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This guy is an elected official, and he’s serious.
All cats seem to really enjoy sticking their butts in their humans’ faces. This is known. V has recently elevated his butt displaying behaviour by combining it with maximal interference with human phone browsing. Well done, V!
V boob-stomping the Intransigent One
V on my shoulder
Naturally for this time of year, the choir that Arb and I sing in is preparing for our Christmas concert, and there is Jebus-music aplenty. Really that’s OK by me; most of the shit about Santa seriously sucks. One of the beautiful carols we’re doing is Harold Darke’s arrangement of In the Bleak Midwinter. Here’s the final verse:
What shall I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.
If I were a wise man, I would do my part.
Yet what can I give him: give my heart!
People don’t think this shit through, they just bleat it out mindlessly year after year.
We’ve all heard plenty about the so-called “friend zone”, which is where a person you want to date, just wants to be friends, and somehow that’s unfair and bad and mean. Let me tell you about its converse, the Un-Friend Zone.
A while back at work, we got a new deskside support/IT guy. He quickly identified me as the person in the department to talk to, because I know what I’m doing – and what everybody else is doing – with computers (even if they don’t). We were going through a major hardware and software upgrade at the time, so IT Guy came around a lot. He and I would get to chatting while he was working, and we discovered we had lots of nerdy things in common. We really hit it off together. We started chatting over instant messaging when he wasn’t around in person, and he really brightened slow days for me – and I assume I did the same for him. I was happy because I don’t make friends easily, and yay, a new friend! It got to the point where I was considering asking Arb if I could invite him to join our tabletop roleplaying group, because I thought it would be fun to be outside-work friends as well as work-friends. I was positive it was strictly a platonic thing, because he was at least ten years younger than me, and I’m not conventionally attractive, and he never said anything remotely flirtatious and neither did I.
Then one day, I said the fateful words: “My husband…” The conversation faltered. (It’s not like I was keeping Arb a secret, just that I’m not one of those people who’s constantly all “My husband this…” and “My husband that…” and “Well my husband says…” to every opinion offered.)
He didn’t message me the next day like he usually did, so I messaged him. He was really terse. I messaged him again a couple days later, same thing. And the other IT guy started coming for all our deskside support calls.
Ladies and gentleman, behold the Un-Friend Zone: where you think you’re making a new friend, and the other person wants more than friendship, and then when it turns out you don’t feel that way about them, they drop you like a hot potato. Obviously there can be hurt feelings involved, and that could require some space to get over; I get that. But on this end of the stick it feels like it wasn’t worth spending time with me and getting to know me, if the payoff isn’t going to be a sexual/romantic relationship. And that’s crappy. (It’s not a gendered phenomenon either; Arb has had women do it to him as well.)
I don’t think I have an obligation to be constantly flashing a verbal neon sign that says MARRIED MARRIED MARRIED MARRIED, just in case somebody is attracted to me and I don’t realise it. On the other hand, I really object when the opening line from a stranger initiating conversation is an inquiry about my sexual availability. (and yes, this happened to me frequently before I aged/fatted out of the prime fuckability category) I don’t know what the solution is. But I wish people who are looking for mates, wouldn’t object to making platonic friends along the way.
The tango that they dance in Argentina is a very, very different dance than you might see on Dancing with the Stars. It’s highly improvisational, and allows not only the leader, but also the follower, to make artistic decisions. Everything is communicated between the partners through physical contact, whether it’s a slight shift of the shared center of balance, or physically pushing with hands, feet, or legs. One guy that I taught tango to, who was into martial arts, commented that Argentine tango is very much like judo, except that the object is to NOT fall down.
Here are Miguel Angel Zotto and Milena Plebs dancing to “Gallo Ciego”, by Osvaldo Pugliese. By where they put little flourishes with their feet, you can tell they’re very familiar with this particular recording of this particular song, but the steps they do together could all be communicated with lead and follow, no need for pre-planned choreography.
One particularly interesting thing about Argentine tango is that because of its origins in a time and place where men significantly outnumbered available women, there’s also a tradition of men dancing with men, without any gay connotation to it – not that gay guys don’t dance tango together nowadays and make it very, very homoerotic. Here are brothers Enrique and Guillermo De Fazio, dancing a milonga – a country dance that was one of the precursors of tango. It uses many of the same steps as tango, but goes a whole heck of a lot faster. Because they do break apart a fair amount, some of this performance probably had to be pre-choreographed. Note how every once in a while they’ll trade who’s leading and who’s following. Enjoy the hot guy-on-guy milonga action!
Because tango music is in four beats per measure, you can actually dance it to any music that’s in a multiple of four. Here, a fan has taken an Argentine tango video, and redubbed it with VNV Nation (the band I introduced you to last week), and it works. In “real life” it’s hard to dance tango to industrial music, because when you go to venues where they play industrial music, you usually wear big, stompy boots, and they tend to be too grippy to spin well.
Two very interesting articles about police conduct came out this week, particularly interesting if you juxtapose them.
Ferguson and the cult of compliance
In cases that seem very different, separated by factors such as age, race, gender, sexuality, geography, class and ability, police explain away their actions by citing noncompliance. They do it because it works. They do it because according to their beliefs, any sign of noncompliance is an invitation to strike.
First, we have to recognize the common denominators in many of these incidents: that people who die at the hands of the police don’t obey commands and that the police initiate violence, despite there being no imminent threat to their safety.
Brown’s story is now well known. According to an eyewitness, a police officer told Brown, an 18-year-old black man, to “get the f— onto the sidewalk.” He didn’t comply, the incident escalated, and he got shot repeatedly.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar examples in which noncompliance led to violence. Ersula Ore, a black woman in Arizona refused to hand over her ID and was flung to the ground. A drunk woman in Skokie, Illinois, didn’t look into the camera when being booked, so the police threw her onto a bench, breaking her face. They claimed she was resisting arrest.
Some victims — Eric Garner, James Boyd and Nicholas Davis, to name just a few — die. Others, such as Antonio Martinez, just get beaten. Every time, the police explain their conduct by citing noncompliance. Cameras can provide a counternarrative to police tales of noncompliance, showing that Garner was peaceful and that Ore was a professor on her own campus.
But here’s the worst thing: Most of the victims of this cult of compliance are invisible. They receive no media coverage. Their stories get buried in plea deals. They are told that fighting bogus charges will just make matters worse. When police violence targets people who have suffered it for so long, it takes something unusual to bring it to light.
And then, written by a senior police officer involved in training other officers:
I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.
…officers are rarely at fault. When they use force, they are defending their, or the public’s, safety.
Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.
And the flipside of the cult of compliance: On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodgers killed six people and wounded thirteen others before taking his own life. It all could have been stopped on April 30, when police responded to concerns from Rodgers’ family about his social media posts. Rodgers was polite and compliant, telling the officers “it was a misunderstanding and that he was not going to hurt anyone or himself. Rodger said he was having troubles with his social life.” The officers determined he did not present a threat, called his mother to reassure her, and left.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this… On the one hand, it’s super-hard being a cop, I won’t deny that. Any mistake you make, whether it’s reacting too much or too little, can get people killed. On the other, clearly whether or not a person instantly and cheerfully submits, is an utterly piss-poor indication of a person’s threat level. And enforcing the law is not the same thing as demanding instant submission.
I remember as a child, being taught that the police were there to protect me. I lost that belief a long time ago. I wonder how much worse it must be for people who aren’t white and affluent-looking.
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