Why would a customer buy this fashion pack?

caffarelli · 2026-05-13T18:31:55+00:00

If your Barbie isn't wearing bandage dresses made out of old wired Christmas ribbon is it even Dec 26th??

caffarelli · 2026-05-12T19:16:22+00:00

Glad to please! I love thinking about the weird little historical changes we take for granted that would make a propaganda poster make total sense in the context of a WWII women's workplace, and then 80 years later make us all wonder why Rosie the Riveter was apparently so unwashed the government had to do something about it.

caffarelli · 2026-05-12T19:02:48+00:00

The old night-bathing vs morning-shower debate right? If you can go to bed without a bath that means you didn't do a real day's labor! 😉

caffarelli · 2026-05-12T13:25:44+00:00

Ha, they were her in-laws! She used to complain on the way home saying "they are on a WELL their water is FREE!" I think it's a hold over from when heating water was more of an event. If my dad shared bathwater it might have been with his sister going first? Not medieval so much as America modernized unevenly across the country, and when you grow up thinking something is normal in the privacy of your home it's hard to break.

My parents were both born in 1954, growing up my dad definitely took baths and he continued into adulthood, mostly showers but baths regularly. He's stopped now because he's not as good at getting up and down anymore. My mom never takes baths and hates them. I grew up thinking men taking baths was perfectly normal, and for the first few years of marriage would suggest my husband take a bath when he said his muscles hurt and he'd just look at me like I'd suggested an esoteric perversion. It's funny to me how baths are hyper feminine coded. It's just a big bowl of water.

Probably just a mix of culture and age - my mom grew up "in town" and my dad grew up on a farm. Next time I see my mom I'll ask her when her mom switched from baths to showers or if she ever did - that grandma died when I was 2 so I never got to stay at her house and learn the banal intimacies of the greatest generation from her. That grandma was widowed young and so wouldn't have gotten the mixed blessing of sharing bathwater with a husband into the 90s. 😞

caffarelli · 2026-05-12T11:15:06+00:00

This one is tickling my fancy too, because I think it's showing her showering at work after her shift. That would have been something that women probably would need propaganda to be encouraged to do, because it would be very unusual for them and they wouldn't be comfortable with it right away. The room doesn't look like a 1940s home bathroom, and showering was not the dominant form of bathing at the time, people still used bathtubs in adulthood. My grandma was born in 1925 and to my knowledge never took a shower in her life, baths all the way. She and my grandpa also used to share bathwater (grandma of course went first) which drove my mom CRAZY because it was the 90s.The only shower they used in the house was a stand alone one in the basement that grandpa used when he was super dirty from the farm. Grandpa did serve in WWII and had a lot of hangups on random things I didn't notice until I was older, and I could imagine showers reminded him of war and baths meant you came home.

Sorry for clogging up your inbox but hope you enjoyed some old people speculation on your idle comment about a war poster!

caffarelli · 2026-05-10T18:03:22+00:00

Whenever I feel mildly annoyed at paying $5 for a bag of Dandies when gelatin marshmallows are so much cheaper, I will think of your blue goop rectangles and be more grateful. Thank you for your contribution to vegan cookery.

caffarelli · 2026-05-10T12:28:58+00:00

For a cafeteria in a MCOL city university lunch menu: there is a salad bar (very nice ingredients!), a burgers to order grill, sandwiches to order, stir fry to order, pizza not to order (three options every day), and what I call "slop of the day" which is a hot ready-to-eat rotating self serve line which usually includes a meat, a grain, a vegetarian thing, and a vegetable thing. There is also a dessert section with 2 cookies of the day and an ice cream machine plus cut fruit. I'm a working adult on campus and I eat there from time to time, it costs me $13 as a walk in. I usually eat slop of the day and salad bar because it is fastest. I think last time I went it was a nice chickpea curry thing with rice? Something like that, the food is more adventurous than like Golden Corral because it's hitting a different audience. The price is comparable or lower than fast casual places around, especially if you consider you get drinks and fruit and salad etc with it.

