I recently discovered Advertising for Love, a blog that’s been posting personal ads from the 19th century. Some of it’s just fun, but I was struck by this post showing some women in desperate straits. It shows why women in 19th century New York would marry: for financial support. An unmarried woman in the city without a family had nothing.

I’ve been reading Beyond Heaving Bosoms, the Smart Bitches guide to romance novels, and in the chapter on heroines, they discuss a problem with historical heroines: in romances written today about bygone eras, women are usually empowered to a point, and they always marry for love, which is nice and all but undermines the basic fact that women in the 19th century married because they had to in order to survive in many cases. Plenty of women did marry for money. These women didn’t have other options. The advertisements highlight that.

Speaking of romance novels, I think this ad sounds like the potential beginning of one. Two people spend almost a week together, then the woman doesn’t show up for their second scheduled rendezvous. What happened? Did she move on to greener pastures? Was she already married? Was she actually a prostitute? Was she struck ill or killed in a carriage accident? The possibilities are endless, no?

+ I only just stumbled upon Effed in Park Slope’s expose of the Atlantic Center Target, the worst Target on the planet. part 1 | part 2 | part 3

I can verify that this is indeed as bad as it looks in the video. It’s so badly mismanaged and understaffed. The lines at the checkout are usually so long that people just abandon their carts. It seems to me that Target would make enough money from one of those abandoned carts to pay the salary of another cashier, you know?

+ Passive Aggressive Notes find notes that are passive aggressive about typography.

+ Here’s a whiny “Those kids today!” article about how college kids are reading Twilight instead of the classics. I have a BA in English lit, so believe me, I’m on board with this rant to a point, although, I don’t remember doing a whole lot of recreational reading when I was in college. I had to read, on average, 3 books a week for my classes, so that didn’t leave a lot of time for other things, and when I did read extracurricular books, they were mostly fluffy things to contrast against the Serious Literature I had to read for class.

+ WTF, clothing retailers? Although my beef with this post is the comment about “average women” having larger waists. You know what? Can we just agree that clothes are not made for real women’s bodies and move along? Because, actually, finding pants that are big enough for my hips inevitably leaves me with pants that are too big in the waist, so speak for yourselves. But, still, it seems stupid that clothes stores are so adamant about not stocking bigger sizes.

+ Check out these Whirl Girls, chorines from 1921.

+ I mentioned that I recently got a Kindle. I think the advent of this Kindle and its competitors is starting to make ebooks more popular and accessible to the masses in easily-readable formats. So, is one advantage to ebooks the embarrassment factor? I mean, I read a lot of romance, and so much of it just has ridiculous cover art, and if I’m reading on the subway, I don’t want everyone judging my books by their covers, you know?

+ Blast from the Past: Battle of the Cartoon Girl Bands.

+ Corollary: I spent part of this weekend looking for a particular Smashing Pumpkins song, and then I just saw this commercial using a song that is so evocative of high school for me (I was a huge SP fan). So strange to hear the song in a different context.

I am apparently only good at posts full of links lately.

+ Gawker prepares for Watchman by looking at photos of New York in 1985.

+ I’ll have you know that I am a geek, thankyouverymuch.

+ Speaking of geekery, Jezebel ponders when it became uncool to be smart, citing a woman who won a quiz show in the UK.

+ The Girl Scouts are trying to modernize. Which is awesome. Although my life is sadly lacking in Girl Scout Cookies.

+ If you thought Monday was snowy, check out these photos from the blizzard of 1888. I’d guess we got almost a foot in my corner of Brooklyn on Monday, enough to inspire people to go cross-country skiing in prospect park.

Nothing I have written today makes much of a statement. Sometimes there are just days like this.

+ I have a pretty small carbon footprint, about 1/5 of the national average, which I feel pretty good about. I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that I do not own a car.

+ Via Jezebel, how great is this?

+ Some writing things. This post on Jenny Crusie’s blog got me thinking about what constitutes a romance novel. (My friend T says, though, that, if you can take the romance plot out of a novel and still have a story, it’s not a romance. Hmm.) Also, men read romance.

+ Check out these awesome fashions from 1928!

+ I have acquired a KINDLE!

I’ve been meaning to get a post up for, like, a week, and there are lots of things I want to write about. So.

+ I have yet to meet a person who does not have a crush on Rachel Maddow, myself included. Maybe that’s why profiles of her can’t stop mentioning that she’s a lesbian.

+ Is RENT too edgy for high school? I think I heard the music for the first time when I was maybe 16, right after it came out. We listened to the soundtrack a lot in the work room of my high school lit mag. Our adviser didn’t object. I mean, it’s not The Music Man, but it’s also not as groundbreaking as it was 15 years ago.

+ 50 must read women in science bloggers

+ How to get from Washington to Lincoln via the subway.

Oh, and there were pratfalls. Domain re-registration got FUBARed, so the site was down for two days, whoops. Not that I’ve written anything here in a while, since real life gets in the way too much. I’m hoping to carve out some more free time for frivolous things like blogging, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, some delicious links:

+ Barbie sales down, American Girl sales up. Some friends of mine were in New York around New Years, and we wound up at the American Girl store, which OMG INSANE! I read a couple of the books when I was 10, but I think I’m a little too old to have been a part of the phenomenon, so I missed it. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think the dolls are mostly positive roll models and also educational, since the Girls come from different backgrounds and different periods in American history. And thumbs up to kids learning history! On the other hand, devotion is cult-like and the dolls, etc., are frickin’ expensive! The store is crazy, too. There’s a doll beauty salon, people, and a cafe with special chairs so that your doll can sit at the table with you. And, also, I had probably 30 Barbies when I was a kid and I don’t think she ruined my self esteem or whatever evil Barbie is accused of most often. Still, it’s interesting, the sales trends. Is Barbie falling out of favor?

+ MSNBC says the economy is making anal-retentive grammar nerds even more anal. I say we’re just fed up with years of people butchering the language. We don’t have to take it anymore! NO MORE SPLIT INFINITIVES!

+ Here’s an only in New York thing. The Union Square carrot peeler guy died. And every New Yorker says, “Aw.”

+ The news story I’m obsessing about most lately is the crazy lady who gave birth to octuplets in California. Here’s zuzu on the story.

+ Buy a book! (Help me keep my publishing job!)

+ Speaking of publishing, romance ebook publishers seem to be taking over (or at least wanting to take over) the dead tree market. I’m interested in ebooks both as a consumer and a… producer? Ebooks are less expensive to produce, and I think they will become more prevalent when the cost of ebook readers goes down, but in the short term, ebooks of popular titles are available, as are a lot of interesting alternative books that might not get picked up by traditional publishers. (This is particularly true of GLBT romances, and some ebook-only publishers are putting out some good, genre-bending romances.)

+ Also, Writer Beware has a good, brief summary of last week’s industry bloodshed.

+ Check out the Brooklyn Hall of Fame.

+ Interesting Times article about art and artists in Green-wood Cemetery. (See also my trip to Green-wood.)

+ Problematic Barbies.

The publishing industry is busy eating itself (major layoffs at Random House, Simon and Schuster, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt today) but I have links!

+ Women are earning combat awards but still no respect in the military.

+ Check out this knit motorcycle cozy.

+ The first LOLcat.

+ The Life Magazine photo archive is now online and there’s lots of good stuff here.

+ There’s an interesting profile of mystery writer Patricia Cornwell in USA Today in which she talks about the Kay Scarpetta series and her 2006 marriage to a woman.

+ Prop 8: The Musical! (Funny, but too little, too late, no? Where were these guys two months ago?)

Seen at the Red Mango on St. Mark’s Place.