Ugly Thoughts

from "The Twits" by Roald Dahl illustrated superbly by Quentin Blake

The Four Agreements - A Code for Life by Don Miguel Ruiz

it's a magical world

The ‘Beauty Bias’ at Work

By Lindsay Beyerstein

In her provocative new book, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Law and Life, Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode argues that workers deserve legal protection against appearance-based discrimination unless their looks are directly relevant to their job performance.

Six cities and one state already ban various kinds of appearance-based discrimination. Contrary to the dire predictions of critics, these laws have not generated a flurry of litigation. Michigan, which banned appearance discrimination in the 1970s, averages one such lawsuit a year.

Rhode convincingly argues that beauty bias in the workplace is a widespread problem with serious consequences. Between 12 and 14 percent of workers say they've suffered some kind of appearance-based discrimination on the job.

It should go without saying that discrimination on the basis of appearance is unjust, especially when it comes to features individuals have little or no control over. Rhode does a good job of spelling out why such bias is offensive to human dignity and equal opportunity.

Volumes of psychological research have shown that unattractive people are assumed to be less intelligent, less capable and less trustworthy. Almost from birth, infants stare longer at faces that adults rate as attractive.

Employers are not immune. Resumes get less consideration if the boss thinks they're coming from an unattractive person. Rhode notes that unattractive people are less likely to get hired and promoted and that they earn less on average, even in occupations where appearance has nothing to do with the job.

The increasing prevalence of obesity in America has done nothing to curb virulent prejudice against fat people. Ironically, immobilizing obesity is protected as a disability, but discrimination based purely on cosmetic aversion to fat is totally legal. In one study, 43% of overweight women reported feeling stigmatized by their employers. Obese women earn 12% less than their thinner counterparts with comparable qualifications. Obese women are more likely to live in poverty, even after controlling for other factors.

Rhode notes that beauty bias also exacerbates and perpetuates other kinds of discrimination. Female workers are held to more elaborate grooming standards than their male counterparts. Then again, women also face discrimination in more senior positions for being too pretty or too sexy. Debrahlee Lorenzana, a Citibank employee is making headlines for claiming that she was fired for distracting her male colleagues with excessive sexiness.

There's a lot of overlap between appearance discrimination and racism. Some have speculated that coworkers percieved Lorenzana in a more sexualized way because she's Latina. Stereotypically Anglo-European features like smooth hair, slim hips, and pert noses loom large in our prevailing beauty ideals. There's a class component in beauty bias, too. A gleaming smile engineered by an orthodontist is a badge of membership in the middle class. As we all know, poverty increases the risk of obesity.

Thanks to the skyrocketing popularity of plastic surgery, a gulf is emerging between those who can afford Botox and facelifts and those who have to wear the natural signs of aging as gracefully as they can. Last year, the National Organization for Women came out against a proposed plastic surgery tax on the grounds that older women need work to get jobs in today's economy.

Rhode acknowledges that the law can only do so much to mitigate the effects of such deep-seated prejudices, but she argues that the enormity of the problem is no excuse for inaction. Sexism, racism and homophobia are certainly ingrained, but that doesn't mean that the law is powerless against them. As segregationists said in the era of Brown, you can't legally force people not to be bigots. On the other hand, when you discourage people from acting like bigots, tolerance can become a habit.

Rhode doesn't specifically address the role of unions in fighting appearance discrimination, but some of the famous examples she discusses in her book involve union members. The two waitresses who successfully challenged the Borgata Hotel and Casino's strict weight limit in court also filed a successful grievance through the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) on the grounds that implementation of the rule violated their collective bargaining agreement.

Michael Yelnosky argues in the Duke Law Review that labor laws already provide a robust framework for unions to fight various kinds of appearance-related discrimination. He notes that the Borgata waitresses had an easier time than a nonunion bartender at Harrah's Casino in Nevada who was ultimately fired for bucking the house rule that female bartenders had to wear makeup and teased hair while their male colleagues just had to look neat. A Nevada court ruled that Darlene Jesperson's allegations weren't enough to outweigh the principle of at-will employment (i.e., the employer's right to fire anyone for just about any reason).

