Hello, friends and enemies. Has anyone else noticed that the spelling and grammar check in Microsoft Word is getting worse? I’ve found myself asking more and more “What the fuck are you talking about” when Microsoft makes suggestions. In the last week, it told me that I might want to change the word “conflate” to “conflict” (no), “received approval to send” to “approval to sending” (no!), and the name “Courtney” to “chutney” (Super no!!). I also asked the internet and it seems people are going to Microsoft’s own website to be like “hey, why are you so bad now?”
The answer seems to be that spell check is telling you what might be wrong, which is what it has always done. Sure. I don’t give all my trust to spell check. After all, I am an editor. But it seems like it used to have better suggestions, or at least not so many garbage ones. Since I can’t trust the grammar check not to waste my time, I ended up turning off a bunch of the things it can look for so it will stop bothering me with utter nonsense. Anyway, this is your regular reminder not to trust the computer too much.
Rampant Consumerism
I bought two book-related items that are, I think, improving my life. First, I got a popsocket for my kobo reader. I was listening to a podcast where the host mentioned that she used one for her Kindle and I was impressed. This had never occurred to me. I bought one tout de suite and it really is a lot easier to hold the ereader with one hand!
The other thing I bought is a lovely notebook from Leuchttrum. I was inspired to start writing some notes by hand about the books I read. I follow @saffanabana on instagram and she makes a lot of great videos about media literacy. She recently posted a video about how to retain what you read. My knee-jerk thought was that I retain a lot of what I read and this video wasn’t for me, but then I thought some more and realized I don’t remember the non-fiction I read as well as I would like. Her system involves writing in books to note important ideas or disagree with the author, and then summarizing each chapter on the chapter’s last page. I’m not morally opposed to writing in books, but I do read a lot of books from the library and a lot of ebooks so I recognized that this system is not for me. I wanted to try it though! So I bought a nice notebook and wrote down quotes that “altered [my] brain chemistry” as recommended and summarized the chapters as I read. Now I have a record of what I wanted to retain of the book even though the book is back at the library. I like the idea of using this to engage more with what I’m reading instead of just passively taking it in. We shall see if it sticks.
Could this be it? The notebook that changes my entire life?
Books and Other Words
I tried out my new notebook this week to take notes while reading All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship by Jennifer Natalya Fink, which I picked up from the Lavender Library. This work is part academic and part autobiographical, and introduces the concept of “re-lineating” disabled family members and ancestors (as opposed to “de-lineating,” which is what has been done in many families who institutionalized or wrote disabled family members out of their history). Fink proposes that if we were more aware of existing disabilities, we might be able to move away from the narrative of what a shocking trauma it is to have a disabled child. She also acknowledges that 20 percent of humans are disabled or become disabled at some point in our lives, so rethinking how we incorporate disability into our family and our stories is important. She goes into some of the history of delineating the category of “disabled,” which arose through fascist policies in Nazi Germany and in the United States as a way to mark certain groups as disposable, and discusses some of the history around ugly laws and their impact on disabled people as late as the 1970s. The chapter that I found most illuminating was one about care giving, with Fink explaining that re-lineating disabled family also means acknowledging the care work necessary for many disabled people. She highlights the struggle this presents for women in particular, who are responsible for the majority of all care work, noting that the “fear of being burdened by the care of another, of having one’s hard-fought feminist freedom curtailed … shapes the fear and stigma underlying ableism.” Another aspect of our fears around disability is found on the other side of this coin: “fear of disability is fundamentally a fear of care.” That cuts deep. Our society, which prioritizes individualism, is antithetical to the level of care disabled people need, even though at some point in our lives, we all become disabled. This shame of needing to be cared for instead of ruggedly pushing through any physical or mental problem animates ableism and makes a lot of people, historically speaking, try to erase disability from their family tree. We don’t want the reminder that it could happen to us too. Bringing these members of our biological or found families, even sometimes in only a metaphorical way, back into our lineages can help us see the full picture of the human experience and start to remove the shame of something that shouldn’t have to be shameful.
I wrote earlier this year about downloading and removing the DRM from all my Kindle ebooks. After doing all that, I finally got my books transferred to my Kobo reader. Now I have all the ebooks I’ve bought in one place, which rules. One of the books I rescued from the Amazon DRM was Foundation by Isaac Asimov, which I’ve been meaning to re-read since we’ve been watching and enjoying the TV show. I read this for the first time when I was probably in middle school and getting really into science fiction, and I read it again in 2011 but a lot of the details of it had not stayed with me. On this read through, I could kind of see why. The book moves quickly, with the story largely propelled by dialog and with Asimov committed to making all new names that sound plausible in English but that are all novel names (like “Hober Mallow” or “Poly Verisof”), which means it takes a little more work to keep track of everyone. As much as I like and appreciate this story for being part of my early reading in the genre, it’s a little hard to really love it now. There is exactly one female character in the book and she’s depicted as a shallow harridan who hates her aristocratic husband (he hates her too, for what it’s worth). And, you know, that’s unpleasant to read! The characters the story follows, that is, the men of the Foundation, are universally the smartest guys in any situation and they succeed by outsmarting people, by knowing what drives people to do what they do even when they themselves don’t know. In that sense, it’s almost more of a mystery novel, which is not a genre I’ve ever been a great fan of and perhaps also why I wasn’t in love with this particular novel. Still, it was interesting to see how much the show runners of Foundation have been able to make out of kind of minimal characterization and exposition. I plan to keep reading but I’m not expecting these books to be as magical to me as they may have once been.
