Yep. Same story in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Not that I am gay, but it’s no wonder it took my youngest brother until the early 2000’s to come out.
I’d also say in grade school, I never got the impression that my classmates fully (or even at all) understood the stuff they were hearing from the adults in their life. Joking about gay bashing, all the slurs for gays, various races (mostly black folks, but jewish people too). Kids just repeat stuff they hear from adults, at least that’s how it starts.
This is also very true. I don’t believe there was anything malicious or truly homophobic from kids playing smear the queer, but it was from a culture that didn’t see anything wrong with making ‘queer’ the thing to ‘smear’. Seems like a lot of adults simply never grow out of repeating things like that and taking it for granted that such-and-such race or creed or type of person is inherently wrong and bad.
“odd man out” or “Billy Parker is a faggot let’s all fucking punch his dumb face and kick him in the nuts”
The way it was played when I was a kid, the pack just decided someone was a queer and chase them down. Generally no blood was drawn, but there was plenty of kicking and getting hit.
yes, exactly. i didn’t know i would grow up to be an out, gay man, that’s for sure – but at the time all i knew was that i was different, and kids are like sharks with blood in the water when there’s a kid who’s “different” somehow. god, i feared that game as much as i feared team sports and dodgeball in gym class…
That was exactly my experience with the game in the mid-70s. I don’t doubt that the name of the game was intended to be horrible. But we were completely ignorant of that. All we knew was that’s what the game was called. I really liked that game, too.
Canola is a cultivar of rapeseed that is selectively bred to have oily, mild-tasting seeds.
A different cultivar of rapeseed whose seeds you may be familiar with is mustard - bred to have oily, strong-tasting seeds.
Other cultivars are bred for culinary use of their leaves - su choy, Siberian kale, Japanese red mustard, mizuna, and others.
Rutabaga aka Swedish turnip is a rapeseed cultivar bred for culinary use of its root.
Incidentally, there’s lots of canola agriculture near us, such that any time grass is ripped up for construction, canola comes up among the weeds. I often pick a few leaves on my way to work, to add to my sandwich (particularly if I forgot to pick some greens from the garden at home). The greens are kind of cabbagey / broccoli-ey, with a bit more mustardy zip.
Not sure I’d want a diet high in mustard oil either, but that’s neither here nor there. The more fundamental point behind my heuristic is that – taking it as given that one will consume a relatively high amount of food oil – that it should come from a food where you might reasonably consume a high amount of that food’s oil just by eating the food itself. The poison is in the dose, and (evolutionary biology handwaving aside) the human body is acclimated to high doses of only the oiliest, foodiest food oils. It’s high doses of other oils (either as the food gets less oily or less “foody”) that I’m suspicious of.
Maybe a more practical heuristic is something like, imagine adding 1 tablespoon of oil to a dish. How many peanuts would I have to eat to consume 1 tbsp of its oil? How many olives? How much corn? How much mustard? If the answer to that question is ridiculous, it makes sense (to me) to avoid that oil.
Here’s Julia Child talking about McDonalds fries, and how they got ruined by nutritionists. Personally I think you feel more sated with fries fried in Animal Fats. It seems to turn on the “That’s enough I’m full” signal in your body. Something that doesn’t sell more fries.
I wonder, too. When I was a kid, we NEVER played soccer, for example, but now, kids do, organized or not. Soccer is a sport where you run around constantly. Maybe that makes up the difference? Swimming? We almost never went swimming.
No that’s not true. Queer was used a derogatory term against homosexual since the late 1900 century.
I’m not sure they played dodgeball in Victorian times.
This is a typical primitive olive oil press (known as a ‘Gethsemane’ - as in the “Garden of Gethsemane” which is at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem). It’s important to get the weight of the stones right - heavy enough to squish the olives but not so heavy it crushes the pits.
Humans have used oils from what you call “less oily” foods for hundreds and hundreds of years. Grapeseed oil, for example, is a great way to use the leftover seeds from winemaking. Soybeans have been used for oil for thousands of years. These aren’t modern extractions of strange substances to be suspicious of. I appreciate that you’ve invented your own heuristic scale for edible oil, because it’s a fascinating work of fiction, but it’s not really practical, useful, or truthful.
Cf. much handwaving and hedging in my previous posts. All’s I’m saying is that I prefer my food to be food. In a nutshell, I think a reasonable guideline (for my own wacky purposes) is that the proportion of oils in my diet should be similar to the proportion of (food * oil content of that food) in my diet.
The game was invented when “queer” meant “odd” or “strange”, not homosexual.
Yeeeeaaah, that’s not true at all. Sorry. The game’s name was always absolutely meant as a slur. Maybe you didn’t quite grasp it as a child. Kudos. But it wasn’t “just a game” either. Usually the smaller or less popular kids were “the queer” that bullied in other ways too.
