Recently in women's studies Category

So something, at least to my easily-amused mind happened to me lately. I wonder a little why I'm posting this, but so is my life.

[I haven't posted for a while. I've been playing with Tumblr a little bit, for one thing. Being a busy stay-at-home housewife (yes, I'm a dude) is another.]

So this last week, I got a 'commemorative issue' of TIME magazine. Definitely pretty, but when I reached for it to read, something was amiss.

Really amiss. Like 7% off the cover. Just not the price (which would have been less than I usually get with subscribing).

7% was snipped off the side of the cover.

(I have measurements of the missing portion, as well as all of the other photographs of interest from this magazine copy, for the curious.)

Which would make, if I ordered it based on the design in TIME, the Obama birth certificate mug kind of difficult to drink from...

... with a whole side of the mug missing, really hard to use...

... but at least the M&M's weren't destroyed, nor the birth control pills, though it was hard to read the context in which they were included in the issue.

I wasn't entirely sure about all of the issues about Obama and Christie visiting a storm shelter. nor was I about Representative Akin's views, though I did find out from other press sources.

If it were just small shorts that were cut off due to their distance from the margin, I guess things would have been funny. However, it became a comedic routine once I figured out whole parts of paragraphs of the cover article/story were missing.

As funny as I find it, it did make reading the cover story kind of disjointed, if not weird.

Ordinarily, I would not really worried, but this is kind of a really good issue that I would love to frame, being not far from a Michaels, at some stage. Maybe I should try my luck asking TIME for another one. I am kind of not sure, but we'll see.

[Cross-posted at http://ngeru.whare.electric.gen.nz/post/35766549244/reading-an-issue-of-time-with-7-off-everything.]

I recalled today that a while ago I mentioned that I was going to do a very bad imitation of the Big Mac Index seeing I haven't been scanning books for a little while. Well, to make the short story shorter, it was a fee comparison for marriage licences between Pennsylvania counties. In all the madness about moving, I forgot that I had this for over six months now lying on my computer's desktop. (It's like adding everything one browses to one's favourites and then forgetting where one put the important link to one's university calendar. Somewhat.)

It may well not be complete, and so on, so, yeah, but it's now uploaded.

The main reason this started my interest is that when I got married in Pennsylvania I was told that any county could issue a marriage licence valid for anywhere in the state. (As an aside, the licensed celebrant need not be domiciled in the county of issue or marriage either, I thought I was also told.) Now, of course one is almost certainly going to go to their nearest marriage clerk (which, for example, in Centre County is the Clerk of Orphans' Court and Register of Wills -- a dual elected position -- in Bellefonte, and in Allegheny County is some non-elected office).

Naturally, costs are going to vary by the cost of living (paying the clerks), cost of the office (the rent or whatever) and the volume of applicants (of both licences and certificates), so I'm not berating the counties that are most expensive, I want to make clear. This was just purely for interest.

The short points are the following, as of roughly June last year:

  • Allegheny County (Pittsburgh, and then some) and Philadelphia City at $75 and $80 respectively are the most 'expensive' counties.
  • The counties of Clearfield and Forest are the cheapest, with both charging $25.
  • If one is thinking long term, sealed copies of a marriage licence that are good for women taking their husband's name -- I never checked if a man could do it -- vary greatly as well. For example, Northampton County throws in a free certified copy after the used licence is returned, whereas to me it appears that Bucks County wants $20. (The married couples, at least in one county, get to keep an 'original' in the form of half of the licence that they keep, that said, but that's not replaceable, so a certified copy is always useful.)
  • Some counties have 'volume discounts' of sorts if one orders more than one sealed certificate at a time, in addition to the counties that bundle a free sealed certificate upon the celebrant filing the completed licence.
  • Some also ask for a stamped, self-addressed envelope, while others build the cost in to their fees.

The spreadsheet, to add a further warning to the disclaimers, is definitely out of date already; I get the feeling, for example, that the fee for the first sealed certificate is incorrect for Butler County. That said, I have no guarantees with my busy life nowadays that I will update the list, but I shall attempt to.

As of right now, http://ngeru.info/eUDaxI here at ibiblio is where you'll find the current June 2010 version of the spreadsheet. It's in Microsoft Excel .xlsx, because that's the easiest format for me to manipulate the data with (so no you-should-have-used-OpenOffice.org, please, which I would have used had it what I wanted). The undated .xlsx files are symlinks to the current file, in case I do upload this. [Update: I forgot about the Google Spreadsheets option, but loading the 'last update' symlink in read-only mode on Google Docs gets rid of basically all of the nice formatting from Excel, not to mention the column sorting that Excel does.]

Um, so, yeah. Enjoy!

So, apparently the White House's Apple App Store-listed app is rated 12+ (albeit in the United States version of the store) for the reason of 'Infrequent/Mild' references to or use of 'Realistic Violence[,]... Alcohol, Tobacco or Drug[s]'. Overall, I am rather amused by this! I doubt, however, such a government institution would be encouraging illegal drug use or underage alcohol use.

Seriously, I would have thought that such ratings would be thrown out for clearly educational apps such as something from the White House, like with nature documentaries in some countries (otherwise said documentaries like Nature would basically be rated for sex scenes). Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I support the US Government -- the White House in particular -- for making the app, but not the rating they got, presumably from Apple, for their efforts. Anyway, the obligatory screenshots (the first of which is also uploaded to Flickr for some reason):

So, here's the screen shot of the apparent, albeit possible madness. And you're probably not bothered enough to zoom in on the screen shot, so this is the requisite bit.

(There's almost certainly other bizarre examples in the iTunes store, mind, but this one seems rather odd to me.)

And, in other news, I'm looking at getting the 1986 report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System on PGDP fairly soon, as I now apparently have the clearances lined up for that with their copyright people.

It's a massacre!

| No Comments | No TrackBacks

Time for some alarmist titles, methinks. Well, first some disappointing news from my university, then something possibly a bit happier.

And after some more marital bliss-inspired absenses from tph, I wake up to discover that the 2009 papers catalogue for GEND at the teachers' college/university that I graduated from (twice, even) is basically empty. Really. Take a look. (Thanks, Kerry. She's a fellow GradDipArts graduate in GEND.) Trying to finish the undergraduate major might be amusing, let alone an honours year or graduate diploma. Sigh.

And in far more cheerful (possibly) news, Kiwibank now have a Visa debit card with prettier designs than Westpac New Zealand's offering -- and, at first look, cheaper fees, too, especially with regards to the foreign currency fee; 2% versus Westpac's 2.5% might well be worth it. Sigh. Again.

I wonder if I will qualify to receive a card...

Or even if it is worth it. I will have to think about it.

About this Archive

This page is an archive of recent entries in the women's studies category.

Section 27(1) is the previous category.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.