What is this belief held by older Italians... and could they be right? People love the comfort of air conditioning and at some point feel fiercely attached to it and resistant to hearing that it might be bad. Obviously, it's bad for the environment, but what about our health?
But first, what exactly to the old Italians think? According to Grok, the idea is that you should keep you body in balance and not move it back and forth between hot and cold. And they speak of "colpo d’aria" or "colpo di freddo" — "blow of air" or "blow of cold" — as a cause of various pains and respiratory ailments. There's a mistrust of modern inventions and a preference for traditional ways, such as opening windows, fanning, and seeking out the shade. Natural seems better than artificial.
Is there an element of truth in that... truth... or beauty?
I wondered if The London Times had ever talked about "colpo d’aria" in any other article. Answer: Yes, 3 times:
"Mehdi Yarrahi’s sentence has now been completed after he was imprisoned in 2023... He had been detained days after he released the song Roosarito, which means 'Your Headscarf' in Farsi...."
Untie your hair, so that they drown in its waves Pull back the curtain so that the sky feels delighted You are the sun, so it is impossible that the night falls
Someone says in response to someone who said "I vividly remember discovering Dylan’s whole catalogue in college and consequently falling entirely out of touch with everything else music-related for a solid year, I also grew my curls out and you best believe I was wearing scarves and dressing like someone who liked to read poetry on weekends for fun."
All of that was in an r/bobdylan discussion of this new clip of Timothée Chalamet, getting (too far?) into his impersonation of Bob Dylan:
Also: "You spend all your life trying to save time, but when you get to the end of your life, there's no time left, and you'll go to heaven, and you go 'But wait, I had velcro sneakers, no-iron shirt, clip-on tie. What about all that time? It's gone.'"
And, though Seinfeld won't show you his Star of David necklace, he says "Yes, I wear a Star of David necklace, because it makes me feel closer to the people of Israel that I feel close to and that's why I wear it."
He reveals his favorite word: "quintessence." He discusses the meaning, but I wanted the OED meaning: "The most essential part or feature of some non-material thing; the purest or most perfect form or manifestation of some quality, idea, etc."
"... for an untold violation of the country’s harsh strictures on women’s dress. By Tuesday, the protests were racing across the country, in a burst of grief, anger and defiance. Many were led by women, who burned their headscarves, cut their hair and chanted, 'Death to the dictator.' The ferocity of the protests is fueled by outrage over many things at once: the allegations that Amini was beaten in custody before she collapsed and fell into a coma; the priorities of Iran’s government, led by ultraconservative President Ebrahim Raisi, who has strictly enforced dress codes and empowered the hated morality police at a time of widespread economic suffering... Many of the protests have been concentrated in the west, the poor, predominantly Kurdish region Amini’s family hails from. The Kurds — who speak their own language, have a distinct cultural identity and are mostly Sunni Muslims in a majority-Shiite country — have complained for decades of neglect by the central government.... In a video from Kerman, in southeastern Iran, a young woman sitting on a utility box, surrounded by a cheering crowd, is seen removing her headscarf and cutting off her own hair. 'An Iranian will die but will not accept oppression,' the crowd chants...."
"Smooth biographers offer clean narrative lines, well-underscored themes, and carrots, in the form of cliffhangers, to lure the reader onward. Their books are on best-seller lists. They’re good gifts for Dad. William Feaver, the author of 'The Lives of Lucian Freud'... exists on the opposite extreme. There’s little smoothness in him at all. His biography is hairier than a bonobo.... Lucian and his furious id would have made an interesting case study for his grandfather. The artist was amoral: violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous.... He had at least 14 offspring he acknowledged as his own. He called himself 'one of the great absentee fathers of the age.' Soon there are grandchildren as well. Freud did not do much hugging, but his progeny could tap him for money.
Many got to know him by sitting for portraits. He painted his daughters naked. 'They make it all right for me to paint them,' he said. 'My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of.'
Freud had a mean word for everyone.... If he didn’t like you, he cut you from his life like cancer. You can always tell a monster: He wears scarves indoors."
