There once was a woman who woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and noticed she had only three hairs on head. Well," she said, "I think I'll braid my hair today?"

So she did.

And she had a wonderful day.


The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and saw that she had only two hairs on her head

. "H-M-M," she said, "I think I'll part my hair down the middle today?"

So she did.

And she had a grand day.


The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed that she had only one hair on her head.

"Well," she said, "today I'm going to wear my hair in a pony tail."

So she did and she had a fun, fun day.


The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed that there wasn't a single hair on her head.

"YEA!" she exclaimed, "I don't have to fix my hair today!"

I've never been one to follow a leader, and I've never understood the human attraction to cult personalities. But there certainly is something in some human natures that needs to feel blessed by someone that they have vested with only vaguely deserved wisdom.

I am thinking about this because of my current altercation with a current cult figure who, in emails to me, has called me a "passive-aggressive bitch" and "doctrinaire moralis" and has accused me of "disgruntled high-horse pretense of moral superiority" and "binary black and white filters." (Out of sheer perversity, I refuse to link to him. But he did start all of this by indicating on his weblog that he thinks I am a half-wit and an anal retentive.)

Now, in all fairness, in response to his blogassault on me, I commented somewhere that I do have something against schmucks who publicly harass former "beloveds" and who can dish out invectives out but can't take them. And, I have only pity and sympathy for narcissistic might have beens who seem to make a great effort to make sure the world at large sees them as emotionally stunted and psychologically deformed (by choice or circumstance -- it really doesn't matter) and then complain that people see them as emotionally stunted and psychologically deformed. In other words, as nasty schmucks.

OK. If you know about whom I'm blogging, I invite you to keep reading. If you don't, it doesn't matter. Move on. I have much more interesting posts to take up your time.

My retaliation to his assault was harsh and nasty. I tend to shoot back first, re-load, re-armor, and then look around to see what's happening. I don't like what's happening. But, before you get to be a Crone, you learn to be a warrior. I've never run from a fight, especially one that pits me against a cult figure who has pitted himself against me.

He is credited by some bloggers as their teacher -- someone who has given them permission to speak their hearts, their guts. In the words of Happy Harry Hardon, to "talk hard." That's wonderful. Everyone should know that they have permission to do that. Everyone should do that. I started when I was 17 and haven't stopped yet. To some, that makes me an aggressive bitch. (I absolutely don't agree with the "passive" tag!)

He has told me several times to "fuck off." And I replied that I don't"fuck off" (in the sense that he means it) that easily. I say that the time has come to diffuse cults of personality. We don't need self-perpetuating personalities to follow and defer to and seek blessings and approval from. People are people, even in Blogaria. Sometimes they behave like nasty schmucks, and when they do, they should be called on it. Sometimes they write like angels, and they should be applauded for that.

I say that it's time to invite all bare-assed emperors to climb off their self-constructed pedestals. The view from down here is kind of nasty.

Billionaires: When the super-rich get richer. 3/23/2007

“It should simply be called the green list,” said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. Forbes magazine last week released its annual tally of the people with the most greenbacks, identifying a record 946 billionaires whose mega-fortunes can only leave the rest of us green with envy. For the 13th year in a row, Bill Gates (net worth, $56 billion) led the way, but this year’s list includes a record number of Chinese, Russians, and other foreigners. Noting that the number of billionaires is up nearly 20 percent over last year, Forbes declared this “the richest year ever in human history.” Excuse me for not celebrating, said Tony Hendra in Huffingtonpost.com. In America, the gap between rich and poor is only growing, while the net worth of the world’s 4 billion poorest souls actually dropped, to less than $35 dollars each. Those who demand more equitable distribution of wealth are often derided as socialists or “bleeding hearts.” But when a handful of tycoons makes more in a day than much of the world makes in a lifetime, it’s tempting to start humming the “Internationale.”

Perhaps we’d be less envious, said Gregg Easterbrook in the Los Angeles Times, if the super-rich were more charitable. Not counting the “sainted” Warren Buffett—who gave away $44 billion last year—the 60 leading American philanthropists donated $7 billion, out of their combined net worth of $584 billion. That’s a mere 1.2 percent of their vast fortunes. Multibillionaires such as software magnate Larry Ellison, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and even that great champion of equality, financier and liberal activist George Soros, all gave less than 1 percent. Consider that in his day, industrialist Andrew Carnegie gave away 78 percent of his net worth. Billionaires can use only so many yachts, cars, and estates. Which raises the question: “Why do the super-rich hoard?”

