okay, sharing a birthday with hugh jackman just sucks so much less than sharing a birthday with k1rk c@meron. so way much less. (k1rk apparently lost jesus under the couch and has now found him and is wanting to share. thus the munging.)

did i link to these yet? here are my fabulous new back stairs! woo!

sitting down in the hat is my friend laura, and the legs underneath everything belong to my friend erik. they designed 'em and built them and everything! totally impressive, by me.

and that's me, in the last picture, looking pleased as punch!

i miss russia. i think i need to take russian classes. i have gotten to the spot where i can recognize certain words without needing to sound them out. prospect, for example. or restaurant. or entrance and exit. this is a long long *long* way from not starving to death if dropped in the middle of russia, but it's a teeny step in a good direction.

being that it's apparently my day to wear the humorless feminist hat, please allow me to poke you in the ass and make you go read this.

this seems to be an archive of a mailing list.

anyhow. the good part.

Feminist Jokes: "The purpose of humor which looks at specific groups is to make fun of that group and help maintain the status quo. This type of humor only works if there are these stereotyped perceptions of a specific group.
To see if humor is stereotyped, try changing the gender, race, religion, etc. and if if does not work when you do that, then you are playing to the stereotype and helping to maintain those false images."

if you weren't already feeling sick to your stomach about our government's policy of torturing prisoners of war, i give you this.

The Blog | Larry Beinhart: Imagine (Torture & The Geneva Conventions) | The Huffington Post:

Imagine, if you will, that you are an Iraqi. You have a captured American pilot. You know that American jets will be bombing your city later this afternoon. If you could only find out what their targets are you could move the women and children - maybe even the old and the sick - out of harm's way. You might be able to save hundreds, perhaps thousands if you only knew where the bombs would strike. Your children are in the city. Your grandparents. Your cousins. The girl you loved when you were twelve years old, who married someone else and is now the mother of two lovely twins.
You could save them, if only you could get that American pilot to talk.

i love my sister. because she sends me stuff like this.

here’s a llama there’s a llama and another little llama fuzzy llama funny llama llama llama duck llama llama cheesecake llama tablet brick potato llama llama mushroom llama llama llama duck i was once a treehouse i lived in a cake but i never saw the way the orange slayed the rake i was only three years dead but i told a tale and now listen, little child to the safety rail did you ever see a llama kiss a llama on a llama llama’s llama tastes of llama llama llama duck half a llama twice a llama not a llama farmer llama llama in a car alarm a llama llama duck is that how it’s told now? is it all so old? is it made of lemon juice? doorknob ankle cold now my song is getting thin i’ve run out of luck time for me to retire now and become a duck

no, she didn't transcribe it herself.

omigod this is sooooo cool.

i definitely have to start taking geography classes.

CommonCensus Map Project

i realize that i am the last person on the planet to know about this, but bitch, ph.d. is absolutely brilliant.

for a start, read the "some of my better bitching" posts, linked to in the side bar. the misogyny in real life post is amazing and painful and validating and i read it on monday and haven't been calm enough to write a sentence about it until today, because most days you can sort of shove it down and go on, you know?

an article in the dallas observer about how mary mapes, formerly of cbs news, was treated by the rightwing blogosphere, and how the rightwing blogosphere was first, wrong, and second, how they behaved about it.

i can't think of the right words to talk about that last part, but here's an attempt.

a few years ago, i was idly looking for another job. i liked the one i had just fine, but maybe a fabulous job would pop up, you know? so i was looking around. and there was a job that i was qualified for at the local planned parenthood. me, i'm all for parenthood, all for having it be planned, and all for a woman's right to choose, plus pretty decently qualified for the description. so i thought "oh! i should apply!". and then i thought "oh, wait. that position is located at the planned parenthood location where they do abortions. where the antichoicers take pictures of the cars that park in the lot. and pictures of the staff. and look up their home addresses. and post it all on the internet in hit lists. and oh, shit." then i dithered about it for a while, and the job posting went away, and the decision had been made for me.

what does this have to do with documents that weren't actually forged? not a lot, on the surface. but i'm hoping that you'll see a connection in the ways that people react to them.

anyhow. on to the article. a quote pulled from it to appease the part of me that is hopping up and down and saying "nyah nyah told you so."

dallasobserver.com | News & Features | Schutze | Mapesgate | 2005-11-10:

Another telling point to recall is that not even the high tribunal and commission set up by CBS to explore the issue was able to corroborate the accusations of fakery. For all the money CBS spent on its commission, not to mention various private detectives--and for the amount of public bloodletting the network justified on the basis of the commission's findings--you have to think they would have found a way to call those documents fake if they could have.

That was the core accusation against Mapes, Dan Rather's producer for that story: that she bought off on fake documents and fooled her superiors. If CBS could have proved the documents were fake, then all the blame would have been on Mapes and much less of it on CBS.

Certainly on the technical side of this I am not a good arbiter. And I'm not entirely neutral on Mapes herself. But I can say this much for her book: Anybody with an honest intellectual curiosity about this story will have to read the book or find some other way to confront the arguments in it. Mapes' evidence supporting the authenticity of the Bush Guard documents is compelling enough to put the ball squarely back in the court of her accusers. The case for forgery is dead in the road until it finds a way around this book.

on livejournal, amarama has written up the first draft of a fat girls' guide to dealing with doctors.

she says:

Per charlottecooper's request, I'm drafting a guide for fat girls to make the most of their healthcare. This is more of a behavior guide for maximizing your experience rather than a list of services that are of particular use to fat girls. It uses fairly personal language instead of detached healthcare language, which I have mixed feelings about. I will probably make a couple more versions of this, so if people have suggestions, let me know!

this is amazing stuff. i already knew a good bit of this, but there is advice in there that i hadn't thought of.

this is so definitely the weirdest thing i've seen today.

(needs quicktime, has sound. is not the same without the sound.)

as we all know, the internet is for porn.

but those fine folks at wikipedia have found another use for it.

CAT PICTURES!!!!!!

(look at the one week old stumpy manx! i am about to die of cute.)

okay, conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories-- the shrub is trying to kill off all liberals by making them laugh so hard they choke to death.


Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Bush Remarks a Jab at Chavez, Castro:

"Eyeing three upcoming presidential elections in Latin America, Bush said citizens must choose ``between two competing visions'' for their future.
One, he said, pursues representative government, integration into the world community and freedom's transformative power for individuals.
``The other seeks to roll back the democratic progress of the past two decades by playing to fear, pitting neighbor against neighbor and blaming others for their own failures to provide for the people,'' he said. ``We must make tough decisions today to ensure a better tomorrow.'' "

he'll have to try harder-- i outwitted the sneaky poptarts and am still here alive to pass this on to you.

i now have new back steps.

erik and laura totally rock my world.

wooo! new back steps!