And don't forget:

Scott Bateman Animation Show!!!

Thursday, May 15, 7PM
Peoples Improv Theater
FIVE BUCKS
Guest starring:
Michael Showalter
Ali Farahnakian
Noah Garfinkel
As my panel of pundits, discussing my animations.
Plus: me, making a fool of myself as the John McLaughlin-like host.

I highly recommend you get ADVANCE TICKETS here: http://thepit-nyc.com/daily.html?y=2008&m=05&d=15

Is anyone a-comin'...?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Feministing/~3/290211904/009190.html

http://feministing.com/archives/009190.html

Last month the NY Times reported that the Defense Department fed talking points to former generals who appeared on cable news. Now the DoD has released a lot of those talking points to the public. Alyssa Rosenberg went through the documents, and found that a number of them instruct the generals to trumpet all the awesome stuff the U.S. military is doing for women in Iraq and Afghanistan -- painting people like Donald Rumsfeld as some sort of savior for downtrodden women all over the world, and conveniently downplaying things like sexual assault by U.S. soldiers.

The talking points actually included this awful story:

Except for this one, from September 23, 2004: "Sally's children were taken away from her more than six months ago. Her husband beat her. Her brother threatened her life while holding a gun to her head. Her own father contracted her deal with a $5,000 reward. Sally, an Iraqi translator, lost everything by working to help Americans rebuild Iraq. Still, she feels her service with Americans is the right thing for her country. ‘I lost everything I have, but I have gained so much,' Sally said. ‘If I had to do it over again I would. I help the Americans help my people.'"

Rosenberg writes,

The anecdote is meant to be an illustration of how much Iraqis love their American liberators; but given how Iraqi translators have been abandoned by the Americans they helped, it's a grotesquely ironic PR ploy.

Almost five years after the Defense Department promoted Sally's story, domestic violence in Iraq is skyrocketing, female illiteracy rates are 10 times higher than they were in the 1980s, and in the past few months more than 40 women--and in two cases their children--have been murdered for defying dress codes. I wonder if Sally still feels like working for Americans was worth it.

After it became clear there were no WMD in Iraq, the Bush administration began using things like women's rights as a reason for its violent occupation of another country. And now that this war has dragged on for five years -- and women's rights in Iraq and Afghanistan have clearly deteriorated, not improved -- it's all the more infuriating to look back and see how military spokespeople (even though they weren't identified as such) used women to justify the war.

For more on the state of women's rights in Iraq -- not filtered through DoD talking points -- check out Women for Women's 2008 Iraq report (PDF). (via)

It's been busy.

My iPod is missing; I had it on Friday when I drove home but I can't remember if I left it in the car (which I parked outside and left unlocked, meaning it was probably stolen) or if I took it inside the house (which I overturned late last night trying to find the damn thing). Aside from being bummed about the possibility of not finding it, I'm going a little nuts at the fact that I can't remember what I did between the car and the house; did I take it in? Did I think "Eh, I'll be right back out" and then not go right back out?

Work's been busy too; two bonus mailings in two days, the second one for a subset of employees whose upper managment is clueless at best. Basically, they wanted us to pay (i.e. have bonus checks in people's hands) last Friday... yet as of last Friday and even on into Saturday morning they were still sending e-mails back and forth about how the damned bonus should have been calculated. Then on Monday we get this nasty e-mail saying "Hey, wtf? You were supposed to have this done" from the very people who were still waffling on Saturday morning! My boss took 'em to town on it. Then there were apparently some adjustments they wanted to have happen and asked why I didn't make them, to which I immediately replied that, should any changes be required, I NEED TO BE CONTACTED. They'd sent the e-mail, but not to me. And even then, when I was sitting with one of the directors, there was still some "well I dunno why [the other director] didn't want to pay this, let's just pay it" going on. Ugh.

The weekends have been good, though. Z and I went to Screen Door last Friday for some excellent Southern food. Saturday night was spent with intoxicants and Star Trek IV, which is really really funny when you try to explain all the details that someone who hasn't seen II and III a hundred times wouldn't understand.

"Why's Spock taking a computer test?"
"Well, cuz he's gotta relearn all this stuff."
"Why?"
"Cuz he was reincarnated in the last movie... see he died at the end of the second movie but was reborn on the Genesis planet in the third."
"Dude, you're so high right now."

Z's been incredibly good to me the last few days; putting up with the music practice, late nights and cooking dinner two nights in a row. She's graduating in less than two weeks and we'll be in Ohio for the ceremony, and I'll be renting my first car ever. That's not one, but two important life milestones happening in one weekend.

http://www.leewind.org/2008/05/ironman.html

By Chris Crutcher

When Bo loses his temper he gets kicked off the Football team and is told if he doesn't do the before school Anger Management class he'll be expelled from High School.

