Tech Support Barbie

I worked tech support once. Briefly.

Nobody dressed like that.

And that perfect hair is gone after the first customer call.  :)

By the way, although I like the message that a girl can be smart and pretty at the same time, I do object to that old glasses = intelligence coding.

Yes, this is a real Barbie doll. I got the pic from the BBC. If you can't trust them, whom can you trust?

Woman To Woman

This is an interesting historical document - it's using Sisterhood to forward the abolitionist cause.  Not surprising in the North, since abolition was taken up by many churches and church work was one of the few acceptable public spheres in which women could participate. And, of course, Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by a woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

However, there is research coming out now that this broadsheet might have played well to the white female audience of the South, too.

Seems as long as you were female, The Man was keeping you down, regardless of color.

I've listed some books you might be interested in below.

I also want to read Gary Gallagher's book on how Hollywood has shaped our perceptions of the Civil War. Because, maybe it's just me, but I think of images from Gone With The Wind before I think of those black & white photos of the war dead. (Which on the one hand is a good thing, because those photographs are very gruesome.)

So there ya go.  Some things to think about.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Lizzie Borden Not Guilty - Her Period Did It

This is the bedroom where Lizzie Borden allegedly took a hatchet to her step-mother.

(And you can actually stay here in this room - the house is a bed & breakfast now.)

I've long known about the infamous axe murder of her parents and the fact that Lizzie was generally thought to have done it even though she was acquitted at trial.

Someone was certainly after them, as they had suffered from suspicious food poisoning. And Lizzie had bought poison at the drugstore.

So why a hatchet?

Well, according to The History of Murder and A Private Disgrace, Lizzie's father had recently chopped off the heads of her pet pigeons with a hatchet. (Makes ya wonder what was going on in that house - what a sick, cruel thing for a father to do.)  And she may have been thinking about that when she had a petit mal epileptic seizure. These are also known as absence seizures. Basically, the person suffering from the seizure can walk and talk and function but isn't conscious of their actions. Such seizures can happen during one's menstruation.

And it is a recorded fact that Lizzie Borden was menstruating on the day her parents were killed.

This was mentioned in Flow, that Lizzie committed the murders during - and due to - her period, and I was like, what? Seriously?

So I looked it up in The History of Murder and, sure enough, there it is. No wonder men are so afraid of a female with access to nuclear weapons. It's not just the PMS you have to worry about. It's the period during the period itself, as well. So that's, what, two weeks each month where women could be indiscriminately violent. As opposed to men....

Anyway, this theory was first put forth by Victoria Lincoln in A Private Disgrace, which I have yet to read. The theory about Lizzie and her period, that is, not the theory about man-fear. Obviously. Just checking that you were still reading attentively.  ;)

On top of the pigeon massacre, there were also some financial dealings with which Lizzie took issue. So money was a motive as well. And then the menstruation-instigated seizure caused her to act out her feelings.

It's an interesting solution to the crime.

Captain Jack and Doctor Shippiness