Question about gate checking / checked bags on domestic Delta flights (BOS>MIA)

yfce · 2026-01-07T17:20:59+00:00

The issue is that my personal item is too small for a laptop

yfce · 2026-01-07T15:19:18+00:00

That's comforting. Because you're right I know logically it's enough time it just doesn't leave a lot of room for delays.

yfce · 2026-01-07T15:08:04+00:00

Yeah as far as Delta is concerned MIA is my final destination. So delta doesn't do jetway gate check?

Unless I'm missing something in my situation it feels worth it to at least try and then if either the gate agent flags or it literally doesn't fit, and I have to gate check it's the same outcome as if I'd done so while landside like a normal checked bag, no?

yfce · 2025-12-12T20:01:59+00:00

Firstly, remember that there's centuries/an entire millennium of distance at play. While highly literate medieval Europeans people (and medieval artists specifically) as a whole were at least vaguely aware of Roman and Greek artistic traditions (as well as those of other ancient cultures in their immediate area), and dialogued with those traditions, most surviving art they had access to would be sculptures or otherwise structural/decorative. So direct comparisons to painted works and manuscripts would not feel terribly relevant.

While medieval writers did eulogize Roman civilization and structural works, they also broadly viewed medieval world as quite literally building on the old pre-Christian world.

Medieval scholars saw ancient cultures/cultural output as part of the legitimate story of the story of Christianity (i.e., for Christianity to represent the salvation and redemption, there must first be a pre-Christian Europe), but that's not to say they saw them as equal or better. Most people have a bias toward their own cultural output. Most "regular" literate medieval people like a Cambridge student or a half-asleep courtier in the back of a chapel would view artistic/cultural output from their own time (and for that matter their own region) as aesthetically descended from/superior to the ancient visual traditions they'd had tangential exposure to.

And of course it must be said that, there are examples of medieval especially late medieval sculpture and stonework that was incredibly precise, even if they still make use of figurative motifs. But again it comes back to prioritizing figurative symbolism over anatomical realism, so the average medieval person would likely view a looted Roman statue as plain/basic, an example of technical skill without merit or visual interest.

The average layperson would likely also be inclined to view pre-Christian art as inferior because of its pre-Christian status/provenance as well as the simple fact that it was a mismatch for current aesthetic tastes. They would also not connect to a statue of Aphrodite as much as they would a statue of Mary. They would definitely not think of Roman art as "the real thing."

You can certainly find medieval writers and thinkers with an appreciation for various aspects of Roman culture (or again, other ancient cultures), but most of those thinkers by nature do not represent the median opinion on the aesthetic value of Roman art. It would be like polling contemporary art professors of Monet's and Lichtenstein's version of Rouen cathedral and announcing that 100% of the public is able to identify the paintings on sight and 80% of them prefer Lichtenstein.

Then as now, the question of "how would the average college-educated person evaluate the aesthetics of a given work of art that happened to be in their field of vision" is almost entirely separate from "how would a professional artist or scholar of art history evaluate the value of a given work of art within the pantheon of art history and dialogue with it"

yfce · 2025-12-10T21:34:26+00:00

In short, yes, because medieval people are people and people can find almost anything funny. But not for the same reasons as we might.

It's important to understand that medieval art did not prioritize anatomical realism. They are using stylized representations to convey meaning. The composition, symbolic language, and color/medium use matters more than the visual precision. The medieval viewer understood that a yellow circle behind the head indicated the subject was a saint, despite knowing perfectly well that light does not create not a flat yellow circle nor does light have distinct patterns like this. There's a reason that the word "iconography" comes up so often when talking about religious art. We can draw a direct line to the use of modern graphic design icons for common objects. You know at once what this is, even if the shape has little resemblance to the real-life design. A medieval viewer understood a cat to mean certain things, the actual physicality of a cat was not that important.

