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My #1 podcast, 99% Invisible, unrolls the mystery

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wipe-out/

audio & transcript.

tl;dr Folks who supply workplaces don't know how to get their product to the consumer market. Folks who wipe at work now need to wipe at home.

Plus: why wipe at all? the benefits of water? the SF sewer district manager opines about "flushable" wipes. (It's a lie -- they're as persistent as nuclear waste.)

Day 7 at home. The dog is looking at me like, “SEE? This is why I chew the furniture.”
You thought dogs were hard to train? Look at all the humans that can’t sit and stay.
Stay inside. Practice social distancing. Clean yourself constantly. OMG… I’ve become a housecat!
Kinda starting to understand why pets try to run out of the house when the door opens.
My house got TP’d last night. It’s now appraised at $875,000.

While I'm writing up the fascinating experience of attending the Society for Disability Studies conference online last weekend, have a ridiculous assortment of dad jokes thanks to a random newsletter:

Anyone else’s car getting three weeks to the gallon now?
Saw my neighbor Tammy out early this morning scraping the “My kid is a Terrific Student” sticker off her minivan. Guess that first week of homeschooling didn’t go so well.
My body has absorbed so much soap and disinfectant lately that when I pee it cleans the toilet.

If I had to choose just one semiprecious stone — wait! don’t make me choose. Please don't feel an obligation to respond (and I do bask in your kind comments).

Silver leaf jasper combines cool and warm grays, tans, creams in soothing swirls and dots interspersed with black and some translucent bits. It’s heavy for its size and holds a lovely polish. I’d been storing up a lot of it and so, here are five necklaces in six pictures:

( click to admire )

AndrewPulrang always makes me think with his posts pondering disability issues. Lots to love at his blog, https://www.disabilitythinking.com

In the last month, he’s been posting a lot at Forbes on the intersection of disability, bigotry, and COVID-19

( hard truths to ponder )

Part of Georgetown University's Disability Studies Program event series, hosted and moderated by Lydia X. Z. Brown.

It will take place via Zoom on Tuesday 14 April 2020 at 7:00pm New York time. (That is 1:00pm in Honolulu, 3:00pm in Los Angeles, 12:00am in London, 2:00am in Cairo, 5:30am in Mumbai, 7:00am in Beijing, and 9:00am in Sydney.)

Dismantling Settler Colonialism and Ableism: Disability Justice and Decolonization

Tuesday 14 April 2020 at 7:00 P.M. (ET)

We are providing ASL interpretation and CART captioning.

The speakers are Jen Deerinwater, Dustin P. Gibson, Najma Johnson, and Azza Altiraifi.

More info about the speakers available at the RSVP form, where you receive the Zoom link for the event.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc9oyAjNE9LKl0KJLYc7L9FG_kELIUlcJehSdfl4NtAi7tsQA/viewform

Please send questions to Lydia X. Z. Brown at mailto:lydia.brown@georgetown.edu

…and since I love pink I love it a lot! These lantern-shaped beads feature pink stripes as well as zigzags of grey, white, and black — they remind me of Florentine marble endpapers. (A "lantern" shape is a thick flat oval where both ends are truncated perpendicular to the stringing axis.)

I'm posting these because at some point I have to send them out into the world. I love feedback and please don't feel obliged to comment.

( pictures of two necklaces & bracelet )

Given my earlier link to the Open Library’s announcement they were lifting limits on how many people can borrow from their extensive scanned book collection "for the duration", I was surprised and enlightened to read about opposition from authors.

( 500 words of links & summaries )

ETA 31 Mar 2020

Ah! I found meaningful discussion and links about this on Metafilter:
https://www.metafilter.com/186248/The-Internet-Archives-National-Emergency-Library

Two informative Twitter threads for those who dare to enter the doomscroll

From rahaeli (aka denise)

This is a specific test case being put to the public in order to challenge the doctrine of first sale as applied to ebooks, and it's in direct response to the exorbitant prices and significant restrictions publishers place on libraries.

thread start https://mobile.twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1244257620548038656?s=20

From AlexandraErin

...okay, and I'm getting that a lot of people don't like the idea of copyrights period. Information Wants To Be Free and all that. But your revolution needs an order of operations. If you kill the copyright first, while we're all still toiling under capitalism, you hurt workers.

