On, Off

Further to your letter of 9th of Never, I have discovered, through someone else's blog, the results of a 2007 study - none to out of date really, considering I am still loving my Office 2007 and finding that I am continually having to save to an earlier version for many other people - which showed that when men used, were exposed to, or not challenged on, sexist humour, they developed sexist attitudes. Who'd have thought eh? But I'm not getting at the study, no ma'am, because without having the science to back it up, even though it seems a no-brainer, people will always say, 'yeah, but where's the science to back it up?'

In 1936, Gretel Bergmann set a German national record for high jump. Two weeks later, it was discovered that she hadn't in fact set a record, owing to the fact that she was Jewish. Harsh?
This is harsh. Finally, in 2009, her record has been restored. Good, but why did it take so long? Fortunately she survived the horrors that came after, and is still alive and living in New York.

At the End of the Day....

It has rained so hard today that animals are lining up in pairs.

My day ended with two Russian women scraping the coffee stains off my teeth and telling me I was very brave. Although actually they were Rumanian. My teeth have never felt so clean.
I have broken a tooth, so although my teeth are now stain free - at least until the morning - I still can't smile too widely. And I will obviously be seeing the Rumanians again.

Then my day ended - again - with a foray into an Indian restaurant for takeaway. Goat Curry for Ben - I couldn't bring myself to..... and then the usual suspects, korma, tikka masala, naan, pulao.

And then the day ended once more with Modern Family. Cam's clown and Jungle Tania.

Then finally the day ended with an Ibuprofen. The rain and the stop-start overheating in shops and offices has me by the throat.

Pink Gloves, Marmite and Innuendo

Three degrees of separation.

This video was sent to me by a friend, whose good friend is the mother-in-law of the woman who made it. It totally rocks anyway, but this is the message that came with the e-mail.

"Emily (MacInnes) Somers, created, directed and choreographed this in Portland last week for her Medline glove division as a fundraiser for breast cancer awareness. This was all her idea to help promote their new pink gloves. I don't know how she got so many employees, doctors and patients to participate, but it started to really catch on and they all had a lot of fun doing it.

When the video gets 1 million hits, Medline will be making a huge contribution to the hospital, as well as offering free mammograms for the community. Please check it out. It's an easy and great way to donate to a wonderful cause, and who hasn't been touched by breast cancer?"

Yesterday evening, as I was travelling to my friend Anne's house, there was a news item on CBC radio about 18 jars of Marmite that had been stolen from a shop in Kingsthorpe in the north of England. I know. It beats me too how this made it onto a national radio newscast in Canada but there you go.
The piece was prefaced by stating that the British and New Zealanders, were the only people on the planet who liked Marmite.
If you are interested, you can find it under 'Marmite Thief' as a podcast for Monday 23rd November, here.

So, the presenter, talking to the shopkeeper, asks him if there were any theories about why the Marmite was stolen. He makes a few suggestions and then says that eventually, it descended into sexual innuendo.
'I'm sure I don't have to explain to you,' he said,
'Er, well, yes, actually,' she said, but he didn't.
Arriving at Anne's, I asked my friend, a New Zealander, if she could think of any sexual innuendo involving Marmite, and between the two of us - we couldn't.
Over to you then.

Pledge

An unfortunately worded news item on the radio yesterday morning, informed us that H1N1 is now available to anyone who wants it.
I think I'll pass if that's ok.

The weather yesterday evening was...well, biblical. Thunder, lightning, sleet, flash-flooding, hail, bigger hail, intense hail that the windscreen wipers couldn't cope with, and then more thunder and lightning.
Over the past week or so, three metres of snow have fallen at Whistler.

If you haven't yet seen this video clip of a ten year-old boy in Arkansas who is refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance until it actually means something, please, please watch it. It speaks to me in many ways. Normally, I can't stand precocious children, well, and that stands, because this kid doesn't come across as precocious at all. He is just a very bright kid who can't see why the words 'liberty and justice for all' in the American pledge of allegiance, doesn't include gay people, and why there is still racism and sexism in the world.
He intends to be a lawyer - if in fact he survives the constant homophobia he is now enduring at school.
I'd like to say, I think he'll be a very fine one.

Prodigal City

The weather outside is wild, a very solid wooden chair has just gone scooting along the balcony. Kevin has taken the hanging baskets down and Whisky is going to have to cross his little puppy legs.

And the wind has blown in my youngest lad, Ben. Yep, I noticed the ridiculously low price of flights on Monday, Wednesday, he's here. He had asked me not to tell Laurence, so Ben had the pleasure of waking his brother up.
'Am I awake?' asked Laurence, 'am I dead?'

The prodigal son, Ben that is. Laurence works hard, he gets up at three every morning and goes to bake bread. He doesn't slack off and he's only sick when he's actually sick.
Alex works hard, granted she plays hard too, but she's no slacker. And neither can understand how the prodigal one breezes in, knows how loved he is and we kill the fatted calf. And I can see all of that and I can't not kill that calf.

