We’re a trans couple who can’t pay rent and bills without help. I’m physically disabled and haven’t been able to find work I can do, and we still don’t have access to our benefits. For food, electric, hot water and rent we need £1300 for the month.
Look the Netherlands takes its flower industry very seriously
People underestimate how fast the Victorians could move things. There were no cars, so they had lots of trains instead - way more train lines than exist today, with much cheaper and more frequent services, because everything moved by rail so that was where all the investment went. This was the height of the industrial age, after all. And since there were no (or not many) telephones and no internet, they had multiple mail deliveries every day, because all communication was done by mail or telegram so that was where all the investment went. They had a same day mail service, even.
I’m not exaggerating about that, btw. My great-grandfather collected postcards all his life, starting as a little boy in Norfolk in the early 1900s, and among his collection is a postcard sent by a cousin who lived way up north. She posted the card first thing one morning saying that she was coming down by train to see her aunt and would be arriving at just after 3pm that afternoon - the same afternoon she posted the card. The card literally says ‘this afternoon’. Posted first thing, and it arrived in good time for her uncle and aunt to know they needed to meet her off the train at 3pm that same day - and she knew posting it that it would arrive in good time. Same day delivery, and that was something like 1905.
Flower shipments from the Netherlands to London in that same era was a booming business, that’s how all the markets were kept supplied. So yes, van Helsing could get flowers delivered overnight on a daily basis.
Multiple mail deliveries per day is why newspapers used to be called “the Morning Times” (now the Glasgow Times) or have two editions, like The Standard and The Evening Standard (now there’s only one - the London Evening Standard.) One thus might get both a morning paper and evening paper, and thereby have a better idea of developing stories over the course of the day.
We’ve always wanted to know what was going on everywhere all the time.
I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
Just wanted to add that the suffix -ster was originally specifically feminine, a means of denoting a lady known by her profession. Spinster = female spinner, baxter = female baker, webster = female weaver (webber), brewster = female brewer. If one of the ladies named Alys in your village was known for selling her excellent weaving, you might call her Alys Webster (to differentiate her from, say, Alys Littel who was rather short, and Alys Bywater who lived near the pond).
This fascinates me for many reasons, but especially in the case of modern families with last names like Baxter or Webster or Brewster. What formidable and well-known ancestresses managed to pass on those very gendered names to all their descendants, when last names were changing from personal “nicknames” into indicators of lineage among the middle and lower classes? There’s a forgotten story of a fascinating woman behind every one of those family lines.
Resource for the history of the -ster suffix here.
Stir everything together except the water in a bowl briefly, then add just enough water to form a lumpy pancake batter. Fry in a skillet with butter or oil like you would pancakes.
Makes 6-8 thick cakes. Watch out for pockets of banana-flavored lava.
Among the reasons why Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek is that the outfits look like they were designed by a competent costume designer who had been given a pile of the world’s most miscellaneous fabrics and told that if they didn’t use it all up by sunrise, Rumpelstiltskin would take their firstborn child.
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I actually like this approach, because it forces the costume designer away from whatever fabrics and silhouettes were popular at the time, and so while the clothes are still Space Clothes, they are visual distinctive Space Clothes, and not contemporaneous clothes in weird colors with some shoulder flares added on.
What I find fascinating about this photo is how much it looks like a natural evolution of Memphis Group design, which was a huge design movement in the 80s with a really iconic look. It featured bright colors with patterns and strong geometric shapes.
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A modern take on Memphis design, the Kartell flagship store in 2015, by Ettore Sottsass, founder of the Memphis Group.
Which suggests that DS9 is, stylistically, from the same family as…
This is a big statement and I mean every word of it. Growing up, I loved spooky things, I loved Halloween, I loved the silly-scary things. No one in my life did until I hit high school and The Craft (1996) came out.
I was the weird kid in a conservative area in a time well before the internet. My conservative family was obsessed with “what will the neighbors think,” and “what will people on the street that we will never see again think.” Constant vigilance on the perception of others.
This broke me, mentally, because I knew I Was Not One of Them and this the way I was should be considered Very Wrong and Bad.
I had no idea who I was and I had no idea how to figure out who I was.
Vincent Price had commercials, in addition to print ads.
Lots of them.
I reiterate this was before the internet. I can’t remember if they aired on TV outside of October, but certainly at least that treasured month showed them in spades.
Vincent Price’s image became a lifeline.
Here is an older man gentle, kindly voice and was spooky in absolutely everything he was in. Not in a horror way – which isn’t a slander against horror – but horror is different. Horror is built to scare.
Vincent Price, in his commercials, was spooky. Comfortingly spooky.
And relishing in it, never hiding.
He was having fun being spooky.
He was showcasing his spookiness.
“I can do this?” He is in a Tilex commercial, I am watching with eyes as wide as windows. “If I can survive long enough to get out of here I can be like this?” He is Vincent Van Ghoul in 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, I am memorizing his every word, desperate to capture the inflection. “This is okay, to be like this?!” I am terribly young to be having these thoughts.
He wasn’t the only example – Elvira, The Addams, The Munsters, Scooby-Doo, creature feature hosts – there are many – but at the risk of all I repeat myself, this was before the internet and I was not welcome where I was. The media that made me was rare and difficult to find and ephemeral when you had it.
This kind, beautiful, spooky, queer man’s work saved my life and he died decades before I would ever come to realize just how much of an impact he had.
my brother asked why my voice was so deep and I said I’d give him 3 guesses, and he said “You doin the little flip-flop? The little switcheroo?” and it took me like 10 seconds to realize that was his Polite Way of asking if i was transitioning
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