some of the things...

...that I haven't been ranting about because I've been too busy gallivanting (did I get it right this time, Marti?) around town with my mother & aunt these past two weeks.

POPLINE, in its own words "Your connection to the world's reproductive health literature," recently had a skirmish with abortion. In that they removed the actual term abortion from its search engine. Seriously. Maybe if you search smashmortion, a la Judd Apatow's summer blockbuster Knocked Up, you might be able to actually, you know, research reproductive health issues. POPLINE has since come to its senses. Read specifics here.

This, which I found strangely moving, from the Barnard Library's Zine Collection.

I've been reading Joan Walsh for awhile now, and have been particularly grateful for her discussions on sexism in the presidential race this time around.

This for Paul, marine biologist and NYC-hater extraordinaire: subway cars get a second life.

Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time among other things, has been a guest blogger for the Times these past months. His recent take on the role of small town America in American politics was a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this hoopla surrounding Obama's "bitter" comments.

A Columbia Business School graduate makes good, inventing a system that may be the salvation of successful recycling throughout the land, or at least in Philadelphia and on Columbia's main campus.

Last, and by far the most disappointing, the Supreme Court is clearly as splintered as the rest of the country when it comes to capital punishment. We've got Justice Stevens (have I said how much I love Justice Stevens? I pretty much love Justice Stevens) admitting that while he's forced to vote to allow lethal injection because of precedent, he actually believes that executions are, as a whole, unconstitutional. We've got Justices Souter and Ginbsurg dissenting outright. And then we've got Justices Scalia and Thomas. Oh God how frightening are Justices Scalia and Thomas? According to them, any execution is just dandy as long as it isn't intended to inflict pain. So why don't we all just go back to using the electric chair? I mean, the intent wasn't to set people on fire, right? What's a little spark every now and again between friends? It seems these two are in agreement with John "It's Not Torture Unless The Pain Is On Par With Organ Failure or Imminent Death" Woo.

It's always hard to jump back into the real world after spending a wonderful week or two visiting with old friends & beloved family, walking through parks and museums, spending hours in coffee shops and yarn shops and being spoiled absolutely rotten by the best mom in the entire known universe.

dinner party, 4.18.08

psycho killer

hobbit

sophistication

river in springtime

the damage done, or, having a car in the suburbs and what it does to you

(no, this is not all mine)

nathan contemplates what he has wrought

(orecchiette with sundried tomatoes & chickpeas)

snippets, or, oh the things you come across when you clear out the space under your bed

"I am two months short of being twenty-two years old now, and yet that number, 22, still seems huge to me. When I was little, my father would invite his senior thesis advisees up to our house in Westchester for a barbecue every spring to celebrate the turning-in of their theses. For years I imagined that these young women who appeared in our house every spring were old, sophisticated, and completely in control of their lives. Well, I turned in my senior thesis a week ago and I'm still waiting for that 'grown-up' feeling that I imagined all those years ago.

Sometimes, for a split second, I will almost catch it -- that sense of being an adult."

(April 1998)

bedroom wall

letter of the day

To the Editor:

“In Economic Drama, Bush Is Largely Offstage” (White House Memo, front page, April 3):

Far from being of concern, Americans should be encouraged by the fact that President Bush is “detached from the nation’s economic woes,” given his success in other policy areas.

We should all be glad that he is in Eastern Europe (where most people have enough sense to pay no attention to him) “arguing about who should get into NATO,” rather than trying to fix a catastrophe caused in no small part by the anti-regulatory policies of his and like-minded administrations.

If only he had been similarly detached from foreign policy earlier in his administration, perhaps we would not be mired in Iraq as we are today.

In any event, let us hope that Mr. Bush vigorously pursues this policy of detachment from all areas of policy, foreign and domestic.

Robert S. Lee
Houston, April 3, 2008

"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like. They're both mad."

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat, "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

-Lewis Carroll

videos of the day, however dated

Jon Stewart & Bill Moyers

Closely followed by Beirut's Elephant Gun, an oddly quaint, if debaucherous, video if ever there was one.

And lastly, for Erik, this. I tried to find Look at the Wind Blow, to no avail, so this'll have to do.

81% & other semi-newsworthy tidbits

According to a recent NYTimes/CBS News poll, 81% of Americans believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction, up from a mere 69% last year and a wispy 35% at the outset of the Iraq War. Just look how far we've come.

Coincidentally enough, 81 is also the number of pages in a memo by the notorious John C. Yoo. This infamous memo, written in early 2003 but just recently made public, is basically a roadmap for the Bush administration to get around various laws prohibiting torture and other legally (not to mention morally) questionable behavior.

In the vein of Henry the Hexapus, I was amused to see yet another article on the octopuses of the world. (Am I the only one to always want to write octopi? I mean, octopuses? It just seems so wrong.)

In from Chris earlier this week, a disturbing tale of dogs gone wild. Quite literally. Can you imagine 30,000 - 200,000 semi-feral dogs wandering the streets of NYC, or any city, for that matter? That's what the residents of Bucharest have to deal with every day, and it's only going to get worse.

Speaking of NYC, welcome to my world - the adventure of weekend subwaying.

And last, algae. When we were kids growing up a block away from Mohegan Lake, we were always grossed out by the algae slowly encroaching on our swimming spot. It smelled bad, it felt slimy, and it was killing the lake. But apparently algae's the wave of the future, renewable-energy wise, at least. And I say all the more power to it.