it’s an ideal height distribution tbh because then whenever bruce, as an adult, is talking about how larger-than-life his father was everyone just feels bittersweet about it because the last time he saw his father he was a tiny boy and it just seems like, “oh, bruce’s memory of his father is always trapped in this time when his dad seemed like a giant”
but no, that has nothing to do with it, bruce is being completely factually correct and thomas wayne was enormous
“I assume your dad’s going to be the one that looks like you,” Clark said, adjusting his glasses as he scanned the crowd beneath the mezzanine.
“Just look for the biggest guy here,” Bruce said flatly.
Clark fought a smile.
“What.”
“Nothing! Nothing.”
Bruce waited.
“It’s just—you know.”
Bruce said nothing.
“You haven’t seen him since you were twelve.”
“Correct.”
“You maybe weren’t the tallest kid.”
Bruce said nothing.
“I’m just going to look for the guy who looks like you, rather than going by relative size.”
“And you must be the fellows who were chit-chatting with my wife!” came a voice, booming and boisterous as arms were thrown around each of their shoulders. Clark jumped; Bruce flinched.
Thomas Wayne was a good two inches taller than Clark, who was himself an inch taller than Bruce. Thomas had a glass of champagne in his right hand, which he had not spilled on Clark. There was a ping-pong ball floating in it. He had a half-empty bottle of wine in his left hand, which he had not spilled on Bruce. Between the fingers of his left hand dangled a bag of red plastic cups, unopened.
No one in the ballroom was using a red plastic cup.
Thomas’ coat and the top buttons of his shirt were undone; his bowtie had not been a bow in quite some time.
“Martha wouldn’t tell me what exactly it is you were up to,” he said cheerfully, “which I can only assume means I’d hate it!” He paused, squinting at Clark. “Oh, she must have loved you.” He gave Clark a proper once-over, down to his shoes and back up again. “Were you raised on a farm or what?”
“Why does everyone keep asking—”
“Anyway,” Thomas continued, somehow managing to pound them both on the back as he disengaged despite still having his hands full. “You two go on ahead and keep not telling me what you’re doing, if you need me I’m heading downstairs to set up a game of wine pong. It’s like beer pong, but if you’re doing it right it costs several thousand dollars! And it’s good for your heart! I’d know. I’m a doctor.”
He downed his glass of champagne and caught the ball in his teeth. He then somehow managed to arrange the items in his hands such that he could shoot them both fingerguns, clicking around the ball and waggling his eyebrows.
They watched as he slid sideways down the banister.
“I apologize for doubting your memory,” Clark said finally.
“Hm.”
“I feel like this explains a lot about your sense of humor.”
“I’m not convinced that it does.”
“… does he look how you remember?” Clark ventured.
“Usually I remember the way he looked one specific summer when I was a kid,” Bruce said thoughtfully.
Clark softened, almost reached out to put a hand on his shoulder. Then he narrowed his eyes. “No.”
“Hm?”
“I know what you’re doing, and we’re not doing it.”
“You asked.”
“I recognize that look.”
“This is just what my face looks like.”
“You’re going to make me think we’re having a moment so I let my guard down for the punchline,” Clark said, “and you’re not going to say it like it’s a punchline, so when I laugh, I look like an asshole.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not allowed to laugh about this. You know I’m not.”
They were silent, the sounds of the party surrounding them from below.
“He had a horrible moustache,” Bruce said.
Clark pressed his knuckles to his mouth.
“I think my subconscious is trying to make death seem like a mercy.”
Clark made a muffled and hideous noise.
“Clark,” Diana scolded, and they turned to see her frowning as she approached. “This is a very difficult mission for Bruce, you mustn’t laugh.”
Clark threw up his hands in disgust.
“Or—wait.” Diana looked between them. “Was he doing it again?”
Clark nodded, lips pressed into a thin line.
“I think I remember this party,” Bruce said suddenly, looking out at the ballroom.
“What?” Clark and Diana asked simultaneously.
“It’s the one where that senator got thrown out of a window.” He pointed toward a commotion downstairs.
“What is your father doing?” Diana asked, leaning over a railing.
There was a crash of shattering glass, a series of screams, and scattered applause.
And he’ll insist he’ll be fine, “cause he’s a doctor” ?
Thomas raised an eyebrow with a level of disdain achievable only by those born to great wealth, and not at all befitting a man in the middle of using a meat cleaver to cut the nozzle off a garden hose. “Oh, I think I can handle it,” he scoffed. “I went to Yale.”
Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.
One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”
I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”
“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”
Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.
And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”
The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.
“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”
The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”
“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”
So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.
But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé – well.
Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.
What the whole world would look like.
Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time – more than nine times out of ten – CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.
If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.
(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)
Also, the custard pie has gravity on its side. Something falling from six feet up plus the height of the person dropping it (assuming they’re at the top of the stepladder), has a hell of a lot more force behind it than one that just sits there and does nothing.