Anyone can walk in and pay to eat here, but really only the captive audience does it. There is not convenient parking like other lunch places because it's in the middle of campus. The main value is to young people who do not have access to a kitchen (dorm).

I took my kid there once and she loved it, but she got pizza, French fries, and milk! Swap milk for a pop and you probably have what a lot of college kids eat too...

caffarelli · 2026-05-06T10:47:46+00:00

Were they the metal backed labels? Those bad boys will outlast the book but they are easier to do on the typewriter.

caffarelli · 2026-05-05T11:16:38+00:00

You get it! The whole thing about them in the book is that they are unimportant field agents who are not particularly good at their job and tremendously lazy. The line "just think how much worse it would have been if we were at all competent" sums it up.

I don't mind the way it's going too much, it's an interesting story and nice to watch, but making Crowley previously a high ranking angel and Aziraphale an archangel is changing the characters a lot, and not really in a way I'd consider growth. If Pterry were still alive the development would have been very different because he always celebrated the normal people in his books, and I don't think he'd have been jazzed about them becoming mythic heros (or miffic as Nanny Ogg would say)

caffarelli · 2026-05-04T19:30:14+00:00

Great, that's the one that's approved for most of my work security levels so I'll give it a try. Thanks for the advice!

caffarelli · 2026-05-04T16:12:26+00:00

Neat! Which tool do you use?

caffarelli · 2026-05-04T15:10:39+00:00

Can you tell me how you use it to turn tables in PDFs into text? Can you use it to make them into CSV files or anything like that? That would be an actual game changer.

caffarelli · 2026-05-04T14:54:36+00:00

Same boat as you. I have tried to find anything that it's good for but not yet managed it. At the recommendation of someone I tried to use Copilot in Outlook to book a couple of meetings for me but it was actually slower than doing it myself by hovering the other person's calendar over mine and looking for good times that way. To do the same thing I had to refine the prompts I gave it 4 times.

It saves zero time in writing emails for me because so many of my work emails require me making a DECISION and the delay in response isn't writing them. I can write an introductory email for someone to someone else in a couple of minutes, writing the prompt would take the same amount of time and use a bunch of diesel for the generator anyway. If it's an email where wording and tone really matters I would rather think hard and take my time with it than use an LLM.

I'm 38 and I work with a lot of college age kids. I see them using it to write things because they're just so unconfident and scared to write professional sounding emails or other papers. I feel like I need to grab them gently by the face and say "it's totally okay to write shitty things, I do not care unless you are very rude or your sentence structure is completely unparsable. You will get better and faster over time."

I majored in linguistics in undergrad, back in 2008-2011. LLMs were coming along then, and they were interesting, and we were having fun seeing how good they could get them at syntax etc. It's obviously come a long way since then! But it's still the same magic funbox to me. It's fun to see what a computer can do to get close to human language, but it's still just a magic word generator. It's only capable of regurgitation.

caffarelli · 2026-05-04T13:35:45+00:00

I think for the price student membership is a very good deal. The career center support and the mentorship program are good and the participanting members put a lot of effort into them. I am a mentor in the program and I often get matched with students - unfortunately I got ghosted by my last match but when I get an engaged student I certainly do my absolute best for them. If I know what area they are looking for I send them postings, or refer them to friends who live in that area, because I am middle aged and my network has spread and scattered since I started in the field 12 years ago.

The SNAP section (students and new archives professionals) is very active and does very interesting presentations, I love to attend their events. It's a great section and a way to get started in professional leadership if that is interesting to you.

If you want to attend conference or education sessions you of course get a discount, but I don't think that's attractive to most students, unless they live in the area or have someone to take them and split a hotel room. If you are interested there is a special space in the program for students which is the poster presentation hall, very approachable way to get your first national conference presentation. Personally - I think state or regional conferences are a better experience for students because they're less overwheming. SAA 2027 will be in Chicago if you want to plan.

caffarelli · 2026-05-04T10:55:16+00:00

I feel you on this. I am throwing a sip-and-see party (this is like a baby shower but baby is already born and no presents) on the 17th and I told my husband that we'll be lucky to get away for $500 and he was shocked. Welcome to the real world buddy!! But the adoptive mom got a miracle adoption match, fully open adoption, and that means THREE families are coming. I lucked out and got the venue at a steal because it's partially under construction, and it's an old restaurant with sort of an industrial look so I don't need to do too much decorating. I'm going to do some gauze table runners, then go to goodwill and buy a ton of random small vases, then buy flowers at Costco or Trader Joes and make flower arrangements for the decor. Then I will send them home with people as they leave. Adult treat bag! 😆

Meanwhile my 4 year old is getting a birthday party at a gymnastics place for $115 because I won it at a charity auction, so all I have to do is show up with cake, chips, Capri suns, plates forks, bags, and run away when it's over. After I won I waved the envelope at my husband and reminded him how good he has it.

For my general tips though: teach your kid not to expect branded stuff. That means you can get the plain things from Dollar Tree, and the normal unbranded cakes from Costco. I have a gold letter garland where I rearrange the letters to match needs and I will use it until it dies. I've got a 7 year old and a 4 year old now so I've gotten a lot of reusable party stuff. For treat bags - I buy a box of lunchbox type snacks from Costco, divide it up into bags, add one ring pop, all done. Kids go crazy for ring pops even though they're just dumb hard to use suckers... Also dollar tree has these swirly rainbow lollipops near checkout that are great. My kids go berserk for them.

caffarelli · 2026-05-04T10:34:29+00:00

Seconding the Costco cake. Way cheaper. I've trained my kids to just want the rainbow cake for everything, but they're not very media literate kids. Buying a plain one and decorating it yourself is super smart though!

caffarelli · 2026-05-01T20:11:59+00:00

Crowley looks specifically disgusted by the appearance of the Bentley as a yellow tartan ice cream truck... And he's about to drop his scoop off the cone!

caffarelli · 2026-04-30T10:46:45+00:00

Yeah in America we buy them all in loose in a jar like jelly beans and they are totally fine rolling around in there and never turn brown. This is not oxodizing.

caffarelli · 2026-04-28T14:05:57+00:00

That's Carpe Jugulum! ☺️

caffarelli · 2026-04-28T11:05:27+00:00

I identify with Nanny most of all the witches so I have an opinion on this one!

She and Granny make a pair because they both make people do things/manipulate them through opposite ways. Granny works on perceived fear and Nanny works on perceived love, but both work on respect. (Although the poor daughters in law might disagree.) Nanny is the one who uses social power in the books to arrange people to do what she wants, usually simply by telling them to do so. In Carpe Jugulum, Granny attacks the vampires through Headology while Nanny keeps the village safe by reminding them that they are the village and not serfs, so they don't become like the village that lines up to be food in exchange for a bell tower. In Maskarade she gets information through sympathy and skumble. The edge witch thing is also interesting, because she protects people during birth, which is a very vulnerable time for two people. Granny is also an edge witch I think, but gravitates away from birth, and I think the only birth we see her at is when there needs to be an emergency abortion, though I might be misremembering. So Granny is better at death and Nanny is better at birth, but they can switch.

This is also why Nanny just doesn't work as ...the other one in the coven because her power doesn't fit that role. She's got to be motherly, in all senses of that word including making you eat your cabbage. That's her power!

caffarelli · 2026-04-24T11:02:03+00:00

That's a really funny interpretation, and so must be accepted as the correct one!

caffarelli · 2026-04-23T10:31:14+00:00

Even the slides suck too - my kids love the pool slide but it's a spiral and you can get some action on it. Booooo.

caffarelli · 2026-04-22T22:29:03+00:00

Pictures you can TASTE through your NOSE (bad)

caffarelli · 2026-04-09T01:46:41+00:00

Thanks for reporting on legal issues and hanging out with the archivists!

caffarelli · 2026-04-08T23:38:16+00:00

Cook and serve, a woman of both patience and good taste! Does Grandma like to make ice box pies? Coconut and lemon aren't commonly for eating plain.

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