NTMP 126: Jürgen Depickle

Not me baby-birding Taco Bell hot sauce

New-To-Me Phrases, November 3, 2024

Hostile architecture * Baby-birding soda * Ho-smell room * Gate lice * J.J. Pickle * Grievance turd * Jorkin Depeanus

Photo by Brad on Unsplash

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The Phrases, With Context

I actually left the house for a few days to attend the Austin Film Festival Writers Conference with a friend. We sat in on panels and roundtables covering the craft and business of screenwriting, celebrated my birthday with tacos and tres leches cake, and got to know downtown Austin a bit (it’s . . . fine, I guess?). As a lifelong TV fan who is now three years shy of 60, it was time for new creative challenges. Am very grateful this pal talked me into learning screenwriting, because it’s a ton of fun and comes with a diverse creative community—including in terms of age.

A COVID outbreak at home meant I got three solo nights in a hotel outside of O’Hare and why have I not been doing this after every conference I attend? I honestly can’t think of the last time I spent that much time alone, which means I should probably do so more often. Thankfully, everyone is now on the mend and half of us seem to have avoided getting sick. I came home to vibrant fall colors on the trees here, a reminder of how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful place.

Enough about me—you came here for phrases, and phrases you shall have! This week, we have a few travel-related phrases, a true name that made me giggle and still makes me giggle and will probably always make me giggle, a bonus micro-poll, and more.

Let’s get to it!

1. Hostile architecture

I can’t recall where I found this phrase, but here’s a definition via a report by The Neighborhood Design Center (emphasis mine to highlight related phrases):

Hostile architecture, also known as defensive architecture or exclusionary design, is an urban design strategy in which public spaces and structures are used to prevent certain activities or restrict certain people from using those spaces.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that the functional segregation created by hostile architecture is rooted in racism and classism. Examples of hostile architecture are dead-end and one-way streets that function like moats around affluent white neighborhoods, benches with dividers on them to prevent people from sleeping on them (something I have noticed at airports in addition to city parks), or a lack of any seating in a waiting area (which I experienced outside O’Hare Airport while standing outside for 30 minutes waiting for a hotel shuttle).

The authors of this report acknowledge that inclusive architecture can’t solve the deeper systemic issues driving homelessness or poverty. They also note that the desire for hostile architecture is often driven by government leaders, real estate developers, and community members who both hold privilege and feel frustrated by homelessness and crime in their neighborhoods. They argue that while those issues can and do negatively impact a community (including people who are unhoused or living in poverty without a social safety net), the solution isn’t to design away opportunities to gather. Hostile architecture is a seemingly easier, surface-level fix that makes spaces worse, not better.

“If you take away features in order to exclude the non-preferred user, they are not available to the preferred users either and you just get empty spaces.”

This sentiment is sort of the reverse of the curb cut effect—when we design spaces to be accessible to people with disabilities, that inclusive design benefits the broader community (parents use curb cuts to push strollers, delivery people use them for push carts, etc.).

Hostile architecture looks good on paper. It appeases community members. But it also strips communities of vital, accessible third spaces where everyone can gather and get to know each other. A key to better design is to facilitate planning that includes all community members, not just NIMBYs or developers with dollar signs for eyeballs.

2. Baby-birding soda

NTMP reader Mel sent this one my way and I just have to say: EWWWW.

This phrase came from a list of team-building activities people have sent Alison Green, who runs Ask A Manager. In this post for Slate, Green shares some of these nightmare scenarios, many of which were infuriatingly but unsurprisingly ableist.

Here’s the soda one—I do wonder whether this really happened:

“We had to take a big gulp of soda and spit the soda into a partner’s mouth! It was incredibly disgusting. I have no clue who thought that this was a good idea and who approved it. Some of the guys got into it, but most everyone declined.”

That’s not even the weirdest one listed; the dolphin woman was next-level bizarre.

What leaders who favor these team building exercises don’t understand is that not all colleagues want to be friends, and many have disabilities and other personal details that they’d rather not disclose. What they do want is autonomy to do their jobs. The friction they experience at work should come through professional growth, not forced personal oversharing.

I liked what Green has to say about this:

The most effective team building comes from teams grappling with real-life challenges in the normal course of working together, and doing so collaboratively and respectfully, with opportunities for meaningful input. Doing that takes good management, day after day. Going rock climbing or baby-birding soda into each other’s mouths won’t get us there.

3. Ho-smell room

I coined this phrase after describing our Austin hotel room as like "a possum that pissed itself and died under my bed a year ago.” (I suspect the actual culprit was water seepage from the shower under the carpet.)

4. Gate lice

Three gross phrases in a row? Oops! NTMP superfan Rebecca sent me this one, which added a bit of observational levity to my recent airport experiences AND skeeved me out at the mere mention of the word “lice”. However, I’ll allow it because it’s incredibly apt.

