Friday links: 4 February, 2022

 Happy Friday! Anyone have any big plans for the weekend? As usual, not much going on here. Maybe a walk on Sunday, since it’s going to be 32F that day, and I have two bags of peppers that need to be chopped and put in the freezer. And I reeeeeeeeeeally need to get some laundry folded; I've been putting that off for, uh, a while now.

Here's what I found interesting online this week!

 

A Tennessee School Board’s Ban of ‘Maus’ Speaks to a Much Larger Problem

This is a good article (full disclosure: I’ve written for one of their sister sites). You may have heard about a school board in Tennessee banning the book Maus by Art Spiegelman recently, on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ostensibly, they did it because of profanity and nudity. For one, I guarantee that every single one of those kids hears worse profanity every day in the hallways of their school (I sure did, and I went to small-town Midwestern schools, one of which was religious in nature), and second, the Jews in the book are drawn as mice. These people are concerned about naked mice (do they also have problems with Winnie the Pooh and Donald Duck not wearing pants?). And the school board member worried about promoting violence? She’s going to have a real bad time with, say, the Revolutionary War, or, uh, a LOT of stuff in the Bible (and I say this as someone who reads a bit from the Tanakh every day).

I began learning about the Holocaust in depth when I was nine years old. Yes, it was horrifying to learn about, but that’s the entire point. How can we ensure that these horrors never happen again if we don’t teach about them? I’m not a hundred percent sure what that school board was thinking, but I have a few ideas, and, as someone who leaves in-person synagogue services and walks out past the armed guards hired to prevent us from getting murdered, none of them make me feel very safe. Add this to the Tennessee pastor who held a book burning the other day (you read that correctly), and I’m so, so very glad we left Tennessee when we did. I have so many friends still there, and I'm so sorry that they're doing this to your beautiful state.

Speaking of people behaving badly around books…

 

Documents reveal nature of threats made against St. Charles Public Library employees

This isn’t too far from me.

A local group of people got a bug up their behinds about the fact that, two years into a pandemic in which almost 900,000 Americans have died of a preventable, airborne virus, the library requires its patrons to wear masks in the building. So, like the petulant, whiny toddlers they are, they threw tantrums in the building and made horrific threats toward the library staff, to the point where the library had to close down.

Classy move, people. Ruin it for everyone.

The group behind the threats is known around here, and they’re scary and dangerous. I’m disgusted that this is what our society has come down to: people too good to follow the rules, so they ruin opportunities for everyone by making violent threats. Awesome message they’re teaching their children, and odds are good that that will very much come back to haunt them when their children get older.

On a lighter note…

 

A short guide to the 100 most nutritious goods, as ranked by scientists

An interesting look at what one group of scientists consider healthy. I don’t eat the seafood on the list- even if I did eat animals, I have huge concerns over the amount of microplastics researchers are finding in fish- but this is a pretty fascinating list.

 

That’s all I’ve got this week. I’m making a run to a local grocery store this morning, then coming home to do more volunteer work. I’m making a taco dip for dinner that I’ve been craving all week, so I’m looking forward to that. So glad I’m feeling better this week than I did last week!

Have a great weekend, everyone! : )