Going to start singing this at people who are still concerned about inclusion and balance for nazis.
Giant mutant tarantulas just want to be loved
(just wanna, wanna be loved, loved)
… when I sing it, I swap out “maniacs” for “murderers” because I am tired of casual ableist slurs
Coffee wasn’t hitting so I am watching Tony Hawk yell “do a kickflip” at skateboarders from his car for 6 minutes ❤️
Turns out you can make baked salmon, sauteed kale, and wild rice pilaf the most exciting meal a child has ever eaten by adding a side of fresh blueberries and calling it Bear Dinner.
Gotta say it made the adults happy too 🐻
Small pleasure of the day was printing other people’s zines to enjoy at home. Going to highlight this free one-pager about drawing cute poops. A perfect gift for the children in your life.
Aww man. Shout out to local beauty salon for kids Lizzie Lee and Me for having a receptionist who says things like “makeovers have no gender” and “anybody can love sparkles”, and who will book any hair, makeup, or spa service for any kid (and any grown-up, if they want to get side-by-side mini manicures).
I appreciate them also just for taking kids desires seriously. It’s so fun to have a kid salon where it’s halfway pretend play. You can wear a pink robe and get a “facial” that is just face mist and cucumber slices on your eyes. You can get a pedicure with no sharp tools, but you get to soak your feet in bubbles and read a kids magazine. The “makeovers” are sparkly face paint with rainbow or flower themes. I dunno, it’s all just very sweet.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks for small children and this is the first one I’ve encountered that includes image descriptions. It’s such a good idea! The small child I was listening with was so excited that I had to pause the story for celebrations. Alt text all the things.
The book is Secret of the Jade Bangle, by Linda Trinh.
I need to be precise in talking about it because infantilization is real, but there can be so much solidarity between children and disabled people.
Last year’s teacher made sure our giant hepa filter got set up properly in this year’s new classroom without me even asking. This should not be necessary but under the circumstances it is such a relief to have an accomplice.
I wanted to get a world map play mat, after seeing examples of using maps to disrupt assumptions of whiteness with kids, talk about immigration and indigeneity, etc (e.g., Dr. Rosales Meza here). Remembering an old scene from The West Wing about how mainstream maps make Africa and other equatorial landmasses unfairly small, I went looking for info on the most justice-minded map projection.
Wikipedia has a good discussion of the argument given by the cartographers in the West Wing scene and the much larger context of the politics of area vs shape trade-offs in flat map construction and the great map projection debates of the twentieth century.
To my total delight, I learned that in 1989, a group of North American cartography associations endorsed a resolution against ALL map projections on the grounds that all flat maps warp our perception of our spherical home planet.
WHEREAS, the earth is round with a coordinate system composed entirely of circles, and
WHEREAS, flat world maps are more useful than globe maps, but flattening the globe surface necessarily greatly changes the appearance of Earth’s features and coordinate systems, and
WHEREAS, world maps have a powerful and lasting effect on people’s impressions of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas, their arrangement, and the nature of the coordinate system, and
WHEREAS, frequently seeing a greatly distorted map tends to make it “look right”,
THEREFORE, we strongly urge book and map publishers, the media and government agencies to cease using rectangular world maps for general purposes or artistic displays. Such maps promote serious, erroneous conceptions by severely distorting large sections of the world, by showing the round Earth as having straight edges and sharp corners, by representing most distances and direct routes incorrectly, and by portraying the circular coordinate system as a squared grid. The most widely displayed rectangular world map is the Mercator (in fact a navigational diagram devised for nautical charts), but other rectangular world maps proposed as replacements for the Mercator also display a greatly distorted image of the spherical Earth.
Way to cut the gordian knot, cartographers. I’m so glad to know you are out there caring whether I have an accurate impression of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas. For real. We got kiddo a pillow globe.