My Kid Does Art

 

Watercolor on paper.

I believe this is from one of the photographs I took on one of the many camping with my brother Mike. California, maybe? Or maybe Colorado.

Best Posts of 2023

 These are the top posts (as judged by me!) of 2023!

January

Culture War Idiocy  (The Right has a fake moral panic about gas stoves)

February

Just Saying (the fake moral panic about trans kids)

March

I write about The Fablemans

April

What I did on Sunday

May

What My Students Do Not Know (a partial list)

June

Arkansas Ban Overturned

July

Ignorance is Conservative

August

I Write a Poem

ties with Children's Books I have Known

September

I Interview Martha Wells

October

I discover an Important Fact

November

Banning Books from the Left

December

Story Sale! (I finally sell a story to Clarkesworld)

Ties with Public Transit

Thanks for reading, all y'all! See you in the New Year!

We Fulfill the Commandment

 There's a meme that goes with this, about Jews having to eat Chinese on Christmas, and what sort of acts fulfill the commandment, but I can't find it. (Update: I found it! See below.)

Anyway, we ate Chinese from a new takeout place. It was tasty!

Update: Here is the meme!

At this link

Transcript:

Jack Abramowitz  Dec. 13, 2018  New York, New

York Okay, let’s review the laws of eating Chinese food on December 25th.

Beis Shammai say that one must eat both an appetizer

and an entree; Beis Hillel say an appetizer or an entree.  Others say that one fulfills his obligation even with won ton soup alone.  The halacha follows the others.

There is a machlokes as to whether one can fulfill his

obligation by eating fortune cookies.  Our practice is to be machmir in this matter.

The mitzvah is to eat Chinese food on Christmas Day.  If one

ate Chinese food on Christmas Eve, he has not fulfilled his

obligation until he eats from his leftovers the next day.  The leftovers need not be reheated but one who does so is praiseworthy.

If one ate sushi, Indian, or Thai, he has fulfilled

his obligation after the fact (b’dieved).  If one ate pizza, burgers or Mexican, he has not fulfilled his obligation.  Rabbi Meir says that one fulfills his obligation with Mexican because it is exotic.  B’shaas had’chak, a shaila must be asked.

End transcript.

Beis Shammai and Beis Hillel were schools, one could say are schools of thought, named for their founders.

Machlokes (machloket): a dispute or disagreement about

Jewish law

Machmir: exceeding the bare minimum requirement

B’dieved: after the fact (in an acceptable but not

ideal manner)

B’shaas had’chak: in extenuating circumstances

Shaila: a question





Late Hanukkah

 The kids had to work during actual Hanukkah, so we had a late Hanukkah dinner with them here on Christmas eve. The kid and I made latkes, Dr. Skull made brisket and matzah ball soup, which the kid helped with, and the kid's boyfriend made deviled eggs. (He has unwisely revealed to me that he knows how to make excellent deviled eggs, so now I compel him to make them on every occasion.) 

It's cold and rainy here. Tomorrow the boyfriend flies out at dawn, to visit family in Pennsylvania.

Previous to the actual meal -- you can see the Hanukkah candles burning

the famous deviled eggs -- that's my mother's deviled egg plate

Latkes frying in the pan

ETA: The latkes recipe

LOL

 

Delightful Ron DeSantis analysis here pic.twitter.com/9L6PM03H0p

— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonyLfisher) December 24, 2023

Image: Delightful Ron DeSantis analysis here: "This quote pretty much sums it up: if the great promise of the DeSantis campaign was Trump without the baggage...what the Republicans got was Ted Cruz without the personality." 

Florida Man Teaches History

 From Alas, a Blog -- history from real Americans:

More on the "right" to ban books.

Earlier this month, a new study by PEN America revealed that there had been at least 5,894 book bans in US public schools from July 2021 to June 2023, with more than 40% of them in Florida, birthplace of a rightwing parents group called Moms for Liberty.

The books targeted are frequently those which tackle issues like racism, gender or LGBTQ+ rights.

What I'm Reading Now

Nick Fuller Googins, The Great Transition

This one is really good. It's Googins' first novel, which both delights and saddens me. (More novels to come -- yay! -- no backlist to read -- boo!) Set in the near future, which is to say about thirty years from now, it is the story both of those who are fighting to save the planet as its ecosystems collapse due to global climate change, and the story of the daughter of two of those fighters, sixteen years later. 

