Is that a peanut in your Snickers bar?

Or could it be Satan?

Jeezly pop.  Just when you thought the Christers couldn't get anymore whack.

During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed. A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure ... During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.

Rats

The dryer broke two days ago.  Of course we cannot buy a new one -- we can barely afford to get it repaired.  We had to wait until today, when we got paid, to go to the laundromat, that's how stony broke we are these days.  It is very sad.

Today, this morning, at dawn, we loaded up all the laundry, which was piles and piles of it, because the dryer has been breaking for days, and drove off to hunt down a laundromat (these are both scarcer and pricier than they used to be -- I will appall you later with tales of how much it costs to wash a load of laundry*).  The kid had never been to a laundromat and was terrified, who knows why.  I kept telling her she would love it.

"They have chairs," I said.  "Nearby will be a small store to buy chips and crap.  We can read and talk while the laundry spins.  It will be warm and smell good and we can watch the interesting people.  I got several of my best details for my best stories watching people at laundromats.  You'll see."

I was right, too.  She loved it.

"This is so cool," she told me, returning from a lengthy circuit of the laundry.  "We should come here every week!"

(Herr Dr. Delagar, I must tell you, was much less sanguine.)

*I forgot to include this. $2.25 a load.  But this is for the big machine, the front-load triple loader.  The smaller machine was only $1.50.  The dryers are a quarter for every 9 minutes.

Yeah, But I Was Making it Up...

This is the premise my SF world starts with: in about 2100, I say, America completely privatizes its prison systems (the real religion of America, as I frequently tell my students, being not Christianity but Capitalism).  

This is an idea I have seen floated about on a few right-leaning economic blogs already; left-of-center bloggers responded with why it was a really stupid idea, which was that once you make something profitable, d'oh, people do more of it.

The commenters on the blogs, though, were who interested me.  You can imagine the comments.

Anyway, I ran with that idea, especially since I had been reading half a dozen other books at the same time -- Billy Bragg, and Octavia Butler's work, and Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, and I forget the others.  I didn't read Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name until later, but that book got folded into my research on the revision level.

However: look here.  Apparently what I thought was fiction, ain't.  And I am entirely off on the year. Go figure.

Oh: and here is why this is a really bad plan.

And What Do You Do?

So we're at the memorial service for the kid's uncle's father, and it's in Fayetteville, which is still a fairly small town. Herr Dr. Delagar and I lived there for about ten years about ten years ago. Everyone knows us, more or less, in certain parts of that community, specifically in the academic community, which is who was at this service, since the uncle's dad was at the university for, heavens, 30 years? Something like that.

So, well. We're doing the bit after the service, where we mingle and chat, and an older doctor of something inquires what I am doing now, and Herr Doctor Delagar tells him how I am teaching at U.A. Fort Smith and how I have a book coming out.

"Oh?" he asks. "What sort of book?"

"It's a novel," I tell him. "Science fiction."

He looks very much taken aback. Then, with the air of one striving to be kind, he tells me, "I hear that's very respectable now."

Yes

Here, read this.

I cannot tell you how happy it made me, recently, when the kid, apropos of nothing, commented, idly, "I really like my body."

My heart slammed inside my chest.  I looked at her sidelong.  "Yeah?" I said, trying to sound calm.

"Yes," she said.  "I look good.  You know?  It's...a nice body."

"It is," I agreed, doing my utter absolute best to sound calm: like I hadn't been working full-out the past eleven years for just this moment.  

