Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve got an assortment of unrelated topics here at the top of the post today.
The election is less than a month away (thank god. Let’s get this over with). I’m proud to say that I got my voter guide done early! Here’s the English version and here is the Spanish version. I know my Spanish is getting better because it only took Ana and I about three hours to review my translation this time. NorCal Resist also posted a guide to the propositions and had the same recommendations as me, so I feel like I got them all right (something that is normal to want and possible to achieve).
If you have ever done a genetic test through 23andMe, it’s a good time to download your data and delete your account. The company is probably going to declare bankruptcy soon, and that opens up the possibility of some other company buying all that genetic data. We don’t know who that would be or what they would use it for, but it’s really a lot of very personal information (and that information isn’t protected by HIPAA). I was considering the fact that 23andMe going out of business means the main company doing DNA tests for people who are just curious about their family history would be ancestry.com, which is run by Mormons. For anyone who isn’t aware, Mormons are obsessed with their genealogy because they believe in posthumously baptizing and performing other religious rites for people so they can get into the top-tier heaven. This reminds me that I really need to write a post about Mormonism and my Mormon upbringing one of these times.
So, is anyone else kinda freaking out about global warming? According to Scientific American:
A new report from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service warns that the last 11 months in a row have all seen global average temperatures above the 1.5 C threshold. And the last 12 have all been characterized by record-breaking monthly heat; temperatures last month hovered about 1.52 degrees above Earth’s preindustrial average.
And “there’s an 80 percent chance at least one of the next five calendar years will exceed a 1.5 C average. Nearly a decade ago — in 2015 — that chance was nearly zero.” The 1.5 C number comes from the Paris Climate Accords, which “has a long-term temperature goal … to keep the rise in global surface temperature to well below 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels. The treaty also states that preferably the limit of the increase should only be 1.5 °C (2.7 °F).” I can’t help but think about how the shitty wars the U.S. funds are a big part of the problem. Research published in June found that “the emissions from the first 120 days of the conflict alone were greater than the annual emissions of 26 individual countries and territories.” We’re sponsoring war to secure oil but the war is setting the Earth on fire faster and using the oil is also going to heat the Earth. What’s the plan here? What’s the end game? The U.S. is just five arms companies in a trench coat and we’re all being sacrificed on the altar of shareholder profits. Where is the option to vote my way out of being a country whose economy is fully intertwined with making weapons? I have no answers here but I am publicly logging my opposition.
Books and Other Words
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez goes deep into the history of the American evangelical Christian movement and how it has “embrace[d] militant masculinity” and a become vehicle for nationalism. Evangelicalism is a major proponent of “complementarianism,” a doctrine that states women and men have separate responsibilities and men are the head of the household. This has given way to an obsession with a certain kind of masculinity, with a framing of Jesus as a “badass” and “warrior,” and thinking of the United States as a country that needs protecting from bad guys, that is, non-Christians and Christians who aren’t Christian enough. This leads to a lot of wild beliefs, like that women who don’t practice this specific brand of gendered behavior aren’t worthy of men’s “protection,” (protection from whom??), which is basically the idea that women who don’t submit to men deserve to be sexually assaulted. Unfortunately for the rest of us, as Du Mez chronicles, evangelicals have embedded themselves into the country’s political scene. For example, James Dobson’s political activism in the 1990s resulted in a million callers contacting their representatives about proposed legislation that would require “homeschool teachers to obtain state certification in each subject that they taught, a requirement that would make homeschooling prohibitively difficult.” The bill did not go through and Congress instead passed legislation “guaranteeing greater protections to homeschooling families.” The book also goes into how evangelicals ended up supporting Trump, which seems hypocritical to us on the outside. However, Du Mez explains that Trump’s brand of masculinity aligned with what evangelicals think a leader needs to be, so rather than a contradiction, for many, Trump made total sense, especially in response to eight years of the Obama administration. The book ends with a bleak litany of evangelical pastors, authors, and other high-ranking men of the evangelical movement who had sexual assault allegations levied against them. This leads one man to ask himself if complementarianism is “‘just camouflage for abusive males,'” but he concludes no, it’s not. Self-awareness: not even once. This book is very good for understanding another aspect of how we got here as a culture, but it will probably make you mad and upset, so proceed with caution.
