Blogs

Halley at Misbehaving.net wishes us a happy 2004. She says that "someone once gave [her] the great advice, 'If you don't hear NO at least three times a day, you aren't asking for enough stuff in your life.'" Hear, hear. I'm going to take a cue from Halley and from The Smiths:

Shyness is nice, and

Shyness can stop you

From doing all the things in life

You'd like to

Fabulous news: Assuming our applications are approved, my roommate and I are moving to a new place! It's going to be a little more expensive--(not much more though!), but worth every single penny. Check out what we get in return:

This is my personality to a T:

Via Invisible Adjunct, who is cadet blue, and golden Phlebas.

Oh, and another thing--last night this Anagram Generator brought me lots of giggles. My favorite anagram for my name is Cat Fancyfrill. :-)

The scientific breakthrough of the year:

Around 23% of the universe is made up of another substance [besides stars], called "dark matter". Nobody knows what this undetected stuff could be, but it massively outweighs all the atoms in all the stars in all the galaxies across the whole detectable range of space. The remaining 73% is the new discovery: dark energy. This bizarre force seems to be pushing the universe apart at an accelerating rate, when gravitational pull should be making it slow down or contract.

Now we know that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Science Daily has more on the story, with an additional list of significant scientific discoveries of 2003, including this sad and disturbing one: "Climate Change Impacts: Global warming was no longer an abstract concept in 2003. Scientists reported melting ice, droughts, decreased plant productivity, and altered plant and animal behavior."

If you have ceiling, consider yourself lucky! I don't! I implore you to click the "read more" and read this whole post. Really, it would mean a lot to me. If you consider yourself to be my friend or friendly internet acquaintance, please do me the courtesy of reading the post and looking at the pictures. I would really appreciate it.



At 7:15 yesterday morning, I was awakened by the sound of a BIG SLAB OF PLASTER falling from my ceiling. A week ago, a crack formed in my ceiling with an accompanying leak of cold brown water. Then more cracks branched out from it:

Thurmond Kin Acknowledge Black Daughter. When Strom Thurmond was 22 years old, he took advantage of his 16-year-old maid, Carrie Butler, and they had a daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, whom the Thurmond family is finally publicly acknowledging. It seems that Washington-Williams and Thurmond had a close relationship, but he would not admit that she was his daughter, and she kept the secret "out of respect" for him and his political career. I'm with Jesse Jackson on this one:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a native of South Carolina, said he was struck by the similarities between Mr. Thurmond's situation and that of [Thomas] Jefferson, asserting that they reflected "a deep and ugly Southern tradition" of white men taking advantage of young black women in their employ.



"By day, they are bullies," Mr. Jackson said. "By night, they manipulate race to their advantage."



Referring to Mr. Thurmond and Ms. Washington-Williams, he added: "The point that strikes me the most is that he lived 100 years and never acknowledged his daughter. He never let her eat at his table. He fought for laws that kept his daughter segregated and in an inferior position. He never fought to give her first-class status. Thomas Jefferson did pretty much the same."

Hey, everyone, it's about that time to start thinking about New Year's resolutions, if you're into that sort of thing, as I am. I think it's a good excuse to improve something in your life. The NYR I'm most proud of is my resolution on 1 January 2002 to quit smoking. For eleven years, I smoked about two to five cigarettes per day, but I haven't had so much as a drag in coming up on two years now. Yay me. I think that my resolution for 2004 will be to floss every night without fail. I already floss fairly regularly, but not every single night. I've been doing it nightly for about a week now and am going to continue in 04. Then there is that resolution that I always try to make, that one involving money--not even touching that this year. I'm sticking with the flossing, the one that's more under my control. Floss or die.

Oh, maybe I should throw in an exercise resolution, too--something realistic--three workouts per week?

In my (fantastic) Women's Studies class this semester, we read quite a few pieces on identity politics: basing one's politics on categories that one claims as one's identity, including woman, working-class, lesbian, and so on. Some theorists, most notably Butler and Wendy Brown, critiqued identity politics, in part for their normalizing tendencies. That is to say, some members in the group might not agree with the hegemonic group viewpoint/party line, so they must either keep quiet or leave the group. In a recent essay responding to comments by Harvard University president Lawrence Summers criticizing what he perceives as "anti-Israel" (and, Butler claims, by implication also anti-Semitic) views, Butler describes this kind of normativity at work: