I have moved my Bookwyrming to @kingrat@sfba.club
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A police procedural where the police work seems like police work. Looking up documents. Canvassing for surveillance camera footage. Interviewing witnesses. Getting warrants.
The main police character, Manon Bradshaw, is annoying AF with her dating life though. I think that's intentional by the author though.
Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. …
More an overview of bicycle activism than bicycling activity and culture, and much of it feels like a history of car expansion. Really good parts are how the early bicycle clubs turned explicitly into car clubs and drove the first car expansion in Seattle. Also, the book does not avoid the racism that touched both cycling and car expansion.
Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. …
After many months of waiting, the ICC sided with the trail committee, setting a precedent that public agencies should have the first opportunity to purchase abandoned rail rights-of-way for creating public parkland.
— Biking Uphill in the Rain by Tom Fucoloro (Page 286)
Reading about the creation of the Burke -Gilman trail is also pretty cool. Finding out that Seattle helped start the movement of rails to trails. It feels like the Burke has always been there, but it must have opened when i was a kid. My parents didn't talk politics or civics, so i was pretty much unaware of anything going on in the city.
Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. …
People who drove on the wrong side of the road or otherwise broke the normal ways of city streets would be called a jay-driver, with jay meaning "a greenhorn or rube," according to Merriam-Webster.
— Biking Uphill in the Rain by Tom Fucoloro (Page 150)
New word: jay-driver
No need for a lookup. Fucoloro did that for me. I knew jay walker was purposely designed to shame pedestrians and claim roads for cars, but i had no idea the word was derived from an epithet for drivers.
Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. …
Started reading in earnest tonight, and this is great!! Fucoloro really dug into the records of the Queen City Cycle Club and read a lot of the Argus.
Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. How did this notoriously hilly …
Content warning minor spoilers
What if you took a very modern female chemist who expects everyone to treat her based on her brains, skills, and accomplishments and dropped her in a misogynist chemistry lab in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Rather than go along to get along she is blunt, direct, and uncompromising. Things go about as well as you would expect for an unmarried mother who challenges the powers that be and the status quo.
I'm guessing a lot of people will love this book because Elizabeth Zott is uncompromising and fights the good fight. It wasn't enough for me, and I bounced off the first half of the book because it is really slow, setting up the character and situation with a litany of sexism.
But I think the part that got me the most was that the setup felt too constructed. For example, a secretary from Zott's employment becomes the typist for a minister who just so happened to have been a pen pal of Zott's former love. Everything was just too neatly tied together.
Six-Thirty was badly in need of a bath. Tall, gray, thin, and covered with barbed wire like fur that made him look as if he barely survived electrocution, he stood very still as they shampooed him, his gaze fixed on Elizabeth.
— Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Page 139)
Oddly, i know someone else who named their dog Six-Thirty. Much much earlier than this book was published.
Paxton reviews the beginnings of fascism, its rise to power, and how it governed in order to try to suss out the common threads between successful and unsuccessful fascisms. Published in 2004, I hoped the book would explain how regimes with fascist tendencies like that of Donald Trump could be thwarted. Interestingly, Paxton hesitated to call Trump a fascist until Trump's unsuccessful attempt to retain power. Indeed, in the book Paxton makes an attempt to do away with democratic norms with the threat or actuality of a populist uprising one of the key part of fascism during stage 2, when it becomes influential, rather than mere groups of people obsessed with the unity and purity of the national people. Very solid and I recommend it.
One thing that Paxton points out is that fascism replaces representative democracy with yes/no plebiscites. That makes me wary of calls for national initiative powers.
The last part of chapter 3 has a few paragraphs on how all three of conservatism, liberalism (classical, that is), and leftism all failed to quell the rise of fascist sentiments. This is absolutely fascinating.
Chapter 3 examines how fascisms changed from their original programs to gain power. In particular, Paxton notes that Mussolini was pro League of Nations, anti professional military, anti Catholic, pro nationalization of industry and anti capitalist in 1919. By 1922, he'd reversed course on those issues. This was how Italian fascism became successful (according to Paxton).
His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform.
— The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton (Page 189)
Huh. So western gear has a much earlier connection to fascism than I was aware