I heard about Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan Greenwell on the Culture Study Podcast. I immediately requested the book from the library after listening to the episode. This book made me mad and will probably make you mad too. It chronicles four people whose lives have been affected by private equity in different industries: retail, medicine, journalism, and housing. Private equity refers to firms that buy up other companies or entities and do not offer public stock, like Black Rock or Bain Capital (of which Mitt Romney was the CEO). Most people recently became aware of private equity when Toys R Us went out of business because of a private equity leveraged buyout. Private equity firms take out huge loans to buy other companies and then find ways to make money off them. However, the private equity firm itself is not responsible for paying back the loans: that’s on the company being acquired. Private equity firms are in search of short term profits—their executives usually make millions of dollars off any given deal—and often do things like sell off a retail chain or newspaper’s real estate to make money. Of course, then the store or newspaper has to start paying rent for its location, which costs them more money. Genius stuff here. One of private equity’s selling points is that it helps distressed companies, but as Greenwell reports, “employment shrinks by an average of 4.4 percent in the two years after a leveraged buyout and 12.6 percent when the company was previously publicly traded.” Additionally, “companies acquired by private equity firms are much more likely to go bankrupt than their peers,” with 20 percent filing for bankruptcy compared to just 2 percent of other companies. So, who is this really helping? A lot of private equity’s funding comes from public pension funds, which is really quite perverse since private equity is buying up companies and putting people out of jobs theoretically in service of making money for public employee’s retirement.
Private equity’s tactics remind me a lot of austerity measures getting imposed on countries with a lot of debt, which, like private equity, results in everyone having a worse time except for the people at the top making money. This book also had me asking the question: what is the purpose of a business? Is the purpose of a newspaper to inform people in a community or to make money for executives? Is the purpose of a hospital to treat injuries and deliver babies or to be repeatedly sold to different firms to make bonuses for executives? You might think the answer is obvious, but in the case study of a Wyoming hospital that Greenwell details, the private equity company shut down the obstetrics department to “save money.” Yet, the people living there did not save money, they had to travel 30 or more miles away to give birth, and the rate of emergency medical transport via helicopter skyrocketed. Ultimately, a lot of these costs were paid by Medicare and Medicaid because that’s the insurance that people using the hospital had (and Medicaid pays for a significant percentage of births in this country). I am, personally, tired of rich assholes taking advantage of public funds to enrich themselves, like the fact that huge numbers of Walmart and McDonald’s employees need to use SNAP and Medicaid to survive. Call me a rotten socialist if you must, but I think that people putting in a full day of work should be able to afford food, housing, and healthcare. Unfortunately, our gutless congress is probably not going to act to solve any of these issues anytime soon, since, as Greenwell informs us, private equity spends a lot of money on lobbying! This whole damn country is a pyramid scheme.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine via On Data and Democracy. I am sure most of you are familiar with the Democractic party fundraising emails where Nancy Pelosi emails you and says if you don’t donate $5, America will be destroyed (I’m starting to think that she’s making these threats herself). This combination of guilt and urgency has been an effective (if deeply annoying) fundraising strategy. However, this guy crunched the numbers and found that the vast majority of the funds Democrats raise is not going to advocacy work, but to a series of PACs, strategists, and consultancies, “represent[ing] a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent,” which means that “for every dollar … 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns.” Long story short: don’t waste your money donating to the Democratic party apparatus.
- Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles via 404 Media. Sometimes I think Wikipedia is the last line of defense against a fully AI-slopified internet.
- In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen via Random Thoughts. This begins, “As a restaurant owner – I’m astounded at the rate of progress since microwaves were released a few short years ago. Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s microwave will be able to cook an entire Thanksgiving Dinner. Ten years from now a microwave may even be able to run the country.” It’s satire, just to be clear.
Corporeal Form
I’m sure you’re all dying for an update on my busted knees. I saw my physical therapist this week and she has ruled out a sprain/ligament tear, but she feels fairly confident that I tore my meniscus. I have plans to see my doctor this week so we’ll see if she confirms that. Even if she doesn’t, the PT regimen is kind of the same no matter what the knee injury is: strengthen the muscles that support the knee. That is what I have been trying to do (despite the current injury), which is also why it’s so frustrating to get hurt. Like, damn, how strong to my legs need to be? I need to focus in particular on my inner thigh muscles, which are a very difficult group to work out without a machine but we are going to have to make do with some exercise bands and a will for gains. I did feel gratified that the PT said I had been doing the right stuff. I told her my knees were feeling a little questionable when weight lifting so I shifted my approach and she said that was a good course of action. I know what I’m doing! Just my body doesn’t always want to cooperate, but she’s doing her best.
Kitchen Witchery
The only noteworthy thing I cooked in the last fortnight was this really good bowl of beans and rice: double brown beans. I used the calypso beans from Foodocracy (I used to subscribe to the bean club at Primary Beans but they decided to get out of the bean game and sold to Foodocracy so here we are with another bean club) and they were so creamy and delicious. I was highly impressed. I was even a little lazy with the recipe and used a pre-made masala instead of toasting and making a whole spice blend as the recipe calls for, but it was still very good. I also made s’mores rice krispie treats, which were a hit. I am not a big cereal eater but I do love golden grahams as a treat sometimes so it was tasty to have them in an actual treat. Finally, just to keep it real with you all, I’ve included a photo of a recent lunch: rolled up turkey and cheese along with pizza rolls. I don’t regularly eat pizza rolls but sometimes it’s what sounds good.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz’s favorite thing right now is the blanket fort I set up for him. I saw him trying to burrow from one blanket to the other and I thought, okay he wants to be in blankets. I was right because he’s been spending just about every afternoon in there.
