November! How did that happen? I miss you guys. How’s everyone doing? I’m fine, despite the radio silence. Work is going well, but it takes a lot more energy than I was expecting. Brooklyn is fabulous, but I’ve started to miss California too. I also realized this week that I’m not going to survive the winter–I’m eight years out of practice with cold weather, and I’ve grown weak.
More later, I hope, including the thrilling conclusion to the world’s most boring travelogue (more for the sake of completeness than anything else) but for now, ye olde link list.
- Debbie at Body Impolitic discusses the gendering of baby clothes. Which is closely tied, of course, to the imposition of gender norms on babies in general.
- Matt Cheney on Terrence Malik’s The New World. He’s convinced me that I would like to see this movie, especially in the context of teaching about European contact in the Americas.
- You’re already reading Cake Wrecks, right? A wonderful compilation of bad cake decorating, mixed up once in a while with examples of gorgeous and amazing cakes. In the former category, we have the sexual harassment cake, Transformers cakes gone horribly wrong, and the ongoing war against cupcake cakes. In the latter, a life-size Wall-E, a Super Mario wedding cake, and my personal favorite, the Muppet Show in fondant. (And if you like Cake Wrecks, you might also enjoy It’s Lovely, I’ll Take It, a blog that highlights ridiculous photos included in real estate listings.)
- I’ve become kind of obsessive about checking fivethirtyeight.com.
- A while back, my cousin Jackie shared a sure-fire solution for cheering up bad days: go to Flickr and search on the tag “puppies”. I’ve found an even more effective solution: look at pictures of dogs in Halloween costumes.
- The Fix reviews Strange Horizons‘ September fiction, and makes some arguments about the nature of the field along the way.
- This American Life explains the economic crisis, in two parts. (Part One: The Giant Pool of Money. Part Two: Another Frightening Show About the Economy.)
- A wonderful post from The Tomorrow Museum, looking at women and science fiction. (There’s an idea in there that I haven’t seen before, but that makes perfect sense once you start thinking about it: saying that women don’t write “real” science fiction is only possible if you keep moving the goalposts for what counts as “real” science fiction.)
- A steampunk Twelfth Night in New York. I want to see this one–in college, I was involved with a rock-musical adaptation of Twelfth Night. (I was backstage crew, not an actor, but I did make a few appearances on stage, first as a satin-gloved hand tossing a microphone to someone, and then operating hand puppets of the Pope and a daisy. Oh, and again with a different satin glove, as the Hand of Buddha. This is all irrelevant to the play in New York, of course, but I do have a particular fondness for Twelfth Night.)
- Ph.D. Comics illustrates the financial priorities of colleges and universities. (Contingent faculty, who are teaching something like sixty percent of college courses these days, would fall somewhere between untenured professors and grad students on that chart; depending on the college, they’re probably much closer to the grad student numbers.)
- I used to obsessively track the USGS Earthquake Map; now it’s the Gothamist Newsmap.
- Gavin Newson visits Google and talks about same-sex marriage.
I think that’s it for now.
Posted Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 10:47 am. Filed under: personal.
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On the baby clothes thing — when we were taking Isabel home from the hospital, a stranger sitting in the waiting area by the outside doors took us to task because her hospital-issue hat had both pink and blue ribbons on it. At two days old, apparently it was already a social duty for us to announce her gender to complete strangers before even saying hello.
(The hospital-issue baby hats consisted of a length of stretchy cotton tube, apparently cut from a roll of the stuff, tied off at the top with the ribbons.)