Psst, hey, Marilyn Monroe’s image as a freewheeling sexpot was a carefully constructed lie. The real Marilyn Monroe was a roiling tragedy and her life was an indictment of our society as a whole. She was orphaned after her mother had a schizophrenic breakdown, bounced around between foster homes where she was sexually abused, and married a 21-year-old at 16 to get out of being sent to an orphanage. Hugh Hefner published nude photos of her without her consent that were taken when she was 23 and desperate. She suffered severe anxiety and depression, which she coped with by drinking and using barbiturates, and was already a full-blown addict when she became famous in the mid-50s. Her career was one of exploitation, condescension and alienation, and she killed herself at 36. That Hugh Hefner, a man who was at best an unpleasant footnote in her life, felt entitled to be buried next to her is one more humiliation in a pop cultural landscape we should all be ashamed of.
“Please don’t make me a joke… I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one… I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity..”
– Marilyn Monroe, last taped interview, days before her death
She deserved better than this
Can I just also say, in addition to all this, that I’m still pissed off about the fact that Joe DiMaggio swooped in and gave Marilyn a Christian funeral before her Rabbi could return from a trip overseas? ‘Cause that shit is fucked up.
So many men who claimed to be in love with her, and not one could fucking respect her wishes, even in death.
“In order to run away with her new love, she stole the body of a dead nun, placed it in the bed of her lover, and set the room on fire to cover their escape”
PETITION TO MAKE A MOVIE/TV SERIES ABOUT JULIE D’AUBIGNY.
“In order to run away with her new love, she stole the body of a dead nun, placed it in the bed of her lover, and set the room on fire to cover their escape”
PETITION TO MAKE A MOVIE/TV SERIES ABOUT JULIE D’AUBIGNY.
We are smart enough to know hot things should be hot.
We are sorry if you don’t
fun story about the reason they do that (at least in America)
once this lady spilled her McDonald’s coffee on herself and ended up getting like 3rd degree burns and since there was no warning on the cup she was able to claim she didn’t know it would be hot (or at least that hot) and won a lawsuit against McDonald’s for $1 million
That’s what the media smear campaign against her would have you believe, anyway. The truth of the matter is that the McDonald’s in question had previously been cited – on at least two separate occasions – for keeping their coffee so hot that it violated local occupational health and safety regulations. The lady didn’t win her lawsuit because American courts are stupid; she won it because the McDonald’s she bought that coffee from was actively and knowingly breaking the law with respect to the temperature of its coffee at the time of the incident.
(I mean, do you have any idea what a third-degree burn actually is? Third-degree burns involve “full thickness” tissue damage; we’re talking bone-deep, with possible destruction of tissue. Can you even imagine how hot that cup of coffee would have to have been to inflict that kind of damage in the few seconds it was in contact with her skin?)
Yeah I’m tired of people joking about either the “stupid” woman who didn’t know coffee was hot or the “greedy” woman making up bullshit to get money.
She was hideously injured by hideous irresponsibility, it was an absolutely legitimate lawsuit and the warning on the cups basically allows McDonalds to claim no responsibility even if it happens again. Every other company followed suit to cover their asses.
So they can still legally serve you something that could sear off the end of your tongue or permanently demolish the front of your gums and just give you a big fat middle finger in court. “The label SAID it would be HOT, STUPID.”
obligatory reblog for the great debunking of the usual ignorance spouted about this case
obligatory mention that the media smear campaign to twist teh facts on this case and get public opinion against the victim was deliberate and fueled by the right wing tort reform movement
it was seized upon to limit the rights of consumers to hold giant corporations accountable for wrongdoing
watch the documentary Hot Coffee, it lays out all of the facts and examines the response to this case and explains why everything you think you know about this case is bullshit, and explains why tort reform is bullshit in an entertaining and informative manner
The woman injured in Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants was 79 years old at the time of her injuries, and suffered third-degree burns to the pelvic region (including her thighs, buttocks, and groin), which in combination with lesser burns in the surrounding regions caused damage to an area totaling a whopping 22% of her body’s surface. These injuries that required two years of intensive medical care, including multiple skin grafts; during her hospitalization, Stella Liebeck lost around 20% of her starting body weight.
She was uninsured and sued McDonald’s Restaurants for the cost of her past and projected future medical care, an estimated $20,000. The corporation offered a settlement of $800, a number so obviously ridiculous that I’m not even going to dignify it with any further explanation.
