TIL: Today I Learned

[Valka D'Ur]

Today I learned about the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option.

Spoiler :

But I would email 500 miles
And I would email 500 more
Just to be the man who emails a thousand miles
Just to fall down at your door...

That was fun, but I prefer the Doctor Who version:

Spoiler :

 

[Birdjaguar]

That song is so excellent that all renditions of it worth noting. Infact the song deserves at one more showing. Their debut on Letterman in 1989.


Link to video.

 

[Josu]

Today I accidentally had a glance to a powerpoint that my manager is preparing to offer a service to a big customer.
TIL that now I am Deputy Team Leader.
Nobody has told me so.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Surprise!

I guess this is a vote of confidence in your abilities (unless you were the leader and this is a demotion).

 

[Josu]

I am not the leader, I don't have a clear position, I am the team's "one-man band"

I have no doubt that this is a vote of confidence. My manager has always shown confidence in my abilities, has always told what he expects from me, until this situation.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Dude I lived in one of those in southern Illinois. They still had the 6:00pm siren... Parents there would take their kids to the local lynching tree to warn them not to date outside their race and the ugly directness of the racism was a real shock to me coming from the south of all places. They are nastier in the rural and suburban Midwest on race issues than anywhere else I've lived.

I can believe there was a siren....but not for the reason you state. Many had a siren at one or more times. noon (lunch), six (end of workday), and 10 pm (curfew). Just happened to drive through my old town last week at noon and heard the siren from the old creamery that I thought closed down years ago (noon was the only time we had a siren).

Did you actually hear parents telling their kids this, or is this what you were told by others. Sounds like a fictitious scene out of a movie for it to really happen in 2010 (1950 would be far more realistic), or was one extremist family, not a 'common event for most families', even in Missouri.

http://m.startribune.com/towns-with-daily-sirens-balance-nostalgia-nuisance/288938591/

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Did you actually hear parents telling their kids this, or is this what you were told by others.

Yes absolutely they still told their kids about it! I listened to them do it first hand and was explained by multiple people what the siren meant. However, I do not think there was any formal prohibitions on the books against black people anymore. There was a curfew for teens, but any formal racist rules had been repealed. But the town was still overwhelmingly racist and the parents went out of their way to indoctrinate their kids that way. My father in law is the one who took my wife to the local lynching tree to warn her off dating blacks. That attitude and approach is not uncommon there.

Formally, the siren was just to signal 6pm these days. Informally, everyone knew the history and worked to pass on that legacy of hate.

It's honestly a testament to my wife's character she came out of that background emphatically anti-racist. I am too, but I had the luxury of being raised by parents that went out of their way to teach me African American history and lecture me on the evils of racism. I was profoundly lucky in that way.

Sorry if you don't believe this. I don't know what else to say about it to convince you this sort of thing is very much alive and in my travels, I have seen this kind of racism in two different places I've lived in the Midwest.

Edit:
This reminds me of a conversation I had with some locals when I first moved to the Midwest where I had to explain that in the South, forced busing/integration is still very much a thing and not something that only lives in the history books about the 1950's. For a single country, the US has a ton of distinct cultures and legal heritages.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Today I accidentally had a glance to a powerpoint that my manager is preparing to offer a service to a big customer.
TIL that now I am Deputy Team Leader.
Nobody has told me so.

A lot of businesses will 'promote' individuals into a specific role only on paper in order to satisfy customer requirements or expectations. It doesn't necessarily mean that anything will change vis a vis your work role and responsibilities. But I hope you do get a formal promotion if you want that!

 

[Farm Boy]

I can believe there was a siren....but not for the reason you state. Many had a siren at one or more times. noon (lunch), six (end of workday), and 10 pm (curfew). Just happened to drive through my old town last week at noon and heard the siren from the old creamery that I thought closed down years ago (noon was the only time we had a siren).

Goes off at noon as the daily test. Sirens are the tornado warning system. Like they're really super helpful even in regional cities of size, though theirs tend to be a little more complicated than in the small towns and villages. I suppose the small towns desperation blow them when the volunteer EMTs and firemen are slow responding to a call. I hate, hate, hate when it goes off for minutes at a time and the weather is good. Somebody is probably dying in a ditch while the EMT that drives is racing home from school with their kid. Or they're ditching out of senior social studies.

What other plausible reason is there for the maintenance of the expense?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Goes off at noon as the daily test.

They do those tests separately on a weekly basis. There is still a 6pm siren that used to dual-function as a warning to blacks. People still refer to it as such even if sundown laws are off the books now.

The racist character of the siren was explained to me by multiple people in town and I witnessed parents indoctrinate their kids in hate. Not just my in-laws either! I saw it with non-relatives. People were open about their racism in the Midwest in a way that is not common in the South. That's not to say racism in the South doesn't exist and is never open, just that it has a different character in the Midwest and honestly I think it's nastier there when present.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Why is the midwest in the north east? Continental drift?

 

[Bamspeedy]

It's one thing to say racism is worse in some regions of the country than others, it's another thing to imply that 'worshipping around a lynching tree' is common practice in that region. Small towns and racists aren't immune from creating and retelling their own 'urban legends'. What originally could have been a work whistle, could have been explained years later as used for some other purpose. It's not often 'sundown' happens at exactly 6PM.
If what you say is all true, that's the exception, not the norm.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Why is the midwest in the north east? Continental drift?

