Apparently saying "ladies" is a form of "microaggression"

Easthampton is rallying around a superintendent finalist who said his offer to lead the city’s public schools was rescinded after he referred to women as “ladies” in an email — an act some school committee members reportedly viewed as a microaggression. 

Dr. Vito Perrone said the school committee rescinded its offer in an executive session last Thursday, about a week after it voted 4-3 to hire the former Easthampton High School principal... 

The decision hinged on Perrone’s use of “ladies” in an email he sent to committee Chairperson Cynthia Kwiecinski over contract negotiations, he told the newspaper...

Perrone, currently interim superintendent of schools in West Springfield, told the Daily Hampshire Gazette that Kwiecinski said using “ladies” was a microaggression and “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem.”

He explained that the terms “ladies” and “gentlemen” were used as a sign of respect when he was growing up, adding that he wasn’t aiming to insult anyone, according to the newspaper.

Perhaps someone can explain this to me; I seem to be out of touch.  Or perhaps there is was some nuance in his email that's not being reported.  Story found at Boston.com.

Addendum:  A big tip of the blogging hat to the reader who found details about this case and the explanation for the offensive characteristics of the term "ladies" in a Boston Globe article.  Several other comments by readers offer additional insights.

Ukranian girl explains the meaning of life

Reposted from 3 years ago, because it's still hits home.

Addendum:  so sad to see this gif link dead.  If any readers remember it ("you go to school, then you work, then you die") and can find a copy for me to embed, I would be grateful.

A man stands on the sidewalk holding a sign...

North Dakota state senators...

 ... defeated a bill to provide free school lunches to low-income K-12 students.

Ten days later they voted to raise the per-diem reimbursements they receive while traveling in the state, from $35/day to $45/day.

"State employees should get a higher per diem because inflation has made eating out much more expensive, he noted."

Michael Palin explores Andrew Wyeth's world

With an initial emphasis on my favorite painting, Christina's World.

Intra-family politics

A New Yorker cartoon.

Global ocean surface temperature at all-time high

I really hate to start my blogging day with a "gloom and doom" item, but the graph is quite striking.

Three years of La Niña conditions across the vast tropical Pacific have helped suppress temperatures and dampened the effect of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

But scientists said heat was now rising to the ocean surface, pointing to a potential El Niño pattern in the tropical Pacific later this year that can increase the risk of extreme weather conditions and further challenge global heat records...

Hotter oceans provide more energy for storms, as well as putting ice sheets at risk and pushing up global sea levels, caused by salt water expanding as it warms.

Marine heatwaves can also have devastating effects on marine wildlife and cause coral bleaching on tropical reefs. Experiments have also suggested that warming oceans could radically alter the food web, promoting the growth of algae while lowering the types of species that humans eat..

Discussion and maps continue at The Guardian.

Randy Rainbow is back...

There are about 4-5 more Randy Rainbow productions posted in the Video - humor section of this blog.

Moonroof after a hailstorm

Image cropped for size from the original at the DamnThatsInteresting subreddit, via Neatorama.

The cherry blossoms of Washington, D.C.

The annual blooming of the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. is currently underway.  The Washington Post featured this photo of "Stumpy," a hollow remnant that still manages to generate blossoms in the spring.  

I was born in Washington, D.C. while my father was stationed there as part of his Navy assignment, and a visit to the cherry blossoms was a standard part of my life, beginning before I was one year old...

... and again several years later at about three years of age -

Nine-year-old girl refuses to let her goat be slaughtered

Excerpts from a story in The Washington Post:

Jessica Long’s 9-year-old daughter brought the family’s goat, Cedar, to the Shasta District Fair and Event Center in Anderson, Calif., 150 miles north of Sacramento, last year to sell him for slaughter. As the livestock auction was starting, she told her mom she couldn’t bear to lose him. They took Cedar home.

Less than two weeks later, a detective with the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office got a search warrant, drove hundreds of miles to seize the pet goat and returned him to Shasta County fair officials to be slaughtered...

In April 2022, Long bought her daughter, who was 9 at the time, a white-and-brown Boer goat. Her daughter, identified as E.L. in court documents, spent nearly three months feeding and caring for the goat, which she named Cedar. She bonded with him as if he were a puppy...

On June 24, Long and her daughter, who is a member of the 4-H program, went to the Shasta District Fair’s junior livestock auction, where she exhibited Cedar for potential buyers, according to the suit. But the girl balked the following day, the final day of the auction, causing her mother to try to end their participation in the event, the suit states. Fair representatives allegedly refused to let them, saying the rules prohibited their withdrawal...

Instead of handing Cedar over, Long took the goat and her daughter home. Before doing so, she told fair representatives she would pay for any financial hit caused by the decision to keep him, the suit states...

On June 27, Long sent a letter to the district fair “to get them to understand, as human beings, her position,” according to her suit. In it, she told fair officials that watching her daughter sobbing had been “heartbreaking,” that the girl had suffered through the deaths of three grandparents in the previous year and that “our family has had so much heartbreak and sadness that I couldn’t bear the thought of the following weeks of sadness after the slaughter” of Cedar...

Melanie Silva, CEO of the district fair, responded the next day, according to an email provided by Long’s attorneys. She wrote that, as a mother, she was “not unsympathetic regarding your daughter and her love for her animal,” but also asking her to understand that the fair is designed “to teach our youth responsibility and for the future generations of ranchers and farmers to learn the process and effort it takes to raise quality meat.”

“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules that are set up for all participants,” Silva wrote in the June 28 email...

Later that day, Ashbee, joined by Fernandez and fellow detective Jacob Duncan, drove at least 500 miles round-trip over the course of about 10 hours “to seize a young girl’s beloved goat for slaughter,” the suit states. 

That definitely will teach her a lesson.  More details and nuances at the source link.

Does anyone really know what time it is...

The discussion thread at the Facepalm subreddit suggests that this might be Australia, or that the orientation of the numerals doesn't really matter since nobody looks at them anyway.

Backstory and more details here, courtesy of an unknown reader.

This reminds me of Drew Gilpin Faust's lament that college students nowadays literally cannot read cursive writing.

Mommy, what's a phallic mikoshi ?

This image (credit AFP/Getty Images) was one of the photos of the day in a gallery at The Guardian.  The caption indicates only that it is a portable shrine paraded through the streets during the Kanamara festival.  Wikipedia has some additional information.

Remembering "Mad Men"

I certainly remember "Mad Men."  I was enthralled by the story during the first several years of its run.  But then it seemed to morph from a depiction of the business world of the 1960s to more of a soap opera probing the personal lives of the characters.  Kottke found and posted this video analysis of a key episode in the third year; it will bring back memories to those familiar with the storyline, but will be of little interest to those who haven't seen the series.

Batesian mimicry

Posted on April 1 - not to fool you, but to demonstrate how Nature fools Nature.

The strategy of pretending to be something other than what you really are is of course common, and not just for humans. In my backyard in Connecticut, for instance, the caterpillar of the swallowtail butterfly Papilio troilus does a brilliant imitation of bird poop, to avoid being eaten by birds. Later in its development, it turns green and produces eyespots so it can pretend to be a snake.

In Malaysia, a spectacular adult moth, Macrocilix maia, one-ups the poop mimics by mimicking bird poop on its body, and two flies feeding on the poop on its wings... All this is just Batesian mimicry. We’re not even going to talk about Müllerian, Wasmannian or Bakerian mimicry.

More at The Grand Animal Costume Party.  Photo credit: Gerry Images/Flickr RF

Not to be confused with crypsis, BTW.