darkemeralds | Network

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Ugh I tried to load the weather radar in weather.com and it took my whole computer down and I lost the post I’d been picking at for a long time.

Oh well.

I woke at 4:30 because the wind was picking up and battering the canvas of the roof corners, and so I hauled myself out of bed and tidied everything I’d left outside so it wouldn’t get drenched. My weather app showed a line of storms heading straight for us to hit around 6am, so I gave up on sleep, got dressed, battened down all the yurt hatches, and came inside. I waited for it to be light enough to see colors, and went out and harvested one particular important filler we rely on that can’t be harvested wet– if there are water droplets on the leaves and you put it into the cooler, it gets black dots where the water was. (Basil. Yes, lemon basil is a perfect bouquet filler and smells wonderful. But it’s delicate and will wilt if not put into the cooler after harvest! Ugh.)

It started raining as I finished harvesting just now, but not enough to damage the leaves. Still, I left them in a cool spot near the cooler, not in it; we’ll put it in later. I hope the leaves are dry enough.

New looks at the radar indicate that the storm’s mostly going to miss us… but the next one won’t. Womp-womp. Today’s flower harvest is going to be very interesting.

history79 posting in

scans_daily

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hollymath

Yesterday morning I saw I'd been tagged in a tweet where Andrew linked to this, saying "Jesus Christ. By this standard, @hollyamory and I are in a 'marriage of convenience.'"

The article is about a High Court ruling saying that a "genuine couple can enter in a marriage of convenience." Even people who are in a real relationship, not seeking a "sham marriage," can apparently be told that they can't get married because by doing so one of them would attain an "immigration advantage."

Which, yeah. Is exactly what Andrew and I did. With no other avenue of study or work open to us in the mental/physical/financial state we were in at the time (or indeed at any time since), the only way for us to stay in the same country was to get married.

As I pointed out in a series of angry follow-up tweets, the only reason we needed an "immigration advantage" is because being poor and disabled have been declared immigration disadvantages. Marriage is the only route available to current non-EU citizens who don't make £35,000 a year. (Maybe one day that (or its successor at a no-doubt higher salary threshold) will apply to non-EU citizens too.) This is not the fault of any people getting married.

This is not the fault of people getting married.

You may start to see now why I hate the Home Office, why I am the unusual rat who jumped on to the sinking ship of Brexit Britain. Andrew and I both really don't want to but also can't move to the U.S., and there's no other country that will have us both. So if we're going to stay in the same country, it has to be the UK. So I want to feel as secure in that as possible.

When I started talking about this on Twitter, a lot of my friends pointed out that marriage is a legal status so of course people are going to enter into it for legal reasons: tax, inheritance, child guardianship, lots of things. In the UK, increasingly few people get married solely for religious reasons, so legal elements are going to be part of the decision for a lot of people. Yet it's a bad thing if any of those reasons are immigration-related?

Increasingly I'm realizing how much higher a standard immigrants are held to than the native citizens of not just the UK but certainly the U.S. too (where, y'know, immigrants and visitors actually have to say they're not Nazis!) and no doubt other countries as well. It's so frustrating to see this everywhere.

gurdonark

Yesterday I could not reach someone by telephone. I will take the train downtown to handle a matter in person I had hoped to handle by telephone. I walked yesterday in Half-Priced Books and in Best Buy rather than in a city park. I did my monthly intake of new clients at the Garland pro bono clinic. We went until 9:15 or so, with lots of clients. I like that the clients were all nice people.

The national news continues to puzzle. Although I remain optimistic that things will eventually improve, it looks as if we will continue to have more absurdity before things improve. I hope that voters turn out in 2018, and that voters vote the way I want them to vote in the next election.