I felt like that at the meeting I went to last night. I've mentioned before that my church runs the extreme weather shelter in Richmond. There are a handful of beds for men at the Salvation Army, but nowhere for women and children, or the rest of the men.
We applied this year to extend the provision, so that we would be open throughout the winter months. We couldn't do this without Provincial funding, which was turned down.
Last year's shelter was run by a teacher-consultant who works full time. She would pull night shifts, go into work, and organise all the volunteers during her breaks. The whole thing was run on the kindness of others, volunteers who gave up their nights to supervise, donations of money, clothes, food from people who care that there are people who have to sleep on the streets, and some funding from the Province.
The City of Richmond do nothing. They don't acknowledge a problem. Councillors have claimed there are no homeless in the city - more difficult after a particularly bitter winter last year, and the church sheltering those people.

The church's committee have been preparing all year for this winter. After muddling through last year, they have lined up paid staff will be more able to do the job since they won't be having to do a separate paying job, and who are to be trained in how to deal with the drug and alcohol issues and behaviours the homeless frequently exhibit.
The city promised them money.
They produced a budget and submitted it.

The city rejected it because 'they thought the shelter would run on the same budget as last year,'
'We had no budget last year,' said the committee, 'we ran on goodwill and donations because you won't give the meanest shelter to your citizens, this year we thought you were going to step up to the plate.'
Silence.

Even last year, there was a strong voice within the congregation who said, 'if we do this, then the city won't.' Turns out they were right.
The committee cannot do this again, they cannot.
But I know they will. They have said they won't, but they will. They won't let those men and women and children have nowhere to go when the wind is blowing hard enough to push a hardwood chair along and the rain is horizontal.

But the city will.

Speech Therapy

Really? Really? I want to say. You're fed up with the subject, well I'm fed up with jerks and arseholes not keeping their ears clean, or being too lazy to sluice out the passages between ears and brain.

Two plus two equals four. That's not a matter of opinion, it's not even a pragmatic truth, it's a simple matter of definition. It's a tautology. Mathematical truths are necessary truths.

When you use a term that has the meaning of 'male', that is to say, a gender specific term, and you apply it to both genders, you are using sexist language. That is what sexist language is, or at least the biggest definition category. You cannot argue that that isn't sexist, you can argue that you don't care, but invisibility defines one group, the major group of sexist language.

Let me push the point home. Man. I am not a man. Kevin is. So man means a male person, it doesn't mean all people, because if it did, then this sentence would make sense,
'When I see man breastfeeding, I realise that man is a mammal,' and clearly it doesn't.
This one does though,
'When I see humans breastfeeding, I realise that humans are mammals.'
This one,
'You men should come into the labour ward to give birth,' and so on.

I am not a man.
Man doesn't mean all people. Man means a male. When you use the term to stand for all people, you make women invisible.

And as it happens, there is research that shows that when you use a term that IS gender specific, like 'postman', 'policeman', 'he' and you expect it to mean both genders, people think of the actual gender. They think of male.

When you are writing which font to use in html, you can write a list, and the first one that the browser comes to that it CAN read, it will. It seems that we do the same.
If you read 'he', you will visualise male. A man will be more likely to visualise male when he reads 'he or she', or even 'they'. A woman will be more likely to have female as well as male images. BUT, if the man reads 'she or he', then he will be more likely to picture a female.

Why is there a difference?
If you read the university lecturers' forums on inclusive language, you will come across a comment from a man who reports a conversation between two women, one black, one white. The white woman thought that what the two of them had in common was being women.
'When I look in the mirror,' she is reported as saying, 'I see a woman,'
'But when I look in a mirror,' says the black woman, 'I see a black woman.' The white woman has the privilege of not having to worry about her colour, her race, it's not an issue because it's 'the default'.
The man who was writing, said that this was a cathartic moment for him, because he realised that when he looked in the mirror, he just saw a person. That HE was the default gender. He wasn't aware of gender because he didn't have to, and at that moment, he understood what it meant to be privileged and what it meant to be invisible. The less acceptable sex.

The research paper points to the inevitability of implications for behaviour and practice.
Inevitability.
Almost, but not quite, a simple statement of logic.

Nog

Ah, Noggin the Nog, thank-you Di for that. I remember it well. Well...kind of, ok, maybe not that well at all, but I DO remember it.

Anyhoo, quite appropriate since we're already drinking egg nog here. I dunno, it's a Kev thing. Mince pies for me, egg nog for him, that British-Canadian Christmas-fusion. No excuse really for why we're drinking it in November, but then, there it was, provocatively showing off on the supermarket shelves.
And besides, it's our wedding anniversary. Four years today, and we've opted to stay in with our little dog.
On the other hand, Kev's cooking beats that of any restaurant I've ever been to.

For some reason, Whisky is wrapped up in one of his blankets - a black, Ikea, six dollar jobbie. It has reminded me, that whilst I was out tilling the soil of the un-garden last weekend, ready for next spring's planting, I could see the grim reaper working across the way. It looked more like a she than a he somehow, but maybe that's because at first, I thought the garment was a burqa. But then I saw that it was someone wearing a black, hooded coat, rather like the Sand people in Star Wars, or of course, DEATH. But this grim reaper was using a rake rather than a sickle.
It still seemed rather a bizarre outfit to be doing the gardening in, but then who am I to judge? I'd love a grim reaper coat.

I am hoping that the mince pies will be M&S ones this year - although I still have a ton-and-a-half of last year's most excellent mincemeat in the freezer. I will be in the UK for the pre-Christmas insanity. I leave here on the 11th and return on the 24th.
My dance card is ready.