Thought for Food

Guess who just got offered a FREE TICKET to the SPRINGSTEEN show at Giants Stadium!

Hint: IT’S ME!!!!!!!

No sketchy Craigslist ad required.

Thanks, Katie, you done made my month!

“China Presses Hush Money on Grieving Parents” (NYT)

After his daughter died when her high school collapsed in the May 12th earthquake, Yu Tingyun began organizing other grieving parents.  He was looking for answers about the construction of the school.  What he got was a police interrogation and a pay-off:

In exchange for his silence and for affirming that the ruling Communist Party “mobilized society to help us,” he would get a cash payment and a pension.

Why did McCain cancel his planned trip to New Orleans — and his visit to an offshore oil rig?*

Sure, the weather forecast isn’t sunny — it’s partially cloudy with a 20% chance of thunderstorms, and there’s a hurricane in a neighboring state — but the real reason seems to be that oil spills do not make for good photo ops.

An oil tanker and barge collided on the Mississippi yesterday, leaking hundreds of thousands of gallons of heavy fuel oil.  The NYT reports that “the accident had nothing to do with the safety of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico,” but it sure doesn’t look good when your planned message is about the environmental safety of offshore drilling.

*Lord knows he needs the press coverage.  Later today, his opponent, a mere American presidential candidate, is expected to draw a crowd of 100,000 in Berlin — frankly astounding and, I am certain, unprecedented.

California is doing its part to mitigate rising temperatures in the Artic  … without even trying:

Robert Stone of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues report that wildfire smoke that reaches the Arctic has the net effect of cooling the surface by reducing the amount of sunlight that makes it through.

From Discovery News.

For a disappointed friend, proof that women like us have been struggling with similar challenges for nearly a century…

From “THE COLLEGE-BRED GIRL; If at Work Must Be Sought Out by Marrying Men,” The New York Times, March 18, 1914:

Well educated, self-supporting, unmarried, and a woman — the combination seems indissoluble, often. Perhaps it is because the man, being hard to convince that women are not all alike, still believes that all college educated women are strong-minded, masculine, unyielding, unsympathetic, undomestic, and nothing more.

But from observation I should say that the reason lies not in the undesirability of the woman, nor in the lack of perception of the man, so much as the circumstances of the woman’s life, if she lives in a large city.  Her inaccessibility … is a barrier that hinders propinquity, which they say is fatal to bachelorhood.

…

Her too brief evenings, after days spent as a man spends his, in earning a living, must be devoted to the small duties of a woman, such as letter writing, sewing, errands [and blogging, keeping up with reality TV, going to the gym, networking, socializing].

…

Her vacations even do not give her freedom, for if she is fortunate enough to have a home and family she devotes some time to them, perhaps in a place where she has outgrown her school friends and is not likely to meet new men [paging the Midwest!].

…

She is perhaps a prize, but not to be won without an effort; and unless the man has foresight enough to believe her “worth having,” she does not appear “worth going after,” when other attractions and distractions are more easily accessible.

Sounds hopeless, doesn’t it?  Well, it wasn’t. Despite the author’s grim prognosis, they found love (if they didn’t, we wouldn’t be here).

And not only that, but while they were loving and making babies and having it all, they were winning the right to vote.

Thank you, my sisters, for blazing the trail.

Painting by Diego Rivera.