Same-sex marriages are happening in Illinois! MARRIAGES FOR EVERYONE!

My only regret is that I didn't get to be the flower girl for one very specific couple. But I do have a trip out that way tentatively planned for June, so I'll just have to pelt them with flowers a few months late.

Congratulations to all the newlyweds!

Hey, congratulations, ursulav! That's pretty awesome.

Also, she has a few interesting words about Narnia, and one that made me laugh:

If I didn’t still care so much about Talking Beasts, I wouldn’t want to scream “Why do you need a Son of Adam to rule you? One Beast, one vote! Trumpkin for President!”

Mostly because I just reread the Lord of the Rings, and earlier this year I plowed through the Belgariad, and I have to say I am getting a little annoyed with the King Hath Returned trope.

I suppose if your king disappears or something, you might start out with some hope, appoint a steward, and sit around waiting for the king. But I am not going to buy that it would last for one hundred years, much less a thousand--later generations wouldn't have an emotional attachment to some long-ago king, and they'd probably find some OTHER form of government, because dammit they have things to do NOW, and after a thousand years just waiting for The King to get back, you're going to get bored.

Which means that, decades or centuries later, if some clown came in proclaiming--and PROVING!--he was the Heir to the Ancient Throne, I would not expect the citizenry to really give a shit. "An unbroken line of firstborn males back to King Fabulous IV? Good for you! Anyway, it was nice to meet you, but I'm off to vote for our senators/watch the gladiatorial melee where the last man standing becomes Supreme Ruler/see who the astrologers picked to be in Parliament/pay homage to the third royal dynasty we've had since your ancestor fucked off to wherever. No, your kingly services are not needed. Thanks anyway!" Patrilineal divine right is not the only way to run a government.

Once again, Pratchett gets it more right than the ones he's parodying. Just goes to show.

Well, at least they struck down the Defense of Marriage Act. I've never been entirely clear on just how an act limiting who can get married is supposed to defend marriage, anyway.

Keep trying to post a nice little So That Happened summary of My Thoughts On The Election, but it's all coming out kind of garbly or rude. So, I will say that I am glad Obama won, I do think he was the better candidate, I hope we can all continue make decisions based on accuracy and long-view wisdom, and also TAKE THAT, TEAM RAPE, THE NATION DOES NOT WANT YOU IN CHARGE OF SHIT, HAHAHA.

... Yeah, that about sums it up.

I believe the phrase "Blitzkrieg of Bullshit" sums up my fatigue with politics over the last few years. I've been advancing my own political theory that the immensely stupid statements that seem to be streaming from Tea Partiers are part of a strategy designed to leave sane people so completely speechless at their ignorance and nastiness that they have no idea how to respond, allowing the crazies to step in and TAKE OVER THE TRI-STATE AREA!!! GOVERNMENT!!!*

Come on, guys. It's really hard to talk to you like grownups when I'm still trying to figure out if I'm on Team Evil or Team Stupid when it comes to figuring out your motives. Give me another option.


*Which would make it a far more coherent plan than Paul Ryan's Secret Plan to fix the deficit. He seems to have the same gift for strategy as the Underpants Gnomes.

Oh, Utah.

I really wish I’d kept the pamphlets we got in eighth grade sex ed. The cover alone was priceless: it was a closeup of the fly of a pair of jeans. A giant chain ran through the belt loops, and right in front of the zipper it was secured by a GIANT PADLOCK. It’s a good thing my mom was the kind of crazy hippie who felt that it’s totally fine for kids to know about how bodies work,* because I’d never have learned it from school.

Well, I say good luck, Utah, in your quest to let hormone-crazed adolescents learn about sex from their parents, unless their parents are as squeamish as the politicians they vote for, in which case the teenagers will learn about it from those completely reliable sources of TV, magazines, the internet, and each other. Let me know how that works out for ya.


*We never had a big formal The Sex Talk. Mom mostly answered our questions when they came up. Interestingly, while I remember her explaining things from the time I was three, so from then on I could explain mechanics of acquiring a little sister, I distinctly recall that it was much later—at maybe age nine—that it actually sank in how the sperm got into the vagina. My brain had glossed over it before that. And I remember it clearly because suddenly, whole new aspects of the culture were now opened up to me. I still can recall the first time I understood that two sitcom characters were joking about THE SEX. Yes, I was kind of slow on the uptake in some respects. Still am.

Wow. The more I read about this Lowe's debacle, the more disgusted I get. It's yet another of those times when my SIWOTI complex slams headlong into the fact that tackling everything wrong with what people are saying would take weeks and likely just piss off the idiots who hold those opinions anyway.

I mean, look at this--according to a marketing executive, the first mistake was advertising during the show at all: "For a big national brand like Lowe's, they've always got to be incredibly careful when advertising during any show that could be deemed controversial." Because a) ordinary Muslim people are CONTROVERSIAL, and b) it's all about money.

And don't get me started on the rest of the Florida Family Association's bullshit. I can't even bring myself to link to it; you'll just have to google it.

This kind of controversy really pisses me off. It's a sign of sloppy thinking, to assume that all Muslims are like the ones you see on the news blowing shit up. I know we're wired to think anecdotally, and that causes a lot of misconceptions. That's something we can work to get past, though.