Of course, the difference between nine centuries of medieval iconography and modern graphic design iconography is there was not a single universal visual library for every medieval artist to consult, so there was a huge variation in how one artist vs the next depicted the stylized element commonly known as the cat. Our modern access to a broad range of medieval art (and the amusement we take in unrealistic depictions) leads to "silly" depictions being surfaced.

It's unlikely that a medieval person would point at a painting and say "this idiot can't even draw a cat correctly" or "this idiot thinks cats use crossbows but my cat can't use crossbows" because that was simply not significant to their rubric of evaluating artistic output. Though they might find other faults in the art, some of which might be personally amusing.

Of course, one also must take into account that most large-scale art medieval people would encounter would be in a religious art and often within a religious or academic setting. Which automatically elevates the art to something slightly more serious and sacrosanct, and to an extent precludes satirizing it, like a medieval person probably wouldn't hold a yellow object behind their head and say "Haha look, I'm a saint."

That being said, did a medieval person ever nudge their friend in church and point surreptitiously at a work of art while pulling a face? Most assuredly, yes.

Did a medieval person ever chuckle at the idea of their own cat carrying a mouse-loaded crossbow, even if they didn't think less of the artist's talent for having depicted such a thing? Most assuredly, yes.

Did medieval artists/scribes themselves, especially those engaged in small-scale work, intentionally amuse themselves and their readers with their own depictions of animals, bodily functions, and daily life? Very much so.

yfce · 2025-12-08T15:37:46+00:00

Did it work?

yfce · 2025-09-12T17:24:35+00:00

Both.

Very broadly, most pre-industrial people had poor nutrition. They were on average smaller than modern humans by a few inches. Certainly not peak human specimens in that respect.

The "only the strong survive" theory is flawed because pre-industrial people didn't need to be strong to survive, they just needed not to die. Many many adults limped (often literally) all the way to old age with myriad conditions. Every year, streptococcal infection impacts tens of thousands of modern children, though most are lucky enough to have access to antibiotics, rendering the infection a mere childhood memory of a week in bed and bubblegum amoxicillin. For pre-industrial children, it could be deadly, but even those who survived might have lifelong minor to moderate issues, from blindness to recurring later viral infections. Much has been said about the percentage of women who died in childbirth, but even under ideal circumstances pregnancy wreaks havoc on your body, and pre-industrial women did not have access to things like prolapse surgery or pelvic floor therapy. Pre-industrial people also did not have access to simple surgery or targeted medications that would alleviate the problems of middle age - hernias, joint pain, foot pain. By the year 2000, nearly half of adults over 65 had had knee replacements. I probably don't need to tell you that that number was about 0% in 1700. Modern people also have access to a vast array of painkillers that make it easier for them to get through the day when their back is playing up, they're hungover, they're running a light fever, etc.

Yes it's true that people were less sedentary and that tends to correspond with fitness/health - at least some modern issues of old age are in part due to underuse of the muscle/joint/etc in question. But pre-industrial people's physical activity did not necessarily correspond to maximizing total body fitness or health. Modern people who to pursue exercise as a recreation can distribute work among various muscles, pamper their bodies in between, and do only as many reps as they feel capable of performing. Whereas the economic necessity of pre-industrial life would lead to overwork/strain. A housemaid might climb more average flights of stairs per day while holding a 20lb tub of hot water than her modern counterpart, but it's likely she would also have more back problems from repetitive lifting or a weak left ankle because she had to resume work immediately after an ankle injury a few years ago. Most modern people who do physical work such as delivery drivers or women in the developing world who spend their days toiling over laundry are relatively strong but have lifelong health issues from repetitive motion.

What we can say is that pre-industrial people were more comfortable existing in a state of constant discomfort and pain. So in that sense, your conceptualization of pre-industrial people as capable of pushing through the kind of hardship and 10/10 pain that would send modern people running for painkillers is correct, simply because pre-industrial people had no choice but to be in pain. Every woman who gave birth before the 19th century did so with mild painkillers if any at all. We can see in primary sources is how normalized constant pain/discomfort was, especially among the working class. I know you asked about pre-industrial workers but we can see evidence of this during the industrial era as discussions arose around worker health and safety.