The good news for union workers is that virtually every collective bargaining agreement involves limitations on the employer's right to fire at will. Yelnowsky stresses that unions can protect their members from appearance-based discrimination when it comes time to negotiate what constitutes "just cause" for termination. He cites an example in which a union successfully negotiated the right of dairy workers to have beards. He also notes that an all-female flight attendants union negotiated height, weight and dress standards through collective bargaining as early as 1945.

There's a tendency to dismiss concerns over looks-based discrimination as frivolous. The Beauty Bias dares us to take appearance discrimination seriously, and for that alone it's an important book. For more on the book, check out reviews by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate, Emily Bazelon in the New York Times, and Anna North on Jezebel.

Original Post Found HERE

Orange Juice: Lies and Truth

Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice" is a forthcoming secret history of the orange nectar. For example, I didn't know that OJ's popularity was seeded by its use as a Vitamin C delivery system for World War II troops. Or that the whole Florida imagery surrounding the drink is mostly a myth these days and that the majority of it comes from Brazil. The Boston Globe interviewed the author, Alissa Hamilton (photo by Bart Nagel):

What isn't straightforward about orange juice?

HAMILTON: It's a heavily processed product. It's heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time...

So parse the carton for us. For example, what is the phrase "not from concentrate" really about?

HAMILTON: In the '80s, Tropicana had a hold on ready-to-serve orange juice with full-strength juice. Then this new product, reconstituted orange juice, started appearing in supermarkets. Tropicana had to make decisions. Storing concentrate is much cheaper than full-strength juice. The phrase "not from concentrate" was to try to make consumers pay more for the product because it's a more expensive product to manufacture. It didn't have to do with the product being fresher; the product didn't change, the name simply changed. Tropicana didn't want to have to switch to concentrate technology.

Does God Hate Women?

By Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom

Reviewed by Johann Hari - 02 July 2009

Authors Benson and Stangroom dismantle the logic of those who cite religion to justify the perpetuation of misogynistic abuses around the globe

A directory of divine misogyny

After all the arguments for subordinating women have been shown to be self-serving lies, what are misogynists left with? They have only one feeble argument that is still deferred to and shown undeserving respect across the world, even by people who should know better: “God told me to. I have to treat women as lesser beings, because it is inscribed in my Holy Book.”

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom are the editors of Butterflies and Wheels, the best atheist site on the web. In Does God Hate Women? they forensically dismantle the last respectable misogyny. They argue: “What would otherwise look like stark bullying is very often made respectable and holy by a putative religious law or aphorism or scriptural quotation . . . They worship a God who is a male who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug.”

Every major religion’s texts were written at a time when women were regarded as little better than talking cattle. Their words and commands reflect this, plainly and bluntly. This book starts with a panoramic sweep across the world, showing – with archetypal cases – how every religion has groups today thumping women down with its Holy Book.

In Zamfara State in northern Nigeria, a pregnant 13-year-old girl called Bariya Ibrahim received 180 lashes of the cane in 2001 after being pimped by her father. The state’s attorney general said: “It is the law of Allah, so we don’t have anything to worry about.” In Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox Jews have set up “modesty police” who terrorise young women who talk to men or show ordinary parts of their bodies. They break into their homes if they are seen with men; they force them to sit at the back of the bus, away from the men; and they even, in one recent instance, sprayed acid in the face of a 14-year-old girl.

In the areas of India still dominated by orthodox Hinduism, a widow is still expected to commit suicide when her husband dies, or go into isolation in an ashram. One – a septuagenarian woman named Radha Rani Biswas – fled and now begs on the streets of Vrindavan. She said: “My son tells me: ‘You have grown old. Now who is going to feed you? Go away.’ What do I do? My pain has no limit.” And on the directory of divine misogyny goes, running through Catholicism, Mormonism and more. Benson and Stangroom note: “Religion doesn’t necessarily originate ideas about female subordination, but it lends them a penumbra of righteousness, and it makes them ‘sacred’ and thus a matter for outrage if anyone disputes them.”

Methodically, they go through the excuses offered for these raw abuses of human rights by the religious, and their apologists.

