why

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tumblr what are

wh– what are

TUMBLR WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING

(i have actually signed on with mobile data on my computer just to post this because for real what the FUCK)

(I can’t even tell if this is a real person let alone eleven actual persons or what)

(if you are a person I assume this is not your doing and I am sorry to single you out)

(if you are not WHAT ARE YOU)

Oh a random follow-up– so the other night when

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Oh a random follow-up– so the other night when there was an explosion and the smell of burning and hundreds of sirens, and my sister went up the hill and figured out a car had rolled on the steep curvy bit of road that goes through part of the farm and taken out a telephone pole? And we were sure someone must be dead?

Well the one guy we were counting on to have the story, who hunts on the farm and mows the lawn in exchange, and is a firefighter, was a total dud in terms of gossip. He said he hadn’t heard a damn thing, and what’s more, nobody was talking about it. But he figured, if it wasn’t in the news (it wasn’t), nobody was dead– if someone dies, you can’t keep it out of the news. Another local said he’d seen just airbags everywhere, so he thought it likely that whoever was in it lived because of the airbags– a newish car, maybe an expensive one. Firefighter lawn mowing guy theorized that it was someone with clout, to stay out of the news.

Well, we found out who knew. We went out for dinner, to the BBQ joint just down the street, only a little ways past the foot of the hill where that street comes out. What’s most crucial, I think, is that the owner’s kids go to the local high school.

He confirmed for us that he knew the identities of everyone in the car and didn’t want to get into too much detail, but when he realized that all we really wanted to know was that nobody was dead, he was happy to give us that much detail. And it was as we’d thought- it wasn’t quite 9pm, so we thought they coudln’t have been drunks, so probably kids? 

Correct. It was a 17-year-old driver, on one of those provisional-under-18 licenses that expires at 9pm and is good for only one passenger, going a bit too fast– state troopers said 50, which on that road might as well have been rocket-propelled– with too many kids in the car, he had 3 passengers wearing seatbelts and a 4th kid illegally in the hatchback, who was ejected from the car– and he caught an edge, overcorrected, rolled the car, and just annihilated the power pole. 

The one kid who got ejected had some pretty serious injuries, but was discharged from the hospital already. One of the other passengers, seatbelt on, had a vertebral fracture, but was walking and all, ought to heal. And the driver wasn’t much injured at all. They were just a bunch of kids being stupid kids, and we all were sympathetic; they were friends of the restaurant owner’s son, and he’d clearly expected us to say mean shit, but I know my brother-in-law was a bit of a wild child, and my own sister once rolled a car stone sober in broad daylight– it’s not a sign of being an evil human to do stupid or sometimes just clumsy things. Don’t do that, kids, but, I mean. Kids do stupid things. At least they weren’t drinking.

It’s a hard lesson to learn, but nobody’s dead.

There was a worse lesson in our home school district, where our mother taught– last week a teenager was driving to school and apparently crossed the center line and collided with a truck, and was killed. Stone sober, broad daylight, dry road, just wasn’t paying attention enough, wasn’t used to driving. 

So. Hug your kids, and hope they survive whatever dumb things they get up to, because kids do dumb things, and gravity and velocity are cruel. 

Here’s the happy punchline, though. The telephone pole that got taken out had a bluebird house on it. When the utility guys put the new pole up, they noticed, and took the bluebird house off the old pole and put it in the proper place on the new pole. 

Lemme just say

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rufeepeach:

The Germans in Wonder Woman are not Nazis.

I just saw a troubling comment on a gifset of Antiope and her badass three-arrow stunt shot at the three german soldiers on the beach. I love that moment as much as anyone. However, this comment referred to her ‘killing Nazis’. And those men were not Nazis. 

Wonder Woman is set in WW1. Hitler would not come to power for over a decade after WW1 ended. Fascism had not yet become a political force in Europe. In fact, Germany’s treatment as a defeated aggressor instead of as an equal party in the armistice negotiations - and later the Treaty of Versailles - despite the Allies’ equal culpability for the war, directly contributed to the rise of fascism and nationalism in Germany.

Stop calling the German soldiers in Wonder Woman Nazis. One of the greatest tragedies of WW1 is that the soldiers on both sides of the trenches were hungry, young, sick, poor men, who had no stake in the war. This article talks about the experiences (at least early in the war) of both sides on the Western front meeting on no man’s land and finding little difference between one another. 

