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Saturday: Cassandra

Posted: June 15, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , |53 Comments
Cassandra2

Cassandra, from the Beavis and Butt-head episode, “The History of Women”

Good afternoon, newsjunkies! Sorry for the delay with this morning’s reads. Had some technical issues (kept getting that spinny circle/hourglass thing–haven’t seen that in ages!)

Anyhow, let’s start off with a little HERstory, shall we?

From a neat little stanford.edu student website called “Mortal Women of the Trojan War”:

Hecuba, in Seneca’s play Troades, also compares herself to Cassandra:

Whatever misfortune occurs, and whatever harms the priestess of Apollo (Cassandra), raving, prophesied, the god (Apollo) prohibiting her to be believed, Hecuba, weighed with child (Paris), previously saw, nor did I keep my fear silent and before Cassandra I was the empty prophetess. Neither the cautious Ithacan (Odysseus) nor the nocturnal companion of the Ithacan (Diomedes) has scattered fire among you, nor the false Sinon. That fire is mine, by my torches you are burning.

And…

Today, June 15th, in 1895, Elinore Morehouse Herrick–the first woman (and seemingly only; still researching) appointed as a regional director of the NLRB–was born (emphasis in bold, mine):

As a divorced, 26-year-old mother, Herrick found herself supporting two boys on low wages. She accepted employment at DuPont’s rayon plant in Buffalo, New York, where she rose rapidly from pieceworker to training supervisor. In 1923, she moved south with the company, becoming production manager of its new factory in Tennessee. Under her direction the plant’s output equaled or exceeded those elsewhere, but knowing that she would not be promoted beyond her current level, Herrick moved her family to Ohio. There she attended Antioch College, financing studies in economics by running a boarding house with her mother’s help and taking part-time jobs. After her graduation in 1929, Herrick became executive secretary of the New York Consumers’ League, which monitored labor conditions for women in that state. While with the League, Herrick produced perceptive reports on female workers in canneries, laundries, and candy factories. When the Wagner Act of 1935 created the National Labor Relations Board, she was appointed regional director of the northeast district; the nation’s busiest, it handled twenty percent of all cases to come before the Board. Herrick’s negotiating skills led to the settlement of most disputes without litigation. During World War II, she became personnel director for Todd Shipyards and was responsible for integrating women and minorities into the wartime work force. Recognizing that the arrival of peace would force many women out of industrial jobs, she argued that society should maintain employment opportunities “for all who want to work or for all who must work irrespective of sex.” Her appeals went unheeded, however, as female workers were dismissed from wartime industries when veterans returned home. Herrick left Todd Shipyards to become personnel director for the New York Herald Tribune and continued writing on labor issues during the postwar era.

Here is a kickass image of her at Corbis, entitled “Portrait of Career Women at Tribute Dinner,” dated March 22, 1935. Please check it out. She’s the first person to the left on the front row. (It’s copyrighted or else I’d have included it here.)

And, here’s a PDF of “Why People Strike,” a piece penned by Herrick. Teaser:

 Too much reliance has been placed on the ability of industry to govern itself, with the result that codes have been selfishly drawn with an eye toward pleasing selfish and dominant employer interests.

Well, would you look at the prescience on her!

THIS is what the insularity and hegemony of patriarchy does. It shuts out voices like Herrick’s from the center stage of the debate during their times and altogether whitewashes them from the history books pored through by any one other than an archery-goddess-witchy-woman feminist like myself.

Speaking of which… Here’s the iconography that speaks to me as such, photography by Henriette Milelke:

archery

Click photo to view on FB at Henriette Mielke’s page in its full glory.

This gives me a perfect excuse to tell you that I find Henriette Mielke’s photography absolutely mesmerizing. I stumbled upon her work through the graces of facebook, and I haven’t been able to stop looking since! It’s erotic, evocative, and just somehow distinctly feels…feminist. I may be wrong in attributing that to her. I don’t know. But, something about these images of women…seems to be about women, from a women’s point of view. I urge you to click on over and check her work out and view and determine for yourself. I’m merely including that blockquoted image to pique your interest….there’s so much more double x energy from whence it came!

Oh and if you want some backstory on the Cassandra-in-Beavis-and-Butthead-land graphic up top–Clicky!

Alright, I’m just going to do the rest of this post in a link-a-palooza fashion:

Wearing Justice for Marco T-shirts, family and friends of the late Marc McMillian are demanding answers and justice.

The family’s attorney, Daryl Parks, said, “Somebody will explain the burn marks on his body; somebody has to explain the torture he went through.”

In late March, the openly gay former Clarksdale mayoral candidate was brutally murdered. The National Black Justice Coalition isn’t convinced the murder wasn’t a hate crime.

Sharon Luttman with the National Black Justice Coalition said, “Society allows it to be some sexual violence or miscommunication when he’s the one that was burned, that was dragged, that was stabbed. The autopsy report shows that.”

Cat Font

Are you a writer? Or maybe just an active Facebook and Twitter-er who misses the good old days of handwritten letters, before digital media destroyed our capacity to express human emotion with words? Either way, are you tired of waiting for all communication to move past the clunky words of generations past and finally metamorphose into the dancing cat GIFs that we all know and love?

Then boy, does the Internet have the thing for you. Meet Neko Font, a web app that will transform text into a new font made entirely out of cats. Well, pictures of cats, to be precise. All you have to do is insert the copy of your choice into the text box and Neko Font (Japanese for “cat font”) instantly hands it back in cat form.

Patty Murray arrived 20 years ago to a U.S. Senate whose “gentlemen” members had a convenient restroom just off the Senate floor, but not the six “gentle ladies.”

“We had to go upstairs and down a long hall,” Murray recalled on Wednesday.

Patty_Murray

Murray: “We had to go upstairs and down a long hall.”

As the old cigarette ad put it, you’ve come a long way, baby.

The Senate now has 20 women.  “Gentle ladies” chair the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Agriculture Committee and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.  Murray is in the Democratic leadership.

And the “gentle ladies” of Congress’ upper chamber are getting a new, expanded bathroom.  While it doesn’t have a glass ceiling, the new restroom will come complete with a window looking out from the U.S. Capitol.

A restroom was carved out of the off-the-floor men’s  room, but it was small and cramped.

“It’s no longer convenient:  There’s a line,” joked Murray.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, excitedly tweeted on Wednesday that the commodious restroom is a “sign of change” in the U.S. Capitol.  “It says we are at work and we require equal treatment,” Murray said.

Okay, I’m going to stop there because my computer just isn’t cooperating this weekend. But, I will say I’m reminded here of Rand Paul’s infamous toilet rant… *wink*

Anyhow, what’s on your reading list this weekend Sky Dancers? Please help me fill in the blanks of these abridged Saturday reads!

53 Comments on “Saturday: Cassandra”

  1. Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)'s avatar Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
    June 15, 2013 at 12:30 pm

    Reblogged this on Let Them Listen.

  2. NW Luna's avatar NW Luna says:
    June 15, 2013 at 1:27 pm

    Georgia O’Keefe’s also in that photo with Herrick! Back row.

    The Kraft Zesty ad wouldn’t have gotten an eyebrow raise if it was a woman’s body strategically bared.

    • Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)'s avatar Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
      June 15, 2013 at 1:41 pm

      Needs MOAR zest, less cloth, perhaps another zesty male….them licking kumquats… 😉

    • roofingbird's avatar roofingbird says:
      June 15, 2013 at 4:15 pm

      Agreed, Luna.

      Are we ever going to get tired of shaved male bodies? It always makes me think one: of total body beard burn, and two: of that “Law and Order” show where the rapist shaved his whole body to avoid leaving DNA behind.

      Give me fur.

    • boogieman7167's avatar boogieman7167 says:
      June 15, 2013 at 8:34 pm

      NW Luna your right but that only if the viewing audience is women but if the audience are men I can assure that it would get way more than eyebrow raised .

      • boogieman7167's avatar boogieman7167 says:
        June 15, 2013 at 8:40 pm

        let face it girls this proves that women respond to pics scantily clad men virtually identically to the same way men to pics of scantily clad women.

        • roofingbird's avatar roofingbird says:
          June 16, 2013 at 1:26 am

          Boogie- I like a man’s body as much or maybe more than a lot of folks here, and I like all shapes and sizes, but I don’t need to see one to sell me salad dressing. Plus, where is the salad? For what is this dressing intended anyway? I suppose sex with salad dressing could be interesting, but is this really why Kraft wanted to sell us some? So, depending on where this ad was intended to run, I agree with the conservative women in this instance.

          Objectifying men isn’t going to make it all right to objectify women.

          • Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)'s avatar Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
            June 16, 2013 at 5:28 am

            Thanks for your thoughts..!

