Hello again! I only planned to not post on Monday last week..but the Wasatch Front saw hurricane force winds Tuesday as a storm moved in and we were without power from Tuesday morning to Sunday evening.
It was fine in the bigger scheme of things (especially compared with the fires in Oregon and California) but frustrating at times (goodbye, everything in the freezer).
But the power is BACK now! I pretty much spent Sunday night using different appliances and turning on the lights.
A Japanese amusement park re-opened but asked riders to not scream out loud on the rides. As translated, the phrasing they used is to “Please scream inside your heart” and if that sentence pleases you, you’re not alone. You can get it on a shirt, a mug, a poster, a meme…and I want them all. This version, by Sarah Walsh, is nice and colorful:
Ride that roller-coaster stone-faced, my friends, and keep those screams inside.
I love how even the vocabulary Twitter account is sub-tweeting our president now:
The Latin proverb ‘stultorum quanto status sublimior, tanto manifestior turpitudo’ warns that inept people who engineer themselves into powerful positions will always end up disgracing themselves. It literally means ‘the higher the status of fools, the more obvious their shame’.
— Haggard Hawks 📚🦅 (@HaggardHawks) July 13, 2020
The Latin feels appropriate for President Nero, doesn’t it?
…week/month/year. This is all I have today but sure! Bring on July.
This was in Sunday’s paper:
As I said on Monday, what a time to be alive. (I’m saying it with a different inflection here, but still. Things are going on. I saw something on Twitter the other day along the lines of, “Future historians will have to pick which quarter of 2020 to specialize in.”)
Our nation’s capital looks like a military dictatorship, 100,000 people are dead from a pandemic we could have been prepared for, nearly 40 million people are out of work but corporations got over $500 billion in stimulus money, everything from policing to educational systems are dysfunctional… this could be a really long list.
A friend sent this last week and I have been watching it on repeat when I can’t mentally add to that list any more.
Tag yourself, I’m the freight train at :12.
To paraphrase a post Doc showed me, “You know things are bad if Utah is rioting.” And things are bad. As someone whose race and privilege has made sure all my interactions with police are safe and cordial, I have no right to talk about “the right way” people should protest.
But this isn’t right, either:
Nor is this:
It’s more than “one bad cop.” It’s more than police brutality, even. It’s this:
(and if that quote makes you feel immediately defensive, can I suggest reading White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo? I read it last year and yeah, it’s uncomfortable, but that’s the point)
Some things from the ‘gram:
Lisa Congdon, with the wise advice yet again
Did you know Mary Engelbreit was still making art? And has an Instagram account? And is super liberal?!
Julie Houts‘ mix of FASHUN illustration and anxiety is pretty great.
THIS. All of this. I’m sure we can all relate. (El Arroyo restaurant and their famous sign.)
We hit 40 days of staying home to self-quarantine yesterday and I just learned about the origin of the word, so let’s talk about that today. From Science Friday, The Origin Of The Word ‘Quarantine’:
Officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia) passed a law establishing trentino, or a 30-day period of isolation for ships arriving from plague-affected areas. No one from Ragusa was allowed to visit those ships under trentino, and if someone broke the law, they too would be isolated for the mandatory 30 days. The law caught on. Over the next 80 years, Marseilles, Pisa, and various other cities adopted similar measures.
Within a century, cities extended the isolation period from 30 to 40 days, and the term changed from trentino to quarantino—the root of the English word quarantine that we use today.
Also, the more things change…
For others, especially those with money, quarantine could be optional. “There are people who are able to evade quarantine, there are people who were able to buy their way out of quarantine, there are people who were able to just leave when a quarantine was imposed and not come back until it was over,” says [science historian Karl] Appuhn. “So, the people who suffered under quarantine tended for the most part to be poor—people who had no choice.”
