Randomness (2/1)

• At what point does something (e.g. a hairball) become so fossilized that you can be excited when you discover it rather than upset?

 

• In the news this week: The woman who does the voice of Bart Simpson phoned a bunch of people to ask for money (she was shilling for Scientology) using Bart’s voice. The show keeps having to disassociate themselves from the religion/shilling. The media isn’t helping since it headlines its stories with things like “Bart Simpson is a Scientologist.”

 

• We have a new word: saddlebacking. This is the practice of engaging in anal sex to preserve “virginity.” A lot of those abstinence-only girls who go to weird proms with their dads are doing it now. I knew several girls in high school who did it. I thought it was stupid (anal sex has the word sex in it), but I’m sure they would remind me that I was the one who got knocked up. Yes, but not in the ass.

 

• House this week started to tackle a really interesting issue. A woman adopted a child after wanting one badly, but didn’t feel anything for it. This could have been productive–a lot of mothers, not just adoptive mothers have this problem. Unfortunately, the problem was solved with a little looking into the baby’s eyes.

 

• W signed something dangerous before he left office.  Health care providers in this country are protected if they would like to withhold your contraception.  They are not required to provide you with a referral to someone who actually will do the job, either.  This issue has been coming up a lot in the past few years.  Some pharmacists have gone so far as to refuse to give a woman her prescription back, forcing her to go back to the doctor before she finds a pharmacist who will fulfill the order.

This makes things especially difficult for those women who need emergency contraception.

These workers say that they shouldn’t have to go against their morals.  It results, of course, in forcing their morals on other people.

If eating pork was against my religion, but I worked in a restaurant that sold it, I wouldn’t be allowed to refuse to fill the order.  I definitely wouldn’t be allowed to be holier-than-thou to those who ordered it.

If you don’t want to ring up something your place of business sells, don’t work there.  Go work in a Catholic Hospital pharmacy (where they often don’t carry birth control).  Or go work in that town in Florida the Domino’s CEO built–contraception isn’t allowed in that town at all.

• Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, is my new hero.  I got a major crush on him when I heard him speak on Friday at UCD.  He’s brilliant AND able to give a brilliant lecture.  He spoke without notes in a gorgeous British accent about economics and food availability and poverty.  And he was funny.  I picked up some whiffs of Izzard, so when I got to meet him briefly after the talk, I asked him about it.  He confessed that he worshipped at the altar of Izzard.  I’ve always said that Eddie should be a History Professor.  Now that I’ve met an Izzarian Prof/Author, Eddie may have a run for his money in my fantasies.

• Neil Gaiman has gotten an award for The Graveyard Book.  It’s an amazing story of a boy who grows up in a graveyard–raised by the ghosts and something that is likely a vampire.  I like this so much better than The Jungle Book.

 

• I’ve been giving myself a break by going to Discworld.  Terry Pratchett is always great, but this week I read Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad.  The former is a mash up of several Shakespeare works, though Macbethis the main source of fun.  The murdered King’s son grows up in a theatre company while the witches try to figure out how to depose the usurper without “interferring.”

Witches Abroad is a sequel of sorts.  It’s part travel narrative (take three very different women –think odd couple plus one more odd), send them into various lands with foreigners, and have them stumble across a series of fairy tales in progress and you have one of my new favorite books.  I mean, it’s not going to replace Eddie or Raj, but it’s great.  And the opening is perhaps the most thoughtful and beautiful discourse on stories I’ve ever read.

• Finally, it looks like I might get my class after all, but since the last one was cancelled just two days before the term started, I’m still sort of holding my breath.