The boobs of Texas

As reported by The Guardian:

"Virginia’s state flag and seal, depicting the Roman goddess Virtus standing over a slain tyrant, her drooping toga exposing her left breast, has been banned from younger students in a Texas school district.

The district, Lamar consolidated independent school district, near Houston, took action against the image late last year when it removed a section about Virginia from its online learning platform used by third through fifth graders, typically encompassing ages eight to 11, sparking a row, Axios reported on Thursday...

The group said that after it filed a public records request, the school district acknowledged that “Virginia” had been removed from the website due to the lesson violating the school board’s local library policy banning any “visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity” in elementary school library material...

In 1901, Virginia officials ordered that the depiction of the bared breast be included to show clearly that the figure of Virtus was female."

The idea that a third grader should not see a woman's bare breast, or that a fifth grade boy who has access to Pornhub on his phone should not see "full frontal nudity" is totally ludicrous.

Addendum:  see also the adjacent post "A Denmark television program shows children the varieties of the naked human body."

Fidelity (Briton Riviere, 1869)

Note the subtle "hangman" scratched on the wall of the prison cell.   Extended discussion at the Art subreddit.

More about the artist here.  And a gallery of his paintings here.

Reposted from 2016.  One of the links is dead, but I don't have time to find a replacement.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging cap to a reader who found a site with images of his other paintings.

Baseball in 1787 !!

Images found in the Houghton Library tumblr.  The book was printed and sold in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1787,

The doll that pooped gold coins

In a very interesting essay at The Guardian, Germaine Greer discusses the practical uses of "old wives tales."

The first collector of popular tales for print is known to us now as Gianfrancesco Straparola, who was connected with the Venetian publisher Comin de Trino. As "Stra-parola" means something like "crazy talk", we may be sure that this was not the real name of the author of the Piacevoli Notti (1550–1556). ..  The Straparola stories are pretty good examples of the kinds of stories old peasant women tell...

At bedtime she brings the doll close to the fire, takes off its clothes, lays it on a woollen cloth, and, putting a little olive oil in the palm of her hand, gently massages its belly and lower back. Then she wraps it in the softest cloths she can find and lays it in bed beside her. She has not finished her first sleep when the doll begins to cry, "Mamma, mamma, caca!" .. Adamantina gently asks the doll to wait until she has spread her apron under its bottom. The doll bears down and fills the apron with gold coins. This she does night after night, and the orphan girls have all their modest needs supplied...

The king, riding by on his way to the hunt, feels a call of nature, gets down from his horse and voids his bowels. His servant can find nothing better to offer his majesty to wipe his behind on than the rag doll. No sooner has the king thrust the doll between his buttocks than it bites him hard and will not let go. Try as they might, the courtiers cannot detach the doll, which not only sinks its teeth deeper and deeper into the royal rear, but uses its hands to twist and wring the king's sonagli (his hanging bells) until he sees stars. To cut the old wives' story short, Adamantina hears of the king's plight, comes to fetch her beloved doll, ends the king's agony and marries the king, and they live happily ever after...

This is not one of the Straparola stories that his aristocratic successors chose to imitate. It stems directly from rural living conditions, in which the management of human waste is essential, complex and demanding. Where there are no toilets, no nappies and no piped water, babies' attendants simply hold them clear of tables or chairs or other people as they excrete. When they can toddle, little girls are dressed in skirts with no knickers and little boys in split trousers, as they gradually learn how to tell what they need to do and where to squat to do it, but there are many accidents along the way. A story like this keys into the manifold anxieties connected with toilet training and with the management of a small baby, which often fell to an older child, when its mother was needed elsewhere...

The object is to amaze and appal, to stretch the limits of the child's imagination. The story often turns on preoccupations of women – impregnation, pregnancy, childbirth, childloss, rape and domestic violence – in various coded forms...

An old wives' tale is the same thing as a winter's tale. Winter was the season of long, dark evenings, when most peasant families had to huddle together indoors with no light but what came from the fire. When Shakespeare called his play The Winter's Tale, he was deliberately invoking the imaginative realm of the rambling tales told by firelight, of the jealous husband, the rejected child, the princess brought up as a peasant, and the king's son in disguise...

Every child attending a parish church would have witnessed the burial of women who had died in childbirth, some with their newborns in their arms, others with babies not yet born. The fact that nobody discussed such matters with children would have made the events all the more frightening. Evidence of the terror of virgins marrying men who had buried several wives can be found only rarely, and then in devotional literature. The only other place it could be expressed was in encoded form in fantastic fables. Charles Perrault is credited with the invention of the story of Bluebeard, which is clearly indebted to folk tales. If we consider that a nobleman was more likely to have married very young wives than a peasant (who needed a grown woman with her full complement of skills) and that these women endured their first pregnancies at the ages of 14 and 15, we can see at once that marriage to a nobleman was a high-risk business...

Much more at the interesting link.  The embedded image [from a different tale] is Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), 1846 - a lithograph by Jacques-Eugène Feyen in Old Book Illustrations.

Reposted from 15 years ago because there is lots of stuff in the early years of TYWKIWDBI that is worth reposting for new readers.  And also so that I can append this observation from an op-ed in The New York Times regarding Donald Trump's opinions on the effect of his tariffs on consumer spending:

"He was taking questions at the end of one of his marathon cabinet meetings when he finally allowed that, yes, his tariff policies and the trade war he has set off with China may soon result in some emptier-than-usual shelves in stores. Specifically, toy stores.

“You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open,’” Mr. Trump said. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”

This, from the billionaire, crypto-salesman, golf-club-operating, Palm Beach-by-way-of-Fifth Avenue president with the golden office and the golden triplex apartment. There he sat, surrounded by the other billionaires with whom he has filled his cabinet, telling the boys and girls of America they’ll just have to make do with fewer toys this year for the greater good.

This grinchy pronouncement by the president had the value of being truthful..."

Foreigners no longer want to visit the United States

Extended excerpts from a story in the New York Post:

Two German teenagers planning to explore the US on vacation were thrown in jail and then booted from the country after Customs and Border Protection found their loosely planned trip “suspicious.”

Charlotte Pohl, 19, and Maria Lepere, 18, arrived in Honolulu, Hawaii, on March 18, with plans to travel around the islands for five weeks before heading to California and then Costa Rica after their high school graduation, according to the German outlet Ostsee Zeitung.

However, the teens made the mistake of not booking their accommodations for the entire duration of their stay in Hawaii, which raised a red flag for US Customs and Border Protection, despite both of them having obtained an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA).

The teens said they were questioned at Honolulu Airport for hours before they were allegedly subjected to full-body scans and strip searches, according to the outlet.

They were then given green prison uniforms and placed in a holding cell with long-term detainees, some of whom were reportedly accused of serious crimes.

The young travelers said they allegedly had to sleep on thin, moldy mattresses and were warned by guards to avoid expired food.

The next morning, the teens were told they were being booted from the country and taken back to Honolulu Airport, where they requested to be sent to Japan...

There has been a significant decrease in European travelers visiting the States over the past few months, despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s efforts to ease concerns among foreigners wanting to travel to America. “I would say that if you’re not coming to the United States to join a Hamas protest or to come here and tell us about how right Hamas is or to tell us about — stir up conflict on our campuses and create riots in our street and vandalize our universities, then you have nothing to worry about,” Rubio said earlier this month.

I understand some readers consider the New York Post a rag, but I have no doubt about the validity of the account, and while I understand there may be "extenuating circumstances," I can't imagine any nuance that would have required strip-searching these young women and locking them up on the basis of their not having booked all their reservations ahead of time.

Criticism of the Democratic party

Excerpts from "Expect more Bulldozings," an op-ed in the February issue of Harper's.

Donald Trump’s second victory cannot be attributed to any unhappy accident of eighteenth-century constitutionalism. This time, he won not only the Electoral College, that antique curiosity, but the popular vote as well. In the end, Trump’s national margin over Kamala Harris was just 1.5 percent—narrow in the manner of all mandates within our entrenched politics. Yet even this slender triumph was disorienting to his Democratic opponents, who had again staked everything on the notion that Trump was fundamentally unacceptable to the American people. Somehow, this year, they were more wrong than they had ever been before...

