Is the word "midget" per se offensive ?

Excerpts from the story reported in the StarTribune:

Chelley Martinka, a Rhode Island mom... noticed that Cains, a popular pickle brand in New England made by Minnesota’s own M.A. Gedney Co., had an offering called “midgets.” It’s a term that’s offensive to people born with dwarfism, as well as their families. And Martinka’s daughter, now 10 months old, had been diagnosed with the condition soon after birth.

So, she blogged about the issue, made a YouTube video and contacted Gedney, the 132-year-old pickle maker with a national presence and a brand particularly well-known in the Twin Cities. Gedney’s CEO, Barry Spector, called her earlier this month and said the company would indeed junk the midget moniker...

Martinka’s daughter Adelaide, has achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, which is caused by a genetic mutation. For those who have it, their preferred name is “little people.”..

Chaska-based Gedney has used the midget appellation in a version of its Del Monte brand of pickles, as well as in one item under the Gedney brand. But with its namesake brand — a big seller in local supermarkets — Gedney uses “Babies” and “Mini-Munchers” to describe most of its small pickles...

The United States Department of Agriculture defined the standards for grades and sizes of pickles in the United States. According to the USDA, a ‘midget’ pickle was the word designation for a pickle with a diameter of 19 mm or less.”

My dictionary shows midget as having been derived from midge (a tiny insect), in common use since the early 19th century.  From Wikipedia:

The term "midget" came into prominence in the mid-19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowe used it in her novels Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and Old Town Folks where she described children and an extremely short man, respectively. P. T. Barnum indirectly helped popularize the term "midget" when he began featuring General Tom Thumb in his circus. "Midget" became linked to referencing short people put on public display for curiosity and sport.

I fully understand that the term is now considered perjorative when applied to people, but I'm surprised it would be offensive when used to refer to other items. 

Photo cropped from the original at the Daily News.

Should Santa Claus be depicted as a nonsmoker?

A new Christmas book puts the issue right in the title:

Twas The Night Before Christmas: Edited by Santa Claus for the Benefit of Children of the 21st Century

The book is a yet-another-publication of Clement Moore's classic poem, but the publisher and illustrator have excised this iconic passage: "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath."

Here's some commentary from a StarTribune column:

Not surprisingly, controversy has ensued, with the American Library Association protesting and Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert labeling the act "political cor-Xmas."..

"I want people to get mad at tobacco, not librarians fighting with me. All parents don't want their children to smoke, so we're all on the same page."  "I'm not cleaning up the most famous poem in the English language," McColl said. "I'm just coming at it from a smoking angle."

I am reminded of the 2010 sanitizing of a famous photo of Winston Churchill by the removal of his cigar stub, and the printing of a U.S. postage stamp with the cigarette plucked from the fingers of the actress.

With regard to the latter, here is the incisive commentary of Roger Ebert:

Depriving Bette Davis of her cigarette reminds me of Soviet revisionism, when disgraced party officials disappeared from official photographs. Might as well strip away the toupees of Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart...

... Look, I hate smoking. It took my parents from me, my father with lung cancer, my mother with emphysema... When my mother was breathing oxygen through a tube, she'd take out the tube, turn off the oxygen, and light up. I avoid smokers. It isn't allowed in our house. When I see someone smoking, it feels like I'm watching them bleed themselves, one drip at a time.

So we've got that established. On the other hand, I have never objected to smoking in the movies, especially when it is necessary to establish a period or a personality. I simply ask the movies to observe that, these days, you rarely see someone smoking except standing outside a building, on a battleground, in a cops' hangout, in a crack house, in rehab, places like that. In an ordinary context, giving a character a cigarette is saying either (1) this is a moron, or (2) this person will die...

Two of the most wonderful props in film noir were cigarettes and hats. They added interest to a close up or a two-shot... These days men don't smoke and don't wear hats. When they lower their heads, their eyes aren't shaded. Cinematographers have lost invaluable compositional tools. The coil of smoke rising around the face of a beautiful women added allure and mystery. Remember Marlene Dietrich. She was smoking when she said, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily."

...Movies can't rewrite reality. The MPAA cautiously mentions smoking in their descriptions of movie ratings (even if it's the Cheshire Cat and his hookah). If, by the time you're old enough to sit through a movie, you haven't heard that smoking is bad for you, you don't need a movie rating, you need a foster home.

Women, rape comments, and voting results

One of the most salient comments I've seen in the election aftermath reportedly comes from (of all people) Alec Baldwin:

""You know your party's in trouble when you read this: A: The rape guy lost. B: Which one?"

