Michael Jackson was planning to create a fifty-foot-tall robotic replica of himself that would roam the Las Vegas desert while firing laser beams.

In Spearsville, Louisiana, two fifth-graders had sex on a classroom floor during an assembly about murder.

In the Indian state of Gujarat, an unemployed man from Tooting, England, had found new work as Bahucharaji, the patron goddess of eunuchs.

At the Gaza–Egypt border a woman with three baby crocodiles strapped to her waist was detained after guards noticed that she looked “strangely fat.”

At least four Palestinians in Gaza were killed by what authorities called a “sewage tsunami.”

Members of a Michigan college fraternity called the police after a woman disrobed and started masturbating in their living room and refused to leave; the fraternity now plans to throw away two sofas.

A 15,000-mile-wide hexagon was seen on Saturn.

A Nepalese teenager believed to be a reincarnation of the Buddha began a three-year meditation in a concrete bunker.

The Common Living Dirt
Marge Piercy

The small ears prick on the bushes,
furry buds, shoots tender and pale.
The swamp maples blow scarlet.
Color teases the corner of the eye,
delicate gold, chartreuse, crimson,
mauve speckled, just dashed on.

The soil stretches naked. All winter
hidden under the down comforter of snow,
delicious now, rich in the hand
as chocolate cake: the fragrant busy
soil the worm passes through her gut
and the beetle swims in like a lake.

As I kneel to put the seeds in,
careful as stitching, I am in love.
You are the bed we all sleep on.
You are the food we eat, the food
we are, the food we will become.
We are walking trees rooted in you.

You can live thousands of years
undressing in the spring your black
body, your red body, your brown body
penetrated by the rain. Here
is the goddess unveiled,
the earth opening her strong thighs.

Yet you grow exhausted with bearing
too much, too soon, too often, just
as a woman wears through like an old rug.
We have contempt for what we spring
from. Dirt, we say, you’re dirt
as if we were not all your children.

We have lost the simplest gratitude.
We lack the knowledge we sowed ten
thousand years past, that you live
a goddess but mortal, that what we take
must be returned; that the poison we drop
in you will stunt our children’s growth.

Tending a plot of your flesh binds
me as nothing ever could to the seasons,
to the will of the plants, clamorous
in their green tenderness. What
calls louder than the cry of a field
of corn ready, or trees of ripe peaches?

I worship on my knees, laying
the seeds in you, that worship rooted
in need, in hunger, in kinship,
flesh of the planet with my own flesh,
a ritual of compost, a litany of manure.
My garden’s a chapel, but a meadow

gone wild in grass and flower
is a cathedral. How you seethe
with little quick ones, vole, field
mouse, shrew and mole in their thousands,
rabbit and woodchuck. In you rest
the jewels of the genes wrapped in seed.

Power warps because it involves joy
in domination; also because it means
forgetting how we too starve, break,
like a corn stalk in the wind, how we
die like the spinach of drought,
how what slays the vole slays us.

Because you can die of overwork, because
you can die of the fire that melts
rock, because you can die of the poison
that kills the beetle and the slug,
we must come again to worship you
on our knees, the common living dirt.

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]