Archive for 2008

Typo America - September 26th, 2008
Seeking New Career - February 14th, 2008
The Princess Bride - January 11th, 2008

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Welcome to My Synonym!

My name is Heather, and I'm always searching for that one perfect word that will describe me.

I'm a writer who loves reading, drawing, gaming, and watching - that covers movies, plays, and people at the mall.

I graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in Professional Writing, but don't let that raise your expectations too much! :D

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canisfamiliaris:

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?

The answer is NO.

The “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”

(via sunfoundation)

this bullshit fills me with a very specific kind of rage. so, TIME TO DEBUNK!

that meal from mcdonalds takes virtually no time to acquire AND is available almost anywhere.
the second meal? that “salad” is lettuce … with nothing else, not even dressing unless its just olive oil or some milk i guess? gross.
also thats the price of each serving, not an entire loaf of bread, a bottle of olive oil, etc. that stuff adds up which means you have to have a lot of money at one time to buy it all.
that meal probably took an hour and a half to make, which is a long fucking time when you work multiple jobs or are caring for a lot of people or dont have help! seriously, if you are a single parent of three who works, is spending an hour and a half every night preparing a meal a likely option?
same with beans and rice! also, you know whats a fucking bummer? eating beans and rice every night because you are poor. ask any person who has done it and they will tell you (you can start with me).
there is a “nutrition” argument here that lacks a follow up: poor people are more likely to be doing physical labor and need more than 571 calories per meal.
you know who is less likely to know how to bake or prepare a chicken? people without access to the internet, or libraries, or who werent taught how to by their parents because their parents worked all the time. access to healthy foods is a classist issue and classism is cyclical, you fucking morons.
seriously, these sorts of infographics make me want to fucking flip tables. do you know why people don’t eat more fresh fruits and vegetables? because fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive, because they take a long time to prepare, because they dont live near a grocery store that has a decent produce section, because they dont have reliable transportation to get groceries to and from the grocery store, because they dont have the energy to plan all of the shit that is involved in making healthy, intentional, filling, balanced meals. basically: poor people get fucked, and then we get BLAMED for being lazy.
eating “healthy”, aka access to fresh fruits and vegetables, is a privilege, first, foremost, always. so fuck you new york times and your ignorant goddamn infographic.
there are SYSTEMATIC REASONS that we do not have equal access to fresh fruits and vegetables. they are very REAL problems. besides, you know, systematic poverty in america, the total mis-distribution of farm subsidies is a perfect place to start. read about that, then either get bent or start working on the actual problem.

I like this. I’d also like to add that if you’re as broke as we usually are, we don’t get meals at fast food places anyway because they’re like 8 bucks each. You order off the dollar menu. If you got the dollar menu equivalents to that McD’s meal up there, it’d be a lot closer to 10 or 11 bucks - depending on if you splurge on fries. Because dollar menu eatin’s usually means you get two burgers and a drink. Under 4 bucks, right there.

Seriously…. people criticizing this shit without living it.

At the end of the month when my paycheck has dwindled down to nothing, I can go take 5 bucks and get dinner for both of us off a dollar menu somewhere -OR- I can go to Walmart and get what?

A pack of ground beef?

Or maybe a box of dry noodles?

I mean, seriously… Have you ever tried to eat a whole meal for two on $5 at the grocery store?

If you do, you aren’t getting healthy shit. You’re paying $.99 for the noodle side packets or those instant rice sides.

And for the record, the amount of rice in that bottom photo…? Like, what store sells you a cup of rice? You have to buy a whole bag… and that’s expensive when you’re down to the last bits of cash you have for the month.

Sure, you can buy a bag and eat rice everyday, but as mentioned above, rice and nothing else for every meal gets old.

And if you’re like me, you have to have protein or you pass out. If I only ate starch and carbs, my blood sugar levels would drop so much that I’d just be sick all the time.

As someone who loves eating healthy but can’t afford it, don’t tell me it’s not as expensive as people think it is.

