The other day I went to the other supermarket

[conuly]

in order to pick up some rosewater lassi. Which they didn't have, but they did have Quatro Leches. Verdict? I still prefer Tres Leches.

I'm a little intrigued, though, by the thought of more leches. It's sort of like figure skating. Sonja Henie was doing single spins and jumps. When we did skating, when I was little, already all the serious competition had to do triples, and it was like that for a very long time. Now people are doing quadruples. But where does it end? In another 50 years, will we be eating ocho leches cake and watching people do octuple lutzes? Will anti-gravity be invented solely so people can indulge on ever more leches and, after their repast, go on to do ever more spins before landing?

************

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Weird Gender Reveal Cakes (The whole concept of a sex reveal party is creepy and weird. These cakes just are more obvious about it than some others. Why are people so interested in infant genitalia anyway? And so invested in fitting those genitalia to cultural norms? Seriously, it's a bit dystopian.)

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Comments

[sovay]

But where does it end? In another 50 years, will we be eating ocho leches cake and watching people do octuple lutzes? Will anti-gravity be invented solely so people can indulge on ever more leches and, after their repast, go on to do ever more spins before landing?

These are wonderful questions.

[conuly]

How many leches are too many to do proper lutzes?

[isis]

I agree! The leches vs lutzes escalation can only end in tears.

[hudebnik]

HTML quibble: you've got the "ice chips" story merged with the "gender reveal cakes" story.

[conuly]

Thanks, fixed.

[hamimi_fk]

I think that extra leche made you philosophical. xD

... Would ocho leches make a person able to lift things with their minds? Hmmm...

[conuly]

Oooooooh.

[greghousesgf]

the first time I ever heard about a gender reveal cake I thought it was for a coming out party for trans people
(and why does pop culture associate curly hair with femininity? lots of very masculine men have curly hair!)
that autistic woman was apparently able to find a man who loved her enough to marry her, that certainly counts as acceptance.

[rhoda_rants]

the first time I ever heard about a gender reveal cake I thought it was for a coming out party for trans people

I want this to become a thing now, badly.

[greghousesgf]

me too!

[conuly]

Thirding.

[marahmarie]

Fourthing. Once I found it what it really was I thought it was (and is) just so creepy and weird.

[conuly]

that autistic woman was apparently able to find a man who loved her enough to marry her, that certainly counts as acceptance.

Acceptance by whom? Assortive mating is a thing - pretty sure that's how my own parents met, actually - and even if both parties in a marriage aren't on the spectrum that doesn't mean that she's accepted by anybody other than her husband.

[greghousesgf]

that's my whole point. she's accepted by him.

[conuly]

That's equivocating. When people talk about "acceptance" without a qualifier, as in this article, the implication is "by society" not "by a few people".

[flexagon]

WIRED did an article on the essential impossibility of a quintuple jump:

https://www.wired.com/video/2018/02/almost-impossible-why-it-s-almost-impossible-to-do-a-quintuple-jump/

People would basically have to get a lot more airtime than they do now.

[conuly]

So low gravity situations, right?

[flexagon]

Well... yes. Figure skating ON THE MOON is going to be incredible!

[adafrog]

I've wondered about that too. How many spins is too many?

[conuly]

According to science it's apparently five.

[adafrog]

Really? Well, it'll be interesting watching them try to get to that.

[archangelbeth]

I do admit, since the hospital has such teeny trays for throwing up into, I'm probably overall okay with them sticking me on the ice chips thing when I had pre-eclampsia. Those basins were tiny! And I had to use them twice. (Throwing up when your diaphragm is no longer under conscious control, due to the epidural, is an experience.)

[conuly]

You'd think that, being a hospital, they'd have bigger buckets.

[archangelbeth]

You'd think! But each time, they just had these itty-bitty curved tray things, as I recall. *shakes head*

[rhoda_rants]

Wow--the Masking Autism story is resonating a LOT right now. That thing about writing down, answering, and memorizing possible interview questions? That's not something everyone does??

[darkoshi]

I was thinking the same thing about the interview questions. I suspect most, or many, people do prepare beforehand - that's why there are books and websites with sample interview questions.

[conuly]

You know how it is with this sort of thing. When you're not normal in so many ways, it's hard to tell which of your struggles are things everybody does to the same degree, which are ones everybody does but mostly to a lesser degree than you, and which ones are really just you.

