Yep, still speechless

Image found at Wikipedia

Anderson Cooper is keeping up with the story here

From his blog:

Invariably, you ask hard core followers here about why they’re not offended about children marrying adults, and they tell you if God wants that to happen, that takes precedence over man’s laws.

I submit that if a god asks girls not yet physically fully grown to submit to being raped by older men, or even allows that lie to be continued over multiple generations in his name, then we as a society have outgrown that so-called god.

Still speechless

I have been trying for days to blog about this.

Sigh

Maybe tomorrow I can finally put it all into words.

Maybe.

For now, I'm going to go pray. I'm an agnostic theist, Unitarian by belief, Catholic by heritage and in practice, and I'm going to go pray.

Go figure.

All that is wrong with this country

photo © Emilie Villemagne for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

I just finished watching Stephen King's "The Mist". If you don't want a spoiler, stop reading now. And if you don't like implied foul language, stop reading now.

Fine, I warned you. Let me save you a waste of time

It's well done. They stuck close to the story. Marcia Gay Harding played an excellent nut job. The creepiness came not from the rubbery fake monsters but from watching the people interact, lose it before your eyes. I was actually rather enjoying the thing.

Until the last five G@) D@^^#) minutes of the movie.

I've been reading reviews, and they all say the story itself doesn't end. But it does end. A small group of them get out, try to drive away, and end up almost out of gas at a Howard Johnson's. They're inside for the night, the three or four of them, and the dad/narrator is playing with a radio when he thinks he hears a broadcast from Hartford. The last line is something like "There are two words that start with that h sound. One is Hartford. The other is hope."

Now in the movie I expected some kind of rescue, the military coming in to save the day, some kind of big Hollywood ending. That would be OK, it was a movie, I can live with that. I could also have lived with the non-ending in the book, give them a shot at hope, but never tell us if they got there.

I sure as H#!! did not expect the dad to be rescued two minutes after shooting his son and the other three survivors.

WHAT THE F^@&!!!!

So the people in the store, who listened to the nut job, who killed the private as a sacrifice to their Old Testament deity of blood and gore, who were not willing to go to the pharmacy to get drugs to ease the burned guys passing, who were sitting on their a$$#$, waiting to get saved...were rescued and lived happily ever after.

While the dad, who wanted to do the best for his son, who wanted to to his best for the others, who was trying his level damnedest to make it work...is punished in the worst possible way. Now he has to live with killing his own son seconds from rescue.

Well f^@& me sideways. Isn't that just what we want to teach people these days. Do nothing to help yourself, ever. No, turn it all over to the big deity in the sky, squat there, and let the government come to save you. Because if you try to use your god-given brains and your human courage to try to help yourself you're going to end up in the living version of hell. Proles win, the confident, courageous Upper Middle Class types lose. Because confidence and courage, the willingness to take responsibility and control of your own life, is what classes you, not how much money or learning or social standing you have. And now that I think about it, that's exactly who remains in the store.

Thank you f^@&ing Hollywood.

/rant

Define modesty

photo © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike


Now, I'm not what they call a Bible-believing Christian, even though I do believe in God and the Holy Spirit, but I think that Richard here has a good point.

1 Peter 3:3-4 Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair, the wearing of gold, or the putting on of clothing— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.

The inspired words of scripture here use such techniques to help keep us on track. Peter says, "Do not let your adorning be external." He then ensures the reader's understanding by giving some examples: "the braiding of hair, the wearing of gold, or the putting on of clothing." He then continues the clarification with an opposite parallel: "but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit." Quite clearly this passage is not encouraging women to be careful that they cover themselves appropriately with clothing. It is in fact saying that this should not be their primary focus.

You can read the rest here.

Oh, and going on about your clothing is not the only thing. I think it can also apply to focusing on how little you eat, how much you work out, how sick you and/or your children are and what you're doing to your house. As well as a number of other things I'm sure a lot of people could list.

You go to work in a soup kitchen with your kids. Do you come home and blog about how you and your daughters worked in a soup kitchen in a skirt instead of jeans, and how awful all those women looked in pants? Blog about how you only ate 4 grams of carbs and walked 2.86 miles to get there and back, burning some trace amount of calories? About how you were so upset because someone left a jar of peanut butter in there where your sensitive son may have sniffed it? About how you want that kind of a professional quality stove in your kitchen?

Or do you say you worked in a soup kitchen today?

Or do you work in the kitchen, and then come home and talk about finding ways to help end poverty?

Hey, I'm as guily as the next person. But he does have a good point.

More on Stacy McDonald and the rest of the Patriarchal group at another time

How to knit socks

Knitting class, Henry Street Settlement, NYC, by Lewis W. Hine, 1910 (LOC). Found through Creative Commons

I was going to make a very snarky post about why you never see Patriarchal women discussing knitting on their blogs. Granted you see them sewing clothing all the time, but it's usually very modest dresses in very feminine prints and styles. Vision Forum doesn't even have a beginners knitting kit in their catalog, although they do have some beginner embroidery kits, doll dress patterns, and a beginner quilt kit is a perennial favorite. But never knitting. You would think this would be the perfect way to relax, express themselves, and do something quintessentially American Female. But no, you never see it.

I thought it was odd. Maybe knitting was too hip for them. Maybe the Yarn Harlot was too much a feminist. Maybe Ann and Kay were a little too out there. And Lord knows, Knitty even did an issues about sex.

Well I went to LAF, just to double check, since she does have all the best links, and I have to take back the words I had yet to even write. Jennie does have a post there on knitting. Specifically the best tutorial on sock knitting I've ever seen. I'd forgotten I'd even seen it.

Well, color me mistaken.

But I can see why VF wouldn't carry a knitting kit. Who knows where learning to knit might lead.

Please note, that last link is NOT safe for children or work.

Too delicate for prime time

The Lily Cardigan from Marie Grace

Now, I would love to make something this kind of delicate for myself. This kind of, dainty, femme, tiny. I would do it in a wood rose, or perhaps a misty lavender, or a steel blue. The husband would suggest it in a rust or burgundy or perhaps a midnight blue. We might settle on a mahogany or a walnut.

Except there is no way that shape would ever look good on me. I'm not the dainty and delicate type. Even if I lost all the lumps and bumps and even if he stretched me so I could bend like a pretzel, I'd still have the body of a sturdy Sicilian peasant, not the delicate English lady of my dreams.

Sigh.

At least the tea cozy fits.

What's up with the bookshelf.

It's clickable, takes you straight to Amazon. I was going to code it myself, just for that since I do like to share books with people, but I'm lazy.

Now if I could find a widget for the music, I'd be good.

UPDATE: And then I took another look at it and discovered a list view. Better, I think, less hokey.

The Movie Meme answers

Since no one ever put up an answer to the movie meme, I figure I might as well tell you....

1) Speaker 1: It could be worse.
[creature growls]
Speaker 2: It's worse.

- Star Wars: A New Hope

2) We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

- Jaws

3) There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours.

- The Princess Bride

4) Amazing how you can do without the essentials of life, so long as you have the luxuries.

- Pitch Black

5) But the worst mistake you made...empty gun rack.

- Chronicles of Riddick

6) Personally, I'd give us one chance in three. More tea anyone?

- The Hunt For Red October

7) By the way... you have to *ask* for absolution to be forgiven... asshole.

- Constantine

8) He still digs humanity, but it bothers Him to see the shit that gets carried out in His name - wars, bigotry, televangelism.

- Dogma

9) I'm never gonna get paid.

- Stargate

10) It's coffee time! Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee! Cappuccino, java, YES!

- Dante's Peak

11) Now I want yous all to cheer like Protestants!

- The Quiet Man

12) Everybody in this family needs to just calm down and eat some fruit or something.

- Signs

13) Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?

- Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

14) Dude, you have a bazooka. Stop thinking Prague Police and start thinking Playstation. Blow shit up!

- xXx

15) Laugh it up, fuzzball.

- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Oro o plomo

Uncle Gonzo told me a story once. It was about his father, and the days he rode with...oh hell, I don't remember now. The Mexican army perhaps, after Pancho Villa maybe. Not the point. He was with some military or paramilitary unit in Latin America. He was a young officer.

Anyway, one day his Captain sent him to a nearby village with a bag of gold to buy food for the men. He rode into town, up to the tavern, put his gold on the counter, said he wanted to buy food. They told him they didn't have any. So he rode back and told his Captain they didn't have any. The Captain asked if he was really that stupid. He pardoned himself, rode back to the tavern, put his bag of gold and his gun on the counter, and bought food for the men.

Moral of the story: You can get sh*t done if you have gold or lead. Oro o plomo.

And why in Karnac does this matter now?

Anyone else notice that gold went over $1000 today? That it went up over $300 in the past six months? That the US saved Bear Sterns, one of the largest global investment banks, securities trading and brokerage firms in the world, by the skin of JP Morgan's teeth this morning? That the whole funny money house of cards is slowly sifting past out ears?

My husband was shocked, shocked, when I explained to him a few years back that you can no longer go into a bank and trade your money for silver. Used to be that way, they still bring it up in the schools, but they never tell you that Nixon got us off that standard. (Who came up with that brilliant idea is fodder for another post). These days you can't even go into a bank and trade your electrons for cash. Mother laughs on a regular basis, yes she works in a very small bank branch now, but her entire bank has less than a third of what she kept in *her own till* in the 1980's. And she was one of 12.

It's nuts I tell you.

So in case the sh*t does start to roll downhill (and you were wondering how the picture at the top ties in) how do you protect yourself? I thought about the power being shut off, but we're in hydroelectric land, we don't need fuel from other countries to keep us going. It's the Pacific Northwest, our water levels are good. Food is kind of iffy, I doubt we grow enough around here to feed the valley, but the herd will thin, I hate to say, and we can stock up. Medical is going to be harder, meds have to come aways, and we have a high percentage of well-medicated elderly. I predict that will be a rough time there, that thinning. The husband and I are on one med each, and we can live without it if we have to. Mother, and Dad and my step-mom, *sigh*.

Imports? Forget it. Starting with oil, and gas. And what happens when the great unwashed can't work or drive or buy plastic crap anymore?

One of the best thought exercises I ever saw on the idea of what happens if was the World Without Oil project. Unfortunately I came across it too late to join in. I think a lot of it would apply to a world without greenbacks as well.

Just something I'm thinking about this morning is all.

Tipping my head in a currious way

Picture by Francesca Woodman

So I found this today - Stuff White People Like - a whole blog that, from the looks of it, is dedicated to telling some group (Non white people? Recent immigrants? ) about, well, what's popular with "white people", so they know how to blend.

On the one hand, I'm almost sure this is intended as a joke. It might be an angry rant, it might be meant to be irony, it might be meant as racism, or reverse racism, but I'm going for joke.

Full disclosure - I'm white. And I'm not laughing.

The funny thing is, to me at least that it's not really talking about white people. Not as a cohesive, stereotypical whole like you would expect from real racists. Example, from # 84 T-shirts "It is also imperative to understand that faux vintage shirts (”Getting Lucky in Kentucky”) are completely unacceptable. They are beloved by the wrong kind of white people, and must be avoided at all costs." So there are the right kind of white people, the kind you use this intel to suck up to, and the wrong kind of white people. Now what are we doing when we divide a group, any group, into the right kind and the wrong kind? We are classing people. Yep, this blog is about class. It's saying "white people", but what is really meaning is "upper middle/upper class people", regardless of color. Really. Go look at the list, if you haven't yet, and come back. It's all about class, not color.

Funny thing. In this country, you can talk about race. But heaven help you if you talk about class.

Full disclosure - I'm at least upper middle class, if not upper class. And I'm still not laughing.

How do I know? I've been studying this for a while now, call it a hobby. Not that there is all that much written about it, discussing class is one of the last great taboos in the US. Paul Fusell, in his book Class, which was also meant to be humorous but has a grain of truth, I think divided up the classes best. The distinguishing mark of the lower classes is anger, they are not getting ahead, their lives are hard, and they are angry at "the man" for it. The mark of the middle classes is fear, fear that they are going to slip into a lower class, fear that their coworkers and neighbors are going to think they don't belong, fear of standing out in any way. And the mark of the upper classes is ease. Not angry or afraid, they tend to march to their own drummer, or snuggle happily in to the cohesive order of their class without a worry or thought.

This is how I finally figured it out. It wasn't my years in prep school, or my college degree, or any of the rest of it. I do my own thing, and don't give a sh*t what anyone thinks. That's the distinguishing mark of being upper class. If you're angry because you feel you've been put down all your life, you're not it. If you're worried about what your boss or spouse or children or neighbors or friends will think, you're not it. If you're neither, you're more likely to take risks, accept failures, and finally achieve success. That's what does it, right there.

I look at this blog and I see someone either very angry, or very afraid poking fun at members of the upper and upper middle classes, from the sound of it because they think we feel superior. Because we enjoy our lives, everything from the organic food to the college degrees, to the trips around the globe, to being outdoors, and so on. We're happy and unafraid, and you're not.

No, we don't feel superior to you. On a day to day basis, we don't think of you at all.

I'm going to go knit, and drink tea, and listen to NPR downloads on my iPod now. And odds are, at some point, I'll be enjoying myself so much, I'll be laughing.

(h/t to Doc for pointing out the blog.)

PS: Don't be surprised if I update this when I think it out more clearly.