Lululemon’s Founder on “How Lululemon Came Into Being”

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Lululemon Yellow YogaI’m unclear on how someone who seems to have such a low opinion of living, breathing women (or “females,” as he might call them) came to found a successful company that sells yoga clothing to women. Lululemon’s CEO and founder has been in the news here and there for saying this or that inane (at best), sexist (at worst) drivel, but it doesn’t appear to be anything new. He wrote a blog post on the company’s blog dated March 30, 2009, that details the company’s origins through a, shall we say, creative interpretation of the last forty years of history—starting with “the pill” and culminating in a surge of breast cancer among “cigarette-smoking Power Women who were on the pill.” Here is his conclusion, and you can decide if it piques your interest enough to learn how the events of the 1970’s through the 1990’s shaped the company:

Ultimately, lululemon was formed because female education levels, breast cancer, yoga/athletics and the desire to dress feminine came together all at one time. lululemon saw the opportunity to make the best technologically advanced components for the Super Girl market.

I, uh, um…..ugh. Continue reading →

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My Take on “Abolitionist Porn”

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SlavesForSaleNewOrleans1861John Derbyshire and I have something in common: I haven’t seen the movie 12 Years a Slave, either. I suspect that is where our similarities end, though.

If you are not familiar with Derbyshire’s work, the National Review fired him last year, essentially for being too much of a racist hack. That should really speak volumes. I’m not going to waste any significant time or bandwidth on Derbyshire’s rantings about 12 Years a Slave, except to summarize that he has identified a genre he calls “abolitionist porn” that overstates how bad slavery was. For some good takedowns of his hackery, see Brian Tashman, Ed Brayton, and PZ Myers.

We do have one additional, very superficial, similarity that I might mention. Derbyshire concludes his “abolitionist porn” screed with a statement that, minus the specific context, I find to be valid and truthful:

In the matter of slavery, though, I already feel sure that the shallow good North, bad South simplicities of Abolitionist Porn and popular perception bear little relation to the thorny tangles of reality.

I suspect that Derbyshire is trying to say that the South wasn’t really that bad, and that’s where I strongly dissent. I would instead posit that the North, applying the standards of today, wasn’t really that good. Continue reading →

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The Rise of the Super Zips

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Presumably because we just don’t have enough ways yet to isolate the super-rich from everyone else, the Washington Post has prepared an interactive map of the nation that identifies what it calls “Super Zips”—zip codes that rank in the 95th to 99th percentile for median income and education level.

Austin, Texas has eight Super Zips. Not at all surprisingly, they are all west of I-35. In fact, with the exception of a small sliver of 78749, they are all west of Mopac. (Fun fact: I lived in that sliver of ’46 for just over three years! In an apartment. Trust me, the Super Zip-ness comes from the west side of the highway.) The highest overall score, a 99, goes to 78746, which includes West Lake Hills and Rollingwood, and should not be a surprise either. The highest median income, however, is in 78739 ($132,552 to the ’46’s $129,188).

The lowest score in Austin, from my cursory review of the map, is east Austin’s 78742 zip code. It ranks in the 10th percentile, with a median income of $21,071 and 14% college graduate rate. It also doesn’t seem to have much in the way of buildings.

Just for fun, I thought I’d look at all of the zip codes where I have lived in my 14 years in Austin:

  • 78705: 48th percentile, median income of $11,910 (although it’s worth noting that this zip code is probably mostly college students);
  • 78751: 57th percentile, median income of $37,521;
  • 78749: 90th percentile, median income of $79,712 (especially now that I’m not there to drag it down);
  • 78704: 66th percentile, median income of $47,336 (damn hippies);
  • 78751 (I moved back here for a while); and
  • 78723: 43rd percentile, median income of $41,839 (interesting that it has a higher median income than ’51, but it only has 28% college graduates to ’51’s 64%).

Screen Shot 2013-12-04 at 3.06.49 PM

Also interesting: the zip code where I grew up, 78209 in San Antonio, is famous for its “old money” excess, but it only ranks in the 79th percentile these days. Still impressive, but it’s clear that the real concentrations of wealth have moved further northwest (check out 78248, 78257, 78258, and 78015 for the big bucks). I bet the ’09 still has an edge in snobbery, though!

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It’s Wednesday, So Here’s a Creepy Bird

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Presenting the shoebill, Balaeniceps rex, apparently also known as the whalehead. It lives in Africa, and it appears to be mildly amused by you.

It’s also classified as “vulnerable,” which is better than “endangered,” but still not good. Who could harm such a majestic creature? I mean, as opposed to backing away slowly from such a majestic creature while trying to avoid direct eye contact.

Photo credit: Jimo.

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Survival, and Awesome Spookiness, on the High Seas

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Whatever sort of crap you’ve had to deal with recently, I hope it doesn’t compare to the ordeal of Harrison Odjegba Okene (h/t Bob):

Entombed at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in an upended tugboat for three days, Harrison Odjegba Okene begged God for a miracle.

The Nigerian cook survived by breathing an ever-dwindling supply of oxygen in an air pocket. A video of Okene’s rescue in May — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArWGILmKCqE — that was posted on the Internet more than six months later has gone viral this week.

As the temperature dropped to freezing, Okene, dressed only in boxer shorts, recited the last psalm his wife had sent by text message, sometimes called the Prayer for Deliverance: “Oh God, by your name, save me. … The Lord sustains my life.”

To this day, Okene believes his rescue after 72 hours underwater at a depth of 30 meters (about 100 feet) is a sign of divine deliverance. The other 11 seamen aboard the Jascon 4 died.

This miraculous (for lack of a better word) rescue has a shock-horror element to it, as well:

Divers sent to the scene were looking only for bodies, according to Tony Walker, project manager for the Dutch company DCN Diving.