I know it’s expensive to eat healthy. I try to do it as often as I can. Food is just a ridiculous expense that I wish wasn’t necessary. Because it sure as hell isn’t worth it. I hate eating. :(

$scienceing: mybluedecember: princess-munchkin: How the fuck does Bill Nye expect this to happen? What do you want to do, force women to enroll in science courses, regardless of whether or not they want to do it? Just for the sake of having “enough” women? Why the fuck do these fractions matter so much? It’s not like people are holding guns to our head and threatening to kill us if we become interested in science. Maybe, just maybe, a lot of us DON’T FUCKING WANT to be scientists. Is that a crime? Hi there, princess-munchkin. Female engineering student here. Bill Nye is not saying that you HAVE to be a scientist, and you are right that no one is holding a gun to my head because I am interested in science, but let me tell you some of the struggles of being a woman in the STEM fields. 1) Because I am a woman, I am not expected these fields. I first fully realized this when I was in high school, on my robotics team. See, although my robotics team was about 50% female, most of the women were part of the “business administration” side of things: finance, marketting, PR, membership, etc. Was this a problem? Absolutely not. But I was there to be an engineer, and specifically, to be the robot programmer. This was met with a lot of hesitation at first from some of the other students (all of whom happened to be male. This is not necessarily a bad thing.) You see, all of the robot programmers before me were guys. Computer programming is just a thing that guys do, or so they thought. Even after I had proved myself to the mentors on the team, many of the students still underestimated my abilities. There were rumors going around that I wouldn’t have been able to program the robot at all if the lead software mentor wasn’t there to help me. This was just flat-out false, but it wasn’t until I won an award for the team that the other students actually saw my merit. 2) There is not a lot of encouragement for women to go into these fields. I first noticed this when I was in elementary school. I was always interested in math, science, you name it, but many of my teachers and family members pushed that to the side for a long time. When I asked for legos for christmas, I would get ballet slippers. In fact, for a long time, I was training to be a professional dancer. I loved to dance. I loved math more, but no one seemed to notice that about me. It wasn’t until I had a long conversation with one particular teacher in high school that I decided to look into engineering. I had never even considered it as an option before, because no one decided to encourage me to pursue my interest in science. If it hadn’t been for that teacher, I would probably not be at the school I am at right now. 3) For a long time, Engineering/Science/Math WAS a “boys only” club. Let me tell you when some of the top technical schools and societies started letting women in: RPI, The oldest tech school in the country, founded in 1824. Started admitting women in 1942 to “replace men called to war.” Campus housing for women wasn’t constructed until 1966. Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honors Society - Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1968. Caltech - Currently rated #3 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1891. Started admitting women in 1970. Georgia Tech - Currently rated #5 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1952. Do you see the implications of this? Engineering has been a part of our society since around the late 1800s (in the case of RPI, since the 1820s), but women weren’t even allowed in for the most part until the 1950s, regardless of their merit. 4) Because of the fact that it was a “boys only” club for such a long time, there are not a lot of women engineers and scientists to look up to. When you’re reading your physics, chemistry, and math text books, the majority of those theories were came up with by men. It is true that much of our history was written by White Men, but this does not mean that the fact that there are few women scientists to look up does not matter. So, as you can hopefully see, princess-munckin, or anyone else that shares the opinions of princess-munchkin, Bill Nye was not arguing that women that are not interested in STEM should go into those fields anyway. But he IS arguing against all of the systematic barriers set up against women who ARE interested in engineering and science. There are several women out there who are just as good as the boys at math and science, but will never pursue their interests because it just doesn’t seem like an option. That was me for a long time. I am super grateful for the fact that I fought against that, and that I ended up where I am. if you don’t like science, fine. Don’t be a scientist. But if one day you have a daughter and she shows interest in being a scientist, PLEASE encourage her. Because Bill Nye is right, there needs to be more women scientists in the world. A+ comment$ rand0mflora:

To be fair…