Thread start https://mobile.twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1244309400690491393?s=20

Mel Chua captures the blissful moment of belonging, of understanding and being understood in her grad school.

The time when I met Rebecca and Stephanie together (a Deaf academics story)

I have always been a strong reader, but I did not have much access to the internal worlds of people in the process of writing, or windows into those (eventually beautiful and polished) thoughts as they were being formed. I’d walked through museums looking at the best pottery made through all of history, behind a glass wall, on a shelf — and then been trying to make pots without seeing or talking with other people about how they used a studio. It has been so, so strange to walk into a studio that’s full of people. And it is still so strange, this notion that I can watch and interact with other people while they’re at work. The work I want to learn to do.

full post: http://melchua.com/blog/2018/11/11/the-time-when-i-met-rebecca-and-stephanie-together-a-deaf-academics-story/

Yesterday SLATE published Dahlia Lithwick’s insightful and helpful essay on self-isolation "How to Spend the Time." It discusses the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic and a mindset approach that is helpful for me.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/03/how-to-spend-time-quarantine.html

( Juicy quotes that I hope aren’t triggering and still behind a cut )

She references Marge Piercy’s poem "To Be of Use," which I love so much it was part of our wedding ceremony, two months shy of 40 years ago.

( 211 words under the cut )

One of the good things that happens every week is a pal (massively offline) and I go for 20 - 40 minute excursions: she walks and I use my powerchair. Walking together supports a casual and low-key conversation.

But that's not possible now: neither the sidewalks nor even the bike path that's near my door are wide enough for us to maintain true 6ft/2m separation.

She's just invented: parallel-separated-walk-and-talk PSWAT pronounced "peeswat."

We have a phone date this evening: she's riding her indoor bike and I'm walking my treadmill.

I'll let you know how it goes.

...and most of it will be posted to YouTube afterwards.

the New England Graphic Medicine conference is entirely virtual over the next few days and is free. Here's the link to the schedule:

http://gmbulletin.captionbox.net/2020-new-england-graphic-medicine/#program

I'll post the YouTube link later when it's available.

It's using the BigMarker online platform, which runs in the browser. There's CART at https://www.streamtext.net/player?event=2020-March-NEGMC

the Twitter hash is #NEGM20

Interesting on its own, and also as an exemplar of an online pop culture con.

Another couple days, some more beaded jewelry. I am so lucky to be able to do this! I can't panic when I'm attempting to thread a teeny bead and keeping count on my patterns. This post has a red and black theme, and I've never read Stendhal.

( three pieces in five pictures with descriptions )

I stumbled on a very short and technically proficient podcast called The World According to Sound. http://www.theworldaccordingtosound.org

They produce 90-second episodes that must be appreciated with headphones or earbuds.

Not surprisingly, they’ve collaborated with blind people at least six times:

Five profiles hosted by KQED Radio SF

https://www.kqed.org/news/11779623/these-five-people-challenge-the-notion-of-blindness-as-a-deficit

There you'll find four-minute pieces interviewing:

Evolutionary biologist
Engineer and bomb maker
Guitarist
Architect
Sensory marketing consultant

all blind.

PLUS

What's It Like to Navigate the Bay Area While Blind?

https://www.kqed.org/news/11755398/whats-it-like-to-navigate-the-bay-area-while-blind

The World-According-to-Sound producers follow Bryan Bashin, an NGO CEO, on his commute from home in Berkeley to Market Street SF. "Courageous" doesn’t appear in the piece, and Bashin manages to silence a leaf blower en route!

Mookaite Jasper comes from Western Australia, getting its name from Mooka Creek. It’s lightweight, takes a lovely polish, and comes in a delicious variety of colors: deep and pale burgundy, lavender, almost-black, and mustard yellow.

