Happy 84th birthday, Notorious Precious RBG! May you take us through to the other end of the Trump presidency.
Here is RBG being sworn in as Supreme Court Justice almost 25 years ago:
And here she is dozing off at Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address because she decided that it wasn’t worth it to bring herself “100% sober” to yet another of those tedious drills. That’s what you get to do when you cannot be fired from your job.
Hey, I’d be sleepy too if I did this workout routine twice a week (called “the world’s most important workout routine” since November 9, 2016). It includes machine bench pressing (“where Ginsburg normally puts up 70 pounds”), leg curls, leg presses, chest flies, one-legged squats, and lat pull-downs (I had to ask Google to tell me what some of these are), several sets of push-ups (she does not do “girl push-ups”), and other crazy stuff.
This is a nice collection of RBG photos from “Toddler to Supreme Court Justice.” And if you haven’t read it yet, “Notorious R.B.G,” a book that was born from a Tumblr of the same name, is worth reading. It takes you through her life and career (she had trouble getting hired at law firms because most did not hire women at the time, and she hid her pregnancy while a professor at Rutgers because she did not want to jeopardize her chances of getting tenure), her feminist, ahead-of-its-time marriage (to a fellow high-powered attorney, but he did all the cooking and much of the child-rearing so she could go be Notorious RBG), her fight for women’s rights (there is an explanation for her criticism of Roe v. Wade, for which she, in turn, has been criticized), and even contains several annotated RBG opinions and dissents, which are fun to read even if you are not well-versed in law.
The Tumblr that inspired the book was started by an RBG fan who was outraged by the Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act. She channelled her anger into an online tribute for the equally outraged dissenter in that case. The Tumblr title is a play on Notorious B.I.G., the late 300-pound rapper also known as “Biggie.”
Yeah, that’s right – don’t mess with RBG.
She Can Do It! 