New TSA stuff.

So here's what I think.

Zeroth, what was the old rigamarole (no liquids, take off your shoes, metal detectors, etc) for if it didn't keep us safe?  And if it did keep us safe, why do we need the new rigamarole? 

First, I want to at least see the face of the person who is seeing me naked. Seeing without being seen is a big power issue. Be glad I don't demand to see her naked too, because being clothed while other people are required to be naked is also a big power issue.

Second, note "her" in the sentence above. One of the reasons I want to see her face is I want to know she's a woman. I am culturally more comfortable at sharing "naked space," like a locker room, with people of my own gender. (Though, see above, "more comfortable" is not the same as "comfortable"--if I was sharing a locker room with a security guard in full uniform I might decide to skip the whole thing and go home in my gym clothes and change there. I don't get that option in the airport.)

I'm not prejudiced. I don't care if the woman seeing me naked is gay. I don't care if she's trans. But I want someone who says right out in public "I am a woman." I want someone who knows what it is to go though life among people who think your body is public property and your time belongs to whoever cares to claim it.

Because anything else is just, you will pardon the term, naked oppression.

Hat tip to Autographed Cat for the post that prompted the response I have expanded here.

History Of Canoeing

Remember when I was talking about the Bear Mountain Rob Roy and I said I thought it was not a historical design because it was asymmetric?

Well, the combination of free e-books of out-of-copyright titles, and the fact that many early European and European-descended canoeists wrote books about their experiences, means I've been reading a lot of books by early canoeists lately and I learned something new.

MacGregor describes the (first) Rob Roy at the end of _A Thousand Miles In The Rob Roy Canoe_ (1865, I think) and gives its width "about a foot abaft (behind) the beam."  Which sounds an awful lot like an asymmetric canoe.  And Field and Stream published a book called _Canoe and Boat Building: A Complete Manual For Amateurs_ in 1889 which has on its cover a body plan of a plainly asymmetric canoe.

It looks like asymmetric canoe design goes all the way back to the beginning of (caucasian) canoeing.  (I don't know anything about Native American canoe design--I may someday but can't say a *thing* about whether kayaks or dugouts or birch bark canoes were asymmetric right now.)

I thought that was interesting.  I still think the Bear Mountain Rob Roy is not a "real" Rob Roy but my belief is a lot more "hunchy" now.

Also, one of the issues with these out of copyright e-books from manybooks.net or the Internet Archive is that usually they're the result of a snatch-and-grab scan-and-OCR job.  And let me tell you, OCR has some way to go yet.  When the Rob Roy kept turning up as the Bob Roy and the Hob Eoy and the Bob Hoy, I thought it was funny.  But in a canoe building book I'd like to know whether that "J in. keel" is 3, 5 or 7 inches, please.  (Turns out it was 2 inches.  Whoda thunk?)

I thought I wasn't going to be able to do anything bout it, but I asked on Mobileread and it turns out there is a program called Sigil that runs on Macs and is a wysiwyg editor for e-Pub.  So I re-downloaded the book in e-Pub and am comparing the page scans to the ePub and fixing the latter as I go.  When I'm done I will convert the e-Pub to mobipocket.  But I've been at it for hours and I'm on page 64 of a 255 page book.  This is going to take a while.

But it's really cool to read how people built canoes back in the 1880s.  Did you know white pine has been used when you can't get cedar for a long time?  And spruce, which most modern books describe as the standard fall back wood if you can't get cedar, was considered to be usable but markedly poorer quality than white pine?  So apparently I picked the right wood when I couldn't afford cedar.