Song Saturday-Clara Engel

This song saturday I bring you a lovely beautiful and ginger haired (I love my fellow gingers!) Singer Songwriter.  Clara Engel native of Canada came to my attention through our own mutual love of Sxip Shirey.  I told y'all I find the best unknown artists through him!  I am loving her work and her art.  Look her up at Bandcamp http://claraengel.bandcamp.com

No Longer Adult Content

Okay so some of you have been gently complaining about my adult content warning.  Not that I mind complaining, it actually fuels my creativity.  Also, complaining is a favorite hobby of my own.

But I can see how the Adult Content warning could be a problem.  When  I first opened this page I was putting a good deal more erotica on it. It's not there anymore, I took it down long ago, so don't bother looking... But also I felt like in many ways this was a site for adult conversations, where we could come to say whatever we please in whatsoever language we please.  I am not offended by so called foul language (usually)  and I really didn't feel like dealing with crybabies.  I had thought of the adult warning as a stop and think sign.

But really it's no longer useful. Plus it's a huge pain in the ass when I'm using my cell phone to access the site and I really don't want to cause myself a pain in the ass.

 I also don't want to drive away the Pentecostals, Baptists and Mormons who may want to join in and rail at me.  I really enjoy when they take it to me, or try to.  Because I'm all about learning and conversation. 

So this is an announcement and a sort of warning.  The adult warning is down.  But please don't think that makes this a rainbow-brite place.  I want honest discussions, with plenty of nastiness. 

Okay? 

On Riots

Last week Egyptians interviewed on the streets and in coffee houses by the BBC stated they couldn't be bothered to riot.

This was in response to the recent riots and eventual presidential "stepping down" in Tunisia. Answers from men from young to old ranged from "I can't be bothered." to "Why would I riot when I can afford to maintain my standard of living and my children are in college."

Clearly the BBC was conducting its interviews in the wrong sorts of places as we now see Cairo is in flames and the economic dirty laundry of Egypt is being flown for all to see.

What I don't get in all of this is where we, the United States get off having anything to say about it. U.S. secretary of state Hilary Clinton said "We believe strongly that the Egyptian government has an important opportunity at this moment to implement political, economic and social reforms to respond to the legitimate needs and interest of the Egyptian people."

WTF Hilary? Really? As an American why are you not speaking up on behalf of us? And when the American people finally do riot are you going to be helpful to them or are you going to be sitting in your swanky office sipping tea and yelling "let them eat cake!" ?

But beyond that, we have no, absolutely no business sticking our nose in Egyptian politics, riots or not. The riots are happening because they NEED to happen.

Honestly riots happen because people aren't heard. It would help to stop future riots if we listened and listened in the right places to the people who are most affected by societal inequalities.

"A riot at bottom is the language of the unheard." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Do you hear me? I mean it.

I'm Sick...or Working on Gender Equality...or Both

So I've been sick this week. Like stuck in bed sick. It's a good thing I used that tax return I got ten years ago, (the last time I got one) to buy a Tempurpedic bed or I would never have made it.

Okay I would have made it, but it sure did come in comfortably handy, and it's not the only time, it also helped a lot two summers ago when I spent the summer in bed because I cut my tendon with a pair of garden shears and the dumb-assed doctor botched the surgery the first time through...or at least he botched the instructions to me, telling me I could walk when clearly walking caused the tendon to break. And by the way a snapping tendon hurts like a bitch. Just sayin....I have never actually passed out from pain before and snapping tendons did the trick. Passed right the fuck out!

Anyhoo. I was sick this week, but comfortable in my squishy bed of foam and other man-made materials. It didn't escape my notice that there were a lot of other people sick as well, like nearly every writer I know and a good many artists...coincidence? Who the hell knows?

I did however get a lot of t.v. watching done. I submitted myself to trying to watch Larry Sanders because A. It was the only thing on besides The Joan and Melissa Rivers show and B. The Late Mitchell Warren was waxing poetic about it. I wanted to see if somehow I had missed something.

