Hazel Scott playing two pianos at the same damn time with ease
Hazel Scott was a musical sorcerer and a civil rights hero. She:
was admitted to Julliard at 8.
was performing in top venues by 16.
pioneered “swinging the classics” and made the equivalent of a million dollars a year doing it.
was the first person of color to have their own national TV show.
went to Hollywood but refused to be cast as a “singing maid.” Demanded and got control over her casting, her wardrobe, and how footage featuring her was cut.
refused to perform in segregated venues and led charges for integration in several northern cities, notably Spokane.
She was brought down by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and has been largely forgotten. But she was a sorcerer, and a hero.
Eliot on Hardison’s brew pub purchase for ronandhermy.
i want to be clear–this rant right here? is exactly why hardison bought a brew pub
because this, this is a familiar rant. hardison has heard it every time they are even so much as within 5 miles of a brew pub (and, ps, none of those brew pubs ever succeeded in designing a decent menu, per eliot)
when he first sees the listing in portland he cringes and clicks away fast because this is one of the rants it’s not even funny to goad eliot into because it happens SO MUCH and eliot doesn’t even get amusingly wound up, just earnestly offended/annoyed, and this is just the first tenth of the rant, okay? the rest of it involves complicated dissections of where brew pubs in general fail at menu design, and then move on to particular brew pubs who have offended eliot’s soul with the travesty of their menus
no way does hardison want to sign up for a daily dose of that rant, directed at his skills. except then he admits that it would take eliot about 2 minutes to take over the menu design, and this is the guy who can identify the sound of 28 different tire treads over 31 different types of surfaces, okay, he likes a challenge, and really it’s a gift to provide eliot with this opportunity
parker doesn’t look convinced when hardison tries out that explanation. “you sound sarcastic, he’s going to think you’re messing with him, not giving him something.”
and, okay, even in hardison’s head it comes off as sarcastic, as do the fifteen other ways he tries to practice giving eliot the brew pub. the problem is, hardison and eliot are only good at emotions with each other when shit is super tense and potentially-death-filled
hardison clicks away from the page again because it seems kind of hopeless, figuring it out, but then he thinks about eliot having an industrial kitchen to cook for them in, and a staff to order around, and a menu design he’s just secretly dorky enough about to brag about on brew pub posting boards and, well
maybe eliot will knowit’s for him from the get go, maybe he’ll figure it out along the way, or maybe it’ll never click for him, whatever. hardison isn’t concerned about the credit he just wants eliot to have it
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red
one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the
number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War,
and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on
the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in
December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a
small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His
children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was
annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then,
Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized
that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him,
ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your
mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper
yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad
looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had
children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the
phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You
know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering
Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and
Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam
says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was
a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,”
Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re
sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’
Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called
the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat
Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks
like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour
and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people
saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor.
And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a
briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she
says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s
known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
I hate tumblr as much as the next guy but at least we still see dashboard posts in chronological order instead of the bullshit random order of instagram and facebook where stuff from days ago appears right below stuff that was just posted
Hey, guess what Staff just announced as an upcoming feature.
I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense
think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?
writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?
maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.
how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?
how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept – how does that work?
what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?
like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that.
THIS IS SUCH A GOOD POST THOUGH.
I think what really bothers me about the whole “men take care of the children and tend house because they’re not in charge” thing is that it reinforces the idea that traditionally feminine work SHOULD be undervalued. That there’s no way anyone could see raising children and think, “wow, what a valuable contribution to society”. Even though families are what societies are MADE of, and if you ignore the welfare of your children the society falls apart in a generation or two.
Imagine if women were seen as the ideal political leaders BECAUSE they’re the ones best suited for raising young children. What if it was assumed that government positions were sort of scaled-up households, and that only a leader who saw their subjects as their children could be fair and compassionate enough to rule effectively? What is a village, or a country, but an extended family?