Russia is not angry about a nonexistent threat to its nuclear deterrent. It’s mad that a U.S. base will be another hindrance to a Russian invasion of Poland. No matter who’s in charge, “whether Ivan the Terrible, Joseph Stalin, or Vladimir Putin,” Russia always wants to conquer, to expand. With U.S. troops on Polish soil, Poland will be protected even more surely than by our membership in NATO. And the U.S. will be protected against incoming missiles from Iran or North Korea.

Bad Week For Queen-size beds, after a University of Vienna study found that when men slept alongside their female partners, they woke up the next day less rested and with impaired cognitive functions. “We were never meant to sleep in the same bed as each other,’’ a sleep expert said.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said that a new “anti-greenhouse religion” had replaced Communism as the paramount threat to global freedom. “This ideology preaches earth and nature, and under the slogans of their protection--similarly to the old Marxists--wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world.”[Reuters via the San Diego Union Tribune.]

In Beijing, weather officials were now using the word “mai,” meaning “haze,” to denote a denser concentration of pollutants than “wu,” which means “fog,”[The Economist] and Taiwan's freeway bureau closed 600 yards of highway in Yunlin County in preparation for a massive migration of milkweed butterflies.[AP via Yahoo! News]

Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck announced that his restaurants would no longer serve foie gras, but that he would continue to slice lobsters in half without first stunning them.

In her denial of an application for divorce filed by a battered Muslim woman, a female judge in Frankfurt, Germany, quoted a verse of the Koran that suggests husbands may beat unchaste wives. “It's a religious thing,” she explained.[The Sun]

After it was discovered that he was drinking the blood and eating the flesh of their young women, a man named Black Jesus was captured by villagers in Papua New Guinea.[Fox News]

Four teachers in Xhyre, Albania, were censured after their students caught them drinking and having sex behind a blackboard. “I saw them acting shamefully,” said fourth-grader Elton Cuka to the Shqip daily. “Would you call someone a teacher,” asked Xhevahir Hohxa, a father, “who drinks raki at ten in the morning and gets drunk and chases the schoolgirls?”[Reuters via Scotsman]

To test the integrity of ten local hospitals, journalists in Hangzhou, China, replaced their urine samples with tea; six of the hospitals diagnosed the reporters with urinary tract infections.[Reuters via Yahoo! Lifestyle]

Families of victims of the World Trade Center attacks filed an affidavit that accused New York City of using the remains of the dead to pave roads and fill potholes.[Reuters via Yahoo! News]

The unintentional development of a compulsive gambling disorder after a medical treatment is discussed in a new case report from the Mayo Clinic. Although the extent of the problem is unknown, treatment of a particular neurological syndrome with medications that stimulate dopamine receptors in the brain appear to trigger the disorder.

[snip]

According to the study, the disorder occurs only in a small number of RLS patients treated with drugs called dopamine agonists. Considering this potential side effect of dopamine agonists, the Mayo Clinic authors suggest that physicians screen all RLS patients for compulsive behaviors while taking a thorough medical history prior to prescribing dopamine agonists.

"We are reluctant to admit that essentially war is the business of killing," Marshall wrote, while the soldier himself "comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable." The Army, having just fought the Second World War, embraced Marshall's findings.

Within months, Army units were receiving a "Revised Program of Instruction," which instituted many of Marshall's doctrines. It was no longer sufficient to teach a man to shoot a target; the Army must also condition him to kill, and the way to do it, paradoxically, was to play down the fact that shooting equals killing. "We need to free the rifleman's mind with respect to the nature of targets," Marshall wrote. A soldier who has learned to squeeze off careful rounds at a target will take the time, in combat, to consider the humanity of the man he is about to shoot. Along with conventional marksmanship, soldiers now acquired the skill of "massing fire" against riverbanks, trees, hillcrests, and other places where enemy soldiers might lurk. "The average firer will have less resistance to firing on a house or tree than upon a human being," Marshall added. Once the Army put his notions into practice, they bore spectacular results. By the time of the Vietnam War, according to internal Army estimates, as many as ninety per cent of soldiers were shooting back. And some were paying a price.

Menu Foods Income Fund (the "Fund") (TSX:MEW.UN) today announced the precautionary recall of a portion of the dog and cat food it manufactured between December 3, 2006 and March 6, 2007. The recall is limited to "cuts and gravy" style pet food in cans and pouches manufactured at two of the Fund's United States facilities. These products are both manufactured and sold under private-label and are contract-manufactured for some national brands.

Over the past several days, the Fund has received feedback in the United States (none in Canada) raising concerns about pet food manufactured since early December, and its impact on the renal health of the pets consuming the products. Shortly after receipt of the first complaint, the Fund initiated a substantial battery of technical tests, conducted by both internal and external specialists, but has failed to identify any issues with the products in question. The Fund has, however, discovered that timing of the production associated with these complaints, coincides with the introduction of an ingredient from a new supplier. The Fund stopped using this ingredient shortly after this discovery and production since then has been undertaken using ingredients from another source.

