and misogyny continuously in life and again in death -- you've really got to have something wrong with you to oppose that. (And some racist shitbags in our lege tried to resist on some of the bills; fortunately the forces of right were able to make some small progress.) I'm going to a vigil this evening, and so will run home from work to get a red shirt.

Wearing orange tomorrow, as are all of you, right?

I suppose the 70% figure comes from closed cases, not the cases where someone goes missing, the authorities blow off family and pretend it's just some gal off doing something unconventional, and then a decomposing body is found months later.

Is anyone shocked that men of color are going to get prosecuted for murder?

WMP?

Also, what's the wearing orange event? I didn't read whatever the relevant link was.

Too early for deer hunting.

Gun violence awareness.

That is, you could have a huge problem with people outside the community preying on vulnerable FN women and still have 70% of murders be intra-community.

Yeah, 70% definitely sounds low and indicative of a huge intercommunal problem. I presume that's a Canadian statistic? I wonder if it's higher in the US.

52: This is the first I've heard of that.

Like a lot of Indigenous activism these days, the MMIW concept/movement originated in Canada and doesn't always translate perfectly to the US context, which is similar but not identical.

The event. I've heard of gun violence.

The cardinals are back in my yard. Maybe the raccoon killed the crows and died of rabies.

And the deer?

The deer and the cardinals have never bothered each other. I don't think the deer could kill a crow or a raccoon.

So the NRCC just called and a robot asked for me by name. The robot asked if I thought Trump was doing a better job than Obama and signed off with a disclosure when I said no.

||

Master of Orion 2 just came out on Steam so now I have a Steam account.

|>

Moby, lurid and I may be about to attempt some refrigerator moving. Any hot tips? I had a beer already.

I did refrigerator moving professionally, and other appliances and furniture, very many years ago (had a job delivering such for Sears).

OK: what's the best way to conceal your fear from the fridge?

62: We had four guys and a dolly and only needed to move it 20 feet over level ground. I'm just old. Then I had to look at all the kids, some of whom were teenagers, and in my serious adult voice, remind them not to put anybody in it because you can't open that kind of refrigerator from inside and enough kids died that way that those types of doors were made illegal. (It was being used as a prop for a play, but apparently worked recently as there were eggs inside.)

This reminds me that I should clean the coils on my fridge.

64 drink all the beer inside it

Inside of a refrigerator, it's too anoxic to drink.

This is all good advice. We procured the U-Haul and holy fuck I haven't driven anything this size for a while. Talk about dysmorphia.

Obviously, you can buy Truck Nutz in a bigger size.

Canada money is weird.

60- Check to make sure you're still registered to vote before the next election deadline.
63- Barry is a member of Dire Straits?

61: briefly excited, then realized I had mixed MoO with Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters. (Autocorrect wanted to make that "Ur-Quran," which certainly would be something.)

Given who controls the state (at least the executive) and county, I'm not really worried about that.

Anyway, I don't get why they would call me first if they were going to do that.

Fridge has been moved! Now washer and dryer, because we are racing the clock vs unknown deadline at which our level-ground house access will end. In their infinite wisdom house architect put hookups in kitchen not ground floor

Dryers are pretty light. Front-loading washers are heavy. They have chunks of cement inside to provide ballast against the shaking.

Still, lighter than a fridge.

Surely a counter-rotating flywheel would work better. (And cost more, and use more power, and possibly weigh more.)

Can you take out the concrete and move it separately?

You usually can with cast-iron stove liners, something my friends and I only realized in the new place. Oops.

A removable flywheel would have the advantage of being rollable, on account of being a wheel. Also I had been led to believe that American houses standardly come with appliances in place, the better to facilitate your semi-nomadic slash-and-burn national ethos.

Yeah, we got the budget model of house -- although if there had been existing fridge and laundry in the same condition as the existing dishwasher and garbage disposal, it wouldn't exactly have been a perk. Cooktop and oven seem fine. We bought the appliances at our current rental because the new landlords are going to remodel.

To expand 76 beyond that telegraphic style: the house was once occupied by the pastor of the Lutheran church next door, so there was a path and a gate leading into the church parking lot, and that was his daily commute. Times changed, the house was sold twice, the church (Missouri synod, fwiw) fell on hard times and leased its parking lot to a preschool. The preschool has set up modular classrooms and they're building a playground next to the gate, and we have known for a while that the gate will eventually be blocked. The latest development, as of Tuesday, was a layer of gravel that kept the gate from opening. Today there were huge piles of mulch that are obviously going over the gravel. I shoveled away enough gravel to open the gate and we dragged all the appliances through a six foot gap next to the now-padlocked parking lot gates, across the parking lot, over the gravel, through our gate, and into the house. I bet they lay down the mulch tomorrow morning. They absolutely have been working on the weekends.

Only fair, right?

