Being poor is discovering that that letter from Duke University, naming you as one of three advanced students in your class invited to test out of HS early into their scholarship program, is just so much firestarter because the $300 it costs to take the test may as well be $3 million.
Scalzi Is An Expensive Tart!
Download: https://urllio.com/2vIXKF
Fifteen years ago, when I started in at a school, the packed that home room teachers got contained for each kid on opening day:1 schedule,1 emergency info form,1 student handbook,1 athletic dept. handbook1 insurance form (AD&D plus emergency med. for school-related activities)
Being poor is being banned from the library because you accidentally fell asleep reading while waiting for your 4th double shift in a row to start, a day before being fired by the manager whose 4 shifts you worked.
Not everyone shares your enlightened views on what constitutes tauntability, so I would claim that explicitly advocating taunting losers is a somewhat dangerous policy. Suppose someone actually started taunting poor people for generally being stupid losers. What would you ever say to that?
Being poor and transgendered is having to somehow come up with far more money for clothes, because the few stores that carry clothes in your size are so much more expensive than even ordinary retail.
Well, acknowledging that it exists and that the playing field is skewed from the get-go would be a nice start. The fact that this is not the first time John has had to make this post is due to the fact that just getting people to understand what privilege is and that it exists can be a frustratingly monumental task.
Actually, I think to a significant degree, people are generally willing to do well in life because of a better starting position, even moral ones. Parents give enormously of themselves for the very purpose of loading the dice for their offspring as much as humanly possible.
For those who are asking now what. We know we are playing on easy, but what do you want us to do about it? James King brought something up earlier. Each of us is an NPC in the lives of everyone around us, and as such we actually SET the difficulty level of the game for everyone else. You want to make a difference then start examining your own life and behavior for ways that you treat Straight White Men differently from everyone else, and try resetting your defaults. The problem is that it is harder then you might think because the bias is so deeply ingrained in our culture that many people apply it completely unintentionally. Overt sexism/racism, etc. is relatively easy to fight, both in other people and in yourself. It is much more subtle stuff that really does the damage. Like this blog post about how women are not crazy, society just sets out to make us think we are. -message-to-women-from-a-man-you-are-not-%E2%80%9Ccrazy%E2%80%9D/. That is just one example (that came quickly to both mind and google), but it is the kind of thing that gets under the skin and really adds up over time. So you are playing on easy and you really want to make a difference, just remember that you are on of the characters handing out experience to other players, you can ignore their difficulty setting if you want to.
Funny story: know a dude, SWM, liberal, graduated from college and professional school, married a fellow professional, felt properly guilty about his SWM privilege (lowest difficulty settings) and set out to make up for that guilt and make the playing field more fair for everyone. In the process he gave up, voluntarily, a more lucrative career and time he would have preferred investing in a family to work for political and economic equality for women. Became a towering beacon of straight white male sensitivity for the entire community. Marched, voted, organized, agitated, used his Whiteness and Maleness for good, all the while being a devoted husband and respected (as well as a SWM can be) member of his fairly liberal community. He wanted to start a family, but his wife persuaded him to wait until they had better established themselves and struck a blow for justice before they settled down. He reluctantly agreed, but he agreed. And he put everything he had into it.
This would be interesting if someone factored in all the relevant variables and turned it into a real game. It might add some insight to the whole discussion and prove some arguments and disprove others. Years ago Yale did a study on the effects of having an economic advantage. They used Monopoly with players starting off with different amounts of money to illustrate the advantage it created. WIth our advanced game development capabilities, this essay could go to the next level.
(And of course, if you want to do more, you can be like John, and start this kind of conversation in your own communities, dedicating a goodly portion of your day (days) to managing it and keeping it civil.)
When people started talking about actual implementation, it struck my geek nature that this idea is even better suited to some of the pencil-and-paper RPGs a la GURPS where characters are built with skill points, advantages, and disadvantages.
We started with the Churro one, because my dad is a churro fanatic. The cookie aspect of this cookie was pretty good, it was like a snickerdoodle, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle, with a rich, thick cinnamon buttercream that was super indulgent. It was definitely good, very cinnamon-y, but for me there was an odd sort of saltiness underneath all the sweetness that was kind of weird. Still yummy, though!