Fundamentally, the election witnessed a rebellion of working Americans squeezed by rising prices. The Biden Administration boasted that strong employment and wage gains negated the impact of inflation, but their measuring sticks—as the progressives’ bête noire Larry Summers has noted—excluded the price of credit, a major omission in an economy built on housing loans and other financing costs. The combined inflation rate of food and fuel, meanwhile, reached in 2022 levels unseen since 1980. Housing, groceries, and gasoline, of course, are the costs that working Americans experience most keenly in their day-to-day lives. The fact that inflation rates declined in 2023—another factor much touted by liberal economists—was little consolation, given that actual food prices, for instance, remained 25 percent higher than they had been before the advent of COVID-19. On election day, 68 percent of voters said the economy was not good, and 70 percent of those who said so voted for Trump...

The fault is not in the Democrats’ campaigns; it is in themselves. This is a party that represents the nerve center of American capitalism, ideological production, and imperial power. Elon Musk’s contributions notwithstanding, in just three months Harris raised far more money than Trump, from a much broader and deeper bench of wealthy elites. This is a party that embodies a contented American status quo—its faultless Constitution, its dynamic “opportunity economy,” its “indispensable” role as military policeman of the global order. And this is a party for which everything is either righteously moral or bloodlessly technical, but for which nothing is political—that is, alert to real questions of power and subject to actual popular contestation.

It is no coincidence that the past three Democratic nominees for president did not emerge from any kind of political process, but were preselected by fellow elites—“anointed” is, in fact, the correct word for the actions of a party of such aristocratic manner and apostolic self-regard. Barack Obama anointed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then, in a crunch, Joe Biden in 2020; Biden, in turn, anointed Harris when he stepped down. Squashing the Sanders insurgency was one thing, since the rebels were all outside the castle, but this is a party that simply does not welcome internal ideological debate."

Words that use all five vowels

 I have previously blogged "EUNOIA" (the shortest word using all five).

And I knew about "ABSTEMIOUS" and "FACETIOUS" (use all five in order), and "SEQUOIA" (another short one), but when I did a recent Harper's word puzzle I learned several more -  SUBCONTINENTAL, MIAOUED, CAULIFLOWER, and EDUCATION (there is something rather satisfying about that last one).  

I am sure there are tons more among the long words (a quick online search reveals MISCELLANEOUS), but the shorter ones are kind of fun to know.

Posted for other English majors, cruciverbalists, and general language enthusiasts.  Anyone want to offer examples from other languages?

Impressively intricate wrapping of the head of this mummy

No other relevant information at the OutoftheTombs subreddit post, but I agree with the comment that this ?linen wrapping of the head is impressively intricate.

Low traffic at the port of Seattle - updated

I have lots of chores to attend to today, but wanted to insert this info about trade.  This morning the above photo was posted in the pics subreddit along with the observation that "The port is empty.  Only one ship and no containers. Usually a busy port."  Another Redditor checked marine traffic data and added "Checked it out myself on marine traffic, one cargo ship from Busan currently docked and one vehicle carrier from Hawaii."

I looked for confirmation elsewhere and found it in the business page of the Seattle Times:

Experts think it won’t be until May that the full impacts of a U.S.-China tariff tit-for-tat hit the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, given the weekslong transit times between the sparring nations.  But port officials and port-dependent businesses are already feeling the early effects.

They’re also bracing for what could be a substantial decline not only in import and export activity, but also in work for related players. That includes longshoremen who handle the cargo and truckers who haul goods into and out of the ports...

Starting last summer, many U.S. companies began importing extra inventory or shipping extra products overseas out of concern that then-candidate Trump would win reelection and make good on his campaign promises of high tariffs. 

That forward buying continued in the first three months of this year. In January, February and March, the ports of Tacoma and Seattle handled nearly 666,000 inbound and outbound containers, a 24% jump from the same period in 2024, port data shows. 

