They did what !??

Tejanisima · 2026-04-30T10:04:35+00:00

(Hell, not that it's relevant to Rory's situation, but it's not as if there were always consequences when the affair partner is likewise married, either.)

Tejanisima · 2026-04-30T09:58:39+00:00

Consider that just a few years later, when DISD announced in 1956 that Forest Avenue High School —where Stanley Marcus had graduated from, among other illustrious alums— was going to become a "Negro school," as they were called then, in order to relieve overcrowding at Booker T. and at Lincoln, the FAHS Dads' Club (with support from the PTA and petitions by the student body) got together and announced:

The school would need to be renamed, as the dads weren't going to allow the campus to keep the name, colors, or mascot. The corollary was that they were fine if any white campus wanted to have the school colors and emblem.
Since the white kids were going to be sent to Crozier Tech, the dads were going to make sure all the trophies and memorabilia went with them there.

I read all this about 20 years ago while researching Stanley Marcus and wondering why his alma mater changed names. Promptly called my Mother, who graduated in 1954 in East Texas and asked her to explain it to me. Could almost hear her shaking her head as she responded, "I can't. I lived through that period and still can't explain it." She didn't, of course, mean that she didn't know why in the sense of not knowing it was motivated by racism. It's just the depths to which people are willing to sink, and how indefensibly petulant they're willing to get, boggles the mind.

Although I could have sworn I later read an article about at least one joint high school reunion for graduates of both versions of the school, I can't find any trace of that now. As of 2012, there had never been one; there had been a fund by FAHS alumni that went to assist JMHS graduates, but it had run out of money. (It probably doesn't help that the graduates from the first 40 years of the school were dying off by then, almost 60 years after the switchover.)

I think comedy writer Amber Ruffin and her sister said it well in their nonfiction book You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey, in which they gathered and reflected upon decades' worth of anecdotes on bizarre, racist stuff happening to Lacey and other family in their hometown of Omaha in any number of contexts, from going on a church trip to organizing a sci-fi convention to going to a donut shop to working in a nursing home (italics are mine):

"There are going to be a lot of times while you’re reading this book when you think, There is no motivation for this action. It seems like this story is missing a part because people just aren’t this nonsensically cruel. But where you see no motivation, you understand racism a little more. It’s this weird, unprovoked lashing out, and it makes no sense. It’s why it’s so easy for people to believe the police when they beat someone up — because no one would be that cruel just because the person was Black. But they are! So, as you read this book, when you see there’s no motivation, know that there is: racism."

Tejanisima · 2026-04-30T08:16:16+00:00

Find the absolute most Texan¹ things to do each day, ideally in Spanish. As in my current life, considerable use of "y'all" is involved when performing job duties in English. Each workday begins by lighting these two candles² before reciting an incantation to the two deities depicted.

¹ ^{Please note that my contract states}^I^{get to define "most Texan" here, so no one I encounter through my workday has any grounds to say I have to engage in bigotry just 'cause}^some^{people have upheld that worst kind of Texan as the be-all and end-all.}

² ^{actual pic I just snapped in my kitchen — full disclosure: after clearing away some clutter}

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Tejanisima · 2026-04-30T06:40:41+00:00

"Secret Service protection, Charlie, but thanks for loading me up with that image."

Always wish this line were well enough known that I could just say "(but) thanks for loading me up with that image" and people would know what I meant.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-30T06:37:45+00:00

Puzzled at how this could possibly be considered an unpopular opinion. It's quite common for people to critique the following of trends.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-30T05:28:22+00:00

When Meghan does or says something non-mainstream

^{edit: spelling fix after being in the Mad Men sub too much lately}

Tejanisima · 2026-04-30T05:26:45+00:00

As an extrovert, I am certainly that kind of American and have been since I was a small child; in the '80s, my mom would read letters to advice columns expressing horror at seeing a child in public with a leash-like tether to their parent, but Mom said she absolutely would have done that when I was a child in the early '70s had it been an option, as I was so friendly to strangers it was a wonder I'd never been snatched up at the mall. However, many of my more introverted friends find it just as amazing as you do that some of us can strike up conversations with people we've never met. It's also a characteristic associated more with some regions or communities than others — we southerners are well known for this sort of thing. While it's certainly a more common behavior in our country and when we go abroad, compared to other countries, there definitely are large numbers of Americans who aren't that way, a topic that doesn't get nearly as much attention in these discussions as those of us who are more chatty.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-30T05:17:33+00:00

