den heter gen-DER

one of the balconies across the highway from us--clearly visible from our kitchen window--has a full-size rainbow gay pride flag hanging in it.  it's on the third floor and one of six balconies on a very pretty building, and anyway, i keep drifting into the kitchen to look across at it, because it makes me really happy. 

i want a gay pride flag!  or a gay pride... something (other than daisy dukes, which are in alabama anyway) (and my gay pride sarong, which i use as a scarf like every single day, but that unfortunately means you can't detect the whole rainbow at once, which means the GAY PRIDE intent is, i fear, not completely explicit).

anyone else?  does the pride flag give you a warm, happy glow? 

also, today in sociology there was a question about sex & gender (rather, someone wanted sldl to recap his entire two-hour lecture on the subject from last month--*eyeroll*) and the elder professor (the department chair, not sldl) chimed in to say "jag var just i sverige och jag märkte att ordet 'gender' liksom i engelska har börjat används." 

(this is even though swedish actually has its own word for "gender", "genus".  but it's not a very PC language, and people tend to still say sex when they mean gender, or to talk about "biological" and "social" sex, so perhaps it's felt the terms are too fuzzy.) 

she paused.  "den heter 'gen-DER'," she added, and the whole auditorium burst into laughter, because, folks, there is nothing cuter than swedish people's accents.  and seriously, her impression was quite good.  (wax_jism: we should go to sweden!  me: okay!)

den mänskliga världen

first snowfall last night.  the sidewalks are slushy and the snow's still falling fast.  there's plenty of light, but the sky's so smooth and matte it almost seems to be absorbing it and not putting it out.

to do tomorrow:  buy some snowboots. 

i still can't decide if i hate snow (i have these unpleasant childhood memories of the few "blizzards"--that is to say, 2"-4" snowfalls--that we had in alabama when i was a child.  both my parents, from their childhoods in virginia and kansas/iowa respectively, have plenty of experience of snow, but i, southernised from age six, could never accept and move beyond its fundamental coldness and wetness.)  (yeah, like that blizzard where mom dressed me in three pairs of socks and two bread bags in between them *per foot* before sending me out to play in it.  okay, maybe the anxiety isn't entirely my own fault.) 

in other news:  choko-cappuccino--the nearest finnish approximation to international house coffee--tastes a lot more like it should, which is to say a lot less like coffee, if you add two more spoonfuls of sugar per cup!  next i'ma try vanilla.

wikipedia love #1,600,042

today's actual homework led me in just one click to the sokal affair:

In an attempt to discredit hermeneutic, postmodern, and other forms of “non-scientific” knowledge, Sokal wrote a paper which he intended to be complete gibberish, to see if a postmodern cultural studies journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". The paper, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" [1] , was accepted and published in the journal Social Text.[*]

wikipedia: learn something fabulously entertaining every day!  ( short but fabulous quote from the paper. )

this reminds me of what i was telling wax, namely that humanism is, according to the rev. jerry falwell, one of the five greatest threats to, well, something: "[The Rev Jerry] Falwell noted 'five major problems that have political consequences, political implications, that moral Americans should be ready to face: abortion, homosexuality, pornography, humanism, the fractured family'"¹.





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