[rhoda_rants]

Yeah, it's weird. I mean, I think practicing for interviews is pretty common overall. BUT I have been doing a lot of self-diagnosis things for spectrum disorder lately ("lately" here meaning "for the past five years or so") and there are so many things that I would've thought were just random Rhoda traits that show up as indicators. The job interview thing probably isn't one, but I've been feeling them out now.

---

[kengr]

Regarding gender reveals, here are a few comics on the topic (she does lots of them, I'm just posting the easiest to find ones)) The strip is on tumblr:
http://assignedmale.tumblr.com

Because of the way she has it set up I'm doing links to the images...

http://assignedmale.tumblr.com/image/170799455807
http://assignedmale.tumblr.com/image/171057590302

[archangelbeth]

OMG, those are great.

[larryhammer]

Why are people so interested in infant genitalia anyway? And so invested in fitting those genitalia to cultural norms?

Because many people, raised on those cultural norms, find intersex conditions disquieting and buy into attempts to erase their existence.

Cultural appropriation bullshit

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I can't get past the WaPo paywall to read the article, but in point of fact, 'The Snake' (https://fablesofaesop.com/the-farmer-and-the-snake.html) is an Aesop's fable.

It was bullshit even in Aesop's day; a base calumny on snakes. If you cuddle a cold serpent, what it'll do is snuggle up; it's way less likely to bite you than, say, a feral kitten. But that's beside the point. If some "black radical singer" made a song out of an extremely well-known story from ancient Greece, you could call that 'cultural appropriation' if you feel the term has any validity whatsoever (I personally do not.) I seriously doubt that Trump has ever heard the lyrics to ANY songs by black radical singers, but all of us Baby Boomers got the Fables of Aesop in our grade-school Language Arts classes as part of Western European Culture.

I'm all down with people criticizing Trump in every legitimate way. However, criticizing him for 'culturally appropriating' something that was never part of non-white culture to begin with is not legitimate, and can only foster those cries - already too often heard - of "Get the fuck off my team."

(Sorry for all the typo-edits; my fingers are sausages this morning.)

Non-typo EDIT:: it occurs to me that, as the WaPo is not what it was (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post) back in the days of Watergate, that articles such as that one may be in aid of an agenda to evoke dissension among the hoi polloi (i.e. ourselves,) the same as those Russian bots that pretend to be 'woke Black' activists, encouraging people to not vote. Since Bezos bought it, the WaPo is not what I would call a trustworthy source any more.

Re: Cultural appropriation bullshit

[conuly]

1. The WaPo paywall is a freaking joke. Aside from the usual bypass methods of deleting cookies or opening the link in a different browser, you can bypass it simply by... stopping the page from fully loading.

2. It is true that this is an Aesop fable, but Trump is quoting a particular song which was written by a black person and using it to drum up xenophobia. He's using those exact words, which is how we know he's quoting.

3. It's widely suspect that Aesop, if he existed, took his stories out of Africa (where most of those stories have been in wide circulation for the whole of recorded history), so at the very least we have to acknowledge a wide Afro-Eurasian cultural tradition rather than a single creative narrator.

3a. And if Aesop did exist, many versions of his origin state he's Ethiopian or at least North African.

Re: Cultural appropriation bullshit

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

1. How do you stop the page from fully loading?

2. Ah, okay. I'm surprised Trump knows the words to such a song - probably he doesn't, and some PR person just decided he should quote it.

3. People can suspect whatever they like, whether or not they have any evidence, but "the whole of recorded history" in that part of the world basically starts with what fragments we have left from the ancient Greeks. There is precisely zero evidence to indicate what stories were told by peoples who didn't write them down. Aesop's fables are similar enough in style to argue a single author, and after all, somebody had to be the first to tell them. Therefore, no, we do not have to acknowledge a totally hypothetical cultural tradition rather than the single narrator reported by the earliest actual sources we have for the stories.

4. According to Aristotle and Herodotus, the earliest sources, Aesop was born in Thrace (now Bulgaria,) lived on Samos, and died in Delphi. Apparently the notion that he was Ethiopian didn't crop up until the 13th century, and was based on a first- or second-century work of fiction.

Re: Cultural appropriation bullshit

[conuly]

1. Wait until the text shows up and then hit esc.

2. I'd be surprised if Trump knew the words to any song, frankly. My estimation of him knows no lower limit.

3. Given how widespread the stories are, I think this is something like tracking language evolution - you don't need a written origin point to prove that German and Sanskirt are both IE languages.