The divers, who were working on a neighboring oil field 120 kilometers (75 miles) away when they were deployed, had already pulled up four bodies.

So when a hand appeared on the TV screen Walker was monitoring in the rescue boat, showing what the diver in the Jascon saw, everybody assumed it was another corpse.

“The diver acknowledged that he had seen the hand and then, when he went to grab the hand, the hand grabbed him!” Walker said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

“It was frightening for everybody,” he said. “For the guy that was trapped because he didn’t know what was happening. It was a shock for the diver while he was down there looking for bodies, and we (in the control room) shot back when the hand grabbed him on the screen.”

On the video, there’s an exclamation of fear and shock from Okene’s rescuer, and then joy as the realization sets in. Okene recalls hearing: “There’s a survivor! He’s alive.” [Emphasis added.]

I took the liberty of capturing the “jump” moment in GIF form for posterity. Feel free to add in suspenseful music. Also, I wish Mr. Okene all the best.

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Corporations Don’t Go to Church

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Rick Santorum was defending the right of self-proclaimed Christian corporations to deny reproductive healthcare coverage because First Amendment:

“I mean, the idea that the First Amendment stops after you walk out of church, that it doesn’t have anything to do with how you live the rest of your life, I don’t know very many people of faith that believes that their religion ends with just worship.”

Someone needs to remind the ex-senator that this whole kerfuffle is about the supposed religious rights of corporations, not individuals. Unless people are attending church services specifically in the capacity of a representative of Hobby Lobby, corporations do not “walk out of church.” I’d say that Santorum doesn’t understand the distinction, but I suspect that he actually just doesn’t care.

He also had some odd words about the imposition of religious values:

“And President Obama is saying, ‘No, once you step outside that church, I get to impose my values on you, your religious values don’t matter anymore, it’s my values that I can impose on you,'” the Pennsylvania Republican continued. “I don’t think that’s what the First Amendment stands for. And I don’t think that’s what the court will say.”

See? It’s freedom of an employer’s religious beliefs, not freedom from an employer’s religious beliefs! I mean, that’s in The Federalist Papers, I think in the footnotes somewhere.

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Monday Morning Cute: Fawning

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Please join me in fawning over this adorable baby deer:

Credit for the pun goes to the original poster on Imgur, xZora.

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This Week in WTF, November 29, 2013

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– When a prank goes very, very, very wrong: They say comedy is tragedy plus time, but I feel bad for even thinking of humor in this. It might be better described as irony but it’s been almost 20 years since I dropped English as my major so I could be wrong. Here’s how the story began: a 19 year-old woman was driving with a group of people, all also 19, on the New York Thruway after a day at the beach. A backseat passenger decided it would be funny (or something) to pull the string on the driver’s bikini top. As the driver tried to get her top back on, the car veered off the highway, collided with a guard rail, and flipped. The prankster died in the crash, and several passengers were injured. An appellate court in Brooklyn found last week that the driver was not civilly liable in a lawsuit filed by another passenger, because the removal of her top was “a sudden and unforeseen emergency not of her own making.”

– Time for a new calendaring system: The town of Wallsburg, Utah did not hold an election on November 5. Because they forgot. Again. Via Kevin at Lowering the Bar:

Wallburg’s city recorder, described by the Salt Lake Tribune as “the employee responsible for oversight of elections,” not only failed to oversee this year’s elections, he or she forgot to have any. The recorder failed to announce the filing period or make any other arrangements for municipal elections on November 5, when everybody else in Utah has them. By the time anyone noticed, it was too late. The mayor and councilmembers will have to be appointed (by who, the report didn’t say) and will serve for two years until the next elections roll around in 2015.

Remember when I said “again”? Oh yes:

Everyone should be familiar with that procedure, at least, because it’s what they had to do in 2011 after the last municipal elections. Which Wallsburg also forgot to hold. An acting mayor and councilmembers were appointed at that time, and those were the seats that were supposed to have been filled this time around.

As Kevin notes, they might consider appointing some new people, or else this could start to look fishy. There may also be an opening for a city recorder soon.

– Here’s a very creepy headline, which I will copy here but not discuss further because seriously, WTF: Sydney Leathers will be selling her excess labia to the highest bidder.

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Grains of Sand and the Universe

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People who know me know that I’m a somewhat obsessive Carl Sagan fan. (We don’t need to go into too many details, but while some people imagine their lives having theme music, mine has voiceover narration.) I was therefore excited to see that we have an effort to investigate Carl Sagan’s claim that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of the Earth’s beaches. The answer (well, estimate, really), via Fraser Cain at io9, is that yes, there probably are more stars than grains of beach sand (I’m not sure what Carl Sagan had against deserts.)

The total number of stars in the universe might be somewhere between 10 and 200 sextillion (that’s 1×10^22, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). The number of grains of sand on beaches (bear with me here) is somewhere between 2.5 and 10 sextillion. So Carl Sagan was right, maybe.

Also, in case you think 10 sextillion is a big number, you might wonder how much space that many atoms would occupy. Per io9, “about four times smaller than a dust mite.” Ponder that, but watch out for the existential dread.

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Monday Morning Cute: The Adorable Apocalypse

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Reddit user winterswallow posted this picture, “222 Golden Retrievers Gather in Scotland”:

222 Golden Retrievers Gather in Scotland

The awesomeness of the picture itself is compounded by the realization of how close we came to world-ending death by squee:

Multiply it by three and you have an adorable apocalypse

Honorable mention goes to the following exchange, beginning with “One tennis ball to rule them all”:Screen Shot 2013-11-18 at 3.23.12 PM

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