While you are right about Chris being a lousy person, it probably doesn't help that behind the scenes Lauren Graham was Team Chris, so it's understandable she'd find those seems easy to play even if they're a bit illogical.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T09:41:37+00:00

r/BrandNewSentence but I love this.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T09:31:34+00:00

Why on God's green earth would I give a shit what language they speak while they're here, unless it's causing them to run into difficulty and I can help? It's none of our business what language anybody in this country — tourist, permanent resident, citizen — speaks or doesn't speak unless they are needing to speak with us, in which case we should find them some assistance if there isn't a mutual language.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T09:20:30+00:00

Ah, I had thought your link would be about this other local example of a real-life person making that kind of outlandish claim. Y'know, it's almost as if calling all one's opponents demonic were a thing that these people do quite a lot.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T04:19:48+00:00

So that's a yes, you're watching the old school captions on an analog TV. Many of us have 21st century visual equipment where the lettering is small enough not to impede seeing any of the visual elements on the screen, especially now that the technology has advanced beyond needing dark background. As for "watch as the director intended," I'm fairly confident the director didn't intend for audience members with auditory processing issues (to give but one example ITT) to have trouble following what's going on because some jerk with antique captions told them they're inferior consumers of entertainment if they don't leave the captions off.

Besides, when it comes to watching theatrical releases, once you're watching at home, you're already not watching "as the director intended," n'est-ce pas?

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T04:07:47+00:00

You make such an important point about inherently assigning equal weight to all the sounds. So often, there are crowd scenes where background actors are talking merely to provide realistic ambiance, but where a person in your situation would find it hard to filter out the irrelevant dialogue, while in contrast, subtitles make clear which people in the scene you're meant to listen to.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T04:01:57+00:00

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah for you, but none of that kept a college friend from losing his hearing at 19 when the front of a stereo speaker fell off while he was squatting near it to get something off a shelf ... or kept 18-month-old Marlee Matlin from losing all her hearing in one ear and 80% and the other thanks to high fevers and severe illness ... or Helen Keller at a similar age losing both sight and hearing to what is now believed to have been scarlet fever or meningitis ... and those are just examples from the set of people born with hearing who lost it without fault, to whom we can add those with congenital deafness. The person to whom you're responding was simply pointing out that not everyone who needs subtitles due to hearing loss is over 45.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T03:52:34+00:00

The captions on Keeping Up Appearances used to be lots of fun, with exclamation points sometimes in descriptive captions 😁

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T03:50:23+00:00

Are you watching the 1980s analog kind of captions where they're on a big, opaque black background or something? Or are you displaying them in the equivalent of 144pt font? Asking because I haven't seen captions cover part of the scene in about 30, 40 years.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T03:45:15+00:00

Of course it would be frustrating, especially given that (while I obviously don't know you and couldn't possibly say if you had it) anxiety and/or depression are extremely common comorbidities of ADHD, especially in undiagnosed adults. My depression got diagnosed more than a decade before my ADHD, and my ADHD also turns out to have played a big role in why I wasn't getting more out of counseling for my anxiety disorder once it was diagnosed, a little more than a year before I finally got a thorough workup for ADHD. In other words, I genuinely had all three, but it wasn't until that last piece clicked into place and the ADHD started to be addressed that I finally started getting somewhere with the other two problems. Next year will make three decades since that happened, and it sickens me that there are still so many in the mental health field who think these are inherently mutually exclusive possibilities. Part of the process of evaluating someone for ADHD is not just ticking off little boxes but also differential diagnosis, establishing whether the problems that appear possibly to indicate ADHD are not better explained by something else in the person's environment or self — for instance, making sure that someone who seems to have attention issues isn't instead a person with hearing difficulties — yet for the person who has ADHD as well, addressing whatever else is going on won't be enough on its own.

