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Mar. 28th, 2013 05:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* Nelson Mandela has been admitted to the hospital with a reassurance of his lung infection. He's 94 and increasingly frail. He is a world treasure and I hope he improves.
* "Attorney general appeals 15 year-old girl’s flogging sentence as authorities contemplate legal reforms:" http://minivannews.com/politics/attorney-general-appeals-15-year-old-girls-flogging-sentence-as-authorities-contemplate-legal-reforms-55264
* "China Bans Reincarnation Without Government Permission:" http://transmissionsmedia.com/china-bans-reincarnation-without-government-permission/
* More of Rachel Maddow's excellent SCOTUS/Marriage Equality coverage, this time in the DOMA case, starts here: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/#51356513
* Play while you pee:
* "The world’s shiniest living thing is an African fruit that looks like a pointillist bauble:" http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/09/10/shiny-fruit-pointillist-pixellated/#.UVPlqVefOM3
* il_volpe foud, "Dying To Go Retro? This Modern-Day Morticia Gives Death A Makeover:" http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/modern-day-morticia-gives-death-a-makeover/
* This points out if you make a law requiring trans folk to carry birth certificates or risk six months in prison, it means everyone has to carry one or risk arrest. "Birth certificates and bathrooms in Arizona:" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/03/26/birth-certificates-and-bathrooms-in-arizona/
* Does the USPS Discriminate Against Atheists: http://www.atheistberlin.com/study
And yet the Christians continue to insist they are being persecuted in this country when they are doing the actual persecuting of the rest of us.
* John Stewart's take on the latest attacks on Marriage Equality:
* Sharia Mop:
* From a discussion of life with an unusual surname in the Internet age:
I have a surname that's not only unusual in this country, but anybody who spells it like I do is related to me, if distantly. (Different families spelled it differently as they came across. We immigrated before spelling in general got standardized, and picked what turned out to be unique orthography. People picked different vowels depending on if they were picking the English or Dutch vowel system. You get different numbers of consonants. The family scattered, but stayed in contact approximately a hundred and seventy years, only falling out of contact not long before my birth). My feeling is that if an ex-lover or old friend wants to contact me enough to do the search, I am willing to let them find me. So far, it's been people I was happy to talk to with the exception of my high school alumni association, and I can delete email or toss out their junk mail without any drama. If that changes. If I'm inundated by junkie, jailbird high school exes, I can always revisit.
In any case, my first college was small and the alumni are close knit. Once the first one found me, the gossip spread throughout he community. It's not like I could hide anything from the Johnnie grapevine.
It's a good thing I don't mind being publicly trans, really. I can only hope the other trans alum in my range feels the same way, because most times someone from my range contacts me, they want to tell me about her, even though I haven't seen or heard from her since she graduated. The upside is the boys I fucked there have generally heard before they contact me, so they've had time to process. The downside is, I have no control over how and what is told to folks a hundred or more stops away in a six hundred or so person game of telephone. Again, it sure is lucky I live completely Out and have low risk for dangerous consequences on being outed.
* My mind is a sensory collage with various words layered with sense memories. Tonight I went downtown to buy my last Stromboli from the real Philly pizza place. The word stromboli is layered with all sorts of things. There is the warm brown crust of the little strombolis from the family run place near my Grandmother's house. In my head I hear the pinball and later PacMan machines, the grandmother ordering people about in Italian, the father and grandfather with the black chest hair poking through the neck hole of their shirts as they tossed the pies, the faces of the grandchildren who worked part time there before they went off to college. After I left, the old people sold to a chain and the pizza ceased to be magical. I see myself teaching My Soldier to make stromboli before he became a soldier. We are standing in his Mother's kitchen, his long brown fingers arranging pepperoni slices with characteristic precision. He flips his long brown hair out of his eyes. I am making stromboli the first time for Skye the summer I roomed with Hypnosis before starting grad school. The next day he would tell Karjack I'd "made him Stromboli." Suspecting this was some perverse sexual practice she was not sure if she could commiserate or congratulate. Overlayed with these are random people I've taken to eat at this particular restaurant and a high school date with my boyfriends where the stromboli was so big we could not eat it all despite our post coital ravenous. Today I waited in a long line in a restaurant packed with other people eating their last real pizza or whatever so I could get my last stromboli and distracted the cats with goosh so I could eat it in peace. I expressed the hope that the workers would find jobs soon. The cashier said that it was okay, most of them had, as they had warning. Goodbye Cicchitti's Pizza. You are irreplaceable and I will miss you.
Tomorrow, we eat the last pizza.
* Last night I dreamed Karjack, Pjack, Ninjakitten, and I were going to Brigantine to watch a hurricane, which makes no sense. That hotel is right on the beach and I'm big on following directives to evacuate. The sky in the dream was beautiful, with all this greenish light coming through an amazing cloud cover. There were donuts and our windows faced the sea. So beautiful. It made me wish I could paint.