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics is a sapphic romance set it what I think is the Victorian era, but we are a little fuzzy on the details here and honestly it’s not important. This is an enjoyable, romantic tale about two ladies falling in love and doing their best to stick it to patriarchal society in their own way. One of the main characters, Lucy, wants to be an astronomer and has worked with her dad for years in his observatory. When he dies, none of the men in the scientific establishment take her seriously. However, she receives a message from our other protagonist, Lady Moth, who is looking for a translator for an important work on astronomy. The two get together for this project … and other activities. I thought it was well written and I liked both the sexy and non-sexy components of the story.
Assassin of Reality by husband and wife duo Sergey and Marina Dyachenko is the sequel to Vita Nostra, which I read two weeks ago. Although I thought it felt less like a sequel and more like the rest of the book, which is a distinction that may not make sense for everyone but it does to me. I am still incapable of actually describing this book but I will say I think this one is about whether we have free will, but expressed through the medium of depressed 20-year-olds who are at a university to learn their potential as words in the Great Speech (yes, really). I liked it.
Alexandra Rowland’s latest book, Yield Under Great Persuasion was so fun and sweet. It’s set in the same world as all of her books, a pre-industrial alternate reality where gods are real and may choose to get involved in people’s day-to-day lives. This story is part of Rowland’s Seven Gods series, which seems to be exploring the people who are favored of each god, but that makes this book sound a lot more serious than it is. The story is about Tam Beckett, who basically hates himself and assumes everyone else must hate him too. This does not stop him from hooking up with local lord of the manor Nicolau Lyford. It’s clear to everyone but Tam that Nicolau loves him and it’s mutual, but Tam is deeply invested in hating Nicolau and has been nursing a grudge for years because young Nicolau knocked over Tam’s plant in some kind of country fair-type competition. I deeply appreciated that, although Tam hates himself, he does not hate himself for being gay, which is a frequent enough trope in certain stories. Rowland’s world is truly neutral on homosexuality (though the author herself is clearly very pro considering her oeuvre so far—and aren’t we the better off for it). This is a great book for someone who wants to read a gay romance with small-town drama and enjoys characters who are just kind of stupidly in their own way, but somehow manage to grow as people anyway.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- California’s COVID surge is finally over. But expect another spike in the coming months via the LA Times. Make sure to get your flu and covid vaccines! The article notes that “More than 95% of adults hospitalized last year due to COVID-19 hadn’t received an updated vaccine.” The vaccine majorly reduces the severity of a covid infection, if you do get it. By the way, for anyone thinking covid is no worse than the flu, “Since Oct. 1, 2023, at least 56,000 COVID-19 deaths have been reported nationally, the CDC said. There were at least 17,000 flu deaths over the same time period, according to the agency’s latest estimate.”
- The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes via 404 Media. AI-generated text has been working its way into Wikipedia, so of course Wikipedians have organized a project around detecting and getting rid of it. I don’t think most people realize how pernicious AI is right now and how close we are to a full-on information apocalypse (side note: the Internet Archive getting hacked this week feels like another harbinger of the end of the internet). Someone pointed out this week that google is dead based on google image search returning a bunch of AI images for “baby peacock.” The internet is about to be over.
- Mysterious white substance smeared on 3,600-year-old mummies is world’s oldest cheese via Live Science. Wake up, babe. World’s oldest cheese just dropped.
- I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can now download over 33,000 sound effects from the BBC archive.
