{"id":10585,"date":"2007-08-17T22:28:15","date_gmt":"2007-08-18T02:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/08\/17\/10585.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:55","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:55","slug":"a-rambling-note-with-a-questio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/08\/17\/a-rambling-note-with-a-questio\/","title":{"rendered":"a rambling note, with a question"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and Your Humble Blogger goes out of town for a few days and all hell breaks loose. Actually, Hell didn’t break loose at all. And, frankly, if it did, I think out of town<\/I> is exactly where I would want to be when it happens. I’m thinking something like...\n

Hell broke loose today in Hartford, Connecticut, and our reporter Cindy Gonzales was on the spot. Our condolences go out to the Gonzales family, with our hopes that it was quick. The forces of the Lord are presently arrayed on Interstate 84 in Waterbury, and it is hoped that the breakthrough can be contained. We’ll be speaking later to a prominent environmentalist about the likely effects of the Connecticut River boiling into steam, and we’ll chat with an obscure local blogger who calls himself Vardibidian, who was well out of town with his family and several friends, and suffered no harm whatsoever. Also, we’ll have a spokesman for the undead to give their side of the story, and to eat the brains of our interns! All that, plus traffic and weather on the eights.<\/blockquote>\n

Anyway. Where was I?\n

Oh, right. Karl Rove resigned, Jenny Holzer has a Twitter page<\/a>, Dennis Hastert resigned along with something like seventy-eight other Midwestern Republicans, Jenna Bush got engaged (to be married), police in the US are suffering bullet shortages, we’ve turned the corner in Iraq, and um. It rained. And I missed St. Cassian’s Day<\/a>.\n

Anyway.\n

Here’s a question for Gentle Readers: have you ever had the experience of entering a large room containing a goodly number of people and thinking there are only [quantity] of [identity group] here<\/i>? The specific instance I am thinking of would be entering a bar and thinking that there are only a handful of white people in it, but I would abstract it to coming into a movie theater and thinking there were only a few of us Latinos, or only a few of us women in this club, only a few of us parents in this restaurant, only a few of us Jews at this wedding, only a few of us young people at this lecture, only a few of us long-hairs at this rally, etc, etc. And to be clear: I’m not asking whether you have ever been<\/I> one of a few members of a particular identity group within a larger crowd, but whether you have thought to yourself<\/I> upon entering a crowd that the members of one particular identity group were outnumbered. I am curious about the specifics, but if you don’t want to provide them, feel free to just say yes, that often happens to me<\/I> or no, I don’t think I’ve ever done that<\/I>.\n

The question, by the way, reminds me of a moment in a Buddy Hackett stand-up concert (don’t worry, this isn’t the joke that begins “Two faggots were fucking a dead alligator on a bus...”) when he asked the audience for a show of hands, how many people at the show were Jewish. He nodded at them, seemingly pleased by the smattering of raised hands, and then asked how many Methodists were in the audience. The Methodists vastly outnumbered the Jews, of course, but when the hands went up Mr. Hackett’s eyes went round (in the particularly comic way Mr. Hackett could conjure) and he quickly said that you Jews had better behave yourselves around us Methodists. The laughter was not altogether nervous, but... not altogether free from nervousness, either. I suspect the Jews laughed louder than the Methodists.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, and Your Humble Blogger goes out of town for a few days and all hell breaks loose. Actually, Hell didn\u2019t break loose at all. And, frankly, if it did, I think out of town is exactly where I would…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18080,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10585\/revisions\/18080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}