Today we raise a glass of warm green beer to a fine fellow, the Irishman who didn't rid the land of snakes, didn't compare the Trinity to the shamrock, and wasn't even Irish. St. Patrick, who died 1,507, 1,539, or 1,540 years ago today—depending on which unreliable source you want to believe—has been adorned with centuries of Irish blarney. Innumerable folk tales recount how he faced down kings, negotiated with God, tricked and slaughtered Ireland's reptiles.

New Age Christians revere Patrick as a virtual patron saint. Patrick co-opted Druid symbols in order to undermine the rival religion, fusing nature and magic with Christian practice. The Irish placed a sun at the center of their cross. "St. Patrick's Breastplate," Patrick's famous prayer (which he certainly did not write) invokes the power of the sun, moon, rocks, and wind, as well as God. (This is what is called "Erin go hoo-ha.")

We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the minutes.

Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

[SNIP]

Brother Gatling Gun of Patience notes that he's pretty sure the world is out to get him because everyone laughs when he says he is a Unitarian. There were murmurs of assent around the room, and someone suggested that we buy some Congress members and really stick it to the Baptists. But this was deemed against Revolutionary Principles, and Brother Gatling Gun of Patience was remanded to the Sunday Flowers and Banners committee.

When accused of stealing lingerie from a shop, a German man told a court that his elf alter ego may have been to blame,[BBCnews.com] and a woman in Boston was suing Planned Parenthood and two doctors for childrearing costs after finding out she was still pregnant following an abortion.[Boston Globe]

A Pennsylvania mother pled guilty to swinging her infant son like a bat to hit her boyfriend,[AP via CNN.com] and after stabbing his wife multiple times a Connecticut man gave the knife to his son and said, “Now you stab mommy.”[AP via CNN.com]

A study claimed that girls shown videos of women suffering from eating disorders became more likely to view these women as “very pretty” and thought it would be “nice to look like” them,[Reuters] and low-dose estrogen and progesterone birth control pills were reported to reduce ovarian cancer risk.[Reuters]

The Navy was researching an electromagnetic beam that would penetrate walls and cause people to fall over and vomit.[Wired.com]

A human rights group in Israel accused the country's army of using Palestinians, including an 11-year-old girl, as human shields,[BBCnews.com] and the Israeli ambassador to El Salvador was recalled after police found him in the embassy, drunk and naked except for bondage gear, with a rubber ball stuffed in his mouth.[BBCnews.com]

A man in England who had demonstrated against cartoons of the prophet Muhammad was found guilty of soliciting murder.[BBCnews.com]

The United Nations announced that Afghanistan's yield of heroin poppies rose 25 percent last year.[BBCnews.com]

Osama bin Laden turned fifty.[Reuters via CNN.com]

"It's about power," proclaims The First Evil in the seventh season's premier episode. By the time the season, and the series along with it, comes to an end, Buffy proclaims to a room full of girls denied such power by long-dead men who were afraid to fight their own battles: "I say my power should be our power."

And suddenly, the series breaks open its long-standing metaphor, of Buffy representing any girl or woman working her way to her own particular power, and shows the point of it all more blatantly and unapologetically than it ever had before.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer always was about one character saying to girls and women in her audience, "My power is your power." Fitting, then, that in the end the series found a way, within its own mythology, to dramatize for us what that meant. To make her power their power.

2005: My Generation is Going Gold by Silvio Laccetti Professor of Humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ

We are the smallest generation. Once called the silent generation, we are the pivotal generation of the last 60 years. We are the Rock' n Roll Generation, born from 1940 through 1945. My generation. This New Year, 2005, the first of our number arrives at the golden age of 65.

Sandwiched between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, we occupy our own high place in America's social history. We have served as foundation builders in key areas of American life, and we have cemented the social structure of the last 35 years. Our generation is recognized by many names.

Of course, as the Rock 'n Roll Generation, we discovered and popularized the music that radically changed popular culture. In the early 50s, proto-rock 'n rollers found the moondog music of black artists on obscure R&B stations. "Rock" became a cultural attitude, infusing the arts, theatre and even politics. We were the first modern generation of rebels, albeit rebels without a cause. We said rock and roll would never die and, for better or worse, it hasn't.

Clearly, my generation is also the Atomic Generation, closely identified with the 1950s and their epochal changes. Domestic joy and tranquility contrasted with apocalyptic visions of annihilation.

On November 1, 1952, the U.S. exploded the first H bomb. Soon afterwards, fantasies of total destruction were regularly projected in film and slide shows in school auditoriums throughout the land. I can still remember the fear that gripped us while watching endless replays of that nuclear detonation. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!

