Lift Up Your Hearts!

It hurts to have your name stolen.

I'm not talking about identity theft, horrific as that is, but something deeper, more personal. I think of all the Kevins in Europe, where "Kevin isn't a name; it's a diagnosis." All the women whose parents innocently named them "Alexa." My own husband, Porter, whose name precludes calling for him in an airport or train station.

And heaven help the many lovely people I know named "Karen."

Recently, heaven got a little assistance from Mikayla Hedrick, in her article "Get me the manager: In defense of Karens." Well worth the short read, and maybe sending the article to a beleaguered Karen you know.

The Millennial and Gen Z generations who adopted the term grew up with a “Karen” as their elementary school teacher, or the mom down the block, or, like me, as their aunt. Now, those Karens are middle-aged women, a thankless season in the lives of females everywhere, and the pejorative is hurled upon them ceaselessly.

They’ve been accused of racism, of being too quick to call the police, of caring too much about their neighbor’s lawn, and of being a causeless nag at a perfectly good restaurant.

And because I was not a Karen...I said nothing.

No one came to defend our mothers, aunts, or middle-school teachers. They were early victims of rising wokeness, and most of us fed them to the wolves without thinking twice. Conservatives who would later reject the labels of DEI culture said nothing while their wives subliminally imbibed the idea that to be a middle-aged woman who cared enough to join the PTA may subject them to internet bullying and character defamation: all hidden behind the label “Karen.”

That ends now.

Rather than perpetuating the stereotype that a “Karen” is a nuisance whose behavior should be avoided, it’s time to admit that it’s Karens who make the world go round.

While working diligently to resurrect a sense of perpetual racial tension, the label “Karen” has cunningly inflamed prejudice, not against women of a certain race, but against all women of a certain age.

It’s the rightful role of the middle-aged woman to guard her community — to ensure its safety, cleanliness, and standards. But standards aren’t cool anymore. If you care too much about such things, you’re mocked with the air of a middle-school bully taunting you for doing your homework.

And the middle-aged woman is the personification of standards.

She is the mother who has known you since birth and can tell you’re slacking off, even when no one else can. She is the neighbor who is tired of you driving into the cul-de-sac blasting loud music when you know good and well that the babies are sleeping.

She is no longer the gullible maiden you can charm with sweet words. She is a matriarch in training and can see right through your BS.

That’s her job in the neighborhood, and that’s her role in the country.

Don’t try to push Democratic Socialism on a real Karen. She will remind you that you still haven’t paid her back for that window you broke as a kid. Don’t expect her to toe the line on your new pronouns. And definitely don’t let her catch you looting a Walgreens in the name of “justice,” because she will personally escort your butt to prison.

She’s not here to play.

And that’s why she’s demeaned. Because she is a vanguard in a culture that wants to get away with everything.

No thank you.

I’ll take safe streets, good service, and the ladies keeping it all together for the rest of us.

When people call for the Fed to fix housing inflation, I often smile because the Fed is a prime cause of housing inflation (and inflation generally). It may have been with the best of intentions, but that’s just reality. Relying on the arsonist to put out the fire is rarely effective. — John Mauldin

Emphasis mine.

For most of my voting life I've been reluctant to talk about for whom I have voted. Even when I've discussed politics, I believe so strongly in the value of a secret ballot that I would almost never admit which lever I had actually pulled. (Even though almost none of my subsequent votes have involved voting machines and levers, that was my first experience with voting and I still think of it that way.)

So it remained for half a century of voting, until the political situation became in my eyes so dire I could not fail to pay attention, and felt an obligation to speak up. But don't worry, this is not going to be a somber political post. 

But I simply cannot resist revealing one of the votes I cast in today's primary election. It was for our county school board, and I proudly cast my vote for...

Antonio Pizza!

I mean, who could resist?

The school board elections are non-partisan, but I think pizza belongs at all parties, don't you?

When we moved to Florida more than 40 years ago, the heavenly smell from an orange juice factory frequenly wafted over our new house. As we drove around we frequently encountered citrus groves, and just outside of our neighborhood a farm stand sold Page oranges. Technically a Page orange is not an orange, but a cross between a clementine and a tangelo, thus 3/4 tangerine and 1/4 grapefruit. But these small, round orange-colored glories are by far my favorite citrus fruit, now nearly impossible to obtain. In the image below, the juice on the right is the best unpasteurized, non-adulterated, not-from-concentrate orange juice I could buy from the grocery store, and the juice on the left was squeezed from Page oranges.