            I don’t have a problem with bare skin itself…I guess I just find it strange that anyone could muster this much outrage over this salad dressing as, when it’s hardly dehumanizing or objectifying as compared to what we call objectification of women…I don’t see him licking objects in suggestive derogatory ways, I don’t see his face/humanity separated from the whole, I don’t see the camera zooming in on just his ass or the strategically placed table cloth…I see it rather on par with the archery image I posted. Perhaps not as elegant as The David… But he’s not “performing” at the pleasure of the salad bottle the way a woman would be with a hoagie or a hot dog or whatever. Zesty man is not exactly an ad I’d want to see everywhere in magazine…but how is one ad like this, which is pretty tame by comparison a “controversy” given what passes as par for the course of women in food advertisements?

            Not directed so much at you roofing bird or anyone else..,just a general comment on the situation.

          • roofingbird's avatar roofingbird says:
            June 16, 2013 at 9:38 am

            Agreed Mona, thats why I think it has a place, but not on something like national TV. Kraft is supposed to be a family brand.

          • Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)'s avatar Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
            June 16, 2013 at 9:55 am

            I think it wasa print ad in an issue of people magazine…not a TV ad (if it had been, i’d be channeling my best bette davis in jezebel and saying “I’m Scandalized by You” throughout the entire 30 second Spot, LOL)

          • roofingbird's avatar roofingbird says:
            June 16, 2013 at 1:11 pm

            People, well, that explains it.

          • roofingbird's avatar roofingbird says:
            June 16, 2013 at 1:48 pm

            I suppose the Oikos ad is supposed to be cute, and he is dressed. I must say, however, every time I see two women giving oral sex to their spoons, in order to keep the fantasy alive I turn the station. It just annoys me.

            Aside from the fact that Oikos has stuff in their yoghurt I don’t like, why did Dannon give it that name?

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oikos

  3. Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)'s avatar Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
    June 15, 2013 at 1:50 pm

    This was one of the links I really wanted to include today, perhaps my most favorite but didnt get to…I will have to frontpage it soon, I love it so very much…but for now:

  4. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    June 15, 2013 at 1:58 pm

    Here’s a weird story. It’s from the NY Post, so…

    Supposedly Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots claims that Valdimir Putin stole a $25,000 Super Bowl ring from Kraft when the two met in 2005.

    New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft revealed the real story behind a 2005 meeting with Vladimir Putin, during which the Russian president pocketed his Super Bowl ring, worth more than $25,000. Kraft, at the time, claimed the diamond-encrusted bauble was a gift, but he now admits Putin stole it, and the White House intervened when he demanded it back.

    Kraft explained the incident happened while Sandy Weill and other business execs were in St. Petersburg. “I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ ” Kraft told the crowd at Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence gala at the Waldorf-Astoria.“I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

    When Kraft tried to get it back, the WH intervened. Kraft released a statement saying the ring was a gift.

  5. RalphB's avatar RalphB says:
    June 15, 2013 at 4:31 pm

    Microsoft’s U.S. law enforcement and national security requests for last half of 2012

    For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities (including local, state and federal). This only impacts a tiny fraction of Microsoft’s global customer base.

    Every warrant, request ,or order they received of any kind including FISA.

  6. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    June 15, 2013 at 6:47 pm

    CNet: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

    I don’t know what to believe anymore…

  7. RalphB's avatar RalphB says:
    June 16, 2013 at 12:20 am

    LGF: CNET Says NSA “Admits” Listening to US Phone Calls – But That’s Not What the Video Shows

    CNET like more oopsy click bait. CSPAN video at link.

  8. RalphB's avatar RalphB says:
    June 16, 2013 at 12:37 am

    Appeals court: Christian can sue Oklahoma over Native American license plate

    The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that a Christian man can sue the state of Oklahoma over the state’s license plate depicting a piece of artwork by a famous Native American.

    The 2-1 decision issued on Tuesday found that the religious freedom of Keith Cressman, a Christian pastor from the Oklahoma City area, could potentially be violated by the state’s licence plates that depict the “Sacred Rain Arrow” sculpture by the long-deceased Oklahoma artist Allan Houser. Cressman argued that the plates “might imply his approval of contrary beliefs, such as that God and nature are one, that other deities exist, or that ‘animals, plants, rocks, and other natural phenomena” have souls or spirits.”

    This horseshit is more worrisome to me than NSA snooping.

  9. roofingbird's avatar roofingbird says:
    June 16, 2013 at 1:05 am

    Oh. Apparently he has gotten several and just doesn’t want to pay the extra money.

    http://gazette.com/court-man-can-challenge-oklahoma-rain-god-plate/article/feed/12505

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