Almagro's letter states that the rights of Indigenous peoples in the Americas is "one of the main concerns" of the Inter-American Human Rights System, which monitors, promotes and protects human rights in 35 countries of the Americas that are OAS members. The system is one of Luis' top priorities in his role. [...] "Given that your country has always sided with scrutiny and international investigation in situations where human rights are violated in different countries, I am expecting to receive a favorable response to this request," he wrote. If Canada agrees, he said he'll start finding experts right away.

re: 44

That all sounds fundamentally like a combination of psychology and technique, tbh. The way stretching works, is basically as much about training your body to not have a contraction reaction (Golgi tendon reflex) to the stretch (to protect the muscles from damage). It's basically a neural process, more than a muscle fibre lengthening process, and you can habituate the muscle to the range of motion and stop that reflex happening.

I can't imagine any physical reason you find just touching your toes so much physical effort. In fact, thinking about what is happening when I do it, I don't think the ab muscles are firing at all, hip flexors, maybe, which suggests you might even be hinging in the wrong place.

Have you tried PNF stretches? Or using something like a yoga strap or belt to allow you to use your arms to facilitate the stretch? PNF stretching might really help, as it's all about that relationship between pushing and pulling muscles, and about forcing the muscle being stretched to relax.

Also, standing hamstring stretches like this: https://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/exercises.asp?exercise=280 might help. (Ignore the fact that her front knee is bent, because ... that's stupid.)

I think this is an area where people with good flexibility have a very hard time understanding the experiences of people with poor flexibility.

Here's a source saying that the abdominal muscles are involved in a forward fold: http://www.yogamagazine.com/seated-forward-bend/

And yes, I've tried PNF stretching -- you, actually, recommended a book here ages ago Stretching Scientifically, that I've tried to work from. It works better than anything else I've tried but not in a way that gets me anywhere near ordinary levels of flexibility, and not so that I've noticed meaningful improvement from one session to the next.

I get a little testy about this, because I've been listening to gym teachers coaches, yoga instructors, and so on finding my incapacity baffling for my entire life (usually before they try to correct for my inability to follow simple directions by firmly shoving me into a position that makes me either involuntarily cry out in pain or fall down). In other contexts, I follow instructions fine; trust me that there's something anatomical going on here.

Something that I find interesting is that I know a fair number of people who are on my end of the flexibility spectrum (although I'm way out there) and we've all gotten the same disbelief from teachers and coaches. People who find flexibility-related improvement easy (or at least possible) seem very firmly committed to the proposition that it's equally practical for everyone.

Congrats on the new house lks

Best of luck with the new house. There's a former rectory that was just sold as a private house near us. There isn't a backyard that could be sold with the house because it's all a cemetery. Which is quieter than a pre-school, but would have bothered me.

80: I only know because I took one apart trying to fix it. It isn't easy to get to the cement things and while they do come off, getting them back on securely may be a trick.

If they had replaced the cement with stolen gravel security wouldn't be an issue.

Like taking gravel from a baby.

||

While Soviet forces had imposed a 10:00 p.m. curfew, guerrillas had vowed to fire on anyone moving after 9:00. To be safe, most residents elected to stay indoors after 7:00.

If it was in the 80s, that's when Cosby was on anyway (central and mountain time).

In their infinite wisdom house architect put hookups in kitchen not ground floor

The house we're buying has the washer/dryer in main bathroom and the hot water heater in a weird closet in the kitchen. We assume both the w/d and the hot water heater were later additions (house built in 1921). We'll try to move the hot water heater to the cellar, but the w/d pretty much have to stay in the bathroom.

On the stretchy front, I started several months ago doing a few sit-ups, push-ups, and light stretching in the morning. It's remarkable how much it helps my morning mood in addition to eliminating the feeling of early-in-the-day creakiness/stiffness. I've also started eating a hard-boiled egg for breakfast, because even though I'm not hungry in the AM, the protein seems to help my brain get going.

re: 85

Apologies for just repeating the same stuff that everyone else has, then. I sort of understand it a bit.

My hip issue means that I superficially have a full range of movement -- to a non expert observer it looks completely normal -- but I'm actually doing the movement in a (covert) unusual way, because I simply can't make my hip move a certain way. That is proprioception and movement pattern, and long term programming into a bad habit, though, rather than an actual physical impingement. But the effect is the same, I can't do a thing, unless given very specific preparation and feedback.

re: 85.last

To be fair, when I used to teach people martial arts, I used to find people telling me exactly that sort of thing, or that a particular movement simply wasn't possible for them _ever_, who, a few months of moderate work later, were doing it just fine.

So, people who coach things come across people who say that simply _cannot_ do something, but who in fact _can_ but have been doing it badly/lazily, WAY more often than they come across people who simply _cannot_ do that thing, ever, not matter what.

I've had exactly the same thing with showing people guitar ... "My hands are too big to make that shape."* or "My hands are too small to make that shape."** When the right answer is, "I don't really have the commitment to many months of hard work and discomfort, so I'm saving face right now."***

But I appreciate that there are people where that really IS true, and it must be annoying as hell to be told all the time that it's your fault, or that this one weird trick will solve it for you (when that one weird trick is one you've heard 100 times before and assiduously practiced for months).

* hands noticeably smaller than mine.
** vice versa
*** only a mild value judgement intended. I have personally given up a bunch of stuff, because I know I don't have the interest/commitment/time/willpower for it.