Sadly, a series of devastating freezes in the mid-1980's drove the citrus industry out of Central Florida, as the owners of our local orchards were faced with the expense of replanting their entire crops—or selling out to developers who were eager to obtain the land on which their dead trees were sitting.

One of our first projects at our new house was to plant a Marsh white grapefruit tree. We nursed it through the freezing time, and for years it provided some of the best grapefruit I've ever eaten. After our local source of Page oranges disappeared, we doubled our "citrus grove" by adding a Page orange tree, and we enjoyed its fruit for many years.

The unusually cold weather of the 1980's moderated, sparing our trees, but the troubles of Florida's citrus industry were far from over. Production peaked in the 90's but the turn of the century brought one deadly attack after another: the Mediterranean fruit fly (Medfly), citrus canker, and several hurricanes that destroyed trees and spread disease and pests all over the state. The pressures of growth and development swallowed many struggling groves. And then in 2005 came citrus greening, a vicious bacterial infection spread by the invasive Asian citrus psyllid, which came to us from China through Mexico. That absolutely devastated Florida's groves, taking our own two trees with them.

The bridges don't fall down immediately. — Bret Weinstein

It's been 20 years since citrus greening came to our state, and the full effects accumulated slowly. Other than the deaths of our own trees, I didn't realize the extent of the damage until about a year ago when I picked up a carton of orange juice from the grocery store. Our favorite brand had long been Florida's Natural, which was reliably not from concentrate, guaranteed squeezed from Florida oranges. But that day I stood there in the middle of Publix, staring at a container of orange liquid that was neither natural nor from Florida: it was made from concentrate, and from Brazilian oranges. Keeping the Florida's Natural name took a lot of chutzpah.

For more of the story, including some out-of-the-box efforts being made to keep the industry alive while searching for a permanent solution, you can read the informative article from which I have pulled a few quotes (emphasis mine).

Florida harvested a record 244 million boxes of oranges during the 1997–1998 season. This year, the Department of Agriculture estimates that Florida will produce only 12.2 million boxes, a stunning 95 percent drop in a little less than 30 years.

Occasional freezes, catastrophic hurricanes, and an on-and-off, decades-long battle with the citrus canker disease proved to be frustrating setbacks for many orange growers, but the destruction of Florida’s citrus industry kicked into high gear in 2005.

The Asian citrus psyllid feeds on citrus tree leaves, causing the plant to contract a bacterial infection known as huanglongbing, commonly called citrus greening. The disease causes rapid root loss, slowly draining the life from healthy trees as they try to absorb and retain nutrients. There is no known cure.

Citrus greening has slashed total U.S. orange production by 80 percent and grapefruit production by 88 percent since 2000, according to a report from the American Farm Bureau Federation. California has now overtaken Florida to become the United States’ largest citrus producer, and nations such as Egypt and South Africa now export more oranges worldwide.

But Florida citrus farmers are not giving up.

When I was young, it was more acceptable than it is today to mimic the speech of people who speak English with a recognizable accent. I remember that the stereotype of an Italian accent ended practically every-a word-a with the schwa sound-a. It's funny that I never questioned why, because none of the Italians I knew spoke like that.

Now I'm wondering if what the mimics were copying was not a generalized Italian accent, but specifically a Sicilian accent. That way of speaking was startlingly prevalent in our recent, and admittedly narrow, experience of Sicily. It marked the speech of our tour guide so strongly that a non-native speaking as she did would be accused of mockery.

I wrote the above when I documented our travel experiences; finally, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to ask Claude about it. I'll skip the technical aspects of Claude's response, but the upshot is that I was right, though it's a feature not just of Sicily but of southern Italy in general. Italians from the more northern parts of Italy do not speak that way. Here's what Claude had to say about how it came to typify the "Italian" accent in America.

The overwhelming majority of Italian immigrants to the US between the 1880s and 1920s came from the Mezzogiorno — Sicily, Naples, Calabria, Campania — not from Tuscany or the north. The "Italian accent" that got absorbed into American pop culture (vaudeville, early film, later Chef Boyardee commercials and mob movies) was really a caricature built on Southern Italian and Sicilian-inflected English, filtered through immigrant communities in New York and elsewhere. It got flattened into "the" Italian accent in the popular imagination, even though it's specifically a regional feature.

It is as if all Americans were portrayed in foreign movies, commercials, and comedy shows as being from the Deep South, or maybe Brooklyn.