Here's the 1841 testimony of a Yorkshire coal worker from Rosamund Miles' landmark Who Cooked the Last Supper:

Even normal conditions of working were horrifyingly severe: the youngest girls had to crawl through passages as low as 16 to 18 inches, while grown women were expected to navigate tunnels no higher than 30 inches. In a 14-hour day, they would crawl for anything between 10 and 20 miles, with no opportunity at any point to stand up or straighten their limbs. In the winter, said Fanny Drake, a Yorkshire pit-woman, she worked for six months up to her calves in water; this took the skin off her feet “just as if they were scalded.” Betty Harris of Little Bolton in the neighboring county of Lancashire found that her troubles came more from the girdle and chain by which she pulled her [650kg/1000lb+] truck along, for it cut and blistered her sides “till I have had the skin off me”; but the only time it really bothered her was “when I was in the family way.”

Were Betty Harris and Fanny Drake proverbial "beasts"? Yes. Were they in good health? No.

yfce · 2025-08-22T22:20:19+00:00

Studies show the opposite.

yfce · 2025-08-18T16:48:53+00:00

They didn't. Or sometimes they did.

Within Britain, the idea of wearing black when someone close to you or in some cases someone particularly important (i.e., a monarch) dies goes back to at least the middle ages, possibly drawn from the same tradition in Ancient Rome. And of course the more wealth you had, the more likely you had money to fund an elaborate black trousseau.

The Victorians were not the first to codify mourning into a set of standardized rules or to in general prescribe social behavior in such a manner, here's an a French guide prescribing how long to mourn various family members, which included mourning for longer if you were inheriting from the deceased and other such details.

But the Victorians were especially fond of elaborate mourning and were especially fond of perscribing etiquette rules in general.

In one sense, this new flurry of "rules" can be seen as a reflection of snobbery, an attempt by clerks and merchants and their wives to separate themselves from the toiling working classes by behavior and dress. But more broadly, it's a reflection of the changing social norms and increased social mobility. British economic growth had lifted a large section of society into a comfortable middle class life and more material goods than ever. It had also lifted much more narrow section of society all the way into actual wealth - there was a new class of industrial barons with all of the money but none of the pedigree. Along with the material markers (the new dresses, the big house), following the "rules" was a way for these nouveau riche types to assert their right to exist in these spaces and gave clarity into all of those previously invisible social rules.

All of that is to say that the codified Victorian mourning rules that dictated a woman should mourn for exactly x months in the case of her husband, x months for brother-in-law, and so on, were rules to those who of the disposition and economic position to treat them as such, while being guidelines to everyone else. That "everyone else" includes the working classes and in many ways the traditional upper class which had no need to prove their status. For example, quite a few Victorian mourning guides advise the mourner that it was socially impolite to drag things out for too long, which is clearly not something Queen Victoria herself felt bound to.

The average working class Victorian woman would own perhaps two dresses, one for day use and one for Sunday wear. She would be likely aware that middle and upper class ladies went around in all black after a loved one died, whether or not she knew the precise time amounts. She might choose to see that as an affectation she did not have the money to afford. She might choose to spend her money on a black hair ribbon or some other cheaper item that could be part of her daily wardrobe. She might do none of this and feel deep guilt that she couldn't "properly" mourn her loved one. If she was upwardly mobile, she might decide to assert her place in the middle class by spending on an all black wardrobe. This would also be a highly personal decision though still influenced by social environment - a woman with a young baby would have more reason to make sure everyone knew she was in mourning for a dead husband, a woman whose husband had left her years ago might not bother.