Luckily our trusted teachers taught us what to do. We learned to duck!

The Atomic Age was the most fearful aspect of a more generalized pathology -- continuous, unpredictable Cold War. Brutal, atheistic communists ravaged our generation's reality. To combat this threat, most institutions, including Hollywood and even the government, itself turned to the only help left- God.

The first Cold War Generation learned more about religion through popular culture than they did by any other means. GOD was inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. Biblical themed epics bounded at the movie shows and nobody objected. The last significant one of this genre- for us- was titled The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Everyone seemed to know He had the whole world in His hands.

As we matured into adolescence we became the Space Age Generation. When the Soviet Union beat us in the space race with their launch of Sputnik in 1957, we were to be the vanguard protectors of the free world. We began preparing for careers in astronomy, physics and rocket science (Science!) math and, of course, engineering. Excitement and challenge were in the air.

We reached for the moon and we helped the nation to get there. We seemed to be reaching for God, climbing a stairway to heaven. But down that stairway had come the Roswell aliens, and others from the dark side of the moon were on their way.

To be sure, not all our generational foundations were unsettling. We were the TV Generation, enjoying a pleasant life in black and white. We were learning to live vicariously as most people do now through technology.

In one special institution (for boys only at first) we lived actively and vicariously as well. We were the founding generation of Little League. Put me in coach, I'm ready to play.

Because we passed through so many mini-revolutions we were also the cement that binds much of our society together. We went from the 78 rpm record to the DVD recorder disc, from the typewriter to the Palm pilot.

Passing through these developments makes my generation a source of wisdom which is a valuable social cohesive never to be overlooked by younger people. We have been and are that proverbial bridge over troubled waters.

My generation was gut-wrenched into maturity in November, 1963 during the long days of national mourning for President Kennedy. Mature, melancholy and morose, our momentum as generational leaders of change quickly ebbed. Our place was taken by Baby Boomers all too ready and too eager to begin their work.

If 1963 was a year of innocence lost, 1965 was the pivotal year for America and our last year as "leaders of the new generation". In truth, we were ready to abdicate. The face and course of America was to change forever in that fateful year.

A short list of events in that single year includes: the great escalation to war in Viet Nam; the shocking urban riots in Watts; a renewed but combative Civil Rights movement; Urban Renewal; the new Immigration Act. Out with the old, in with the new!

In New York City, the last great World's Fair closed its gates and in November, the lights went out in the city. My generation was not the one that turned them on again.

Forty years later, it's 2005 and most of us are staying alive (oops). Thanks to new attitudes toward seniors and second careers, and with continued help from medical advances we remain an undeniable part of America's future. As veterans of four decades of change in which America became the sole world super power we still have much to contribute. We will not fade away.

Good Week For Outsourcing, after a Chinese man advertised for a woman to serve as a stand-in for his mistress, so his angry wife could beat her up. He offered 3,000 yuan ($400) for 10 minutes of being pummeled. Ten women have applied.

Bad Week For Rural humor, after a Maryland legislator proposed a ban on "bumper nuts," outsize plastic testicles that wry pickup-truck owners have taken to affixing to their trailer hitches. "It's a pretty serious problem," said Delegate LeRoy Myers Jr. "You have body parts hanging from the hitches of cars. We've crossed a line."

America isn’t the only place where science is under siege, said Nicolien den Boer in Amsterdam’s Radionetherlands.nl. Muslim creationists are waging a stealth campaign to try to make Europeans doubt the truth of evolution. They have blitzed European schools with copies of an 800-page Islamic textbook called The Atlas of Creation. The Turkish author, Harun Yahya, holds that Darwin’s theory “is responsible for all the evil in the world, including international terrorism.”

NATO member Latvia said this week it would pull most of its troops out of Iraq by the summer, to free up forces for the fight in Afghanistan. Baltic neighbor and fellow NATO member Lithuania quickly followed suit. Latvia currently has 125 soldiers in Iraq and 36 in Afghanistan; Lithuania has 53 in Iraq and 120 in Afghanistan. Three Latvian soldiers have died in Iraq since joining the coalition forces in May 2003.

There are prophecies and oracles from around the world that all seem to point to December 21, 2012 as doomsday. The ancient Mayan Calendar, the medieval predictions of Merlin, the Book of Revelation and the Chinese oracle of the I Ching all point to this specific date as the end of civilization. A new technology called "The Web-Bot Project" makes massive scans of the internet as a means of forecasting the future... and has turned up the same dreaded date: 2012. Skeptics point to a long history of "Failed Doomsdays", but many oracles of doom throughout history have a disturbingly accurate track record. As the year 2012 ticks ever closer we'll speculate if there are any reasons to believe these doomsayers.