Tolerance

Remember when Orson Scott Card was going to overthrow the American government if gay marriage became legal?

Now he's pleading for tolerance. Um. OSC, you're on the board of an organization that has, as pretty much its sole mandate, intolerance.

A boycott is not censorship. No one owes OSC, or anyone else, a living as a writer. No one owes him a platform from which to spew his bigotry. Man, I hope this movie flops harder than a dying fish.

Snakes on a train

So Toronto experienced epic flooding last night. I am lucky enough to have been spared, so if anyone needs electronic devices charged or a dry place to hide out, let me know.

I'm sure you're all surprised that the Honourable Wife-Beater is being useless in terms of crisis management, leading Toronto residents wondering if we could borrow Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi for a bit. Here's a comparison between the two mayors' Twitter feeds. (Somewhere, I saw that a benefit for flood relief in Alberta had been cancelled because of the flood here.)

The most dramatic moment yesterday involved a submerged GO train that had to be evacuated by boat, but I didn't realize just how dramatic it was until corwin77 texted me just now to tell me that there was a snake on it, too. I am sick of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking aquatic train!

It does seem like no one died or was seriously hurt, so that's a relief, despite chronic underfunding of city services and infrastructure maintenance. It could have been a lot worse. But with extreme weather becoming much more common, perhaps some actual planning might be in order here.

ZOMG history!

Here is a thing I didn't know about:



These lovely ladies are Night Witches, female military aviators of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, who flew harassment bombing campaigns for the Soviets during WWII. We don't learn about them in history class for some reason. I blame the patriarchy. They flew utterly obsolete airplanes that made huge amounts of noise and nevertheless managed to kick serious Nazi ass. Their leader flew over 200 missions and was never captured.

Here is some more information from a website with horrible typography. And here is a Telegraph article focusing on Lilia Litvyak, who flew under the call sign White Lily and needed a cushion to see out of the windshield. I'm bookmarking this BBC segment for later. Bitch has an excellent article about them as well. From former pilot, Dr. Galina Beltsova:

"We slept in anything we could find—holes in the ground, tents, caves—but the Germans had to have their barracks, you know. They are very precise. So their barracks were built, all in a neat row, and we would come at night, after they were asleep, and bomb them. Of course, they would have to run out into the night in their underwear, and they were probably saying,—Oh, those night witches!' Or maybe they called us something worse. We, of course, would have preferred to have been called 'night beauties,' but, whichever, we did our job."

Oh, and Garth Ennis wrote a comic about them. How is that not in my eyeballs right now?

( More pictures! )