There are passes that include trips from and to the Marco Polo Airport. However, keep in mind that as you activate your pass at the airport, the clock starts ticking. It might be cheaper to pay that extra fee for those trips in order to activate your pass later when you need it for your sightseeing.
We had been advised to get certain dishes to split, along with whatever else on the menu appealed to us, and it's a very appealing menu -- brasserie-style classics also join a fresh Louisiana seafood bar, with oysters, crabs and shrimp. Our eyes all zeroed in on this to start, though:
Flamenküche is a thin Alsatian onion tarte, with bacon, Emmenthaler cheese and caraway -- like a pizza, but with a crisper crust. The bacon was Allan Benton's, one of my favorites and a favorite of local chefs as well. Hoo-boy, this was good. (My French 75 is in the background.)
Everyone else did this earlier; I couldn't bring myself to do it just yet. What I did yesterday was to take Carlin's entire recorded output (or close to it) and put it in my iPod. I've been listening ever since. Some of it I knew so well I could practially deliver the routine along with him; some of it I hadn't heard in a while and it became fresh again. There's plenty out there -- just go to YouTube and start looking. You can get most of his recorded output, as I did, via digital downloads from eMusic (alas, my old LPs didn't go easily into my iPod).
I've got it stuck somewhere in my head that the original recipe for the Añejo Highball contained 1/4 ounce of pimento dram (allspice liqueur), but the recipe had to be adjusted once the Wray & Nephew product became unavailable in the U.S. I checked the recipe in New Classic Cocktails and there was no mention of it, but I can't for the life of me remember where I might have come across this. It sounds good at any rate, and I've made the drink this way too -- it's terrific. If you want to keep the sweet-tart ratio in balance you can add another 1/4 ounce of lime juice if you like.
They brought out an amuse bouche, as they've always done. This one was simple but very tasty -- Grilled Shrimp with Crispy Artichoke and Olive Tartar Sauce. Great seasoning on the shrimp, perfectly cooked (of course), artichokes om nom nom nom and an unusual flavor component to the tartar that gave it a bit of intensity and character, as tartar sauce tends to be boo-ring.
We looked through the list of appetizers and I saw two that were still on the menu from when I had been there last, which I remembered from years before that and which had probably been on the menu more or less from the beginning -- the Angel Hair Pasta with a Tasso Cream Sauce and Smoked Exotic Mushrooms (a great dish) and the Barbecue Shrimp, his own take, with the yummy little rosemary biscuits. The house-made andouille with house-made Worcestershire was still there too, but joined on the plate by house-made boudin, Southern cooked greens and beer-braised onions -- sounds better than before. Plus the rest of the recent batch of starters, and a list of four salads. We couldn't help but notice that out of the four salads, three of them contained bacon or pork products of some kind. "Yeah," the chef told us later, "we do love bacon around here." Well guh. And you had four worshippers at the First Congregational Church of Bacon right here, bra.
Mary, displaying some common sense unlike the four ravenous, caveman-like males at the table ("OOK WANT MEAT!"), went with her instincts and ordered the FOUR GIGANTIC FECKIN' SLABS OF PORK BELLY as her main course, and got a very sensible, and very lovely starter:
As usual, when being presented with a menu full of amazing-sounding chioces, I was torn. I had narrowed it down to two, one of the main menu items, and one of that night's specials. I had had pork already in the starter, FOUR GIGANTIC FECKIN' SLABS OF PORK BELLY, in fact, but the pork dish special sounded somewhat intriguing. "Pork breast?" That's how it was described. What the hell's pork breast? I'd never heard that term used before. It was "chile-glazed," accompanied by something called "crispy crab rice" and a jalapeño bok choi "slaw." (Quotes theirs.) Intriguing, maybe. But I dunno.
So we were therefore bludgeoned with that longtime Brennan restaurant tradition (which is where I suspect Emeril picked it up, having started his career as an executive chef at Commander's), the Dessert Bomb. If you're not familiar with it, it's when they send out one of each dessert on the menu to your table. In this case, it was nine desserts. For four people. 2ff7e9595c
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