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Seattle woman takes up crocheting animal hats. She reportedly feels fantastic and finished 132 of them in 55 minutes.

https://twitter.com/SeattlePD/status/1363968600181121027

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Red wine is being served at an event in Berkeley with no bottles shown. They offer: Malbec, Montepulciano, CA Cab Sauv, Barossa Valley, or water. Which do you choose?

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Elsewhere in college

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A good airport in the US

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Tip

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OUR CRUMBLING DEMOCRACY

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PRO

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CAL

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I don't know if any of you read Louise Penny books (mysteries; I enjoyed them for awhile, but the last few I read got a bit too dramatic/blockbuster movie-esque), but she just announced that she's writing a book with Hillary Rodham Clinton: https://www.facebook.com/louisepennyauthor/posts/274433350717899

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/britney-spears-mara-wilson-hollywood.html?fbclid=IwAR2xMRmCnKFeEnyhWMA2pp9l_H6Rh5dTRWp2hmi1ST-niQT18SfeGhTG7RQ

(open in incognito mode if you don't have a NYT subscription)

The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls by Mara Wilson

The next morning I got up, groggy from jet lag, and put on my best Forever 21 attire. Two press coordinators checked in before I started my interview: Did I want the air off, or a soda? I said I was fine — I didn’t want to get a reputation as a complainer. But when the journalist asked how I was feeling, I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I told her the truth.

I don’t know why I opened up to her. But I had never been good at hiding my feelings. (Acting, to me, is very different from lying.) And she seemed like she really cared.

The next day, Canada’s newspaper of record put me on the front page of its entertainment section. The article began, “The interview hasn’t even begun with Mara Wilson, Child Star, and she’s complaining to her staff.”

...

A big part of The Narrative is the assumption that famous kids deserve it. They asked for this by becoming famous and entitled, so it’s fine to attack them. In fact, The Narrative often has far less to do with the child than with the people around them. MGM was giving Judy Garland pills to stay awake and lose weight when she was in her early teens. The former child actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessed stalker. Drew Barrymore, who went to rehab as a young teenager, had an alcoholic father and a mother who took her to Studio 54 instead of school. And this doesn’t even begin to take into account the amount of abuse nonwhite actors, particularly Black actors, get from the public. Amandla Stenberg was harassed after being cast in “The Hunger Games” as a character that had been written as Black, but whom some readers of the book series had imagined as white.

The saddest thing about Ms. Spears’s “breakdown” is that it never needed to happen. When she split with her husband, shaved her head and furiously attacked a paparazzi car with an umbrella, the Narrative was forced upon her, but the reality was she was a new mother dealing with major life changes. People need space, time and care to deal with those things. She had none of that.

Many moments of Ms. Spears’s life were familiar to me. We both had dolls made of us, had close friends and boyfriends sharing our secrets and had grown men commenting on our bodies. But my life was easier not only because I was never tabloid-level famous, but because unlike Ms. Spears, I always had my family’s support. I knew that I had money put away for me, and it was mine. If I needed to escape the public eye, I vanished — safe at home or school.

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TBB suggested a Pi Day event

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