Yesterday was Results Day in much of the United Kingdom. I "watch" it every year on social media via Twitter. I find the UK system fascinating, in which university admission offers can be predicated upon achieving x grades on the A-Levels, a set of comprehensive examinations. We have some analogous situations here, but it all works a bit differently and a bit less uniformly here. Social media allows one to see folks discuss their results in real time. Oddly, one also reads annual tweets by Jeremy Clarkson, the former host of car show Top Gear. He posts annually how he did poorly on his A-levels and now he is a rich and comfortable man. Though I think his intentions are good, I notice that lots of 17 and 18 year-old folks feel little need of tweets about how events they find heart-breaking were but a bump in the road for a now-middle-aged man who improbably found success as a media presenter, before he punched someone at work. Overall, I am not offended by use of examinations to assist with school admissions. But it is a lot of pressure for kids. I think that it's far better, though, than some other things kids that age have faced in recent history. It's a myth that kids reaching young adulthood have ever been sheltered from challenges.

People in this country and the UK can discuss applying to "reach" schools and to "safety schools". I never applied to a "reach" school in my life, with perhaps one exception, and always looked into "safety schools". Both my undergraduate school and my law school were schools a bit less selective than my grades and standardized test scores would have permitted me to attend. It's not a huge difference--my credentials would have gotten me into more selective schools than the state universities I attended, but not into truly elite, selective schools. But I think about how social class filtered into that outcome.

My parents were both children of folks who did not get to attend university after high school. My mother's mother did get her normal certificate, which involved some teacher training, but did not get a university degree until my mother was college-age. My mother's father could not attend university despite high grades after he had to work to help support his family when his father died of tuberculosis. My father's father and my father's mother never went beyond high school, and I am not aware of their aspiring to ever do so.

My parents valued education, in part because their parents valued, though they did not obtain (save one grandparent in later life), much formal post-secondary education. But their notion of the pinnacle was not to have a child in an elite school far away. Their notion was to send their children to state universities. This was more affordable. But also this offered the possibility that kids who went to the state university would stay nearby after university. My father had gone to a more elite university than the state university, though not quite a "top" school. He found the experience a bit of a mixed blessing, as his classmates included folks who had better educational backgrounds than what he had received in high school. He had been co-valedictorian of his high school class but university was more difficult for him. He ultimately did well enough to get into the University of Arkansas Medical School, though not into the medical school at Tulane, his undergraduate institution. But the experience caused him to have a lifelong belief that the local state university was a simpler way to get an education. As applied to me, his new belief worked out pretty well. I retain, though, a lifelong prejudice in favor of public education, public libraries, and educational opportunity for all as a social equalizer. I think one of the most pernicious things in our society is the concerted effort to shift more costs of post-secondary education onto kids. This has the effect of making it harder for kids who grow up poorer to get post-secondary education. I'd like to see that trend reverse a bit.

We have rain predicted again today. This has been a surprisingly "normal" Summer, except it's been a bit wetter than usual. I hope it is not cloudy on Monday, the day of the 75 percent eclipse here.

breakfast: brown rice cereal and skim milk
lunch: turkey sandwich and baked chips
dinner: three slices buffet pepperoni pizza, pickles, cucumbers and carrots

daily_otter_feed

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2017/8/18/otter-climbs-a-tree-to-be-among-its-flowers

Via kagijouurushi

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2017/8/18/otter-climbs-a-tree-to-be-among-its-flowers

torachan

1. I got a small paid translation job tonight. Due Tuesday morning Japan time, which means Monday evening for me, so that gives me plenty of time. A lot of times when these guys ask me it's super last minute and the time zones make it impossible, so I'm always happy when it's one I can take.

2. I made chocolate chip cookies. Haven't done any baking in ages since it's been such warm weather, but it really hasn't been bad the last week or so and it really didn't heat up the house too much to make these.

3. I finished another book today, which puts me at fifty books so far for the year. I can't believe it! My goal was originally twenty! It's at sixty now, but I think I'm going to have to end up upping it again at this rate.

4. Molly was sleeping with her paw over her face, and when I went to take her picture, she moved her head but still kept her paw in the same place, which was super cute.

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Current Mood: lethargic

steepholm

Last year I spent some time on Facebook arguing with people who thought that the "Rhodes must fall" campaign was wrongheaded because it was erasing history.

I suggested that putting a statue up to someone was generally (and in this case undoubtedly) not intended as a dispassionate recording of the fact that such-and-such had occurred, but rather a celebration of that person's life and deeds. In this case, the statue of Rhodes marks the approbation of the Oxford college he had endowed with some of his very ill-gotten African spoils.