The biography is a 2-volume thing, and Volume 2 just came out. In posing this question about whether you could just start with Volume 2, Garner reveals a shocking ignorance of the power of Google:
When "Clement" suddenly appears in Volume Two, with no surname attached, will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother?
Who capable of reading a big hairy biography wouldn't just google the words Lucian Freud Clement? It gets you right to a Wikipedia article on Clement Freud.
The grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of Lucian Freud, he moved to the United Kingdom from Germany as a child.... He worked at the Nuremberg Trials and in 1947... He married June Flewett (the inspiration for Lucy Pevensie in C. S. Lewis's children's series The Chronicles of Narnia).... Freud was one of Britain's first "celebrity chefs"... He appeared in a series of dog food advertisements (at first Chunky Meat, later Chunky Minced Morsels) in which he co-starred with a bloodhound called Henry (played by a number of dogs) which shared his trademark "hangdog" expression.
Too much information, if anything. Bark, and Google scoops it into your bowl. Chunky Meat, later Chunky Minced Morsels indeed! Not only will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother. Every reader will know that the dogfood Chunky Meat was rechristened Chunky Minced Morsels.
It's the deborahbirxscarves Instagram account. It's not as though the scarves are doing satirical commentary. It's just photographs of the doctor in her scarves. Example:
The official American presentation (with rubber bands):
The dreamier Japanese presentation (with hair elastics):
I think hair elastics would be more comfortable. I'm thinking that the cloth would feel heavy hooked over your ears like that and would prefer something that left the ears alone. The instructions I'm seeing for masks that tie around the back of your head all seem to require sewing.
And yet, it is obviously possible to take a long scarf, put it over your face, and wrap it around and do some tying to hold it in place. That's something we do in the North in the winter when the temperatures drop below zero. But there are summer scarves, and how to tie them to cover the face for sun protection seems to be well worked out, at least for women. I like this, which strikes me as stylish, but perhaps not much of a virus defense:
I'm seeing some videos showing bandannas tied in back in the classic Western armed-robber style. Is that approach good enough? Well, no one was ever claiming that a mask was a perfect shield, only that it might help to some degree. What degree? Who knows?!
And there's the whole dimension of mental wellbeing and social signaling: Do you feel better? And: Do other people see that you're being caring and thoughtful? The "bad guy" bandanna might not be so good at social signaling:
Now, the masks are voluntary, so you could just go without them (or go without them except when doing something dangerous, like venturing into a grocery store or a polling place). Are you going to wear a face covering? I took a poll, here, yesterday. Results:
Do you see that I gave you pairs of options? There were 3 answers — yes, maybe, and no — and for each of the 3, there were 2 choices. The first choice for each had you reacting to a message from the outside— reacting one way or another to being told you should do something. The second one in each case had to do with thinking for yourself in doing what's rational. For each of the answers — yes, maybe, and no — the internal decisionmaking approach was much more popular. In fact, all of the thinking-for-yourself answers —the second, fourth, and sixth — were much more popular than any of the answers that were based on the reception of messages about what you ought to do.
The least popular answer was the one where you do what's recommended. I wonder if doing what you're told would become more popular if mask-wearing were not voluntary. But taking my poll would never be mandatory, and there'd be no consequence to lying on my poll, so I don't think I'd get a lot of check marks on the option: Yes, I'll do what I'm told.
If you're making your own face mask... what are the key elements? The pleats? The ear loops? I wouldn't assume you need the standard features of a commercially produced paper mask. The key — I'm guessing — is the fabric itself and the seal and perhaps getting some distance between your face and the fabric. Those loops around the ears seem like they are for health care workers — and other workers — who are actively engaged in something and who need to put them on and take them off quickly. For the civilian carefully venturing out in the world, we have some leeway, don't we?
From the NYT article:
The internet abounds with mask designs, but the research suggests that as long as the mask covers your nose and mouth and is comfortable to wear, the specific pattern you choose may not matter very much. Various household materials differ in their effectiveness — in Davies’s study, vacuum-cleaner bags offered better filtration than fabrics made of cotton blends, but plain cotton T-shirt fabric still provided a useful barrier.....