Yes, I tend to take metaphors literally.
Which means you still TRY, you give it everything you have, because you might just make a difference, and this is where reblogging comes in, this is where quantum theory gets involved. How? Because small actions can have huge impact. Reblog that post you believe in, reach your followers, spread the word. THINK DR WHO. THINK THE LATEST EPISODE. THINK ROSA PARKS. One small act of resistance sparks change. One voice joins all the others until there are millions of voices all saying the same thing, until they have to be heard. If they are not there, then nothing will be done. So vote. Use your constitutional right to make a difference. If you don’t, then nothing will change. If you do, then things might change, they might not, but ask yourself, can you risk it? So, that person who just drops dead in front of you, are you going to ignore that person because the odds are against you succeeding at CPR? Or will you risk the chance that you could be in the 4% to bring them back?
To quote Gimli in LotR, “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”
if you’re american and coming to australia, I’m gonna go ahead and say that you should be 100 percent way more worried about being king hit by a dude named “dane” in a bintang singlet than any fucking spiders that exist here
what does this say in english
“Good sir, if you are a resident of the United States of America and coming to visit the sunny land of Australia, allow me to inform you that you should be rather more concerned about being sucker punched by a gentleman named ‘Dane’ who is likely to be seen wearing a wifebeater with a beer company logo on it than by any of the dangerous spiders that exist on this lovely continent”.
ok so what does it say in american
“You’re more likely to get sucker punched/cold-cocked by an asshole than you are to be bitten by a spider”.
thank you
Well rattle my spoons, that don’t make a lick of sense. Wot in tarnation does this hootenanny say?
“If ya mosey on by Australia, you best be fixin’ to get to some fisticuffs more’n checkin fer spiders.”
I just found out that they have thousands – thousands! – of Torah scrolls, which they then donate to other Evangelicals for financial reasons and political leverage. (In one case, they donated a 16th-century scroll to Liberty University. It was completely unfurled and directly handled in an auditorium. By untrained students.) Almost two thousand of them are sitting in an explicitly Evangelical museum full of supercessionist bullshit, and the text of the largest display talks about how they were “saved” from burial or the genizah.
Saved.
From proper Jewish ritual handling.
By Evangelical Xians.
Who then donate these things to other Evangelicals who mishandle them.
For money.
I… I think I’m going to cry.
I was just about to post this! I even got a little shout-out in the article. 🙂
The notion of “build[ing] a Christian museum on the backs of Jewish items” is, as I’ve come to understand in my research of the history of Judaica collecting, goes back several centuries to the origins of the modern museum itself. But it is particularly disturbing to see how this classically-supersessionist and fossilizing language (“God gave those people [Jews] a job, and they did that job well,” Steven Green explains, referring to the “job” of preserving the Torah text in identical copies so that evangelical Christians could prove the Bible’s unerring nature) is intertwined with corporate capitalism and greedy tax evasion. If only there was something in all those Torah scrolls on the subject…
Not okay. Not even a little.
It gets even more disgusting when you realize that the reason why they’re desecrating our most holy artifacts is because they’ve figured out how to use them to perpetrate tax fraud. This is how the scam works:
A congregation owns a Sefer Torah. It is worth many thousands of dollars.
A rabbi examines the Sefer Torah and discovers that it contains one or more flaws which render it no longer kosher and it must be retired from use. However, because a damaged Sefer Torah likely contains individual panels that are still in good condition it can be dismantled and combined with other damaged sifrei in order to produce a new kosher scroll. Those panels make the entire scroll worth a couple of thousand dollars.
The congregation offers the damaged sefer up for sale with the expectation that the buyer will use it to produce a new Sefer Torah with the undamaged panels while properly laying to rest any panels that can no longer be used. Somehow one of these assholes buys it.
Said asshole donates it to one of these museums.
The museum then ‘appraises’ the scroll as if it were a kosher Sefer Torah worth tens of thousands of dollars. After all, who’s to say it isn’t, amirite?!
Said asshole deducts tens of thousands of dollars off of their taxes when they only paid one or two thousand dollars to buy the scroll.
So there you have it. Not only is the Sefer Torah deprived a respectful burial but a low-income congregation somewhere is deprived a Sefer Torah that they are able to afford. All so that some rich Christian asshole can scam the federal government out of a few thousand dollars.
Reading this raised my blood pressure.
I’m BEYOND furious.
I live in spitting distance of liberty university, that evil community. We only have one synagogue, and a chavurah. Also only one Islamic Center. In a SEA of evangelical churches who hate us. Another nearby town only has one synagogue as well. My heart feels like it’s being torn to shreds. Any of these small congregations would gladly have bought or raised money for that non kosher Sefer Torah LU mistreated.
DarkestElemental616 