They were playing music out loud. I hate that. I asked them to stop. They didn't. "Fuck it", I think, and decide to choose violence. I move nearer them, remove my own headphones and start doing Duolingo Greek, which I know from experience is extremely irritating to be around. I figure anyone else nearby is already annoyed and I can't make it worse
But then I ran out of hearts. And I wasn't finished with violence yet, so I decided to turn on my own music.
"What are you doing" say the youths. I shrug.
The youths begin to bop along ironically.
"They hate this," I think. "I am winning."
"Hang on," says a youth. "What is that."
I realise something is going wrong but not what to do about it. "It's Italian," I mutter
"Are you Italian?"
"No, I just speak it."
"Oh shit. This goes hard actually," says a youth, whose bopping along no longer appears to be ironic "Is that rap? There's Italian rap? Whoa. Took me a second"
"What's it about?" says another youth.
My inner Public Transport Etiquette Absolutist and my inner Italian Music Evangelist are now at war. Fatally poised to decide the balance is the fact that I am a middle aged woman who has just had her musical tastes flattered by Youths.
"It's called Arresto Cardiaco, which obviously means cardiac arrest, and it's about a panic attack," I say. They lean over to peer at my phone.
"He must have some bad panic attacks," says the first youth thoughtfully.
"Maybe he gets them all the time," agrees another.
Somewhere along the way, and I realise I don't know when it happened, they turned off their own music and are now bopping along to mine.
I can't bring myself to turn it off.
Other passengers stare at me with open loathing. They are right to do so.
I literally could not beat them and I accidentally joined them. I am sorry.
Ace hardware store guy: "Anything I can help you find?"
Me: "I need caulk"
Ace hardware store guy: "Sorry, I'm not really into women, or anyone actually, so I can't help you with that. Tracy over in the pipes section can though"
The Trump administration has issued an executive order aimed at dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services - the ONLY federal agency for America's libraries.
Using just 0.003% of the federal budget, the IMLS funds services at libraries across the country; services like Braille and talking books for the visually impaired, high-speed internet access, and early literacy programs.
Libraries are known for doing more with less, but even we can't work with nothing.
How You Can Help:
🔥 Call your congressperson!
Use the app of your choice or look 'em up here: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
Pro tip: If your phone anxiety is high, call at night and leave a voicemail. You can even write yourself a script in advance and read it off. Heck, read them this post if you want to.
Phones a total no-go? The American Library Association has a form for you: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=23577
🔥Tell your friends!
Tell strangers, for that matter. People in line at the check out, your elderly neighbor, the mail carrier - no one is safe from your library advocacy. Libraries are for everyone and we need all the help we can get.
...Wait, why do we need this IMLS thing again?
The ALA says it best in their official statement and lists some ways libraries across the country use IMLS funding:
An executive order issued by the Trump administration on Friday night, March 14, calls for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Li
But if you want a really specific answer, here at LCPL we use IMLS funding to provide our amazing interlibrary loan service. If we can't purchase an item you request (out of print books, for example) this service lets us borrow it from another library and check it out to you.
IMLS also funds the statewide Indiana Digital Library and Evergreen Indiana, which gives patrons of smaller Indiana libraries access to collections just as large and varied as the big libraries' collections.
As usual, cutting this funding will hurt rural communities the most - but every library user will feel it one way or another. Let's let Congress know that's unacceptable.
I think Vivaldi would have been tickled by this as he actually wrote so much of his music for an all girl orphanage/school.
So to see a group of girls still playing his music hundreds of years later?!?!?!
On an instrument he'd never seen?!?!?!
Tfw a pair you've been using to churn out boring fodder beats all of the genetic odds and throws out a perfect bab that would also be absolute perfection for the one single Skydancer hatchling UMA you own
still so fucking weird to go from real life, where a cis man being flamboyant/effeminate/camp is judged like 70+% by how he speaks and carries himself, to online queer communities, which often seem to have no concept of male gender non-conformity that doesn’t involve wearing a skirt
i promise you, a man can be fem to the point of being in danger while wearing literally exactly the same thing as a hypermasculine guy. a boring basic black suit. a t shirt and jeans. a UNIFORM. gender conformity is not only about what you wear
None of you have watched that heartbreaking scene in The Birdcage where Albert gives up wearing everything he likes to try and blend in for their son’s conservative prospective in-laws and is so awkward and uncomfortable that no one says much until finally he says, defeated, “I know what you’re thinking - dressed like this, I’m even more obvious, aren’t I?” and it shows.
It’s so funny how literally the way a man holds his wrists is an indication of femininity but also people think it’s all about makeup and clothing. But we’re also at a point that if you have a suit that is any color other than black, dark grey, or navy, it’s flamboyant.
Men’s sartorial stylings are so rigidly controlled it’s painful. Tim Gunn here is at the very absolute bleeding edge of “acceptably masculine” here for most cishet men, just for some noticible stripes, patterns, and purple, and that’s before he even moves. This is how restricted it is.
But Trixie Mattel (out of drag here) wearing standard masculine garb is could still be deemed unacceptably feminine for body language alone.
This is why we talk about “toxic masculinity” – the idea that any expression of emotion besides anger or even wearing colorful clothes is non-masculine and therefore restricted is horrifying. It sucks! Men should be allowed to express themselves outside of a tiny box of acceptable behavior, because they’re, y'know, people, and people have a wide range of expression in the way they like to look and move and act.
I honestly feel like it’s gotten worse over the last couple decades, too. If you look at men’s fashions from the 70s and even into the 80s, there’s a lot of style choices that look pretty cringe to us, but…. you also see a lot more color and pattern in suits than you do now. I’m not sure when this started to shift, or if it’s tied in to the increasing lack of color in all consumer products, but it sucks.
I am not a conspiracy theory kind of person, but it has not escaped my attention that just within the last 2 years (it is currently January 2025, Pantone's Official Year of Beige) we've gone from having an incredible array of makeup colors - bold, bright, intense - to ... beige. Everything is fucking beige. Even the colors that aren't beige are beige-tinted. No strong colors allowed.
I mean, look at the "Best Sellers" tabs for any given category on MAC's website. MAC, of all companies. You know, the company that provided the prize makeup and money for the first few years of RuPaul's Drag Race.
This is their homepage
The one exception? You can find plenty of "retro red" lipsticks so you can look like a proper little tradwife.
There have always been color trends for makeup, but it's difficult to find the same shades of purple and red that I've been wearing since goddamn 2002.
Anyway, my pet conspiracy theory is that the "Sad Beige Moms" thing was leading up to this. It's a lot harder to play with what conservatives think Gender is when everything's fucking beige.
A strain of influenza appears to have disappeared from the planet since COVID. As a result, U.S. flu vaccines have been redesigned.
This year’s flu shot will be missing a strain of influenza it’s protected against for more than a decade.
That’s because there have been no confirmed flu cases caused by the Influenza B/Yamagata lineage since spring 2020. And the Food and Drug Administration decided this year that the strain now poses little to no threat to human health.
Scientists have concluded that widespread physical distancing and masking practiced during the early days of COVID-19 appear to have pushed B/Yamagata into oblivion.
This surprised many who study influenza, as it would be the first documented instance of a virus going extinct due to changes in human behavior, said Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
“It is such an interesting and unique story,” Wurtz said, adding that if it were not for COVID, B/Yamagata would still be circulating.
One reason COVID mitigation efforts were so effective at eliminating B/Yamagata is there was already a fair amount of immunity in the population against this strain of flu, which was also circulating at a lower level, said Dr. Kawsar Talaat, an infectious disease physician at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 was a brand new virus that no one had encountered before; therefore, masking and isolation only slowed its transmission, but did not stop it.
The absence of B/Yamagata won’t change the experience of getting this year’s flu shot, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends to everyone over 6 months old. And unvaccinated people are no less likely to get the flu, as B/Victoria and two influenza A lineages are still circulating widely and making people sick. Talaat said the disappearance of B/Yamagata doesn’t appear to have lessened the overall burden of flu, noting that the level of illness that can be attributed to any strain varies from year to year.
The CDC estimates that between 12,000 and 51,000 people die every year from influenza.
However, the manufacturing process is simplified now that the vaccine is trivalent — designed to protect against three flu viruses — instead of quadrivalent, protecting against four. That change allows more doses to be produced, said Talaat.
Ultimately, the costs of continuing to include protection against B/Yamagata in the flu shot outweigh its benefits, said Talaat.
"If you include a strain for which you don't think anybody's going to get infected into a vaccine, there are some potential risks and no potential benefits," she said. "Even though the risks might be infinitesimal, the benefits are also infinitesimal."
Scientists and public health experts have discussed for the past couple years whether to pull B/Yamagata from the flu vaccine or wait for a possible reemergence, said Kevin R. McCarthy, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Vaccine Research. But McCarthy agrees that continuing to vaccinate people against B/Yamagata does not benefit public health.
Additionally, there is a slight chance of B/Yamagata accidentally infecting the workers who manufacture the flu vaccine. The viruses, grown in eggs, are inactivated before being put into the shots: You cannot get influenza from the flu shot. But worker exposure to live B/Yamagata might occur before it's rendered harmless.
That hypothetically could lead to a reintroduction of a virus that populations have waning immunity to because B/Yamagata is no longer making people sick. While that risk is very low, McCarthy said it doesn’t make sense to produce thousands of gallons of a likely extinct virus.
It is possible that B/Yamagata continues to exist in pockets of the world that have less comprehensive flu surveillance. However, scientists aren’t worried that it is hiding in animals because humans are the only host population for B lineage flu viruses.
Scientists determined that B/Yamagata disappeared in a relatively short period of time, and this in and of itself is a success, said McCarthy. That required collaboration and data sharing from people all over the world, including countries that the U.S. has more tenuous diplomatic relationships with, like China and Russia.
“I think the fact that we can do that shows that we can get some things right,” he said.
Sarah Boden is an independent health and science journalist based in Pittsburgh.