True, came the reply, but that approbation is itself a historical artefact, and to take down the statue is to erase it. Well then, why not put it in a museum, along with the other historical artefacts, and stick a label on it detailing exactly how Rhodes came by the money to endow colleges and scholarships? Why keep it in a place of honour, thus perpetuating the honour done to Rhodes?

Of course, taking down a statue can never be more than a symbolic act, any more than raising it, or indeed keeping it. Symbolism is the currency of statues. To try and pretend that they are naturally evolve into some kind of historical resource is profoundly disingenuous. (In the case of Rhodes, I don't think anyone tried to argue that the statue was a thing of beauty, but aesthetic arguments fall into much the same category.) Museums and art galleries are themselves far from politics-free zones, obviously, but at least they make some overt attempt to defuse and reframe such things as historical and/or aesthetic objects rather than direct political statements.

In the end, Rhodes stayed of course, because Rhodes's successors (the college's current donors) threatened to withdraw funding if it was removed. ("Now I see, I see, / In Fulvia's death, how mine received shall be," as they put it.) As ever, money shouts.

Anyway, I was just wondering to myself how the people I was arguing with on FB last year (nice liberal types, every one) feel about Trump making exactly the same arguments this week? Were they nodding along? If not, why not?

As a tangential postscript, I gave my friend Haruka a lift to Brighton yesterday (I was helping my daughter move some of her things back to Bristol), and we stopped in at my mother's for a cup of tea en route. Haruka took this picture of my mother. It was only after five minutes that I noticed that it also includes her care assistant, Haawa. Talk about hidden black history!

Can you spot her, readers?

alethia

( The Bold Type 1.07 Three Girls in a Tub )

Current Mood: bouncy

torachan

What are you currently reading?
I read about a chapter more on Attack of the Theater People, but that's it. I think I've only managed to read before bed one time this last week, and every other night I stayed up too late and went straight to sleep. (Even the nights I went to bed early I was too tired to read.)

What did you recently finish reading?
I finally finished The History of Forgetting. This book was kind of a mish-mash of the history of LA, LA in fiction, and some actual fiction about LA. The latter is the weakest part of the book and I think dropping it would have made it a better book overall. A random sixty-page novella dropped in the middle of a work of non-fiction could possibly be made to work, but it didn't here, at least not for me.

I did like the parts that were actual history of LA and a look at how LA has been portrayed in books and movies over the years. This was published about twenty years ago and a lot has changed downtown since then, and I'd be interested to see the author's thoughts on those changes. It looks like an updated version of the book was released about ten years ago, but even that was before the real downtown revival.

What do you think you'll read next?
Well, I have three books marked "currently reading" on Goodreads that I haven't actually started on, so hopefully one or more of those! People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman is what I just added to GR tonight as my current physical book. I read several books by her a few years ago and really liked them, but for some reason never read the last two I had bought at that time, and when looking for a new book to read tonight after finishing A History of Forgetting, I spotted them and decided to go with that. I've also still got Hollow City, though since I'm also reading Attack of the Theater People, idk if I will actually make any progress on this until I finish that, since I don't like switching between ebooks. Then finally I've got The Big Picture: Murals of Los Angeles, which I found in a pile of books on the curb the other day while out on our evening walk.

jmtorres

This was in Club Vivid, and it is very silly.

vid: UFO
vidder:

jmtorres
fandom: Home, AKA The True Meaning of Smek Day, the Movie
song: UFO Has Landed In the Ghetto by Ry Cooder
format: mp4, 39MB
runtime: 2:32
link: on Google Drive. I'm trying a new thing for where to keep my vids. Let me know if you have technical issues downloading it, please!
warnings: I can't think of any, there's a couple of explosions but it's an animated kids movie, they're not exactly graphic.

ellenmillion

Guppy bounced out of her first day of Kindergarten declaring that she had fun, and that she had done everything the teacher asked. Except sing. But everything else. And she liked the teacher. And she didn't make friends, but she did talk to other kids, and some of them might become friends (she didn't remember any names), and she was hungry and could she have a snack?