On the one hand, the ability to use physical force effectively is super important for a low-tech society, and there’s always the threat of hostile military takeover, either from outsiders or via internal revolt. On the other hand, a society where all the men want to rebel is probably not a society that’s being run at all effectively, and there are other ways of maintaining control (ie religion, cultural traditions, propaganda, etc). Women could be the more educated group–in some ways that’s even intuitive, since a non-magical preindustrial society is one with a high infant mortality rate, which means it has to have a high birth rate to compensate, which means women will be pregnant a lot. If they have trouble consistently working physically demanding trades, why not assign them to jobs that require more mental exertion? Why not a society where all the lawyers are female, all the doctors are female, all the historians and most respected poets are female? If you keep that up for long enough, eventually that gets seen as an inherent sex difference, and men don’t exert physical force because holy shit they’d have no idea what they were doingonce they gained power.
It doesn’t have to be these specific differences, of course. But I think that’s the thought process that most of the best worldbuilding comes from–why are things this way? How have they stayed this way? Just saying “what if women could tell MEN what to do!” is so boring compared to asking why we value the things we value. Besides, fictional societies that are created without asking why things are the way they are are not going to stand up under close scrutiny, whether they play into or subvert our expectations.
This is such an excellent addition to my post, @apprenticebard, I am rubbing my hands together with glee.
(Not aliens, but goes along with some discussions on how cultures might differ.)
The thing about a gender hierarchy is that most gender-based “x gender is better at y task” is bullshit, and so is “all x gender have (or are supposed to have) z trait.” You will find all kinds of people of all kinds of gender presentations with all kinds of skills and traits. I mean, there is an after-the-fact correlation where girls are taught one set of things and boys are taught another, but it has zip zero zilch nada nothing to do with aptitudes and interest.
So if aptitudes and interest and the raw stuff of skills and traits is gender-neutral, how come we think some things belong to one gender or another? The answer is quite simple. Because any trait or skill that society values gets assigned to the highest gender in the hierarchy.
Let me repeat that for the folks in the back. Any trait or skill that society values gets assigned to the highest gender in the hierarchy. And you can see this because as values change, tasks and traits get passed between genders.
The best example of this that I know of is sexual appetite. See, one thing that really boggles peoples minds when they read medieval literature is that their assumptions about sex are, to us, backwards. Ask anybody today who has the greatest sexual appetite, and they’ll say it’s men! Who has the least sexual appetite? Women! A great deal of research has shown that this is bullshit, that there is a wide range in both men and women and gender tells you exactly bupkiss about sex drive, but even people who know this are guided by unconscious assumptions that men are ravening sex fiends and women are only in it for the emotions.
Except in the middle ages, they thought the exact opposite. Men were pure, in it for emotions and cerebral affection. Women were the ravening sex monsters who couldn’t control their lusts. Why? Because celibacy and sexual innocence was the highest sexual virtue. Therefore, men had it and women didn’t.
This changed in the Renaissence, when potency and virility (and hence, lots of sex) became the highest sexual virtue. Therefore, men have high sex drives and women don’t.
When you look at occupations today, and which ones we value and which ones we don’t, especially as you track changes over time, you will also notice that when men enter a field in large numbers, its prestige and pay rises. When women enter a field in large numbers, its prestige and pay fall. It is not that some jobs are high-status and men gravitate to those jobs, and women gravitate to “lesser” jobs. Instead, JOBS THAT MEN DO ARE VALUED, AND JOBS THAT WOMEN DO ARE NOT.
So for example, in the USSR there were a heck of a lot more female doctors than there were in the west at the time. Since “doctor” was a high-status occupation in the West, the West assumed that women were more equal in that they had access to high-status jobs. Not so; women were just as oppressed in the Soviet regime as they were in the West. The difference was that in the USSR, being a doctor was a low-status job. Therefore, it was open to women.
