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Airy, Airy, Au Contraire

@airyairyaucontraire / airyairyaucontraire.tumblr.com

I used to be airyairyquitecontrary, but following a deletion I can’t get that back. I like Sailor Moon, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Expanse, and cats. From Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1978.
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catfindr

this is my cat lyra, she is obsessed with my brother's leather boots. she has what we call "boot time" which is when my brother leaves them out so she can rub her face all over them and drool because she's a weirdo. as you can see in the picture she really loves these specific boots.

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catfindr
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changes

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023

🌟 New

  • We’re running a new experiment that changes the header on posts to reduce the redundancy of avatars in reblogs, save some vertical space by moving recommendation labels around, afford more room for badges, and more! On desktop web, it also removes the floating avatars and makes posts full width with the sidebars. If you have feedback about this change, please send it in to Support using the “Feedback” category.
  • We’ve removed the blog carousel at the top of the Blog Subs dashboard tab (for those who have it enabled), as it was causing the load time to worsen dramatically. (You can enable this tab in your Tumblr Labs settings, or via the new experimental dashboard tab configuration button if you have it.)

🛠 Fixed

  • Fixed an issue in recommended and related tag card carousels that would show a “Follow” button when you’re already following that tag.
  • We were having some issues with SoundCloud embeds not working in posts, but it’s cleared up now.
  • In mobile phone browsers, the “Source” and “Submitted by” text at the bottom of posts is now correctly aligned on the left (it was a few pixels off).
  • Also in mobile phone browsers, we’ve cleaned up a visual glitch on trending tag pages that was causing the “Trending now” label to be on the same line as the tag itself.

🚧 Ongoing

  • Nothing to report here today.

🌱 Upcoming

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@her-rightful-self thank you for the reblog

This appears to be almost completely inaccurate. Baby Esther/Esther Lee Jones was a Black child entertainer, at one point reportedly the highest-paid in the world, who retired from show business as a teenager (she was born about 1918 but her date of death is unknown because she vanished into obscurity). The photos above are not of Esther Jones and were not even taken during her performance career; they're of a Ukrainian model called Olya Gussy who posed in Betty Boop cosplay in 2008. I thought they looked odd for the period claimed and that's why I started looking for more information.

Helen Kane was an older, white singer and actress (born 1904) who sued Fleischer Studios in 1932, claiming that Betty Boop was based on her and alleging infringement, unfair competition and exploitation of her personality and image. One part of Fleischer's defence was the contention that Helen Kane's singing style was not itself original but based partly on Baby Esther's (and several other popular singers'). Esther Jones was not a party to the lawsuit or a witness in the trial, although her manager testified that Helen Kane had seen her perform and a recording of her singing was submitted as evidence.

The idea that Esther Jones herself was the basis for Betty Boop appears to have come from an error in a listicle that appeared on the PBS website in February 2015. PBS has since published a detailed article explaining the error and how it should have been clarified or corrected.