I do believe that some improvement is possible -- as I said, the two years of weightlifting has for the first time in my life made flexibility changes I can perceive in daily life. Annoyingly, I don't quite know what about it exactly is helping, so it's hard to lean into the precise right thing to try and get more.

I really am curious, though -- you've worked with people who you've seen transition from unusually inflexible (take "unable to sit upright with legs outstretched" as a measure) to more flexible than average (something like forehead to knees or palms on the floor) through a few months of moderate work?

Because I get into conversations about this -- it's something I've been thinking about as a significant personal flaw and barrier to athleticism (as well as a reason to be very jumpy about teachers/coaches getting behind me because many of them have hurt me) since I was ten or so, and I get into conversations about it. And I don't hear stories like that. I hear "Yoga's been great for my flexibility. Of course I've always been pretty limber." And I hear stories like mine, of starting with a low baseline and not a lot of improvement ever. And for a few people (I mean, I'm thinking of literally one, but where there's one there must be more) of starting with very poor flexibility and through years of hard work improving slightly to sort of ordinarily poor flexibility.

I had kind of decided, based on the anecdotal evidence I'd heard over the years, that conventional stretching might be effective for people in sort of the middle/upper half of the bell curve for flexibility starting out, but there was a pretty big chunk of the population it didn't do much for. But if you've got different experiences, that's a cheerful thought.

||

Saddam offered his assessment. "This is nothing new," he told his inner circle. "It is new in regards to their depravity, in the level of moral decay of the Americans and specifically their president."

Re: 96

Lots of anecdotes of people going from, say, a 3 or 4 out of 10 to 5 to 7 out of 10 for flexibility which was enough for what I did. Personally, I was quite bendy as a teenager but when I started very inflexible by comparison. I was probably 7 out of 10 or so by the end (where 10 would be a serious amateur dancer or yoga practitioner) which was enough. For me, the big difference wasn't the amount of flexibility I could demonstrate in some passive palms on the floor type thing, it was in the range of moment I could use in activity, where there was a much bigger change.

I could never get my head on my knees, for example, but I could (gently) kick someone 4 or 5 inches taller than me in the head.

I can't recall anyone entirely crossing the hump in the bell curve from low to high, but lots of people shifting themselves up the scale.

Coordination and kinaesthetic sense seemed to improve more, but was also where I saw people who just seemed unimprovable. Adults with the kind of total inability to replicate a demonstrated movement that I see in xelA's kids martial arts class. And they just never got better.

I suspect weight lifting is doing a lot of dynamic stretching, which is why it works. Serious weight lifters are pretty bendy.

ttam right re both amount work necessary to obtain results for most people ime from music & child's observed exp from dance & also right re amount of coord & body-in-space awareness being different between people - below a certain threshold close to nothing can be done (the deer in headlights small child in dance performances after months & months of acharne Russian instruction)*, on other end of scale the viola-playing culp sister of my youth orchestra days, soaring above the rest of us prize-winning chumps (also absolutely lovely lovely woman). in the rest of the mid range, intelligently approached consistent hard work can accomplish huge amounts. child not naturally particularly flexible but crazed belorussian stretch specialist established a solid foundation, & he can accurately & promptly follow any "put your body in precisely this position, then move it thus per this beat" instruction.**

own innate hyper mobility a total pain in the ass, but consistent muscle strengthening helps with joint stability, extended broken & rebroken wrist saga causing puddling of muscles v disturbing. upper left arm pathetic.

* hilarious variant - summer intensive program for ballet kiddos, studio performance of jazz routine - sole annual opportunity for little hot house flowers to "break out of the ballet box" - always sharply divided btwn those that take to it like duckies to h2o & those condemned to social dance like dweebs forever.

**suspect knowledge of this drove sport prof nuts over years, bc consistent low scores ourside of the gymnastic-y module solely due to disinterest. sport prof seems particularly invested in badminton, once spent parent-teacher conf droning on at us re weaknesses in child's mid-court game. last report card of fr school career everyone else contributed appropriate leave-taking, summing up remarks, sport prof still banging on about next steps to improve badminton game, ending in "courage! continue!" - best note ever.

Oh please, I didn't steal the gravel; this was more like shoveling snow. It's all still there, just uneven.

Only fair, right?

Out of boundless narcissism, I was steeling myself for a link along the lines of a video I watched a few years ago, of an academic panel on "The Human Right to Housing and the Vancouver Situation" -- did I link this before? It came out right after (or during) the Balmoral Hotel fiasco. Everyone's going along in their circumlocutory academic way and then a community activist stands up and asks a pointed question.

There is a land trust out here set up by Ohlone women and partially funded by an opt-in tax (renters can pay too; landlords can super-duper-triple pay ahem).

But to your actual point, absolutely fair play!

something I've been thinking about as a significant personal flaw and barrier to athleticism

I strongly don't consider flexibility to be a barrier to athleticism, fwiw. I think of athleticism as being a synchrony between mind and body: how well can I intuit what to do, and then have the strength and coordination to execute it. Gymnasts and kickboxing and so on benefit from flexibility, of course, but in general I think of it as being a mind-body-quickness/responsiveness/cleverness.