Re: Cultural appropriation bullshit

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

1. Thanks!

2. I was thinking that as well, but when would he ever even have heard that particular song, let alone listened to it, understood it and remembered it? No indeed; somebody else came up with that.

3. There are lots of other ways to demonstrate that German and Sanskrit are both IE languages. What way do you propose, to demonstrate that Aesop's fables were being told before 620 BCE when (according to Aristotle) he was born? All the sources we've got from (near to) his era attribute the fables specifically to him; what evidence is there that they were mistaken?

You might just as well claim that since Shakespeare's stories are so widespread in our culture, and since they reference historical occasions before his time, that he wasn't the one who wrote them, despite every source from his own time asserting that in fact, he was.

Every story has to start somewhere, and given when Aesop lived, there was plenty of time for his fables to have spread all over the Hellene world before the time of Alexander. Two things we know for fact: Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander and his Companions, and he knew the fables of Aesop well. Alexander's armies spread a lot of Greek culture across Asia, and the Romans who appropriated it spread it even farther.

I have no opinion as to whether Aesop made up the fables himself, or 'borrowed' some of them from stories he'd heard. However, the earliest extant sources all claim that he wrote a book - which was not a commonplace thing to do in 600 BCE, even in Greece - and apparently it was well-known to the Greek dramatists, who refer to it fairly often. Therefore I see no logical grounds for claiming that Aesop's Fables are not clearly and specifically part of the ancient Greek cultural tradition, regardless of what other cultures have appropriated them over the past 2600 years.

Can't have it both ways. If cultural appropriation is a thing, then that "black radical singer" appropriated the ancient Greek culture that is considered the foundation of the Western European cultural tradition, and the pot has no room to talk about the kettle. Trying to pretend that Aesop might have been African is mis-culturing him, and apparently it was only done because he was a slave.

Re: Cultural appropriation bullshit

[conuly]

I think there's a statute of limitations on appropriation, though. Otherwise we're all back to grunting in caves.

Re: Cultural appropriation bullshit

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I'd be all in favor of ditching the whole 'cultural appropriation' thing entirely, but I don't see that the rest of the culture is prepared to ditch it. It's hardly cricket to claim that a black radical singer's culture is being appropriated, but then invoke a hypothetical statute of limitations to justify that singer's having appropriated a very well-documented piece of European culture. Aesop's heirs may not be around to sue for the royalties, but everybody knows The Farmer and the Viper came directly from his book.

And it's still an undeserved insult to snakes, as well as being morally opposite to the story of the Good Samaritan and various other parables of Jesus (if he existed at all, and was really the one who told them.)

Ocho Leches and anti-grav

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Will anti-gravity be invented solely so people can indulge on ever more leches and, after their repast, go on to do ever more spins before landing?"

I'd never even heard of Tres Leches - it looks ineffably delicious, but also like it has at least 200 calories a bite. So if one indulged in ever more leches, one would need anti-grav just to get around, and would look like Baron Harkonnen (https://youtu.be/30WjxhLASCU) doing spins.

With anti-grav, you can spin as long as you like without ever landing at all. Sheesh, imagine zero-G rhythmic gymnastics! (Imagine Feyd doing them, not the Baron.)

Re: Ocho Leches and anti-grav

[conuly]

You've never heard of Tres Leches? OMG YOU MUST TRY SOME.

And the best part is it's not just Latin American anymore! It's also Turkish! So if you get bored of maraschino cherries you can get some with rosewater.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

LOL, I'm sure such delicacies can be found in Seattle's International District, but I'm out on the edge of the Olympic Peninsula, where ethnic cuisine is seldom seen. My best option would probably be to make it myself - this recipe (https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/tres-leches-cake/) seems simple enough, though apparently it can be a bit tricky. It's got a ton of sugar, though; I'd want to cut that by half at least.

Heh, maraschino cherries - do you know how those things are made? If you like them, you probably don't want to know. But I'll bet fresh blackberries would go well with that cake.

Something I've been meaning to make someday is Skyr Cake (https://www.google.com/search?q=skyr+cake), if I can find someone local who makes skyr. I suppose I could make that myself as well, if I had a starter, but that's more trouble than I'm willing to go to, just for fancy Norse cheesecake. Maybe Greek yogurt would work as well?

[conuly]

Oh, I use *organic*, and *dye-free* cherries.

I'm scared to look up Skyr cake. I don't want to have another thing on my to bake list.