(We have no scale in our house, no one in our house ever goes on a diet, any discussion of food in our house has to do with recipes and what we like to eat, not with what we weigh or whether we're fat, I never, ever, ever, comment on anyone's weight, ever, we take walks because we like walking, we hike and such for the same reason, we don't keep crap in the house -- bad food I mean -- but that's because we don't eat bad food, it's nasty, not because we want to be skinny, blech, we have better things to do than fuss about who weighs what, when I was a kid growing up that was ALL that ANY girl every talking about, ALL girls were on diets, ALL girls were judged by their weight, ALL girls weighed themselves five and six times a day, and EVERY girl who weighed over the prescribed amount was WORTHLESS, I spent 90% of my adolescent years fretting about my weight, when I could have been -- shit, who knows, studying algebra? Learning Latin?  Learning to write deathless prose?  Hell if I know, because instead I memorized the # of calories in Oreos and carrots and mashed potatoes and tried like shit to weigh the "perfect" weight for my height, which would have, at long last, made me a real human being, instead of a valueless bit of filth, this was not happening to my child, no way, no how.)

 "You've got a fine body," I said.

"Yeah," she said, and went on reading Lemony Snickett.

SCORE!

Hee!

The bacon/hummus split!

Right-Wing Reality

Here it is in action.

If you don't like the world, make up your own world.

One where Right-Wing Idiots aren't idiots at all, they're just pretending, see?

Drrrrrrr

Herr Dr. Delagar is trying to print his dissertation, to submit it to the graduate school archives, which is the last requirement before he's officially done with the PhD hoops.  

Maddeningly, his evil computer has glitched on him (twice); then his printer wouldn't print; now he has run out of toner, which he did not discover until he had destroyed so much paper (of course the dissertation must be printed on %100 cotton bond) that now he has to go buy more extremely expensive paper, as well as another extremely expensive toner cartridge.

Grr.

What?

Over at P.Z.'s place, he's got a post up about the -- I don't know what I'd call them: advertisements sort of sounds wrong to me, but okay, we'll call them that: ads for atheism being runs in NY city subways.

The post isn't really about the ads, which are fairly non-controversial (Put up by the Coalition for Reason, all they say is A Million New Yorkers are Good Without God -- Are you?).  It's about that, oh, how shall we phrase this?  That miseducated, overpaid Fox-news Republican-Welfare recipient, Sean Hannity, who, having heard about these ads -- I'm guessing someone sent him a link -- hopped around on TV fulminating, "Can you imagine?  What if some Christian group ran pro-God ads in the subways?  Can you imagine the outrage?"

Dude.

Apparently Sean has been living in a cave, I would respond, except, well, he and his ilk are always responding this way, aren't they?  Almost everything they say makes it clear they don't live in the same reality as the rest of us.  They live on planet Wing-Nut, Planet Xtian Loon-O-Sphere, where Obama is trying to take their guns, where there really is a War on Christmas (despite the huge decorations being put up in my public park as we speak, and the aisles and aisles full of Christmas crap that has been for sale in every store in Fuck Smith for a good week already), where White Christian Males are the truly persecuted people in America, where those huge signs on I-40 (COME ON OVER TO MY HOUSE BEFORE THE BIG GAME THIS SUNDAY -- GOD) do not exist and where, as PZ points out, the hundreds of different sects of Xtian advertising in the subways and every other public space -- why, not allowed!  Just like no little Xtian boy or girl is allowed to pray over his school lunch or read the Bible at school!  Because of the evil Lie-brals!  Because we're the ones who hate!  We're the ones who are truly intolerant!  Not them!

Gah.

Not Speaking English A Crime In Dallas

I knew this was a wet dream among my students, but I didn't know Dallas Police had started actually issuing tickets.  But hell yeah!  39 so far!  Driving While Latino!  Line'm up!

Gotta love America.  I mean, or get the hell out, right?

Many Happy (Late) Returns of the Day!

Yesterday was Ursula Le Guin's 80th birthday.  

Le Guin is one of my top ten favorite writers on the planet.  For a very long time, The Dispossessed was my favorite book -- that, and The Lathe of Heaven, and The Word for World Is Forest, and Always Coming Home...well, then there were her short stories.  Brilliant short stories.

