Silly Site o' the Day

Still pretty burnt out from the long workday yesterday and today's subsequent catch-up to do much blogging. Just a reminder, please get your Estrogen Month votes in by the end of the day! And remember, read everything on the internet tomorrow (April Fool's Day) with a healthy sense of skepticism, lest you be an ass in the box (via Desi).

Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)

Cower, you insignificant kitty! Cower before... Doom!



By the way, those pages are from Books of Doom #5, out now in your local comic shop...

Silly Site o' the Day

Feeling much better now! The steroid regime ends tomorrow but I think the lingering cough has been driven out largely by the combination of antibiotics and Flonase (the latter of which also seems to be keeping any allergies I have under control); I've been on the bike twice this week; I think I have a better handle on office work today than yesterday and my boss won't be in tomorrow; I've given up hope of ever being able to access my Verizon email again but found the Gmail one much more suited for home-based personal correspondence since I was able to upload all my contact information into it (which came in handy when I had to look up my brother Gene's work number to call him for his birthday on Tuesday); and by golly it's going to be near 70 degrees Fahrenheit today and tomorrow! What's not to love? Via Augie, here's a guy doing some amazing juggling to the tune of Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End - remember all, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make!

Estrogen Month - T Minus 2 Days

Friday's the day I add your choices of choice women bloggers to my blogroll! So far I only have two votes, one for Bitch Lab and one for Grace Davis, so unless others chime in those two will be added on Friday. Sorry I couldn't make this celebration as lively as last year's was, but I'm guessing readers out there may be suffering from Koufax voting burnout, intermittent Blogger outages, allergies and all the other maladies of the month. Here are the "rules" again; it's never too late to add your recommendations!

As long as I have some free time this evening (unlike during one of the more jam-packed workdays I've had in awhile) I wanted to acknowledge some cool feminist stuff taking place so I can close some windows:

• Ragnall has issued her second call for submissions to the 12th Carnival of Feminists. The deadline is Monday, April 3. She teases us with some Truly Awful Art, because I guess she couldn't deal with analyzing brilliant Neal Adams panels any more and wanted to rot her brain or something...

• You know that Stephanie McMillan cartoon that everyone's been reproing on their blogs? The one she's now selling the original of on eBay, all proceeds to go to Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and the Oglala Sioux tribe? You know, this one?:



Well, Nancy Goldstein decided to call Napoli and left a message for him at his home to please call her back with advice on whether to use bacon or chorizo in her paella recipe, and he returned her call! Read all about it here on RawStory.

In other news:

• Susie's in the hospital with something that sounds very similar to what I went through last December. Get home as quickly as you can, Susie, and get well soon! I'm a phone call or email away if you need any advice.

• Deepest condolences to Echidne on the loss of her faithful canine companion Hank. Her remembrance is one of the most beautiful things I've read all year.

• Pandagon is back up, and just last week Amanda celebrated two years of blogging. (Fafblog also celebrated its third blogiversary last week, but while I consider them the funniest bloggers around they tend not to focus on feminism so they merit a scant parenthetical in this link dump...)

• Hugo Schwyzer has a great thought piece on teaching and student crushes. This one really hit home for me; in college I had a major crush on my Spanish teacher, a nice Jewish guy four years older than me named Sandy Cohen who lived a few blocks away from my parents, dated my best friend and my roommate, invited small groups of students to his house where he played guitar and partied with us, but still kept his distance from me one-on-one to the point of even writing me a "dear jane"-type letter. I still have the letter in my files, but the only line I memorized from it was "You are looking for something you must find in yourself," because I swiped the line and used it in a song (I wrote lots of songs in those days). And he was right, in that I was (and it wasn't until I was happy with myself that I could really appreciate loving someone else), but he was wrong also, because you don't date my best friend and my roommate and snub me like that even if maybe I wasn't really dateworthy material at the time, because you've already shown you don't believe in a student/teacher boundary anyway and, well, it was just cruel. But boy, could that guy teach. He was on fire. I wonder what he's doing now, and if he's still pretentiouslly calling himself "Sandro."

• Lastly, there's an excellent post by Paula Brantner at Stand Up Blog on business meetings at strip clubs, about which I generally feel the same way I do about contributing writing to soft-core porn sites. I may like the people involved, I may even think they have very worthwhile and important things to say, but I won't go to a venue whose primary purpose is to devalue and objectify half the population. And I think it's very rude, almost barbaric, to conduct business in a place whose attitude towards my gender effectively eliminates my participation.

Silly Site o' the Day

Not only do I have insomnia again, but I think my blog has caught a bug.



Thanks a lot, Laura...

Estrogen Month - T Minus 3 Days

The almost-always-cool Wil Wheaton (one of Pen-Elayne's "blogfathers" and perpetually in my Top Six section) was gracious enough to respond to my query as to why he was so enthusiastically supporting a soft-porn site that's not only unwelcoming to any readers who don't particularly care to look at nude women but has an apparent history of exploiting their female employees in more ways than one. Wil doesn't "find their content offensive in any way" and that's understandable, because he's grown up looking at the world through a male gaze. Just one more impetus, methinks, to present our portion of the world with more female gazes! Please don't forget to vote for worthy women to add to the Pen-Elayne blogroll; just three days left!

Silly Site o' the Day

I wonder if these steroids are giving me insomnia? Feeling rather zombie-like today. Hope it's a relatively easy one at work. Brain isn't really working that much, it's one of those days when I may need others to think for me. Speaking of which, here's the Official God FAQ, via Frank Paynter.

Estrogen Month - T Minus 4 Days


The current face of the liberal blogosphere AKA the young boys' network

Want to discover more "A-list" female bloggers? Place your votes in the Estrogen Month contest to add more women to the Pen-Elayne blogroll, and look through some dynamite female-written blogs while you're at it! Details here. Four days to go!

And We Cook, Too!

First, some pictures to whet your appetite:


Preparation (otherwise known as "mis en place") for making my guacamole deviled eggs.


The final product, filled with eggy goodness!


And that's my keema matar, still in the pan.

And now the announcement: Robin drew and submitted line drawings from the first two photos above, and I provided the essay and accompanying recipes, for the just-out And They Cook, Too: A Blogger Fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders, edited by Ginger Mayerson and Kathy Flake and featuring contributions from Tild~ (who did the cover), Kathy Pearlman, Pam Spaulding, Lindsay Beyerstein, CE Petro, NTodd Pritsky, Jeanne d'Arc, Wayne at PSoTD, Trish Wilson, Linkmeister, and three people with whom I've had the pleasure of dining - Jenonymous, Julia, MadKane - as well as a number of folks whose recipes and blogs I look forward to discovering. (Alas, I don't see Melanie Mattson's name anywhere in the TOC I'm currently perusing, but please, folks, go to her blog for some of the best liberal politics + recipes anywhere!) Please consider purchasing a copy, it's for a good cause and I'm sure the recipes are yummy!

Silly Site o' the Day

This one's dedicated to Dr. Myers, 'cause I know how much he loves the things. Also to my ex, 'cause apparently "squids" is a nickname for sailors. Via Adorablog. Oh, and speaking of PZ, I just learned a new word from him: pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon usually involving an image being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. You know, like people thinking they see the faces of Jesus and/or Mary everywhere (particularly strange considering the lack of historic record of what these faces looked like).

