Quickies
Quickies: #AskThicke Q&A Session Goes Unforseeably Bad, Gender Neutral Bathroom Signs, and a 1930’s Escort Service for Single Ladies
- Gentlemen for Rent – In the 1930’s, it was taboo for women to walk around NYC (or any city) unaccompanied by a man. So one entrepreneur came up with an escort service for single women. Read this article for an interesting slice of history.
- Robin Thicke publicity stunt goes horribly wrong – How did he not see this coming? From Petr.
- A Woman Wrestles With A Disturbing Family Memento – From NPR’s The Race Card Project, “this story is about the burden of history, and how one decides to deal with it. Do we accept history as it’s handed down, challenge it to command a better understanding — or ignore it as a way to find a peace of mind?”
- Palm Beach County girl credited for breakthrough in lionfish research – “Lauren Arrington just wanted to top the other kids’ science fair projects.But she ended up making a breakthrough that surprised even seasoned, Ph.D.-holding scientists.Her research showing that venomous, highly invasive lionfish can survive in nearly fresh water was ultimately replicated and expanded upon by ecologists, who cited her in their published, peer-reviewed study on the topic.” From Sarah.
- Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Solving the Sign Problem – Someone comes up with a genius solution for how to indicate where a toilet is without using gendered icons (or those horrible “half-man half-woman” icons).
“Well, it’s either the sign for the bathroom or a robot with a monocle.”
Hahaha now I see it. At least the robot looks happy!
That’s actually funny, the first time I heard that phrase, I think on prime time TV, that’s what I naïvely thought an ‘escort service’ to be.
Though you can still get that kind of service in Japan. Japanese women will actually hire young men just to talk to them.
I saw a film about the Japanese “boyfriend” industry!
Can you overdose on schadenfreude? Just wondering, because I just read the Robin Thicke article and now between bouts of laughter I’m feeling ill.
Can you overdose on schadenfreude? Just wondering, because I just read the Robin Thicke article and now between bouts of laughter I’m feeling ill.
Whoa, is there an echo in here?
A note on the bathroom thing: The person getting credit for that sign has previously shown themself to be at best willing to misappropriate credit for a trivially paraphrased idea, at worst an outright plagiarist: https://storify.com/cisnormativity/the-genderbread-plagiarist . This time it may be a genuinely creative thought, but color me skeptical.
Disturbing note on the Montana hanging. Why no mention of what the victims were convicted of? Why did the owner of the card think the hanging was a lynching when the invitation was from the Sheriff?
OK, a link in the article leads to a near-illegible clipping. The men were convicted of shooting three men, killing one, in the process of a train robbery. Were white train robber/killers objects of special clemency?
Still chilling to think of how easily sentences of death were passed, are passed, in the US. That a state would be so eager to have a ‘triple hanging’ that journalists would scour records for prior examples.
The racial question is perfectly legitimate, and the whole horror of the death penalty in the US is worth more reporting. But this little article is manipulative and dishonest in its selective exclusion of basic material.
You must have missed it. The article does discuss that:
These three men were arrested for a murder that took place in the commission of a robbery. Very little is known about these men. They were said to have been railroad workers. They were called hobos in some accounts, itinerant workers. And it was the first legal triple-hanging in the state of Montana. It was a pretty big deal.”
In reporting this story, the Race Card Project team also learned that there had been some controversy around the execution — there had even been an effort to commute the sentence.
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Thicke as a Bricke . . . that gives me an idea for a song . . .
HAH. A toilet. Called it.