Then Octavia Butler showed up, and I had two favorites.  And lately I have discovered Eleanor Arnason, so 3 favorites...but hey, this is an excellent problem to have.

In any case, Ursula Le Guin is not only 80 years old, she is still writing brilliant fiction.

Wow.  How cool is that?

Happy Birthday!

Look! More Conservative Respect For Women!

Ah, I can't even work up a comment about this one.  Gah.

streiff: I was an evaluator on a live fire exercise back in 84 when a herd of free range cattle moped into the impact area and about 200 troops decided they were much more fun to shoot at than 55-gal drums filled with dirt. I wish I had pictures of the outcome of that because that is what her photo op is like

Neil Stevens: Streiff: You aren’t comparing Dede with a cow are you? Because that wouldn’t be right. 

streiff: actually, I was thinking of one particular cow that had a rear leg chopped off by an M-60 machinegun

…no, that image wasn’t pretty: then again, neither was this

Most people realize that everything these guys say about feminism is bullshit, but it never hurts to be reminded.

Oh, yes: and notice that these tools respect our troops just about as much as they respect women. 

Scum.

Shop Verb Noire Now!

Verb Noire's latest book is now available: Juke Box Bard.

Verb Noire, as I am sure everyone remembers, is the independent press which will soon publish Martin's War -- so everyone should scoot on over and buy Juke Box Bard.  

Support the team!  It's an anthology, which I'm sure (I've just bought it and will be reading it starting tonight) is chock full of goodness. (A more thorough review available once I've read it.)

Wow

When I said the Republicans were dead, stick a fork in them, I hadn't even seen this poll yet.


Republican Party favorability
Fav Unfav
All 21 67
South 48 37
NE 6 87
Midwest 10 78
West 12 75

More, over at Daily Kos

Oh Woe is Feminism!

Maybe you heard about this ground-breaking study (pdf) which has found that since 1972 women have become progressively unhappier. See! See! the ant-feminist crowd is crowing. We told you so! Feminism is sooooo bad for the womens! Girls just want to stay home!

Except, of course, as Barbara Ehrenreich (among others who have looked at the study) points out in this column, well, no.

First, the "progressively unhappier" indications aren't that strong. White women are one point more likely to say they're unhappy in 2006 than white men in 2006, compared with the same groups in 1972 -- and, btw, this holds true for all groups of women/men. That is, stay-at-home moms vs working moms vs childfree women, etc. All equally happy/unhappy. So. Make of that what you will.

And: suicide has plummetted for women from 1972 to 2006, while staying stable for men, which, as Ehrenreich says, and as the study itself admits, would seem to be a more reliable measure of misery/unhappiness. Women were unhappy enough in 1972 that they were eating their guns. Not now. Isn't that a better measure of happiness than what box they tick off on a form?

And then there is this:

Another distracting little data point that no one, including the authors, seems to have much to say about is that while "women" have been getting marginally sadder, black women have been getting happier and happier. To quote the authors: "... happiness has trended quite strongly upward for both female and male African Americans. ... Indeed, the point estimates suggest that well-being may have risen more strongly for black women than for black men.

But you can see why, ah, certain groups and blogs are ignoring that data point. It's not like brown women are real people, is it?

Further: these are self-reported trends in happiness. That is, these surveys asked the women and men themselves how happy they were. Well, crap. There's this thing, see, called socialization. Women get socialized, and got socialized even more strongly back in the 1960-1970's than we do now, to claim to be happy even when we weren't.

I still remember my second grade teacher snapping at me in class, I mean just yelling at me, furiously, "Why don't you ever smile? Smile."

I need not tell you that she never said this to any little boys in class.

And what woman here has not been instructed, by some random man on the street, that we need to smile? Or scolded because we aren't smiling?

So: it's just barely possibly that the women in 1972, 1978, 1980, I'm just saying, were over-reporting their happiness; that women since then have become more able to report their actual feelings about how things are (kind of the way men do?) -- just maybe?