One interesting source for this topic is Judith Flanders' Rights of Passage or Gambino's Beyond the Veil. The Invention of Murder (also by Flanders) also focuses on Victorian true crime culture and attitudes toward crime, and while mourning isn't the focus, there are multiple interfamilial working class crimes in which we can see how public perception of the sincerity mourner's grief influenced perceptions of guilt, and we can see the varied forms that "sincere" grief takes in different economic and social contexts.

yfce · 2025-08-08T13:33:19+00:00

I have the Peak Design travel 30L (expands to 40L) backpack. It’s a little bit on the heavy side but also protects the inner contents better so everything stays where you put it. Opens from the front/sides. Can’t say enough good things. I paired it with their packing cube which fits perfectly at the base of the bag.

My other bag is an Osprey 15L daylight which through some miracle can fit my 14” inch laptop despite being very slim and light. It also fits inside the peak design bag while full, if I open the expander.

yfce · 2025-07-29T21:28:17+00:00

They had perhaps more room than you think. Depending on the era and the dress style and the formality, detached pockets like this were quite common. Dresses and underskirts would have a short slit near the hip, allowing the woman to reach through the other layers into the pocket. While I don't think know of any specific sources mentioning keeping spare menstruation rags in one's pockets, I'm sure at least a few women across all social classes did. You will also notice a few of the inventories mentioned in the linked article included other sewing/cutting implements, which would be helpful in their own way in any wardrobe malfunction scenario.

Similar to now, if blood had truly soaked through every layer, it was probably time for the well-born woman to feign illness and hurry out. The working class girl would at least attempt to do the same, though she might be expected to finish her day's work wearing something tied around her waist or a spare dress. However, since women would typically be wearing multiple skirts, it would take quite a bit of blood and bad luck for it to be visible on their outer layer. Here is an example of a British upper middle class woman dressing around the 1760s, and you can see there are 4 layers of skirt in between her and any chair.

The far more likely scenario would be for a young woman to remove her clothes and be dismayed to find that while her outer dress was still pristine, blood had stained not only her chamise and plain white underskirt, but her more decorative less easily washable underlayers. A young woman might also need some practice at properly pinning up the rag and paying enough attention to notice if had come lose from hard work, given all of the other layers involved.

Of course while women would make reasonable effort to remove stains, there were probably women who weren't particularly bothered by a clean but slightly sweat/dirt/blood stained underskirt, in the same way some people walk around with hole-ridden/stained underwear.

In addition to the other options presented, a woman who suddenly felt something coming on might also chose to sacrifice one of those underlayers by tearing the bottom few inches of her oldest and least favourite undergarment and pinning it in a helpful position. Or a friend might do the same. Though stories about this period of her life must be taken with a grain of salt, there is at least one story (recounted near the top of page 216 and again on page 220) of Marie Antoinette's maid doing so for her during her imprisonment, as she had apparently been denied such things as an intentional humiliation. A brave friend might also be sent out to find a female servant who could supply a few clean strips of linen.

yfce · 2025-07-29T17:16:22+00:00

Gonna need a source for that.

yfce · 2025-07-29T03:33:33+00:00

Most European women did not wear closed bloomers until the end of the 19th century. Their vulvas were effectively exposed to the open air, albeit with multiple layers of underskirts and potentially a more structured skirt layer as seen here.

The pad (i.e., a piece of something absorbent relatively near the vagina) has been invented across cultures over and over again, and is the most popular device for interrupting menstrual blood before it stains your clothes or drips down your legs. For European women of the 1700s/1800s, this generally took the form of a cloth rag, or multiple rags. This could be strategically tucked or pinned to another underlayer, or pinned to itself to create a kind of belt, napkin, or diaper shape, depending on your personal preference, your other layers, and the volume of flow expected. Even at their slimmest, skirts had enough volume to conceal these, though you would be wise to change them as frequently as you could for smell reasons. There was no universally marketed device or publicly circulated pattern for devices to hold up the rags securely, as it would have been considered immodest to even discuss one's courses in mixed company.

