If you have not yet read the New York Times article "USA Said to Have Averted Inquiry Into '01 Afghan Killings", bookmark it for when you can handle something very upsetting. Not that you will be unhinged with surprise to learn that the Bush Administration was up to some weird shit behind the scenes. At this point, further revelations of that kind seem almost redundant.

No, it's our collusion in this ( particular type of war crime )

Do we have a democracy? Can we hold these people to account?

Edited to add: You can sign a petition to the US Attorney General here. If you do, come tell me that you did. I want to know.

What do you do when you are ready to be a mom, but your mom was, for whatever reason, not ready when she had you? If your mom made parenting mistakes that you feel damaged you, you've got more than one problem. I was terrified of parenting for this reason, even though I love to hang around with children. Hey, there are about a million jokes that I know that they've never heard. I knew I could connect with children before I had a child, but could I deal with being the mom? Did my own childhood ruin me to be a mother, either because of the anger I carry from not having my emotional needs met, or because my mom was an imperfect role model?

I got over my fear and I had a baby, finally, at age 36. I'm not perfect, but so far I seem to be doing all right. (My kid, on the other hand, is spectacular, but I'll try to restrain myself from explaining why just now.) I think Theresa Strasser's piece, Inner Child, Meet New Baby, Please Don't Smother It does a damned good job of dealing with this question. You know, "If my mom gave me a sucky childhood, do I have to give the same to my kid?" ( Read more... )

I have participated in this more than once, and want to make the same point I always do.

Warnings are a liberating system. They give authors like me permission to explore difficult material. I know that when I warn readers, they can take responsibility for whether they read something they might find offensive or profoundly upsetting.

Thinking about what requires warnings is also a great opportunity for me to raise my consciousness about what other people's experiences are, and why some choose to work through difficult experiences through fiction while others avoid triggering topics in fiction. Some of us have endured abuse and rape, and how we deal with that is varied.

Can't say enough that's positive about the whole fandom idea of kinks and squicks, individual responses to sexuality, and how accepting it is of our variety as people. So thanks for that, enlightened and slightly-less-enlightened fannish types. You've made me a better human being.

Ever since rexluscus posted a snippet of fic, I've been mentally humming "Honey You Are My Omphalos." (To the tune of "you are my shining star," did I just ear worm you all?)

Omphalos=pupik.

I had a bad enough headache that I left work an hour early today. Probably didn't help. I had a nap between the time I picked up my son and when he finished his allotted screen time. He's watching Cyberchase on Youtube. As a result he learned to say, "You win some, you ooze some," which he repeated several times to me over the pasta I made for dinner. The show seems made for him--ensemble cast, cartoons, really idiotic jokes, and math. I love his little kindergarten geekiness--he keeps wanting to do more experiments from Science Wizardry for Kids.

I still have a slight headache. This is ridiculous. I can't function with constant headaches. I drank a lot of water in the afternoon, which meant that I had an aching head AND a full bladder as I drove home. I probably need to eat more salt again, to stay hydrated. Or more fat, I was trying to eat low fat. Or more protein. Or more sleep. Or a massage. I have new glasses, but I don't think they caused these because I've had them before--in fact I thought they would knock them out.

My dad always had a lot of headaches at my age. He took so many analgesics that they harmed his digestive system. I can see how that could happen to me, even though I do yoga and before that chi gung and before that weight lifting and traditional Chinese medicine, health food, vegetarianism, herbal tea, blah blah blah, but now here I am. I'm 43, a coffee addict, insomniac, with a hyper brain and crummy sinuses.

I ate a lot of empty starchy calories for dinner and I feel considerably better, but I still have the headache ghost.

People. You all recommend Ursula LeGuin books all the time, but no one warned me that The Lathe of Heaven is so much catchier, so much more absorbing, than the others. Or maybe it was where my head was...I picked up the book in the middle of the night and read it in about an hour, the whole thing, cover to cover. I think I read it from about 1AM to 2AM. I admit, I'm a scarily quick decoder, but I do blame the book a little. I was just completely absorbed into the central problems of the book.

