Random Things–The ‘Let’s Peruse the Internet’ Edition

1.  If you’re going to go watch hot half-naked men beat the shit out of each other, bring me!

2.  This week, I’m going to try to be nicer to Kleinheider.  So far, it’s going medium well. 

3.  Veronica, your post is so good I want to say something intelligent and insightful about it, but I keep getting sidetracked by my perverse desire to write a feel-good musical in which everything on that list happens to the protagonist.   I’m sorry.  I know the things on that list are all very terrible, but to see them listed that way like some twisted definition of what it means to be a woman?  It makes me want to burst out inappropriately into song.

Maybe some kind of square dance?

Take your partner, grab her cunt.

She’s just a woman so do what you want.

I don’t know I’d have to work on it some, but damn, if that’s all there is to being a woman, pass me a penis; I quit (which, bless her heart, I think Heart really doesn’t get.  She makes it seem like being a woman is the most horrid, vile thing that could ever happen to a person.  Who wants to join that revolution?  Oh, maybe there’s a song there, a waltz: One-two-three, one-two-three/ You’re horrid and evil, but we’re so gross./  It’s hard to imagine which one is worse./  To be so evil and have no soul/ or to be forced to conform by carrying a purse.  Ha, okay, it’s not that great.  Maybe we’re seeing why there aren’t a whole lot of fundamentalist feminist musicals!).

4. Continuing my random crushes on conservative loons, how can you not love this quote from Clark Stooksbury?

The global warming debate is odd in that it appears to be between climate scientists and rightwing pundits.

Tee hee!  (via Brittney) 

5.   Bob Krumm, don’t make me write you an open letter.  I voted for you because I believe that you are a thoughtful person with a conservative bent.  But this post makes me gravely worried that this is not actually the case.  Let us set aside political posturing for a second. 

a.) You really can’t imagine how seeing someone you identify with do something extraordinary (for whatever reasons you identify with that person–race, gender, sharing of a common name, etc.) opens up possibilities in your mind for what you might do with your life?  I don’t believe it. 

b.)  Even if having two black head coaches wasn’t meaningful to you, surely you must see how it is meaningful, how it indicates that jobs that have been historically hard for black men to get are now not so and that how, when black men are given a chance, they can rise to the pinnacle of their careers.  Then, can’t you see that, when you say stuff like, “I guess I never stopped to consider race as an important factor in football. I still don’t think it is.” it’s dismissive of people whose experiences tell them otherwise?

c.) What’s with the Wage and Uncle bashing? I get that Wage is an easy target, but Uncle shoots guns.  Doesn’t that prove his manly man-ness beyond question?

I’m just saying, that whole rhetoric of “Oh, look at the silly liberals and their hand-wringing nonsense” seems more like Frank than you and I’m a little shocked to see it. 

Snow

If you want to feed the world, it helps to have a thick blanket of snow over your ground all winter, snow that slowly melts in the spring.  The black dirt is like a dry sponge and too much water, too fast, will roll right off it.  You need steady, slow seepage.  This is one advantage to no-till.  Not only does it keep your topsoil from blowing away, it provides cracks and fissures in the surface of the soil, a way for the water to work its way in.

I wanted to say something about how Rachel came over and fixed my life on Friday, but it probably seems pretty mundane and I didn’t want to bore you or get into too many specifics about the source of my unhappiness.  But we talked a lot about how to organize my thoughts about what I have to do, and she made me a to-do list.

And I slept better than I have in weeks.  And I felt calmer.  And even the shitty people at the park didn’t sour my mood for the rest of the day.

A little water seeping in.