Ten things meme.

[rivka]

Ten things I've done, which you probably haven't:

1. Dyed monkeys various colors, using Manic Panic hair dye.
2. Seen a Nobel Prize winner naked.
3. Interviewed Transylvanian villagers about their parenting practices.
4. Had ten major surgeries by age 20.
5. Eaten fire.
6. Been thrown out of the Oregon statehouse while brandishing a turkey baster.
7. Been required to supply regular blood samples as a condition of employment.
8. Driven around Nashville at 3am with someone I had just met, looking for someplace to buy condoms.[1]
9. Routinely had people committed to locked psychiatric wards.
10. Driven Mary Daly around in my car.


[1] One of the people on my Friends list has done this. But I bet the rest of you haven't.

Comments

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

7. Been required to supply regular blood samples as a condition of employment.
Well, I had to supply regular urine samples whilst in the Navy. And they could certainly demand blood samples anytime they felt like it, which usually happened at least once a year at my annual physical. But I suppose it's not quite the same thing.

6. Been thrown out of the Oregon statehouse while brandishing a turkey baster.
Now that's got to have a good story behind it!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

6. Been thrown out of the Oregon statehouse while brandishing a turkey baster.
Now that's got to have a good story behind it!

Well, to be fair, it might not have been entirely about the turkey baster. It might have been what we were chanting:

2, 4, 6, 8
It's our right to inseminate!
1, 3, 5, 7
Fuck you and your bill, Kevin!

It was in honor of Kevin Mannix, then a state legislator. He had introduced a bill making it illegal for a doctor to inseminate - or facilitate the insemination of - an unmarried woman. The Lesbian Avengers took issue with that, and hit the statehouse to discuss the bill with Mr. Mannix. He didn't turn out to like us very much.

[geminigirl]

I remember that bill...

[ailbhe]

Jesus Fucking Christ on a Bicycle. That's... Wow.

That makes me feel very young, for some reason. I can't imagine it. But I *do* remember the decriminalisation of homosexuality in my native country, which is just as bad. But then, I remember it partially because a whole bunch of people turned around and said "What, is that illegal then? Who knew?" which helped the media hype a bit - my generation seems to have thought the illegality was around public exposure, rather than gay sex, and it turned out it wasn't.

[kate_nepveu]

I occasionally went to court to keep people committed to locked pyschiatric wards, but those days thankfully are over (re-organization of office).

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

Wow, those are impressive!

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I have the most interesting friends. (-:

[xopher-vh.livejournal.com]

1, 2, 3: Interesting experiences, but don't fill me with envy.

4, 7, 8: Sound damned unpleasant (though 8 I hope had a pleasant aftermath). Anyone who envies you for 4 belongs under 9.

5: Hope this was a one-shot thing...unless you count Thai food. :-)

6: Admirable but not enviable. Still, it might have been fun, as long as they didn't rough you up.

9: Just a job thing, right?

10: The green color of my face wouldn't come across even on a digital photograph...I was an admirer of Gyn/Ecology even before taking Marilyn Frye's Philosophical Aspects of Feminism course at Michigan State. I'm afraid I found the Wickedary too extreme, however: call me hypersensitive, but I think the term 'Final Solution' should be reserved for activities of which one disapproves.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

5: Hope this was a one-shot thing...unless you count Thai food. :-)

It was several times. It was fun. It gave me a rush, which I hope was from adrenaline and not from inhaling butane fumes.

9: Just a job thing, right?

What exactly would you do if I said, "No, actually, more like a hobby"? ...But yes, indeed, it is something I do every so often at work.

10: The green color of my face wouldn't come across even on a digital photograph...[...] I'm afraid I found the Wickedary too extreme, however: call me hypersensitive, but I think the term 'Final Solution' should be reserved for activities of which one disapproves.