Look out, Kindergarten... here comes Guppy.

I got to have brunch with my husband after dropping her off and then went shopping ALL BY MYSELF, and bought tubs of ice cream and hot tamales to help me cope.

Kindergarten stress was the tip of my emotional iceberg today, as Norway is failing very fast, and I'm deeply frustrated by what I'm not able to do, but I also know someone who got stung by 20 hornets today, so it could all be very much worse and I will be grateful for what I have and call the day an overall win.

Crossposts: http://ellenmillion.livejournal.com/1628558.html

niqaeli

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170817.html

NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170817.html

sasha_feather posting in

access_fandom

Eric Deggans on NPR (All Things Considered):

Netflix, ABC Portrayals Of Autism Still Fall Short, Critics Say

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/11/542668400/netflix-abc-portrayals-of-autism-still-fall-short-critics-say

You can read or listen to this piece, which is about "The Good Doctor" and "Atypical".

james_davis_nicoll

A Pocket Full of Murder (Uncommon Magic, book 1) by R. J. Anderson

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/5973505.html

kronette

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

twistedchick

From a Charlottesville resident:

"There seems to be a perception from people outside of Charlottesville that what is going on here is two opposing groups coming to town and fighting some ideological battle that has gotten messy. That is not what is happening here. What is happening here is that several hate groups from the extreme right have come together under the "unite the right" banner here in our town and basically started acting as terrorists. This may seem like an exaggeration but it's not...."

archangelbeth

Which is an improvement, but I should like to catch up with nine sometime.

Tomorrow the washing machine comes.

Today, I belatedly ordered spouse's anniversary gift. I told him this. He went, "But I didn't get you anything." I told him the washer could count. He said that sounded like something that should get him in trouble instead. OTOH, not having to go to the laundromat is certainly a win...

Plus all his clothes are permanent-press, and transporting those -- they have to hang to get the folds right -- would be pretty tricky or impossible to do from the laundromat. (Which made me realize that permanent-press is a status marker along the lines of "owns house and washer/dryer." The next status marker up is "send everything out to be dry-cleaned," I suspect? Which then removes the need for house and washer/dryer, probably due to living in a studio apartment downtown that costs eleventy zillion a month and has a spectacular view and white chairs...)

Portuguese version of Legend of the Morning Star should be up on the Zon now. And now I can fix... the copyright date. *headdesk*

(Please continue good thoughts for my friend who dearly, dearly needs them.)

Havva Quote
M__ needs to rant about Secret Empire again.
M__ thought he purged all the toxin. But then comics this week came out.
-----------------------Quoted by M__------------------------
M__: Wow, I'm glad Secret Empire can't get worse...

Marvel: HOLD MY BEER!
------------------------------------------------------------

( INwatch+Bookwatch )

( Dragons under fold )

Crossposts: http://archangelbeth.livejournal.com/1950018.html

elanya

I got looking at the internet instead of showering or making this post.

Knitting earlier, and before that I went to dinner with two of my friends. It was nice, though the cider I had was not great - bitter.

Work was fine and I finished another project. I'm close to done the third, and can probably wrap it up tomorrow if I buckle down. I want to leave a little early,as I have LARP this weekend, but we'll see, I guess!

Page generated Aug. 18th, 2017 10:40 am

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The Ink-Pot and the Palette

The character of a scribe

Network

Ugh I tried to load the weather radar in weather.com and it took my whole computer down and I lost..

Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk #6

More fodder for the book!

getting eddicated

Otter Climbs a Tree to Be Among Its Flowers

Daily Happiness

Just One Thing (18 August 2017)

Rhodes and Lee

The Bold Type 1.07 "Three Girls in a Tub"

Weekly Reading

the vid I made for vividcon this year

First Day, survived.

aerial class

NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans

2 links 17 August 2017

A Pocket Full of Murder (Uncommon Magic, book 1) by R. J. Anderson

it appears my happiness quota is only 5 hours every 3 months

Believe what you see.

Up to not-EIGHT-hours of sleep!

So much for early