monkeys and ponies

I love Marathon Monday. I love that people from all over the world come to Boston to do what feels to me like the completely absurd but admirable pursuit of running 26.2 miles, something I know I could never do. (Longest run: 2.25 miles.) I love watching the marathon at home, because I am just so damned impressed people can do this at all. The marathon coincides with when spring finally starts to hit Boston, and the city and suburbs always turn out in force to welcome and cheer on the runners.

( trigger warning for the rest of this, just in case )

My niece's fifth birthday was today, but since the family-only party isn't until next week, I spent some time today looking for a birthday card. I know that the children's birthday card selection is probably always going to be dominated by licensed cartoon characters; I find the level of commercialism slightly distasteful, but it doesn't surprise me.

What does tick me off, though again, I'm not surprised by this little issue, is how highly gendered the card selection is. The girls' cards are pink to a fault, and covered with glittery princesses. The boys' are blue and green and have robots and superheroes. This makes me fairly cranky, since I was a girl who had a much-loved Tinkerbell figurine from Disneyworld and a slot car set, and I know my niece is being raised by parents who have no problems with her wearing a tiara and pink tutu while she talks about how much she likes Spider-Man.

But what finally made me stomp out of the card section today was seeing the dinosaur-themed cards were all for boys. What child doesn't like dinosaurs? But no, they're for boys only. RAGE.

However, after I had a brief discussion on Twitter with a few other equally outraged folks, columbina took one of their ideas and ran with it. Thus, the birthday card my niece will see next week has her in a princess costume riding a velociraptor. As my sister just said to me on Twitter: "If anybody could ride a velociraptor, I predict my daughter will be it."

Screw you, card industry. Dinosaur-riding princesses of the world, unite!

I know several people on my flist are scientists, researchers, or generally interested in science research, and since a few of you may not have heard yet about the fan fiction survey, consider this an object lesson in Doing It Wrong. Seriously, how do you get to the point of having a PhD in a scientific field and not realize that you can't change the questions in the middle of the survey without affecting your data? (And that's the least of the problems with this little project – it's just one of the most obvious points of Science Fail.)

The survey is finally down while the researchers "digest all this great feedback." Personally, I agree with the anonmeme theory that this is subtle code for "BRB, BU IRB SMACKING OUR ASSES, AND NOT IN THE GOOD WAY YOU FOLKS WRITE ABOUT."

I have just spent nearly an hour on the phone with my sister trying to determine our flight dates and hotel possibilities for the London trip. Virgin Atlantic is having a big sale, so we thought, what the hell, we'll book our flights tonight if we can find good pricing.

"Premium Economy," as in, "slightly roomier cattle-car," is $690 round-trip. Sweet! And then you add the $460 of taxes and fees on top of that.

Allow me to repeat that: an additional $460 in taxes and fees, or 2/3 the cost of the ticket.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO.

We wisely abandoned our plan to buy tickets tonight and are instead going to start looking at package deals, since you can now start booking for the early fall. We may end up having to fly economy after all, but such is life. My willingness and ability to splurge on this trip ends somewhere around the point where I have to nearly pay for an entire second ticket to get where I'm going.