* Greenwick foud a cool site where they will send you free Buddhist Literature: http://greenwick.livejournal.com/195427.html?mode=reply&style=mine
* "Attorney general appeals 15 year-old girl’s flogging sentence as authorities contemplate legal reforms:" http://minivannews.com/politics/attorney-general-appeals-15-year-old-girls-flogging-sentence-as-authorities-contemplate-legal-reforms-55264
* "China Bans Reincarnation Without Government Permission:" http://transmissionsmedia.com/china-bans-reincarnation-without-government-permission/
* More of Rachel Maddow's excellent SCOTUS/Marriage Equality coverage, this time in the DOMA case, starts here: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/#51356513
* Play while you pee:
* "The world’s shiniest living thing is an African fruit that looks like a pointillist bauble:" http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/09/10/shiny-fruit-pointillist-pixellated/#.UVPlqVefOM3
* il_volpe foud, "Dying To Go Retro? This Modern-Day Morticia Gives Death A Makeover:" http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/modern-day-morticia-gives-death-a-makeover/
* This points out if you make a law requiring trans folk to carry birth certificates or risk six months in prison, it means everyone has to carry one or risk arrest. "Birth certificates and bathrooms in Arizona:" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/03/26/birth-certificates-and-bathrooms-in-arizona/
* Does the USPS Discriminate Against Atheists: http://www.atheistberlin.com/study
And yet the Christians continue to insist they are being persecuted in this country when they are doing the actual persecuting of the rest of us.
* John Stewart's take on the latest attacks on Marriage Equality:
* Sharia Mop:
The Colbert Report
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* From a discussion of life with an unusual surname in the Internet age:
I have a surname that's not only unusual in this country, but anybody who spells it like I do is related to me, if distantly. (Different families spelled it differently as they came across. We immigrated before spelling in general got standardized, and picked what turned out to be unique orthography. People picked different vowels depending on if they were picking the English or Dutch vowel system. You get different numbers of consonants. The family scattered, but stayed in contact approximately a hundred and seventy years, only falling out of contact not long before my birth). My feeling is that if an ex-lover or old friend wants to contact me enough to do the search, I am willing to let them find me. So far, it's been people I was happy to talk to with the exception of my high school alumni association, and I can delete email or toss out their junk mail without any drama. If that changes. If I'm inundated by junkie, jailbird high school exes, I can always revisit.
In any case, my first college was small and the alumni are close knit. Once the first one found me, the gossip spread throughout he community. It's not like I could hide anything from the Johnnie grapevine.
It's a good thing I don't mind being publicly trans, really. I can only hope the other trans alum in my range feels the same way, because most times someone from my range contacts me, they want to tell me about her, even though I haven't seen or heard from her since she graduated. The upside is the boys I fucked there have generally heard before they contact me, so they've had time to process. The downside is, I have no control over how and what is told to folks a hundred or more stops away in a six hundred or so person game of telephone. Again, it sure is lucky I live completely Out and have low risk for dangerous consequences on being outed.
* My mind is a sensory collage with various words layered with sense memories. Tonight I went downtown to buy my last Stromboli from the real Philly pizza place. The word stromboli is layered with all sorts of things. There is the warm brown crust of the little strombolis from the family run place near my Grandmother's house. In my head I hear the pinball and later PacMan machines, the grandmother ordering people about in Italian, the father and grandfather with the black chest hair poking through the neck hole of their shirts as they tossed the pies, the faces of the grandchildren who worked part time there before they went off to college. After I left, the old people sold to a chain and the pizza ceased to be magical. I see myself teaching My Soldier to make stromboli before he became a soldier. We are standing in his Mother's kitchen, his long brown fingers arranging pepperoni slices with characteristic precision. He flips his long brown hair out of his eyes. I am making stromboli the first time for Skye the summer I roomed with Hypnosis before starting grad school. The next day he would tell Karjack I'd "made him Stromboli." Suspecting this was some perverse sexual practice she was not sure if she could commiserate or congratulate. Overlayed with these are random people I've taken to eat at this particular restaurant and a high school date with my boyfriends where the stromboli was so big we could not eat it all despite our post coital ravenous. Today I waited in a long line in a restaurant packed with other people eating their last real pizza or whatever so I could get my last stromboli and distracted the cats with goosh so I could eat it in peace. I expressed the hope that the workers would find jobs soon. The cashier said that it was okay, most of them had, as they had warning. Goodbye Cicchitti's Pizza. You are irreplaceable and I will miss you.
Tomorrow, we eat the last pizza.
* Last night I dreamed Karjack, Pjack, Ninjakitten, and I were going to Brigantine to watch a hurricane, which makes no sense. That hotel is right on the beach and I'm big on following directives to evacuate. The sky in the dream was beautiful, with all this greenish light coming through an amazing cloud cover. There were donuts and our windows faced the sea. So beautiful. It made me wish I could paint.
* Greenwick foud a cool site where they will send you free Buddhist Literature: http://greenwick.livejournal.com/195427.html?mode=reply&style=mine