According to CNN:
“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,” Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. “And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.”
The president has taken a courageous stand in favor of traditional marriage at a moment in American history when the courts are conspiring with anti-family extremists to undermine our nation’s most vital institution,” said the Rev. Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition.
I’m just about ready for another Civil War. And you know what side I’ll be on.
Bush’s cronies (in contrast to Crones, to whom he REALLY should listen), are heading us straight toward another Dark Age. Their agenda is clear: limit the rights and privileges of gays, minorities, the poor, the uneducated; the disabled; use words like “conspiring” and “undermine” (which are exactly the opposite of what we who believe in the spirit of the Constitution are doing); set up anyone with views that differ from the neocons as the devils: gays, liberals, non-Christians (except maybe Jews, since they believe in at least half of the Bible)…..
Why hasn’t anyone more erudite and articulate than I am begun to define Bush as the supposedly prophesied “anti-Christ” who distorts and manipulates true Christian teachings in order to woo susceptible believers into laying the foundation of their own destruction. It’s so obvious to me who the Devil Incarnate is these days. But then, again, what do I know. I do rituals at the ocean’s edge and make online amulets.
I guess next, they burn people like me at the stake. Heh.

See, for me, an important part of blogging is the conversation that posts prompt. (The rest is, as Frank Paynter’s site so succinctly explains, that it works as a “public place for self-expression.”)
Recently, I commented on a post of Frank’s (entitled “When Does a Blogger Find Time to Write”) about what constitutes success for a blogger. He cites several, for example, who have parlayed their blogging expertise into dollars. To that I commented:
Maybe it’s because my primary medium is poetry (and we all know that very, very few people make any money writing poetry) that I’m comfortable with the notion of blogging not being a commercial venture. For me, blogging is like giving a poetry reading at Borders: I don’t get paid, and the audience is small. But it’s what I do, and there are always a few people out there who appreciate it, a few people whom my words touch in some meaningful way. Bloggers and poets — each in good company, I think.
While blogging and writing poetry differ in style, often the intent is the same — to share with the world a personal interpretation of a larger reality.
And then Tom Shugart posted a funny piece on an episode of the HBO series Real Sex (which he swears he doesn’t really watch. Right.)
Given my ongoing disagreements with the expressed gender attitudes of both RageBoy and Halley, I wound up leaving a very serious comment. Some things I have a hard time not taking seriously.
I’ll bet that the Boy Toy was invented (and marketed via HBO) by a male. If you read erotic fantasies written by women (ahem, yes, I’ve been through more than a few of those books), it becomes pretty clear that many, many, many of us prefer a slow hand, an easy touch, warm skin on skin. Erotic movies written and directed by women (ahem, yes, I’ve seen a few of those, too) are also very different from the slambamthankyouman scripts devised by men. So, if men seem to be becoming irrlevant to many women (we don’t need them for financial support and all we need is their sperm for impregnation)perhaps it’s because what we look to men for is really something very different from what many men think we look to them for. And so if men seem to be becoming irrelevant, perhaps it’s because they’re making themselves irrelevant.
Anyway, Tom, from what I’ve learned about you here over all of this time, I don’t think you have to worry. Big, heavy-handed anatomically correct Boy Toys are about as satisfying as Halley’s “Girlies.”
Q: What’s the difference between a cucumber and a man? A: A cucumber doesn’t leave a wet spot. (Sorry about that.)

As I emailed to my friends and relatives:
I guess this is one instance where age has its advantage. To be included in an article with Rebecca Blood and Meg Hourihan, the crown princesses of blogging, is an honor that resulted pretty much solely from the fact that I’m one of the oldest women on the blogblock. But that’s OK. These days I’ll take whatever I can get.

Tribiune staff writer Gail Philbin captures a good (if necessarily limited) cross-section of women bloggers who reveal why they bother to blog. I thought I mentioned Blog Sisters in my interview with her last month, but if I did, the mention got lost in the editing. Too bad. I like to plug that bunch whenever I can.
I guess I’ve used up my alloted minutes of fame. Or maybe not.
P.S. Since my interview with Philbin I asked the Linda Lovelace site to remove the link to my blog; I get enough porn spam without that kind of help, and I’m sure that anyone actually finding my post about Lovelace was terribly disappointed anyway.

I don’t play computer games, but my former boss is a real Sim City addict, so I know a little about how that works.
An article posted at Bloomberg.com yesterday reports:
The U.S. military plans a worldwide on-line futures market to help it predict events in the Middle East. Traders could bet on the likelihood of events ranging from the overthrow of a government to the collapse of an economy or the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
[snip]
The market is to be managed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. DARPA spokesman John Jennings wasn’t immediately available for comment. The senators said their information came from the market’s Web site.
The site doesn’t make clear the extent to which traders, geopolitical analysts or ordinary citizens actually “bet,” the mechanics of payment if any, and how the Pentagon plans to use the information.
Somwhere along the line these guys and their Dumbya leader have gotten pretend game-playing and real-life confused. (Although certainly this tendency among men hungry for power is not new. I just finished Poisonwood Bible, which reflects all too painfully how most of us have to live our lives staying out of the range of influence of those kinds of evil male-dominated machinations.)
It’s time to hook these infantile guys up to a VR Sim Planet game and let them play out their fantasies of power and persecution to their dark hearts’ content. Then maybe the rest of us can find a way to work together to make the real world the kind of place in which our grandchildren can thrive. Feh on them all!