Top image discussed at The Dish; lower one found at imgur.

The nonsense of "zero tolerance" in schools

Here is yet another in a seemingly-neverending series of incidents in which schools rigidly enforce "zero tolerance" of sex/drugs/violence/etc related matters.  In this case a three-year-old child deaf child who signs with his hands has been told to change his name sign because the hand gesture resembled the pointing of a gun.

Hunter Spanjer says his name with a certain special hand gesture, but at just three and a half years old, he may have to change it.

"He's deaf, and his name sign, they say, is a violation of their weapons policy," explained Hunter's father, Brian Spanjer.

Grand Island's "Weapons in Schools" Board Policy 8470 forbids "any instrument...that looks like a weapon," But a three year-old's hands?

"Anybody that I have talked to thinks this is absolutely ridiculous. This is not threatening in any way," said Hunter's grandmother Janet Logue.

"It's a symbol. It's an actual sign, a registered sign, through S.E.E.," Brian Spanjer said. S.E.E. stands for Signing Exact English, Hunter's sign language. Hunter's name gesture is modified with crossed-fingers to show it is uniquely his own.

Source link, via Neatorama.

Addendum:  I just noticed that the boy's name is "Hunter," which may explain the hand sign he was taught to use.  Also this comment from the Reddit thread -

...the boy is using SEE instead of ASL. Read through to the related article, and you'll see that the school district teaches to deaf children with ASL instead of SEE (the former is much more common). What most likely happened is that the school is just trying to teach the boy ASL, perhaps starting with his name, so the parents ran to the news to create the story that the school is trying to change his name due to their gun policy, when it's actually because their teachers don't speak SEE.

- which, of course, would put the story in a different light.

Librarian porn

Excerpts from an article in the Paris Review (NSFW pix at link):

It was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney...

Why did many of the best sex scenes in today’s librarian porn take place outside of a library? ... Long before the era of the public library, stories of sex among books were set in private collections, in secluded humanist studies. The protagonist of Antonio Vignali’s 1526 La Cazzaria (The Book of the Prick) examines a collection of raunchy books and manuscripts in a private study as he awaits the arrival of a lover....

Lucy’s very real encounter in the stacks is the modern library’s attempted rejoinder to the loneliness of life online. The physicality of the library space is presented here as a concrete alternative to the interminable virtualness of contemporary erotic imagination. It’s the last argument for the library’s continued relevance as a space and of the subversive potential of books...

Explaining the "14" and "88" memes

Excerpts from an article at Spiegel Online discussing subtle new neo-Nazi codes:

Openly Nazi symbols such as the swastika are banned in Germany, so neo-Nazis get around the law by using coded combinations of letter and numbers such as 14 and 88. A new book explains the meaning of such codes, and reveals that far-right style is becoming increasingly diverse and hard to spot...

According to Weiss, the number 14 is a reference to the so-called "14 Words," a phrase coined by the American white separatist David Lane ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children"). The meaning behind "88" -- often found in conjunction with 14 -- is slightly more complicated. Here, the number eight stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, forming "HH" -- an abbreviation for "Heil Hitler," a phrase which is banned in Germany. Similarly, the number 28 signifies "BH," standing for "Blood and Honour," a far-right network that was banned in Germany in 2000.



The secret code numbers can be found "everywhere," says Weiss, including on license plates, tattoos and on signs at football games. "There are fans who travel 400 kilometers (250 miles) to a game just to hold up the four numbers that form 1488," he says...

The increasingly diverse image of right-wing extremists mean that neo-Nazis can often blend in at left-wing demonstrations or in a sports stadium, Weiss explains. "The problem is that many of these people no longer stand out."

More at the link.

"It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

YouTube link.

You either like George Carlin or hate him. If the former, you have probably already heard this rant. If you're in the latter category, you don't want to hear it.

In this performance he addresses the problem of public education. It's only a 3-minute excerpt from a longer stage presentation. There's a bit of profanity, but unlike the performances he gave when he was younger, the profanity isn't the point; now it's just used for emphasis. The focus here is broader (and more controversial).

[I originally wrote this post in 2008, but discovered today that the video link there was broken, so I've embedded a new version.  Note this presentation was done years before the Bailout and the economic downturn].

"Diamonds are a girl's best friend"

These lyrics would today be considered at least old-fashioned (and more likely politically incorrect), but the song and dance sequence from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" is an iconic moment in an otherwise forgettable movie. 

