First …

I read a really annoying essay on a substack called Raised by Germans. It’s all about a girl who grew up in the 90’s and was, shocker of shockers, a tomboy. She thinks it was a new thing.

I was a tomboy.
But so were the majority of girls when I grew up. I think there was a time in the 80s and 90s were girls finally were set free.
https://germanoddities.substack.com/p/tomboys-grow-up

I can’t really tell much about this substack writer but I want to know how she missed out on people like Laura Ingalls Wilder, a real person, who did a lot of boy things, or Caddie Woodlawn, a more or less fictional tomboy, written in the 1930’s. How about Kate in The Good Master? Kate was a quintessential tomboy, saved from complete ruination of her character, by being allowed to run free on a farm, though the story is set around 1912 in Hungary. (The substack writer might have grown up in Germany, or grown up here with German parents. I didn’t look too far into it.)

One thing that the stories I mentioned all have in common is that the tomboys ultimately learn to value the feminine side of things, one way or another, without giving up their other likings. This is especially interesting because in these stories incredible hard work is the norm. Laura, and Caddie, and Kate were working harder than Ms. Substack can probably imagine. The American West of the 1800’s was a hard place and so was Hungary, even before World War. Kate had to do a lot of men’s work when World War I took the farmhands to the war and killed them.

That leaves me thinking that a little humility about the past from Ms. Substack would be welcome. She sees that something has gone wrong, because tomboys are no longer allowed, but she doesn’t seem to understand how it happened; she credits feminism with giving her a free childhood, but she’d do better to realize that freedom came from the inventors of washers and dryers, reapers and harvesters, cars, trains, planes, etc. And from the Christian idea that men and women are both created in God’s image.

Having read one annoying essay, I continued strolling through the web, and found a very funny article from about eight years ago about a problem on the subways in Paris. (I was following a link from a commenter so I can’t reproduce how I got to this essay.) This guy is trying to explain how French solve problems in a way that is quite different from anything that he could have imagined. https://secretsofparis.com/french-culture/understanding-paris-the-cartesian-method/

The specific problem that Mr. American-in-Paris discusses, is an announcement on the Paris subways explaining in English, French, and, maybe Italian or Spanish, that a given stop goes to the airport. The German announcement says that the stop will take you to Disneyland. This causes German speakers to jump off the train in a great panic — when they absolutely should not. The writer spends several years watching this problem, and trying to contact authority to fix it. The essay is quite funny and I enjoyed it without taking its commentary on the French character too seriously.

Third, I am still preparing for the Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival this weekend, September 27 and 28.

Enough said!