The climate science seems accurate and more than a little scary. The fact that we will have to change the world to save the world also seems accurate. And Googins is a skilled writer, one who gives us both great pacing, good characters, and a lot of great detail. Also, the novel asks an important question -- what should be done about those who do wrong? Do we forgive, or do we take vengeance? The answer we get is not the standard one, fair warning.

Highly recommended. 

 

Tien Pham, Family Style

This is a memoir about how Tien and his family fled from Viet Nam at the end of the war there, traveling first to a refugee camp and then to the US, where his parents struggle to stay afloat, and Tien and his brother navigate the US school system and US teen culture. The parents work a variety of jobs before buying their own business, which grows to several businesses (the kids work in the stores); Tien and his brother shrug off their culture in an effort to be good Americans. Tien eventually begins to regret forgetting his mother tongue and the Vietnamese culture, but that's not the point of the graphic novel. That journey from refugee to US citizen is the point.

Nice art and good narrative techniques here. If I were going to teach a class in graphic novels, I'd include this one. (Who knows, I might be. I'm teaching script workshop in this spring, so why not graphic novels?)

Kate Collins, A Good House for Children

This is a horror story about a house that devours people. It's really well written and engaging, and it's set it England, with a prototypical small English village in Dorset, all the stuff I like, but I could not finish it because it was too scary. Great characters. I wanted to keep reading, because I wanted to know what happens to them, but I couldn't take it. I'm a lot less able to put up with scary stories these days apparently. If you don't mind scary this might be for you.

Stacy McAnulty, Forever Twelve

A boarding school, immortals, secrets in the past. This is a YA novel about kids who have been twelve years old (more or less) for a couple hundred years, who all meet up to attend this boarding school every few decades, just so they can hang out with one another. It's a lot harder to be an immortal twelve year old in the 21st century than it was in say, the 18th century, when kids could work at factories and no one would blink an eye. Also, being ten to twelve years old forever -- an immortal prepubescent -- is not as much fun as you might think, which is the central plot of this novel. I liked this one a lot. There's going to be a sequel, which I will definitely seek out.

John Scalzi, Starter Villain

Scalzi novels are kind of like potato chips: tasty, not very filling, enjoyable, pretty much all the same. Sure, one flavor is BBQ and another is Sour Cream & Onion, but basically it's a chip. 

By which I mean to say that I always enjoy Scalzi's novels, and that's pretty much what they're for, and I enjoyed this one too. A down-on-his-luck guy who wants to turn his life around by buying the pub in his hometown instead has his life turned around when his rich uncle dies and leaves him a request behest -- that is, do this, and you'll get a (relatively) small reward. Relatively compared to the uncle's fortune, which runs into the trillions.

Fulfilling the request leads to the guy (a typical Scalzi everyman) having to become a villain (his uncle's word) at a Batcave like facility on an island with live volcano. There are talking (well, typing) cats, intelligent dolphins and whales who want to form a union, and many plots twists. It's a lot of fun, if not especially deep. Recommended if that's what you're looking right now.

Currently Thinking about Next Semester

Next semester I am teaching two Comp I classes. What I've been doing for the past few years, and what works really well, is I'm forcing the entire class to research and write a paper on a specific subject, which I choose -- like, this past semester, they had to choose an invasive species and either write an informative paper about the effect of that species on the environment, or a solution to the invasion. I made them read a lot of scientific papers and some general media about feral hogs and the hippos in Columbia, and they proposed and researched some invasive species of their own.

As I said, it works pretty well, because they have a limited field in which they can choose a topic, and so I don't get a bunch of shit papers like "why social media is bad" or "abortion is murder" or "gun control just means only criminals have guns."

Also it cuts down on plagiarism. When they have to propose a topic in the first weeks of class, and then find a source on that topic and write an evaluation of it as a source; and then write an annotated bibliography for that topic; and then write an essay map for that topic, and so on, it both teaches them how a research paper is written and keeps them from buying a paper off the net or having an AI write it for them, since they have to write all the steps along the way first.

Though some of them don't bother to do these steps and just give me the final paper. But then they fail the class, so.