Paying Attention

I must admit, I really applauded Roxanne's comment about perspective vis a vis the rightie plagiarist briefly hired as the Washington Post blogger. (Sounds like a cheesy villain type, doesn't it? "Beware the Wrath of the Washington Post Blogger! mwahahaha...") But then I read Leigh Anne's Blog Like Ben offering and thought, maybe I should have given more notice to this even though 99 out of 100 times I ignore or completely skim over what liberal bloggers say conservative bloggers are doing because I won't really get the in-jokes otherwise.

And then I read August's very thoughtful piece about why it's a good thing to talk at length about what's going on in the cozy relationships between the mainstream news media (TV, newspapers of record, similar corpo-driven communications enterprises with huge ad revenues) and an extremely partisan perspective in favor of the people currently charged with running our country, one that delights in spin and confers authority upon the unworthy in much the same way they do in Washington.

And I concluded, you know what? I just don't have the time to care about the irony surrounding wonky liberal bloggers complaining about whiny conservative bloggers accusing wonky liberal bloggers of being whiners. I have enough whine in my own head to suffice me for the rest of my life, I've found a little public wonkiness goes a long way, and I'm just here for the free crisps, mate.

Yes, it's important to keep pointing out the sleazy and corrupt and hypocritical activities going on around us. But as part of a greater whole (the selling of the media to a profit motive, for instance), not an obsession in and of itself posted in large measure because you want your readers to think you have cogent quips that they haven't already thought themselves. It's almost like a high-school game, to see which blogger best and most maliciously mocks other bloggers who don't share his or her viewpoint. And they figure they have a ready-made excuse for this: "they started it!"

Of course they did. But not by themselves, and that's not the point anyway. Here's what I think is the point: when serious issues are breaking out all over us, compounding daily with interest, nobody outside of our little corner is going to be paying relatively that much attention to the kids throwing sand at each other. They're going to want to learn more about the stuff that actually matters to them. They're already paying attention in greater and greater numbers. Good writers in the liberal blogosphere ought to take advantage of that thirst for truth, instead of living out Charles Atlas revenge fantasies of kicking sand in the bullies' faces. It may provide a momentary laugh (which value I don't downplay at all) but doesn't really humiliate those bullies in real life, it just feeds into their rigged damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't talking points ("liberals are whiners") and winds up making the whole exchange All About You instead of all about communicating with fellow readers and citizens.

So um, I guess I agree with Roxanne.

Estrogen Month - T Minus Five

Five days left to vote some "new blood" onto my News+Views Gals sidebar! Congratulations to all the blogs that made Civil Liberties Blog Central's Top 10 Blogs on Feminism and Women's Rights! Six of them (Feministing, Echidne, Alas, a Blog, Feministe, Hugo Schwyzer and Majikthise) are already on my blogroll, two are sponsored (Planned Parenthood's Now What? and Amnesty International's Stop Violence Against Women), and the other two (The Happy Feminist and Kortney Ziegler's blac(k)ademic) are on my Where the Women Bloggers Are bookmark list, waiting to be voted on along with (at last count) 106 other worthy candidates, so come on and start voting in the comments section below! Here's the full rundown of the "rules" for those who came in a bit late...

Liberal Coalition Top Ten
Week of 3/19 thru 3/25/06

Hoorah, after three days Bloglines once again "found" my Atom feed, and the last three days' worth of posts have finally shown up there. No time like the present to not only remind readers that this year's Estrogen Month add-some-worthy-women-to-my-blogroll voting now underway (only five more days!), and to carry on with my weekly look at Liberal Coalition members' posts that caught my eye:

• Alex at Sooner Thought warns us that Halliburton's coming to his back yard. Yikes, run away!

• Andante at Collective Sigh brags about her daughter, as well she should!

• Bryant Gries at Make Me A Commentator!! has gone all Goon Show on us. Not that I'm complaining!

• Echidne of the Snakes examines that deceptive "freedom" that never seems to be defined. Frankly, I think to many conservatives "freedom" and "free markets" are one and the same; it's the freedom of rich people to exploit everyone else while they acquire stuff.

• The Farmer at farm runoff explains what salvia is. I'd never heard of this plant before, either the "benign" one that grows in these parts or the divinorum hallucinogenic variety that's found pretty much only in Singapore.

• John at archy is perhaps too excited about an upcoming mammoth movie. Geez, I have no idea why, it's not like it's snakes on a plane or anything.

• Steve Gilliard at The News Blog has lots of tasty stuff, as usual, including examining the right's tendency toward more open racism of late, displaying a modern recruitment poster, and reminding us why the old boys' network is alive and well.

• Trish Wilson tells us which of the top 100 must-read sf books she's actually read. A lot of them aren't on my list because I got tired of feeling left out of the fun (identifying-with-character-wise) because I was female. Of the list, I count only nine by women, and to my recollection I've read 19 of the 100 listed, which sounds about right as I have little interest in some of the male authors and heretically suspect the movies made from their tomes are probably more interesting than the original text in many cases.

• upyernoz at rubber hose has fond memories of the Queen of the North.

• Lastly, given my Bloglines feed-reading problems the past few days, I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge those LC members whose feeds haven't been working properly due to no fault of their own. Keith Kisser at Invisible Library invites us to download his new book (I've just downloaded the PDF), and Mike from Left is Right has tons and tons of cool sites for us to peruse.

Silly Site o' the Day

Bloglines is still not seeing my Atom feed after three days, so if you read Pen-Elayne via that newsreader and you happen to have clicked on my blog wondering where I am - well, I'm still here, and please subscribe to my alternate feed instead for the time being. (Someone set up a LiveJournal feed for me eons ago, which is good and bad because, while it's useful for RSS purposes, it completely blocked off "penelayne" as usable for an actual LiveJournal and wouldn't even let me sign on to change it because I wasn't the one who set it up, so had to use "elaynetoo" instead for my backup LiveJournal blog.) As we tore about a bit yesterday (Ikea and Home Depot in one day, whew!), today's strictly at-home, monitoring Datsa who's now off his medicine and back on a specially formulated dry food as the new vet thinks all he needs is more fiber. If I have the energy, I may even do the ironing, if you know what I mean. Speaking of which, here's a Euphemism Generator, to to speak. Know what I mean, eh? eh? Via Gerard's Generator Blog, to which I'm now subscribed thanks to Jim at Empty-handed. Humph, not fair, Gerard's Atom feed shows up on Bloglines, why won't mine? pout pout...

Because He Desperately Needs the Hits

Via Atrios, the link to the Dixie Chicks' website opens to their new song, Not Ready To Make Nice, complete with lyrics to follow along as the song plays. While I thought it was a good, powerful statement about the crap they've had to take from some of their less tolerant country music base, I also read "feminist empowerment statement" into at least a portion of the lyrics.

There's No Place Like Home

Congrats, Susie! Hope the landlady musician doesn't keep you up late hours...

Pass It On

Via Julia: "When you see this, post an anti-war song in your journal."

