partyinsidemyhead

Instead I will be reading and thinking about Ted Bundy’s victims. I wonder where their movies are. I wonder why their names aren’t raised.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Lynda Ann Healy, a 21 year old psychology major about to graduate that semester. Lynda worked with handicapped children and got up early every day to report on the skiing conditions for local radio.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Debra Kent, a 17 year old aspiring social worker who was known for always having change to feed parking meters for strangers.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Susan Curtis. Susan was only 15 years old and was riding her bike to church that day. She was a star on her high school track team.

In a world filled with kind, beautiful people, I wonder why we all know Ted Bundy’s name. I wonder if that isn’t giving him and people like him exactly what he wanted. And frankly I’m sick of hearing people talk about him.

I’d like to talk about 12 year olds Lynette Culver and Kimberly Leach, neither of whom turned 13 because Ted Bundy stole their innocence and their lives from them. Kimberly had just been elected first runner up “Valentine Queen” by her peers and never got to wear that pretty new dress. Do you think her parents still have that dress, hanging in the back of a closet? I bet they do. I bet her dad sits with it in his darkest moments. You ever thought about him when you hear the name Ted Bundy?

Let’s talk about 19 year old Susan Rancourt, who had a 4.0 GPA. 17 year old Laura Aime. 18 year old Georgeann Hawkins. 23 year old Janice Ott. 26 year old Nancy Wilcox. 23 year old Caryn Campbell. 17 year old Melissa Smith. 19 year old Donna Manson, who was an excellent flute player and by all accounts a bit of a goth. 20 year old Kathy Parks. 22 year old Brenda Ball. 20 year old Lisa Levy. 21 year old Margaret Bowman. 25 year old Denise Oliverson, who had just gotten into a spat with her new husband and had gone for a walk to clear her mind. Denise weighed 105 pounds. She was bound, gagged, raped, mutilated and thrown from a fast moving car. Have you ever considered what HIS life has been like since that day? How many hours of his life do you think have been spent on the floor, clutching the ring he had given her, apologizing into thin air?

These stories are real. These people are REAL.

I get that Ted Bundy was handsome and his eyes were very blue but please. Please stop glamorizing him like this. He ended and ruined lives. Nothing about him is cool or worthy of emulation. Ted Bundy raped, tortured, mutilated and strangled over 30 females, including 12 year old girls. None of his victims weighed more than 115 pounds.

Ted Bundy was a pathetic man.

Emulate Lynda. Emulate Debra. Raise their names and their voices to those around you. Honor them. They were very real people with promising lives and futures stretched ahead of them, stolen.

Please don’t elevate or whitewash this kind of rampant violence against women. I assure you the world is harsh enough for us without a new generation thinking Ted Bundy is a cool, fascinating guy.

Thanks.

The backflip is a hard and obviously dangerous move to do on ice, the real controversy with it is actually the landing. Before Surya Bonaly there were three other dudes to have done it but landing it on two feet, while she landed hers on one. (Here’s generally some info on backflips in ice skating)

During the 1998 Olympics Bonaly was competing after she had surgery due to an achilles injury knowing this is probably her last competition, she messed up her routine and realized she wouldn’t be able to win so she just kind of went fuck it and went for it and did the backflip. The rule was that all jumps must land on one foot which included the backflip (since it was done on two), but Bonaly landed it on one, which was technically legal although they still didn’t count it. She ended her performance with her back towards the judges, facing the audience, while it’s accepted to face the judges. It was kind of her way of saying this was for you to her fans and fuck towards the judges. She’s the first and only Olympic female skater to have done the backflip landing it on one foot.

Surya did face racism throughout her career. Her non-typical and athletic figure and her fast skating with a lot of jumps didn’t sit well with judges.

Bonaly originally did both ice skating and gymnastics, later on giving up gymnastics so she could focus on figure skating. At the time (although probably still now) the ideal female performers were pretty, gracious and artistic, but Bonaly was fast, more athletic, she didn’t have a typical figure skater body and her performance was closer to gymnastics with a lot of jumps so she was usually rated lower on artistry.

She caused a big controversy during 1994 World Championship when she finished second after Yuka Sato (Japan). She thought she deserved better and got upset and protested by refusing to stand on the podium and took off her medal, which of course people didn’t like and the media painted her as angry and with an attitude rather then an upset and disappointed teenager. If you watch the ceremony and the short interview after it’s actually pretty heartbreaking seeing how upset she was.

$7.25 x 40 hour full time work week: $290

$290 x 4 weeks per month: $1,160

That weekly check comes to, according to you, 290. Most places DO NOT pay for your half hour lunch that is required by law. So your beginning number was wrong. $7.25 x 7.5 hours a day x 5 days a week only gets you $271.88.  Most people in America get paid bi-weekly, so let’s double it to get the budget. $543.75. That’s GROSS, not NET. Out of that comes anywhere between 10% and 15% taxes depending on state so we’ll low ball it at 10%. Automatically down to $489.38 a pay check. Now health insurance. Usually anywhere from 70-100 a pay check for the cheapest plans. Again, we’ll low ball and go $70. So now we have $419.39 a paycheck. x 2  = $839. 

Eight hundred thirty nine dollars. A MONTH.

But again, you seem to think that’s fair. So let’s proceed. You say rent is $500? Okay. This person now has $339 left to buy groceries for the whole month, pay utilities, car payment, car insurance, and gas money to get to work. 

Those are the bare needs. You have to eat. You have to pay for heat, water, garbage removal, gas and or electricity because apartments do not always include things and rarely all of the above. Most cities in America do not have public transportation. Mine doesn’t despite the fact that our population is over 15,000 people, not counting a taxi. If you have a car, you have to pay that. If you have a car, legally you have to have car insurance. You have to pay that. You have to have gas in that car to get to work to make that money.

Now if you can tell me you can get all of that out of $339 you’re lying.

You are so focused on rent that you aren’t thinking about everything else people have to pay for. Rent was an example. This is a breakdown of the budget you gave me and it’s not possible to live off that in 2017 America. 

And BECAUSE this person makes over $800 a month, they probably won’t qualify for financial aid or food stamps. $800 is the line in my state where they won’t help you. No food stamps, financial aid, or government housing if you make more than $800 a month. 

we have the technology to have unlimited solar energy and we don’t use it

we have the technology to turn the Sahara desert into farm land and we don’t use it

“The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy. Salt dissolves very easily in water, forming strong chemical bonds, and those bonds are difficult to break.”

“There are environmental costs of desalination, as well. Sea life can get sucked into desalination plants, killing small ocean creatures like baby fish and plankton, upsetting the food chain. Also, there’s the problem of what to do with the separated salt, which is left over as a very concentrated brine. Pumping this supersalty water back into the ocean can harm local aquatic life. ”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-our-drinking-water-from-the-ocean/