To ‘whump’ a character is to write a fic where awful things happen to him, often at the hands of other characters from the book/show/movie, after which everyone realizes they’ve done him wrong and make amends. Daniel from Stargate SG-1 is the canonical whump!fic target since he’s always dying, getting kidnapped by aliens, or dropped into stray singularities.

It’s amusing to learn this, and explains the odd reaction I get when introduced to fan writers.

I’ve asked how long the term has been in use, and guesses range from a decade to the past 20 years.

Andrew Leonard, writing at Salon, discusses debit cards. Which, outside of California, can expire if not used. Wal-Mart plans to stop cutting checks for employees who don’t have direct deposit and give them debt cards. The cards will incur fees for checking balances as well as for transactions.

Over at Slacktivist, Wal-Mart doesn’t fair any better. The company is now going to charge $3 to cash checks, which is lower fees than charged elsewhere, but still that’s $3 that someone who is working poor could had used to pay utilities. And over the course of a year that fee adds up to what might be a dentist or medical co-pay.

Slacktivist points out that check cashing fees and debit cards are two symptoms of a lack of affordable banking services for the working poor. Nobody, it seems, is interested in serving that market. Back when banks were local, they would at least offer things like passbook savings, and in Europe and Japan, there are the Postal Banking systems that the poor and middle class use.

In The IndigNation, Fred Clark talks about “The National Indignation Convention” (!) an early 1960′s movement, similar to the shouting mobs showing up at public meetings on health care, but were convinced that the danger to America was fluoridated water instead of public insurance.

Unsurprisingly, the movement started in Dallas, which at the time was a hotbed of anti-Catholic sentiment in the wake of JFK’s election. Of course, there was another facet to the meanness:

The woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson with the picket sign was affiliated with the National Indignation Convention. Photojournalist Wes Wise, who captured that incident on film, reveals another revealing detail in Robert Huffaker’s book, When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963. After the woman’s assault on Stevenson was condemned nationally, the crazy lady offered what she considered an excuse for her behavior. “I was pushed from behind by a Negro,” she said. There were, of course, no black people in the vicinity.

These Pearls Won’t Clutch Themselves is a funny dialog between someone who is scandalized by someone saying a politician is lying (in this case, Governor Palin, on the so-called ‘death panel’) and the person who pointed out the lie.

B: You realize what you’ve done, don’t you?

A: Drawn a link between the spreading of malicious falsehoods and the practice commonly referred to as “lying”?

B: Well, yes, that. That’s not allowed.