Trouble is, a lot of people don't. All-American Muslim seems to be trying to fight psychology with psychology--if we're going to go by anecdotes anyway, they present us with some new anecdotes about Muslims doing their everyday stuff. Admirable, cool, and apparently too late for the Florida Family Association people, who haven't got room for any more anecdotes.

Which is a crying shame. I am not a Muslim, but the ones I have met have all seemed like, y'know, normal people to me. In my dumb white American experience with Muslims, not one has tried to terrorize me. They've shown me Bollywood movies, played good-natured tricks on their students, gone completely nuts over birthday cake, played Super Mario, yelled back at Dora the Explorer, discussed philosophy, raced boats, learned to draw manga, rassled their kitty cats, given to charity over holidays, shared recipes, saved me when I had malaria, cheered for Stevie Wonder at the Paralympic opening ceremonies, and confessed to an unconditional love for Babysitter's Club.

That's the kind of thing they're showing on All-American Muslim, from the Muslims' point of view. And that is the kind of thing the Florida Family Association seems to find so objectionable.

Remind me why Lowe's listened to them, again?

I’m beginning to suspect that the monumentally stupid things the Tea Partiers—and even the more general GOP candidates—keep saying are in fact part of a strategy. If your opponents are concerned with analyzing assumptions and relying on facts, all you have to do is make a short statement that is so mind-scramblingly, brain-torquingly wrong on so many levels that it’d take a full-on graduate thesis to address every problem within it. Congratulations: they’ll now have to spend weeks compiling and organizing facts and statistics, and by the time they have it together everyone will have the sound bite so firmly in their heads it’ll be impossible to dislodge.

And hey, if you spout out several of these in a row, they’ll NEVER catch up!

Maybe we opponents should just stick with the slightly less fact-based, but age-old, counter-strategy—simply pointing and laughing at the stupid. At least it’s less time-consuming.

My fellow Americans! I come to you today to address an alarming trend that has been sweeping our nation, one that threatens our very way of life. Even as you sit and read this, an American institution is being attacked from all sides, and unless we do something to stop it, the very thing that makes this country great will disappear forever.

I’m talking, of course, about dinner.

It is a proven undeniable fact which I just made up that throughout the majority of history, all over the world, dinner has been made with peas and carrots. This is the natural order of things. But recently, an alarming trend has surfaced: the use of zucchini as an ingredient in dinners.

What garden-fresh horror is this? The traditional, old-fashioned values of peas and carrots have fallen by the wayside, making way for some nasty greenish stringy squash. Some people argue that they just can’t help liking zucchini, but this can’t be true. Using zucchini in dinner recipes is a choice, and a harmful one at that.

Harmful? Why, yes! I quote from the definitive cookbook, Cooking, by Doris P. Hemperdinger, Chapter 5, Recipe 7, Step 4: Some people like to add a little zucchini to this casserole. My recipe does not add it because it does take away from the main focus of the dish. Clearly we are not meant to cook with zucchini!

Well, you say, it’s all right if people like zucchini, as long as they don’t wave it in my face. But they do! One can hardly go to a grocery store without seeing these squashes piled up in the produce aisle, right next to wholesome carrots, where even a child might catch a glance of them. What an awkward conversation for parents to find themselves in the middle of when the children ask questions! And even at bakeries, our children are lured with zucchini bread; at restaurants, breaded fried zucchini is served. You cannot protect your children from something shoved in their faces.

And of course, once we start saying that zucchini is an okay ingredient, then we’ve started down the slippery slope. What’s the next acceptable dinner ingredient? Asbestos? Cyanide? Human flesh? For once zucchini is accepted, it will only be a matter of time before everything else is as well.

My fellow Americans, this cannot stand. I enlist you, every one of you, to help me fight back against this abominable dinner choice. How can we, as a nation, ignore such a threat to our way of life? So please, write to your congressman. Tell him that we cannot in good conscience allow people who like zucchini to eat it. Do it for your country, for the troops, and for your children. It’s up to you, America.


This sprang fully formed from my head like Athena from the head of Zeus. No, I have no idea what I was smoking. And now, here is a box provided for you, if you wish, to type in whichever zucchini-sexuality joke sprang into your head when you realized where this was going:

[Poll #1547847]

Criminy, I tell you, I am having mood swings with regard to Iran. This is some scary shit and some exciting shit and I keep oscillating between YOU TELL THEM, AWESOME PROTESTERS and CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG and OH THE HUMANITY.

I feel like that’s about all I can do. Much as it’s tempting to try to swoop in and fix all the broke shit, that’s not really possible in any sense—we might get rid of a few old problems at the expense of a giant crop of new problems. And anyway, that’s not really what we’re for, anyway.

Mostly, I regard foreign policy with a similar attitude to my own social policy—that people can deal with their own problems, and if they need my help, they’ll ask for it.

So for now, I think the plan is to watch and hope my first mood is the prescient one.

Iran is an amazing country—the disjointed history I have learned speaks a lot of ordinary people trying to live ordinary happy lives despite the fact that ordinary happy lives are heavily frowned upon. It’s one of the most straightforward tales of how very alike humans are, and how resilient the will to Live—a will sometimes completely at odds with the instinct to just survive—is. I hope one day it gets easier.