While it’s unclear how much of that extra volume was tied to forward buying, “a significant portion of that is likely due to folks advancing orders with concerns about potential tariffs,” said Steve Balaski, director of business development at the Northwest Seaport Alliance.

Now, however, the period of forward buying appears to be giving way to a period of slow or even no buying...

Trump's earlier claims that the tariffs were bringing in millions of dollars reflected that "advanced ordering" (just as recent commercial store sales are stabilized by consumers stocking up).  The reality is starting to hit, and it's going to hit hard.

Our family is stocking up on certain items.  FYI, here's a longread from a toilet paper company re the potential effects of tariffs on that historically newsworthy product.

Addendum:  An anonymous reader found this comment at the Reddit source link: '"That looks like Terminal 30, which paused operations at the beginning of the year until further notice due to waste water quality regulations. This was an operational pause planned as long ago as August 2024. Additional traffic is being rerouted to other terminals and to Tacoma."  I have therefore modified the title of the post and some of the language in my commentary to indicate that the situation at the port appears to be serious, but not cataclysmic.

Addendum:  This link shows current traffic in the port.

Addendum:  An anonymous reader provided the link for this very thorough and informative video:

See also: Don’t Look at Stock Markets. Look at the Ports.

Why would a cell phone suddenly consume huge amounts of data?

I'm putting on my elderly English-major hat to write this post requesting advice from some of the tech-savvy readers of TYWKIWDBI, because I don't know what to do.

Here's the story.  For the past 15-20 years I've used AT&T for landline and cellphone service with very few problems.  About two summers ago I was on a long road trip, sending photos home during the journey, and I received a test message "You used 75% of your plan data this bill cycle.  If you use all of it, your data will be slowed to 128kbps..."  I learned from that experience to bring the photos home or wait until I was near a motel wi-fi before sending them, and I've had no data usage problems since then.

Until April 15.  Taxes were done and filed (days earlier), and I was out in my garden clearing winter debris when the phone beeped withe the "75% data used..." message, which confused me because the phone was not in use.  And then, within probably 15 minutes I get a second message "Hi, it's AT&T.  You used all your plan data this bill cycle.  Your data usage will be slowed (max 128 kpbs)..."

That was a shocker.  I went into the house.  My wife was not using her phone (and we have no children or other phones on the plan).  The next evening I got online to track down and print out pages and pages of usage data.  The embed at top shows the start of the event, which continued like this...

So, basically 3 gigabytes of data consumed in about a ten-minute period.  

I phoned the AT&T help lines, which were singularly unhelpful.  The well-meaning staff probably have English as a third language and operate out of call centers with immense background noise or children playing, and were able to give me no useful answer as to what had happened (though they did try to upsell me some enhanced service).  

My next stop was an appointment at the Apple store to meet a tech at the genius bar.  He basically rebooted the phone, which improved its overall function, but he could not ascertain why this episode happened.  He went to the Settings to examine the Cellular Data which showed all the installed apps, but could not dissect out which one (if any) was hyperactive on the afternoon of April 15.  

I inquired about possible malware, which he considered "unlikely."  He thought perhaps one of my installed apps had gone rogue and called for data (???).  I have wondered whether someone hacked into my system - perhaps a neighbor who wanted to download a movie, or maybe someone driving down the street with some type of scanner looking for networks to hop onto for ten minutes to ?mine bitcoin or some other nefarious activity.  (We have a complex alphanumeric password that would take some degree of professional skills/equipment to hack).  

Things are not back to normal yet, with some residual problems seemingly affecting our gateway router and our access to premium streaming channels.  We have learned that TDS is in the process of laying fiber in our neighborhood and are considering switching to them from AT&T (who say they will have fiber but don't know when...).

So, an old English major would love to hear ideas about 1) why/how this happened, and 2) how to prevent it from happening again.  And if anyone has experience/comments re TDS Telecom fiber service, that would be a nice bonus.

Thanks in advance; perhaps your comments will help other readers of TYWKIWDBI with similar problems.

Pavement burns

Photo from a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine.  Brief clinical details at Ars Technica indicate that the 56-year-old man was inebriated and walked barefoot for one minute on alphalt during the 2021 "heat dome" in Seattle, where air temps reached triple digits.