There’s a lot to love about Wonder Woman, and I very much enjoyed it. I also loved the points in the movie when the violence done by Americans and British - such as when Diana speaks to Chief about the death of his people - were addressed as well, but they were brief. The presentation of Germans As The Bad Guys - especially since Aries’ influence was inconsistent as a plot point - has led to people mistakenly reading it as a movie about Nazis, when the Nazis did not exist in 1918. A WW1 setting does not sustain a narrative of one side being ‘heroic’ and the other ‘villainous’, especially if one takes into account the atrocities both sides had committed during the quarter century leading up to the armistice. It troubles me that this movie allows WW1 German soldiers to be read as Nazis. 

Please stop referring to Nazis in the context of Wonder Woman.

I’m so excited about these teeny bouquets in

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I’m so excited about these teeny bouquets in these teeny jars please come buy them so I have an excuse to make them again!! (at Troy Waterfront Farmers Market)

Stopped by my 20th high school reunion just to hold a banner...

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Stopped by my 20th high school reunion just to hold a banner for a minute. Hey what’s up emma. (at Emma Willard School)

entertainmeweakly: Have fun storming the castle! -

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entertainmeweakly:

Have fun storming the castle!
 - Miracle Max

I reblogged this to my fluff blog with a “yess!” caption but I also want to seriously post it:
How phenomenal a “fuck you” is this to Joss Whedon’s Age of Ultron directing whatsername Olsen not to make “unattractive” faces while Wanda Maximoff was fighting?
Fuck. You. She looks fucking AMAZING. Women can do action roles without fucking duckfacing through the fight scenes.

unicornduke replied to your post about 20th high

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unicornduke replied to your post about 20th high school reunion

that is the fanciest castle??? I’ve ever seen. is that really a high school????

it sure is. 

It’s in Troy NY, has been in operation since 1814 which makes it the oldest high school serving women in the United States, and that campus dates from 1914 or so, when they did a swap with a women’s college to give them downtown space in return for a more isolated campus. The campus is a gorgeous example of American Neo-Gothic architecture and is pristinely maintained by the most meticulous grounds crew you can imagine, and naturally, as a student there, I had basically no notion of this. Anyway.

Here are more pictures. It’s a whole thing. It’s fancier than that photo even shows you. Check some of those interiors, it’s unreal. 

We just had a whole conversation about what it meant to have gone there and such. I honestly just gate-crashed because one of my classmates was giving a presentation and I wanted to support her. It was $100 to stay to dinner but I did not do that. I got in all the pictures though, waved some banners, was generally obnoxious. I went there on a huge need-based scholarship and it was still a lot of money and a stretch for my not-that-upper-middle-class family, but it was kind of an amazing experience, I won’t lie about that.

We recently had a huge scandal, there was a class-action lawsuit over decades of allegations of sexual abuse of students by staff. One of the complainants was someone I knew, and the teacher she accused was one of my favorite teachers, and I absolutely believe her. The school settled and then instituted a whole separate governing board of experts and alums and such. And like, it’s a lot of self-flagellation, but there’s no other way to do it, you need to be fucking sorry for shit like that. Many of my friends suffered at the hands of administrators who were out of their depth and just wanted them to shut up, about all kinds of things– the woman who gave the presentation had a mental breakdown and in lieu of treating her they threw her out, and we never knew what happened or why, and now she’s back at our 20th reunion getting a Distinguished Alumna Award? Clearly, if she was willing to come back, they’ve changed things, and I do feel that they have. But there were some hard conversations in among all the feelgood bullshit.

It remains one of the last single-sex educational bastions in the United States, and I think the commitment stands pretty firm. Integrated education is great, but until women are genuinely considered people by the culture at large, they still need protected spaces, and I do think Emma’s mission remains sacred. Even if they mostly churn out White Feminists ™, but I will add, they’ve got a great international student contingent and I’m still grateful for having had that kind of exposure and perspective at such an early age. Especially if they’re going to have decent mental health supports and some kind of accountability for action on complicated interpersonal and disciplinary issues and abuse issues and such. I dunno, it’s not all sunshine and roses but I still think it’s an important institution. And having gone there, as I explained in that workshop– the main value for me was that, in matters interpersonal, academic, social, or high-class-society related, after Emma nothing really cowed me. I’d seen fancier, done more advanced, been through worse, seen crazier, heard of worse– my world was much larger than my compatriots’, and it wasn’t necessarily that it got me ahead, it just let me keep up in a way I’d never have managed on my own. 

Also, in 1991, they filmed Scent of a Woman there. I’ve only seen the movie because of that, but for the record, it opens on a gorgeous shot of our campus coming up the hill from the athletic center, with the two modern buildings in the back cropped out. 

Oh, current notable alumnae include the current junior senator for New York State, Kirsten Gillibrand (class of ‘84), so. I bought some Emma postcards to mail to her.