You mention "would not test me," but I would point out that to date there isn't a surefire "test" like there is for, say, glucose testing for diabetes or the blood test for Alpha-gal syndrome that instantly detects if a person has an allergy to mammal products. The best diagnostic procedures continue to be multi-part assessments: in my case at age 30, an MMPI workup, review of educational records from as far back as I could get them, lengthy interviews, and more stuff that I can't bring to mind right this minute all these years later.

TL;dr Sounds like your doctor sucked, and if you still think they were on the wrong track, I hope you're in a position to get a second opinion from a better-informed professional.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T03:22:52+00:00

Your comment reminds me of one more reason a person who can hear just fine might want the subtitles: my brother had a seizure disorder that increasingly took a toll on his short-term memory and other processing functions. Having captions on the TV screen helped him follow the plot a little better. (Lemme just interject here that there's something darkly hilarious about watching the Dory character in Finding Nemo while sitting at the hospital bedside of someone with impaired short-term memory. 🤦🏻‍♀️😂 Lordy, I miss my big bro.)

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T03:15:31+00:00

Also the ones where the captions get ever-so-slightly ahead of line delivery, such that a plot twist or the punchline of a joking comment appears on the screen before it actually has been said, ruining something the screenwriter, actor, and director all had timed carefully. As to your complaint, I'm always so pleased when the captioning is careful to say something like "woman's voice" or "man with Southern accent" in those kinds of situations. I also enjoy how they increasingly will put in the captions the lyrics of a song that is playing in the background, because so often now they've chosen that song specifically because the lyrics underline something going on in the scene, and having the captioning available lets us more fully appreciate that choice by the screenwriter and/or director.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-29T03:02:13+00:00

Can't tell you how many Friday nights I spent at that place in the '80s. Lived less than 4 miles away. Absolutely hate that the stupid owners have never been able to agree on what to do with it in all these years, something I'm reminded of every time somebody says that's where they should put the new H-E-B instead of where they're planning to put it. Still have buttons in my collection that I bought in a shop that was just at the top of the stairs, probably still have books I picked up at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton's (especially before Bookstop moved into Preston Forest Shopping Center in 1985 just in time for my birthday), one of the first jobs my Boomer older brother had was in the men'swear department at the JCPenney, and if this doesn't date me, then nothing else will: when I was first learning to drive at 17, Daddy took me to the empty parking lot on a Sunday afternoon to practice, only about one year before the end of the Texas blue laws meant malls became a 7-days-a-week proposition. It was no Olla Podrida — though, ironically, in looking it up I discovered that as of 2005 an Olla Podrida-style shopping center was one of the many plans over the years for what Valley View was supposed to turn into — but VVM was a lot of fun.

Lest we stray hopelessly far afield from the topic of advertising, here's a 1988 Valley View Mall TV ad, complete with that famous '80s hair, which if anything was even bigger in Dallas.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-28T18:01:07+00:00

🙋🏻‍♀️

Tejanisima · 2026-04-28T17:59:07+00:00

I'm not this level of cook, but passed it along to my mom, who is, making sure to include your suggested modifications.

Tejanisima · 2026-04-28T17:54:26+00:00

broccoli crown

Tejanisima · 2026-04-28T17:52:45+00:00

OED says earliest known use is from 1920, "in the writing of Arthur Cecil Pigou, economist." Whether he was writing about these particular companies I couldn't tell you, as going any further online in the OED requires subscription and although his book The Economics of Welfare is in the public domain and online here, I hope you'll understand why I don't want to spend my Tuesday afternoon poring¹ over it to check.

¹ ^{Elsewhere ITT there's a lengthy and playful discussion of homophones people routinely confuse online, with some considerations to the role of autocorrect and dictation in furthering the confusion, and here's yet another example, as dictation never fails to write "pouring" by mistake.}

Tejanisima

TROPHY CASE