I long for computers to blow up.
No, not really. But on Star Trek, when a computer dies, it dies in a shower of sparks and a satisfying array of booms and bams and puffs of smoke. Whereas in real life, when a computer dies, it just silently and unsatisfyingly goes fffft and ruins your life.
So I mentioned this to a co-worker and she says
“Oh, you should have smelled my senior project.”
There’s a phrase you rarely hear.
…is now up at Fetch My Axe. My post on Feminism and Goddess Worshp is included (w00t!)
I have no idea what’s under the stove.
Mingo seems to.
And it kind of freaks me out.
P.S. Fanty runs away whenever she sees me with the camera. Never heard of a camera-shy cat before.
I am a bit too heart-sick to write about it, but I don’t need to, because Bitch, Ph.D. said everything I would have said, but better.
So yesterday, I posted about the phrase, “In a post-Imus world,” and I think I was misunderstood. Perhaps it seemed like the post was about Imus, but I didn’t really mean that.
The Bush White House is inordinately fond of the phrase “in a post-September 11 world.” We are meant to believe that “everything is different now.” Our response to a national tragedy was manipulated to put us into an unjust and unrelated war, and to strip away our civil liberties.
The phrase is irritating not just because it’s manipulative, but because it’s short-sighted. The phrase implies that the whole world is changed. The whole world. It says we don’t need context, we don’t need history, we don’t need anything except to understand that there’s a Before, and there’s an After, and whatever standards, morals, goals, ethics, you are adhering to are Before so forget ’em.
If this creeps into our language as a snowclone, I will lose my frickin mind. Does the radio host who said “in a post-Imus world” truly believe that the very world he lives in is altered by Imus’s firing? Because fuck, I didn’t know worlds changed so easily. Or is it just incredibly lazy speech that is so annoying I almost ripped the radio out of my dashboard? I vote for the latter.
All solved!
In the car earlier, I heard Brian Lehrer use the phrase “In a post-Imus world.”
Dear Gods, I beg you: NO.
Two clues remain. Solve away!
1. Because he wants to be a gunman, he tries to hide his nearsightedness.
Solved by TehipiteTom (comment #5).
2. A pair of brothers hired to repair a small tractor.
Solved by OhKen (comment #12).
3. A young woman, who doesn’t really like to talk about herself, plays touch football in a skirt.
Solved by Kathy (comment #7).
4. He is killed with a crossbow while diving into his swimming pool.
HINT: He is killed by a woman. Our hero wanted him alive.
Solved by lunofajro (comment #20).
5. She makes roses out of paper. She dreams of someday making them out of silk, but she is shot to death before that can happen.
HINT: Her former lover finds her in bed with another man and shoots them both. The other man shoots and kills him, but his own wound will ultimately prove fatal.
Solved by sopka (comment #21).
6. “I don’t like cold things touching my skin.”
Solved by Amy (comment #15).
7. Three sailors having a picnic in a park on a freezing winter day.
Solved by George (comment #1).
There are two things you hear about feminism and goddess worship.
The first is that goddess worship distracts from the serious work of feminism. This is the sort of complaint that I’d like to dismiss out of hand, ’cause it’s stupid. There are hardcore atheists that will say that any religious life is problematic for political activists, but the argument holds no water. Religious people have been in the forefront of political action since forever. Mahatma Gandhi anyone?
Spirituality, like sex, is a basic human need. Most (but not all) people have it, and shutting people down for expressing it will go nowhere and accomplish nothing, except to drive people away. People do their best work when their needs are met. Period.
The second thing is that goddess worship is inherently feminist, or at least inherently good for women. I thought Marina Walker demolished that theory pretty effectively by looking at Mary worship, and demonstrating that Mary is worshiped most fervently in the most patriarchal enclaves of Catholic culture. But you can also look at India, home of Shakti worship and Kali worship and Lakshmi worship; it is also a hotbed of sexism and misogyny. How anyone can look at goddess worship as it exists in the world today and assume that worshiping goddesses makes you all warm and cuddly towards real-world women is beyond me.
So that leaves me and my relationship with goddess worship. And feminism. » Read more..
