RIP. We'll miss you

Ouch.

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What was Moby like? He seems cool.

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We were both AV geeks at Darien HS in Darien, Connecticut. It was 1981, and he was 2 years behind me, i think, so we didn’t have any classes together. He hung around with his sub-group of friends who we all called “the punkies,” because of the music they liked, while my friends and I were d&d geeks. I recall some mild contempt that each of our sub-groups had for each other, but he was an otherwise nice kid. The lady who ran the AV department adored him, and I think kept in touch with him after high school. I remember him frequently playing with the reel-to-reel tape recorders, splicing the tape and looping it over and over on itself, or running the same length of audio tape through multiple machines, so he was into playing with sound long before the digital age.

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So basically the same as he ever was. :slight_smile:

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I remember once, I watched an interview of him on a talk show Isaac Mizrahi did. Isaac went to his apartment and chatted with him while Moby cleaned his stovetop. When Isaac asked him why he was cleaning his stovetop, Moby said “I want your audience to think about me every time they clean their stovetops.”

And dammit if I don’t think about Moby every time I clean my damn stove top.

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That’s brilliant

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Maybe cheating to list this as ‘someone who made a notable difference to the world’, but none of the other topics are sad enough.

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That snail lived a long life. How long are snails supposed to live?

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It varies a lot. Some live less than a year, others take a few just to mature, and Roman snails are said to live as long as 2-3 decades. Animal lifespans seem fairly random to me, but snails cover a good range of sizes and niches – more species than vertebrates, you know – so it might not be surprising they are so different. The articles generally agree George was very old, as one last data point for Achatinella apexfulva.

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97…a great run! (pun intended)

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Off topic, but most people don’t realize she was black.

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Oh no. I thought she would live forever. She was amazing - one of a kind.

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In her 2002 autobiography, “Just Lucky I Guess,” Ms. Channing revealed that when she was 16 her mother told her that her father was part black; she kept her racial heritage a secret, she wrote, for fear that it would be bad for her career.

That doesn’t make it sound like she identified as POC.

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Well, yeah, at the time she didn’t dare identify that she was mixed race. Doesn’t mean she wasn’t. It’s important to acknowledge that great talent can be denied access simply by the discovery that the person isn’t the societal norm in some way (white, straight, etc.). If she’d acknowledged her paternal side, she probably would never have gotten the roles that made her a star.

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I understand that.

But we’re talking about a woman who was not raised African-American, had no idea she had any family connections to African Americans, apparently didn’t make anyone suspect she was African-American, and only discovered there was a connection because her mother told her when she was nearly an adult.

She chose until later in life not to publicise it, and yeah that was because she was living in a racist society and that’s a bad thing, but the point is she could.

So if no-one knew, she didn’t experience it societally, and she didn’t grow up with it, how can it matter unless someone wants to invoke the one-drop rule, which is itself racist? Note even her dad was only partly African American – at least from the article it doesn’t say what his own relation was.

By that logic Elizabeth Warren really is Cherokee.

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According to Wikipedia, her paternal grandmother was African American.

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There are hidden costs when you know you have to hide who you are. Specifics, like she may have chosen to do her makeup and hair, for example, in a style to hide any trace. But also psychological: worried that the truth could come out and change everything. It’s not the same as growing up with obviously dark skin, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect her negatively.

Also, speaking as someone with mixed heritage: it’s very personal, deciding what part(s) to openly acknowledge to the general public. But all the parts are real. Being able to pass, with ‘only’ 25% African American heritage, doesn’t mean she isn’t part black.

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As someone who’s also mixed heritage… I’m starting to feel like I’m being put in a camp whose actual members would automatically kick me out.

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LOL!

It’s just, I’d love for us to be in a ‘post-racial’ society where we can honestly say that someone who successfully hides their mixed heritage has therefore not suffered for being part of that heritage, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

(Obviously, in a truly post-racial society one wouldn’t feel any need to hide one’s heritage.)

Also, which camp would have accepted her if it became publicly known that she was 25% AA? Probably neither.

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