Winston Churchill, nonsmoker. WTF??

The above photo was recently displayed above the entrance to a London museum.  Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of 20th century history would know that this image has been digitally altered.  The classic photo looked like this:

No one admits to having perpetrated this travesty:

The Winston Churchill's Britain At War Experience, in South-East London, confessed to being astonished to discover that the image may have been doctored...

So just who did pinch the great man's Havana?

It wasn't the anti-smoking lobby, which has had no known contact with the museum; it certainly wasn't Churchill's family - his grandson Nicholas Soames said 'it doesn't matter one way or the other'; and it wasn't the museum itself - in fact it's got wartime posters advertising cigarettes on the walls.

But intriguingly the museum, which gives all profits to charity, declined to name who put together the display and, crucially, who enlarged the image for the poster.

Museum manager John Welsh was astonished to be told the image was missing one vital ingredient.

I'm a nonsmoking ex-smoker, and I'm frankly tired of this kind of manipulation of history for the sake of  modern political correctness.  The United States did the same thing when they honored Bette Davis on a postage stamp, using an image with a deleted cigarette:

Rogert Ebert offered some trenchant commentary:

Depriving Bette Davis of her cigarette reminds me of Soviet revisionism, when disgraced party officials disappeared from official photographs. Might as well strip away the toupees of Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart...

...Movies can't rewrite reality. The MPAA cautiously mentions smoking in their descriptions of movie ratings (even if it's the Cheshire Cat and his hookah). If, by the time you're old enough to sit through a movie, you haven't heard that smoking is bad for you, you don't need a movie rating, you need a foster home.

The Virgin Mary spanking The Baby Jesus

The proper title is The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter, painted by Max Ernst in 1926.  According to a Time magazine story in 1976 -

His father was a fiercely authoritarian Roman Catholic, an amateur painter who taught in a school for deaf-mutes in the Rhineland town of Brühl. Little Max briefly persuaded this eccentric sire that he was the child Jesus. Memories of this sort underlie Ernst's most notorious thrust of anticlerical wit, a spanking Madonna...

The painting is (not surprisingly) said to have been controversial at the time.  Now it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art   Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

Anti-global-warming advertisement

"They Will Come To Town" is supposed to frighten people about the prospects of the consequences of global warming.  From my viewpoint, it makes the future look a little brighter for the planet (if not for humankind).  A win for the whales...

Queen Victoria used cannabis for PMS

Queen Victoria was the first woman to use marijuana for PMS.

This occurred a few months after Dr. O’Shaughnessy brought cannabis to England about 1840...  It was prescribed by a Dr. Sir Russel Reynolds physician to Queen Victoria. The Queen had previously used Opium, Coca (raw cocaine), wine and chloroform...

The Queen obviously found that cannabis/marijuana worked well. She used it also for morning sickness and obstetrical anesthesia with no harm to fetuses.

Photo credit.

Norway hasn't had problems with its ocean drilling

After all, there is one country that has established an unrivaled record for environmental safety while exploiting its offshore petroleum reserves. That would be Norway, which created the company now known as Statoil Hydro as a fully state-owned entity and still controls nearly two-thirds of the company's "privatized" shares...

Statoil rigs in the North Sea are required by law to maintain special "acoustic switches" that shut down operations completely (and remotely) in case of a blowout or explosion...

What makes Norway so different from the United States -- and much more likely to install the most protective energy technology -- is that the Norwegian state can impose public values on oil producers without fighting off lobbyists and crooked politicians, because it owns and controls the resources...

Rather than debate the need for stronger environmental regulation with powerful private interests for the past quarter-century, the Norwegians were able to harness the profits of their oil resources to improve the environment (and provide a generous social security and universal healthcare system for their people).

A terrible toy

"Well into the nineteenth century it was the custom in Italy to tie a string to the leg of living birds or big cockchafers and give them to children to play with. The custom was so universal that we even see such living playthings represented in the hands of the Christ Child, especially in pictures of the Italian Renaissance. A curious example of a similar kind was to be found among the usually so simple and harmless German toys, as a Nuremberg catalog of the eighteenth century proves [above]. These were comic figures with space inside to hold a bird which in its struggles gives to the figures all kind of motions. As the catalog says: 'No ones would imagine that a living bird was inside, but would suppose that it was clock-work which made the head, eyes, and beak of the bird move.'"

From an interesting collection of vintage toys at A Journey Round My Skull.