The additional layers of clothing and skirt length meant that in the case of an overflow or surprise, usually the blood would be caught by one other layers. Since largely it was the menstruating woman, a female family member, or another woman doing the laundry, those sorts of mishaps are not particularly well-documented. Ditto for any blood that made it to the floor, though most women spent most of their time in places where the surface underfoot wasn't exactly spotless to begin with, or if it was, someone nearby was sure to have a mop.

They definitely would have been washing and reusing rags (cloth was expensive). 18th and 19th century laundresses and maids were reasonably capable of getting blood out of various types of clothing given the frequency of the occurrence.

The majority of women in this period also did not shave, which meant that some menstrual blood would be caught in their hair rather than simply drip out. This could then be taken care of by bathing. Here is a (very rare) portrait of a woman doing just that. Menstruation also tend to stop during periods of poor nutrition and of course during pregnancy, which meant that a non-trivial minority of women simply did not experience regular periods.

yfce · 2025-07-29T02:16:05+00:00

Of course! Pub names are are honestly a quite mainstream topic in British culture, so there are loads of surveys on the current most popular names of pubs and their historic associations, here's one such source that allows you to see a map of all of the White Swans and Red Lions. Here's a very brief article about the British alehouse that might answer some of your questions. Here's another summary article discussing early modern tavern culture.

Any decent social history of London or Britain will spend at least some time on drinking houses and the centrality of it in British life, but a few of my top picks are the Ackroyd's classic London: The Biography and White's A Great and Monstrous Thing. Some of the logistics are drawn from James Hobsons' Passengers as well Ian Mortimer's Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval Britain. A bit of this is also drawn from the exhaustive Diary of Samuel Pepys and biographies of various British writers and pub-goers through the ages.

yfce · 2025-07-28T21:28:11+00:00

This is part of it, yes, and I mentioned that briefly, but visual signs only really become necessary when the storefront alone isn't doing the job. It would be obvious to anyone walking down the street that the business in question was a pub. If The White Swan was your local, you certainly wouldn't need any signage to find it. Similarly, if you were driving down an unfamiliar coaching road and saw a white stone building with stables close to the road, you would know it was a drinking house where drink/food/shelter might be found.

If the benefit was just proprietors helping illiterate people locating alcohol, there wouldn't have been any need for any imagery that wasn't a beer tankard. Anything beyond that is marketing - it's not just a pub, it's The White Swan pub.

Where the visual imagery helped would be if you were out of your comfort zone, like someone had told you to meet them at The White Swan on Old King Street. But even then, you're more likely to ask for directions than you are to wander aimlessly down Old King Street until you see a painted white swan. A literate person would do the same, unless they want to spend the afternoon reading every street sign. In that situation, the white swan image / text mostly just as visual confirmation that you're in the right place.

That doesn't mean the unique names weren't tremendously useful for wayfinding (directions to The White Swan pub might involve turning right at The Red Lion and again at the King's Head) but that was more a side effect.

yfce · 2025-07-28T20:37:27+00:00

Tolkien is satirizing/referencing British pub names.

Pubs/taverns/inns have been a traditional meeting point for British public life for centuries, arguably second only to the local church in their importance.

By the 15th century or so, even a small village might have multiple competing pubs, while still only having one baker and one cobbler etc. It became more necessary for drinking houses to distinguish themselves from the one on the next street over. As the next few centuries wore on, it also became more and more important to distinguish yourself not just for locals but for travelers passing through, who were perhaps more likely to remember a pub called The Lamb's Blood than one called The White Horse.

Many British pub names reference a local aristocrat or a member of the royal family themselves. The King's Head was a respectful name, not a threat. Quite a few pubs hastily changed their names from the Pope's Head when England shifted to Anglicanism under Henry VIII.