I think the three pieces that captured my attention the most were: ( cut for spoilers, naturally )

This is fantastic news--Arnold Lobel's daughter found a manuscript of Frog and Toad poems and illustrations that were never published. According to the NPR story I heard about it, she colored the illustrations. My son has loved these books for years, and now that he's finally working on learning to read for himself, we have returned to reading them together. The new book is called The Frogs and Toads All Sang.

This is so moving. Lobel died in 1987. The book Frog and Toad are Friends was one of the learn to read book my mom bought for me when I was going to turn five. I caught her hiding them on a high shelf and begged her to let me read them. Adrienne Lobel is working on her father's work. Reading and writing pass from parents to children.

And look, ha ha! There's a video about the book! I'm going to embed it.

Some good writers just poke their heads into fandom and then are never seen again. I know many regret the disappearance of Calligraphy, for example. One writer who showed a lot of promised was Dingochow, who wrote, as far as I know, only three stories a few stories. If you know of others, let me know. (This plea began paying off immediately, so now I have five listed here!) I left a comment on one of her two journals to find out whether she ever posted a fourth story that she'd said was in process.


Hemlock, or the Beast Within Snupin Santa, R Severus gets trapped inside a wolf.

The Shopping Trip Snarry, NC-17. Some pretty nifty BDSM stuff, though BDSM isn't really my kink. Narrative is, though...

Cinnabar Sling, a story from Not Groom Lake NC-17, AU

The Third Attempt Snupin Santa! NC-17 snegurochka_lee had a rec for it that she shared with me! Can't believe I missed it--guess I was busy then.

The Secret Sketchbooks of Hebi no Komori Snupin, NC-17 Snape is a mangaka.

This isn't a proper rec post. I've been thinking about how much I appreciate it when people rec things. I don't have a ton of time right now to review these stories--I just want to have a place where people can find them, so why not my journal?

Just read this blog post about some conservative doofus who doesn't like the way our newest Supreme Court nominee pronounces her name. Then if you really want to be appalled, read the people in the comments using references to the Armenian genocide to attack the conservative doofus. Oy.

But seriously, there is something just infinitely stupid about someone insisting that it's some sort of bizarre political correctness to pronounce people's names the way they ask you to do it.

I follow one of the American Prospect staff writers on Twitter, and he mentioned that they were going to run a feature story on people of color in science fiction. It went up while I was offline for Shavuot, but now I see that it's by Michelle Belton, a blogger I also follow, mainly at The Black Snob.

Anyway it looks like a good piece, I've just skimmed it in between reading a bizillion personal and work emails and most but not all of my flist. I still haven't seen the new Star Trek film (though I've been reading the fic--is that so wrong?) but I am familiar with a lot of the other SF that Belton brings under scrutiny--and so are you!

I'm actually in the middle of a movie I'm watching with my husband, Short Bus. He knew he was going to have a work thing to do around midnight. Somehow we managed to pause at the climax of the movie. (Heh. Um. Yes, it's a movie about orgasms and I said climax.)

I'm sure to be Ms. Postalot in the next 24 hours because I have a lot to do online, so see you more later.

Because real lesbians aren't all young. Because older people (and even some of us middle-aged ones) love new slang. Because Albus Dumbledore really should have been a Slytherin. Because you love Neville Longbottom as much as I do. Because you need biscuits with chocolate on top, and grandmothers whose gardening is terrorizing the tulips, and fics that make you happy, read A Toast to Lord Voldemort by Magnetic Pole.

The California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8.

But, they also said that people who got married between the court case that declared same-sex marriage legal, and the passage of Prop 8, were still married. Why? Because Prop 8 is a change in the law.

Unless someone introduces a specific, discriminatory clause into the constitution, civil marriage is not limited to opposite sex couples. Prop 8 doesn't repeal or abrogate other rights.

This isn't the end. Another referendum could return same-sex marriage to California. To make that happen, we can't lose heart. Especially, those of us in opposite-sex relationships that have state recognition. Despair is not for allies. Allies have to be strong. That's what we're here for.

