Friday, January 30, 2015

Friday Facts And Some Fun: On Marissa Alexander, Colleen McCullough, Scott Walker And Others




1.  This American Life has a segment on Internet trolling of comedian Lindy West and another segment about the complaints people make about vocal fry, but only when it's young women's voices which have it.  Both are worth listening.  The Lindy West segment links to the online nastiness in general and in a bizarre way to the question whether we need a different kind of language policing when the message sent is a simple IHATEYOUBITCHDIE.

2.  New fragments of Sappho's poetry may have been found.   Her work is tantalizing because of its current scarcity despite the great reputation she possessed in antiquity.

3.  Marissa Alexander is out of prison but not free.  Her case is worth learning about because of the Stand Your Ground excuse didn't apply to it and because she almost received a mega-sentence for shooting a gun in the ceiling.

4.  An Australian newspaper begins the obituary of the best-selling author Colleen McCullough  like this:



Do a gender reversal on that.  Pick some famous guy whose books sell really well and begin the obituary by stating that X was a charmer, with a red ugly nose and a big belly, but he was still able to attract women, he said.  It's not impossible to imagine such an obituary, but it's much more unlikely than similar obituaries of famous women which far too frequently are grounded in the fact of them being women first.  That's why cooking skills or looks enter those kinds of obituaries.  Because they still matter for how we judge women and because famous women are still sometimes viewed as little dabs from the giant womanhood mountain.

5.  I adore this Freudian slip by Scott Walker, a Ringwraith and the Governor of Wisconsin:

But Walker did have a small Freudian slip in this part of his spiel. Walker said:
"I think that looking ahead as Republicans, we need to make the case that we are going to promote policies that promote and support and defend hard work in this company - er, in this country once again."

It's delicious, because Walker does the bidding of the Koch brothers, and also because many conservatives indeed see no real difference in how to run a country vs. Walmart:  Both are to profit the few who are viewed as the proper owners.