Here's my choice:

Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans
At the end of the early British war
The young land started growing
The young blood started flowing
But I ain't marchin' anymore

For I've killed my share of Indians
In a thousand different fights
I was there at the Little Big Horn
I heard many men lying
I saw many more dying
But I ain't marchin' anymore

It's always the old to lead us to the war
It's always the young to fall
Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all

For I stole California from the Mexican land
Fought in the bloody Civil War
Yes I even killed my brother
And so many others
And I ain't marchin' anymore

For I marched to the battles of the German trench
In a war that was bound to end all wars
Oh I must have killed a million men
And now they want me back again
But I ain't marchin' anymore

(chorus)

For I flew the final mission in the Japanese sky
Set off the mighty mushroom roar
When I saw the cities burning
I knew that I was learning
That I ain't marchin' anymore

Now the labor leader's screamin' when they close the missile plants,
United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore,
Call it "Peace" or call it "Treason,"
Call it "Love" or call it "Reason,"
But I ain't marchin' any more.

Got that from here.

95 Years Ago Today




We still remember.

Silly Site o' the Day

It's been two days and my Bloglines feed is still broken (although if you click on my Atom feed from my sidebar it works, so I assume other news aggregators aren't having the same problem). Plus, I think Robin and I both picked up colds going outside late yesterday afternoon in that chill wind (and all he did was walk me to the bus stop by our house). And of course I have to schlep back to the same pharmacy today (after we take Datsa for his first checkup at the new vet down the block) to pick up my steroid regimen and regular heart/BP medications. I hope the steroids don't cause me to see tiny people and animals on top of food (via Xeni at BoingBoing)...

Estrogen Month - Salute to Straw

In honor of the woman who probably influenced me more than any other (just got off the phone with Mom); in the hopes that despite this evening's relapse (after waiting for a homeward-bound bus for 15 minutes in the biting wind after, ironically, the pharmacy told me my medicine wouldn't be ready for a couple of hours) I think I'm finally getting over this month-long cough; and considering we still have a week left in March, I've decided to do a truncated version of last year's not-quite-good-enough-for-the-Koufax-finals Estrogen Month. As you may recall, this was a month-long event wherein I attempted to introduce readers (and myself) to new voices in the feminist blogosphere, via holding weekly polls wherein folks could vote to add names to my regular reading list and sidebar blogroll.

So I'll get to the "rules" of this year's version in a minute, but first I wanted to mention that I've added a few names on my own, women who'd either inadvertently been dropped or weren't added and should have been or had me blogrolled and I'd neglected to reciprocate. So welcome (back) to the blogroll, Riggsveda and News Writer and Terry and especially Ilyka Damen, for whom this has been Blog Against the Strawfeminist Week. Do click through the link above to read her entire (and very amusing) intro, and then read about bipolar strawfeminism (positively link-crazy and brilliantly written!) and playing name that quote year and repurposing Animal Farm and getting feedback and pop, pop, pop culture and *gulp* castration and, at last, a search for definition. Nice job this past week, Ilyka!

Now, to the "rules," such as they are:

• If you click on my Bloglines subscriptions and go down to the 7th and 8th categories, you'll see two sections called "Where the Women Bloggers Are." This where I bookmark my "gals in waiting" blogs, ones that were brought to my attention but which aren't yet on my official sidebar blogroll and regular reading list.

• Peruse these two sections as much as you like, particularly the first one, which has blogs that I found of more specific interest to me (and all the links are current as I just went through them today to make sure). The sections are listed alphabetically by blogger name/handle, with the blog name following in parentheses.

• If you see one or more blogs there that you personally adore, or that you simply cannot believe aren't on my regular list yet, speak up in the comments section attached to this post and the "countdown" comment sections to follow in the next week. Please make some sort of case (it doesn't have to be long, a sentence or two is just fine) for why you think I should add your blogger(s) of choice to my blogroll, and why other Pen-Elayne readers should check out her/their blog(s).

• You can, of course, give a shout-out yourself to be added to my blogroll if you're not there already! If you have or know of a female-written blog that isn't listed in the "Where The Women Bloggers Are" sections, and you don't see the blogger's name anywhere in my sidebar sections (under Liberal Coalition, News+Views Gals, Kultcha Gals, Dynamic Duos and Group Blogs), please let me know about it!!

• On Friday, March 31, I'll tally everyone's votes and add the top vote-getters to my sidebar. Meanwhile, everyone keep checking the comments sections to find out, as I hope I will be, about some great female-run blogs out there!

Now, if only my Atom feed starts working again I'll be a happy camper...

Friday Linky Dumpy

The best thing about this (via Augie)? I can hear it all in my ex-husband's voice. "Elayne. Look. It's like this. There's snakes. And they're on - a plane! You know. SNAKES. On an f'n PLANE!" Cracks me up every time.

Speaking of which, Gary has a problem with the #1 movie hype of any given week. I can relate, I actually heard a Chicken Little ad touting it as "Disney's #1 animated movie of 2005" and I didn't notice the word "Disney" at first, then Robin pointed out to me that it was their only animated movie in 2005...

Colleen muses about horse (and house) country down VA-way.

I'm very, very pleased that Ragnell is hosting the next Carnival of the Feminists.

Sandra discusses the inking process. Geez, don't I get enough of this at home? :)

Anne muses at length about the imminent decline of the American empire. "What worries me is that they can make it true...by making people believe it's true."

Eric interviews the courageous and savvy President of the Oglala Sioux, Cecilia Fire Thunder.

Chris has posted his Time.com story about the current situation in Iraq.

Maia has a great post up at Alas, A Blog about people mistakenly equating beauty with health (and, of course, defining beauty way too, erm, narrowly)...

Glenn announces his upcoming book. Tom's book is out now. Ah, I vaguely remember when I used to have time to read books...

Greg makes the compelling observation that Operation Iraqi Liberation is a success, in that "Yes, Bush went in for the oil -- not to get more of Iraq's oil, but to prevent Iraq producing too much of it."

I'm glad I was right to pay no attention to Ben Domenech. As a rule I pay little to no attention to any right-wing blogger; it's all I can do to keep up with the liberal and lefty ones! If you have to ask "who's Ben Domenech?", you're my kinda blogger...

Time to go home! If I'm a good girl and finally do another Estrogen Month post tonight, can I have my RSS feed back, Blogger/Bloglines?

Silly Site o' the Day

Today is a milestone birthday for my mother. Happy Platinum Day, Mom!! Here's a word search puzzle maker just for you, have fun! Via Karen.

Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)

Amy loves her some windows. Here she is peeking out the side of the blinds atop the AC in our computer room...



...and here's a silhouette of her in our bedroom window...



Pay no attention to that cuteness behind the curtain!

Silly Site o' the Day

Weird and long day so far, and I haven't even gotten to post anything until now. The doctor finally saw me this morning and gave me a course of steroids to get rid of the last of my month-long cough. Then I found myself very busy at work, even though my boss isn't in, but it's all been interesting secretarial-type stuff for a change. Our home email (Verizon) hasn't been working and is probably going by the wayside soon (parents please take note) so I'll be busy importing all my Outlook info to my all-but-unused-till-now Gmail account over the weekend. Feeling better overall, except for the cough and the home email thing, so it could be a lot worse, I could have... Blog Depression! (Well, I do, sort of, but only in the "when am I ever going to get to read all of these posts?" kinda way.) Via Karen.

Silly Site o' the Day

Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, doo dah, doo dah, Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, via this here post...

