Follow up on Hobbit casting rumors
Baker Street Supper Club has confirmed the character Cumberbatch will play in the Hobbit, who everyone already guessed.
2011-06-17
Entry tags:
Men May Want to Skip This Post
I am extraordinarily fond of oddball history books. Books about various aspects of feminism (The New Girl, Warrior Queens, The Harvey Girls, Lowell Girls, Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her); books taking a new angle on famous people (Becoming Shakespeare, Appetite for America), books on various aspects of food and how they've changed (Food of a Younger Country, Appetite for America), books on attitudes about things (The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History), history of science & forensics (The Poisoner's Handbook, Stiff, Necropolis) - I've even got one that's a world-wide cultural history of ghosts and ghost stories.
So in my habit of giving thumbs-up press to books I'm still reading, I've come to *ahem* gush about Elissa Stein & Susan Kim's Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation.
At times I disagree with the authors' conclusions - facilely deciding Lizzie Borden did it out of literally killer PMS depends on handwaving the intriguing evidence that her sister may well have done it - but on the whole it's a lot like another favorite of mine, Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers in that it is a wittily written history of a subject that gives most people the collywobbles. Roach compared being dead to like being on a cruise: "You lie around and people don't expect much of you" while Stein and Kim wax eloquent about the medicalization of menstruation and how the only people who really study it are trying to make a buck off it: In a "clinical trial" paid for by the makers of Loestrin 24 Fe, 85 percent of the women polled said that "having their period" was one of their five greatest annoyances... Had we been polled, we perhaps would have written down "global warming," "unaffordable health insurance," and "the inexorable passage of time" as rating higher... Of course, it's different for those who suffer from primary dysmenorrhea, endometriosis, fibriods, and the generic condition known as "bleeding like a stuck pig."
To cover the topic, they also end up at least glossing on the roles of women, or at least menstruating women, in society and religion, but mostly in the "m" words: marketing, mass media, and medicine. On a more facetious note, there's also a rather long list of euphemisms used throughout the world. (Really, Finland? Ew.) A hilarious number of them, at least if you have my sense of humor, involve one country making snarky comments about another.
The text is liberally spo- okay, I won't stoop to the obvious single entendre a second time - liberally illustrated, mostly with the history of American "feminine protection" products... although there is one reproduction of the 1880s "Health through the fine art of massage" poster, because if you didn't know, the first appliance to be electrified was the vibrator.* In the poster, the man has his hands up a lady's skirt, but is looking away as befits a gentleman. She is looking in the opposite direction with a set face and crossed arms, possibly planning out a menu as she is cured of "all disease of the midquarters from neck to knee"... but she's MUCH more likely to be thinking "God, do I have to draw you a fucking map?"
The librarian visibly blanched when she handed it to me, but I'm enjoying the heck out of reading it. Recommended.
*Did it really take modern Sherlock to Go There and have the story about Dr. Watson using that thing on his patients? I refuse to believe that it's taken this long for fandom to perv.
So in my habit of giving thumbs-up press to books I'm still reading, I've come to *ahem* gush about Elissa Stein & Susan Kim's Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation.
At times I disagree with the authors' conclusions - facilely deciding Lizzie Borden did it out of literally killer PMS depends on handwaving the intriguing evidence that her sister may well have done it - but on the whole it's a lot like another favorite of mine, Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers in that it is a wittily written history of a subject that gives most people the collywobbles. Roach compared being dead to like being on a cruise: "You lie around and people don't expect much of you" while Stein and Kim wax eloquent about the medicalization of menstruation and how the only people who really study it are trying to make a buck off it: In a "clinical trial" paid for by the makers of Loestrin 24 Fe, 85 percent of the women polled said that "having their period" was one of their five greatest annoyances... Had we been polled, we perhaps would have written down "global warming," "unaffordable health insurance," and "the inexorable passage of time" as rating higher... Of course, it's different for those who suffer from primary dysmenorrhea, endometriosis, fibriods, and the generic condition known as "bleeding like a stuck pig."
To cover the topic, they also end up at least glossing on the roles of women, or at least menstruating women, in society and religion, but mostly in the "m" words: marketing, mass media, and medicine. On a more facetious note, there's also a rather long list of euphemisms used throughout the world. (Really, Finland? Ew.) A hilarious number of them, at least if you have my sense of humor, involve one country making snarky comments about another.
The text is liberally spo- okay, I won't stoop to the obvious single entendre a second time - liberally illustrated, mostly with the history of American "feminine protection" products... although there is one reproduction of the 1880s "Health through the fine art of massage" poster, because if you didn't know, the first appliance to be electrified was the vibrator.* In the poster, the man has his hands up a lady's skirt, but is looking away as befits a gentleman. She is looking in the opposite direction with a set face and crossed arms, possibly planning out a menu as she is cured of "all disease of the midquarters from neck to knee"... but she's MUCH more likely to be thinking "God, do I have to draw you a fucking map?"
The librarian visibly blanched when she handed it to me, but I'm enjoying the heck out of reading it. Recommended.
*Did it really take modern Sherlock to Go There and have the story about Dr. Watson using that thing on his patients? I refuse to believe that it's taken this long for fandom to perv.