Sisterhood and wisecracks: That’s how Joanne Weintraub of Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinal describes my favorite sitcom of all times, Designing Women. (Well, maybe after Northern Exposure, which made me laugh out loud too, but for different reasons.)
I couldn’t resist tuning into parts of the Designing Women reunion show that aired tonight, and I hooted and hollered at the old clips all over again and cheered on Dixie Carter as her character launched into her clever and clipped diatribes about the nonsense that women not-so-patiently put up with, particularly from men.
Its characters talked about things real women talk about, from politics to pantyhose. There’s a clip from an episode where Mary Jo (Potts) deliberates getting implants that may be both the funniest and most honest discussion a TV character has ever had about breasts. (from Weintraub’s article)
Small-chested Mary Jo carries on about how powerful she feels with bigger (temporary) breasts. If she were a “D,” she muses, she’d probably punch someone out. And her descriptions of how differently men treat her and her bigger breasts are as hilarious as they are unfortunately realistically accurate.
I think I’ve seen every episode more than twice since they started airing in 1986 and moved into re-runs in the early 90s. The characters are feisty and fallible, smart and sexy. They are not girls. They are women. They like themselves, they like each other, they like men, and they like to laugh at their own human foibles.
Hot, sexy, strong, femine, feminist W-O-M-E-N.

Every so often, I start seeing the numbers 11:11. What’s really spooky is that I’m not the only one.

It started several years ago, and I wrote about it somewhere on my old weblog but I can’t seem to locate the post. It started with purchases that totaled $11.11. Or change from purchases. Then, it seemed like every time I looked at a digital clock, it said 11:11. I go through spurts like that every once in a while.

It’s happening again. At least with the clocks — in my car, my bedroom, the VCR. I understand that it’s likely that somewhere in my subconscious I’m telling myself to look at a clock when I sense it’s that time. But that doesn’t explain why it only happens every so often, with no logical reason why it should start again.

I’m an irreverent non-believer, which you might not believe because I love to conjure rituals and am fascinated by synchronicities — especially because everything in life really happens so randomly.

Some people are born into poverty and ignorance and some into affluence and privilege. Some get cancer and some depressed and some breeze through life full of joy and energy.

Yesterday, I relaxed for a couple of hours at a friend’s pool — gossiping, reading, book-reviewing, keeping cool and privileged in a manicured back yard of the lovely home that she got in her divorce settlement. And across the city and across the world, others sweltered, suffered, starved. It’s a crapshoot that we begin where we begin.

One one one one. The beginning number. 11:11. Supposedly it means that I’m on the right track. I sure don’t feel like it.

It’s spooky.

My newspaper today had a column by Andy Rooney bemoaning the fact that his “voice” had been stolen by someone who was circulating something (racist and vitriolic) on the Internet that claimed to have been written by Rooney. It was written in his unique staccato style, and while many readers emailed Rooney to say that they know he couldn’t have written something like that, others were taken in by the accurate stylistic parody. I don

— Drive back and forth to Boston twice in six days.
— Decorate with an

Word is out that Ann Craig (once a blogger, always a blogger) needs our good wishes, good thoughts, good vibes.
And so I conjure mine — a healing blue bindrune for skin diseases (coincidentally configured like an “M”) contained by a conch shell whose center radiates harmony and healing and whose root grows life-affirming green.

a full moon on the 13th
and magic from the sea
signs life to sisters
under the skin
Meditate on this and be well, Ann.

I’m getting ready for my one and only grandchild’s vist this week to celebrate his first birthday, and I can’t imagine loving any grandchild any more than I love him.
At the same time, I’m having this odd thought: the female lineage of my family ends with my daughter. Her one and only child is a boy. The generations of my family’s genes that have been passed down from mother to daughter for centuries ends with her. She is past forty and will be having no more children. No daughters.
Our last photo of four generations of women was taken when my daughter was about six months old and I was in my twenties and my mother was in her forties and my grandmother was in her sixties. No more passing down of family genes and secrets and stories and myths from daughter to daughter to daughter….. Something I’ve always taken for granted is gone.
Well, I might not someday be watching Alexander bounce around in a tu-tu, but I sure will pass along to him our family secrets and stories and myths, and I’m sure even a few of my wayward genes. Maybe he’ll even let me teach him to ballroom dance.
In the real world, the end of this female line doesn’t really make much difference. But in my mythic one, it feels somehow important, and I’m sure that there is a poem to be written about this after I let the feeling simmer for a while.