Furthermore, from personal experience, flexible people seem to get injured a hell of a lot more than people with my short, thick, muscles. I picture gum, again - if it's stretched out, it can overstretch much more easily.

Being overtight is no fun, but I think flexibility is like vitamins - there's problems with both under and oversupply.

I'd agree with you about the lessened injury risk -- I don't sprain things.

We had four guys and a dolly

Sexist!

Travel teaches you thinks

Stupid phone. Anyway, in Canada when you are in a construction zone, they paint the lane dividers orange to make it clear they aren't fucking around.

Significant personal flaw is an an overstatement, I was being a drama queen. But one of my strongest associations since grade school with any kind of phys ed or coaching has been that unless I'm quick to protect myself teachers/coaches are going to hurt me by adjusting me firmly into positions I can't get to without pain, and they're going to believe I can't follow directions because they don't understand and won't believe how limited my range of motion is. It made sports depressing and unpleasant.

Rowing wasn't too bad -- the coach got kind of hostile at me about having my heels pop up as I came forward to the catch -- but other than that range of motion didn't come up much.

"Yoga's been great for my flexibility. Of course I've always been pretty limber."

Yoga's been great for my flexibility. Of course, I've always been a stale breadstick, so any improvement would be material.

From my perspective there's a religion about stretching and some trainerfolk act as if it's immoral to be stiff. I'm agin it. I'm too lazy to dig up research, but I remember reading a (bias-confirming) study saying that stretching didn't improve athletic performance AND it increased injury risk (leaving out the stretching itself; having stretched and being limber made some study population more prone to injury). Anyway, switching from sketchy confirmation biased 'research" to personal experience, NOT stretching was the cure to my chronic back problems in my 20s. That and quitting doing sit-ups or anything like them. My back is healthy when it's strong, not when it's limber (and I pass the lizardbreath criterion - I can't sit on the floor with torso vertical and legs straight out). But having tight hamstrings did not hurt my tennis game, my basketball game, or my horseshoe throwing.

Pre-back injury (i.e., teens) I could do bigly situps and I could at one point touch my palms to the floor and my forehead to my knees. But now, stretching injures me.

The secret to throwing horseshoes is to remove them from the horse first.

I remember reading a (bias-confirming) study saying that stretching didn't improve athletic performance AND it increased injury risk

I think I remember Gretchen Reynolds writing about this.

Basically, I think that flexibility is not something to worry about when you're young, but it's something you should work to maintain as you age. For the young, warming up before exercising should get you to your natural range of motion, but not beyond.

Last update: paranoia 100% vindicated, they were up blocking the gate this morning when we got to the house.

lk, IANACL, and definitely do not know the law in CA, or enough facts to make any kind of judgment at all, but since the parcels were under common ownership in the past, I'd want to think about whether there's an implied easement to use the gate & path across their place.

(Under our law here, necessity is not a requirement for every implied easement: you can get an implied easement based on prior use even if there are alternatives. A two minute Google suggests that necessity might be required in CA.)

So wait, there's now no way in and out of your house?!

I'm too lazy to dig up research, but I remember reading a (bias-confirming) study saying that stretching didn't improve athletic performance AND it increased injury risk (leaving out the stretching itself; having stretched and being limber made some study population more prone to injury).

To the best of my knowledge,* that is sort of true. If you do the kinds of muscle lengthening/relaxing _passive_ stretches before athletic performance, your performance will degrade and you'll be much more likely to be injured. Which is why good coaches don't do it that way.

Before athletic performance, you get warmed up and gradually increase your range of motion using dynamic, movement based exercises, which are all about priming your body for the full range of motion you'll do in the sport. So that when you do them, things like overextending muscles and tearing then, or the Golgi tendon reflex, etc won't cause you to injure yourself. But you are NOT trying to increase your overall flexibility. You are just making sure that you can move comfortably, and dynamically (or even explosively), through whatever your maximum is.

You only do the passive and PNF stretches designed to extend your overall flexibility afterwards.

The point isn't that being more flexible is a bad thing, it's that you need to stretch in the right way and at the right time. And there are times and places where certain kinds of stretches will be really actively bad for you.

* and I've read quite a few books on the topic, and various training and physiology manuals for martial artists.

The "science" part:

Passive stretching is basically fucking with your muscles' natural elasticity and propensity to contract, and deliberately fucking with the various proprioceptive reflexes that are there to keep you from injuring yourself while moving. You do that to reset your maximum, and program it to be be more flexible. But if you do it before you have to use that muscle properly, and at speed, you've basically just fucked up the muscle's performance and ability to protect itself. Hence, shitty performance and more injuries.

In the interest of science, I just did some stretching, and my hamstring flexibility is shit compared to where it was 3 years ago. I can just reach my toes in a sitting hamstring stretch (and keep it there), but it feels fairly hard to do so. Quad flexibility is even worse.

Canada has condominiums galore and toilets that have two different flushes, depending on what you are voiding.

Canada has condominiums galore and toilets that have two different flushes, depending on what you are voiding.

I'm guessing lk has house access but not convenient for large appliances house access.

It's a tunnel under the daycare.