Here’s the headline from a Fortune article that offers a succinct definition of the phrase:

American Airlines is testing a new system to humiliate ‘gate lice,’ the people who try to board planes before their seating group is called

“Gate lice” are a creature of the airlines themselves. By charging to check bags, people started panic-packing as much shit as possible into as many carry-ons as possible. They also try to board before flight attendants cut off the number of carry-ons allowed for a given flight. In my experience, boarding line design at airports could also use improvement, because often people aren’t sure where to stand. The problem is that staff end up suffering the ire of privileged pieces of shit who feel entitled to cut the line.

American Airlines is testing an electronic system that plays an “audible signal” to shame them into returning to their proper boarding group. (Please tell me it sounds like an airhorn.) As one source pointed out, this saves flight attendants from having to babysit belligerent passengers. You hear the tone, you get your ass back in line while the rest of the people waiting visibly judge you.

Another cool thing I learned is that people have been studying why people cut in line for decades now. I’ve often thought sociologists should study school pickup lines as an example of this behavior.

5. J.J. Pickle

So I’m mapping my walk to an Austin Film Festival panel and

If you’re wondering whether Google maps is that cool, I added the pickle emoji.

J.J. Pickle was a U.S. Representative from 1963 to 1995. Pickle was a Democrat who Wikipedia says was one of the only “Southern Representatives” to vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; he also voted in favor of the Voting Rights Act. Is Texas considered Southern or Southwestern? I feel like it’s southern in terms of racism and voter suppression but it seems to also have its own culture that is heavily Southwestern (which is itself heavily influenced by Native-American and Mexican-American culture).

I wonder how Pickle got that surname. Bonus: His first wife’s nickname was “Sugar.”

6. Grievance turd

I thought about sharing this BlueSky post (I still cannot bring myself to call them “skeets” but I’m sure I will start at some point) to include the image of Trump, but I thought I’d spare us all from yet another image of him so close to the election. We’ve seen enough, haven’t we?

Is there a better descriptor for Trump than “grievance turd”? 🤌🏻 I think not!

If you want to see the image, you’ll either have to be on BlueSky or start using it. It’s 1000% better than that confusing turd, Threads, and the user experience feels like OG Twitter. If you join, follow me and say hi!

7. Jorkin Depeanus

Display this tweet as part of the extensive slideshow of similarly hilarious memes at my memorial service, along with a crawl of every new-to-me phrase that I wrote about:

My one criticism is that I think that is what it stands for.

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Bonus Bits

1. Archive Report is the newsletter you didn’t know you needed in your life

But you do need it. If you enjoy NTMP, Archive Report has a similar “let’s have fun in our goddamn inboxes for a change” vibe. It’s a heady mix of pure art, silliness, and adept wordsmithing—rather like my friend Charlie, the fine mind behind this project.

Here’s the homepage teaser that will have you surrendering your email address immediately, as it did for me:

There is an underground warehouse the size of Manhattan in the remote desert of Nevada. The warehouse contains a server farm with a full 21st century internet archive, as well as miles of hard goods gathered from homes, stores, libraries, etc. The warehouses were made when people had to quit living on the surface. They are run by Custodian droids that digitize the archive and make the data available for searching and viewing on the comms terminal in every subterranean apartment. The Custodian of this archive is malfunctioning. Transmissions are regular, but incomplete.

Get yourself some of this magic!

2. A micro poll:

Discuss:

3. Turkey update

He’s still around, pooping on our front porch and chasing delivery drivers. And of course we love him madly. He came by for trick-or-treating but we didn’t give him any candy and was confused by all of the kids in costumes, so he eventually flew up on the roof as the launching pad to roost on his tree branch above our house.

No, we’re not planning on roasting him. This is our Halloween warming station.

Meanwhile, a different tree shed a huge branch onto our driveway. If you’re looking for a career change, consider becoming an arborist because trees are eye-wateringly expensive to maintain or remove.

4. Have you voted yet?

My family has. This is also my youngest child’s first presidential election. I teared up when filling out my ballot. Getting to vote for a woman of color as president fills me with such excitement and positive emotion.

I understand that anything can happen, but I am also having the audacity to feel hopeful about Harris winning big. Seeing people excitedly crowding her rallies feels like a good sign. I am going to hold onto this hope in the coming days, and my wish for you is that you can feel even a tiny bit of that along with me.

If you’re reading this and still on the fence about voting, or wondering whether you’re selling out because Harris doesn’t check all of your boxes, email me or message me on Substack or BlueSky if you want a safe person to talk through it with you. I’m happy to share my reasoning if you’d like or to just read what you’re thinking and feeling. It’s a stressful time and I think we need more connection and listening to each other. If I can do that for even one person, I think that’s a plus.

If you’re wondering how you can help, as canvassing is physically tough for me this season, I’m going to spend some time today and tomorrow making phone calls for Harris. It’s not too late to have good conversations with potential voters, whether by making calls for candidates or just talking to the people in your life and asking them good questions if they’re uncertain.

That’s it for this week! Remember to keep making it weird and to stay furiously curious.