New Year in Ciudad de México

The little mujeres:
Caitlin, me and Raquel ate 12 grapes each at the stroke of midnight in obeisance of the Mexican/Spanish? Catholic tradition for good luck. They were seeded and quite a bit of work to get through while also dutifully spitting out seeds. One of mine was too rotten to eat, and I wondered what the consequence would be of only actually ingesting 11. Apparently, it's 12 grapes for the 12 apostles- according to Israel and Fidel, the adorable gay couple who welcomed us to their table at Papi Fun Bar in Zona Rosa. I didn't catch the rest of the religious background of this tradition due to the pounding house music and my rusty Spanish.

japanese bling trucks

your decorated buses in pakistan reminded me of these. i freakin' love these things. i want my car to look like this.

passage

it would be more accurate to call this five-minute game a poem. i'm trying to understand how the maker imbued such pathos into this low-res, simple game. i nearly cried.

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/

as a side note, the designer, Jason Rohrer, is really fascinating. he lives in the middle of nowhere with his family, challenging themselves to leave the smallest ecological footprint possible and on a budget of less than $10,000 a year.

decorated vehicles of Pakistan

It really fills me with hope and emotion to think that there are perfectly everyday vehicles outfitted with such care and attention to beauty as these.
















photograph by Peter Grant
link

Feminists for Life

During her oral argument before the Supreme Court, attorney Sarah Weddington argued in favor of legalized abortion —in part— because "a pregnancy can completely disrupt her life….It disrupts her education." She noted that some women are forced out of college simply because they are pregnant.

Rather than using the legal system to address inequities in education or the workplace, arguing that women are strong and capable, Weddington argued that women need "relief" from these societal pressures through abortion.

Unlike Weddington, Feminists for Life's summer intern and pro-woman, pro-life student leader, Chaunie doesn't underestimate the ability of women to overcome complex problems.

Chaunie (pronounced "shawnee") has asked me to share her story with you. This is the first of her letters, and your invitation to share her journey as she faces challenges, receives support, and most of all—to celebrate her unplanned joy.

Serrin M. Foster
President
www.feministsforlife.org

Dear Serrin,

I left my Feminists for Life internship this summer fired up about helping pregnant students on my campus. I had no idea that in a few short weeks I would be one of them.

Four weeks into my senior year I took a pregnancy test, sure that the result would be negative, that I was just easing my mind. I looked down to find two bright blue lines staring back at me. Frantic and disbelieving, I immediately took another test. Positive again.

In that instant, staring down at the two tiny lines that represented the most dramatic change in my life, I understood how women facing unplanned pregnancies can turn to abortion. In that moment of panic and fear, it does not feel like a new life, but rather the end of life as you know it. A million questions race through your mind—what will people think, what will I do, how can this be happening? You just wish it wasn't happening, wish you could rewind time, wish it would go away.

It's easy to understand women in crisis wishing that the baby isn't real, so they can make it go away.

The next day, still in denial and in a very fragile emotional state, I went to the campus health service for confirmation.

A nurse practitioner called me into her office and gave me the results of my test. There was no doubt about it, I was pregnant.

When she started talking to me about telling my parents, I broke down.

I sat in the chair, crying hysterically while the nurse examined her chart. After a minute or two, she stood up and said "I have other patients to see, you can stay here if you want."

She left me crying and alone to see the only other patient in the center, a young man with a sore throat.

My struggles continued after my visit to health services. I gathered all the information I could find about student insurance. Not one plan covered pregnancy. In fact, all of them specifically stated that they would not cover pregnancy.

Though the university used to have daycare on campus, I learned the President got rid of it a few years ago. Housing was another disappointment; once again, the university used to have family housing but dissolved those dorms for the better-paying first-year students.

I have to tell you, as president of my college pro-life group and an active advocate for women, it was frightening to see the complete lack of resources and support available for pregnant and parenting students at my school.

I understood how women in such a vulnerable situation could feel they have no choices.

In addition to physical and material resources for myself and my child, I needed emotional support.

My boyfriend was scared and uncertain, like me, but supportive. He could offer no words of wisdom, but took my hand and told me that it would be OK. He offered his love and stood by my side.

I was absolutely terrified to tell my parents. Every day that passed without telling them was even more horrible because I so desperately needed their support too.