Also! I am convinced that a huge amount of what we call "flexibility" is just differing ratios in limb-torso lengths. I remember sitting next to a friend who was a few inches shorter than me due to having shorter legs. Doing a sit and reach, our torsos were at the same angle, but she could reach her feet and I could reach my lower shins.

Maybe not a HUGE amount. But a little component, at least. How far your muscle stretches isn't a perfect predictor of how far the limb goes.

116&117 - Agreed, and I maybe should have inserted a disclaimer in my already long comment that we*'ve come a long way baby since the old dogma I was railing about. I guess I'm still a little tender in that spot is all.
*we = enlightened trainers and athletes

*we definitely does not include all PTs yet though. The "stretch and strengthen" dogma has staying power. And xeroxed sheets.

121 is right. All routes now involve stairs between vehicle access level and house upper (main) level. They have gotten a lot of use today and yep, hauling a fridge up either stairway would truly have been hell. I can't believe how close we cut it.

Today there were huge piles of mulch that are obviously going over the gravel.

Just... over it? That sounds like a terrible and short-lived plan.

I am now in possession of a Looney.

Actually, I gave one to the bartender who gave me two of them and one to my son.

||
Can I get a score on the percent likelihood I just got screwed out of a thousand bucks?
We're away for the weekend, a couple hours from home. 2pm Saturday and car has a flat- it's run flat tires but when I stop at a gas station to add air it's flat again within half an hour. Went to a dealer for our make since car might still have some kind of warranty, they're booked all weekend, they sent me to a Sullivan Tire. Guy says it's $30 and an hour to patch a tire- he knows I'm from out of state with four kids in the car, and it's two hours until all tire stores are closed until Monday. We go to a park down the street to wait, he calls and says bad news, it's a slice along the edge of the trade up the sidewalk, tire can't be repaired, and because it's AWD and the tires are at 6/32 of tread (car has 10k miles on it) all four tires have to be replaced and it's $250/tire plus $150 installation. I called a couple other places but no one can take us today, but they tell me prices for tires on our model are $80-$250 (which might be non-run flat at the low end). I call guy back and he says there's a slightly cheaper tire but it still ends up $1k all in. At pickup I didn't get to see the damage to the tire, they'd already put them into their pile for disposal (or I assume resale of the non-damaged ones).
Likelihood the tire was 1) actually non-patchable and 2) all four really had to be replaced because they were 6/32 AWD you can't have more than 3/32 difference between tires or you damage the AWD transmission (he said new tires are 10/32)?
|>

"trade up the sidewalk" s/b "tread up the sidewall"

If your tire went flat that quickly, the odds are pretty good it wasn't patchable. The rest of it, I never heard of, but even if it's bullshit, you're only out about $500 since half the tread was gone on the old ones.

If you can't trust a guy in a Canadian opera house, who can you trust?

It's not called an opera house, but it has those private boxes for people to sit in along the side, so technically it's an opera house.

Would they really have been at 6/32 on a car with 10k miles? I asked and the tire guy said dealers sell new cars with tires that start with less tread than when you buy new tires later.

New car tires are shitty often.

128: it's a pretty thick layer, but yeah, I also wonder about mulch-over-gravel as a sustainable play area strategy. Maybe it's an East Bay garden fetish thing: "we'll make sure your little sprouts get enough moisture and phosphorus in their rhizomes."

Gravel was what we had for a play area at school.

Recreational mulch wasn't invented yet.

Gravel for President!

We had grass and concrete. Except one year they manured all the grass so it could recover from children. Then we had concrete.

The 109-day occupation ended in a political victory -- sort of. The Vallejo City Council unanimously authorized a first-of-its-kind Cultural Easement and Settlement Agreement with the Yolo County-based Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, the closest federally recognized tribe. Under the agreement, the tribe gained the legal right to oversee and protect the area. Yocha Dehe officials, however, had little connection to the struggle. Within months, they made concessions to the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, allowing park planners to grade much of the site and even install part of the contentious parking lot.

Everyone in Canada seems nice enough that I'm thinking the one homelesss guy throwing coins at the other homeless guy is trying to help.

131 I hate shit like that. There's a good possibility that you actually needed four new tires and that you weren't screwed out of a thousand bucks but unless you checked your tires recently there's no way to really know so you will always feel like you were screwed out of a thousand bucks.

Mulch over gravel drains a lot quicker than mulch not over gravel.

When I see shellmound I assume midden heap, but apparently these people buried the dead inside the mound?

.The world is my oyster !

Oh, wait hang on: it appears these oysters are my afterworld

re: 123

I have short legs and a long torso (but not especially long arms)* for someone who is 5ft 10. So yeah, that wouldn't surprise me, either. But, I've seen significant differences in how far I can stretch over time, so I'm still convinced that for most people, it's something that can be learned/improved.

* Like if I sit on a plane, unless I actively lean over to one side or slump, my elbows won't reach the arm rests. I suspect I sit fairly upright, but others seem to manage oK.**
** I still get annoyed at the shit bags who grab both arm rests and then stick their elbows into my side.

136: High likelihood it wasn't patchable. You might have gotten away with replacing one (or two) and going to your regular shop, but it's probable you'd have to have done the rest. Hope you got a buy three, get the fourth free deal, which are really common. 10K miles on new car tires isn't crazy. 15K is pretty standard, then replacements are much better quality.

