World’s Slowest Gardener

The Butcher and I were going to put the garden in tonight, but he got called away and I was having a crappy day and I didn’t feel like spending my evening feeling pressured to finish it.

So, I had some dinner and I went out and put the watermelons in and the spinach in and felt the cold ground beneath my feet and remembered to mark the watermelon hills with a stick so I’ll know where to weed.

And that’s good enough for today.

People, the sad truth of my life is that I’m just not good at the things I do.  Except this.  And I don’t really want to be good at anything.  Though I enjoy being good at this.

Hmm.

Anyway, with the exception of getting my garden tilled, which you do have to be somewhat competent to be able to do, one of the things I like about gardening is that, in this day and age, it is truly okay to suck at it.  You give it a try and if some stuff works, great.  If it doesn’t, oh well, you’ll try something else next year.

It’s not like I need it to eat.  I’d just like it.

But I also like the feel of the dirt on my feet.  It feels soft and cold and alive.

And I don’t have to do anything to have dirt.

I don’t know.  I guess this post sounds more melencholy than I intend it to.  I don’t feel melencholy.  I just feel like the yard is this one place in the world where I don’t have to know what I’m doing or how to get it done and it kind of doesn’t matter.

A Couple of Things Not to Miss

Sweet Machine has a post up about how one of the methods of torturing prisoners was to reduce their caloric intake to 1,000 calories a day.  And how it was justified by arguing that, since people voluntarily go on diets that restrict their calories that much, it couldn’t possibly be torture.

That’s interesting, but DO NOT miss the link she has to Junkfood Science.  There you’ll find Sandy Szwarc’s post on the Minnesota Starvartion experiment in which people whose caloric intake was restricted to 1,500 a day and it fucked them up.

Many, many people have made this point, but I will make it again.  Encouraging women to obsess over our weight and to restrict our caloric intake is one of the easiest and surest ways to keep us from being as effective as we might otherwise could be.  No one has to actively hold us back if we accept it as our duty to do it to ourselves.

Wrestling Hall of Fame

This is such a brilliant idea that I can’t believe that it didn’t just spring into existance the second Brad Watkins thought it up (which reminds me, Memphis.  One of y’all who knows Mr. Watkins needs to ask him if he’s related into the Brad Watkinses who were preachers in Illinois.).

The main obstacle is, of course, Vince McMahon.  You’d have to have his cooperation and participation (especially because, if you didn’t, other wrestlers might not participate) and he seems like a pain in the butt.

On the other hand, Lawler does work for him, so…

I don’t know.  I think it sounds like a great idea.

Oh, Harold Ford Jr., Do Not Make Me Have to Roll My Eyes at You

Don’t get me wrong.  Somebody some day is going to write a book about the Fords and it is going to be so awesome that, in 300 years, people will be debating how much of it is true and how much of it surely must be made up.  It’ll be like the Macbeth of our times.

One chapter will start something like:

“The rumor around town was that, not only did John Ford have a wife he shared a house with outside his district, but that he had two or three girlfriends he shared houses with and none of them lived in his district either.  In fact, it was said that the only time Ford slept in his district was when he shut his eyes for a quick nap at the N.J. Ford and Sons Funeral Home…”

And there will be corruption and petty jealousies and handsome men who know how to charm and women who hold families together in the face of amazing ridiculousness.  And gunfire and bribery.  And MSNBC.  It’ll be the story of an amazing political dynasty, somehow uniquely American, but specifically Memphis.  And, if properly done, it will be like One Hundred Years of Solitude and All the King’s Men had a baby.

But please.  Harold Ford’s autobiography, More Davids than Goliaths, is not going to cut it.  First of all, he’s a young man.  He’s not going to speak the whole truth about his family until they are dead in the grave and he’s got one foot in it.  And second, Harold Ford is the most boring Ford there is!  He doesn’t even have a snazzy hat.

