Welp, I don’t expect this one to generate much commentary
“No doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies,” Wright wrote, referring to periods.
The lady is Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of the very few women practicing medicine in the 1870s. She argued that wammen brains wouldn’t explode if exercised during menstruation. This was a thing doctors believed.
I point you to this article about it in the Atlantic.
It isn’t so much that the topic is interesting, I just found it hilarious reading Aunt Flo described in the windy, pompous language of late 19th Century doctor science.
July 10, 2019 — 8:48 pm
Comments: 10
Huh. Lookit that.
So for a lark on my birthday, I bought £50 worth of bitcoin. Annnnd…that’s where it is today.
My original plan was to set it up to put something silly like £5 a month in the account every month, but it turns out the transaction fees would be stupid. So I plunked down my five Jane Austens (I just looked at one; that’s who’s on the £10 note) all at once and paid just under £2 in transaction fees.
Actually, that’s not all bitcoin. There’s about £7 worth of stellar lumens in there, too. Eh. I earned them by watching videos about them. There’s a lot of that sort of thing around. And, being the conscientious weasel what I are, I really paid attention to those videos, too.
This is fun.
Oh, I know. It will come crashing down at one point. THAT’S MY SIGNAL TO BUY!
July 8, 2019 — 8:02 pm
Comments: 11
Brother, can you spare a megabyte?
Still out. Down to last 100 megs of data. For the love of dog, send memes!
July 2, 2019 — 4:27 pm
Comments: 12
I have no internet and I must post
Line down, we think. Probably one of those lush willows lining our drive ate our cable. BT says it could be Wednesday.
I have a small phone data allowance. Any idea how crazy this is making me?!
July 1, 2019 — 7:27 pm
Comments: 7
shhhh…kitties
Yes, thefritz wins the dick! w00t! My apologies – I got in too late to set up a new Dead Pool. Which is okay; I like to give people a couple of days to prepare themselves. You know, for the rigors of a new Dead Pool. I’ll push it to next Friday and hope your favorite doesn’t croak in the next seven days.
Here, easily distractible friends, look at the kitties! Our local big cat charity has announced their snow leopard has had two kittens.
If you’re looking for something to do this afternoon, there are worse ways to spend it than watching snow leopard videos on Youtube. There isn’t much footage of them, but they are amazing. Those tails! That coat! The weirdly human faces!
The adults anyway. The cubs are just BIG, FLOOFY KITTENS. Good weekend, all!
June 28, 2019 — 8:21 pm
Comments: 11
notes
Specifically Tironian notes, a system of shorthand developed at the end of the Roman empire by Tiro, a slave to Cicero. The system was widely adopted and expanded by Medieval monks until it contained thousands of symbols.
By which time, I would have thought, the whole business was too cumbersome to be practical. You know, if you’re having to remember 10,000 word-symbols, you might as well learn Chinese.
This image came into my feed today, anyway, and I thought it was neat. My mother knew shorthand. The non-Tironian kind. Occasionally, she slipped into it and left me impenetrable notes.
June 27, 2019 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 10
Inspirational
Too long for a bumpersticker, too much thread for a cross-stitch. I tried to subscribe to this woman’s newsletter, but it asked me for money.
Imagine expecting to get paid for your work in [current year].
June 26, 2019 — 9:27 pm
Comments: 7
I had to buy 100 of these for the office today
They are finger cots, colloquially known as fingerdoms. Basically, rubber glove fingers. Somebody from the British Museum recommended we use them to handle medals because cotton gloves pick up junk and leave bits, and whole hand rubber gloves get sweaty.
I go to Amazon for this. My boss is watching over my shoulder. My boss is very old and very reserved. Sure enough, at the bottom of the page, Amazon cheerfully informs me “people who bought those also bought…” the biggest, purplest sex toy you ever saw.
I’ve never closed a page so fast in my life.
June 24, 2019 — 8:51 pm
Comments: 8
Somebody order a bucket of chicken?
He’s fine. He wanted a dust bath and Uncle B had planted up the raised beds.
He. Yes. I tried the egg experiment last year, too, with tragic results. My flock already includes an excess of adult roosters, because I’m a slop-bag.
June 18, 2019 — 8:50 pm
Comments: 3
RFC
TUESDAY EDIT. I’m going to leave this up this week while I ruminate. Also, lazy.
WEDNESDAY EDIT. It feels weird, not squeezing out a post every night. I feel like I haven’t brushed my teeth or something. How about guest posts? Any of you have something you’ve always wanted to tell the internet? I don’t have a big reach, but if you’ve been holding in some burning truths about stamp collecting or dressage, I’m willing to entertain the idea.
THURSDAY EDIT. The internet was quiet. Too quiet.
FRIDAY EDIT. Thanks for the input, y’all. I will probably publish my half-assed instance and whip it into shape in realtime. Because I just can’t get enough of my own incompetence. I won’t be deleting anything, just de-internetting it for now. We’ll see. Did I mention lazy? Good weekend!
Request for comments, that is. I went poking through my old content over the weekend. Twelve years and 3,500 posts and I don’t know how to begin to sanitize it of possible copyright infringements.
I don’t even know how to decide what’s infringing. Wildlife photographers and freelancers whose work gets picked up by the media are touchy as hell about their content, I know that. Fair enough; they get ripped off all the time and they’ve been sore about it for years.
But what about news images in wide circulation? Memes? How much do I have to change somebody else’s image to make it transformative? It would take forever to go back through, if I even knew what to wipe.
What I’m thinking is, I’ll start a new instance of WordPress in a new directory, switch over and just retire the old content entirely. My stuff has gotten pretty repetitious anyway, as I’ve exhausted the novelty of being in England.
But I think it would break my heart to shutter the blog completely, at least right away. I’d miss you guys; I really would. I’m sure viewership and participation will fall off a cliff if I switch to irregular vague-blogging, but I’m open to suggestions.
I surely can’t hang a whole blog off a Dead Pool, can I?
June 10, 2019 — 9:11 pm
Comments: 45