While looking up what states were part of the regions, I found this:

As European settlement in the U.S. expanded westward through the centuries, the meaning of the term the West changed. Before about 1800, the crest of the Appalachian Mountains was seen as the western frontier. The frontier moved westward and eventually the lands west of the Mississippi River were considered the West.[2]

Maybe it's something to do with that.

 

[Farm Boy]

It's one thing to say racism is worse in some regions of the country than others, it's another thing to imply that 'worshipping around a lynching tree' is common practice in that region. Small towns and racists aren't immune from creating and retelling their own 'urban legends'. What originally could have been a work whistle, could have been explained years later as used for some other purpose. It's not often 'sundown' happens at exactly 6PM.
If what you say is all true, that's the exception, not the norm.

What the everloving ****?

Why is the midwest in the north east? Continental drift?

While looking up what states were part of the regions, I found this:

As European settlement in the U.S. expanded westward through the centuries, the meaning of the term the West changed. Before about 1800, the crest of the Appalachian Mountains was seen as the western frontier. The frontier moved westward and eventually the lands west of the Mississippi River were considered the West.[2]

Maybe it's something to do with that.

Parts of it are Midwestern because they were admitted under the Northwest Ordinance, no? Like that divided the territories down into states, then counties, then townships and whatnot.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

It's one thing to say racism is worse in some regions of the country than others, it's another thing to imply that 'worshipping around a lynching tree' is common practice in that region. Small towns and racists aren't immune from creating and retelling their own 'urban legends'. What originally could have been a work whistle, could have been explained years later as used for some other purpose. It's not often 'sundown' happens at exactly 6PM.
If what you say is all true, that's the exception, not the norm.

The other racist towns I lived in did not have lynching trees but had the same character of racism. I'm not claiming the example of a lynching tree and sundown whistles themselves is widespread, but the racism in the rural and suburban Midwest is widespread.

What the everloving ****?

The thing about blocking people is that you're not allowed to reference it by way of expressing outrage at what someone else is quoting. You do this regularly. Usually in the process of the other person trying to clarify with you, you end up saying you're blocking me as well, which is also disallowed. Obviously I'm preempting it in this instance but this is a pattern.

Either go all-in and unblock me or stop shadow debating me.

 

[Bamspeedy]

I don't doubt there are racists, of course there is. Preaching to their kids about the 'dangers of dating a colored person', in a public space no less, is something I've never witnessed in rural, SW Wisconsin, if that counts as 'midwest'.
I grew up in a town of 750 in the 80s. Sure, many parents would not like their children dating blacks, so they are racists in that way, but the only parents I could see publicly stating 'the dangers' was the ultra-religious farmer family who lived near me. They didn't allow their kids to participate in Halloween. 2 of those 3 kids married black people.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The majority of the population centers in North America are in the East and the region of the Midwest is more or less geographically in the middle of the continent and to the west of the population centers so it makes sense to me that it's the Midwest.

Preaching to their kids about the 'dangers of dating a colored person', in a public space no less, is something I've never witnessed in rural, SW Wisconsin, if that counts as 'midwest'.

Those instances were not public. I was friends and/or extended family with the people that were saying and doing those indoctrination things. The lynching tree itself was not something the father in law told me directly either (my wife told me what he said) but I was around when he lectured everyone on racist stuff. I would listen to other parents explaining racist stuff to their kids in their homes as well.

The open racism was the stuff like the Quiznos where an interracial couple got yelled at for existing and forced to leave, the shouts and hollers that people of color would get for walking down the street, and how openly people would express racial animus at work or in public. At various jobs I had to threaten to get HR involved just to get my coworkers to stop dropping the N-word in every other sentence. This was white guys saying it in racist context out loud. They used the word 10x more than my African American coworkers, who never used it derogatorily as the whites did.

Then you layer on housing discrimination, schooling discrimination and police issues and it was a mess. There is a reason Ferguson happened down the road from where I once lived and worked in the Midwest and there was not an equivalent in the Southern towns I lived in.

But it's not the case that people would stop a rando on the street and tell them about the lynching tree. Well, actually they might if the rando was a person of color as a way of intimidating them. But I would consider that extreme even for where I lived.

For reference, all of these examples are from 2006 - 2016 in two different states (Illinois and Missouri). It's not ancient history and I don't think the racism was a unique feature of the various towns I lived in in these states.

 

[Farm Boy]

So you can imagine some dude having said that in public, a dude who a majority of his children formed mixed families? And in some book somewhere it said tornado sirens are lynching worship. This sounds like some New York ******* tripping on shrooms and lost in a park.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

mAYBE THIS DISCUSSION WOULD BE GOOD FOR A NEW THREAD? jUST A SUGGESTION

EDIT: Crap, I hit the caps-lock.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

So you can imagine some dude having said that in public, a dude who a majority of his children formed mixed families? And in some book somewhere it said tornado sirens are lynching worship. This sounds like some New York ******* tripping on shrooms and lost in a park.

No it sounds like where I lived Farm Boy. You and I were only ~5 hours apart by road and I reckon the culture of rural southern Illinois is exactly the same a rural northern Illinois. We had the Chicago-hate in common at least! Across the river in rural Missouri a few hours west was largely the same as rural Illinois in my lived experience. In all cases the number of confederate bumper stickers (and actual flags!) were constant and on par with the South.