At yesterday's Task Force press briefing — transcript here — President Trump let us know — and know and know — that we could use a scarf:
You know, you can use a scarf. A lot of people have scarfs and you can use a scarf. Scarf would be very good, and my feeling is if people want to do it, there’s certainly no harm to it. I would say do it, but use a scarf if you want, rather than going out and getting a mask or whatever. We’re making millions and millions of masks, but we want them to go to the hospitals. I mean, one of the things that Dr. Fauci told me today is we don’t want them competing. We don’t want everybody competing with the hospitals where you really need them. So you can use scarfs. You can use something else over your face. It doesn’t have to be a mask, but it’s not a bad idea, at least for a period of time. I mean, eventually you’re not going to want to do that. You’re not going to have to do that. This is going to be gone. It’ll be gone, hopefully gone for a long time....
You can get a mask, but you can also do … I mean most people have scarves and scarves are very good and they can use a scarf and where are we talking about a limited period of time. And it says in the recommendations you can use … You can substitute a scarf for a mask. So if people feel that … And I think some people disagree with the mask for various reasons and some people don’t. But you can wear a scarf, you can do the masks if it makes you feel better. We have no objection to it and some people recommend it.
I'm not criticizing the repetition. I like it. You get the message, and you're certain he meant to say it. Notice that he's not really recommending a scarf: You can use a scarf... if it makes you feel better. It still seems as though he's refraining from saying we need one because he doesn't want us competing with the people who really need them. And I also get the sense that he hates the idea of a masked public. This is going to be gone. It’ll be gone, hopefully gone for a long time....
But meanwhile, you can use a scarf. I get the feeling that he's saying you can use a scarf because he thinks we all have silky, beautiful scarves, and wearing scarves might be uplifting and optimistic, and the people in the street in their scarves might still look like America and not like some phobic closed society that isn't us at all.
"Then word gets out and strangers show up. People take cues from the environment. Mimosas in a sun-dappled atrium suggest one kind of mood; grain alcohol in a moldy basement suggests another. Sometimes, a pattern emerges on its own. Pinterest, a simple photo-sharing site founded by three men, happened to catch on among women aspiring to an urbane life style, and today the front page is often a collage of merino scarves and expensive glassware. In other cases, the gatekeeping seems more premeditated. If you’re fourteen, Snapchat’s user interface is intuitive; if you’re twenty-two, it’s intriguing; if you’re over thirty-five, it’s impenetrable. This encourages old people to self-deport."
I went to Pinterest to see if the front page was a collage of merino scarves and expensive glassware, and I couldn't figure out how to get there — it was impenetrable — other than as myself, the person who opened a Pinterest account to collect photos to show my hairstylist. So this is what I see on the front page:
Lots of chopped off hair — and one Jack Kerouac — but no scarves and glasses.
IN THE COMMENTS: Rabel corrects:
Three Jack kerouac's plus Women of the Beat Generation.
What she was doing whoring in Mexico at that age and with that tender cheek and fair aspect God knows. Some awful grief had driven her to it. She drank beyond all bounds. She threw down drinks when it seemed she was about to chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually, the idea also being to make us spend as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy housecoat in broad afternoon she frantically danced with Neal and clung about his neck and begged and begged for everything. Neal was so stoned he didn’t know what to start with, girls or mambo.
[Payam Mohebi, the city’s star veterinarian], who is running for one of the 21 seats on Tehran’s City Council, is shown on the posters posing with a stray dog. In most countries, that would hardly turn a head. But in Iran, where the ruling clerics consider dogs impure, taking one for a walk risks the arrest of the owner and the seizure, and possible extermination, of the animal.
The doctor says he knows about all that, but is willing to take the risk. “I’m doing this so that one seat in the City Council will be for the animals,” he said. “They live with us, we love them, they have rights too.”...
In 2002, he started Tehran’s first pet hospital at a time when few people there had dogs and cats... “People said I was crazy, but I saw change coming.... Iranians wanted pets.”...
3 years ago, Parliament increased the penalty for owning a dog to $2,500 and 60 lashes — plus death for the dog.