Milestone Notes

In addition to it being Mark Waid's birthday (see below), today is also the birthday of two delightful people I've met at Julia's wonderful blogger parties: Teresa Nielsen-Hayden (her 50th!) and Jen from The News Blog. Many happy returns of the day, gals!! Also, Kath David informs us that it's World Puppet Day, and she should know! And Dwight and Mary Beth have finally posted the finalists for the 2005 Koufax Awards (I didn't make the finals, nor did I expect to). If you're having trouble voting on the blog, MB suggests you send an email and provides all categories to copy and paste.

Silly Site o' the Day

Tom Peyer informs us that today is Mark Waid's birthday. What do you get the man who has everything, sometimes in triplicate, usually in its original box? This post seems like a nice present for him. But I think I'll link to Trish's post about the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, even though the link for the store itself doesn't seem to work. That may be because it appears to have been a project (scroll down to October 20, 2005) of this very cool-sounding arts organization for kids that holds seminars like this.

Arianna Updates

Robin tells me I should let people know I've posted three updates to the post I first made on Thursday about Arianna Huffington and George Clooney, because people who don't read Pen-Elayne via its RSS feed don't know about the updates, and also because the NY Times has now reported on the affair, naturally sneering at HuffPo for not practicing journalism (which blogging isn't), which it seems to interpret as "stirring up a tempest in a teapot two full days after the whole mess has ended."

Silly Site o' the Day

Boss in early, expected nausea and abdominal cramps from the antibiotics are kicking in (but the cough/phlegm/post-nasal-drip/whatever is still with me and, if anything, is increasing), not feely so good. Mondays; ick. Don't even know what silly site to choose... eeny meeny... how about Warning Signs for the Web, via Ann Bartow?

Silly Site o' the Day

I'm sorry, Bush in drag disturbs me on levels I can't even begin to articulate, but to take that image and put it into a text adventure called Georgina Bush requires a mind so warped I either have to congratulate the perpetrators or, you know, cross to the other side of the street if I see them approaching. Via August Pollak, damn him to hell.

Liberal Coalition Top Ten
Week of 3/12 thru 3/18/06

Congratulations to Jane Hamsher's Firedoglake partner Christy Hardin Smith, aka ReddHedd, on acquitting herself quite well on this morning's Washington Journal! I have to admit I watched it more to hear Christy talk about blogging than to hear her debate a PowerLine creepazoid (whom I muted), but it's early in the morning and I have no stomach for false equivalency. Also congrats to Guy Andrew Hall on his new job, and to Alex Greenwood for making the finals in the Crooks & Liars Murrow Contest! Now let's see if I can go through the other Liberal Coalition members' posts of interest from this past week with Bloglines' formatting skewed...

• Andante of Collective Sigh presents her laundry list for 2008 Presidential hopefuls.

• All your base are belong to us! If we're the base of the Democratic Party (and I don't think we are, not so's they'd notice at least - most of them are too busy still suckling the teat of the conservative Republican-lite DLC to notice what their actual constituency is saying) then, asks Jane Hamsher, how we can we make it any clearer what positions they need to support, and support strongly, in order to respond to our concerns? Steve Gilliard of The News Blog thinks it's that they don't trust their own hearts. Echidne of the Snakes despairs of the Dems as well (as so many liberal bloggers have this past week), noting, "How do you like them choices: either Attila the Hun or someone cowering in the corner, waiting, waiting." Nope, don't like 'em at all...

• Both NTodd Pritsky from Dohiyi Mir and Kathy Kattenburg at Liberty Street have zeroed in on Jennifer Loven's AP article about Bush arguing with strawmen during his speeches. It doesn't come as a surprise at all that this fellow essentially talks to (and has arguments with) himself; that's what's behind the Graydon Carter observation as well, isn't it, that "He speaks to the audience as if they're idiots. I think the reason he does that is because that's the way these issues were explained to him." Norbizness of Happy Furry Puppy Story Time figures that as long as Bush is actually talking to himself, why not put words in his mouth more relevant to what's actually going on (not to mention more amusing)?

• Steve Gilliard is still the only blogger I read who's critiquing the Dutch. Perhaps that's because he wasn't one of those who went on the Amsterdam junket. He also has a fascinating article about transracial adoption.

• Bryant Gries at Make Me A Commentator!! highly doubts that rock and roll is dead. I agree; since Air America screwed over Marc Maron and I've switched to FM music stations for my commute, much of the new music I'm hearing is just as good as the old stuff. Bryant also shakes his head at conservative pundits who go out of their way in refusing to understand the difference between reality and metaphor.

• A couple great Estrogen Month posts from Echidne - one about harems and one about the prominence of women in the progressive media (as with other areas, we're actually all over the place, but as long as "prominence" is male-defined and the media of whatever political stripe is owned by men, well, you know the rest).

• Jeff at Speedkill takes a look at Christian blasphemy, Canadian style.

• John at archy has little patience for the latest round of "we've found Noah's Ark!" Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof has had it with the HHS folks who suggest stocking up on canned tuna will help in a pandemic, in the same way duct tape helped stave off anthrax. And upyernoz at rubber hose is none too thrilled with the AAA, which opposes PA's clean vehicles program and apparently has quite the anti-environmental history. And Mike at Left is Right is beyond disgusted with the results of the latest Congressional report card on the Bush Administration.

• Lastly, Eryk at And Then... flips us the bird. But, you know, in a good way.

Headline of the Day

From the Independent: "Three years on and still they're lying to us." Oh my dears, they were lying long before that... Runner-up: Joe Klein's beyond-unbelievable "Our Eyes Are Open. Now What?" Um, mayhap you should have had them open 3+ years ago like most thinking people?

Another Blogger Update

Because not every Blogger user subscribes to Blogger Status:

A clarification about the filer we restored yesterday: This machine is indeed up and functioning again, so the affected blogs are no longer entirely inaccessible. However, it is still not in great shape and we are in the process of moving all the data off of it and on to better machines. So over the next few days there may still be lingering and intermittent problems for some blogs. This includes the "forbidden" errors we're all getting tired of, as well as occasional publishing errors, or incompletely published pages. If you get an error viewing a blog, refreshing the page once or twice should clear it. For publishing problems, simply wait a few minutes and republish, and that should take care of it. Thanks for your patience while we work on clearing all this up.

That's pretty much what's been going on with my publishing ability switching on and off like a crazy monkey. Hope this helps others. Of course, now Bloglines has developed a bit of a glitch with its formatting, making it hard to read new posts from my subscribed-to blogs...

Hey Mom and Dad, A Little Help Here!

I see the "visited states" game is making the rounds again, so now that Blogger is (fingers crossed) fixed, I refer folks to this post from two years ago, wherein I mapped my visited US states, UK counties, countries in the world and even planets in the solar system (as far as I know I've only visited Earth). As I mentioned at the time, however, there are a number of states not marked in red below because I visited them with my parents when they drove cross-country over 47 years ago and I don't remember any of that because I was one year old. So, Mom and Dad, here's my visited-states map again:



Which other states should I be marking in red as having visited?

P.S. I love what Anne Zook did with this map on her site, making it a map of countries whose residents visited her blog...

Better Safe Than Sorry

Just a reminder, with all the screwiness Blogger has had of late (I'm still having trouble posting), folks who use the service may wish to back up their templates and save them to their hard drives. I just realized I hadn't pasted an updated template into my MS Word files in a couple months, so that's now taken care of.

A Grim Anniversary

Riverbend takes note. (Glad to see her RSS feed fixed after all this time; mine seems to be working again as well...)

Silly Site o' the Day

Via WHAK'd in our comments section, a whole mess of blog image and sign generators - have fun, folks! (Warning, the site opens to music...)

Who's On First

Yes, me like the new Doctor Who episodes, which yes, I know are actually last year's model. But then I'm easy to please, I even liked the Mary Sue-ish TV movie from a few years back.

Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)

Kitty placeholder, since I don't know when or whether this will ever be seen...



Amy, like I, dreaming wistfully of better times and easier posting...

Please Stand By

Still major problems with Blogger... sorry... hope to get in cat-blogging later but it may have to go by the wayside... I may just give up for awhile and post to my LiveJournal...

Silly Site o' the Day

Top o' the morning'! Sayeth Blogger, "The filer that we have been having trouble with in the last few days failed again. Those blogs that are stored on the bad filer are temporarily not available for publishing and viewing." I can publish to mine but y'all can't view it unless you're reading the RSS feed. I need a drink. [Update 4:00 PM EST: Should be fixed now, although my ability to post keeps cutting in and out like a crazy monkey; hi all!] Have you ordered your Guinness Surger yet? Yes, Rob wants one (or as he says, "one for every room"). Via Jason.

Damn You, Bebeto Matthews!

That's the name of the AP photographer who took this photo:


[Here's the uncropped shot.]

Now the cat's out of the bag and everyone will know it was really my husband who talked John Bolton into voting against establishing a UN Human Rights Council (do click on that link, the accompanying picture is much funnier). Not that I can read his mind or anything, but perhaps he did it because he didn't think the US looked bad enough in the eyes of the world. [Seriously, it's scary how many people Robin looks like...]

On Misrepresentation

By now I'm sure many readers are as sick as I am about the "what is a blog?" discussions. I've lost count of how many times I've said "bloggers are writers who use a set of computer-based tools to compose one-to-many entries; journalists are a specific subset of writers so some bloggers are journalists and others aren't" yadda yadda. But one thing usually isn't in contention - the blog's byline (whether actual or pseudonymous) is assumed to match the person writing the words. Particularly if the entry in question contains a phrase like "There, I Said It!"

When the Huffington Post group blog began I admit I had the same caveat lector trepidation I usually reserve for celebrity-filled blogs. Because so many of them are living in a world where Their People do everything for them short of bathroom visits, and because so many are - like non-celebrities - fairly neophobic, I usually assume that any blog with their name on it isn't written by them. Also, it's pretty easy to spot the exceptions - Rosie O'Donnell (whose entries I quite like despite the freeform poetry-prose she uses), Wil Wheaton (whom I'll always consider the first true celeblogger), Margaret Cho, David Byrne, even Pete Townsend when he chooses to update. And since celebs like Harry Shearer have done a great job on HuffPost, their index is chock-full of other celebs who've occasionally posted, and the celeb in question last Monday is well known for his liberal views, there was no reason to doubt that the following post from was real:

I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It!
By George Clooney on Iraq

I am a liberal. And I make no apologies for it. Hell, I'm proud of it.

Too many people run away from the label. They whisper it like you'd whisper "I'm a Nazi." Like it's dirty word. But turn away from saying "I'm a liberal" and it's like you're turning away from saying that blacks should be allowed to sit in the front of the bus, that women should be able to vote and get paid the same as a man, that McCarthy was wrong, that Vietnam was a mistake. And that Saddam Hussein had no ties to al-Qaeda and had nothing to do with 9/11.

This is an incredibly polarized time (wonder how that happened?). But I find that, more and more, people are trying to find things we can agree on. And, for me, one of the things we absolutely need to agree on is the idea that we're all allowed to question authority. We have to agree that it's not unpatriotic to hold our leaders accountable and to speak out.

That's one of the things that drew me to making a film about Murrow. When you hear Murrow say, "We mustn't confuse dissent with disloyalty" and "We can't defend freedom at home by deserting it at home," it's like he's commenting on today's headlines.

The fear of been criticized can be paralyzing. Just look at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, "We were misled." It makes me want to shout, "Fuck you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic."

Bottom line: it's not merely our right to question our government, it's our duty. Whatever the consequences. We can't demand freedom of speech then turn around and say, But please don't say bad things about us. You gotta be a grown up and take your hits.

I am a liberal. Fire away.

Great post, referenced in lots of places in the lefty blogosphere. Thing is, though, as it turns out it doesn't actually fit the definition of a blog post - i.e., a piece of one-to-many writing composed at a computer by the person whose byline appears atop the entry - as it wasn't in fact written by Clooney, but rather culled from various statements he made in interviews and structured by Huffington to look like a blog post.

At first I couldn't figure out the entire story, as all I saw was Huffington's explanation-slash-pseudo-apology which followed. But thanks to Jane Hamsher I found this blog post by Elizabeth Snead at the LA Times, which gives a fairly complete rundown of events (including updates).

Snead follows up with what may be the real story behind the story - basically, Clooney's People on the left hand didn't connect with Clooney's People on the right hand. See, in Hollywood folks like Clooney have personal publicists (the snubbed guy whom Arianna didn't even know) and independent publicists that handle various projects on which they work (the gal to whom Arianna actually spoke) and I wouldn't doubt at all that those publicists have publicists. So it's not a matter of Clooney not standing behind the words attributed to him - which he does, make no mistake - but of his guy getting snubbed (as well as the words appearing not really being a post by Clooney because, after all, the guy can write and probably would have wanted to structure something for HuffPost in his doubtless copious free time if Arianna had been a bit more patient).

Obviously this is all mountains-out-of-molehills with a hefty dose of typical Lalaland bullshit thrown in, but the end result is a lot of people asking, as a commenter did in a response to Snead's follow-up (which comment also mentioned a Walter Cronkite post actually being culled from a letter Cronkite had sent to the Drug Policy Alliance), "How many other 'phony bloggers' are posting at Huffington??"

The Huffington Post doesn't need more participation; it already churns out a few dozen posts a day by its various writers. And it doesn't need more celebrity appeal, judging by its index. So why does Arianna feel the need to mislabel stuff she's reprinted from elsewhere as being a blog post by the person who spoke or wrote the words she's reprinting? And why remove the Clooney post in its entirety (unless she was asked to) rather than just adding a disclaimer or other parenthetical stating where the words are from? It's not like there isn't a method for doing this. Lots of bloggers repro important and interesting things (speeches, columns, letters, interview excerpts) from other sources, sometimes with links and sometimes without. None of the bloggers reprinting Paul Krugman's NY Times columns are claiming to be Krugman. In her haste to jump the gun and make her blog seem more exclusive and important than it actually is, Huffington has shot herself in the foot here. And the shame of it is, The Huffington Post is already interesting and informative and celeb-laden enough that none of this was necessary. Sometimes eagerness and good intentions are a bad combination.

Update #1: Apparently Arianna still doesn't get it. It's not that she "repurposed" Clooney's words from interviews, it's that she didn't label them as repurposed - she made them into a blog post and signed his name to it. She seems willfully myopic about how much negative press this loss of credibility has garnered; all she sees is that the post got an "overwhelmingly positive response and provok[ed] a great deal of valuable discussion." Can someone please clue her in? Otherwise people are going to keep wondering if that's really Jack Klugman or Alec Baldwin and it'll just keep going on like that and pretty soon there will be no reason to believe anyone there is who she says they are.

Update #2: Finally, I think she's got it.

Update #3: Hey look, the NY Times discovers the story, only two days after it's all played out! Apparently that's called journalism!

Silly Site o' the Day

Shall I refrain from mentioning how the drop in temperature brought the cough back with a vengeance? Nah, I'm sure you're all bored by now. I know it's a couple days late, but here's the Pi Song (again via Laura).

For Those Who Like This Sort of Thing...

Heidi MacDonald has posted an exhaustive interview she did with Alan Moore last fall. Update: Turns out that was only the first part; here's part two.

A Day Late...

...but still worthwhile reading. Hats off to all these estrogen-bearers!

Avedon Carol on the latest volley in the culture wars about how many progressives are falling for the conservative meme about how the left is godless. You know, the side that actually strives to practice what the esteemed prophets preached, throw out the hypocrites and mammonites, etc.

Barbara O'Brien on our napping yet overworked administration - a great comparison between things said five years ago and today.

Nona Williams is running an interesting contest - the best name-based neologism wins a Flying Spaghetti Monster car emblem! I'd say something like Holy (Wholly) Stoned to describe Sharon Stone's press conference behavior in Israel but that's pretty lame so I'll leave it to the experts.

Amanda has some great posts up - on the words of a woman punching strawfeminists about sex; the difficulty of running a feminist blog that attracts trolls (not a problem for me - as I see it, deleting trollish comments from a blog you run is not a free speech issue at all, and the more these idiots cry "censorship" the more they show that they have no clue as to what censorship actually means); preaching about the knee-jerk anti-religious left, tongue firmly in the other cheek she's just turned; and a terrific thoughtful piece about how forced-childbirth advocates are only following "natural" orders. Ya wohl!

Go wish Trish Wilson a belated happy birthday. And send some good vibes in Susie's direction.

Silly Site o' the Day

What better time than the Ides of March to contemplate the wonders of the Earth Destruction Advisory Board (via Laura)? Whew, the alert level is green, the current Earth status stands as "not destroyed!" Good thing, too; if it weren't around people couldn't run-not-walk to their local comic shops today to pick up their copies of Birds of Prey #92!

Yes, Yes, I Know...

...another Purim come and gone and my Megillat Vashti script not yet begun. Someday I'll have a job that doesn't suck out my soul and leave my body constantly drained...

The Feminist Gastronome's Dilemma

So we all had buffalo wings in the office today from this really great sports bar/wings place nearby. And they give you little paper trays to put 'em in, with pithy sayings on the side like "Our political viewpoint? right wing AND left wing" and such. And one of them really bothered me: "Two things guys don't like stolen from them: wings and girlfriends." Now, this isn't like Hooters - the food is actually good and I want to keep patronizing the place. Fortunately, their website has a feedback form, of which I took advantage to remind them that many of their customers are female.

Silly Site o' the Day

One day soon I hope to begin a blog entry with something other than "Still coughing"... It actually appears to be a tripartite cough - there's whatever is left over from the illness three weeks ago, plus the allergic reaction, plus the result of involuntary tightening up whenever I find myself in an uncomfortable or stressful situation (what Robin calls my "nervous cough"). The Flonase wasn't working on the second aspect as well as I'd hoped, so I've switched to OTC antihistamine (chlorpheniramine maleate) tablets. But there's little I seem to be able to do to mitigate the third aspect because it's all involuntary reaction and so much of my job is stressful. I had a few coughing fits yesterday afternoon that literally left me breathless; one of our tenants heard me wheezing by the reception desk and hurried in thinking I might need medical attention! With my boss in early today I've just felt the entire area tighten up again, and there's not a darn thing I can do about it, not even taking deep breaths. Thank goodness for Silly Sites like Etched in Time by artist George Vlosich, sent to me in an email from Len Cleavelin of the late Dark Bilious Vapors (which I miss).

RIP Maureen Stapleton

The Oscar-winning actress has passed away at age 80.

Silly Site o' the Day

Since the Koufax Awards got kinda glitchy and first round voting is being extended one more day, I won't open up Estrogen Month voting (with accompanying explanation) until at least tomorrow. Maybe by that point my cough will be all but gone. I hate when flu season morphs right into duck season rabbit season allergy season. But hey, at least our taxes are done. I'd only expected to get as far as tallying Robin's business-related deductions yesterday (being married to a self-employed person I've learned to obsessively horde and organize receipts), but we're completely through the entire process, surprising ourselves so much that every few minutes we walk around giddily saying stuff like, "Oh Robin, don't forget we need to do the taxes - oh no, wait, they're already done!" At this point we cannot recommend TurboTax highly enough, although I do still exhibit 20th century Timid Caveperson tendencies and your 21st century computer tax programs frighten and confuse me (Robin did all the inputting).

I'm also keeping up pretty well with both comics and blogs at the moment. I have a few months' worth of one more Wildstorm title to skim through then I'm caught up with the entire DC comp boxes so far (did I mention Birds of Prey #92 comes out this Wednesday?); and, at the moment, my Bloglines subs show unread blogs in only four categories and a total of maybe 350 unread posts - doable in a couple hours at most. In all my blog reading I've also beefed up my saved Silly Site links so I won't have to go searching for awhile. Here's one that really caught my fancy (pun intended), an amusing blog purportedly written by a pigeon called Brian who hangs out in London with his pigeon'y mates. Via Xeni at BoingBoing, natch.

Milestone Notes

Happy belated birthdays to Scott "Legs" Lemieux and Elaine Frankonis!

Missing the Point

As pointed out by both Justin at Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy and Mark Evanier at News From ME, it might have been nice if someone, anyone on Bill Maher's panel this past week had reminded Larry Miller and their viewing public of the FISA provision that says you can get a warrant up to 72 hours after the fact if you're wiretapping suspected terrorists. This is vitally important to keep hammering in - that liberals aren't "soft on terror," but rather that conservatives (at least the ones in power) are soft on the rule of law.

Liberal Coalition Top Ten
Week of 3/5 thru 3/11/06

Before I get to other Liberal Coalition members' posts of interest from this past week, I want to extend my deepest condolences to John at archy on the loss of his beloved Miss Parker, and send my best to Echidne of the Snakes, who's dealing with Hank's histiocytic sarcoma as best anyone can.

• Death was on the minds of many LC members this week, as Natalie at All Facts and Opinions pays tribute to Dana Morosini Reeve, Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof (among others) remembers Gordon Parks, and Michael at Musing's Musings assures the dead dictator Milosevic that he won't be missed.

• Life does continue, however, and a few LC'ers celebrated PZ Myers' birthday this past week by doing some very good science blogging, like Coturnix's latest roundup and John's reproing a picture of PZ's favorite icon.

• Both Uptown Ruler at Scrutiny Hooligans and Echidne warn against sushi (actually, the mercury levels found therein in some CA restaurants, as well as the "food uniformity act"). Lalalala, I can't hear you, lalalala...

• None of the male-run A-list bloggers seemed to notice International Women's Day - heck, even Arianna's Huffington Post didn't mention it! - but LC members blogged about it, as well as blogging against sexism. Here are posts from Echidne, Bryant at Make Me A Commentator!!!, and two good ones from T. Rex.

• In other news, Scrutiny Hooligans scores an interview with Dr. J. Wendell Runion, Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake name-drops all over the place, so does Echidne but in her case it's goddess stuff, and Scott at ...You Are A Tree is extremely excited about Spore.

• Steve Gilliard takes a look at how the Dutch want to ban burqas. I wonder how many progressive bloggers who got those free trips to Amsterdam are going to write about this; so far the total seems to be zero, so I stand by my theory about them being successfully bought off.

• Last but not least, Mustang Bobby makes an interesting connection between Bush's current standing in the polls and the latest bullshit terror warning. 'Twas ever thus...

As a final reminder, lots of LC member blogs, including Pen-Elayne, are nominated for various Koufax Awards and the first-round voting ends today. Personally I think it would be very nice if ever LC member votes for the Liberal Coalition in the category of Best Blog Community.

Silly Site o' the Day

Ah good, I can do some serious bloggy catch-up now that Blogger has resynched its RSS feed and I'm not getting any more of those feed-error exclamation points on Bloglines. But first, another episode of a delusional "sighting" of someone's idea of what Jesus looks like replicated in foodstuffs, reported by Pam, led to Sabina Becker's recommendation in the post's comment section of Cheesus Industries - Behold the Power of Cheesus! Alas, they don't appear to actually have any product available yet, but I love the idea...

Silly Site o' the Day

Yesterday a couple coworkers kept asking me why I didn't see my doctor about the cough, seeing as how it had been at least two weeks since I first took ill, and I related the story of how Robin and I had gone for our checksups last year just as he was going through something similar, and she gave us a pulmonary test and he had a major relapse and the only medication she gave both of us was Flonase, on which I'd given up last year after the 2-week trial because it didn't seem to do anything (and besides, I was still addicted to Neo-Synephrine then, from which I've since weaned myself completely after the hospital heart scare, so I'm convinced it wouldn't have allowed the Flonase to work anyway). Then as another coworker and I were leaving, she obvserved that what I had sounded like an allergy-related cough, which she gets as well this time of year, and not just the leftover from my fever a few weeks back.

Those conversations stuck in my head, and last night I dug out the Flonase from the back of the linen closet shelf and started using it again, and while my chest and throat still feel a bit stuffy this morning I'm hardly coughing at all. Even though I think my doc is sometimes too quick to prescribe stuff, particularly stuff of which she receives free samples, I do like the flowery smell of the Flonase as I inhale it. And if it actually works, who am I to complain? So I think I'm finally moving forward a bit, and having caught up on my immediate finances (we hope to do our taxes tomorrow) and blog-reading (I've even voted in all the Koufax Awards categories - remember, first-round polls close tomorrow! - except Best Post, Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition and Best New Blog, as I want to actually read through the entries first which has been my plan for some time) I think I'm in pretty good shape. I'm even going to try getting on the bike again today, for the first time in at least a month. So here's to the coming spring, a time of renewal both within and without, and let's hope we keep El Nino at bay (via Lauren at Feministe).

The Self-Correcting Blogosphere

Let's see if these updates get circulated as widely as the original bits were:

Via Angie, that teen sending text messages to her mom saying she'd been kidnapped and was being held in a basement made the whole thing up.

And that "live-action Simpsons opening" video reproed on so many blogs this past week has been declared a viral marketing success in promoting Sky One, so I'm sure Rupert Muroch congratulates the blogosphere on once again being a useful tool in more ways than one.

"The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts."

Or, payback's a bitch, as Paul Krugman notes. (Freebie link found via Maha.) We watched much of the Bruce Bartlett interview on The Daily Show last night, until Jon Stewart started desperately trying to convince Bartlett that competent government might actually be A Good Thing no matter the size, which we felt was a pointless tangent when Stewart could have kept to the subject at hand and said something along the lines of what we were thinking, and what Krugman's quote above articulates. This is what I wish Stewart had asked:

George W. Bush ran in 2000 on, among other things, the promise that he'd be a "CEO President," but the signs were all there, throughout his entire career, that he was a failed CEO at every company he'd been handed. Why on earth did so many voters ignore this matter of public record and believe he'd actually be competent? Moreover, why did so many persist in believing in Bush's competence as President in 2004 even after so many events had proven otherwise?

And I'd have loved to have seen Bartlett's response.

Musings on Control

A trio of completely unreleated posts has got my brain whirling this morning. First I read Mark Morford's latest column (fatphobia-free, hoorah!) about how there's Just Too Much Out There for modern folk (read: mostly well-off, mostly white, mostly urban Americans) to keep up with. Then I perused Dwight Meredith's patient explanation directed at those who would argue logic with anti-choicers (a daunting proposition at best) that, basically, men can't have abortion rights because men don't get pregnant (in legal parlance, they're "not similarly situated"). And then I noted that Cheryl Lynn is perplexed that, as a woman, the only kind of spam she seems to get is about erectile dysfunction.

And so I concluded that all three of these posts were, in the end, really all about the culture of male privilege and entitlement, and how so many, particularly in this country with its hyper-emphasis on individuality (which makes sense if the people in power don't want the folks without power who far outnumber them to engage in collective action against them, but that's another essay) are raised to believe that to be a man is to control your own destiny and, by extension, everything around you. And how all these things that Mark and Dwight and Cheryl talk about involve a lack of control that's interpreted as a loss of control, and to lose control (of your time, of your bodily functions, of the people around you, of your war) therefore implies that you're a failure as a man.

Never mind that women are (and ought to be) autonomous beings. Once they are impregnated, the above logic dictates that they are defined by the men who impregnate them, and who therefore have rights (both personal and legislative) over their incubators. Never mind that one can choose to turn off any electronic entertainment device at any time; one Must Keep Up to remain in the know! Never mind that the human body is a complicated and mysterious thing - if it doesn't obey one's every command at will there's something obviously wrong with it.

It's almost like a child believing that if he closes his eyes the world disappears. "Of course it's All About Us. We're told over and over again that we're the masters of our own fate!" And for an overwhelming number of these men, a lie repeated often enough becomes gospel. Because the alternative - the facts that they're not the center of their universe, that collective and cooperative action is often preferable to and accomplishes more than individual endeavor, and that there are just some things that one (male) human being cannot and never did control - is just too frightening to contemplate.

Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)

It feels like spring today, and Datsa has cat-scratch fever:



Okay yeah, he pretty much has that all the time...

Silly Site o' the Day

Or ... .. .-.. .-.. -.-- / ... .. - . / --- .----. / - .... . / -.. .- -.--, as they say in Morse Code, thanks to the Morse Code Translator (via Avedon Carol) that's keeping the art alive. I wonder if there's a shorthand translator somewhere? I couldn't find one in my brief Google search...

I Ain't Gonna Play Sun Trail City

Did you know that every state in the US has a tourism board, with websites chock full of resources? For instance, here's a listing of all of South Dakota's tourism associations, complete with phone and fax numbers as well as web links. Perhaps some folks might want to get in touch with any or all of these boards to let them know why the state won't be getting any of their tourist income.

On Speaking Too Soon

Just *cough* don't, okay *cough*? Stupid cough...

Mark Your Calendars

Only six more days until Birds of Prey #92 hits the shelves! Well, for you, at least. To quote Columbia re: Frank 'N' Furter's laboratory, "I've seen it!" (What I haven't seen are these mysterious Robin Riggs-inked JSA pages the solicitation mentions... perhaps they were thinking of LSH [Legion of Super Heroes] or Supermen of America or Green Arrow or Flash or any number of other DC books on which he's worked...)

Silly Site o' the Day

Oh frabjous day, callooh callay, I chortle in my joy! A coughless chortle, yet! Well, I'm not entirely over this horrid illness, but I haven't had any major fits yet, just a single cough here and there. And I have my full voice back! Still, I'm nowhere near 100%, so I'm not going near the stationary bike yet, and I didn't bring the Buckley's with me but I do have cough drops and another lemon to do my hot water/honey/lemon routine again, as that seemed to help a lot yesterday. Anyway, it's nice to be able to take deep breaths again and not collapse into coughing spasms. And just as spring is in the air! Here's a handy sunrise and sunset calculator if you want to keep track of the lengthening days, via Hanan Levin.

Frontiers of Science

In honor of PZ Myers' birthday, I think we should all post our observations on science news today. Here's mine.

This TV series sounds cool; I hope it's shown in the US soon.

I'm very happy Snopes has an RSS feed; they've just debunked the "blondes will be extinct in less than 200 years" bit that's been floating about again.

Morgaine found an interesting National Geographic article wherein anthropologist Robert Sussman concludes that prehistoric humans were not in fact warlike, according to the fossil record.

Of course by now everyone's heard of the discovery of what appears to be water on one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus.

Lastly, the NYSE is eating its own young... oh sorry, that's not science, is it?

Indispensably Devalued

[This is my post for Blog Against Sexism Day. After writing it I see it's more a work-related observation than a sexism-related one, but I think the idea of being treated as simultaneously indispensable and valueless tends to be much more applicable to women than to men in our sexist society.]

I've been a secretary for over 25 years, long enough to see my designation go from "typist" to "executive administrative professional" or whatever multisyllabic nonsense is currently in vogue. I started as a speed-typist at an appellate printer in the days before computers became plentiful in the business world, when we programmed short macros into our electronic typewriters so we wouldn't have to type the same frequently-used phrases over and over. I remember carbon paper and dot-matrix printers and switchboards with plugs. I also remember joining 9to5 and hearing horror stories about secretaries having to do personal work for their bosses like picking up dry cleaning and making/serving them coffee or lunch, and hoping I'd never be in that type of servile position.

We didn't know how good we had it in those days.

From what I've seen on the job boards I still peruse, the modern executive secretary is not only expected to be organized and make online travel arrangements and have expertise in the usual suite of computer programs, but it is often assumed she or he will also be doing a fair amount of personal scheduling for her or his boss(es), particularly if the boss in question is a CEO. Which not only infuriates me but confuses me - modern communication has made it so easy for just about anyone, especially the online-savvy which many bosses are, to take care of personal matters themselves that there's no real excuse to have their secretaries do it. For many, it seems to be just another way to exercise power over one's subordinates. And for most, that's a sexism issue because, by and large, the bosses are men and the subordinates are women.

The grey area between secretary and servant is often tricky to navigate. Take HIPAA, for instance. What started out as a way to protect patient privacy has become a nightmare for the secretary trying to find out information about her boss' family's claims status. "How are you related to the patient?" I'm not, I work for the family. "I'm sorry, we can't give out any information unless the family [jumps through various hoops to basically give the secretary power of attorney]." Many doctor's offices nowadays won't even let you schedule an appointment for someone to whom you're not related.

Mostly, being a secretary-servant means you get used to being treated as both indispensable and of little value simultaneously. If you work in an office with less than a couple dozen employees, chances are you're the only secretary, and if the office doesn't employ temps you can't take vacation days unless the boss approves (in some cases this means you don't go away unless he does) and there's nothing pending that only you can do. You learn to schedule your life around your boss' and his family's, to make their concerns your own even if you're not Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire who owns a mansion and a yacht. You also learn very quickly that any compassion you show is unlikely to be reciprocated, that your presence is going to be taken for granted, that as a de facto servant you're often regarded as being lower on the totem pole than if you were "just" an employee not directly reporting to the person at the top.

The up-side? If you're lucky you get paid more. You get to vicarously experience a lifestyle you will never be able to actually live even if you do get paid more. Your abritrarily-assigned tasks are often impossible but never boring. And you can make lots of high-level contacts which may serve you well in your quest for a job that doesn't assume you want to be a servant.

Kiwa Hirsuta



Via BoingBoing and other places. Just the sort of thing to put me off Lobsterfest...

Blogging Against Sexism and in Favor of International Women's Day

I've written my post but, ironically considering the day, have emailed the draft to my husband to see what he thinks before I post it. While he reads it, I wanted to give shoutouts to the BAS / IWD posts I've read so far that I found of particular interest.

• The When Fangirls Attack gals both have terrific posts up - Kalinara explains why she hates token female characters, and Ragnell explores her adolescent (and adult) power fantasies.

• Natalie Bennett, whose Friday Femmes Fatales posts are must-reading (here's the most recent one) and who started the Carnival of the Feminists ball rolling (the latest CotF is posted today), has a good international perspective of the day.

• Twisty has another good international link roundup.

• Susie Madrak discusses the situation for women and girls in Ethiopia.

• Ms K at au lait also has an African perspective on the day.

• Chris Clarke has a good one on the glaring omission of women in a famous text from 1967 about the environment.

• Mel at Chandrasutra has a great idea for a Women's Day "'meme' of four." If I have time and energy tonight I'll try to tackle that one, which requires a bit of thought.

• Jill at Feministe is link-happy as well, with a terrific overview post. Alas, she'll be taking a break from blogging for a bit, and will be greatly missed.

• Amanda at Pandagon rallies the troops.

• Elise relates the story of two Hasidim who refused to understand that their flight wasn't Mechitza Airlines (and who were, unfortunately, backed up by the carrier in question).

• Pseudo-Adrienne repros NOW's message.

• Rana has another terrific essay up, this time about how All Our Bodies Belong To Us.

• Tresy notes that IWD is invisible to the mainstream US media. It's also invisible to most male progressive bloggers, as I mention below.

• Lastly, Hugo Schwyzer comes through in spades, with a long dissertation on his own anti-sexist work.

Update: I'm rather disappointed that, as of 8 PM today, my Bloglines subs show no other men on my blogroll writing about International Women's Day. A few have paid tribute to Dana Reeve, and a few others have talked about the South Dakota anti-abortion crazies in power, but nothing about IWD and no blogging against sexism whatsoever. As was pointed out a number of times amongst comics bloggers during the recent sexual harassment episode, it's not up to women to change their behavior, it's up to men to recognize that this happens and talk about it and try to prevent future occurrences through changed behavior and raising their own consciousness. Otherwise, even something like International Women's Day gets marginalized, and I'm pretty darn tired of the majority of the world's population being made constantly invisible like this.