She was extremely nice, in person. What doesn't come across very well in the Wickedary, but totally did when she read from it in person, is that parts of it are supposed to be funny.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Mary Daly? Isn't she the radical who says all penetration is rape? I saw her on C-SPAN and was mightily unimpressed. She was going on about how women can't ever possibly be happy and fulfilled in a mixed-gender educational environment. Which, from my own overeducated perspective, is bullshit.

[xopher-vh.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the C-Span person, but Andrea Dworkin said all penetration is rape. I don't know if Mary Daly said it too, but I doubt it.

Andrea Dworkin is a nutjob, to use the technical term. (Why isn't that in the DSM IV? Slackers.)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

(I really should remember to Google first.) I found a picture of Daly, and it was indeed she whom I saw talking about the inherent evil of all men. Grrr...essentialism in all its forms seriously annoys me.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I found her very likeable in person, actually.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I think what I saw was a discussion of why she was getting fired for excluding men from her classes, so I'm sure she was nicer in real non-controversial life.

Unless I'm confusing her with somebody else, in which case I apologize to all concerned. I'm still foggy from the Crud (and the concurrent Benadryl bender).

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I'm perfectly willing to believe she said something like that in an interview, but the explanation I consistently heard was not that men are evil or something, it's just that men change the type and level of discourse in classes, and Daly wanted to focus on specific subjects and modes of discourse in her seminars/classes.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Andrea Dworkin said all penetration is rape.

She didn't, actually, but is commonly misquoted (along with Catherine MacKinnon) as having said so.

Not that I think very highly of Dworkin or MacKinnon regardless.

[xopher-vh.livejournal.com]

Oops. Well, damn, I wish I knew where I got that so I could discount other information from the same source. Sigh.

What did she say that was misquoted in this way? Or was it an outright fabrication like the bra burning stories?

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Which Nobel winner was this?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

George Wald, Physiology or Medicine Nobelist in 1967 (http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1967/index.html), and a bit of a nudist.

Which was certainly a shock to his teenaged granddaughter, let me tell you.

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

You had a Nobel Prize winner for a grandfather?

Wow. Just, wow. I am once again Officially Jealous of you.

[kateyule.livejournal.com]

What, nobody's going to ask about the monkeys?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Maybe it seems like an everyday sort of activity to everyone on my friends list but you.

However:

I used to have a job in a research lab at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. It was a study of the effects of infant nutrition on visual and cognitive development - I am partially responsible for the fact that you can now buy infant formula supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids. We used infant rhesus monkeys, and fed them one of three different diets: safflower oil-based (deficient in omega-3s, and equivalent to infant formula sold in 3rd world countries), soy oil-based (standard infant formula in the U.S.), and simulated monkey milk (with omega-3s). The diets were color-coded: green for saff, red for soy, yellow for SMM. So was everything else: the formula itself (food coloring), the monkeys' cage tags, the tape we used to label samples, etc.

We paired our monkeys during the day so they could have social interaction, and separated them for feedings. The research assistants could tell the monkeys apart by their appearance, but the animal care staff relied on their ID tattoos. Occasionally they made a mistake, and the animals were separated for meals into the wrong cages. If that meant they got the wrong formula, they had their tiny little stomachs pumped. It was bad.

So we experimented with Manic Panic, a non-irritating, vegetable-based, omega-3-fatty-acid-free hair dye, to see if it would help avoid errors in separating animals. We picked a pair of monkeys named Simon and Garfunkel and dyed green (for Simon, who was on the safflower oil diet) and red (for Garfunkel, on the soy diet) stripes into their fur. Simon handled it all right, although he didn't like the part where we held him under the faucet to rinse off the dye. Garfunkel, on the other hand... well, what I wound up writing in the lab notebook afterwards was, "Bright red Manic Panic looks exactly like blood. Consider using another color, such as hot pink, to avoid terrifying the animals."

In the end, we decided that it would be less work to separate the monkeys for the noontime feeding ourselves. So we only ever dyed them once.

#8

[lcohen]

not in nashville, no.

Re: #8

[ranunculus.livejournal.com]

Ditto this... :)