Things that have diverted me lately

[undyingking]

Just a roundup of a few things which caught my eye / attention, and which other people might find similarly diverting.

• Word Strips, a Flash game of spotting cobinations of lettert aht form words, quickly. There are loads of games like this about, but this is a nice realization and the scoring mechanism is pleasingly straightforward. Also, it's too difficult to be a real time-eater. My best is about 300...
• The Slingshot -- "the Great British Paper for Young Chaps. Its watchwords are Patriotism, Clean Living and Fair Play... Immerse yourself in the healthy, hearty pages of The Slingshot and you will soon understand why it is that the sun never goes down on the British without asking permission first." Very much in the tradition of Ripping Yarns. Not truly brilliant, but with some good bits, especially the adverts.
• When cake-icing software goes wrong. Poor Aunt Elsa, I bet she ends up getting the slice with the code fragment.
• Did you know that Unicode incluides the Hebrew Alternative Plus Sign, for people who find the normal one looks a bit too much like a cross? I didn't.

On a random note, I was interested to see that some people think Barack Obama is not really black. Or, rather, that he may be black, but he isn't "black". That "black" in America refers to a cultural heritage going back to the days of slavery, which Obama, whose father came from Kenya, does not share. Of course, this could be code for being wary of him because his politics aren't those of more traditional black leaders such as Jesse Jackson. I don't know enough about the subtly overtones of American race politics... Did Colin Powell, whose family were Jamaican and thus descended from slaves of the British rather than the Americans, get similar comments?

When I went to university I was surprised to find that the Black Caucus group welcomed people of South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan) descent as well as people of African or Afro-Caribbean descent. It seemed to me a regrettably loose definitiion to say that because we all have darker skin than Caucasians, we are all in some sense "black". (It may have been because at my university there were hardly any actually black people, but loads of South Asians.)

It's sometimes disconcerting when reading Pepys's diary and seeing him talk about the black woman who lives round the corner, etc, that in his day that description just meant that she had dark hair, in the same way you'd speak of a blonde woman. I guess an actual black person would have been described as a Moor.

On a related note, continuing the ramble, T was recently told at a diversity training event that to describe people from China, Malaysia, Japan etc generically as "Oriental" was considered insensitive. Apparently the thinking is (a) it covers some very different countries, cultures and ethnicities, and it shows callousness to lump them all in together under one adjective; and (b) suppose though that you don't know where they're from in any more detail, and so have to use a generic word, "Oriental" is historically associated with harmful ethnic stereotypes and slurs relationg to Fu Manchu, opium dens, cunning Oriental devils, etc -- a better because less value-laden term for such people is "East Asian". This was new to me, but I guess it kind of makes sense.

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

You'd think there'd be some well-meaning picture book (a la "Jenny Lives with Alan and Martin" or whatever it was called) that lays out the subject sensitively.

[t--m--i.livejournal.com]

Surely it just demonstrates that brixtonbrood never uses the terms "black" "white" etc in front of Teh Kidz much at all, or they would have picked it up from her. Unless they're going to get beaten up, I'd be inclined to let them find out in their own sweet time.

When I was at primary school, we used to sing the black and white song which, being seven, we thought nothing of: after all, the board was black, the chalk was white, the children were also (more or less, if you weren't too pedantic about the actual shades of brown/cream/pink etc) black and white (certainly we were as close to black and white as the daisies were to silver and the dandelions to gold!). So it was just another song.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

We sang that too -- good old Spinners!

And of course there's ebony and ivory, which sit together in perfect harmony side by side on my piano keyboard.

I digress

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

What I really want is one that introduces the concept of religious belief in a sensitive manner "Maria, Mohammed, Sanjit and Rachel talk to their Imaginary Friends" for example (and the fact that that is the title that leaps to mind gives you a rough idea of why I could do with a book that gives a slightly more PC spin).

There is a very good book called The Wibbly Wobbly Tooth about a little boy who learns from his friends about their various superstitions about what to do with teeth (particularly nice in that the protagonist is Chinese so his cultural whatsit is shown as the default, good for Chinese kids of course, but very good for WASP kids to give a real sense that other people's traditions are exactly as valid as one's own, and not just curios) which does it for me - but using it as the basis for my analogy does reduce all religious belief to the level of the tooth fairy.......

Left to my own devices the word "magic" does tend to creep into the discussion - which is not too bad a tactic actually as Small knows exactly what that means (Just A Story), but it's unlikely to get her into too much trouble in the playground (though it might get her marked down a tad in citizenship classes).

Re: I digress

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Difficult to know who might write such a book. Anyone religious would probably scorn to treat all such as essentially the same category of belief, but anyone non-religious would have the same problem as you of how to handle it at all generously.