TV and Music
On Friday, we saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and we really liked it! Hollywood is unreasonably obsessed with sequels but this one was actually good. I thought the plot was very well put together and of course Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara were great. I liked that the story showed us more of the bureaucracy and nonsense and just fucking Looney Tunes-ass behavior in the afterlife. Unrelated to the actual movie, I found myself looking up why Jeffrey Jones, who plays Catherine O’Hara’s husband in the original Beetlejuice, wasn’t in this movie. Like did he die or what (I also had to look up this actor’s name because I didn’t know it lol)? His character appears in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice but his head and shoulders have been bitten off by a shark, so we see his headless corpse roaming the afterlife (this is barely a spoiler; it happens in the first ten minutes). This actor is not actually dead but, according to IMDB, is now a sex offender! Why are so many people so disgusting! Please stop!
Corporeal Form
It’s been over six months since I sprained my ankle, and it’s still not fully functional, so this week I visited my physical therapist about it. She said my ankle and the inside of my calf is still really tight, but she did a little bit of massage and some cupping, and that’s already made a big difference. Apparently you can buy suction cups to do cupping to yourself, so I’m supposed to do that and a few other exercises for foot and ankle strength. I’ve been having a hard time jumping because bending my ankle in the landing is not working, but in class today I already felt a lot better, so that’s a relief. It’s not going to be permanent damage.
I also got my eyes checked this week and I’m happy to report that they’re in good health and my prescription didn’t get any worse. I bought some new frames anyway because it’s been two years since I got new glasses. Getting glasses is complicated now because I need Neurolens for my binocular vision issues, but my optometrist doesn’t have it (it’s a huge, expensive machine and not that many people really need it). So, I get frames from her (she has the better selection), then take the frames and prescription to another doctor for the Neurolens. Unfortunately, the practice in my neighborhood that offered this no longer does so I’m going to have to schlepp to Roseville or something to get my dang prescription filled. Everything is annoying!
Kitchen Witchery
Although I don’t restrict soup to a particular time of year, I do believe that fall is soup season, or at least peak soup season and it is definitely the most enjoyable time of year for soup. To that end, I made pasta e fagioli (noodles and beans) from The Bean Book. We liked it a lot and, in fact, Kirk has already requested I make it again, so I think this is going into the regular rotation. As in previous weeks, I have been into that Smitten Kitchen archive. This week I made her chicken chili, although I did make a few adjustments because that’s who I am. Chili is something I don’t usually follow a recipe for (my dad taught me to make this and he’s the type to add spices based on vibes and not measurements), but I have been trying to improve my chili and try different versions (I always add too much liquid if I’m not following instructions), so it was good to have a recipe as a starting point. I left out the crushed tomatoes because I hate them, but I added sweet potato and corn because vegetables. I used good mother stallard and whipple for the beans because that’s what I had and felt like using. It was really good! Finally, one of my friends requested chocolate muffins so I made the NYT’s version of the “olympic” chocolate muffins that people were going wild for over the summer. I left out the ganache filling, but they are still very good and super chocolatey.
Cat Therapy
We took Fritz to the vet this week try to rule out any physical causes for his rogue pooping. I thought it would probably be a behavioral issue, but the vet said that they did find some issues with his bladder; it’s inflamed and crystals have formed, which may be the cause of his distress. We had to leave him at the vet for a few hours so they could get a urine sample, which I found really stressful since we just lost Huey a few months ago. I know rationally it didn’t mean Fritz was about to die, but the emotional part of my brain does not care about that kind of information. Fritz also didn’t seem pleased about his time at the vet, so it was a hard day for all. The vet has recommended prescription food to help the urinary issues and his anxiety (surprisingly there is a food formula for both of those problems together) and getting Fritz to drink more water. Unfortunately, you can’t just tell a cat to stay hydrated, so I’ve ordered a water fountain for him in hopes that moving water entices him to drink more. Also unfortunate: the food is very expensive. I guess I have to stay employed to feed my cat. If this doesn’t work, the vet said Fritz may benefit from prozac. My son has anxiety just like me.
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