“We have one million pets in this city — what are they thinking?” Dr. Mohebi said. “There is a massive gap between our politicians and us.”
If he is elected, Dr. Mohebi said, there will be no more killings. “We should have special parks for dogs instead, like we have special women-only parks for women who want to go running without their Islamic scarves,” he said.
"The Times started referring to them as 'the secular elite.' In 2007, the Times reported that a protest of the A.K.P. by hundreds of thousands of Turkish secularists was motivated in part by a 'fear' of the life styles of their more religious compatriots—by 'snobbish' complaints that 'religious Turks were uneducated and poor' and that 'their pesky prayer rugs got underfoot in hospital halls.' It’s difficult to imagine the Times reporting in an equally condescending manner about the élitism of Americans who oppose the Christian right."
From "Cover Story/The head scarf, modern Turkey, and me," by Elif Batuman in The New Yorker. As for head scarves, here's a conversation the author (who is the American daughter of Turkish immigrants) had with a cab driver in Istanbul (she was his sole passenger):
[O]nce, when a driver pressed me particularly jovially for an opinion, I said something like “I think all women should be respected. It shouldn’t depend on their hair.”
The driver replied that I was absolutely right, that of course women should be respected, and that the head scarf was the best way for women to remind men of this necessity for respect. Men, after all, were worse than women: they could sometimes forget themselves, and then unfortunate things could happen, “even”—he said in a hushed voice, adding that he didn’t like to mention such things in front of me—“even rape.”
I replied, in my simplistic Turkish, that to me this sounded like a threat: either cover your head or rape can happen. The driver protested in ornate phrases that nobody was threatening anyone, that to speak of threats in this situation was unfitting, that he could tell from my smiling face that I was a good and trusting person, but that the world was an imperfect place, that some men were less like humans than like animals, and that it was best to send clear signals about what one was or wasn’t looking for.....
Later, she describes her experience walking through Urfa after accidentally leaving on a head scarf that she kept with her to wear when she visited religious sites that women cannot enter without wearing a head scarf:
[W]alking through the city with a head scarf was a completely different experience. People were so much nicer. Nobody looked away when I approached. I felt less jostled; men seemed to step aside, to give me more room. When I went into a store, a man held the door for me, and I realized that it was the first time anyone had reached a door before me without going in first and letting it shut in my face. Most incredibly, when I got to a bus stop shortly after the bus had pulled away, the departing vehicle stopped in the middle of the street, the door opened, and a man reached out his hand to help me in, calling me “sister.” It felt amazing. To feel so welcomed and accepted and safe, to be able to look into someone’s face and smile, and have the smile returned—it was a wonderful gift....
Batuman gave some thought to wearing the head scarf all the time in Turkey. It's all communication, and failure to wear it communicated something she didn't mean to say to the people around her — perhaps that "I disapproved of them and thought their way of life was backward." So why not wear the head scarf, not just to make her experience easier, but also to make "the people who lived here feel so much better"? If they are poor and working people, and she is elite and privileged, shouldn't she adopt their form of expression? She wears high heels — which are more burdensome than a head scarf — to business meetings in NYC in order to get better respect from the people there. Why suck up to those elites and not to the common people in Turkey? She thinks of the answer: Because "it felt dishonest, almost shameful, as if I were duping people into being kind to me." We're left to infer the what that means about the heels in NYC. I think it's: But there's nothing dishonest or shameful about duping privileged people at business meetings in NYC.
Much more at the link. Read the whole thing. You don't know where it goes. In fact, I don't know where it goes. I stopped to write this blog post when I was only 2/3 of the way through. I decided to write this blog post when I was only 1/4 of the way through — that is, when I read the material about how Western elites notice elite condescension to working class, foreign Muslims but not the equivalent condescension to working class American Christians.
Such anthropomorphism and nondualism, so familiar in Japanese culture, as Leonard Koren, a design theorist who has written extensively on Japanese aesthetics, told me recently, was an epiphany to this Westerner. In Japan, a hyper-awareness, even reverence, for objects is a rational response to geography, said Mr. Koren, who spent 10 years there and is the author of "Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers."
