Listen to what Beth wrote: "Shhh, Meade. People are going to think you're a fictional character. I knew it as soon as I saw that picture of him on a porch, reading the paper. Hey, I have that same man at home!" (Well, maybe Beth just has the same model coin-operated boy....)
What's in that container? Store-bought wild blueberries?
No! Blackberries! We went looking for ripe blackberries...
A provocative study — but at least women can feel good about our brains. We're symmetrical. Nah nah.
IN THE COMMENTS: Beth said:
EnigmatiCore beat me to it: Althouse, what's up with that "women can feel good about our brains" thing? Care to qualify it?
Oh, I fell afoul of the code of political correctness! Of course, I can casually mock men and jokingly express female superiority, but I bumbled into making fun of lesbians! And I said "we women" in a way that excluded lesbians. Now, I'm in trouble.
Yeah, my thought too. That's why I didn't blog about "My Personal Credit Crisis" — by Edmund L. Andrews — when I read it last week. And it's a long article. It's very rare that I go all the way through a long article and refrain from blogging it. Normally, I taste things, and the decision to consume them in full is automatically a decision to blog them. But I felt aggressively hostile to giving Andrews any attention. It was a readable article. I'll give him that. But I wanted to smack him.
I read this with disbelief. This guy, after child support, was bringing home less than $3k a month, and his fiancee at the time had no job at all, and it made sense to borrow HALF A MILLION BUCKS???? He keeps saying how easy it was to borrow it, but until months after the bills actually start coming in, he never thought about how hard it would be to pay back. That's the kind of thinking I've seen in friends with manic depression, in a manic phase.
It seemed to me that the guy did whatever he could get away with. And now he writes a confessional memoir about his shamelessness with the NYT as his springboard.
On any other day in 1892, Plessy could have ridden in the car restricted to white passengers without notice. According to the parlance of the time, he was classified "7/8 white."
In order to pose a clear test to the state's 1890 separate-car law, the Citizens' Committee in advance notified the railroad — which had opposed the law because it required adding more cars to its trains.
On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket for the commuter train that ran to Covington, sat down in the car for white riders only and the conductor asked whether he was a colored man.... The committee also hired a private detective with arrest powers to take Plessy off the train at Press and Royal streets, to ensure that he was charged with violating the state's separate-car law.
Everything the committee plotted went as planned — except for the final court decision, in 1896. By then the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court had gained a more segregationist tilt, and the committee knew it would likely lose. But it chose to press the cause anyway.... "It was a matter of honor for them, that they fight this to the very end."
(Thanks to our regular commenter Beth for emailing me that link.)