ANYWAY: I'm trying to think of a topic for this coming semester. I don't do the same topics in consecutive semesters, because we do have frats and sororities on campus, so I don't want to tempt people into using the essay banks I know those groups have.

I have two ideas in mind right now.

(1) The problem of plastics in the environment

(2) The causes/solutions for poverty

The second seems a really interesting topic, especially for this moment in time; but about half my students are working class and about half come from the wealthy or religious families in town who don't want to send their kids up the hill to the flagship because they want their kids to stay under their thumbs. So I'll have a bunch of kids raised up with the prosperity gospel who think being poor is a crime/sin, and a bunch of kids who have been raised up in households without enough money who also think being poor is a crime/sin. The topic will make both sets emotional, is what I'm saying. They won't be able to look at the question impartially, and being emotional will mean they won't be able to think about the question. They'll just emote at it.

Plastics is better. It's still a current problem, and even though they'll STILL get emotional (because many of them are conservative, and thus thinking about harm done to the environment is a crime/sin), they'll get less emotional about that. And it's an interesting topic. I can use the research to show them why there's no simple answer here -- why, for instance, banning straws won't solve the problem, and why "vegan leather" is a terrible idea, and why we can't, in fact, just stop using plastic.

But there's no real solution, and plastic is in fact terrible for the environment, so it will be a depressing semester.

I should find a third topic, I guess.

Grading Accomplished

I have submitted my grades. Also made bagels, done about ten loads of laundry, and mopped the floor. I even made dinner one night. Anything to keep from grading, apparently.

But it's done, and now I can devote all my time to writing, reading up on how to write screenplays, reading novels, and exercising.

At least until January 10th.

Anti-Trans Laws AKA State-enforced Bigotry

 Missouri has proposed a law that will fire teachers, nurses, and social workers if they call a child by any name other than that on their school records -- so, for instance, Tim instead of Timothy -- or if they fail to "report" any child's deviant gender performance. These fired people will be suspended from being rehired for four years.

Transphobes have gone from "We shouldn't silence people!" who want to call kids by "wrong" names or pronouns to "We MUST silence people!" who call kids by names and pronouns we don't like.

"That's unenforceable!" nice liberals insist, but they're forgetting how laws work in the US. Of course no teacher will be fired for saying "Tim" instead of "Timothy." (Unless, of course, they're a black teacher or a gay teacher or a trans teacher or a teacher the principal just doesn't like.) Instead, this law will be used to go after trans kids and after teachers, nurses, and social workers who support trans kids.

That's the purpose of the law. To punish and harass trans kids and those who support them. To stop anyone from supporting trans kids, and to make those trans kids afraid.

And if you think this stops with kids, you're pretty fucking delusional. It's just like Roe v. Wade. Once the reactionaries won with abortion, they moved on to birth control. Once they win with birth control, they'll move on to policing what sort of jobs the gestating can hold, what sort of food they can eat, where they're allowed to be -- fascism doesn't stop, y'all. It's goal is total control, and there is always a new neck to step on.

ETA: More on the subject:

School officials - a category that includes teachers, counselors, and nurses - would be required by this law to out kids to their parents. There's no provision or exception made for cases where this would endanger the child. Disgusting. https://t.co/AQJkWtq3J2 pic.twitter.com/H0uPf4JzVD

— Barry makes comics. Find me on Bluesky! (@barrydeutsch) December 17, 2023

Multi-Tasking

At this very moment I am

• grading final papers
• doing laundry
• making bagels
• listening to music
• drinking tea
• re-reading bits of a SFF novel which I plan to review this evening

Life in the fast lane, y'all.

Thermostat Conflict

One item on the "Is this a viable life partner?" check list ought to be thermostat settings.

In the summer this is not a problem for Dr. Skull and me, since it is impossible to get the house as cold as I would actually like it, and also way too expensive.

But in the winter this is a conversation we usually have six or seven times a week:

DR. SKULL: It's cold in here.

ME: It's 70 degrees! (It is actually 66 degrees.)

DR. SKULL: It's so cold in here. Why is it so cold in here?

ME: It's fine.

DR. SKULL: Can't we turn the heat up?

ME: Put on a sweatshirt. You're going around in a teeshirt and shorts and complaining it's cold. Where's your schmata?

DR. SKULL: (grumbling as he goes to look for his hoodie) I'm freezing to death.

Story Sale!!

I just sold a story to Clarkesworld, a market I have been trying to crack for literally years.

I have only one thing to say: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

Supreme Court Takes Mifepristone Case

In the year 2000, the FDA approved mifepristone as a safe and effective drug. Mifepristone is a abortion pill typically used for medical abortions or to complete partial miscarriages in the first trimester of pregnancy. 

Last year, anti-abortion crusaders sued to have the drug removed from the market, saying the FDA had acted too quickly. Mind you, this is a drug that has been used all over the world since the 1990s, and which has undergone multiple clinical trials, all showing it is safe to use, with side effects occurring in less than one percent of patients.

Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. The petitioner for the medication (which is on the WHO's list of essential medications) have also asked the Court to decide whether the anti-abortion crusaders have standing to sue.

“You can’t just bring random lawsuits in court. You actually have to have been harmed by something,” said Greer Donley, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. “That’s really what standing analysis is all about, to try to figure out if if the people who bring the lawsuit actually have a stake in the case.” Numerous legal experts have questioned whether the challengers in this case have properly demonstrated that they have been harmed by mifepristone’s continued legality.

The anti-abortion crowd are not being harmed by this medication, which none of them have taken (or at least none of them will admit to have taken). No, what is being harmed is their ability to force other people to do as they are told -- told, that is, by these anti-abortion fanatics. 

What is being harmed is their ability to control the lives of other people. 

They believe they should be given the power to control the lives of those they consider inferior -- women, the poor, the working class, LGBTQ people. Not being allowed to control the bodies of those groups is the harm being done to them. And that -- not zygotes or fetuses -- is their real concern. If women and the working class and poor people and LGBTQ people are allowed to control their own bodies, they might begin to think they can control their own lives. They might even think they should have civil rights and equal protection under the law. 

This is also why they're infuriated by trans people. If people are men or women because they say they're men or woman, well, how will these people know which people are by nature inferior and subject to control? 

This is why they get more furious about trans women than they do about trans men (although they also hate trans men, don't worry). Trans women violate their belief about how the world works. Trans women both are and are not an inferior gender -- if they're women, they should be controlled; if they're men, they should do the controlling. But to control a trans woman -- how can they do that? 

Traditionally they have controlled women through rape, the threat of rape; forced pregnancy and the threat of forced pregnancy; and violence. They can't force trans women into pregnancy, and while they can threaten rape, that's another conflict for this group, since they don't want to admit rape exists. 

They can, of course, still use violence and the threat of violence, which they do. And they can and do use the legal system as a form of violence -- to control trans women (and trans men) by that method. Hence all the fucking laws being put in place over the past few years.

I've avoided using the word "conservative" to talk about these people. They aren't conservatives. They're reactionaries and fascists. They don't want to conserve. They want to control, and they are perfectly happy to strip away the civil rights of others as well as to drive this country back to the nineteenth century if that is what it takes to allow them to control those they consider property.

At the Laundromat

I had to wash the slipcover for my sofa, which I used to wash once a year but until today had not been washed since before the pandemic. It has to be washed at a laundromat with oversized machines because it's just too big and heavy for any normal machine.

Anyway, so I hadn't been to a laundromat since before the pandemic and holy hell, y'all, the prices have more than doubled. It used to be $3.50 to use the big machine. Now it's $8.00. I also took the rest of my laundry, so long as I was there, and the regular machines are now $4.00. They used to be $1.50.

The dryers are now ten minutes for fifty cents. I think they used to be fifteen minutes for fifty cents, but I'm not sure about that. The big dryer, which I have to use for the slipcover, is $3.75 for 30 minutes. I don't remember what it used to be.

Anyway, the entire experience took me two hours and cost me over $30.00, counting the cold brew coffee I bought at the gas station on the way.

Besides me, the clientele was mostly mothers with small children, though there was one guy who looked like he worked on oil rigs. I remember going to the laundromat with my mother when we were small; she would buy us candy from a snack machine, and there was a corner with toys for all the kids. No snack machine in this laundry, and no toys for the kids. They ran up and down screaming instead, and seemed to have just as much fun as I did with the toy garage and blocks.