Same-sex marriage is an important step in dismantling patriarchy. It's part of the model of creating families based on love and affinity rather than on economic necessity or social pressure. That's why so many people are afraid of it, and why we have to keep pursuing it. This is the way to go.

About half a dozen people on my flist posted a link to, or embedded, the trailer to the new Sherlock Holmes.

The comments range from delighted to appalled yet perversely delighted. Robert Downey Jr.'s accent is not quite the thing. Why is he dirty, when in at least one story in canon he is "as fastidious as a cat," as bethbethbeth notes? Yes, we knew he knew boxing and martial arts, but puh-lease, jumping out a fourth-story window into the Thames? And yes, Jude Law is the most fantastic sex object Watson, but should he really be taller and slightly less stocky than Holmes? Holmes is meant to be tall, with a long face and long fingers. And Irene Adler appeared in what, one story? Two stories? Certainly she was a fascinating woman, but she did not appear in Conan Doyle's stories in her underwear.

I do not care. I have been corrupted by fan fiction. ( more meta about film adaptations of novels )

I've been reading a lot of fan fic without even commenting, much less reccing. I got a lot of pleasure out of some of the stories in the recent Snarry fest on snape_potter, but I think I commented on ONE of them. Part of it is that at home my computer has a sticky keyboard. At work I'm actually busy and kind of on a roll! So there is less to want to avoid and therefore less time to comment on fic--even fic I read at home.

Anyway, I'm going to rec a Harry/Draco story, just to shock your pants right off. I read them sometimes, but I'm picky about Draco. I want him to be a putz like he is in canon, but not so much of one that you can't imagine what Harry sees in him. In other words, character dynamism is essential. I really liked Sex on Fire from the Beltane fest. Draco has both the incipient positive characteristics you can see in canon, including a strong sense of duty, and the negative ones--fear, pride, etc. The idea of making Draco a healer who specializes in burns is perfect. I will probably never be a really strong Harry/Draco shipper, but a good H/D like this one, in which the characters seem to have grown from where they were in canon, is a real pleasure.

A Facebook friend of mine posted this. It's a combination of super-duper acapella singing and using a flute as a percussion instrument. (No, not by whacking it against something--don't be so technical--you'll see.)

from busaikko via Mechiaeh (on IJ): "This can be a quick one. Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes."

I read this to mean that they had to be books that I remember. ( cut because I made little notes after each book )

I came home and asked my husband, who works in human rights, about the military psychologist I'd heard interviewed on All Thing Considered. (It should be a tip-off to you that the article is called Military Psychologist Says Harsh Tactics Justified.)

It's a horrible piece of interviewing. The journalist completely fails to challenge the psychologist's bullshit assertion that torture could provide valuable information to interrogators. Let's just say that is an extreme minority view among social scientists. The journalist treated it like another valid scientific view, who are we to say who's right, etc.

I just don't understand this crap. It's like someone goes out robbing people and the journalists covering the robbery go out to get an alternative view that robbery is a good method of redistributing property. What I mean is, it's still illegal, you idiots.

The psychologist in this story, Bruce Lefever, gets a platform to just natter on about how much he enjoyed torturing US soldiers as part of the SERE program. Which is what the program was for, originally, if you haven't been following this--it was a program to teach US personnel how to cope with torture if captured by bad guys who do that sort of thing.

Then there was his utilitarian ethical justification, with only a sentence-long after the fact comment by the reporter,"Most psychologists don't think this way, they only think of the patient they are treating." HELL YEAH, because most psychologists aren't living in Orwell's 1984. Maybe the reporter's plan was just to make this guy sound like a mouth-breathing psycho on his own by not challenging anything he said? I just can't understand their thinking here.

Yes, I know, this isn't fandom and it's not even me unpacking finance and economics. I'm just up in the middle of the night again. I suppose there is a connection to the meta I wrote right after Deathly Hallows came out about crucio and torture. Argh.

Dreamwidth crossposting:( you've probably thought of all of this )

The movie we saw tonight, The Saddest Music in the World, was very very weird. It was a musical set in the 1930s in Winnipeg. I don't think I can recommend it. I need help finding better downloadable movies, or maybe buying DVDs or just--something.