Sarah Marshall linked to this on Facebook and now I’m really into it:

Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) was a village sign language once widely used on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, U.S., from the early 18th century to 1952. It was used by both deaf and hearingpeople in the community; consequently, deafness did not become a barrier to participation in public life. Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language played a role in the development of American Sign Language.

The language was able to thrive on Martha’s Vineyard because of the unusually high percentage of deaf islanders and because deafness was a recessive hereditary trait, which meant that almost anyone might have both deaf and hearing siblings. In 1854,when the island’s deaf population peaked, the United States national average was one deaf person in 5728, while on Martha’s Vineyard it was one in 155. In the town of Chilmark, which had the highest concentration of deaf people on the island, the average was 1 in 25; in a section of Chilmark called Squibnocket, as much as a quarter of the population of 60 was deaf.

Hearing people sometimes signed even when there were no deaf people present: children signed behind a schoolteacher’s back; adults signed to one another during church sermons; and farmers signed to their children across a wide field, where the spoken word would not carry.

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Related to the Chipewyan naming issue we talked about on Tuesday, how Facebook (in league with trolls) messes with Native names:

Iron Eyes says that in late summer 2014 Facebook disabled his personal account and asked him for ID to restore it. That account suspension meant that Iron Eyes—who also co-founded Last Real Indians—also lost access as an administrator to the site’s Facebook page.

“I turned in my Standing Rock Nation ID twice, but Facebook kept my account disabled anyway,” Iron Eyes says. His tribal identification allows him to vote in North Dakota, but Facebook required a state ID.

Iron Eyes, who was highly visible during the protests in Leith, suspects that PLE targeted him, but he hasn’t been able to prove it. Ultimately he holds Facebook responsible for what he calls discrimination. “So many of us Lakota people have these two-word last names that were sometimes handed down [in] ceremonious and meaningful ways. Facebook has belittled and singled us out because of it,” says Iron Eyes, who adds that the social network didn’t offer him an explanation about why his account was flagged in the first place.

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Previously: The Comment Section For Every Article Ever Written About Intimate Grooming and Tipping and Recipes and the Third Trimester. Nicole is happy to report that after not being able to breastfeed Kid One, Kid Two is breastfeeding like a champ. LIFE IS A RICH TAPESTRY.

Breast is best.

Your issue sounds like a tongue tie, go get it snipped.

Three pediatricians have examined him and said he doesn’t have a tongue tie.

It could be a posterior tongue tie.

It COULD be a lip tie.

It’s obviously a tie of SOME kind. Just start snipping things inside his mouth until the situation improves.

The DOJ’s Ferguson report is just as horrible as it could possibly be, and I encourage you to follow Wesley Lowery’s Twitter timeline for the kind of intensive drill-down on individual excerpts you won’t get from news articles about it.

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URSULA K. LE GUIN GOES FOR IT:

Mr Ishiguro said to the interviewer, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?

It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.

To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.

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all is ashes in my mouth bc leonard nimoy is gone but he will live on in my kitchen window and all our hearts always

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Sister of The Toast Laura Ortberg Turner wrote about Katy Perry and God for Buzzfeed:

A hallmark of the charismatic church is the belief in an active, intimately involved God. Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wrote a book about the American evangelical relationship with God, When God Talks Back. “Over the last few decades,” she writes, “this generation of Americans has sought out an intensely personal God; a God who not only cares about your welfare, but worries with you about whether to paint the kitchen table.” This upbringing has undoubtedly influenced Perry as it has so many of the faithful; to them, God isn’t a distant grandfather type but an omnipotent being who has an opinion about every possible decision they have to make, no matter how small.

When Perry talks about praying before her Super Bowl performance, she is talking about (and to) this kind of God. The charismatic God “really is unconditionally loving,” says Luhrmann over the phone from her home. He’s “a loving God and a buddy God…people do this back and forth when they’re talking to God, the way two young girls talk to each other. They’re sharing everything.”

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