'musing' Category
reactions to assorted things online
Taelle has posts a fic quote that should probably be checked out by all LMM fans. I read this one a couple of days ago and have been wanting to link it and get all and sundry (“all and sundry” including most particularly those of you who are interested in the ideas of faith and [...]
feet of the future
I feel like I’m the only liberal in the world who doesn’t think Oscar Pistorius being allowed to compete in the Olympics is an unmitigated good. To me it all comes down to the question “Do his prostheses give him an unfair advantage over unmodified runners?” where by “unmodified” I mean the ones who run [...]
and maybe this is why
Catching up with Bear’s post on why women react so strongly to even “minor” harassment has triggered me to think that there may be another reason I want to hang out and not go anywhere much this weekend. The thought I’ve been aware of and trying to ignore all week is that this trip is [...]
design for accessability, because the person who benefits might be you
I seem to be a day late for Blogging Against Dis/ablism Day, but since I don’t think that ablism has magically vanished since yesterday, this essay still applies. It was originally written for an acquaintance’s zine, so I didn’t want to publish it until she did; however it looks like she decided not to use [...]
Occupying my brain
The thing is, I don’t actually begrudge executives and CEOs big salaries and luxurious lives, in return for performance. (Notice I said “big”; “big” is not necessarily synonymous with “mind-bogglingly humongous”. Also, giving someone a massive bonus for inadequate bonus is just bad business.) I’ve met a few, and had enough exposure to others to [...]
the contagion of outrage: outside influences, part 2
This is the second part of me maundering on about how my feelings and opinions are affected by discussion online. In the first part I talked about how sometimes I get too affected by other people’s discussions of their very real problems, like a medical student with hypochondria. That is entirely my own problem. Not [...]
outside influences, part 1
One of the things I worry about, being online so much around so many fabulously articulate people, is how much my own feelings and opinions are unduly influenced by other people. This plays out in a bunch of ways and not all are bad, but some are. It’s getting long, so I’ll split it into [...]
a small rumination on the news from NY
I don’t think anyone who reads my blog needs convincing, but it seems a bit obligatory to write something when you’re faced with history. Way back when we lived in Texas, my husband (then fairly newly promoted to that title) was standing around chatting with two co-workers. Both were griping about recent or impending divorces, [...]
someone’s little girl? so what?
This article irritates me a bit, in the same way that Kipling’s “Unknown Female Corpse” from “Epitaphs of the War” does: Headless, lacking foot and hand, Horrible I come to land. I beseech all women’s sons Know I was a mother once. If the idea that a woman was someone’s little girl once, or someone’s [...]
the menopausal vampire
It was just brought to my attention that Arabella Keneally, an early “feminist” (in more or less the way Phyllis Schlafly and Sarah Palin are feminists) wrote a cautionary tale about “the menopausal vampire”. I can’t help but think that would have been far better as a fantasy novel: The menopausal vampire only sparkles when [...]