In the spirit of Trust but Verify, before posting I ran this through Gemini, which caught one typo and a couple of awkward sentences. (I reworded the latter, though not with Gemini's suggestions.) It also suggested the nuance that the "Italian accent" is present even in northern Italy, because the Italian language "favors...words ending in vowels. When native Italian speakers speak English, they naturally append a schwa to words ending in consonants to fit their native speech patterns." That makes sense, although I would say it is very much less marked in northern Italians.

On our last day in Florence, Italy, we visted the Museo Galileo, a museum of the history of science.  So many amazing ancient scientific instruments, both serious and playful!

One that lands on the playful scale is an optical toy from 1642, designed and built by Jean-François Nicéron, a French mathematician and friar.  (The intersection of Faith and Science showed up again and again during our time in Florence.)  Looking through the instrument at an apparently jumbled and nonsensical painting reveals an image of a portrait of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de' Medici.

On the more serious side, I was delighted to find a 17th century calculator (for addition) with dials turned by a hand-held stylus.  It looked and functioned remarkably like the addition machine I remember my parents using when calculating their income tax in the 1950's (most likely a Sterling Dial-a-Matic).

And there I also saw my first Faraday Net.  Looking remarkably as if you would use it to catch butterflies, it's actually the device Faraday used to demonstrate that an electric charge resides entirely on the outside of a charged conductor.   It's a predecessor to the Faraday Cage, and explains why your cell phone stops working in elevators and why some people like to wear tin-foil caps.

The following gets a little technical, but if like me you have a particular interest in American Sign Language, you might enjoy it.

Sign Language in the Museum

There was one feature of the museum itself that puzzled me.  Throughout, there were video screens displaying an image or video, along with text in both English and Italian, and a sign language interpreter (for what version of sign language I could not tell).  At first I was just thrilled that they thought to include Deaf people—but then I thought, Why? Anyone old enough to be interested in the material would also be old enough to read the text.

The question intrigued me sufficiently that I posed it to Gemini, and received a detailed answer, which I've edited slightly for compactness.  It simultaneously opened my eyes and left me with more questions.

[This] touches on a really fascinating aspect of how language, literacy, and accessibility work for the Deaf community.

To answer your first question: the version of sign language being used here is LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana), which is Italian Sign Language.

As for why the museum includes an LIS interpreter when written text is already available on the screen, there are a few very important reasons that usually surprise hearing visitors:

For many profoundly Deaf people, a sign language like LIS is their native, first language, while the written language of their country (like Italian or English) is actually a second language. Because sign languages have completely distinct grammar, syntax, and structure that don't match spoken or written languages, reading a dense paragraph of text can feel like reading a foreign language. Having a sign language interpreter allows them to receive the information in their natural, native language.

I knew this, but had not thought of it in a museum context.  What it brings to mind immediately is the German-speaking Swiss.  Their native language is the many dialects of Swiss German.  High German is their written language, generally acquired when they enter school, and thus a second language.  As far as native vs. acquired language is concerned, how is this different?

[A] hearing person can look at [a moving 3D object] while simultaneously listening to an audio track. A Deaf person cannot look at the text and look at the changing details of the historical instrument at the exact same time without constantly fracturing their attention. A sign language video allows for a much more fluid, visual processing of information that matches the natural rhythm of how Deaf individuals absorb visual content.

That's also a point I hadn't considered, perhaps because as a hearing person I had a similar problem.  I'm certain there was audio available somehow for these displays, but they were silent as far as I was concerned, and I, also, had to "look at the text and look at the changing details…at the exact same time."  I don't know enough to guess how watching both the changing details and the interpreter simultaneously fractures the attention less.

Many European museums receive funding or accessibility mandates to follow Universal Design principles. This means creating an environment that doesn't just provide a workaround (like text), but actively treats different language communities equally. By providing LIS, the Museo Galileo ensures that Deaf visitors get the same depth of engagement, tone, and emphasis that a hearing person gets from an audio guide.

It is a subtle layer of cultural and linguistic accessibility that hearing people rarely have to think about, but it makes a world of difference for the Deaf community.

The question of whether or not there are enough native speakers of Italian Sign Language to justify privileging them over others who also miss that depth of engagement—Deaf speakers of American Sign Language, for example, or visitors who speak neither Italian nor English—is an issue I can't effectively address.  But as a former resident of Rochester, New York, which has a sizeable Deaf community, and having a daughter who took a college minor in American Sign Language, I enjoyed diving deeper into the reasons for the existence of these displays.

Buc-ee's not only has low-priced gas, decent food, and the best restrooms on I-95, it also rivals South of the Border for billboard advertising.  Seen recently:

OPERATION EMPTY BLADDER

and my personal favorite,

EVERY LICENSE PLATE STOPS HERE

If you know, you know.