Tag: blither

Vocally Sexist?

Posted on by kat_richardson

Black-and-white photo of a dark-haired young woman holding a microphone as if she is about to start singing.

My “Sin” of Vocal Fry:

I was watching a video on YouTube by linguist Dr. Geoff Lindsey about the recent hate expressed for the speech phenomenon of “Vocal Fry” and some of the mechanism, sound symbolism, and other issues around it. One of the things he brings up near the end of the video is the idea that much of the of the current discussion may have an element of sexism and/or ageism to it. And, as someone who does speak with a bit of “fry” (or “creaky voice” as the British call it), well… I have an opinion.

The Vocal Fry Among American Women discussion that’s going around reminds me of a phenomenon I encountered as a singer and speaker when I was in my twenties and thirties. My male instructors/directors and coworkers (with the exception of my High School choir director Richard Stout) often directed me to sing and speak more “forward,” to sound “brighter and more open,” while my female instructors/directors and coworkers often preferred my tone when it was slightly more relaxed, or “creaky.” “Pitchier” as one of them called it. Other women, I discovered, sometimes found my “bright” tone irritating or “girly,” while men found it more “feminine,” except on the phone, where, ironically, men often told me I sounded “sexy” when my voice was more “fried.” So, yes, I do think a lot of the current public hate for “vocal fry” utilized by American women is sexism (and ageism, since it’s usually directed at women under 40.)

I’ve been working to return to my lower, more relaxed tone recently, since, as I age, I care less about how “feminine” I sound and more about how comfortable I am with my own voice.

We should be comfortable with our voices as with our bodies, we should not find ourselves attacked for what is natural and comfortable for us. I’ve always had a little bit of a lisp; I speak in a lower register than some women, and with a bit of “fry”; I have a regional accent (Central California Valley melded to “SoCal/Val”); I “whoop” when I laugh; and I’m perfectly fine with it. You should be too.

 

 

WPMail Hates Me

Posted on by kat_richardson

I’m Very Annoyed

I haven’t been getting anything but spam here for about 6 months. I figured you guys just didn’t have anything to say to me, which was sad, but understandable. But today I discovered that WPMail forms has been borked for months and not sending mail to me because the value in the “from email” —which was provided by WPMail itself!—is unacceptable. It’s fine using the same information in the “reply to” part of the backend, but not in the “from email” part. What fun, eh? So, until I figure the bastard thing out or replace it completely, I’m stuck asking you all to contact me through my professional mail, which is: kat.rchrdsn at gmail.com  Fun stuff… (if you love spam, depression, and paranoia.)

 

Theft of Self

Posted on by kat_richardson

Closeup of a raging wood fire. Image by Brigitte Werner (ArtTower) from Pixabay.

Who Owns You?

The following is a rant cut and pasted from my spewing on Blue Sky about new AI Training policy at Zoom. I shall now reproduce my rant here, so I don’t have to keep on cutting-and-pasting all over the Internet:

I’m not naive to the fact that all business now pads its nest with data scraping and selling information about its consumers to other businesses, but…

For Crying Out Loud! Now it’s not just my prefs and personal data, but my actual self that’s for sale *without my permission AND I don’t get paid!*

There’s a common legal concept that the one thing you absolutely own is yourself. (I did spend a lot of time hanging around with lawyers in my youth.)

If I do not own me, I own nothing and have no inherent rights.

 If a company can unilaterally decide that the essence of another’s Self is theirs for the taking simply because I utilize their platform (for which I pay) then I am no longer mine.

 Is this not the definition of slavery—to not own yourself? to have no control over your body, your thoughts, your essential being? Are we not appalled by this? We should be.

And I could go on, but I’ll stop here because I already spend too much time wibbling between rage and despair.

 

Spork Off!

