Category: Local / Living

Hanging Out in the Kitchen at a Party

Manhattan sidewalks harbored unmeasurable demand for more public space. This Flatiron triangle was particularly notable because the plaza lay just across the street from a lovely park. One of the planners explained: “Why would so many people choose the plaza over the park? For the same reason that people at a dinner party gather in the kitchen instead of the living room or dining room.”

Paved Paradise
Henry Grabar

Why would people at a dinner party prefer to gather in the kitchen instead of the living room or dining room?
ChatGPT
There could be several reasons why people at a dinner party might prefer to gather in the kitchen instead of the living room or dining room. Here are a few possible explanations:

Social atmosphere: The kitchen is often the heart of the home and a place where people naturally congregate during social gatherings. It tends to have a more casual and relaxed atmosphere compared to the formal setting of a dining room or the comfort-oriented setup of a living room. The informal vibe of the kitchen encourages conversation, laughter, and interaction among guests.

What does it mean to be *on*?
Impression management is a conscious or subconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.[1] It was first conceptualized by Erving Goffman in 1959 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and then was expanded upon in 1967.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_management

African American History Mural, Denver

I saw this when I was walking around downtown recently.  Around the anniversary of the Birmingham church bombing.

On the morning of September 15, 1963, Rev. John H. Cross Jr. and members of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, were preparing to start the Youth Day worship service when a bomb went off.

“I will never forget that horrific noise,” said Barbara Cross, the reverend’s eldest daughter. “I remember everything got real dark and you could hear kids screaming.”

At 10:22 a.m. a massive explosion sent glass, cement and debris flying. An FBI investigation later discovered that four Ku Klux Klan members (KKK) had planted dynamite under a cement staircase outside of the church.

The blast knocked down power lines and blew a hole in the side of the building, completely destroying the ladies restroom in the basement where a group of girls had been getting ready for church.

Four little girls were killed in the church that Sunday morning: 11-year-old Denise McNair, along with 14-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins. Nearly two dozen others were injured.

60 years after 4 little girls were killed in a KKK attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church, memories of the lives that were taken live on
CNN

Striking Workers – Summer 2023

This year, workers across industries in the United States have increasingly walked off the job or threatened to do so. In July, tens of thousands of actors joined screenwriters on the picket line, bringing Hollywood to a halt. Meanwhile, a summertime strike of more than 300,000 United Parcel Service workers seemed imminent before a deal was reached last month.

Now, another large-scale strike looms. The United Auto Workers union has voted to authorize a walkout of about 150,000 members at General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis if negotiations fail before contracts expire on Sept. 14.

If the auto workers go on strike, the number of workers who have walked off the job at some point over the course of this year will top 450,000, the highest level since 2018, another notable year for work stoppages.

A Summer of Strikes
Work stoppages in the United States this year could reach heights rarely seen in recent decades.

Duran Duran – Red Rocks – August 29, 2023

Velvet Newton
Night Boat
The Wild Boys
Hungry Like the Wolf
The James Bond Theme (John Barry song)
A View to a Kill
Notorious
Give It All Up
Lonely in Your Nightmare / Super Freak
Is There Something I Should Know?
Anniversary
Friends of Mine
Careless Memories
Ordinary World (Dedicated to the people of Hawaii and Ukraine)
Come Undone
Planet Earth (With band intros)
White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It) (Grandmaster Melle Mel cover)
The Reflex
Girls on Film / Acceptable in the 80’s

Encore:
Save a Prayer
Rio

setlist.fm

NOTE – I was at this show. Also featured were Nile Rogers/Chic, and a band I was unfamiliar with called Bastille. All excellent, imho. And, the crowd was into it, singing along with a number of the tunes.

UPS Workers Win New Contract

The union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, reported in June that its UPS members had voted to authorize a strike, with 97 percent of those who took part in the vote endorsing the move. The tentative agreement will now go before the membership for ratification.

“We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” the Teamsters president, Sean M. O’Brien, said in a statement. “UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations.”

UPS handles about one-quarter of the tens of millions of packages that are shipped daily in the United States, and a strike could dent economic activity, particularly the e-commerce industry.

UPS Reaches Tentative Deal With Teamsters to Head Off Strike
United Parcel Service faced a potential walkout by more than 325,000 union members after their five-year contract expires next week.

The Staked Plains

In February 1852, Carleton was sent with a contingent of dragoons to follow with precision where the Pecos led, and to learn whether there might be a place, somewhere downriver, to build an army fort.

Carleton and his men traced the river for nearly a hundred unappealing miles, through stingy country of mesquite and cholla cactus, occasionally glimpsing buffalo in the grasslands to the east. They moved across a hard yellow plate of dirt that lay beneath a pitiless sky prone to weird weather, abrupt storms, leveling gusts. He was not far from the border of Texas and the swallowing hopelessness of the Staked Plains, a place so featureless and vast that early Spanish explorers, Theseus-like, were said to hammer stakes into the ground every league they crept along to mark a sure path for their safe return.

Blood and Thunder
Hampton Sides

See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_Estacado

Paying for Someone’s Baby Formula


old lady got extremely pissed over me paying for a moms baby formula
by u/EstimateThese1815 in TrueOffMyChest

EstimateThese1815
im 16 and work as a cashier for a grocery store. ive seen all kinda of depressing shit in my time working there but this has to top it.

last night a woman who didnt look older than 20 came in my line with a can of baby formula. she looked like she hadnt slept in days hadnt showered in days or even had time to properly care for herself, she just looked so worn out. i rung up the formula and it was like 40 bucks she put her card in and it wasnt going through. so i went through this process that i can do to see if she had any money on her card and she only had a few bucks. when i looked at her after saying that she looked like she was about to burst out crying i felt so sad and i understood what she was going through(my bsf was r worded and got pregnant at 15 and ive been buying formula so she doesn’t have to worry about my nephew going hungry). i told her its fine i got it and paid for it and she tearfully thanked me and left.

the person next in line came up which was a older lady i asked her how her day was(something i kinda have to do) and she started complaining about how new moms now in days have so much help from people how if people like me wanna help sluts that cant keep their legs closed im causing more and bigger issues and then out of nowhere started screaming at me. she got kicked out and im still in shock like why would you want a fucking baby to go hungry ? like you seriously have to be that low of a person to complain that someone else is helping out a mom buy food for her child.

Active_Skin_1245
Glad you helped this mom feed her baby. Monsters are real. it’s sad that you saw one up close and they spewed the venom that resides in their soul at you. I hope you continue being a kind and good person

Work Breaks in Texas – Dying from the Heat

As the heat index hit 115 degrees on Monday, Karla Perez took a five-minute water break at a construction site in Dallas. Such rest breaks are required by the city, as they are in Austin.

But a change in Texas state law, which goes into effect in September, will wipe away those local requirements, leaving workers like Ms. Perez to count on their employers to provide time to rest and rehydrate. Right now, she gets three breaks a day. She dreads what the change might bring.

“Workers are going to die,” she said. “There’s no way around it.”
…
The ordinance in Dallas passed after the death of a 25-year-old worker, Roendy Granillo, who was installing hardwood floors in a house without air conditioning when he began to feel sick and asked for a break. The request was denied. He kept working until he collapsed.

The medical examiner’s office said the cause was heat stroke. “My parents were told his organs were cooked from the inside,” said his sister, Jasmine Granillo.

In Battle Over Direction of Texas, an Unlikely Casualty: Water Breaks
A new law pre-empting local labor rules is part of an effort by Republicans in the Capitol to exert control over the state’s Democratic-led major cities.