Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: SCOTUS Will Be Perfect When We Get Rid Of All The Men

• Oh look, it's Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg being a super-bad badass and crushing the patriarchy again. No, she didn't do some gay-marrying this weekend, as she is wont to do. No, she didn't kick her own heart's ass while pumping iron in the gym. As she is also wont to do.
  [contextly_sidebar id="BPga6ZHwNnawxSTAc6tc6FKbD3u0dXfD"]This time she just gave a little talk at Georgetown University about how hard it used to be "in the ancient days" for lady lawyers because it was a male-dominated profession, and males, well, they were men.

  In those days, in the Southern District, most judges wouldn’t hire women. In the U.S. attorney’s office, women were strictly forbidden in the Criminal Division. There was one woman in the Civil Division. And the excuse for not hiring women in the Criminal Division was they have to deal with all these tough types, and women aren’t up to that. And I was amazed. I said, have you seen the lawyers at legal aid who are representing these tough types? They’re all women. People ask me sometimes, when — when do you think it will it be enough? When will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is when there are nine.

  
  BOOM. And that is why Notorious RBG is notorious. And The Best. And she will sit on that Supreme Court bench just as long as she wants to, thank you very much. Oh, and P.S.:

  If I had any talent in the world, any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva.

• The most absurdly unaffordable city in America is even more absurdly unaffordable now:

  According to real estate listings site Zumper , the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco jumped to $3,410 last month, up 0.6 percent from December. That’s about $400 more than the median one-bedroom in New York, which San Francisco surpassed in rent prices for the first time last September.

  Remember, San Francisco's minimum wage is a whopping $11.05 an hour. Which means that just to pay rent, foregoing all other luxuries like food and electricity and the bus pass to get you to your job and paying your taxes and stuff like that, you'd only have to work about 77 hours a week. Great deal.

• Do you have health insurance through Anthem? Because hackers probably just stole all of your personal information:

  Anthem, which offers several Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans across the country, said the database that was breached included names, Social Security numbers, birthdays, addresses, email and employment information for as many as 80 million people, including some of its own employees. That is what you call the “keys to the kingdom,” security experts said.

  If it's happened to you, you're already kind of screwed, but here's Anthem's attempt to fix it:

  Anthem created a website, www.AnthemFacts.com, and a toll-free number, 1-877-263-7995, to respond to questions. The company said it would provide free identity repair services and credit monitoring for up to a year.

• Are you the kind of person who really enjoys debates about proper grammar? If so, this thread is for you:

  I feel as though there must be a word for that thing where people getreally fucking madabout how wrong prescriptivists are.

• Our friends at Happy Nice Time People have some news for you teevee binge-watchers out there, which is all of us, isn't it?

  Why are you so sad and lonely all the time? Is it because you haven’t accepted Christ into your heart and produced for him a quiver full of children? Is it because you’re stuck in Folsum Prison while the world moves on without you as symbolized by a train to San Antonio? No, of course not! It’s because of television!

  Except not. Go read the whole to find out why.

• Um, this is fascinating:

  Every language has filler words that speakers use in nervous moments or to buy time while thinking. Two of the most common of these in English are “uh” and “um.” They might seem interchangeable, but data show that their usage break down across surprising geographic lines. Hmm. [...] Geography is not the only possible answer to the “um” versus “uh” mystery. Earlier research by [linguist Mark] Liberman suggests that women use “um” more often than men. Also, using these in writing is much different than using them in, uh, person. People on Twitter, for example, often use it to express awkwardness or condescension.

•  Dads, right? 

  At 12, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus method — find it and land on it — using one finger on his left hand and two fingers on his right. Dad typed swiftly and with great passion. In this fashion, he eventually wrote and published more than 400 books. Two were science fiction and 24 were fantasy, written under his own name; the rest were pornography, using 17 pseudonyms. In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust — not because of the content, but because of how poorly they were written. He hurled a book across the room and told her he could do better. Mom suggested he do so. According to her, the tipping point for Dad’s full commitment to porn, five years later, was my orthodontic needs. When I was a kid, my teeth were a terrible mess: overlapping, crooked and protruding like fangs. Mom wanted to work part time and pay for braces. Dad suggested that if he quit his job as a salesman and she typed all his final drafts, they could finance my dental care. Over cocktails in the woods of eastern Kentucky, they formed a partnership to mass-produce porn.

[Image via Notorious RBG ]