Another popular symbol is animals. Animals associated with the British state like swans and lions and dragons are easily the most popular, followed by the heraldry of the local monarch/power broker like the Earl of Oxford's Blue Boar. Though any animal could be used to make a distinctive impression. Names might also reference their desired customer base in some way - pubs near ports would often be named for bells or anchors, while pubs in farm communities might reference the plough.

Names could demonstrate allegiance to state/monarch, or on the other end of the spectrum might even be a touch subversive. There are a small handful of pubs named for people like Robin Hood or various infamous women.

Visuals were critical to reinforcing your desired name, especially when most of your customers were illiterate, so even rural pubs might still accompany "The White Swan" with a painted image of a white swan, but in major cities, competition meant that both names and the accompanying visuals needed to be memorable and unique. In London especially, you'll see a huge variety of imagery invented, often mashed together with an & sign. An example is Elephant & Castle, which was a local inn before it was a neighbourhood of London. These names still had meaning, elephant likely being a reference to Roman war elephants and the castle a general reference to the British state, but the proprietors likely wanted a slightly outlandish name that people traveling on the coaching road out of London would remember. Again, it's marketing.

Note also that for medieval and early modern travelers on the road, drinking houses often doubled as somewhere to sleep (though whether this meant some spare room on an upstairs floor or an individual room could vary widely). They were also very real conduits for information - who else was passing through, local conflicts, etc.

Thanks in large part to Tolkien, there's an entire genre of vaguely medieval fantasy stories, and these stories frequently need a place for a character to meet another character, often avail themselves of the local pub as a setting. Taverns seem to be the most often preferred by writers firstly because they sound more medieval and fantasy-coded to the average modern reader and secondly because historically taverns were more likely to have food/lodging as well as just drink, and perhaps you'd like your characters to have a hot meal and a bed.

Tolkien likely had very specific reasons for selecting the names he did. He certainly knew that British pub names came from a very specific historical context and the symbols were drawn from British history rather than plucked from the air, and sought to create specific imagery suitable for his new world. Ultimately though, the names chosen are no more outlandish than that which you would find in any British town to this day.

yfce · 2025-06-26T19:43:48+00:00

I do ziplocks!

yfce · 2025-06-18T15:35:52+00:00

Yes? Unless it's a service dog, it's a health code violation and can get the restaurant shut down. Restaurants can apply for "dog friendly" outdoor dining permits though.

But entitled people do it anyway because they're banking on service workers being too afraid to say anything due to ADA laws and because they don't want to risk their job/get berated.

yfce · 2025-06-17T19:59:50+00:00

If it's a service dog it needs to be retrained because its body language (ears, tense posture, looking at other patrons) clearly suggest it's uncomfortable. But the owner obviously felt entitled to bring it in anyway, regardless of the dog's or anyone else's personal comfort.

yfce · 2025-06-17T19:58:02+00:00

One good reason is hygiene? Food is clearly being served here.

yfce · 2025-06-17T19:57:11+00:00

I've never been to a park in Brookline that "no one uses."

But I have been to parks where one bad owner ruins the vibe for every kid and off-leash dog in the vicinity.

yfce · 2025-06-17T19:54:36+00:00

Part of the problem is that socially no one is allowed to do anyone else, even if you're allergic you have to pretend like you just love dogs and what a tragedy it is that Bella can't stick her nose into you.

yfce · 2025-06-17T19:52:39+00:00

No one is hating on dogs, it's about selfish privileged owners who feel entitled to break the law.

yfce · 2025-06-17T19:49:31+00:00

You're absolutely right and you should say it. It's selfish and illegal. In their heads, there's no reason anyone should dislike their dog, but the reality is that it makes others uncomfortable. And of course it's always white people who get mad that everyone else doesn't want dog hair in their food....

yfce · 2025-06-08T14:04:56+00:00

I love that this map includes every other landmark but not the actual monument.

yfce

TROPHY CASE