Welcome back to Wednesday Links!
How are you all doing? I’ve been working remotely to keep an eye on Fig this week and much to my colleagues’ delight, they got to watch her scale the back of my gaming chair while in a meeting.
I’m so excited that we are creeping closer to fall and I hope the heat is mostly behind us. I have a dear friend who firmly believes “sweat is an aesthetic” and I just cannot get onboard with that. She can keep it!
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Sarah was quoted in The Washington Post on disabled romance authors incorporating disability into their books. There may be a paywall for this one!
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Did you know that the Netherlands hosts a floating parade dedicated to the art of Hieronymus Bosch? The parade also has an Instagram account.
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This link comes from EC Spurlock!
EC Spurlock: I don’t know if this would be of any interest to the Bitchery in general, but I thought maybe someone out there would relate and find it comforting. This is a blog started recently by an old friend of mine, who lost her husband about two years after I lost mine. I was able to help support her through her grief through our shared experience and help her work through the confusing and difficult aftermath. In her blog she speaks about her experiences and shows how she is using her art to help her work through her emotions and grief. It’s very soft and comforting and a safe place for anyone recovering from loss.
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Pokemon meets Planet Earth in this YouTube series! There are only three episodes and you can really tell how they’ve increased in quality and production. Can’t wait for more!
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
I subscribe to the WaPo, and I can gift articles! With this link, you should be able to access: https://wapo.st/3yddaE8
@Melissandre: Thank you!
I usually am a reader not a poster, but I really think the Bitchery needs this link.
I’m feeling pretty good. The heat has broken (for now) and it’s just regular awful DC July hot, not record breaking hot. I also feel lighter and happier for boring American politics reasons that I won’t get into here 😉
Okay,I’ve been meaning to recommend the ‘Wild Card’ podcast with Rachel Martin for a while, but I have an extra good reason to recommend last week’s episode (eps come out on Thursday). The guest was LeVar Burton
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/18/1244130930/levar-burton-reading-rainbow-embracing-chaos
Wild Card is a celebrity interview, but it’s just loosely organized by life themes and the guest randomly gets to pick a card (1, 2, or 3). and they get one “flip” (Rachel Martin answers first) or a “skip” (they don’t answer just draw a lot of cards). A lot of the questions do repeat but not always and it’s been really interesting to see how vulnerable the host makes herself in the conversations. It definitely feels like a dialogue. I enjoy listening to it and thinking “mm, how would I answer that question?” She’s gone beyond the obvious candidates and interviewed more unusual people like David Lynch (weird but interesting as you’d imagine) and the poet Nikki Giovanni (an absolute delight).
But, I mean? LeVar Burton, my favorite so far and one I suspect it’ll resonate with lots of Bitches of my generation. I don’t want to quote too much b/c the pleasure is in him answering the questions naturally but I will say he talks about his mother, Erma Gene Christian. He made a point of saying her name and then said (I’m paraphrasing) – whenever I get a chance to speak her name out loud, I do, because she deserves her flowers.- He said that everything he has done for literacy has been in her honor and in her name b/c she was a schoolteacher (among many things!) and reading was so important to her.
Guys, when I say it brought up the happy tears, I mean seriously? How could it not. Just lovely stuff I needed after a kind of crummy Thursday last week.
@JillQ- you beat me to it! I listened to Levar Burton on ‘Wild Card’ yesterday and immediately wanted to share it on Wednesday links. It was the most joyful, profound and uplifting interview I have heard in so long.
I think the phrase “national treasure” gets so overused but, you guys, Levar Burton truly is. The episode was so full of gems, but the one that stuck with me all day today was this:
“ I used to embody success unconsciously by how busy I felt and how busy I was. Now I feel that success is spending my time well.”
And the other amazing one that won’t leave my head was how he discusses his three biggest roles – ‘Roots’, ‘Reading Rainbow’ and ‘Star Trek’ in this way:
“part of the beauty of that journey for me is seeing that, as a storyteller, I’ve been able to portray the Black experience in America from our enslavement to the stars. And LeVar, the “Reading Rainbow” guy, is absolutely in the middle of that continuum. And so to really plot the trajectory of Black people through time and space in this roughly 20th, 21st century time frame…What a gift.”
I put on a pumpkin bourbon scented oil today and got SO EXCITED for fall and started imagining pumpkin coffee on cold mornings. Can’t wait!!
I read the WaPo article link with no problem.
I wish the author of the article understood that an “amputated leg”–article author’s words–is a limb difference. That phrasing is ableist. Based on the cover, transtibial amputation may have been the proper phrasing for an acquired limb difference, if the article author didn’t want to use limb difference twice in the same sentence. It’s so easy to research and look up the correct terms.
Publishers need to use sensitivity editors. I’ve seen far too many ableist terms still being used. As someone with a congenital maxillofacial difference, plus three incurable, chronic autoimmune diseases, it matters. Using archaic words which are ableist causes harm, and it reintroduces words we’ve tried to eradicate.
I don’t give a pass to historical fiction or historical romance using those terms, either. We know better, so we should be doing better.