Of apostrophes and injustice...
On Friday morning I visited the DMV to apply for California state ID. It's almost as useful as a driver license but doesn't permit you to drive. However, they don't make you pass a test of skill to get it. Anyway, I'd made an appointment via the Web a couple of weeks ago and wanted to confirm it before I left home in the morning so I tried looking my appointment up on the Web by providing my full name and phone number but the system insisted that it couldn't find me. Frustrated, I called them and spoke to customer service rep. She asked me for my last name so I spelt it out for her but she stumbled after the 1st letter, having apparently never heard of an apostrophe before! This did not fill me with much confidence in the competence of DMV staff. After informing me that the DMV "didn't use apostrophes" she tried to look me up by last name (minus the apostrophe) and phone number but was unable to find me. I wasn't surprised. I told her that my appointment should be for 9 am that day and asked her to look it up by the time slot. After a few moments she discovered that my last name had been recorded by the system as simply "D", dropping the apostrophe and everything that followed! I'm certainly unimpressed with the degree of care taken by the DMV to handle such exceptional cases in their online data-processing code.
Every year Stanford puts on a production of the Vagina Monologues to raise money for, among other things, the "comfort women" who were forced to serve as sex slaves under inhumane conditions by the Japanese government during WW2 and continue to be denied so much as an apology for this horrible mistreatment by the current government of Japan. I'd heard about the deplorable treatment meted out to Canadians of Japanese descent during the war by the Canadian government but I see now that both sides have their respective skeletons. But the Canadian government eventually did issue a formal apology for their misdeeds so there may be hope yet that their Japanese counterparts will come around too. The monologues were both educational and entertaining for the most part although they did betray glimmers of misandry at a few points.
Every year Stanford puts on a production of the Vagina Monologues to raise money for, among other things, the "comfort women" who were forced to serve as sex slaves under inhumane conditions by the Japanese government during WW2 and continue to be denied so much as an apology for this horrible mistreatment by the current government of Japan. I'd heard about the deplorable treatment meted out to Canadians of Japanese descent during the war by the Canadian government but I see now that both sides have their respective skeletons. But the Canadian government eventually did issue a formal apology for their misdeeds so there may be hope yet that their Japanese counterparts will come around too. The monologues were both educational and entertaining for the most part although they did betray glimmers of misandry at a few points.