"Wabi-Sabi" got me drifting off trying to remember that Jim Kweskin song on that album we always listened to in college. What was it? Ah! The album is "Relax Your Mind." The song is "Guabi Guabi."
And that's how we relax in America, some of us anyway. Much as I'd like my house de-cluttered in some way that I might find all the more relaxing by thinking of it as Japanese, I just don't care anywhere nearly as much as I did before listening to "Guabi Guabi." How organized are Jim Kweskin's closets? But back to Leonard Koren:
"Think of the kimono, and the tradition of folding... There is also the furoshiki, which is basically a square of flat cloth used daily to wrap packages. Folding is deep and pervasive in Japanese culture. Folding is a key strategy of modular systems that have evolved because of limited living space.”
The company has changed its dress code since then, but it's fighting this case on the ground that it didn't deny her a religious accommodation because she didn't ask for a religious accommodation. That is, it had a dress code that applied to everyone, and she violated it, so she was treated like anyone else who fails to comply with the dress code, not subjected to discrimination based on religion.
If she'd asked for an accommodation based on religion, the company would have had to make some conscious decision about whether an exception to the usual rule could be made. Without having been given that chance, the company argues, there's no discrimination, the company says. The EEOC, which brought the case on behalf of Elauf, doesn't want the burden to bring up religion to rest entirely on the employee. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Abercrombie.
[T]he EEOC says Elauf never requested an accommodation because she didn't know about the "look policy." The agency also claims that Abercrombie was clearly on notice that Elauf needed to wear the headscarf for religious reasons, or else it wouldn't have denied her a job.
Abercrombie's lawyers say the law is clear that an employer must have actual knowledge that a religious conflict exists before any accommodation is offered. The company argues that job applicants "are not permitted to remain silent and to assume that the employer recognizes the religious motivations behind their fashion decisions."
It's not surprising that a job applicant wouldn't want to bring up religious needs during the hiring process, and it's hard to see how the employer is supposed to be expected to bring up something that might have to do with religion. If the EEOC is saying the company should see itself as "on notice" of the need to wear religious garb, that seems to conflict with other things we might want the employer to do, like not bring up religion in a job interview. How proactively religion-conscious do you want employers to be?
ADDED: Here's the PDF of the 10th Circuit opinion (EEOC). I'll extract some highlights:
In China, the phrase "to shed off the golden cicada skin"(金蝉脱壳, pinyin: jīnchán tuōqiào) is the poetic name of the tactic of using deception to escape danger, specifically of using decoys (leaving the old shell) to fool enemies. It became one of the 36 classic Chinese strategems.... In the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West (16th century), the protagonist Priest of Tang...
I know. You want to make a joke like: Give us this day our daily orange-flavored beverage.
... was named the Golden Cicada; in this context the multiple shedding of shell of the cicada symbolizes the many stages of transformation required of a person before all illusions have been broken and one reaches enlightenment. This is also referred to in Japanese mythical ninja lore, as the technique of utsusemi (i.e., literally cicada), where ninjas would trick opponents into attacking a decoy....
The lady with the scarf... who had been for some time fondly supposing that Genji had given up thinking about her, appeared startled and embarrassed when she saw him; but, as a matter of course, the usual courtesies were paid. The younger lady, however (who was free from all such thoughts), was rather pleased at his appearance. It happened that, when the eyes of the younger were turned in another direction, Genji ventured to touch slightly the shoulder of his favorite, who, startled at the action rose suddenly and left the room, on pretence of seeking something she required, dropping her scarf in her haste, as a cicada casts off its tender wingy shell, and leaving her friend to converse with the Prince.