So if you are going to build a matriarchal society from scratch, your first question should not be “which genders do which jobs” but rather “which jobs are going to be high status in this society, and which are going to be low-status?” and then assign the high status jobs to the women.
This! ^^^
This post was insightful and interesting, but also rubbing me kinda the wrong way, and I couldn’t figure out entirely why until I saw @beatrice-otter’s addition.
The first thing you need to decide, when building any fictional society, is how it sustains itself. What does it run on? How does it gain power, gain security, manage labour, acquire resources? This doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert in economies or politics (although research helps). What it means is that you have to have some kind of an idea of what sort of civilization you’re looking at.
The concept of a ruler-as-parent is not inherently matriarchal (paternalism in violently bigoted societies is often a major thing, in fact, and lots of patriarchal civilzations have equated kings with fathers). The concept of a conquest-driven warrior society is not inherently patriarchal, either, we just associate parenting with women and violence with men because of our own socially-conditioned presumptions. And any civilization which heavily preferences one group of people over another is probably going to be exploitative, because that’s the main motivation for encouraging social inequity – it lets the people in power hold on to their power, and accumulate even more by increasing the disparity between their authority and other people’s. (Which isn’t to say that some of the above ideas aren’t still good ways to look at things, just that it’s kind of an incomplete perspective).
The ‘elite’ set the tone for what is valued or devalued, as it suits the climate of their society. When computers were a new and niche thing, and no one was quite sure how far they would take off, programming was considered a branch of secretary work – it was women’s work (and WoC’s work). As computers became more influential, and men in the field became more frustrated with having their work ‘devalued’ by its association with women, a concerted effort was made to drive women away from computing and associate it with them, instead. And now the typical image of a computer expert is, of course, a dude with glasses. Image campaigns were launched, more men were recruited to the field and fast-tracked to promotions, women were discouraged and pushed out via harassment and reduced career mobility, and historical retcons were put forward to make it seem as if they’d never been there to begin with. The social equivalent of headbutting your partner out of the classroom window on Science Fair Day and telling the teacher you did all the work yourself.
Of course, there is a question of how one gender initially gains this kind of advantage over another, and then builds off of it in order to reach the level of privilege where this sort of shit can fly. We don’t honestly know for certain, but women are, of course, strongly associated with the ‘gives birth’ end of the reproductive equation. Pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, these things can all disadvantage someone when it comes to doing other stuff – especially if you’re doing them routinely because infant mortality rates are high and birth control is less-than-reliable. Free time and mobility are significant factors in who can explore their interests or focus on learning new skills, travel to other places, or investigate untested concepts.
So, provided the genders of this hypothetical matriarchy are still composed along our own lines of thinking*, that should probably be taken into account when considering what runs this civilization**. Either the people going through pregnancies need to have an easier time of it for some reason (i.e. magic makes it easier on them, society is comprised of immortals who can waste time on loads of stuff anyway, etc) or the people not having babies need to have a harder time of it for some reason (i.e. magic makes it rougher on them, pregnancy provides some kind of immune boost that makes people more resistant to some kind of plague, etc).
Because the unpaid/unacknowledged part of the equation is the most important. A matriarchy which is run by rule of violence still might not be all that interesting to read/write about in the end (at face value, it can look less like a meaningful social critique, and more just like ‘look how horrible the world would be if women were in charge! This is what feminists want!!!’ which is.. tiresome). But in order to switch that around, step one is figuring out where the power is, and how this one group of people got a hold of it. That will give you the best indicator for how they should go about keeping it, which will, in turn, tell you what social roles are probably going to be the most lauded and compensated.
*More works which change this up would be pretty cool, I think. And shine some light on the arbitrary nature of a lot of presumptions about gender.
**Of course, that’s if you don’t just want to shrug and go ‘I dunno, something happened in the early days of the major society we’re focusing on, and the advantage tipped far enough the other way that women have been able to build up on it since’ – that’s also totally fair.
andtheytoldustotellyouhello 