{"id":18106,"date":"2016-01-23T13:04:57","date_gmt":"2016-01-23T20:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=18106"},"modified":"2016-01-23T13:19:19","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T20:19:19","slug":"best-youve-ever-seen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=18106","title":{"rendered":"Best You’ve Ever Seen?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A\u00a0quiet Saturday morning with little\u00a0to do\u00a0until later, when Donna and I go to our bimonthly cooking club meeting. Our club meets every other month.* Two years ago, when we started,\u00a0we’d\u00a0cook\u00a0ahead of time and bring\u00a0prepared dishes\u00a0to the\u00a0designated host’s home, but for the past year\u00a0we’ve been bringing ingredients instead, then\u00a0prepping and cooking together before sitting down to eat. The theme tonight is Cajun, and we’ve been assigned recipes from the late Paul Prudhomme. Donna and I drew dessert,\u00a0some sort of pecan praline thing (not a pie, which is a relief …\u00a0our record with crust is a poor one).<\/p>\n

The downside to\u00a0prepping and cooking together is it always takes longer than we think it will, and sometimes we\u00a0don’t eat until nine. Some members\u00a0have big kitchens with lots of counter space and all the\u00a0utensils; some don’t. And even in the biggest of kitchens, eight or nine cooks is\u00a0a crowd. The upside? Working\u00a0together’s a hell of a lot of fun, and by the time dinner’s ready we’re all good and hungry.<\/p>\n

I watched the final episode of Continuum<\/em> on Netflix last night. I’m going to miss that show. I said the same thing about Firefly<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>and Rit<\/em>a, and Breaking Bad<\/em>, and after\u00a0five more episodes\u00a0I’ll be saying it about Veronica Mars<\/em>. Sometimes we think\u00a0about canceling cable and streaming and going without.\u00a0Between\u00a0Comcast, HBO, Amazon, and Netflix, we’re spending crazy money;\u00a0stacks\u00a0of books are waiting to be read. But then there’s this: How do you know when people don’t\u00a0have a TV? Just wait, they’ll tell you. Yeah, we don’t want to be like them, so maybe we’ll wait until Game of Thrones<\/em> is over.<\/p>\n

For a change, an employer contacted Polly before she contacted them. Apparently someone she once worked with saw her profile on LinkedIn and thought she’d be a good fit for the company he’s now with. The job, if she gets it, is in Scottsdale, two hours north of here. She has an interview Monday afternoon. I’m not sure how it’ll work if she gets it; clearly she’ll have to move to Phoenix and she doesn’t have much of a bankroll, just the money from the motorcycle she sold. One step at a time. Get the job, then we’ll figure out how to help her get started again in Phoenix. Fingers? Crossed. Toes? Ditto.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Scottsdale, I’ll be at the Barrett-Johnson car auction with some Tucson friends next\u00a0Thursday. A friend from my flying days who now lives in California will be there too.\u00a0I’m bringing a\u00a0selfie stick so we can snap an iPhone photo of us in front of a cool car. Of course I’ll be lugging the\u00a0big DSLR and flash attachment too, taking photos to add to my car show collection<\/a> on Flickr.<\/p>\n

\n

I probably shouldn’t say anything about the latest social media witch hunt, but when has common sense ever prevented me from talking about things that upset people? By now I’m sure you’ve all seen this photo:<\/p>\n

\"twitter-girls-1\"<\/p>\n

The girls are seniors at a Phoenix-area high school. The photo was taken yesterday or the day before. One of the\u00a0girls, or possibly a friend, posted it to Twitter, where it caused an immediate stir. I first saw it\u00a0yesterday in a Phoenix newspaper’s tweet, the faces blurred out. Half an hour later I started seeing uncensored copies\u00a0with\u00a0the girls’ faces visible and identifable. Within a few minutes someone had posted all six\u00a0girl’s names; without a doubt their addresses, Facebook pages, and phone numbers are out there too. I know, from another news article<\/a>, the girls are already receiving threats, as is the principal of their high school, and that police were on campus Friday afternoon to prevent violence.<\/p>\n

Whew! That escalated quickly, but these days that’s how it goes. Remember Justine Sacco<\/a>? She’s the woman who\u00a0posted\u00a0this immortal tweet in 2013:\u00a0\u201cGoing to Africa. Hope I don\u2019t get AIDS. Just kidding. I\u2019m white!\u201d By the time her 11-hour flight landed in\u00a0Cape Town, she was the top trending topic\u00a0on Twitter, the object of the hashtag\u00a0#HasJustineLandedYet, quite possibly the most hated woman in the world. The second or third call she answered\u00a0after deplaning was from her employer, letting her know she no longer had a job. All over a joke … an insensitive one, but still, a joke, no different than the kind of joke TV comedian Daniel Tosh gets paid for. You can click on the link to see what Justine’s life has been like since her brush with infamy.<\/p>\n

I wonder what these girls’ lives are going to be like now. Personally, I think they were joking. That it’s a terrible joke and they shouldn’t have done it is obvious. They probably thought so too, once they did think about it. And I’m sure they’re damn sorry now, what with being suspended and getting death threats and all.<\/p>\n

Before the damning photo was taken, the girls had been part of a senior class photo lineup, wearing black t-shirts with letters spelling out “Best*You’ve*Ever*Seen*Class*of*2016.”\u00a0It’s not hard to imagine one or more of these six girls coming up with the idea to spell out a forbidden word. God knows my mind works along similar lines. If only they’d had the right letters, they might have gone\u00a0with “fuck off” or “eat shit,” and at worst gotten a stern lecture from the principal. But they spelled out “ni**er” instead, probably thinking it would come across as sarcastic or intentionally ironic. Oops.<\/p>\n

\"twitter-girls-4\"<\/p>\n

No, I don’t think these six girls\u00a0are members of the Aryan Sisterhood. I think, like Justine Sacco, they were trying to make a joke. Still … take a good look at the class photo. See any black faces? Funny, neither do I. Which makes me wonder about school integration in Phoenix, and school integration in general. Somehow great swathes of America have become segregated again. Or maybe school integration never really took, save for schools in a few target cities, and then only for a little while after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. But that’s a subject for a more well-thought-out and researched post, not one I’m prepared to tackle today. Instead, I’m going to be busy dodging hateful comments accusing me of making excuses for these stupid girls.<\/p>\n

*I’m bothered by the nonexistence of separate words for “twice a month” and “every other month.” It offends me that bimonthly means either, and that I have to go out of my way to specify which of the two meanings I intend to convey. How did English-speaking people, with such a sloppy language, ever manage to come to grips with\u00a0engineering and science?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I probably shouldn’t say anything about the latest social media witch hunt, but when has common sense ever prevented me from talking about things that upset people?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,250,10,16,27,2,827,414,21],"tags":[527,2039,2038,2036,2037,497],"class_list":["post-18106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-media","category-memes","category-personal","category-social-media","category-tv","category-words","tag-barrett-jackson","tag-desert-vista-high-school","tag-justine-sacco","tag-on-on-gourmets","tag-scottsdale","tag-television"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18106"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18127,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18106\/revisions\/18127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}