The settlement number most often quoted is not the amount that the corporation actually paid; the jury in the first trial suggested a payment equal to a day or two of coffee revenues for McDonald’s, which at the time totaled more than $1 million per diem. The judge reduced the required payout to around $640,000 in both compensatory and punitive damages, and the case was later settled out of court for less than $600,000.
Keep in mind that at the time, McDonald’s already had over 700 cases of complaints about coffee-related burns on file, but continued to sell coffee heated to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (around 90 degrees Celsius) as a means of boosting sales (their selling point was that one could buy the coffee, drive to a second location such as work or home, and still have a piping hot beverage). This in spite of the fact that most restaurants serve coffee between 140 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 71 degrees Celsius), and many coffee experts agree that such high temperatures are desirable only during the brewing process itself.
The Liebeck case was absolutely not an example of litigation-happy Americans expecting corporations to cover their asses for their own stupidity, but we seem determined to remember it that way. It’s an issue of liability, and the allowable lengths of capitalism, and even of the way in which our society is incredibly dangerous for and punitive towards the uninsured, but it was not and is not a frivolous suit. Please check your assumptions and do your research before you turn a burn victim’s suffering into a throwaway punchline.
my favorite thing i’ve learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like “the eight winds cannot move me” blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes “FART” (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and he was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says “wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake”
i googled this bc i desperately wanted this to be real, and guess what…it is.
the dude’s name was su dongpo (also known as su shi). his original poem went like this:
稽首天中天，
毫光照大千，
八風吹不動，
端坐紫金蓮
(Humbly bowed my head below all skies Minutest lights shine through my deepest bounds Immovable by strong winds from eight sides Upon purplish gold lotus I seated straightly by the low mound) (x)
on which his friend wrote “放屁” (fart, literally), and you know the rest.
this is even funnier because just writing “fart” out of the blue sounds really stupid and random in english, but in chinese, fart (fang pi) is used as a common reply to, well, people talking out of their ass. kind of like how we’d use “bullshit” in context.
So apparently last year the National Park Service in the US dropped an over 1200 page study of LGBTQ American History as part of their Who We Are program which includes studies on African-American history, Latino history, and Indigenous history.
Like. This is awesome. But also it feels very surreal that maybe one of the most comprehensive examinations of LGBTQ history in America (it covers sports! art! race! historical sites! health! cities!) was just casually done by the parks service.
FINE I’ll just do your homework for you. Trust me, it’s not just “what we think”, we have ample evidence and it’s pretty much unanimously agreed upon among brewers that women were traditionally the ones brewing and often drinking the beer. So long long story short: yes, brewing was very much a women’s craft in the majority of cultures worldwide pre-industrialisation. A couple of popular brewing textbooks state:
“Initially, brewing was carried out as home brewing by women for domestic use only. It was part of the daily housework next to cooking and baking bread.” (Handbook of Brewing, Priest and Stewart, 2006)
“Traditionally, [African] beers are made by women brewsters, as was the case medieval Europe, and they may be consumed with some ceremony.” (Brewing, Briggs, Brookes, and Stevens, 2003)
Honestly though, just google “women brewing history”.
lol wow thank you!!! i will spread this information in the world
also will use it to shut down Manly Beer Drinker of all sorts
THIS IS USEFUL! I SHALL BE TAKING THIS INTO MY LOCAL MICROBREWERY AND BEING OBNOXIOUSLY FEMINIST. I LOVE YOU FOR THIS SO MUCH!
Fun fact: men (specifically, monks) started adding hops to beer. Hops makes beer taste bitter – the tast men today insist is the “true” tast of beer which makes it a masculine drink. The fun part of it is that hops is a phytoestrogen which is (according to some sources – there are disproving articles so I won’t say it’s absolutely true) responsible for low sex drive, lower energy, man boobs, and abdominal fat. Actually, monks started using hops in beer in order to lower libido of men in the monastery.
yeah, at least it’s what we think, since women were the ones who started brewing shit. the goddess of brewery and beer is, well, a goddess and not a god, which is probably because women were the ones starting it historically.
“Women’s role in the history of beer is often forgotten,” says Sofie Vanrafelghem,
author and master beer sommelier. “One of the very first written
documents to refer to beer,” she says, “was an ode written 3,800 years
ago to the Sumerian goddess Ninkasi, whose priestesses brewed beer in
her honour.”
