Ludicrous Language
thusspakezuska | January 7, 2010Maybe you tell us why they're blue.
First the name. Avatar--if you play computer games, you may know this very well--is a character you use inside an unreal world. The word Avatar has its origins in Indian mythology. An Avatar (ava-tara in Sanskrit) is god's visit to earth to fix something that is broken. Vishnu, one of the three gods who protects creation, by necessity visits earth often. Vishnu, the puranas declare, is dark-blue in color (the original story teller was inspired by blue oceans, blue sky?).
Thank you, Scientific Indian.
Maybe you go pretentious.
The point, though, is that…
thusspakezuska | January 3, 2010I see erv is blogging some trash-talking shit about how she would "bet a large sum of money that [she is] the fittest person on SciBlogs". Bah! Kids and their puny bragging!
I am totes the hairiest-legged feminazi on SciBlogs! AND the most out of shape! And furthermore, if you mess with me, I will absolutely make you sit your ass down and eat with me some of the sour soup (sauerkraut, water, mushrooms, barley) my mom used to make us eat every year on Christmas Eve, and count your blessings and be grateful. And then I will puke that crap up on your shoes.
Not hungry? You'll eat what your…
thusspakezuska | December 29, 2009Last time I checked, Erma Bombeck, when she was alive, was a hugely popular American humorist who wrote a newspaper column and published 15 books, most of which were best sellers. She came from the working class, and made quite a successful career for herself in publishing, at a time when women normally did not have careers.
But apparently, since she wrote about housewives and domestic issues, there's nothing to admire about what she did. And if you want to mock a woman writer these days, why, you just link her to Erma Bombeck and call it at day. See: "Erma-Bombeckian" (Steven Pinker…
thusspakezuska | November 14, 2009Subtitle: It's really cool when feminists can help me advance my personal interests, as long as nobody sees me talking to them, 'cause, you know, they're ugly.
Over at Isis's place, Victoria writes that she does not wish to be sexually harassed at scientific conferences, no matter what she is wearing. She does not want to feel responsible for controlling men's poor behavior through her sartorial choices.
Zuska is on board with that.
Victoria also writes that she wants "to maintain the feeling of being a sexy, feminine woman without sacrificing the science".
Zuska is less sure what…
thusspakezuska | July 15, 2009Everybody's talking about Unscientific America 'round these parts lately. I've almost finished reading it and will post a review of my own sometime soon. In the meantime...Isis has a post up where she makes note of ERV's displeasure with the book. In response, ERV comments thusly on Isis's blog:
Isis-- I havent read Unscientific America. I called foul on some shit Mooney wrote in 2006 he has yet to address, I would have been shocked if he sent me a copy.
My issue with Mooney initially had nothing to do with atheism, nor does my problem with him today have anything to do with atheism.
PZ…
thusspakezuska | May 21, 2009It can't be avoided. Once a year you make the trek to the gynecologist's office for the annual exam. For various reasons, the whole experience is extremely unpleasant for me, and yet I go, because I try to take care of my health. And hey, I have health insurance! And it pays for the annual exam. Lucky me, I don't even need a referral to see my gynecologist. Though I do get to pay the higher copay for "specialists". This is especially maddening as my primary care physician, a woman I respect and dearly love, could do the exam for me - and does, for many of her other patients - but my…
thusspakezuska | April 30, 2009What's a good citizen to do if he or she thinks that cough and sneeze is swine flu? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends:
Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
This afternoon I've been reading Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich - which is ever so more relevant now, if that were possible, than when it was originally released. Near the end she notes:
It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition -…
thusspakezuska | April 27, 2009Sooooo....it appears some of you take your comics quite seriously. At least, should one be so foolish as to point out painfully obvious, boringly everyday occurrences of sexism.
Danimal asks of Comrade Physioprof: "So you are saying the comic reflects real life?"
What Physioprof said is this: "Every single one of the Foxtrots themselves represents absolute conformity to patriarchal gender norms. And the characters who are not part of the family who appear to violate those norms serve the patriarchal narrative purely as foils."
Inasmuch as patriarchal gender norms represent Real LifeTM,…
thusspakezuska | April 21, 2009I love the comic pages in the newspaper. Some of them are just mildly amusing, but some are bitingly funny and offer real social satire (Pearls Before Swine comes to mind here, as does Non Sequitur). But I was definitely not amused this past weekend when I read the April 19 strip of Foxtrot.
In case you aren't able to view the strip: the first panel shows a string of numbers, below which is a key. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a semi-complex mathematical formulation, which must be solved to yield the number, which in turn allows one to substitute letters for numbers in the…
thusspakezuska | April 7, 2009Yesterday I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR and caught this very intriguing segment, Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong. Would you describe a bridge as fragile, elegant, beautiful, peaceful, slender, pretty? Or as strong, dangerous, long, sturdy, big, towering? Lera Boroditsky, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford University, found that it depends - for native German and Spanish speakers, on whether your native tongue assigns a feminine or masculine gender to the noun bridge.
Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German -- die brucke -- is a feminine noun…
thusspakezuska | February 20, 2009I love Ursula K. le Guin's the Earthsea series, and recently finished reading the final novel, The Other Wind. Those who are familiar with the Earthsea books will know that among other topics, le Guin explores traditional gender roles, their change, and men's disparagement of women's power. Towards the end of The Other Wind, one of the characters, Tenar, observes
How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another - then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being…
thusspakezuska | February 10, 2009I love being part of ScienceBlogs. I've gotten to meet a lot of my Sciblings in person by now and have generally found them to be wonderful people. Readers, I like them!
Except. I really don't like the trash one of my Sciblings has been flinging around lately. Sooooo not cool. Details over at Isis's pad. Sing it, sister!
When people go around saying stuff like this
I have been accused of not being on board because I don't like the anger. At the same time I'm a progenitor of anger when I feel like doing it. I admit that the anger works, but I also feel that ally building is sometimes…
thusspakezuska | February 8, 2009Here's the story:
Samia was hacked off about something.
I know I recommended white science bloggers link to other bloggers in a show of link-lovin, but some of the stuff I see just seems tokenizing/LOOK AT ME I'M OPENMINDED! Ew. Fuck a bunch of wannabes.
This kinda got Isis hacked off.
What the fuck??? No, I mean seriously. What the fuck?...
...So what has you upset Samia? Is it a particular incident or the blogosphere in general. Either way, you've got to offer more guidance than today's brief blog-lashing. You've established yourself as an advocate for diversity and as someone who is…
thusspakezuska | December 22, 2008I don't particularly enjoy having needles poked into my scalp and neck and shoulders and temples and I especially don't like having them poked into my forehead just above my eyebrows. Yet I allow my neurologist to turn me into a pincushion every three months because regular botox treatments subdue my migraines, and nothing else does. I like my neurologist; I trust him, and we have a good doctor-patient relationship. On this last visit we discussed my current medications and how they're working, and agreed that I could probably start scaling back one of them. My neurologist is at a…
thusspakezuska | September 10, 2008So, to recap:
A couple of women are having a conversation, and the topic turns to tit-ogling. "No one should be staring at my tits in the workplace," they all agree. "That makes me uncomfortable, creates a hostile work environment, and constitutes sexual harassment! How difficult is it to look at my eyes? Staring and ogling is a threatening display of power enacted in a sexual manner. This isn't the Mad Men era. Haven't men figured out how to behave in a professional situation by now?"
A dude at the table next to them has been listening in and feels compelled to pipe up:
"Ladeez…
thusspakezuska | August 28, 2008I read it in the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Longer version here in the LA Times.)
In a news release, Roy Den Hollander, who's best-known for suing Manhattan nightclubs because they offered free or discounted Ladies' Night drinks to women, contended that [Columbia] university could not use government money, such as federal financial aid, to fund its Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
Women's studies courses, he maintained, discriminate against men and are therefore in violation of the Fifth and 14th amendments. He also called Columbia a "bastion of bigotry against men . . . [that has…
thusspakezuska | August 19, 2008A reader named Paul Murray left this comment on a older blog post of mine:
The comments on tit-staring make me wish the women could occupy a man's body for a day. Ignoring tits in your visual field is as easy as it is for a woman to simply ignore a cute baby in the vicinity.
I was flabbergasted, to say the least. What to be more annoyed at? The suggestion that women are somehow programmed - biologically, of course, I am sure - with some sort of infant-adoration module? Or Mr. Murray's casual insult to his fellow men, that they are simply incapable of behaving decently? That's quite some…
thusspakezuska | August 5, 2008In the past it's not been my practice to read the business section of the newspaper but lately I've been paying more attention to it. Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer's business section featured an article I just couldn't resist: Hacker Camp: Computer programmers get to play attacker in order to learn how to do security better.
Early in the article we learn that all the "campers" are men. This is discouraging. I don't know how attendees were recruited or selected but I'm guessing there wasn't a lot of outreach to women. This is the part of the article that really woke me up, however:…
thusspakezuska | August 1, 2008Female Science Professor has a great Q&A post, So They Had To Hire A Woman. Here's a sample:
Question: So you're going to get a Ph.D.? Couldn't you find anyone to marry you?
Answer 1: Why would I want to get married when so many men are just like you?
Answer 2: That's right, and I want to be a professor so that there are fewer people like you saying things like that.
I much prefer the first answer. Heh.
But really, once you start perusing the comments, it's absolutely stunning how many women report having some variant of this question thrown in their face. Like this comment from…
thusspakezuska | June 27, 2008I was browsing the Women's Policy Inc. site, which is awesome, and ran across an item in the June 16, 2008 issue of The Source that just left me with my mouth hanging open. I can't find a permalink for this item; follow this link and scroll down to the fifth item, "House Approves Paid Parental Leave for Federal Employees". What's under discussion is a bill that
would allow federal employees to be paid for four of the twelve weeks of parental leave to which they are entitled under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) (P.L. 103-3). The legislation also would permit federal employees to…