It’s mostly Tony just rambling about everything this week. Car crashes. Disney. Gillette. Ellen DeGeneres. Other stuff. Just a whole mess of Tony, just babbling about whatever. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
You hired a contractor and paid X upfront; they quit without finishing that work. What would you do? How much would you need to be owed to pursue legal action? –Beth
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Having recently experienced both, childbirth was much better than dealing with some contractors. I would do my best to avoid working with Lowe’s; they require all payment upfront, and are currently trying to argue with me that 18 months on a kitchen remodel is “normal” (and therefore they shouldn’t compensate me for my inconvenience).
The contractor I wrote in about was a guy named Howard Cooper and his associate Arnoldo. Howard was recommended by the neighborhood listserv. We had a contract for them to fix ~11 holes in our drywall of varying sizes, caused by fixing our plumbing and heating. In the contract, we agreed we would pay $1100 total (50% paid upfront, 50% to be paid at completion), and the work would be finished in 5 days. On day 4, I asked if they thought they would finish on time, as they had only drywalled 2 of the holes, and had not plastered them. They asked me to pay more money for them to complete the job. I said I wasn’t going to pay any more money until at least 50% of the work was complete. I said if they weren’t going to complete the job, they owed me $400 back, and please return my key. They left our key on the table, and despite several attempts to get the money back, I was unsuccessful. I could have filed in small claims court for a $5 filing fee. I had intended to do that, but time (and pregnancy) got away from me.
I’m really far out of the Disney game; I remembered fast passes from my last trip, but don’t know anything about Magic bands or this app you mentioned. Looking forward to hearing more about the trip.
I’ve had some minor problems with contractors, but I would choose contractor problems over labor any day. 🙂 I often think that the story of my labor would serve as an effective birth control device.
OK, I have to admit, the English Professor in me did go….
WHAT!!!!!
when Will said he didn’t know who Toni Morrison was. Luckily, I was driving, so my response was muted by having to pay attention to driving conditions.
Ahem. Anyway, Toni Morrison is probably the most famous living African-American Woman novelist. She won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1993). She was the first Black Woman to win the Nobel Prize. I’ve posted a link to her Nobel Speech. Of her novels, I’d recommend Beloved and Song of Solomon most, though Beloved is so heart-breaking,I had to give up trying to teach it.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/
Tony, I don’t know if you’ve ever read any stuff that Jean Baudrillard wrote about Disney as a kind of hyper-reality culture. Something you mentioned about Disney having its own culture reminded me of that.
I did hear Rush Limbaugh mentioned in connection with Trump recently. It was Limbaugh and Ann Coulter whose criticism of Trump’s apparent willingness to fund the government without the wall that supposedly motivated him to change his mind and led to the current impasse.
Here’s one take I have on the Conservative backlash to the Gillette ad.
I heard some of Ben Shapiro’s reaction to the ad. He doesn’t really seem to be responding to the content of the ad. What he does say is that toxic masculinity (bullying, sexual predator behavior) is a result of young men having no strong male role model to show them proper male behavior (gallantry, protection of others). And the lack of a strong male role model is because of the dominance of women in their lives (single mothers, female teachers, female social workers). Underlying this argument is the assumption that women can’t model gallantry or protection of others. So the only way boys are learning about bullying, etc. is by the imposition of rules of behavior, parental/maternal influence, female teachers & social workers (and now ad companies). Social Justice Warriors, Cultural Marxism, yada yada…
There does seem to be some connection there to the more extreme Men’s Rights Activist/Alt Right argument that men are naturally supposed to be in charge and that they are being emasculated by contemporary cultural demands that they behave in “politically correct” ways.
Yeah, that does seem to be where “the Right” is coming from. It just seems ironic to me, since in many ways the Gillette ad agreed with them. The ad seemed to stress that there are good men and… not even *bad* men, just clueless men… and more men need to be like the good ones so that boys can grow up better. The ad didn’t suggest that masculinity is bad or wrong at all. In fact, it only seemed to suggest that it’s bad to be a bad father (not actively engaging in your son’s development, just saying “Boys will be boys”), which is also “the Right’s” message, be a good father, teach your son that “a real man” respects others and doesn’t use violence as a first resort, etc. “The Right” ought to be praising the ad, maybe suggesting subtle changes to make it even more “correct” as far as they think, but overall spot on as to the roles men ought to serve in society.
But… nobody can present a positive, nuanced massage these days, it seems. One side or the other will irrationally freak out about it.
I don’t think the Right could really praise the ad because in a way the ad doesn’t really agree with them. For the Right, it should be fathers who are teaching sons about respect for others. It should not be ads that are teaching fathers about what lessons they should teach their sons. It should not be ads that show men schooling other men about cat-calling women. Respect, honor, gallantry, chivalry–these are private, male-bonding activities–not things that culture or society at large instructs men about. The fact that advertising is doing it is a sign of the “feminization” of culture/society (as I think Piers Morgan put it–though not exactly in those words).
Or to put it another way, I saw a meme about this in which a woman is expressing SHOCK….SHOCK, I say, that an advertising might instruct someone about how to behave (i.e. women are told this all the time)–drawing attention to the way in which men on the Right are having their privilege challenged and are acting accordingly.