The first – especially beloved of the Vatican and Islamists – is that women are not being treated worse, just “differently”. They claim that it accords a woman special “dignity” to trap her in the home. But this is an abuse of language. As the authors note: “Permanent consignment to a limited and lesser role in the world is not what ‘dignity’ is generally understood to mean . . . The smallness and intimacy and relatedness of home are fine things, but not if one is confined to them permanently.”

The religio-misogynists then claim that it is “racist” or “imperialist” to oppose such abuses. This merrily ignores how women within these cultures protest against their treatment – very loudly. They aren’t objecting to being imprisoned in their homes, or having their genitalia cut, or being stoned for having sex, because a white person told them to. Benson and Stangroom put it well: “Multiculturalism by definition makes a fetish of cultures, and it is almost impossible to do that without treating them as monolithic. As soon as you admit that all cultures have internal dissent and nonconformity, the whole idea of protecting or deferring to particular cultures breaks down into incoherence.”

Then the gentler, nicer apologists for religion arrive. They say that misogynists are simply misinterpreting the holy texts, which are in fact about love and compassion and kindness. But the authors point out this is certainly not the God of the texts who orders his followers to commit mass murder, including of women and children, and explicitly says women are inferior beings.

So, in order to defend their God, the apologists often have to lie about what He and His Prophets “say” in the texts. Cherie Blair, for example, claimed in a lecture: “It is not laid down in the Quran that women can be beaten by their husbands.” But it quite plainly is. The Quran says: “If you fear high-handedness from your wives, remind them [of the teachings of God], then ignore them when you go to bed, then hit them.”

Karen Armstrong – one of the most egregious defenders of superstition – repeatedly claims that Muhammad was an emancipator of women. Yet it is explained in the Hadith (the sayings and traditions of the Prophet) that he married a prepubescent child, and that when he was given two slave girls he gave the ugly one away to a friend and kept the beautiful one, Maryam, to use sexually. It is a strange model of female emancipation, to sleep with children and slaves.

There are people in all religions who have – through theological contortions – managed to leave behind literal readings of the text and invent a less foul God to believe in. It is not for atheists to say that one group of believers is right and the other is wrong, as we think they’re all wrong. We can note that the less literalist a believer is, the easier he is to live beside, but we will only discredit literalism and force reform if we are honest about the words of the texts, rather than trying to soft-soap believers.

By the end of this book-length blast, Benson and Stangroom have left religious hatred of women in rubble. Anybody not addled by superstition will have to conclude that such bigotry deserves neither respect nor deference. It does not deserve the taboos that today surround it. It deserves the opposite: contempt – and relentless, unyielding opposition.

Does God Hate Women?
Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom
Continuum, 208pp, £14.99

Crippled by Indecision? The 10-10-10 Rule.

Making radically changing life decisions can often be a process that often leaves us doubting, sleepless and paralyzed to do anything else.

Should I get a divorce?
Should I quit my job?
Career or full-time motherhood?

In 10-10-10, the namesake book by Suzy Welch, the 10-10-10 rule is proposed to make the process more manageable. When facing to make a difficult choice, ask yourself these questions:

What will be the consequences in 10 minutes?
In 10 months?
In 10 years?

These questions not only reveal the immediate impact of the decision made, but also, if it matters and how it matters in the long term. Here is an except of the article:

Fifteen years ago, she was a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company. She loved the job, and the job loved her. The first in her family to attend college, she was looking forward to a long and successful corporate career. Then came marriage and two children.

My friend tried to keep working, but one day, when she returned from a week on the road, the nanny put her son in her arms, and he didn't recognize her. She quit, telling herself she would go back the minute she could.

That minute never came.

She has three children now, the youngest a baby. "The other day, I was cleaning the refrigerator and Sammy was crying his head off, and inside I was screaming, "What have I done?"

"10-10-10 reminded me." Both the 10-minute and 10-year scenarios made her shudder. "Short term, I'm looking at a lot of diapers and spit up," she said, "and long term, I'm seeing a big black hole. Kids gone, but so is my career."

image source, Link

There Is NO Mystery to Happiness

There is NO mystery to happiness.

Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn – or worse, indifference – cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn’t look ahead. He lives in the present.

But there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning – the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life – a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

EXCERPT FROM: INTERPRETATION OF MURDER BY JED RUBENFELD

8 Rules For Writing A Short Story by Kurt Vonnegut

On pages 9 and 10 of his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading
   characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the
   reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as
   possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could
   finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

- By Lev Grossman, Original Article Here.

The proper length for an obituary for Kurt Vonnegut is three words: "So it goes." This one will do what Vonnegut never did, which is go on too long.

"So it goes" is a phrase from Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. It's an expression the Tralfamadorians — a race of four-dimensional aliens — repeat whenever somebody or something dies. It expresses a certain airy resignation about the inevitability of death. Vonnegut — who died Wednesday night at the age of 84 from injuries suffered in a fall — had the Tralfamadorian attitude. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was 12 or 14," he told Rolling Stone last year. "So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me."

Vonnegut was born Indianapolis in 1922, the son of an architect. His early life shows the kind of aimless lateral peregrinations of someone who was in the process of inventing a kind of person that hadn't really existed before. He put in a mediocre stint at Cornell before enlisting in the army in 1942, in the teeth of World War II. Shortly afterward — and within a year of each other — two events occurred that would prove to be formative for Vonnegut. In 1944, on Mother's Day, he came home on leave to discover that his mother, an unsuccessful writer, had committed suicide with sleeping pills. In December of that same year Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war. On February 13, 1945 Dresden was leveled in a massive Allied bombing assault so intense it created an enormously destructive firestorm. Well over 130,000 people died. Vonnegut survived by hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse.

Perhaps because he began his writing career fully disillusioned, Vonnegut's view of the world changed very little over his five decades as an author. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952 and set in a spiritually empty, hyper-mechanized future dystopia. (Vonnegut mixed literature with science fiction long before it was cool.) His most famous novel — his personal favorite, and the one that deals with most directly with the Dresden disaster — is Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of one Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes "unstuck in time": Billy experiences the events of his life in random order, including his own birth and his own death. Understandably, this imbues him with a weird, almost redemptive fatalism, which is echoed by the narrator, who is Vonnegut himself. "There would always be wars," he writes, "they were as easy to stop as glaciers... And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."

Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike — he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.

Vonnegut struggled with silence and depression — including a suicide attempt in 1984 — but in all he managed to publish 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays and five works of non-fiction. His last book, Man Without a Country, a collection of essays published in 2005, was a surprise best-seller.

Although he died a literary celebrity, lionized by the culture of which he was so unsparing, Vonnegut was always drawn to outcasts and failures in his writing: criminals, the deformed, the exiled, the damaged, the insane, anyone who no longer had a stake in repeating society's familiar lies. The cast of Cat's Cradle includes one of those outcasts, a midget to whom Vonnegut gave the title speech:

"No wonder kids grow up crazy," the midget says. "A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's..."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle."

Freaky Sex-Ed Book for Juveniles

I stumbled into this at Boingboing.net first thing in the morning in between sips of coffee. It was so surreal I just had to blog it to have documentary proof come tomorrow that it was for real.

Per Holm Kudsen wrote a book entitled The True Story of How Babies Are Made and it is an illustrated children's book that has odd, graphic drawings. Frankly speaking, it was hilarious. And I rather thought it honest and effective in explaining the whole "the birds and the bees" thing. Kids won't find it nearly as funny though. Hee-hee.

If you want to see the entire content of the book, click this Link which has it in German. Make sure you click on the book images to turn its pages.

The Universe Within

Having immense fun reading John D. Barrow's The Infinite Book. A sampler in which Barrow borrows from Frank Morgan (yes, you've heard versions of this before, tis a classic, but none so cunningly put):

Three guys go into a hotel, each with $10 in his pocket. They book one room at $30 a night. A short while later a fax from the headquarters directs the hotel to charge $25 a night. So the receptionist gives the bellhop $5 to take to the three guys sharing the room. Since the bellhop never got a tip from them and because he can't split $5 three ways, he decides to pocket $2 and give them each one dollar back. So each of the three guys has now spent $9 and the bellhop has $2 for a total of $29. Where's the extra dollar?"