This data’s been on my radar for a while now. I remember being in one of our favorite places in Dublin, Porterhouse Central, and spotting a sign hanging up above one of the aisles that said BEERS BREWED BY MEN, NOT MACHINES. A nice enough sentiment, but unfortunately / unnecessarily gendered.
I was in a bit of a mischievous mood and said to the barman, “No women?” “Nope,” he said.
I said, “You should really get at least one woman brewer in here. For historical reasons if nothing else. Didn’t you know that until a couple of centuries ago it was illegal for men to brew in Dublin?”
He was kind of stunned. True, though. It was traditional in the city from Viking times that only women should brew. In fact there was a sense that it was unlucky for men to brew, that the beer would fail, that it didn’t like them.
My bartender was a little bemused by this. “But why would that be?”
I just kind of laughed. “Women,” I said. “Yeast. We have a relationship.”
I wish I could describe the series of expressions that went across his face. 🙂
Also really cool info: In medieval Europe, women would sell their excess home-brewed beer. They would identify themselves by wearing pointed hats at market and by placing broomsticks outside of their doors. Surprising absolutely no one, the Church was not really into female entrepreneurs and/or women having power and respect in the community. Church officials spread word that these women were evil servants of the devil and should be avoided because they would bewitch you with their potions. This is where we get much of the iconic Western European witch imagery ie. broomsticks, pointed hats, cauldrons. Basically the Church got pissy because women had power in their communities and basically started the a ridiculously long-lasting smear campaign against female beer-brewers. link to a full article: http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/recipes/women-and-beer-a-snap-shot-history
So while doing some pirate research for the play I’m writing I stumbled upon one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read. In the 5th century A.D. there was a Scandinavian princess called Alwilda who’s father tried to set her up to marry Alf, the Prince of Denmark. Alwilda wasn’t cool with this so she and some female companions dressed as men, stole a ship, and sailed away. Eventually they met a company of pirates who were in need of a new captain and they were so captivated by her that they elected her as their new leader. Her crew became so infamous that Prince Alf was sent out to stop them. When their ships met he took Alwilda prisoner and she was so impressed by Alf’s skill that she agreed to marry him after all and eventually became the Queen of Denmark.
I stopped caring whether this was factually accurate about halfway through because it’s completely AWESOME.
Medievalist here for triumphant fact-checking: this story is, if not true, at least true according to the history of the Danes (Gesta Danorum) written in the 12th century by Saxo Grammaticus. You can read his account of Alwilda’s story in the original Latin here, or in English translation here. Highlights include:
She exchanged woman’s for man’s attire, and, no longer the most modest of maidens, began the life of a warlike rover. Enrolling in her service many maidens who were of the same mind, she happened to come to a spot where a band of rovers were lamenting the death of their captain, who had been lost in war; they made her their rover captain.
I love the implication that there were lots of Danish maidens just WAITING for the opportunity of a life of piracy…
what’s the difference between ninjas and stage crew?
ninjas move silently around walls, stage crew moves walls around silently.
BUT YOU KNOW WHAT IS SO GREAT
The depiction of ninjas as dressed all in black comes from traditional Japanese theatre. Actual historical ninjas didn’t dress in black because it’s conspicuous as hell in the daytime and even at night in the dark a person dressed in solid black tends to stand out; dark grey or blue is better for hiding in shadows. Usually they just wore ordinary, like, people clothes which are far better for blending into your surroundings in than a specialised professional costume.
BUT YOU KNOW WHO DID DRESS ALL IN BLACK LIKE THAT
the stage crew in a theatre
and it was a generally accepted convention that the black-clad stagehands were invisible, so they could be on stage at the same time as the actors and move things around and the audience would just mentally CG them out
but then one day because a director was a GENIUS, during an otherwise normal performance of a play, suddenly a stagehand stepped forward, assassinated one of the main characters and then melted back into the background
THEY WERE A NINJA
AND THE AUDIENCE LOST THEIR MINDS BECAUSE IT WAS AMAZING
and eventually it lost its mind-blow value because after a while everyone had seen a play like that, so although the “stagehands wear black and are invisible” convention continued, the new “ninjas wear black and are invisible until they choose to strike” convention became established, and from then on fictional ninjas have just worn black because it looks so cool.
So in fact the answer to “What’s the difference between ninjas and stage crew?” is “You will never know until they stab you.”
ruby-dear archive 