Here’s another fiddle-friendly necklace, featuring an owl pendant carved from mookaite jasper, hanging from a necklace of round and rice-shaped mookaite beads.

( shiny! )

This mookaite choker has three very long cigar-shape beads in front — they alternate with round and puffed-rice-shape — in shades of mustard, lilac, burgundy and mixtures

( chunky )

I learned a lot about mookaite from this miner's site: https://www.outbackmining.com/mookaite backup link

I am so grateful for Hannah Leatherbury's guided meditations. She's a yoga teacher (who's recently gone back to school). Her voice is beautiful. Unlike many guides who focus totally on thinking, she supplies hand motions and novel breathing patterns, as well as nifty bits of poetry. Her technical quality is outstanding—like a morning bird whispering in my ear. They work well when I'm lying down, and I return to her meditations whenever I feel lost.

Sample: You Are Enough https://www.hannahleatherbury.com/audio/you-are-enough-1500-min

( well worth purchasing from BandCamp )

Given the imperative to avoid face touching, I’ve been cranking out jewelry that gives me something to fiddle with. This “fiddlejoy” necklace combines round and rice-shape mookaite beads — mostly burgundy color — with some sparkly red rondelles. Hanging from the center is a 40mm mookaite ring with a 12mm bead suspended inside.

( click to admire )

Thanks to

tamsin on the new

stayinside comm, here's a delightful video: a year’s worth of wildlife interacting with an old log over a small stream in wildest Pennsylvania.

The footage is from a high-quality camera that continuously captures images day and night. Robert Bush, Sr. owns the camera, directs and edits the video, and makes a cameo in the last frame.

The other actors, in order of appearance:

Raccoon
Black bear
Chipmunk
Porcupine
King Fisher
Growlers
Muskrat
Bobcat
Coyote
Crow
Whitetail deer
Gray squirrel
Bullfrog
Mallard duck
Beaver
Sandpiper
Bluejay
Gray fox
Turkey versus great horned owl
Bob

If you’re looking for a challenge, I’d welcome video descriptions of each of the performers in comments:
- what's the animal?
- do they notice the camera?
- how do they move relative to the log and stream?
- are they swaggering, limping, striding, flapping, slithering?

( Five minutes 21 second wildlife parade with ambient sound )

Kitty O’Meara Captures the Possibility in the Time of Pandemic

( 130 words in total )

That’s from sonia’s recent links post full of non-terrifying COVID-related thoughts and photos: https://sonia.dreamwidth.org/247063.html

Robin Sloan on Making Art Amidst Chaos

I often read the monthly email newsletter from Robin Sloan, a West Coast creative of a type made familiar to me by the Whole Earth Catalog/Co-Evolution Quarterly.

This week, I found his exhortation to keep safe and make art reassuring:

( 267 words )

Payal Arora explores what internet access will mean for the folks who don’t have it now. Relevant because internet access may very well prevent revolutions from happening during this unstable time.

The biggest myths about the next billion internet users

( 234 words )

One hundred seventy-seven days ago, Bella was in the vet ER suffering through a ton of tests. She was eventually diagnosed with primary immune mediated hemolytic anemia. She's taken several paper bags worth of meds, including cortisone and cyclosporine. We hit on hotdogs as the premier treat to get her to swallow her meds, after trying almond butter, peanut butter, and canned chicken. We tapered off the cortisone last month and today we learned her latest blood work is so good we can halve her cyclosporine.

So much good news!

The hair is starting to grow back on her belly. That belly is big again since she's up to 51 pounds (only four more to go).
She has energy and enthusiasm and she's ready for spring.
Almost all the warts have gone, with some dried up holdouts generating copious dandruff (of course it's also blowing-her-coat season).
She continues to be an excellent role model for me by conserving energy when she needs to. Now she's feeling up to visiting with dog park users (both canine and human).
She's digging toys out of her basket and squeaking.
She's doing zoomies around the living room.

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adventures with Jesse the K

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