Turns out no, I still hate Larry Sanders.

I got no writing done. My head swam dizzily everytime I attempted to think and/or type so I gave up. I also gave up on my healthy eating and excersising. There were several factors that went into this. One was Carrie Fisher gave me the creeps with her new Jenny Craig commercial. It made me never ever want to diet. Another was a long-hike preceded me getting sick. You know how when you throw up something it puts you off of that food forever even if it had nothing to do with that food? Yeah? Well I think hiking is out for a while. I may have to go to hiking therapy to overcome this fear that it will make me ill. And finally, I can't eat vegtables when I'm sick. I really can't eat much of anything except potato soup and bananas foster ice cream which is what I've been eating for the last 3 days. I think Safeway even made extra pots of potato soup in anticipation of me sending the Brownies down there for my daily pick-up. One day they had to go back because there was only chicken-ish soup, so I sent them down there to be ready for the fresh pot.

Oh yeah, the gender equality thing, I almost forgot. So you know how they say that men are bigger babies about being ill. I set out to attack that myth by being the biggest sick baby ever. I think I did a pretty good job. I whined about my aches and pains. I cried for the exact foods I wanted. I generally gave everyone a hard time...I'm just doing my bit to get rid of gender stereotypes around illness...pass it on.

Being sick is boring. That's what got me out of bed today. You would think having nothing to do but laze about watching movies and eating soup would be a delight and don't get me wrong, it is, but one gets to the point where they run out of good movies and they have run through the secret stash of porn and then what is there to do in bed? Knit?

No thanks.

So I got up today, I dusted off the computer and set out to write something, anything to blaze the cobwebs made up of soup, ice cream and porn and try to get some real work done.

Mission accomplished.

Now I'm going back to bed.

A Word About A Word

NAZI

Is the word in question.

I recently wrote an article which you can read HERE about the discord I experienced between a pharmacist and a doctor. However, it's not the article I am concerned with today it's some of the responses.

The name Nazi really tipped the scale for some of the people commenting. It made the difference I think between being somewhat reasonable and deteriorating into emotive name calling.

I get it, Nazi is not a nice thing to call someone. And, just to be clear I did not call anyone that. (In this article anyway, I have called people that before and they can just suck it, Nazi-pigs that they are.)

What I and others noticed however is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about what a Nazi is.

One commenter pointed out that the word Nazi is derived from the National Socialist Party, which is the party Hitler ran and won with post depression. Hitler Supporters were therefore Nazis. However we all are aware that the socialism did not extend beyond Hitlers supporters and in later years not even to them. By the time we entered WWII Nazi was a generally agreed upon term for those who followed and fought for Hitler's regime.

We also all agree that we don't like Nazis, unless you are a Nazi in which case I assume you like yourself and your friends.

The problem is spin doctors and media voodoo practitioners like Glen Beck have been getting on t.v. nightly and telling people that NAZI=Socialism therefore Socialism is bad.



An interesting outcome of pundits like Glen Beck is that I can almost see commenters, bloggers and people I have discussions with working out blackboard scenarios in their minds. For example:
Nazi=National Socialist Party=Socialism=enough for everyone=this conversation is about medicine=Obama wants to help get everyone medicine= Obama is a socialist=writer must be both a socialist and an "Obama-tron". (that's one of the names thrown out there in the the discussion)

There has been a shift in which everything is becoming politicized whether or not it was intended to be should have been or is in anyway relevant. A discussion about Dr./patient/pharmacist relationships really shouldn't have been political, however because of the way words like Nazi are being bastardized and thanks to Glen Beck's magick chalkboard, now as Lewis Black pointed out everything is a 6 degrees of separation game and somehow it all comes back to politics.

And of course Nazis and Socialism.

Look Nazi is a strong word. It shouldn't be used lightly in public and ideally one should know what the hell they are talking about when using it. However I stood behind my quote because, A. It was a quote that illustrated frustration. B. It was appropriate because it had to do with controlling behavior to the detriment of an individual. C. It was a bloody quote!