hand me my shovel, i'm going in!

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

I took the cargo ops class at school but my teacher explained that it doesn't give a certification and I'd only be okay for ship's crane and the school forklifts. she said I could take an online exam and get my cert. I paid 60 bucks.

I'm googling and I'm seeing a lot of resources saying that the online programs cover the classroom part of the exam but not the in person practical aspect.

29 CFR 1910.178 (l)(2)(ii)

oh! the space needle is a cute mascot base for seattle’s MLB team! i wonder how they managed to communicate that in a big foam costume?

oh

oh

it’s run by a fascist

it’s been trending further right for years

it needs serious reform

things you can’t say about the USA:

it’s unique in any of the above mentioned issues

it’s the most right wing or conservative place on earth

Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.

Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.

Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but that’s a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.

The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer – which I’ll be real is probably contributing to people thinking it’s old-fashioned and white, because it’s easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)

Here’s Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather – he’s performing a variation of his famous “stair dance” in parts of this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM

Here’s probably the most widely famous version of the “stair dance”, from The Little Colonel:

There’ve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years – see, for example, everyone’s favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:

… but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and it’s weird to me that people don’t know that.

Have a scene from Tap (1989).

and this from 2014-ish:

And if you are saying, well, I never heard of this guy, I guess today you are going to learn about this guy. But I bet you know THIS guy:

Mumble’s dance is choreographed by, and mo-capped from, Savion Glover.

This guy. This guy is SKILLED, ok? He’s in his 50s now; he’s been a professional tapper for over FORTY YEARS – he made his Broadway debut at age 11. He’s in that movie, Tap, that I linked a clip from above. Sometimes his tap seems a little old-fashioned – other times it is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. This is intentional – he’s paying tribute to his teachers and tappers of the past by learning and performing their signature moves, but also he’s got his own style.

It is absolutely worth going through whatever you can find on YouTube. Look for “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk” – he was Tony nominated for the choreo & his performances in this musical. (The MDA telethon performance above is an excerpt – he did these for several years on the telethon.)

I like this one, because you can watch modern African-American tap alongside modern-traditional Irish dance and you can see that these are related, but distinct, art forms. They share a common ancestor, but they’re also so different. Right around 4 minutes, Colin Dunne (the man in the cover image below) and Savion Glover start dancing together, trading off, and it’s AMAZING.

Sidenote, if anyone ever hears of a revival of “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk,” please tell me, I want to see it liiiiiiive.

Let’s finish off with Glover’s special guest performance at the Stockholm International Tap Dance Festival last year: