Post for the purpose of showing off costumes.

I tried posting a link to the page where I had these, and apparently you need a password to see them. The photos are really not that great at all, so I think when there's an outside that we can go outside in without catching pneumonia I'll reshoot. And try to show off the skirt size as well, so it's more obvious that they are *big* skirts.

And we do not look like this in person. :)
*edit* I think these are a slightly more normal size now. I'm hoping.
And I do not want to do this again.

( Medieval dresses )

Feeling mildly offensive. Nice long rant on the stupid. And oversensitivity. And banning books.

Thomas Bowdler's efforts in his 1818 "Family Shakespeare" gave rise to the word "bowdlerize".
From this site. I was looking for interesting things to read, and found all sorts of interesting things about people banning Shakespeare. Now granted he's not my favourite thing to read, but really, people. This is supposed to be education, and you really can't teach English Lit without covering Shakespeare, and very few people want to read the clean stuff. Not that I can think of any really "clean" Mr S. That boy just had a dirty little mind. And I found the source of the work Bowdlerize, which pleases me. I like knowing word origins.

As to the stupid. I have been a voracious reader since I was a very small child, and I wasn't just reading children's books, I read Shakespeare and Hugo and started several books by Dickens, among other things. By elementary school I was pretty sure people did really mean things to each other for no reason based on the books and the news, and said mean things (I knew that pretty well from personal experience. Not that I knew what several of the words meant, but whatever. Funny, though, the dictionary was no help whatsoever.) You can't protect children because chances are they're already exposed to some variant of whatever you're trying to hide from them, by the people they associate with. When I was maybe 7, my brother and I played, not cops and robbers, but Isreali-Palestinian conflict. Gun sounds were made with a noise sounding remarkably like Beiruit. This was not a coincidence.

This is not a pretty world in many respects. War, violence, classism, racism, pick your poison, these things aren't going to go away anytime soon, if current trends are any indication, not without a great big fucking bomb. You can try to clean things up as much as you want, but it won't go away. Want to know something I'm completely unashamed of? One of my favourite stories as a child was Little Black Sambo. I loved it, even with the very 1920s illustrations. Which is to say, not PC. (And a note on the art, have you ever noticed that even white people drawn in that style are not particularly attractive either? The look like anaemic weasels. So I assume it's ok to draw white people in an unrealistic, unattractive manner?) Yeah, it isn't nice. But it's still a part of the cultural history. It does not detract from the literary quality of a work. Let's take for example Huck Finn, he's an easy target. I mean really, it uses the word *nigger*, and there's not a lot that's more offensive. Ok, so there probably is. I just don't know those words. And is full of slaves. But you know what I took from that book, after reading Twain's introdiction to it, wherein he said that the words he used were just trying to be accurate to the time and place? And after I asked my mother what a nigger was, and why he said it? I walked away from teh book seeing only an orphaned white kid and a runaway slave going off an a raft together, having a great adventure. Together. And yes, I asked my mother about the history of the word. She told me. Hell, go into it in class. Use whatever the current theory is on the origin of the word. Personally, I think the corrumtion of Niger has the better claim. If it was really "ignorant" it would have been applied to any ignoramus, not just one that hailed from Africa. Or to go back to Shakespeare, his Merchant of Verona is rather anti-Semitic. More than rather, really. Fine. Teach it. Use it as background to all sorts of historical violence done on Jewish settlements from Spain to Germany. It was pretty bloody common and not to address that is as much of a crime as doing it. And why? Because people won't learn that when it happened before it was wrong, and that if it happens agin it's *still* wrong. I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes in the 4th grade for class. And I learned from that massive accountability, that people from my country dropped a couple bombs that were still killing people years after it fell. And that's just wrong. It never said explicitly that America was at fault, for dropping the bomb that ultimately killed her, but it was there for anyone who knew history at all. Teach them when they're young that these things happen, and can be avoided if you have enough brains to think about the results first.

And how the fuck do you intend to *learn* from your mistakes if you just gloss over them and pretend it never happened?

I am not saying that anyone should use words like nigger or kike or any other offensive term that my brother could list off to you. I'm sure he has a bunch that you and I have never even heard of. They are unpleasant words, and very rude, and people get offended at them. And when it all comes down to it, everything hinges on politeness. If you treat a person like a human being instead of like an animal, you often begin to see, or at least have the opportunity to see if you're not a total asshat, that they really *are* people. See? minimum work, decent return. It's really quite simple. And you come out of it looking like a human being as well. Or you find out that they are complete and total idiots and not worth your time.

Sometimes I think I should go back to the old goal of teaching subversive history through literature. Someone has to.

(no subject)

Oh yeah, the house has heat again. This is to say that it is once again very warm in our room. I think the heat should be turned down before my face melts off. I hate warm sometimes.