Woo-hoo! (Yes, I can be a nerd.)

Ok, I'm throwing this in for Joseph who mentioned it. It's the case of the terminator 0, 1/2 and 1:

We begin with the infinite series S = 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ...
which we can rewrite as: S = (1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1) +.. meaning S = 0

but grouped differently: S = 1 + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) +.. or S = 1 + 0 + 0 + .. thus S = 1
so we have proved that S = 0 and S = 1 thus if S = S then 0 = 1 !

not only that, S = 1 - (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1...) or S = 1-S or 2S = 1 meaning S = 1/2!

We have thus proven that when dealing with infinity, S can be any number.

What we have here is a beautiful mathematical explanation to the philosophical and metaphysical presumption that ultimately, we are all one and the same, and that, just as we are part of the universe, the universe is within us.

There are Sadder Things But This is SAD

I got this factoid from Life Statistics's blog entry entitled: "How Many People Read"?:

58% of the US adult population never read another book after high school.

Crowley's Case for Earth

b
Matt was talking about Armaggedon and it reminded me of this excerpt from Gaiman/Pratchett's Good Omens:

Crowley (the demon) was ruminating:

That's how it goes, you think you're on the top of the world, and suddenly, they spring Armaggedon on you.. The Great War, the Last Battle.. That's what the end of the world meant. No more world. Just endless Heaven, or, depending who won, endless Hell.

Crowley didn't know which was worse.

Well, Hell was worse, ofcourse, by definition. But Crowley remembered what Heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn't get a decent drink in either of them, for a start.

And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you get in Hell.

Adults lie, but not always.

My grandfather picked me up. "Shall I throw you in, eh? Shall I throw you in the water?"

I shook my head. Adults are threatening creatures.

"Shall I throw you in the water?".."I'll put you in the rubbish bin.".. "I'll eat you all up.".. "I'll take you back and get another little boy."

That's what they say. And no matter how much you tell yourself that they're lying, or teasing, there's always a chance. Maybe they are telling the truth.

I had an aunt who claimed she had a tail, beneath her dress. I sneered at her, made sure she knew I knew she was lying; but secretly, I could not stop myself from wondering.

Adults lie, but not always.

When I was four, I believed everything, accepted everything, and was scared of nothing. Now I was eight, and I believed in what I could see and was scared of anything I couldn't. Scared of things in the darkness, of things invisible to see.

- from Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

1986 Memory

My father's mother, the only person to whom I have ever said goodbye, properly, before they died: I remember her holding a paring knife, and peeling apples before she sliced and ate them. Her hands: red, and wet, and athritic: the apple peel curling onto newspaper in her lap. Also I remember the tart taste of the apples.

Each image carries with it a sense of loss, even if the loss is tinged, no matter how faintly, with relief. Age carries strange burdens with it, and one of them, perhaps inevitably, is death.

But I must not brood. The path of memory is neither straight nor safe, and we travel down it at our own risk. It is easier to take short journeys into the past, remembering in miniature, constructing tiny puppet plays in our heads. That's the way to do it.

-- from The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

what death said about bagel, lox, cream cheese and glass of orange juice

Sexton: What time is it?

Death: Breakfastime on a really most excellent summer's day. You know what we need?

S: I have no idea what you think I need. You need subtitles or some kind of instruction manual.

D: We need breakfast... I love food. Food is so great. I mean, it's so much more fun than photosynthesis or having a power pack in your back, or bathing in liquid crystals or any of those things.

-- from Death: The Cost of Living by Neil Gaiman

what sandman said of merv

"It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor."

- from The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman

page 18 / Alchemist / Paulo Coelho

"Hmm..." said the old man, looking at all sides of the book, as if it were some strange object. "This is an important book, but it's really irritating." ...

"It's a book that says the same thing almost all other books in the world say," continued the old man. "It describes people's inability to choose their own destinies. And it ends up saying that everyone believes the world's greatest lie."

"What's the world's greatest lie?" the boy asked, completely surprised.

"It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie."

Vonnegut: a dialogue between two pieces of yeast

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions