This is the road to the house where we lived. It is Father’s Day 2008, and my husband and daughter are already at his parents’ house for the celebration. I am driving, alone, for no reason I care to examine.

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The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and strops,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918, seven days before the Armistice)

“An authentic life.”

For some reason, this phrase, neither new nor newly trendy, has been popping up more and more in reading, conversations, casual messages and in-depth debates in my field of awareness lately. For some reason, although I often care very deeply about the people involved in the discussion, the words themselves leave me cold – or perhaps that’s too harsh. Less than cold, then, but also less than moved. I don’t roll my eyes, as at “That’s not fair.” I don’t despise the speaker. I don’t even mind that it’s a cliché whose meaning is entirely dependent upon its user; most human experience fits into well-worn phrases when viewed from the outside. And I understand, once the explanations begin, what different people mean by it: searching for your true work, maybe, or living closer to the land, or connecting more with people than with things. I simply don’t like the descriptor itself nor the way it tends to be used.

What bothers me, I think, is this: the implication that life itself can be inauthentic. Full story »

What is happening in this photo?

Fine. Here’s the whole scene and another picture to CONFOUND AND AMAZE you… Full story »

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis (italics mine) in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.

Judge Vaughn R. Walker
August 4, 2010

And this, my fundamentalist Christian fellow citizens, is precisely why you are not the boss of me, or of gay couples, or of women, or of African-Americans or of anyone but your own selves (and your children, until they escape you). Irrationality. Beliefs based on, well, belief. Faith without reason. Useful for searching souls, perhaps, and it seems to fill the plates and build the megachurches, but it’s no way in hell to run a country. Full story »

Being born a woman (albeit a “natural” and therefore conservatively acceptable one), the prospect of joining a club in which my functions would be limited to possible figurehead, full-time cook and designated dicksucker* baby machine has consistently failed to seduce me. Short version: I’ve never been tempted to become a Republican. It’s difficult to imagine that any female could ignore the patriarchal worldview that is the GOP, no matter how terrifying crime and the shaky economy are… and yet self-identified Republican women exist and thrive here in the steamy crotch of the Bible Belt. I see the bumper stickers in the preschool parking lot. I hear the conversations everywhere from Neiman-Marcus to Target. Several of my friends and acquaintances have an elephant in their closets.  Hell, I love and trust one enough to leave my daughter (Her Majesty in the picture there) with her at least once a week, more often if her grandfather can wheedle hard enough. Full story »

The Texas GOP platform for 2010 has been out for a while now. From my casual skimming of reviews and analyses, the general sense and direction of the party line didn’t seem to have changed much; and so, in a shameful victory of sloth over principle, I absolved myself of reading the actual document and went to the pool. Or the river, or the grocery store, or the dentist – anywhere, in fact, rather than a quiet place in which I could closely read for myself the principles of the majority political party of the state in which I was born, raised and once again live.

But if my conscience sleeps soundly, my curiosity has a terminal case of insomnia, and last week I holed up at La Taza, fortified my flagging resolution with a large latte and two palmiers and began to read.  And read. And at last I understand, both intellectually and at a gut level, the hopes, fears and way of life of the Texas Republican. The platform is more than a statement of beliefs. It’s a signpost, a guide to the kind of life an honorable, principled Republican aspires to lead and the vices he struggles to avoid – because of course, no decent human being would hypocritically urge his beliefs upon society without striving to live them himself. The following is a small sampling of what I learned about the private lives of my neighbors of the GOP persuasion.

1. No blowjobs. Full story »

Note to the sport-specific prescriptivists out there: not only am I an American, I live in Texas, where calling any game that does not include 300-pound men in Spandex slapping each other on the ass “football” is a Class B misdemeanor. Seriously. Look it up. I will therefore be referring to the sport played by the rest of the world as “soccer,” because your pantywad is not my jail time, pal.

• World Cup soccer appears to be played by extremely fit and flexible men with incredible stamina (more on this later). They rarely stop running, and when they do, it’s only long enough to kick a ball while spinning sideways through the air or to collide artistically with one or more other players four feet off the ground. Full story »

The story so far:

Pushed out of his rightful place by invidious, freedom-hating and downright evil forces,* one man dares to take a stand. One man defends God, country and family values.** One man rises in near-holy defiance of those who would undermine the self-assurance, certainty of purpose and irrefutable moral superiority of these great United States of America.*** In the twilight of his ascendancy, one man resolutely refuses to back down, fulfilling the promise of more than a decade with the Texas State Board of Education in a final glorious swan dive into the history books as the man with the guts to rewrite history… the way it should have been.

This man. Don McLeroy.

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If you’re a woman in a Western or Westernized culture in the twenty-first century, chances are good that you have, do or will own, wear, struggle to get into and on occasion hasten to get out of a garment called a brassiere. A bra. A couple of  fabric cups and some elastic which contain, shape and redistribute the weight of two masses of mammary tissue… while also bearing the burden of more than a hundred years of cultural, medical and political debate and opinion. Just off the top of my head here, a bra:

• is an essential device to support, train and protect fragile breast tissue while slowing or preventing their eventual droop earthward;
• is a cancer-causing, lymph-node-squishing, shoulder-aching contraption which has no effect on the actual shape or condition of the breast; Full story »

Only in the shallowest of senses are the sonnets in Fatal Interview “traditional,” as they are often damned today. They are traditional, in outward form—Millay never went overboard for the epidermal innovations and prosodic gimmicks that tantalized contemporaries like e.e. cummings and Marianne Moore—but jarringly new in substance and sentiment.

Cristina Nehring: Last the Night

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Christina Hendricks: that’s what real looks like, boys.

Today, women around the interwebs participate in Boobquake. The brainchild of self-described “liberal, geeky, nerdy, scientific, perverted atheist feminist” blogger Jen McCreight, this Commemoration of Cleavage, Festival of Funbags, Jubilee of Jugs is in actuality a double-mam slap in the face to this jackass, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, whose charmingly magical thinking runs something like this:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Wow. I knew adultery, rape, disease, societal meltdown, bastard children and plagues of locusts were the fault of my dirty pillows, but earthquakes? Damn. Full story »

A few months ago, a friend of mine on the-site-that-is-not-Twitter posted this article: “Good Dog, Smart Dog,” a look at changing ideas about the cognitive abilities of the canine set.  The short version – hey, dogs might be smarter than those brainiac science-types thought. My layperson reaction?  “Finally, some scientists who actually live with dogs.”

A beagle I once knew (not a breed that ever makes the “smartest” list, by the way) would purposely sit and stare intently at our French doors and squeak frantically to go outside, allow the then-frantic male mutt to assert his dominance by rushing out first as the door opened… and immediately drop to the ground to indicate that she wanted to stay in, thank you. Full story »

juxtapost (v. t.) to  inadvertently post two somehow related headlines next to each other

“Gaza hospital overwhelmed by dead, wounded”
“Bush family mourns death of 18-year-old White House cat”

After all, they don’t even know all those Palestinians.

“The impact of the death of a child”
“For stress reduction, just say ommm”

Dead kid? Just skip to the second story, folks.

“More than half of U.S. cyclists forgo helmets: report”
“Social Security overestimates death rates: study”

Probably not the death rate among cyclists.

sources: Yahoo News, CNN.com Health, Reuters.com

The holidays began this year sometime around the ides of November, with a surprise in the mailbox: a birthday card addressed to me in my younger brother’s wretched handwriting. After the obligatory “older than I am” joke, he had written:

You’re old, old, old, old, old. And crazy.
Love, Jason

Full story »

“Sweet fancy tap-dancing Jesus, Ivins!” roared Sam. “What crapped on your head?”

Ann abandoned her effort at slinking into the Scholars and Rogues newsroom; an effort, if truth be told, rendered futile at its inception by not only the astonishing configuration of her normally flat, mousy hair, but also by the conspicuously awkward floating-head stride she was attempting to maintain. She sighed, gingerly lowered herself into her chair, offloaded an enormous tote bag, and only then replied, “It’s an updo, boss.” Full story »

Taking a hiatus from posting has allowed me the opportunity to more fully inhabit the comment threads of the bastion of progressive genius that is Scholars and Rogues… and I’m ready to go home now. While there are many, many marvelous commenters here, every now and then one of the less desirable sorts takes up residence – or a worthy citizen or regular poster (!) has a moment of weakness, succumbing to the temptation of an all-out online brawl, becoming for a moment one of my least favorite types to run into in a dark thread late at night. Such as:

The Blog Stalker Full story »

Forget politics for a moment.

Forget terrorism, torture, genocide, mad dictators, the fate of the world, the state of your IRA, that fleeting pain in your left arm, the whereabouts of your daughter every time she leaves the house.

Let’s be afraid… for the fun of it.

In honor of Hallowe’en – and not the Harvest Hop or the Fall Festival or some other eye-gougingly inane euphemism, the real Hallowe’en – a murder of Scrogues share with you the stories, books and poems that first terrified them as children, or the tales that make them shiver in their intellectually elitist boots today.  Because let’s face it: the boogeyman doesn’t care about your voting record, your political views or your rhetorical skills.

He wants to know when you’re going to turn out the light.

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Bitch, please. This isn’t Cosmo, and never mind how I can come up with four or five of those titles right off the top of my head. These are a few simple, surprisingly little-known facts about feminists that I’ve put together as a service to the astonishingly large number of people who toss the “f” bomb around without a clue as to its meaning, its history or how asinine they sound.  Ignorance may be bliss, but idiots get on my last nerve, so let’s start with a helpful definition.

“Feminism (here we go) is a discourse that involves (endlessly variable) movements, theories and philosophies (immensely important though often migraine-inducing) which are concerned with the issue of gender (and sex, because, hey, biology exists) difference (if that’s not too divisive), advocate equality (or equity, or parity, or some therapeutic ball-busting) for women , and campaign for (and argue about) women’s (or womyn’s, or humyn’s (I didn’t make that up)) rights and interests (including women of any color, any religion, and any orientation, but expect all estrogen hell to break loose if anyone says the words “class” or “race”).” *

So much for helpful. How about “women are human?” Let’s go with that… Full story »

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