Nikki has been gone for four days and thus far I have forgotten to do social sharing two days in a row and napped through the first twenty minutes of an important work phone call. I CANNOT BE LEFT ALONE WITHOUT AT LEAST TWO NICOLES TO HOLD ME UP AT ALL TIMES.
What happened during this wretched week when I was expected to fend for myself?
Turns out you guys have plenty of opinions about the various deaths in the Silmarillion!
“So, I settled into bed on Monday night with a plate of meatloaf, as is the custom of my people, hoped that the nineteen people who I’ve given my HBO Go login to were not all doing the same thing, and opened my mind and my heart to a new season.” Every choice Nicole makes is right and meet.
When I asked an employee at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia for directions to the Museum of the Confederacy, he gave me a strange look. “Are you sure you want to go there?” I understood the skepticism of this African American man in his smart bellman’s uniform. Black folks generally tend to stay away from memorials to the “Lost Cause.”
Studies Show That You Should Come Into This Room Right Over Here, And That You Should Come Alone
An interview with @Afamhistfail, a docent who gives slavery presentations at a historical plantation
A chat with Friend of the Toast Carvell Wallace about forgiveness and racism:
Carvell: Yes. It sort of speaks to the thing I’m always talking about, the inability of oppressed people to be seen as human in the eyes of the oppressor. Black people aren’t some mysterious magical race with superhuman forgiveness powers. We are people like you and we are exactly as pissed off as you’d be if this stuff was happening to you for all these years.
Mallory: It’s a relief for us, in some ways, a pressure valve. “If the families of nine people murdered in a church can forgive the killer, racism must not be so bad in this country.” It’s a weird and twisted moral gymnastic leap to get out of accountability.
“I don’t know your life“
There’s a venerable history of proposals for irony punctuation. The backwards question mark ⸮ is probably the most popular: it was first proposed in the 1500s as the percontation point, and was subsequently re-proposed by several people in the 1800s as the slightly catchier irony mark. The 1800s also saw a proposed “oversize arrow head with small stem”, the 1600s saw a proposal for an upside-down exclamation mark ¡, and the 1900s saw the Greek letter psi with a dot underneath (approximately Ψ̣ if my fonts would line up better). And it hasn’t stopped: in the 2000s, we’ve already gotten proposals for both a lightning-bolt exclamation mark and a (proprietary) round-swirly symbol with a dot in the middle, the Sarc Mark. (You can read all about them in detail on the glorious Irony Punctuation Wikipedia article.)
SUBS VS. DUBS: THE BATTLE CONTINUES