Re: flexibility, when I was a kid, I remember a coach explaining to my mother that my physique was like cooked spaghetti: very flexible, no strength.

Congrats, lks.

I can't figure out if "We The North" is about basketball, Game of Thrones, Canada in general, or some combination thereof.

Pericles' funeral oration, but for Toronto.

Those were the most confusing sinks I have ever seen. I almost pissed I'm them, then realized what they were, then on using them, made it rain but turning on the water and the dryer at the same time.

I'm thinking maybe it was less the fault of the plumbing than of whatever intoxicants and/or offspring are giving you aphasia.

"General Wolfe has a very Mixed Day" is here.

I am sober and with no one younger than thirteen.

They still have to go to Nebraska to get the mammal fossils completed.

Some places will shave down tread on a new tire if it's already really close to the tread of the three existing ones and you need all four to be matching. I almost went through that when getting a replacement for a flat on a relatively new car with low mileage, but they measured the tread and the flat was so soon after getting the car* that they all still had the same depth.

Probably a pothole with sharp crap in it, that section of road was patched within a week of my getting a flat and I'm guessing I wasn't the only one.

Ok you all made me feel better but how do I know this blog isn't sponsored by Big Tire?

131. We used to go to Sullivan Tire (in MA) but they were hard-sell and nasty most of the time. (There are several Sullivan Tire locations, so the one near us may have been unique. I doubt it though.) Putting the tires "away for disposal" is beyond sleazy; it would make me say, "dig it out, asshat," even if I had (as you did) decent evidence the tire was broken.

The unpatchability of tires with punctures or slices anywhere near the sidewall is a thing. It has been alleged to me that the patches quickly come off due to tire flexing, and that it is illegal to patch tires with such injuries. I have also heard the bit about 4WD cars needing to get all their tires changed at once. (Tire stores will always say to need to replace both front or back tires at the same time, too.) A reason I have heard, from my car dealership, is that if the tread wear is different between left and right tires, it messes up the low pressure sensors. The sensors are indeed (usually) not direct measurement pressure sensors, but rather there is something involving noticing how many rotations per mile (km in heathen parts) the tire is doing compared to its partner. [All this new, weird auto and tire technology makes me feel like I should get an onion for my belt.]

These concepts make a certain amount of sense, and I admit to being somewhat skeptical about them, but they are possibly utterly true. If it is a scam, it is common to all tire dealers. SP, if you being scammed, so is everyone else.

Top tip: when you get a low pressure warning on a tyre, check all four. I had one on a hire car, checked the indicated tyre, found it was ok, checked it again, still ok, assumed the sensor was faulty and drove on. Fortunately when I started to lose steering I was on a quiet road. The sensor was working fine: it was just wired wrong, so that a flat rear left tyre produced a warning that the front right tyre was flat...

It once took me an hour to figure out the spare was also monitored. The car just has the one warning light.

Canada has condominiums galore and toilets that have two different flushes, depending on what you are voiding.

The dual-flush toilets I support. They really do save on water, and therefore make good sense from an environmentally-friendly design perspective.

The condos galore are mostly just awful. They probably also make good sense from an environmentally-friendly design perspective, but ugh. So ugly, so awful.

I am now in possession of a Looney.

Well done! That's worth about 75 cents on the American dollar in USian currency, I guess. But it's nicer-looking than the American dollar bill, so there's that.

However, in Canada it's generally a loonie (and if you order a Scotch in Canada, it's whisky, not whiskey, unless it's of Irish or American origins, of course).

On the stretching subthread, I can count on the fingers of one thumb the number of times I've heard a ballet teacher tell someone to work on flexibility; telling someone to work on strength happens every other class, as does telling the class floppy to stop showing off before she gets an injury. That said dancers gonna dancer and whatever teachers tell 'em there's always the show-off stretch olympics before class.

Also, this guy: https://www.ballet.org.uk/people/renato-paroni-de-castro/ was always on about the importance of loading up the muscles that counterbalance whatever it is you're going to flex, so if you're going to backbend you need to lock up your abs first and then contract your chest so the tension is in those muscles rather than in your back strictly speaking. He also very rarely talked about flexibility except to warn us off over-relying on it.

(Shorter me channeling Renato: the weightlifting is almost certainly doing you good on that score and keep at it.)

164.2: I was thinking that it looked like a good way to house a middle class in a large city.

164: Condos aren't inherently ugly, but current architectural trends leave much to be desired. The one-plus-five apartment/condo buildings with alternating siding styles to give visual relief just aren't very inspiring. Despite so many of them being unique in their precise choice of siding or slight variations in balconies, etc. It feels too combinatoric.

The inquiry's commissioners have said the calls for justice are not merely recommendations but legal imperatives based in "international and domestic human and Indigenous rights laws, including the Charter, the Constitution and the Honour of the Crown."

I thought condo(minium) is a legal arrangement describing ownership of part of a building, whereas apartment or townhouse is more about the layout. I live in a condo in a two family house that is two floors of the house; I would not describe it as an apartment. Previously I lived in a condo that was one unit of 72 in the building, I would call those apartments but they were also condos because each apartment was owned by separate people rather than a company renting out the whole building (although not all the apartments were owner-occupied.)

