Blogaround

1. A spot of good news in an Ebola crisis: Vaccine supplies are expected to last (posted January 22)

2. The Kind of Sex I Thought I Wanted (posted January 24) "I thought that my partner would be dissatisfied and leave me because I wasn’t giving him sex. I thought that I was being a terrible wife because I couldn’t please my partner. I thought that my body was broken and betraying me because it couldn’t do the one sex act it was made to do."

3. Japan’s Supreme Court rules transgender people still have to get sterilised (posted January 24) "The Supreme Court of Japan has upheld a law which forces transgender people to get sterilised before they can legally change their gender." Whoaaaaaaa not cool.

4. Black Children Don’t Have Nick Sandmann’s Rights (posted January 25) "A black teen exercising his right to stand there or walk there or drive there or play there or exist there can be guilty of a capital offense in this country. But a white teenager can block a national freaking monument and get a pat on the head from the president of the United States?"

5. The Supreme Court Just Ended My Military Career (posted January 22) "The court is saying that government discrimination based not on evidence, but solely on animus against transgender people, is permissible."

6. The United States Is No Longer the World Leader in Resettling Refugees (posted January 23) "After the United States adopted the Refugee Act of 1980, it resettled more refugees than every other country in the world combined for more than 30 years in a row."

7. 打首獄門同好会 (Uchikubi Gokumon Doukoukai) - I don' t wanna get out of futon (posted 2018) A Japanese song about how it's too cold to get out of bed in the morning. OH MY GOD SO RELATABLE.

Note: The word they are translating as "futon" in the English subtitles is the Japanese origin of the English word "futon" but it doesn't actually mean a futon, it's just the Japanese word for a regular bed. So uh... something to keep in mind when you're watching the video and reading the subtitles.

Perfect Number: [watching video] [every 10 seconds] "... but why is it a futon?"

(Then I had to explain to Hendrix what a "futon" is. It's a couch that can turn into a bed, and therefore it's not comfortable as a couch and it's also not comfortable as a bed. Every American, when they hear the word "futon", thinks, "remember that time I was at my grandparents' house and there weren't enough beds and I had to sleep on that horrible couch?" So, uh, this mistranslation kind of changes the whole feel of the song...)

8. Speaking Black Dialect in Courtrooms Can Have Striking Consequences (posted January 25) "Researchers played audio recordings of a series of sentences spoken in African-American English and asked 27 stenographers who work in courthouses in Philadelphia to transcribe them. On average, the reporters made errors in two out of every five sentences, according to the study."

9. Teaching children about racism (posted January 28) "The goal is not to achieve respectability, to awkwardly brush a comment aside with, 'Don’t say that. That’s not nice.' The aim, rather, is to teach the child that such language is based on an unjust racial hierarchy. 'We don’t say this word because this is what people have said in order to treat people unfairly.' Get straight to the heart of the issue—that the injustice of racism harms human bodies in real and oppressive ways."

10. I Learned Latin and Memorized Old Poems–and I Wish I Hadn’t (posted January 28) "They were surrounded by people who told them that this was what a good education looked like; they believed them. That was that."