Posted on by kat_richardson

The Problem of the Runcible Spoon (a bit of Writer Archeology)

Quite a while ago (late January of 2011, in fact) I wrote the following about runcible spoons and what they are and aren’t. At the time there was actually rather less Internet than there is now, and also a bit different flavor of Wild West to it all, so I’ve had to make a few edits and and had to unlink due to the disappearance of one of my reference sites. But imagine my surprise when I was suddenly getting hits from my old WordPress site (which hasn’t been active since 2018) this week. It seems artist and teacher Jenie Yolland has copy-pasted my little research rant because they have a deep and abiding love for Sam Neil’s reading of The Owl and the Pussycat, and an interest in weird table utensils. And all that is utterly fine with me, so, without further ado, here is a slightly updated version of what I said about runcible spoons way back when:

Ah the Runcible spoon, which rose to fame in the Edward Lear poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” is not, in fact, the poet’s invention–no matter what the internet says. How do I know this?

Because I read Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson in college. There’s a scene in the diary wherein Boswell and Dr. Johnson have stopped at an inn while traveling and they must provide their own utensils while they eat from a shared bowl. Boswell is put out that he has only his belt knife and cannot keep up with the prodigious gobbling pace of Johnson who has a “Runcible’s spoon”. This invention of a man named Runcible (no, his first name isn’t mentioned that I recall, but I’d bet on “John” just to be perverse) is described by Boswell as a long handle with a spoon bowl at one end and fork at the other, and one sharpened edge to make a small knife (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten if it was the spoon or the fork that had the sharpened side). Boswell is interested in Runcible’s invention and though Johnson finds it a bit of a challenge, it’s a huge step up from making do with a belt knife and fingers as Boswell has to do.

Johnson predates Edward Lear by a considerable time. That the internet has widely reported the story of the Runcible spoon as an invention of Lear’s does not, in fact, make it true. It’s the invention of Runcible.

And although it is sometimes mislabled a “spork,” it is, in fact, a variation on Mr. Runcible’s spoon. (The Slightly Less Than Official Spork Page claims “’Spork’ is the colloquial term for `Runcible Spoon’” but the spork doesn’t usually have a sharpened edge and there’s no knife edge on the official patent design.) The original must have had a longer and more distinct handle, but still… a spoon bowl, fork tines, and one sharpened edge…. Plainly a Runcible’s spoon. You can imagine how swank Dr. Johnson must have been to own such a marvel in the Eighteenth Century. Very, very swank! No sharing germs with the peons for Dr. Johnson! No burning his fingers snatching bits of meat out of the stew pot with his unaided hand.

And, in spite of what my parents told me, a central-pivot salad tongs is also not a Runcible spoon. Just isn’t. Sorry. Not to mention how could the Owl and Pussycat ever have eaten “mince and slices of quince” with a salad tongs? Ridiculous. But with a Runcible spoon? Easy as… well, as pie. Om nom nom!

Also, the poem wouldn’t have rhymed very well with “spork.”

A pair of silver-colored salad tongs, which look like a giant pair of scissors with a spoon bowl and a large fork where the blades ought to be

 

Scissor Gnomes

Posted on by kat_richardson

Tricksy Bastards

Scissor Gnomes. They have been a plague upon me since I was a child. Put the scissors (or box knife) down while working. Use another tool for a few minutes… Finish. Reach for the scissors… They aren’t where I put them. Look everywhere in the vicinity. Find them not. Yell and scream at the Scissor Gnomes, tell them this is Not Funny. Walk out of room. Return. Scissors are back where I first put them down. Scissor Gnomes: Total jerks.

3d rendered model of man-like figure dragging a large pair of scissors.

 

Woe!

Posted on by kat_richardson

isolated figure huddled in a corner of an empty brick-walled room

Well… hell

I had all the pricing and shipping info ready to post so any of you in a book-acquiring mind could buy books from me. But it turns out that my WP Forms-generated contact form has not been sending me email since… well, I’m not sure, but the last email I got through this site was back in January  of this year. I’ve been trying to solve the problem, but so far, it’s defeating me. Tomorrow I shall bring out the big guns: Mr. Kat (who used to work for my ISP). Hopefully, we’ll be able to get it working and then I can sell you guys books! And exchange email with you!

And all this time I thought no one was sending me email. Gosh, I hope I didn’t miss something really wonderful while my contact form was broken…

 

Casting Stones?

Posted on by kat_richardson

Locked Out of Your Stuff

So, there’s an article at the New York Times about Bitcoin billionaires losing access to their accounts because they’ve forgotten their passwords and the bitch of it is that the structure of Bitcoin means they can’t just reset the password, so unless they magically remember, these poor suckers are out, in some cases, billions of techno-dollars.

My first impulse is to snicker and mutter snarkily “oh, poor babies.” But on further consideration, I don’t like that response. Here are people who took a risk and invested in a start-up technology, just as anyone who invests takes a risk, This tech worked and it turned a ridiculous profit. At least for now. You wouldn’t laugh at the misfortune of someone who lost their wallet, or lost money investing in, say, the Rocket e-Book. Taking public pleasure in the misfortune of these guys isn’t really any different—yeah, they are great targets when a lot of us are struggling to keep a roof over our heads, but taking the piss smacks of juvenile jealousy and gloating. It’s beyond Schadenfreude.

You’re probably rolling your eyes at me and muttering “Oh come on, Kat…” But I’m serious. This is a lousy attitude and one I don’t want to feed in myself.

Why? Because the root of their problem is something very ordinary, very human: the difficulty of remembering a complicated string of letters, numbers, and symbols that are otherwise meaningless. Here are a handful of people who might be ridiculously rich—and some already are, but some aren’t—if they could only remember their password, and we’ve all been in the position of forgetting a password. Some people even lose access to important things because of it. You know: that email address that linked to your old website or Facebook page, your old phone’s backup directory, or that guest account on the old laptop… It happens all the time. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to you. Don’t pretend it hasn’t.

And don’t pretend your urge to sneer isn’t at least partially motivated by old-fashioned jealousy that you don’t have that kind of dough to lose. I know mine is.

But to gloat and make public mock of these poor schmoes is hypocritical, and after the year we’ve had, this sort of snark is just petty.

Let he/she/they who are without password-forgetfulness cast the first stone.

Me, I’m thinking of writing a book, instead. See, there’s this guy and he can’t remember…

 

Photo Play

Posted on by kat_richardson

Close up of Egg Shell with coffee grounds inside, which have colored the shell with swirled watercolor-like shades of green and brown

reddish brown sky with red-orange sun

 

Strange Nature

I was cleaning up after breakfast recently and happened to look into my countertop compost bin, where I saw this interesting color effect on an egg shell which had caught some coffee grounds. I found it so interesting that I went and grabbed my cell phone to take the picture here at the top of the left column.

I know that to most people this is just a photo of my garbage, but I was struck by the interesting colors, especially since I knew there’s nothing else in that bin other than coffee grounds, egg shells, and a green tea bag. Nature creates some amazing colors—even in the trash.

By contrast, the lower photo is also the colors of nature, but in a less-friendly mode. This is the sky above Silverdale Washington, at 14:30 hours on September 12, 2020.

Due to windborne ash in the air from wildfires in Oregon and California, the sky was a reddish brown and the sun a mere orange spot that could be stared at without any eye protection.  I’ve started calling this effect “Apocalypse Sky.” I think that would make a nifty title for a book, or an anthology of short stories, though what it would be about I don’t yet know.

Balls!

Posted on by kat_richardson

 

Just Photos of My Dogs

We got the dogs some new Jolly Balls on July 4 and they’ve been playing with them in the yard until they’re both exhausted. Good thing too: our neighbors set off very loud, colorful fireworks for two and a half hours starting about 21:30 that night. Normally Jack and Banjo dislike loud noiseds and bark like mad, but they were too tired to get wound-up about the noise this year.

Remind me to buy “The Best Toys EVAR!” (according to Jack and Banjo) again next year.

And below is Banjo playing with “his” Jolly Ball while Jack looks on. Jack doesn’t like to be recorded, so he sat this one out.

 

Jack Puppikins

Labradork

 

 

 

 

 

 

Banjo Wigglebotham

Brown Hound