on-line<\/a>, so follow along at home, Gentle Reader. I would like to know who you find easy to identify, who you were able to get after a minute or two of thinking, and how many you just give up on. [That link is a bit hinky, due to some cookie-juggling, I believe. If it didn’t take you to the right picture, try again—the second time was the charm on two different computers.]\nThere are nineteen people on the cover. Thirteen men and six women. I was able to quickly identify eight of the thirteen men. Of the five I could not identify, two were mostly covered by a sticker, so you could call it eight out of eleven or 73%, based on the breakfast table persual. Or you could take into account that after looking at the image on-line, I am convinced I would not have been able to identify either Cesar Chavez (who appears to be carrying an iBook) or Sir John A. MacDonald, had they not been so covered. I also, after some discussion with my Best Reader, made a guess at Wolfgang Mozart which turned out to be correct. Of the remaining two, I pretty much fail at cultural literacy for not knowing who Terry Fox was (my Best Reader knew who he was but couldn’t remember his name), and no amount of consultation identified Alexander Graham Bell (or the object he was holding). So I’ll call that missing four out of the thirteen; around a 70% success rate.\n
Of the six women, however, I was only able to identify two immediately. And those were Mother Teresa and Diana, the late Princess of Wales. My Perfect Non-Reader know Helen Keller (because her eyes were closed, which signified blindness); that passed me by. My Best Reader and I both suspected that the African-American in the back was Maya Angelou, but neither of us was willing to put down a wager on it. As for the slender Rosa Parks or the grinning Anne Frank, well, perhaps I should have recognized them, but they certainly don’t look enough like my idea of them to ring the proverbial.\n
And it’s not quite a digression, but—Princess Diana? Seriously? If we absolutely must have a British Royal, how about Victoria? I’d rather have Mrs. Pankhurst, of course, I do understand that they can’t customize the covers for crazy people who believe in, you know, feminism, and we’re supposed to recognize Maya Angelou and like it. No Sojourner Truth, no Margaret Sanger, no Emma Goldman. I get that. I don’t like it, but I get it. Also, no Joan of Arc, no Sarah Bernhardt, no Florence Nightingale, no Molly Pitcher, no Queen Liliuokalani, no Sally Ride, no Golda Meir, no Barbara Jordan, no Madame Walker, no Billie Jean King, no Babe Didrikson Zaharias, no Marie Curie, no Mary Travers (rest in peace), no Mary Cassatt. No. Plenty of room for Dodgers<\/i>, but only six women, and one of those is a fucking princess.\n
But what I was really wondering was whether that percentage gap—I recognized half the women and something better than two-thirds of the men—is due to my own cultural illiteracy (GIS tells me that the image is taken from recent covers of her Diary<\/i>; the cover of mine must not have had that image) or due to crappy artistry. And if it is crappy artistry, is this an illustration (pardon the pun) of the institutional<\/i> problems with the patriarchy: because our generation doesn’t internalize those images when we are kids, even our quality control on crappy notebook covers is slanted against women? Despite the whole thing being a deliberate attempt at celebrating diversity and whatnot. It’s an illustration anyway in its clumsy choices (although an argument could certainly be made that the choices of beardies are clumsy, and there’s that inexplicable Dodger<\/i> business, but still, on the whole, Newton-Einstein-King-Lincoln-Gandhi-Shakespeare, you know?) but what I want to know is whether the illustration is an illustration, or whether that’s just YHB.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger gets a total of sixty-three, but its the breakdown that concerns me.<\/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":[196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hatchet-job"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12391","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=12391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18873,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12391\/revisions\/18873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![on-line<\/a>, so follow along at home, Gentle Reader. I would like to know who you find easy to identify, who you were able to get after a minute or two of thinking, and how many you just give up on. [That link is a bit hinky, due to some cookie-juggling, I believe. If it didn’t take you to the right picture, try again—the second time was the charm on two different computers.]\nThere are nineteen people on the cover. Thirteen men and six women. I was able to quickly identify eight of the thirteen men. Of the five I could not identify, two were mostly covered by a sticker, so you could call it eight out of eleven or 73%, based on the breakfast table persual. Or you could take into account that after looking at the image on-line, I am convinced I would not have been able to identify either Cesar Chavez (who appears to be carrying an iBook) or Sir John A. MacDonald, had they not been so covered. I also, after some discussion with my Best Reader, made a guess at Wolfgang Mozart which turned out to be correct. Of the remaining two, I pretty much fail at cultural literacy for not knowing who Terry Fox was (my Best Reader knew who he was but couldn’t remember his name), and no amount of consultation identified Alexander Graham Bell (or the object he was holding). So I’ll call that missing four out of the thirteen; around a 70% success rate.\nOf the six women, however, I was only able to identify two immediately. And those were Mother Teresa and Diana, the late Princess of Wales. My Perfect Non-Reader know Helen Keller (because her eyes were closed, which signified blindness); that passed me by. My Best Reader and I both suspected that the African-American in the back was Maya Angelou, but neither of us was willing to put down a wager on it. As for the slender Rosa Parks or the grinning Anne Frank, well, perhaps I should have recognized them, but they certainly don’t look enough like my idea of them to ring the proverbial.\nAnd it’s not quite a digression, but—Princess Diana? Seriously? If we absolutely must have a British Royal, how about Victoria? I’d rather have Mrs. Pankhurst, of course, I do understand that they can’t customize the covers for crazy people who believe in, you know, feminism, and we’re supposed to recognize Maya Angelou and like it. No Sojourner Truth, no Margaret Sanger, no Emma Goldman. I get that. I don’t like it, but I get it. Also, no Joan of Arc, no Sarah Bernhardt, no Florence Nightingale, no Molly Pitcher, no Queen Liliuokalani, no Sally Ride, no Golda Meir, no Barbara Jordan, no Madame Walker, no Billie Jean King, no Babe Didrikson Zaharias, no Marie Curie, no Mary Travers (rest in peace), no Mary Cassatt. No. Plenty of room for Dodgers<\/i>, but only six women, and one of those is a fucking princess.\nBut what I was really wondering was whether that percentage gap—I recognized half the women and something better than two-thirds of the men—is due to my own cultural illiteracy (GIS tells me that the image is taken from recent covers of her Diary<\/i>; the cover of mine must not have had that image) or due to crappy artistry. And if it is crappy artistry, is this an illustration (pardon the pun) of the institutional<\/i> problems with the patriarchy: because our generation doesn’t internalize those images when we are kids, even our quality control on crappy notebook covers is slanted against women? Despite the whole thing being a deliberate attempt at celebrating diversity and whatnot. It’s an illustration anyway in its clumsy choices (although an argument could certainly be made that the choices of beardies are clumsy, and there’s that inexplicable Dodger<\/i> business, but still, on the whole, Newton-Einstein-King-Lincoln-Gandhi-Shakespeare, you know?) but what I want to know is whether the illustration is an illustration, or whether that’s just YHB.\nTolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger gets a total of sixty-three, but its the breakdown that concerns me.<\/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":[196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hatchet-job"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12391","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=12391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18873,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12391\/revisions\/18873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/premiercampus.com\/courses\/file.php\/42\/cast_of_character_cover.png\"){kind=link}