Ah! That reminds me of another insects-in-the-garden photograph:
As shown by Site Meter, percentage of recent visitors to this blog:
how do you hang yourself from a doorknob 0.1%
hanging by door knob 0.1%
how to hang yourself from a door knob < 0.1%
how do you hang yourself from a door knob < 0.1%
how can you hang yourself from a door knob < 0.1%
hanging from door knob < 0.1%
hanging by a door knob < 0.1%
woman hangs herself from door knob < 0.1%
suicide with scarf and doorknob < 0.1%
scarf doorknob scuicide < 0.1%
mick jagger all his women tried suicide < 0.1%
lwren scott, how do you hang yourself from a doorknob < 0.1%
l'wren scott how do you hang yourself on a doorknob < 0.1%
l'wren scott how do you hang yourself on a door knob < 0.1%
l'wren scott how did she hang herself < 0.1%
lwren hanging from door knob? < 0.1%
lren scott how hang self doir nob < 0.1%
l wren scott, hanging from doorknob < 0.1%
is it possible to hang yourself on door knob < 0.1%
how to hang yourself from a doorknob < 0.1%
how to hang yourself door knob < 0.1%
how scott hung self from door knob < 0.1%
how lwren scott hung herself < 0.1%
how is it possible for someone to hang on a doorknob < 0.1%
how does someone hang themselves with scarf tied to doorknob < 0.1%
how does someone hang themselves from a door know < 0.1%
how does someone hang themself from a doorknob < 0.1%
how does onw hang from a doorknob? < 0.1%
how does one hang themselves from a doorknob < 0.1%
how does one hang oneselve from a door knob < 0.1%
how does a person hang themselves from a door knob < 0.1%
how do you hang yourself trying a scarf to a doorknob < 0.1%
how do you hang yourself ftom a doorknob < 0.1%
how do you hang yourself from doorknob < 0.1%
how do you hang yourself from a doorknob?? < 0.1%
how do you hang yourself by a doorknob < 0.1%
how do you hanf yourselffrom a door knob < 0.1%
how did l'wren kill herself < 0.1%
how did lwren hang herself on a door handle < 0.1%
how did l'wren die < 0.1%
how could you hang yourselfbfrom a door knob < 0.1%
how could she hang herself from a doorknob < 0.1%
how could l'wren ssott hang herself from a doorknob < 0.1%
how could l'wren scott hang herself from a doorknob? < 0.1%
how could a woman hung herself from a door knob < 0.1%
how can you strangle yourself on a doorknob? < 0.1%
how can you kill yourself with a scarf on a door knob? < 0.1%
how can you hang youself on a doorknob < 0.1%
how can you hang yourself with a scarf < 0.1%
how can you hang yourself on a door knob < 0.1%
how can you hang yourself from doorknob < 0.1%
how can you hang yourself from a doorknob? < 0.1%
how can you hang yourself from a doorknob. < 0.1%
how can u die from hangimg from a doorknob < 0.1%
how can someone hang themselves from a door knob < 0.1%
how can someone hang themselfs from a door knob < 0.1%
how can someone hanf themselves from a door knob < 0.1%
how can someine hang from a doorknob < 0.1%
how can one hang oneself from a doorknob < 0.1%
how can a person hang themselves from a door knob < 0.1%
hanging yourself with a scarf < 0.1%
hanging oneself on a doorknob < 0.1%
hanging on doorknob < 0.1%
hanging from a door knob < 0.1%
hanging doorknob desth < 0.1%
hanging by scarf around door knob < 0.1%
hanging by doorknob < 0.1%
hanged herself by doorknob < 0.1%
hang yourself from door knob < 0.1%
hang by doorknob < 0.1%
did lwren scott die of auto eroticism < 0.1%
"how do you hang yourself with a doorknob"
ADDED: Here's the post of mine that attracted the traffic. And I didn't write this post (or that one) as a way to get traffic. I wrote it because I often check Site Meter to see what search words brought people to this blog, and this time, I was surprised to see nearly the whole page of search terms to be about this how-do-you-hang-yourself-from-a-doorknob business.
For the record: Don't hang yourself — not from a doorknob, not from anything. And don't kill yourself in some other way either.
One friend said: "L'Wren is probably the only person I look at her Instagram and say she has such a glamorous life. She was always on a plane. She was always very controlling, strong."
Here in Madison, Wisconsin. Everyone is staying in, so I see a danger of keeping too warm, losing one's acclimatization to the cold, so that when it warms up enough for some nice winter days outdoors — back to, say, 18 above — that will feel chilly. Perhaps we'll take a walk around the block at some point in the interest of preserving winter acclimatization. There's also the interest in being able to say that you remember when it was 18 below and you don't just remember it from reading what the temperature was from inside the house: You remember how it felt.