“Once upon a time, I was born. I behaved myself, went to school, listened to my Dad, and proved myself to be a competent and bright political mind.  Bob Corker ran an asshat campaign that screamed ‘ARRRGGGGG!!!!!  White women want to fuck him!!!!!’ and I lost my last election. But don’t fret dear reader, I’ve gotten to see first-hand how tall Keith Olbermann is and I might run for something else some other day.  The end.”

There.  I saved you $30.

Once You Start Making Things Up, It’s Not the Truth Any More

So, Tiny Pasture’s got footage of this UCLA student getting told that she should lie about the age of her boyfriend when asked if she wants an abortion.  And he’s got news that this “damning” piece of evidence is being used by the Right to (Some) Life crowd to push State Legislators to pass SB 470, which would defund Planned Parenthood.

But the whole thing is really strange.

For starters, you never see the front of the Planned Parenthood building.  So, who knows if that footage was actually shot even near the Memphis Planned?  I see a sky and some trees.  I don’t even hear the traffic on Union.  And I don’t see the face of the intake worker, so how can I know if she’s an actual Planned Parenthood employee?

But let’s get on to the second problem.  We don’t get to see Lila Rose’s face.  But you can get a glimpse of her here on Bill O’Reilly’s show.  And she doesn’t look thirteen.  Or fourteen.  Or fifteen.  Or whatever other ages she’s pretending to be when she goes on her little stings (if, indeed, she goes on them all).  And she certainly doesn’t sound like a young teenager on her own tape.  She sounds like a grown woman pretending to be a young teenager.

So, even if I might be sympathetic to the idea that she’s discovering some wrong behavior on the part of some Planned Parenthood workers, when I try to put myself in the position of the supposed Memphis worker, I wonder what my response would have been.  Not because I think it’s right to break the law.  If someone in the Memphis Planned Parenthood is faced with an actual 14 year old actually claiming to be impregnated by a 31 year old, she sure as hell needs to report that.

But even from Lila Rose’s own tape, which she has edited to be as damning as possible to Planned Parenthood and to put herself in the best possible light, I hear hesitancy in that worker’s voice, like she’s not sure who she’s being faced with and she’s just trying to get through her part of the job so she can pass Lila Rose along to someone else.

And if you consider what she’s facing, it’s hard to blame her.  Workers at Planned Parenthood see women of all ages all the time; not just for abortions, but for all kinds of healthcare.  So, here’s this worker standing in a room with a 20 year old woman who’s claiming to be 14, who’s speaking in a weird baby voice.  And who wants to have an abortion.  That’s what that worker (if indeed it’s a worker and not someone else also lying) sees–a girl who is already obviously not telling her the truth, but who seems pretty sincere about what is obviously not the truth.

Okay, so then there are two types of people in the world who seem like they believe the lies they tell you–con artists and people who have an untreated mental illness.  Though Lila Rose happens to be a con artist, why would the Planned Parenthood worker have any reason to think that she was anything other than a woman in need of mental healthcare?  And yet, as we know, people with mental illnesses have a hard time getting that care.  So, it’s not surprising to me to hear her kind of feeding the delusion, even as her voice seems to give away that she thinks there’s something peculiar here.  She’s saying what she needs to say to pass Lila Rose off on someone else.

The whole set-up is so obviously bizarre that I’m not sure we can draw any conclusions from it (though mark my words, it won’t surprise me if this video makes the rounds and convinces the State Legislature to pull funding to Planned Parenthood).

Lila Rose says “I said I was 14 and they said these things to me.”  But she’s not 14, so she’s established herself as a liar.  Everything else that happens in that video?  How can we trust the truth of it?  I don’t know that it was shot in Memphis.  There, suspiciously, aren’t any good establishing outside shots.  I don’t know that she actually talked to a worker at the Memphis Planned Parenthood, because, suspiciously, there aren’t any shots of her face.  And I only have Lila Rose’s word that the alleged Planned Parenthood worker believed that Lila Rose was 14 and pregnant and not the scenario which is just as plausible–that the worker thought she was an extremely fucked up 20 year old who was lying about her age and hoped to pass the problem off to someone else.