"Asphalt can absorb 95 percent of solar radiation and easily reach 40° F to 60° F above air temperatures on hot days... The burns were classified as second-degree, meaning they affected both the outer and middle layers of skin."

At several websites where this photo has been reposted, knee-jerk comments assert that the man must have been diabetic, but the clinical report indicates that he was in severe pain upon arrival in the ER, so this is not simply a case of insensitive peripheral neuropathy.

The New York Times reported last summer on the increasing prevalence of contact burns during heat waves, including through clothing and shoes.  I hope I don't need to remind people that dogs can incur burn injury on the pads of their feet.

Geography quiz: Where is the westernmost point in Asia?

I didn't know when I encountered the question in a crossword puzzle.  The answer may win you a bar bet.

"All dams are temporary"

Interesting engineering video - especially the demonstration of sediment deposition using colored sand.  Not really new info, but worth a browse because it's well illustrated and concisely narrated (14 minutes, plus a relevant advertisement at the end).

Powassan virus - another tick-borne disease

The photo is humorous, but the disease is real.  Info from the Minnesota Star Tribune:

While the Powassan virus is uncommon compared to other tick-borne diseases in the state, it is among the most serious, said Elizabeth Schiffman, epidemiologist supervisor at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). Carried by blacklegged ticks (more commonly known as deer ticks) the Powassan virus can cause neurological damage and, in rare cases, death.

Last year, there were 14 reported cases in Minnesota — the highest reported since recordkeeping on the disease started in 2008, according to MDH data. In 2011, the state recorded the first death caused by the virus after a woman in her 60s died of a brain infection...

About 10% of people who are clinically diagnosed with the virus die, Aliota said. Those who survive a severe bout of the virus may suffer long-term symptoms like headaches and memory problems...

In Minnesota, the risk of getting bitten by blacklegged ticks starts as the weather warms up in the spring, Schiffman said.  Because an adult blacklegged tick is about the size of a sesame seed and younger ones are even smaller, it can be hard to spot them before they bite...

Because there is no medicine to treat the virus, the best ways to protect against bites are pre-treating clothing and gear with permethrin-based repellents and using insect repellents on the skin, Schiffman said. It’s best to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants. Wearing light-colored clothing can help with spotting ticks...

“One of the reasons there are so few cases and that we don’t know as much about it as we do some of the other infections people get is because testing isn’t widely available for Powassan,” she said. “I think there’s probably a lot of people that could have it, especially in those mild cases, and they’re not ever getting it detected and reported.”

This is a black-legged tick (credit (James Gathany/CDC via AP):

Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Meteora - updated

I've always been fascinated by places like this.  The one in this image is the Monastery of the Holy Trinity at Meteora in Greece.  

Prior to the twentieth century, Holy Trinity had a very difficult approach, requiring crossing a valley and climbing through the rock outcrop to reach the building's entrance. Provisions were placed in baskets drawn up by rope-ladders (now with a winch). In present day, one can walk from Kalambaka for 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) along a foot track to reach the monastery, or use a winch-operated lift. There is a road from the back side of the cliff. It is currently reached via tunnels and 130 steps of stone. The grounds include a 2-acre (0.81 ha) garden at the summit.

When I first blogged Meteora fifteen years ago, I offered this observation:

Meaning ‘suspended in air’ the name Meteora includes the entire rock community of 24 monasteries. There were no steps and the main access to the monasteries was by means of a net that was hitched over a hook and hoisted up by rope and a hand cranked windlass to winch towers overhanging the chasm. Monks descended in the nets or on retractable wooden ladders up to 40m long to the fertile valleys below to grow grapes, corn and potatoes... the ropes were replaced, so the story goes, only "when the Lord let them break..."

In ancient times building materials would have been winched or hand-carried; perhaps nowadays they use helicopters.  I can guess how human waste was disposed of in the 14th century; not sure how that is managed now.

Photo credit Michael Probst / AP, via The Atlantic.

Reposted to insert this awesome 70-minute video about all six monasteries in Meteora, submitted by reader Aleksejs: