u/themaddesthatter2

Offered to hem jeans for my sister and my mother. I’m doing original hems on a machine that doesn’t have a free arm and I always forget how boring and annoying hemming is…

I love my family more than I hate hemming pants and that says a lot! But I’m feeling crabby about it rn so I am here to commiserate.

There’s an old joke about people meeting at an Esperanto conference, speaking Esperanto in the event hall, and, after the conference breaks for snacks, everyone switching to speaking Yiddish.

How many of the early Esperanto-adopting crowd were (native) Yiddish speakers? Aside from/in addition to L. L. Zamenhof himself.

A safety question for the more knowledgable people here - I know that any kind of choking or breathplay (aside from simply asking someone to hold their breath) is inherently dangerous and falls into edgeplay territory.

That said, does simply putting a hand on someone’s neck necessarily mean you’d be choking them, or is it more of an issue of pressure and placement?

I suppose I’m asking if one ought to assume that the person being held might (even involuntarily) move in such a way as to cause constriction, or if placing one’s fingertips on someone’s neck (think placing your thumb and pointer on pulse points as if to check their pulse) can be done safely.

I know I can do it on my own neck without feeling any difficulty breathing, but of course I have immediate feedback from my own body when I do things to myself that I wouldn’t have with someone else’s body.

Perhaps “why” isn’t the best question - two very differently shaped people are easier to distinguish. But what is the origin/prototype of this trope?

New York City has a lot of pigeons. Those pigeons come in a number of different color morphs, mostly greys and blacks and whites.

The iconic “NYC pigeon” of iconography and art is the blue bar morph.

How did this specific color pattern become synonymous with the NYC/more broadly urban pigeon? Was it just because it’s the most common?

Early in his adult life, Fiorello La Guardia served as an Italian and Yiddish interpreter on Ellis Island. Him knowing Italian makes sense, but how/why did he know enough Yiddish to serve in a government position on the back of that skill? Was it simply childhood proximity?

Moreover, how well did an interpreter have to know/speak/read a language in order to be hired at Ellis Island? Was the standard different for different languages? Would being able to interpret/work in more than one non-English language have moved the dial for an interpreter who spoke one of those languages better than the other?

During the mass migration/Ellis Island era of immigration to America, a majority of Italian immigrants came from poor backgrounds, from the south of mainland Italy and the island of Sicily.

How did this impact the character of what became Italian-American culture/cuisine/dialect/etc?

How did this inform what Italian-Americans considered to be “Italian” and what non-Italian Americans considered to be “Italian”?

I’m currently watching Hulu’s Harlots, a period drama about brothel workers in 1760s London.

In one of the later episodes of (I believe?) the first season, a young Christian woman receiving charity from a brothel owner is called to aid by a friend she has made, a molly boy who makes money by spying for a rival brothel owner.

The young man asks her to find a doctor to aid his partner, who is also a man, and who is very ill.

She asks him if he ”fears death more, because they are sinners”.

Signaling out male-male sex as a distinct/character-defining sin while living in a bawdy house feels like a modern distinction to me, from what I know of the historical construction of “sodomy” as a category of “sex outside the bounds of the law.”

Would this distinction/moral condemnation of (consensual, otherwise uninvolved in law-breaking) male-male sex over male-female sex outside of wedlock have been a contemporaneously held attitude?

I’ve started finding lots, I’ve been drying them and putting them in penny sleeves (cheap plastic card sleeves) and giving them to people I interact with, they’re usually pleasantly surprised. What do you all do with your clovers?

Not immediately pertinent, but I have something that I was wondering about because I have dermatographia and like marking/bodywriting/other temporary physical reminders of an encounter/sex.

(For those who are not familiar, dermatographia is a condition where the body has a histamine reaction to superficial trauma like being scratched, pinched, spanked, etc, resulting in red or raised lines along the site of impact that fade within 30 minutes.)

Has anyone here done impact/marking play with a partner who has dermatographia, and if so, what implements worked best to mark clearly without causing actual damage to the skin? I’d like to avoid breaking the skin/doing harm and want something more flexible/agile/dextrous than a fingernail.

(because we’ve had some posts recently that cross into self-harm territory/attempting to sublimate those actions through the medium of BDSM, I want to be very clear that this is _not_ about self-harm, but is instead along the lines of hickies/spanking handprints/bodywriting/etc.)

One question that gets brought up every so often, in this forum and in others, is some variation of “why do we talk/learn about Jews in the Holocaust and not these other groups?”

That question has been addressed here a few times.

My question is - when did [non-Romani] people start accusing/complaining of Jews monopolizing the conversation about the Holocaust?

While serving as the National Poet Laureate of the US, Joseph Brodsky commented that one thing he found disappointing about the culture in the US was that, compared to his experience in the USSR, everyday people were less interested in and aware of poetry.

He wanted to get poetry into ”supermarkets, gas stations, etc.“ so people could chance upon it and learn that they were not the first to have experienced their emotions/experiences.

Does Brodsky’s cultural observation reflect the reality of the USSR, or was he speaking from a place of a poet who socialized largely with other poets?

According to the Wikipedia article, at least, while investigating/searching for the bodies of the young men, investigators found the bodies of 19 year olds Charles Eddie Moore, a college student, and Henry Hezekiah Dee, a mill worker, who had also been murdered by the KKK. That case was brought before the prosecution in 2007.

But the article also mentions that the investigators found the bodies of “5 unidentified African Americans.“

Were any of them ever identified, and did anything ever go to court?