2020-12-02

sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
Me, eating the object in question: "A rice cake covered with prune jam really feels like a Depression-era snack." [personal profile] spatch: "You could've just chewed on a sugar beet."

(Technically speaking, the prune jam is lekvar left over from Purim, which was so early this year it was still normal. It's just every holiday since that's been strange. Have some links.)

1. Sign of the 2020: I forgot it was only this April that I watched the first season of Homecoming (2018) and therefore need not feel like an idiot for taking so long to realize that my feelings about Shea Whigham's Thomas Carrasco are closely aligned with my feelings about William Daniels' Albert Amundsen, even though one is a pen-pushing gift of a co-protagonist and the other a two-scene wonder. I genuinely thought it had been at least a year.

2. Mildly edited from the swearier textbrick with which I hit [personal profile] selkie when I heard about the UK's high court ruling on puberty blockers, which I had previously missed:

The thing about the furor over blockers that I find silliest, by which I mean the most transphobic, is that it's not as though the human body doesn't have a complicated relationship to sexual maturity to begin with. I had a childhood friend who effectively went through puberty in a matter of months because until then she'd been an Olympic-track gymnast and the intensity of exercise had held her body at a ten-year-old shape even when she was thirteen. I imagine a significant percentage of children who train seriously for sports have similar experiences. We can argue about the pros and cons of the global sports-industrial complex, but the fact is, it can stop your clock even if you didn't ask it to. Anorexia will do it on purpose, malnutrition by accident—Audrey Hepburn's celebrated gamine figure was pure hunger winter. As far as we can tell, my late onset was strictly genetics. But that's all fine, that just happens naturally. A person makes a decision for themselves—even if that decision is simply to buy time to consider further decision-making—and oh, God, won't somebody think of the children. Well, not those children. The other children. You know. Choir, preaching, but it's so stupid. I hate stupidity on general principle and it should not be permitted when it isn't even real stupidity, just malice playing dumb.

3. I had either forgotten or never properly made the connection that Louise Fitzhugh was one of the creators—the other being Sandra Scoppettone—of Suzuki Beane (1961). It never occurred to me as a child that the book was a parody of Kay Thompson's Eloise (1955), but I loved it. It was my introduction to Beat slang. I will have to tell my mother that her crumbling paperback copy is rare.

My current music comes courtesy of [personal profile] aurumcalendula's "What Could've Been." I recommend the vid not just because the song is stuck desperately in my head, but because I have never seen either Supernatural (2005–2020) or Warehouse 13 (2009–2014) and the parallels were still very clear.
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