170: You're right, but I think apartment-layout-style condos are most common, so the word often gets used to refer to them specifically.

|| It's Monday morning, so you folks are undoubtedly wondering what the US Supreme Court is up to. Quite a bit -- the took several cases for argument in the fall, including a CERCLA preemption case from Montana and a discrimination case from the 9th Circuit. Decided 3 cases: (a) offshore drill rig workers can't assert claims under California employment law; (b) house invasion counts as burglary for sentence enhancement purposes; and (c) Sotomayor and Breyer split on whether the US Government is a "person" for purposes of some patent laws. Also, in a statement regarding the denial of cert, Breyer indicated that it's time to think about the "unraveling" foretold in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. [Is the war on terror sufficiently different from other wars, that understandings about detaining combatants until the end of the war have unraveled.] |>

172(c) -- Vote was 6-3 in favor of non-personhood.

Implications of (c) and last?

I guess rules that rely on a presumption that a war will have an end do seem pretty out of date. What's next, uniforms?

Arcade Fire is still on the radio in Canada. Thank you for Canadian content laws.

If the United States Government attains corporate personhood, it will finally be UNSTOPPABLE.

You can't be an asshole without being a person first.

And the rig workers are what, under US federal law? Is there federal employment law? Why would the US EEZ not be divvied up among the various states and thingies?

Everything is legal at sea, even a monkey knife fight.

And how can the US not be a legal person when it's appearing in like 15 billion court cases a year.

To the discomfiture of the Baltic Fleet.

The Ontario Provincial Police cake itself "OPP" on signs, which amuses me.

You down with OPP. Then you don't speed.

Other People's Police

179: Mossy, as the decision relates, there's a long history on the question of jurisdiction offshore. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-389_4g15.pdf It's federal. And the applicable federal law seems to incorporate state law. The question was what is and what isn't incorporated. It's a good read.

Know what else is a good read? The Fourth Circuit's decision from week before last on whacking telemarketers (actually, the company whose services were being sold) for calling people on the do not call list. Can anyone read this without fist pumping? https://www.ballardspahr.com/-/media/files/dish-decision.pdf

The French acronym (which AIUI by law is required to exist) is presumably PPO; or, for easier pronouncability, PoPO.

Much as I want to read highly-recommended PDFs about offshore jurisprudence I also want to sleep. How long is it?

18 pages, but you can skip the syllabus, so 15. The telemarketing case is 33 pages, but so evidently right, and so satisfying at knocking down the arguments advanced by Dish Network, that it's worth it, if you only have time for one. Are there robocalls/telemarketers where you live?

Fuck yes, but they mostly send texts. Then sometimes the police send texts telling you to watch out for fraudster texts. Which is super nice of them, but really I'd rather they just apprehended the texters.

The signs are often just in English now that we are driving through rural Ontario.

15 pages I can do. In fact I think I'll print it out and read it while pretending to work, to spite their no-phones policy.

OPP has sneaky police cars to catch speeders. Not us.

|| I survived the earthquake! Are the other Unfogged Buckeyes ok? ||

Bucked the temblor, as it were?

181: En serio, I think governments are, or ought to be considered, sui generis entities, that can hold property, enter into contracts, sue and be sued, all that stuff, but don't have to be considered persons or have rights and privileges precisely corresponding to legal personhood. (I know nothing about the case mentioned in 172, my opinion may be irrelevant to that.)

196, 181 -- It's a really narrow question about whether the Postal Service can use a special administrative procedure for challenging patents that are the basis of infringement suits. The statute says it's for persons. I'm not concerned that Dred Scott is making a comeback, at least not with this. I kind of think Breyer has the better of this argument, but am mostly annoyed that one of Sotomayor's very few majority opinion writing opportunities of the term is getting used up on this. Which, of course, is exactly what Roberts was thinking when he assigned her to write it.

||
I know there's a technical term for them, but for some reason I have had my brain invaded by swearing substitute terms, like "goshdurnit" and "Just one cotton picking minute" -- the sort of things that clean cut cowboys say in fifties westerns. And I wondered, in an idle way, whether "cottonpicking" was a periphrasis for "motherfucking", as the two words scan the same.

Goshdurnit!, and "What in tarnation?" are both phrases where the words not said are easily heard. But "Cotton picking?"
|>

It seems that the term might have been most prominently popularized by Bugs Bunny!

I can't even find non-literal uses of the term in Google Books before the 1970s or so, although my link above has a 1942 example. There are a few Congressional Record usages in the 1970's.

183: The Orleans Parish Prison also uses those initials. Don't ask me how I know this.

198: The term I think I know for that is 'minced oath' -- 'goldurnit' 'motherforking shirtballs', that sort of substitution.

And finally, the OED's first citation is 1958, New York Post: "I don't think it's anybody's cotton-pickin' business what you're doing."

OT: I have a dozen more important things to do than watch everyone go after Amy Chua on Twitter... so, naturally

"Motherforking shirtballs" is wonderful, yes.

