u/themaddesthatter2

I’ve been picking for… many years. It’s exacerbated by the fact that I have acne even if I don’t pick at my skin.

I also have trypophobia.

most of the picking fidgets I could find wouldn’t work for me. They were either too close to the real thing, which would trigger wanting to pick my skin, or they triggered my trypophobia, or they were too messy for me to be comfortable with.

What’s been working? Cleaning my seashells.

I‘ve been collecting seashells since I was a little kid, and I always cleaned them with soap and water (and more recently, bleach), but you‘re still left with the remnants of the calcified periostracum, bits of sand and grit, etc.

Cleaning that out is close enough to picking, but not so close that it’s triggering, and it isn’t destructive/one-time use.

By the time I’m done with my shells for the day, I’ve satisfied my urge to pick. And once I’m done with shell, I can display it, because now it’s pretty and isn’t covered in sand and calcified matter.

While being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted for his politics and refusal to answer about them to the House, Pete Seeger went on tour, performing at schools and local community venues.

His 1960 Bowdoin college concert setlist includes a number of tracks that are critical of war and the military… and the song Tzena Tzena Tzena, an Israeli Hebrew song by Issachar Miron that directs the girls of the village to “give the returning soldiers a warm welcome“ (Seeger’s words).

Renditions of this song were also performed by The Weavers and Arlo Guthrie, among others.

How did this come to be performed by English-speaking musicians at all? And how/why by anti-war activists?

I can’t imagine that they included moving advertisements back when you needed a projectionist to manually crank the film and editing meant literally cutting and pasting film cels, but I could be wrong there.

Reading _Coming Out Under Fire_ and in the beginning, it talks about various ways gay men did (or didn’t) avoid being drafted for WWII in the US.

We talk about dodging the draft in the context of the Vietnam War, but that category seems to encompass both explicitly legal ways of avoiding becoming a soldier (honest medical disqualification, conscientious objection, going to college(?), having to take care of a family member), skirting the draft in a way that doesn’t “ping” the legal system (faking a medical condition, fasting/binging etc in order to fail the medical evaluation), and explicitly illegal ways of dodging (burning your draft card, leaving the country(?), etc).

Were all of these treated equally in the eyes of the law? What about the eyes of the public? What was within the purview of Jimmy Carter’s Proclamation 4483 (Granting Pardon for Violations of the Selective Service Act)?

How/why did the American version of a Chinese tile game become a fixture of American Jewish women’s leisure culture?

(I’ve tried to look it up myself but most of what I could find was that it did become that, not why.)

Basically the title. Why do some questions have a “good question” flair? What’s the criteria for the flair and who awards it?

Historically, a variety of sex acts have been legally categorized (and thus outlawed) under the title/category of “sodomy“.

These include non-reproductive sex acts between married partners, sex acts between two men, and others.

Outside of the law, however, did “sodomy” (as a vice) have this same expanded meaning? Or was it used strictly to refer to male-male anal intercourse?

Ian Gibson’s eponymous book characterizes (sexual) lashing as quintessentially English. Was this the wider perspective, or is this a “spanish flu“ situation?

And if it is English, then why?