Might have to show this to my Ancient Civilizations class as an example of monumental architecture and collapse
Official ominous sign
I used to work for Sears. Simultaneously one of the best and one of the worst jobs I ever had. I as part of so many class action lawsuits for wage theft while I was a commissioned sales associate there…
I cannot overstate how much I love Tom Lehrer’s story. It sounds so fake but is entirely real.
He’s a goddamn genius- he started studying mathematics at Harvard when he was 15 and graduated magna cum laude. He worked at Los Alamos for a few years before being drafted and working for the NSA, where he claims to have invented jello shots to get around alcohol bans.
He then went back to Harvard for a couple years before starting to teach political science at MIT.
Through all of that, he was writing and performing both some of the funniest shit you’ll ever hear (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango) and absolutely scathing political satire (Who’s Next, Wernher von Braun, Send the Marines). Until the mid/late 60s counterculture gained momentum. He didn’t like their aesthetic, so he stopped making music.
Shortly after, he moved to California and started teaching math and musical theater history at the UC Santa Cruz for the next 30 years.
I don’t know if non-Californians understand just how goddamn funny that is. It’s where stoners and math (and now computer science) kids who couldn’t get into Berkeley go. Leaving Harvard/MIT for UCSC is peak academic phoning it in. And by all accounts he had a blast.
Plus the whole putting all of his music in the public domain thing. That fucked.
Also he is still alive! 95 years old as of November 2023.
The other day @piecesoftape sent me a text that said, “you probably got a notification for this, but Tom Lehrer outlived Kissinger.”
There’s a quote attributed to Lehrer, probably in answer to why he stopped performing, that “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
I am delighted to report Tom Lehrer is still with us as of January 13, 2025.
And still with us as of 21st January 2025.
Here’s one I hadn’t heard before. As someone who experienced the conversion from Old Money to New, I understand.
At least I understand the theory, but since I didn’t and still don’t have the Master’s Degree in Mathematics which he recommends, the practice leaves me as baffled as before.
Suffice to say that both in UK New Money and later in Euro, decimal makes a lot more sense than this song.
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Writer Note – for general info about what pre-decimal currency was like, check this video. It’s Old Currency Info Lite, and a bit sloppy about details.
It flubs a couple of things, completely overlooking that there were other banknotes than the one-pound note.
Five- and ten-pound notes were in use, though growing less common in ordinary circumstances as their value increased. The largest denomination an ordinary person might carry were fivers, and perhaps an occasional tenner.
At the other end of this scale was a ten-shilling note, something lucky kids might receive through the post, tucked into the birthday or Christmas card sent by a particularly doting relative.
Speaking as one of those lucky kids, leaving out the ten-bob note is IMO a reprehensible oversight.
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The video could also make it clearer that gold guinea and half-guinea coins were long out of circulation by the time decimal currency came in. Gold sovereign and half-sovereign coins were also long gone from street use, reserved for investment and bullion transfer instead.
Pricing of goods and services in guineas continued after the coins went away, used for “snob value” to prove the purchaser could pay more when buying things like land or property, tailored suits or horses, and paying professional fees to lawyers and doctors.
(It may also have a “baker’s dozen” aspect, with the purchaser adding a bit extra to offset any risk of seeming stingy, or as a way of adding commission to the sale – though TBH, for most purposes it’s more likely to be snobbish.)
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The video also suggests that a crown (five-shilling coin) was regularly used for shopping right up to decimalisation. Beg to differ. During my pre-decimal lifetime I never saw one as pocket change. Half-crown yes, crown no.
After QEII’s coronation in 1952, the crown coin was AFAIK only ever issued as a commemorative, so while it remained legal tender and could be used in shops, it was invariably just kept as a souvenir.
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As Terry Pratchett once put it: “British people resisted decimal currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.”
But with all that said, and lacking a scientific study to confirm or deny it, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that pre-decimal people were better at mental arithmetic, if only as a survival measure…
There’s something very horror movie-esque about no matter where you go in your state you know the majority of the people around you voted for fascism and a cartoon villain but you don’t know exactly who
Hey There 👋 I’ve got some math for you that will not actually make you feel better in general but it will serve to make you feel less surrounded by fascist dipshits voting against their own self interest.
In the 2020 election 74 million people voted for the fuck trumpet. In this election it was 72 million. Those are big numbers. That is not great. But that is not half the country. That’s not a majority. It’s not even a fifth, it’s something close to 18%.
Why did we let a minority chose the executive branch of our government? Because even less people showed up to vote for the other guy. Harris only got 68 million people up off the couch to go vote.
More than half the country didn’t bother. Personally, I think that’s worse.
There’s something very horror movie-esque about no matter where you go in your state you know between trump supporters, 3rd party voters, and non voters, the majority of the people around you are complicit in the rise of fascism but you don’t know exactly who
PBS was the only news outlet that dared to call it what it is, namely a nazi salute and today PBS got defunded??
Guys, please be careful. This is not what’s happening. Republicans are calling for this, but it hasn’t happened. They’re calling to defund Wikipedia, too, which shows they have no idea how Wikipedia is even funded, because it has nothing to do with the US government.
That being said, Republicans have always hated funding of the arts, especially public arts, and PBS was always going to be under threat with Project 2025, and still is. It isn’t the only thing, either.
Don’t let yourselves get distracted. Stay focused. Answer calls to action when you can. Try not to spread exaggerated hysteria. All that will do is exhaust everyone so we can’t fight when we need to.
Stay safe. Take care of yourselves and each other. Check your sources.
THIS IS A CALL TO ACTION. Censorship affects all of us, and if Project 2025 gets its way, the entire trans publishing industry is at a significant risk of criminalization. In this article, I lay out the problem and the stakes, and suggest a broad action plan with dozens of potential response ✊
What I cover:
– Citations from P25
– Historical overview of American obscenity law as pertains to trans people
– Assessment of trans censorship in Nazi Germany
– Three core philosophies for resisting fascist censorship
– An action plan broken down by interest group (readers, authors, etc.)
I took absolutely no pleasure writing this article, but I have a lot of research around obscenity law and historical precedents for this that I know nobody else has access to, and getting the information out there is crucial right now 😔
The core thesis of this article – one that echoes much of the other advice that I’ve seen floating around leftist spheres over the past week – is that our best defense against this type of censorship is mass grassroots action. If every person who reads this picked five books they want to preserve and five people they want to share this with, it would have a much broader impact than if a singular group of readers attempts to document and archive the entire corpus.
A centralized preservation effort can do immense work, of course, but it won’t be accessible to the trans people who need to read trans books and see trans joy to survive whatever comes next.
Trump paused communications from all of our health agencies. He wants them reviewed.
You will be much less likely to know from now on during the early days if we have something like the current rising bird flu epidemic. You will be less likely to know about any illness epidemics. Even once things are confirmed and being reported in some media outlets, there’s a non-zero chance that you are not going to see any urgency or any communication at all from places you are used to.
For the love of little green apples, please start masking again. Please be more careful with your health then you have been over the last 4 years.
There’s a “public health” feed on Bsky. I’ve got it pinned to my home page. I got through Covid largely due to the efforts of researchers and healthcare providers that I followed on a curated list on Twitter.
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amhrancas 