The Pinnacle of the Human Experience.

Dave Daubenmire has a recent column up, where he tries for “hey, look, I’m a reasonable guy” instead of his usual rant at the top of his voice idiocy. There’s still plenty of idiocy, interspersed in between attempts to establish his credibility as a feminist, but only a proper one, y’know. I’m going to skip all that, and the bit where he finds it necessary to try and illustrate empathy by how he treats his aging dog. This is important, because while Dave has never been a dog, he can feel for one. Just like Dave has never been a woman (something he takes great pains to emphasise), he can certainly feel for them. By golly, Dave is even married to a woman! And it is pointed out, more than once, that his wife is a genuine, born that way woman. Now, with all that out of the way…

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Cool Stuff Friday.

Go and watch David Firth’s Cream on Vimeo. You won’t be sorry, this is one of the coolest, most pointed, and terrifying things I’ve seen in a long time. Great.

Have a new pet and want something on the different side for a name? Check out Medieval Pet Names.

You can now have art texted to you from SFMOMA!

In a world oversaturated with information, we asked ourselves: how can we generate personal connections between a diverse cross section of people and the artworks in our collection? How can we provide a more comprehensive experience of our collection?

Enter Send Me SFMOMA. Send Me SFMOMA was conceived as a way to bring transparency to the collection while engendering further exploration and discussion among users. Send Me SFMOMA is an SMS service that provides an approachable, personal, and creative method of sharing the breadth of SFMOMA’s collection with the public.

Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message. For example “send me the ocean” might get you Pirkle Jones’ Breaking Wave, Golden Gate; “send me something blue” could result in Éponge (SE180) by Yves Klein; and “send me 💐” might return Yasumasa Morimura’s An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Collar of Thorns). Each text message triggers a query to the SFMOMA collection API, which then responds with an artwork matching your request.

You can read more about this here.

Portrait of Ruth Saint-Denis, a copy of which is in the BAM Archives (1920) (via Library of Congress/Wikimedia).

From an 1869 advertisement for a lecture by Frederick Douglass, to production photographs of the 2012 revival of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, the Leon Levy BAM Digital Archive contains more than 70,000 items chronicling over 150 years of theatrical history at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The online platform for the BAM Hamm Archives was launched last month, including collections of posters, playbills, building photographs, and audio and video recordings.

Hyperallergic has the full story.

Crushed By A Giant Bag of Drugs! Bad!

The Tiny Tyrant is talking again. Sad! Bad, too.

President Donald Trump said in an interview on Air Force One during the flight to France that his border wall with Mexico won’t just be solar powered, it’ll be transparent so that people don’t get crushed when drug dealers throw “large sacks of drugs” over the wall.

[…]

“One of the things you need with the wall is transparency,” said Trump. “You have to be able to see through it in other words, if you can’t see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side.”

Why does the president believe you need to be able to see through the border wall? To avoid getting crushed by giant sacks of drugs being thrown in from Mexico, of course.

“As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over. As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall. But we have some incredible designs.”

I thought “the wall” was supposed to stop all those bad hombres with the evil weed, yeah? Doesn’t seem to be much point, if you can just walk up and heave big bags of drugs capable of crushing someone over the side. Will there be lines of trebuchets, perhaps? What’s to stop people being heaved over the great transparency?

Apparently, some of the details are that the wall will be 55 feet tall. You have to have one hell of an arm to be pitching gigantic bags of drugs over the side. Right.

You can see some choice responses here.

Collocation and Pejoration.

‘I am a gentil womman and no wenche’: from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, c1386. Photograph: Alamy.

Linguists call it collocation: the likelihood of two words occurring together. If I say “pop”, your mental rolodex will begin whirring away, coming up with candidates for what might follow. “Music”, “song” or “star”, are highly likely. “Sensation” or “diva” a little less so. “Snorkel” very unlikely indeed.

What do you think of when I say the word “rabid”? One option, according to the dictionary publisher Oxford Dictionaries, is “feminist”. The publisher has been criticised for a sexist bias in its illustrations of how certain words are used. “Nagging” is followed by “wife”. “Grating” and “shrill” appear in sentences describing women’s voices, not men’s.

[…]

Perhaps “rabid” is collocated with “feminist” more often than with those other words (if the data the OUP uses includes online discussions, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case). Sexist assumptions find their way into speech and writing for the simple reason that society is still sexist.

Language, as the medium through which we conduct almost all relationships, public and private, bears the precise imprint of our cultural attitudes. The history of language, then, is like a fossil record of how those attitudes have evolved, or how stubbornly they have stayed the same.

When it comes to women, the message is a depressing one. The denigration of half of the population has embedded itself in the language in ways you may not even be aware of. Often this takes the form of “pejoration”: when the meaning of the word “gets worse” over time. Linguists have long observed that words referring to women undergo this process more often than those referring to men. Here are eight examples:

Those examples are Mistress, Hussy, Madam, Governess, Spinster, Courtesan, Wench, and Tart. I’ll just include Hussy here:

Hussy.

This once neutral term meant the female head of a household. Hussy is a contraction of 13th-century husewif – a word cognate with modern “housewife”. From the 17th century onwards, however, it began to mean “a disreputable woman of improper behaviour”. That’s now its only meaning.

My whole lifetime, hussy has carried a negative meaning only. I had no idea it actually meant head of a household, much like my surprise over the primary definition of paraphernalia.  Click on over for the full article and to see the rest of the words, and how they have changed over the years! (I got to this article from another interesting one, on how American is taking over English all over the world. I get teased a lot for using English spelling rather than American, but that was how I was taught, and I’ll keep using it.)

Kellyanne’s Flash Cards.

More like flash paper, really.

Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday deployed two small flash cards to make the case that there has been no collusion between the Trump administration and Russia … “yet”.

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, Conway said she was using the cards “to help all the people at home” understand the significance of revelations that Donald Trump Jr agreed to meet a Russian lawyer, after being told the lawyer would provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton because the Russian government was supporting his father’s presidential campaign.

At the end of her interview with Hannity, Conway held up her first placard, which read: “conclusion, collusion”.

Conway crossed out the word collusion and explained: “What’s the conclusion? Collusion? No. We don’t have that yet.”

She then held up a second card, which read “Illusion, delusion”, and said: “I just thought we’d have some fun with words.”

I have fun with words all the time, words are wonderful. That said, I’m something of a stickler for using them correctly. Unfortunately, Ms. Conway doesn’t allow herself to be bothered by that overly much.

Defending the Trump administration, Conway told Hannity the media talks “more about Russia than America”.

The cards, she said, were like Sesame Street’s “Word of the Day”, a reference to the children’s TV show which features a segment in which Elmo and occasionally other muppets, such as the hapless Grover, explain the meaning of words such as vote, stumble and canteen.

I have Word Wednesday every week. What I do, and what Sesame Street does, is to provide nifty things like definitions of those words. That’s not at all what Ms. Conway was doing. She was attempting to switch one word for another in blatant propaganda style.

Conway later tweeted a link to an article about her segment and said: “Apologies to the humorless.”

I’m not humorless, Ms. Conway. I find often find you quite funny, but not in any way you meant.

But by Thursday morning, inevitably, her appearance had become a meme:

Scott Kerr: Kellyanne Conway did the worst version Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

You can see additional responses at The Guardian.

America On Its Baby Hobby Horse.

Lance Wallnau is at it again. Does the man ever shut up? This time, he has the explanation for all that Russia stuff, and America is being too whiny, and sucking its thumb too much.

“Do you know why Russia made it a point to interfere with our election?” Wallnau asked. “Because Putin was incensed that Hillary Clinton, during the Obama administration, had utilized organizations in the West to plant operations in Moscow for the pro-democracy movement because—get this—the Democrats want the LGBT social agenda to be embraced and Russia won’t get on board with it.”

“Putin is virulently anti-homosexual, same-sex marriage,” he continued. “The Democrat progressives targeted Putin for regime change, so we put money and organizations into Russia for pro-democracy and Putin did a massive crackdown on it, kicked them all out … and then went on the offensive and decided to let Hillary experience what it’s like to have your political system meddled with by a foreign power.”

This business of assigning all these amazing actions to one woman is getting past tiring. I suppose it’s just beyond all reason to think that gay people in Russia might have some passing interest in having full human rights, and other little things, like not being murdered. Yes, Putin is about as homophobic as one can get, but he’s one person. He is not all of Russia, and he certainly does not speak for every person in Russia. Naturally, this has jack shit to do with anything. Trump is convenient puppet, a moron who is easily influenced. Anyone who was looking for an idiot puppet would have chosen him, he has no capacity when it comes to thinking for himself. The man is a dictator’s wet dream, as far as puppets go.

“America has to get off its little baby hobby horse here, sucking its thumb, being all offended,” Wallnau said, “because we did it to [Putin] and that’s why he did it to us. So America is guilty of this stuff too.”

Oooh, well that’s telling America. You wouldn’t be calling your listeners snowflakes, would you?

Via Right Wing Watch, there’s video.