Pleats assume a small waist and a flat stomach.

I've always had a marked waist/hip differential, but I've never had a flat belly. Pleats are the enemy.

I think swimming is very race related. Not playing in the pool, but swimming, actual swimming even in the deep end is more common with white people.

Interesting. Being Jamaican, I can't really comment, because it's different there.

We'll be upgrading to a queen this month, which should buy us some time before the eventual transition.

We have a queen, but Li'l Sphere's become quite the little animated sleeper. He wakes us up constantly through the night and loves to turn perpendicular, which leaves us no room at all. It's nice when he wants to snuggle up to you, but not so good when he flails around and smacks me in the face at 3 am.

When I was a camp counsellor there was a distinct urban/suburban split among the swimming kids and it often cut along racial lines with the white kids being suburban and more swimmy and the black and latino kids being more urban and less swimmy.

The whoozit abuse picture of Lily is AWESOME. She has so many interesting faces.

Hil - German WWI uniforms: [link]

Thank you! That was exactly what I was looking for, and now I can place this photo as somewhere between 1915 and the end of WWI. Still not sure who it is, though -- that would be my great-grandfather's generation, but I'm not sure who in my family was in the army.

swimming, actual swimming even in the deep end is more common with white people.

I can't speak to your general thesis, but a couple of my high school friends who also swam in the Gulf at night were black.

What's interesting is that all of my students are urban. And my latino students can swim at least a full lap without flailing and concerning me about their safety, while my blakc students often couldn't. Though both groups said they could swim.

Okay, question: how many people here fear swimming in deep water? in the pool? in a lake? in the ocean?

I have no fear of depth, and have swum (off a boat) in open seawater/baywater. If you dropped me from a plane into the open sea, I might have different feelings about it, because I discovered while sailing that I do have a mild horizon-paranoia: when it was sea in all directions off the boat, I got nervous.

This was in the Chesapeake, which is not exactly Wild Open Sea, so I am pretty sure it was the pure visual stimulus of seeing no permanent features in any direction. I have spent my whole life not too far from the coast, but that means close on land, and close by sea as well. (And the land is a particularly hilly part of the country.)

See, that's the thing about my general thesis is it's based on my students. And my friends. Most of my nonswimming friends are nonwhite. In fact, one of them is a godparent to an Athletic Director at a Major University here and that AD (also black) made claims about race and swimming, that blacks don't swim for a variety of reasons.

And another friend mentions that it also has to do with cultural issues, such as pools were segregated and kids who have parents who don't swim, often don't learn on their own.

And then there were hair issues.

It's been a fascinating topic of discussion.