jenk

Moar Michael Jackson Auction pictures are here.

There's one picture that most everyone reading this will recognize and that I can see someone buying.

How Ethiopians have coffee: Don't just grind the beans yourself - roast them.

Reading the tea leaves cardboard boxes.

American teenage girl uses Facebook and cops in two countries avert an attempted suicide.

I remember laughing when I read #21 in Simplify Your Life: "Sell the damn boat."

Well, now you can't, at least, you often can't at the right price, and they're a little big to just throw in the trash. So more pleasure boat owners abandoning their boats or even sinking them, making them into both navigational & environmental hazards.

Some owners deliberately sink or "lose" the boat and then tell the insurance company it was an accident. Yes, this is fraud.

California's come up with a novel solution: if it's seaworthy, you can give it to the state to dispose of for free. Hopefully they will handle disposal in a smart (recycling as appropriate?) way.

I wonder if people are abandoning cars too, or if they tend to end up back at the dealership.

1. It's raining.

2. Jet City Pizza - at least the Redmond location - has closed. The Redmond Jet City number now rings Garlic Jim's.

3. Courtesy of Slog and Seattle PD comes this brief lesson in how not to get a job.

Drink Pepsi, piss off The American Family Association :)

I first had cassoulet at Voila. I first read a recipe for it in Tony Bourdain's cookbook, where he notes that it's one of the standard French restaurant offerings because you can vary the meats and veggies to use up what's around. Or, if you do it with duck confit (like his restaurant does) it doesn't matter that it takes multiple days because you can just have it be a standard kitchen background task.

OTOH, this cassoulet recipe wouldn't take all day, much less multiple days. Might have to try it.

This video is of Alison's DTWOF slideshow presentation and Q&A at the Booksmith in San Francisco during the Essential Dykes to Watch Out For tour, on November 10, 2008. Note the several references to the recent election :)

(You don't have to know the comic to enjoy the presentation. I think. :)

Not sure if this is my first or second white Christmas. I spent all those years wanting it, and now...eh. Pretty, but a pain.

A few links you might find interesting ...

The Von Trapps's ski lodge in Vermont is still around, though the staff hides some of the more kitschy "Sound of Music" stuff from the boss.

Junk Food Science tackles the prevalence of peanut allergies. One thing I thought interesting is that studies find that the number of parents who believe their kids have allergies is much greater than those who confirm it through double-blind testing (skin pricks confirmed with food challenges against a placebo). This study was on infants, and this one was on teenagers. Perhaps other food intolerances are being lumped in as allergies? Lactose intolerance due to lack of lactase, for example, affects 1 in 10 - much more than allergies.

Perception of pain can vary depending on your perception of how it occurred.

It hurts plenty when someone, say, bonks you on the head with a badminton racket. But it hurts even more, researchers have found, if you think the bonking was no accident.

Applying "evidence-based practices" in drug/alcohol rehab situations.

The NY Times blog "Bitten" is syndicated at bittenblog_nyt.

Slate's Explainer tackles Iraqis & shoes.

More locally, The Stranger's Erica Barnett provides this illuminating interview with Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond on what the hell's been up with Metro the last 2 days. In a nutshell: Thursday their snow plan, which is about a 20% reduction in service, basically failed. So Friday they decided to "pull in and focus our service in places where we have confidence the buses can run" - mostly not in places like West Seattle and Redmond, mostly not with articulated buses, and realizing that the trolley buses (that use electrical wires above the street) can't usually change their routes to avoid a problematic hill. It ended up being about 50% of normal service. Communicating this is a problem, too.

Desmond did say they plan to run mostly normal schedules on Saturday & Sunday, assuming no more snow. Um....

As for us, well, 'nother storm is expected, a windstorm this time, which frequently means falling trees, downed power lines, and so on. Does look like a fairly normal windstorm for us - lights will probably flicker, may even go out, but hopefully not for a week this time please?

We have done prep: We have food that doesn't need much prep. Since our old downstairs flashlight died we got a new one last night. Also batteries. We also have loads of candles, including candles in glass jars (thanks k_crow for that tip.) I ran the roomba downstairs last night; dishwasher running now, and I'm off to vacuum upstairs & do a last load of laundry.

This may not seem important. siderea gets into why it was:

What was taught in the psychiatry classrooms of the US -- what had been taught since the mid-1940s [...was...] that same-sex sexual desire was not an ordinary human experience, but necessarily a symptom of a grave and disabling insanity. You could not desire members of your own sex, they taught, without also being a sociopath who would lie, cheat, steal, and rape (anything or anyone) at the slightest opportunity. Homosexuality -- for those of you who are clinicians -- was a personality disorder.
[...]
And this was, they insisted, necessarily so. You couldn't have the symptom of same-sex desire without this attendant whole personality illness, that pervaded every aspect of your life, the total of your personality. You could not be a person of character, could not have close human relationships, could not control your impulses or appetites in any way, they said.

This is what was taught. This was what was taught to psychiatrists. All of them, pretty much. For thirty years.

I was born in 1966. My earliest memories are from the early 70s. By the time I was grappling with my sexuality it was the mid-to-late 80s, and the only serious anti-gay voices I heard were religious.¹ This helps fill in some of why the older folks seemed so wigged at the idea, especially those who didn't know they knew anyone who was gay or lesbian.

What changed this? A combination of activism and education on the research that had been done - outside of the psychiatric field.

Among that research the most astonishing was Evelyn Hooker's 1956 "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual". It was a gold-standard, double-blind experiment. Psychiatry claimed that homosexuality could not exist without all sorts of other debilitating effects throughout the personality. Very well, said Hooker: let's test that hypothesis. She recruited thirty gay men who had never had therapy and thirty controls who were matched for them on age, socioeconomic status and intelligence. Each was given the standard, most esteemed, tests for psychopathology then in use. Their anonymized results were shipped to three highly esteemed experts on those measures, to be graded.

And what was returned was that the very best experts in psychological testing for psychopathology, using the best tools of the day, could not tell the gay from straight respondants on the basis of pathology -- or at all. The rate of psychopathology in the two populations was almost identical, with the gay subjects being just a tad better adjusted.

This research made an enormous splash in psychology, but psychiatry wasn't ready to hear it in the 1950s.

Psychiatry was ready to hear it in 1973.

There's a lot more goodness here.

¹cooncat reminded me that I certainly heard anti-gay slurs and crass jokes. But the serious "authority" anti-gay voices were pushing the "It's against God" reasoning, not "Gays are by definition insane" reasoning. Even the anti-gay initiatives of the time resulted in publicizing research that shows that gays are normal.