The online journal, notebook and playground of HFM

Todd Akins triggers some good writing, at least

You’ve heard about Todd Akins, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri, right? The guy who actually said:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Obviously there’s been a big reaction to that douchebaggery all over the internet, and dude has since tried to walk back his comments, so I don’t need to go into that noise.

Here’s some cool writing that has come out of this “discussion” about rape, though.

Eve Ensler: Dear Mr. Akin, I Want You to Imagine…

Jessica Valenti: The Seven Stages of Feminist Grief (Todd Akin edition)

Mallory Ortberg at The Awl: Other Things Missouri Representative Todd Akin Believes To Be True About The Uterus, Besides Its Ability To “Shut Down” A Legitimate Rape

Anne Gerhart, Washington Post: Rep. Akin’s comments just the latest attempt to define rape — and women

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon.com: A guide to “legitimate” rape — This is a nice spelling out of what rape laws around the country are for the uninformed.

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Typography, believability, and what literacy means

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Via the NYTimes.com – Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth.

The first part of this two-part series from The New York Times discusses the impact of different fonts on people’s opinions – the font used in a document appears to have an impact on whether people believe the content to be true and/or take it seriously.

The second part takes a look at John Baskerville, the creator of the font that was considered “most believeable” in the survey in part one.

One of the ideas that jumped out at me in Baskerville’s story – not the main point at all, but I found it interesting – is that Baskerville was critiqued as being “illiterate” by his contemporaries. But clearly he could read, and what they meant by the criticism was that he was unfamiliar with literary references, i.e., he wasn’t versed in a body of literature they considered to be “canon” for educated people of their time.

Clearly the common meaning of the word illiterate has changed over time, because it now means “completely unable to read” when we call someone illiterate. By the definition of Baskerville’s contemporaries, I’m probably quite illiterate.

And fuck you guys, I can read, bitches.

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The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater

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Link: The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater via Northwest Edible Life.

I know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.

The article is meant to be funny, but’s almost literally my experience. I tried eating more fruits and veggies at the recommendation of my cardiologist, and the seeds triggered diverticulitis and made me very sick. No matter what I did to “eat more healthy” I got spun around at every turn.

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Captain Marvel T-Shirt

I added my first Marvel Comics title to my comic book pull list today – Captain Marvel. The “new” Captain Marvel is the former “Ms. Marvel” — Carol Danvers the female adjunct to Captain Marvel from the old comics, before he died. She’s had a comic for years, but Marvel has reworked her costume and has her taking over the title of “Captain” in this new series.

The story is not too bad; a little heavy on the overt “girl power!” charge at the beginning of the book; with the villain taunting Danvers with sexist remarks while she and Captain America battle him, and of course she wins the day, because “girls are awesome! I thought none of that really needed to be said, but the rest of the story was great, with Danvers working through her reluctance to take on the title of “Captain” from her old friend and mentor.

And hands down, the new costume is my favorite superhero costume ever, knocking my former favorite – Captain America – into the dust. It’s pretty damned awesome. I love it so much, I made a t-shirt design inspired by it, that you can buy at this link on Red Bubble. Unfortunately, they made me take the design down.

Captain Marvel Shirt Design
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Dostoevsky on the Problem of Evil

Dostoevsky on the Problem of Evil.

… And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”

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Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The Newsroom’

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(‘The Newsroom’: Yesterday’s News, Today – Entertainment – The Atlantic Wire) This whole review is worth reading if you’re at all interested in Aaron Sorkin or his new HBO program “the Newsroom” (a fictional take on Cable News networks), but this particular quote is pithy and a good summary of the failure of the show:

It’s as if someone tried to tell the story of The Wire in the world of Game of Thrones. “Watch them corners, Tyrion.”

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More on the rowing….

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…with some pretty pictures, because my posts are too boring otherwise.

I decided not to blow off the rest of my classes, despite my frustration, and that turned out to be a good thing. We went out in a quad and sculled with a “guest coach” – this dude Andy who rowed for Yale – and I did better, although it’s clear that I suck at sculling. I just can’t wrap my brain around both oars and what to do with them. And I was feathering completely wrong because I’ve never had a whole class that focused on doing that correctly due to all the rain outs and unhelpful weather this spring.

Sculling Single

Sculling – more oars, more problems. Plus, tippy boat.

Monday we went out in the training barge, which is I guess a bit undignified, but it sure helped ALOT – because I finally got a chance to really focus on sweep (which is what I want to do) and I got help feathering, finally, and learned what I was doing wrong; leaving the oar feathered for WAY too long before turning it back on the square and dropping the blade. This is why I was catching crabs all the time.

Sweep – one oar, one problem. More people, more stability.

The tricky part of this is that I STILL need to get what I’ve learned into muscle memory. I’m hoping to start rowing with the other adult rowers on Tuesday nights to try to get some of this down so that I feather correctly without thinking about it. That makes me a little nervous because I don’t want to be a liability for the other rowers, but I’ve got to learn somewhere.

I’ve still been going to the boathouse regularly to erg, but I’ve switched to mornings because it’s so hot in the afternoon. Here’s a little slideshow of my workouts, for your entertainment. You can see the whole photoset here.

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Rowing at a Crossroads

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I’m having some frustrations with rowing lately, and I think I need to work out on paper some of my thoughts. Indoor rowing – love the heck out of it, and I plan to do it for the rest of my life. I’m looking around for a used ergometer for home so I can erg everyday.

Outdoor rowing – This is where my frustration lies. I know there’s a gap between my skill set/physical capabilities and other adult rowers in our club that are regularly out on the water. I took Learn to Row 1 and Learn to Row 2 at IRC to try to close that gap, so that I would be an asset in a boat and not a liability.

I can tell that I didn’t close that gap, so I took Learn to Row 2 a second time. It’s been a disaster, to put it mildly. We don’t have enough people in the class to take a larger boat out, so we keep ending up in a sculling boat, which is not at all what I’m interested in learning. We did go out in the quad (4 person sculling boat) and I felt like I was learning something, but that was one evening. Last night, though, we had 5 people, so we had to take out singles and try to learn to row and feather near the dock. If you are looking for a floating dock builder in Quogue NY, you may contact companies like EZ Dock of Long Island.

This is the type of boat I flipped. And not what I want to learn, so I was doubtful. I managed to get out and get a bit of rowing, but my instructor had to run over to help one of the other women in a run away boat, so I didn’t get much time in. When I hopped out and my partner got in the boat, we tried to steer her perpendicular to the dock… and she flipped the boat trying to get her oars set in the water. But she blamed me, although there’s not a thing I could have done to prevent it.

So we ended the evening frustrated, without learning much, and with creating distrust between the people in the class who are supposed to learn to work as a team.

I’m ready to throw in the towel on Learn to Row 2, and just go to the boathouse to erg until I can get an erg for home, and forget about getting out in a boat altogether for now. I still want to row on the water – that was the goal from the beginning – but I just can’t seem to get the skills I need to do that well.

I’ve been looking for Rowing Clubs in the Midwest that have indoor tanks for practice – basically a boat suspended in a pool that lets you learn to manage your oars without fear of capsizing. None that I can find are close enough to drive to regularly to get training, so I’m stuck, I think, until something changes. I don’t have much confidence that I can get the instruction I need from the coaches at the boathouse, so I don’t know where to go next.

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DoubleXplainer: What is a vagina?

Double X Science: DoubleXplainer: What is a vagina?.

What is a vagina?

First, let’s just practice saying the word. Vagina. Vuh-ji-nuh. VAGINA!

OK. Why are we practicing this? So that we can avoid suffering from the fluttery sensibilities of one Rep. Mike Callton of Michigan who, upon hearing colleague Rep. Lisa Brown use the word vagina during a speech on the Michigan House floor, commented:

What she said was offensive. It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.

So here we have a fellow who is so squeamish about female anatomy that he won’t even use the appropriate terminology for that anatomy in front of the people who have the body part. So beflustered are his tender feelings about the word vagina that he and the Republican leadership of the Michigan house of representatives refused to allow Rep. Brown speak again when discussing a bill about retirement of school employees. I assume they were concerned that somehow, she’d drag in the dreaded V-word again while talking about pensions.

All for the transgression of saying the word “vagina.” Vagina.

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Park 16 Apartment Fire

This evening, fire broke out in the “Park 16” apartments being build at 16th and Broadway Avenue in Indianapolis, a few blocks from our house. We ran up the street to take photos, and were able to get remarkably close.

The Park 16 Apartment complex (formerly called Caravelle Commons) was controversial, which I wrote about when they were planning it – the subsidized housing that had been at that location was poorly managed for many years. When the state and federal government allocated money to tear down the old housing and build shiny new apartments, there were lots of neighbors (including me) who were concerned about the density and size of the replacement buildings, which were much larger than the surrounding area. There were also, unfortunately, several Tea Baggers amongst our neighbors who were very vocal in opposing the project because the residents were black and of lower income. It would not surprise me in the slightest if they found this to be arson.

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