le petit hiboux

Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

Charles Yu, How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe (page 54)

If a woman is oppressed on the inside, it doesn’t much matter what she’s wearing. You can’t change minds by changing outfits. If we really want to set women free – rather than just relieving ourselves of the burden of having to look at what we imagine to be oppression – we need to allow women to engage in dialogue with liberal, secular values wherever they happen to be, whatever they happen to be wearing. Banning clothing is a way of saying that we don’t trust in the power of our own values to change minds that are open to them. But those values are powerful, and they can and do change minds.

According to your Will, by Naomi Alderman [Granta Online]

I mean, do a group of old white ladies govern what goes on with my balls? No. They don’t. But this is what happens in America. Old white men who believe in an invisible man in the sky get to say what goes on in all women’s vaginas. The last time I tried to make anything happen inside a woman’s vagina I didn’t even get past the whole “taking her to dollar-beer and bingo night at the bar by my house” thing. Swing and a miss, there. And hey – that was just one vagina. In their case, they are trying to control ALL OF THE VAGINAS. Who do they think they are? Prince circa Purple Rain?

Ned Hepburn of Death and Taxes magazine sums up the situation in Indiana, where all abortions past 22 weeks were banned last week.

You can see part of the state legislature’s chilling debate here, when a GOP rep says there can’t be an exception for rape or incest, because women might lie about being raped to get an abortion. Democratic Rep. Linda Lawson’s response, while tear-jerking, is priceless.

(via motherjones)

(via izzycjohnston)

Apostrophes, however, I love with all my heart. I support the correctly used apostrophe with that kind of fierce emotional investment in an irrelevance that most people reserve for football. (Go the team in the forthcoming thing, mind you.) I know punctuation rules well, derive a lamentably high percentage of my self-esteem from that knowledge and feel, again with my heart not my brain, that I’m a higher form of life than people who have either forgotten those rules or never been taught them.

Tomorrow: We listen back to interviews with actor Jon Hamm and author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.)

Quote from David Mitchell (the funny English one, not the authory English one) (via furtivelittlefeelings)

For Sarah Brown.

(via craftybutcher)

I feel this way about semi-colons.

(via craftybutcher)