When I finally worked up the nerve to tell my parents, their reaction was unbelievable. They offered me nothing but love and support, and they were even happy and excited for me! Word quickly spread in my close-knit family and, incredibly, every single family member was supportive, offering to help in any way they could and reassuring me that it was right to celebrate this new life.

I am now happily engaged, planning a beautiful Christmas wedding and eagerly awaiting my next doctor's appointment, when my fiancé and I will hear our baby's heartbeat for the first time.

While I have received so much support and love from all of my family and friends, it has still been a struggle adjusting to my new life. There is no easy way to get through an unplanned pregnancy, but with the support I have received, I am managing, and every day brings me more happiness and excitement. As FFL's Honorary Chair Patricia Heaton says, "Women who are experiencing an unplanned pregnancy also deserve unplanned joy."

I am so fortunate to have received love and support. Sadly, this is not the case for many women who face situations like mine.

More than ever, I realize the vital importance of FFL's work. I not only believe in Feminists for Life's mission, I am living it.

I am grateful that FFL is changing the way people think about pregnancy, particularly in higher ed.

It is possible for women to continue with their educations, with their career goals, with their dreams. FFL refuses to choose. So do I.

Serrin, I wanted to share my story because I believe that there is a better way for women. There is a better way for me.

How reassuring it would have been for the campus nurse practitioner to talk to me, discuss my options, offer me support and encouragement, and connect me to community resources.

Instead, she left me alone and in tears.

I can't imagine how a woman unsure about abortion, uninformed about her resources, lacking support from those she counted on the most, feels she has a choice—what hope is there for a good outcome?

Thank you for helping mothers like me. I'm deeply grateful to the many people who support this important work.

I'll keep you and everyone at FFL posted with photos and updates.

For women,

Chaunie Saelens
Former Feminists for Life Intern
President of campus Students for Life

PS Please feel free to forward this letter to whomever you think needs to know what is really like for pregnant students.

Micah and I drove out to the desert in the wind and rain on Sunday

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech this past Saturday

excerpt:

...I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls - Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.

Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind of house you were in."

But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

I have been looking at the speeches by some of the recent Nobel prizewinners. Take last year's winner, the magnificent Orhan Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition. Take VS Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition. Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes; taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind. In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the tradition.

full speech

one casualty of South Korea's worst oil spill

By Sunday, it became clear to local residents that they were battling an environmental disaster. The size of the oil spill was twice as big as a spill off South Korea in 1995 that cost $101 million in damages to fishermen and required a cleanup operation that took months.

A bird covered in crude oil on the beach. Each year, millions of tourists flock there to bathe in the sun or watch migrating birds stop to feed.

more

Elephants put on special boots

Elephants are fitted with special boots to alleviate foot problems and heal lesions at the Singapore Zoo.

link

hallucinogenic version of an Ohmu, the terrestrial crustaceans of "Nausicaa, Valley of the Wind"

"Mass Overflow"
incredible drawing by Jen Stark
Jen Stark's website

The Siren Song of Sex with Boys

The researchers questioned the practice, common in many studies, of lumping all sexual abuse together. They contended that treating all types equally presented problems that, they wrote, "are perhaps most apparent when contrasting cases such as the repeated rape of a 5-year-old girl by her father and the willing sexual involvement of a mature 15-year-old adolescent boy with an unrelated adult."

In the first case, serious harm may result, the article said, but the second case "may represent only a violation of social norms with no implication for personal harm."

They suggested substituting the term "adult adolescent sex" for child abuse in some cases where the sex was consensual.

More

A Famous Sex Scandal between a woman and a boy:
34-year old Mary Kay Letourneau and her 13 year old lover Vili Fualaau

While most people looked at Vili and saw the kid as a kid, Mary Kay apparently saw him as an adult in a boy's body. She would say, "He dominated me in the most masculine way that any man, any leader, could do. I trusted him and believed in him and in our future." Others would wonder about the psychological maturity of a 34-year-old woman who was "dominated" by someone barely in his teens....

...The case of Mary Kay Letourneau and her 13-year-old lover focused attention on questions of sexism, gender bias, and biological gender differences. Many observers thought the elementary school teacher was getting far more public sympathy than a man would who committed a similar offense. Her insistence that she did not deserve punishment for a sex act motivated by love grated on the sensibilities of those who believed a man who made such an excuse would be laughed at.

On the other hand, some pointed out that the case is far different from that of an adult man having sex with a 13-year-old girl in one very vital respect. Vili did not get pregnant and go through birth and never had any possibility of doing so. Mary Kay did. Regardless of age differences or anything else, the female alone bears the child and the physical and psychological costs of pregnancy itself. As a woman who knew the principals in the case commented, "A 13-year-old girl getting pregnant is a heck of a lot different physically than a 13-year-old boy getting someone else pregnant."

For the full, fascinating story

finally, a place i can get hairpieces for my cats

Blue is edgy and electric. In this wig, Chicken sports some serrrrious attitude – she’s thinking saxophones, smoke and snapping fingers.

Blue gives your kitty a sharp look -- jazzy and totally copacetic.

http://kittywigs.com/index.html

Madam Lin Fu Tien

My grandmother peacefully passed away tonight at home.

Cat with 2 heads

The Telegraph UK:

Vets believe the cat, which has two mouths, two noses and four eyes, may have two brains, as one face can go to sleep while the other remains awake and it can blink independently on each one.

"When he purrs it is like he is purring in stereo," the cat's owner said.

more

The Independent:


Al Jazeera: 'It's no hangout for al-Qa'ida'

Al Jazeera has been bombed, banned and ridiculed – but its new English language version has accumulated viewers in 100 million homes after barely a year on air. Ian Burrell goes inside its London bureau to find out what makes the station tick

...But Al Jazeera English is far more than Sir David Frost's Friday foray into politics and culture. It is a station that follows the sun as it moves around the globe. Early-morning coverage emanates from Kuala Lumpur, and is transferred at 10am to Doha in the Gulf; the London bureau takes centre stage at 8pm before handing over to Washington at 11pm, Greenwich Mean Time. At all times, the station is attempting to provide an alternative to what it sees as the Western perspective of rivals CNN and BBC World, offering a "south to north" interpretation of the news. In its first 12 months, the network has far exceeded its expectations, reaching 100 million homes, though it is shunned by most cable networks in the US, where it relies heavily on its website stream.

more

Micah hides from a hip scarf

First Trick

Or Treat
This is a bit late, but Micah learned the mores of trick or treating for the first time this year.

On the zoo

"At the zoo, that terrible 'zoological garden,' the child see living animals he has never seen before- jaguars, vultures, buffalo, and, strangest of all, giraffes. He sees for the first time the confused variety of the animal kingdom, and the spectacle, far from alarming or frightening him, delights him. It delights him so much, in fact, that a trip to the zoo becomes part of the 'fun' of childhood, or what passes for fun. How is one to explain this common and yet mysterious occurence?

We can, of course deny it. We can tell ourselves that children brusquely led into that garden become, twenty years down the line, neurotic, and the truth is, there's not a child who has not discovered the zoo and not an adult who is not, when carefully examined, discovered to be a neurotic. Or we may assert that the child is, by definition, a discoverer, and that discovering the camel is no more remarkable than discovering mirrors, or water, or stairs. We may assert that the child trusts his parents, those who take him into that place filled with animals. Besides, the stuffed tiger on his bed and the tiger in the encyclopedia have prepared him to look without fear upon the tiger of the flesh and blood. Plato (should he join this discussion) would tell us that the child has already seen the tiger, in the world of archetypes, and that now, seeing it, he but recognizes it. Schopenhauer (still more startlingly) would say that the child looks without fear on tigers because he knows that he is the tigers and the tigers are he, or, more precisely, that tigers and he are of one essence- Will."

Jorge Luis Borges, excerpted from the Forward of The Book of Imaginary Beings

photo: Academy Animals, 2002, Richard Barnes

http://www.richardbarnes.net/

tabitha has always liked exotic fruits like papaya and melon, but i didn't know she likes to nuzzle and be close with strawberries too.

aaargh matey

"While I will admit to a certain cynicism the fact is that I am a nayser and a hatchet-man in the fight against violence.

I pride myself in taking a punch and I will gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Ghandi and King.

My concerns are global.

I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation.

The foundation for such a method is love. I love you..."