Unmanly men are offended by the slogan selected by organizers of Bolder Boulder, a ten kilometer run held annually since 1979.

The Daily Camera reports:

Out Boulder, an LGBTQ advocacy group, has launched an online petition seeking to pressure organizers of the Bolder Boulder to drop their slogan “Sea Level is for Sissies” because they say the word “sissies” is derogatory.

But race organizers say they have no plans to retire the slogan.

The Change.org petition was posted Wednesday by Out Boulder’s executive director, Mardi Moore, and by the evening it had 25 signatures.

“The word is used to (demean) traits that are problematically and stereotypically associated with women,” the petition reads. “Traits that all genders have but are not valued because they are associated with women. … All genders express emotions and they should be embraced when they do.

“It’s past due that the Bolder Boulder retire this slogan. Make your voice heard.”

Moore said the slogan is “harmful” and leads to further misunderstanding about gender.

“This has been a longstanding issue for us in the LGBT community,” Moore said. “When somebody calls you a sissy, it is not positive. … That word continues the incorrect thinking that having emotions or expressing something in a stereotypically female way is somehow wrong in society.”

Moore said she was motivated to put up the petition after a letter to the editor by Debbie Ramirez appeared in the Daily Camera on April 21 calling the T-shirt “highly offensive.”

“I am a women who runs, rock climbs and performs well athletically. I also have the traits associated with someone who is called a sissy,” Ramirez wrote. “I cry, I get hurt and I express my emotions. If this is what a sissy is, I am proud to be a sissy and would never wear a T-shirt that does not value these traits in all genders.”

Shipman’s web-site.

Edmund Blair Leighton, The Accolade, 1901, Private Collection.

Clive Aslet, in the Telegraph, reports that today Queen Elizabeth II will be presiding over ceremonies linking today’s Britain with the chivalrous traditions of the Middle Ages.

Foreign tourists in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey today, may be in luck. They’ll glimpse Her Majesty the Queen participating in a ceremony that only enters her diary once every eight years: the Installation of the Order of the Bath.

Like the Woolsack, hunting with hounds and the last of the hereditary peers, it’s a piece of traditional pageantry that escaped the reforming zeal of New Labour – perhaps because it is so arcane that they failed to notice it. Certainly most Britons, were they to see the parade of Knights Grand Cross or Knights Commander (Dames too, now), in their gorgeous crimson satin mantles, freighted with stars and tassels, would be as flummoxed as visitors from overseas.

What’s going on? Can there be any earthly point in such flummery, as the nation – otherwise dressing down on Fridays – struggles with the challenges of modern life?

Scrape beneath the surface and the ritual turns out to be more interesting than one might suspect. As a body of knights, one couldn’t expect them to do much practical defending of the faith. It is one of the few occasions in the year when Her Majesty can be sure of being in the company of distinguished people who make her seem, in comparison with their years, positively youthful.

But the ceremony is also an instance of the British ability to preserve and reinvent tradition. You would have to be a firebrand Roundhead to object to something so abstruse, so harmlessly picturesque as the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. And yet it also serves, however obliquely, as a reminder of the chivalric values that – whether or not doors are still held open for ladies – underpin our sense of public virtue. Does honour mean anything, in these fallen days of cash for questions and parliamentary expenses scandals? It does here.

Republicans might object that today’s ceremony, held in Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey, where the Sovereign and the most senior Knights and Dames Grand Cross will occupy stalls in the choir, is an anachronism. Of course it is. That is – and always has been – the point about chivalry. Even in the Middle Ages, it was a romantic throwback to a supposed golden age. Washing ceremonies – yes, the Order of the Bath really is to do with bathing, not a place in Somerset – appear at William I’s coronation, but the touchstone of chivalry was located in an era that far predated him.

Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia entry.

Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten, Man at a Window, 1653, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna.

Fox News reports that a Grizzly Bear taken last Fall near Fairbanks by a fellow out hunting moose has broken the Boone & Crockett record.

Larry Fitzgerald and a pal were moose hunting near Fairbanks, Alaska, when they came across fresh bear tracks in the snow. Three hours later, the auto body man had taken down the grizzly that left the prints, an enormous bruin that stood nearly 9 feet tall and earned Fitzgerald a place in the record books.

Although Fitzgerald shot the bear last September, Boone and Crockett, which certifies hunting records, has only now determined the grizzly, with a skull measuring 27 and 6/16ths inches, is the biggest ever taken down by a hunter, and the second largest grizzly ever documented. Only a grizzly skull found by an Alaska taxidermist in 1976 was bigger than that of the bear Fitzgerald bagged.

I’m not really a trophy hunter, or anything,” Fitzgerald, 35, told FoxNews.com. “But I guess it is kind of cool.”

Fitzgerald brought down the bear from 20 yards, with one shot to the neck from his Sako 300 rifle. He said he and hunting buddy Justin Powell knew from the tracks he was on the trail of a massive grizzly, but only learned this week that he held a world record. …

Bears are scored based on skull length and width measurements, and Missouloa, Mont.-based Boone and Crockett trophy data is generally recognized as the standard. Conservationists use the data to monitor habitat, sustainable harvest objectives and adherence to fair-chase hunting rules.

Richard A. Warshak, in the Atlantic, associates the origin of the dark crimefighter with a boyhood beating experienced by his creator.

Years ago I became aware that a particular superhero, who has entertained millions of people, had special appeal to the traumatized children who visited my office. I had a hunch that a trauma had inspired the creation of this superhero. See if you think my hunch was correct.

His pals nicknamed him “Doodler” because he was constantly drawing pictures. His pals had nicknames, too—they were fellow members of a neighborhood club know as “The Zorros,” an appellation that a young Robert Kahn had chosen, inspired by the cinematic crusader for justice played by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. The Zorros’ clubhouse was built with wood stolen from the neighborhood lumber yard—a place whose many nooks and crannies made it the location of choice for their games of hide-and-seek.

One night, when he was 15 years old, Kahn—who went by “Robbie” at the time—had a terrifying encounter. Walking home through rough neighborhoods of the Bronx after a music lesson, carrying a violin case, he was followed by “a group of seedy-looking roughnecks from the tough Hunts Point district,” as he wrote in his autobiography 57 years later:

They wore the sweatshirts of the Vultures, and they were known to be a treacherous gang. They were whistling at me and making snide remarks that only “goils” played with violins. I stepped up my pace and so did they. Finally, I started running and they did likewise, until I reached my neighborhood. Unfortunately, my buddies were not hanging around the block at the time.

Kahn’s memoir goes on to give a very lengthy, melodramatic blow-by-blow account of his dash to the familiar lumberyard, the Vultures’s pursuit (“with terrifying menace in their eyes”), and his attempts at self-defense, complete with “Zorro” leaps, grappling hook, and mid-air kicks while swinging on a rope. He fought bravely, he writes, but for naught:

My worst fears came true. Two Vultures pinned both my arms behind my back and held me firm while another beat a staccato rhythm on my belly, knocking the wind out of me. Another bully stepped in and used my face for a punching bag—while he cracked a couple of my front teeth.

I was in a fog, when I felt my right arm crack at the elbow after a gang member deliberately twisted it behind me in order to break it. The pain was excruciating and I screamed in agony.

Before I blacked out and fell to the ground like a limp rag doll, I heard him laugh sardonically, “Just to make sure dat da Fiddler ain’t gonna play his fiddle no more!” Little did he know that it wasn’t playing the violin again that concerned me, but the fact that he had broken my drawing arm.

Then he stepped on the hand of my broken arm! I don’t remember how long I remained in a blanket of darkness before I regained consciousness, but when I came to, I was a beaten, bloody wreck. Somehow I managed to pull myself up and it was then that I noticed my violin on the ground, smashed to pieces. This was the coup de grace!

This whole episode, to this day, remains in my subconscious like a nightmare. I had played Zorro and lost! Had it really been a dream or a movie, I would have emerged victorious. But this real-life drama had almost cost the life of a reckless fifteen-year-old.

Here we have a boy who was attacked by a gang of Vultures in the night. He defended himself by playing Zorro, using a grappling hook to fend off his attackers. He was unsuccessful and was hospitalized, severely injured, with the possibility that he would be unable to pursue his chosen career. In spite of permanent injuries—scars, chipped teeth, and limited mobility in one arm—he went on to become a cartoonist.

Seven years after being brutalized, he created a comic-book superhero that would become a pop-culture legend—and whose appeal may be deeply, subtly connected to what happened that night in the lumber yard.

Welcome to Derinkuyu, an underground city that once housed up to 20,000 people. In the Cappadocia region, famous for its cave dwellings and underground villages, Derinkuyu stands out for sheer size and complexity. Locals began digging in the 500s BCE. The city consists of over 600 doors, each of which can be closed from the inside. Each floor could be closed off as well. And just to make attacking completely impossible, the entire city was deliberately built without any logic. Its maze-like layout makes navigating the city nightmarish for unfamiliar invaders.

Via Ratak Monodosico.

In the Wall Street Journal, Stefan Beck re-visits the perennial children’s classic Treasure Island.

One can witness, in scholarship about “Treasure Island,” an urge to study it in a postcolonial or Marxist context. Stevenson would have wanted it read a different way. In “The Day After To-morrow,” he wrote: “Our race has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection, to sit down…in the tedium of safety…. The bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns.” “Treasure Island” is a paean to risk and peril.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Philip K. Howard, at the Daily beast, served up an excerpt from his new book on how excessive regulation is rendering America dysfunctional, The Rule of Nobody.

In February 2011, during a winter storm, a tree fell into a creek in Franklin Township, New Jersey, and caused flooding. The town was about to send a tractor in to pull the tree out when someone, probably the town lawyer, helpfully pointed out that it was a “class C-1 creek” and required formal approvals before any natural condition was altered. The flooding continued while town officials spent 12 days and $12,000 to get a permit to do what was obvious: pull the tree out of the creek.

Government’s ineptitude is not news. But something else has happened in the last few decades. Government is making America inept. Other countries don’t have difficulty pulling a tree out of a creek. Other countries also have modern infrastructure, and schools that generally succeed, and better health care at little more than half the cost.

You might think that some adversary of the current administration must have photoshopped this photo of the President seated in the Iron Throne, but no! it turns out that the photo was tweeted Saturday evening by the White House itself, titled “Westeros Wing.”

Business Insider tells us that Barack Obama is a major “Game of Thrones” fan.

The Guardian assures readers that this fashion trend will pass.

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Nicki Daniels explodes:

YOU GUYS ARE RUINING MY BEARD FETISH. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved a man with a beard. To me, they meant strength, power, MANLINESS. Someone who could protect me. Unfortunately, you guys have turned it into a fashion statement. The beard has turned into the padded bra of masculinity. Sure itlooks sexy, but whatcha got under there? There’s a whole generation running around looking like lumberjacks, and most of you can’t change a fucking tire.

Read the whole thing.

From Small Dead Animals via Ed Driscoll.