If Bugs Bunny was anything like our rabbit Oedipus, "cotton picking" almost certainly referred to his sex life.

In the end, I struck a blow for feminism and clean living and casseroled him.

(Oedipus the rabbit came from my Swedish life. I would not like it thought that Ume had anything to do with such crudeness)

|| NMM to the Trump-Macron Friendship Tree ||

204 cont'd: maybe a thread? The summary. Additional background. Unlike most people with any brains, I actually read the Tiger Mother book in its entirety (I skipped the dog chapters, which I assume no human being has ever read). You know, I also skipped a bunch of The Prince: does Machiavelli have anything to say about self-delusion, or is that just anachronistic? I've always found AC kind of interestingly horrible, and this whole affair has made her seem interestingly more horrible. The banality of evil as shallowness and swotting, among other non-banalities.

209: This is impressively shameless.

Late in life, Amy Chua regrets all the time and stress she spent on Tiger Mothering a child who then got into a prestigious job directly out of school thanks entirely to her connections with powerful friends. Could have taken it easy and ended up in the same place. Seen some sunsets! Gone traveling!

211: But then she remembered the wisdom of Adam Serwer, "The cruelty is the point." She smiled to herself -- "Yes, it was fun."

I Here in the USA, "Cotton picking" is a racial reference. A cotton picking minute could be any amount of time because the cotton pickers don't wear watches and can't tell time, aren't paid by the hour (they are sharecroppers), and they are so lazy that they might dawdle all day doing something the boss knows should take a minute.

Bugs Bunny's spiritual ancestor, Brer Rabbit, was all about the cotton picking minute.

Thanks. I had thought it probably was, but I didn't get *which* reference. The lack of watches and the other details makes it all plain: it is an elastic unit of time.

211: Galaxy brain version: AC did take it easy-- the Tiger Mothering book was ghostwritten to loose specifications, bears little relation to AC in life. But the text is an easy way to project an image while also getting $$$paid$$$

In Quebec, but not technically looking fur a job.

Wait a... minute, that book was written by *someone else* to make Amy Chua seem like a grotesque, feckless idiot with no moral compass? I'm sure the explanation is that the ghostwriter is also a shallow nitwit (or can imitate one to spec), but maybe it was deliberately spiteful?

Well, good ghostwriters try to get across the core of what their subject has to say but more attractively and coherently packaged, right? Like how Trump as depicted by Tony Schwartz was still a nihilist, just one with some level of intelligence and self-awareness.

He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil. Men are so self-complacent in their own affairs, and in a way so deceived in them, that they are preserved with difficulty from flattery. A prince, therefore, ought to be a constant inquirer, and afterwards a patient listener concerning the things of which he inquired; also, on learning that any one, on any consideration, has not told him the truth, he should let his anger be felt.

That really gives new meaning to "You're a prince Charlie Brown."

||
So, just saw Long Day's Journey Into Night. I can't really give a proper opinion of it until I've thought about it for a while, but my immediate reaction is:
a) it's worth seeing for the cinematography alone, and anyone who is into film should see it.
b) it just made me want to watch Kaili Blues again. I really think that movie is moving up into my top 5, maybe top 3. The Criterion Channel, which is independently great, is streaming it for another month or so.
|>

I loved loved loved Kaili Blues and can't wait to see Long Day's Journey Into Night.

And damn, it's only screening in New Haven.

It was touch and go whether it would make it to Boston at all. If you're sticking around, looks like there's a run starting 6/30 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.

Awesome, I'm here till July 6th. I used to live within a walk of MoMI. Been meaning to catch some films there and elsewhere in NYC but I've been bogged down in family obligations for my first two weeks back home.

OPP has sneaky police cars to catch speeders.

They're not nearly as good (as sneaky?) as NY state troopers, though. When I'm driving in upstate New York, I really try to watch my speed (yes, I got a speeding ticket in upstate NY last summer, which admittedly I deserved). Once I cross the border into Ontario, I don't worry so much. Have never, ever been stopped by the OPP in my entire life, and I do sometimes often exceed the speed limit on the 401 (aka the King's Highway).

In the interests of paying my NY state speeding ticket from last summer, I somehow ended up talking to the wife of the sheriff from the relevant jurisdiction in upstate NY (well, I mean, I just dialed a number that I thought would connect me to some sort of official municipal office/local courthouse/whatever, but I had the impression that I had actually just dialed the sheriff's home!). We had an amicable conversation (me and the sheriff's wife, I mean) about icy road conditions in both New York and Ontario, and she told me where to send my money order, and it was all good. Upstate NY is so friendly, but so weird....

Wherever I see it, I will say it. "Yeah you know me."

The 401 going west had so many wrecks yesterday. We were driving past miles of stopped cars because they closed the road.

226: I've only received speeding tickets--plural--in upstate New York. (Ignoring the "unsafe driving under conditions" ticket I got for my in-state car accident.) They're definitely more stringent there, at least towards out-of-towners.

I will keep that in mind for the return trip.

||

In the 1990s, before grazing was halted to protect the grass cover, the wind would blow away livestock. "People would go out into the Gobi after the storm to retrieve their sheep,"

Wow.

And you thought you had problems.