UPDATE: Meade reports that he stood outside, without a coat, but with his hands in his pockets, for about a minute. He says it was "painful." So I step outside, without a coat, with sleeves pulled down over my hands. It's surprisingly pleasant. Predawn, 7:15. Quiet. For many years, I'd believed that what's distinctive about temperature lower than 5 below is that when you breathe you feel the moisture in the air icing up inside your nose. You need to wrap a scarf around your face to create an antechamber for the air to make it breathable. But I had no scarf, and the breathing was fine. It felt good. But the door was at my back, and I knew I could withdraw into the warmth at any second. How much that changes the perception of cold!
The weathermen can tell you how much the element of wind affects the perception of cold, but they cannot calculate the effect of the mental element, which, even if it could be measured, varies from person to person and even within one person constantly changes. Our powers of mind enable us to get out and experience nature in winter, to the point where we might actually damage our bodies. The mentally strong have their stories of frostbitten hands and feet. It is possible to get hurt and even to die. The powers of mind must also be expended to take proper precautions, the best of which is access to an indoor refuge.
By the way, speaking of factors the weatherman doesn't report when they tell you what the wind makes the temperature feel like, how about the effect of wearing a woolly hat, a scarf around your face, insulated mittens and boots, and a very warm, long coat? They tell you the wind chill factor, but never the coat-warmth factor. The wind-chill factor is based on the feeling of blowing cold air over naked skin. To really know how it feels, I need to redo my front-stoop test naked. But dawn has now struck, and my test results would be crazily skewed by the public-nakedness-embarrassment factor.
The government's fashion show did not deviate from the requirement that women cover their hair and bodies in public. The dispute is more about things like leaving coats unbuttoned and wearing boots.
Followed by television cameras, a team of judges — mostly men — circled the halls, grading the coats on their functionality, design and “Islamic-ness.”...
According to the linked WaPo article, Ahmadinejad is posing as "a champion of civil rights" to win votes for his supporters in the March parliamentary elections.
[W]ith young adults making up the majority of the population — nearly 70 percent of Iran’s more than 72 million people are younger than 35 — religious conservatives have been waging an uphill battle to prevent young urban women from dressing the way they want, even within the framework of the laws that mandate coats and scarves....
On any given day, women in the streets of Tehran can be seen wearing combinations of wide-open coats, heavy makeup and towering platinum blond hairdos held in place by large hair clips and minimally covered by brightly colored scarves. Technically, they are not violating the dress code, but they can still be arrested.
Unfortunately there are no photos of Tehran street fashion at the link, only of the government's more moderate fashion show. Maybe WaPo doesn't want to get these young people in trouble. You can Google "street fashion Tehran" or something like that to try to get to some pictures.
It's fascinating the extremes that one resorts to when stuck with some specific rules. Where the rules give some room individual expression, you go all out. So, of course, heavymakeup and hair teased high for under-scarf impact. Find a picture that shows one of these young people and show it to someone who doesn't know what restrictions that person is dealing with. See what they say, then tell them what they are looking at. Watch them go from derision to respect in an instant. As I say, it's fascinating.
My links on "heavy makeup" go to the website of a photographer who writes: "I now live in iran which has become way more exciting to me than New York [because] of all the diverse art and the energy of its youth."
Now, I feel like I'm almost unwittingly making an argument in favor of limitations! But no, I'm for freedom. In an environment of American freedom, you'll have a hard time coming up with something truly original and expressive. Heavy makeup and teased hair... it's not daring and transgressive. What is? Perhaps, ironically, modesty... or modesty with irony. I'll let you know when I find pictures on the internet of that. Googling things like "modest dress in america" only takes me into the realm of religion. Which is ironic, but not the kind of irony I'm looking for.
ADDED: From Hijab style — I love this one. And then there's this.
AND: Those 2 links ended up taking you to the same place. This is the one I meant to say I loved. And this is the other one I meant to point out.
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
पोस्ट्स