So instead of football, he decides to train for a triathalon (hence the title, "Ironman.") As far as the Anger Management class, he expects the other kids to be losers, future freeway sniper types, but that's where he meets Shelley, a future American Gladiator, who becomes his girlfriend.

The adults in Bo's life include his father who seems to bent on breaking his son's dreams, the Japanese Cowboy Anger Management teacher, a swimming coach, and Larry King - the talk show personality, to whom Bo writes a series of unmailed letters.

In the course of the novel, Bo has to deal with love, divorce, child abuse, mastering his anger, and (here's the Queer part) finding out someone he cares about is gay.


Add your review of this book in "comments!"

A cold is going around and Emily had sniffles for days. No fever this morning, but after two sets of tears this morning, I kept her home anyway. I think the cold is making her tired and I would just as soon she stay home and rest and her mood improve as well as her sniffles.

So she's operating under sick day rules. No boat building or playing in the yard or reinventing the wheel. She can draw, look at books, listen to books on tape, she can snuggle her stuffed animals in bed, watch a movie, even play on the computer, but it's all about the resting. I'm surprised how well she's conforming. We've read some books together.

And now I'm going to clean the living room and set up a table for a jigsaw puzzle.

So I was just surfing the web thinking I want to buy myself a pair of sandbags, and thinking shipping 20 pounds of sand now that could get pricey.... so I'm thinking why not be crafty and make my own!!!

Has anyone done this? If so what kind of fabric did you use? did you put the sane in anything inside the fabric so it didnt leak, what about the handle? anyone possibly have a nice set of directions to follow??

Thanks!!!

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2008/05/14.html

fetter: a restraint; also, to impose restraints on.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Feministing/~3/290164992/009191.html

http://feministing.com/archives/009191.html

Hey folks, just a note to say that posting may be slow today. I have a flu/cold that's kicking my ass, despite all the Sudafed I'm forcing myself to take. (Any tips for getting better sooner would be much appreciated. I'm a garlic-clove-eating person myself, but it's not working.)

In the meantime, enjoy the picture above - a little something I like to call "shoe graveyard." It's what Andrew and I came home to on Monday night after a long dinner. Monty has never been much of a shoe-eating dog, but it seems he got it all out of his system at once. I had to say goodbye to some of my favorite shoes, but the cute-guilty look on Monty's face was almost worth it. Almost.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Feministing/~3/289688866/009188.html

http://feministing.com/archives/009188.html

Lynsay Skiba is the Reigle Human Rights Fellow at Justice Now. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), where she focused her studies on human rights law.

Many people who are pregnant inside California’s women’s prisons experience some form of mistreatment on a daily basis: they are deprived of basic information about their pregnancy; they lack access to responsive and consistent medical and mental health care; they endure degrading treatment at the hands of some prison staff; they lack control over important lifestyle choices impacting pregnancy such as diet and physical activity; and they are forced to cope with the prospect of being separated form their newborn shortly after birth, in some cases permanently.

Driving this mistreatment is the prison system’s apathetic and punishment-driven approach toward people in prison and their medical and mental health needs. What this means is that while people in women’s prisons who do not experience physical or mental problems during their pregnancies may receive treatment and experience medical outcomes that are unremarkable by accepted medical standards, those who have physical complications, mental health problems, or who choose to challenge their treatment are vulnerable to serious consequences, including death.

Using a participatory model of human rights documentation, Justice Now partners with those most impacted by these issues – people inside the two state prisons that house pregnant people – to expose pregnancy-related abuses through an international human rights framework. Together we have found that these prisons consistently violate the human rights to family, information, health, bodily integrity, dignified treatment, life, and the right to be free from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/parenthacks/~3/290127414/dilute-apple-ju.html

Here's how Abbi eliminates arguments over juice dilution:

Although I start all my children on plain water, I have two who simply stopped drinking until I began giving them juice. So apple juice has been a staple in our home for several years now. Of course, we dilute the juice, but it's hard to measure proportions in a sippy cup, and it's no fun to rush over to the filter tap when a toddler is screaming for juice. So one day we came up with a great idea: we dilute the juice in the bottle. The benefits: the kids don't see you dilute, so they don't make a thing about how the juice tastes different, you control the amount of dilution (50/50, 30/70, or whatever works). And pouring juice is as simple as, well, pouring juice. A minor drawback is that we always have two bottles of apple juice in the fridge, but we've learned to live with it.

Related: Easy diluted juice: freeze juice into cubes first

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/elfcosmetics.asp

We address the rumor that e.l.f. Cosmetics has been bought by a major department store chain.

Uttavalon estaa ain pahalukselle? Min omatunu selle menneet hy, toista. Palveljen alh tkö an välin oli ei alkohol pisten jol elenin. Että, ille, ittavaikki oli nim tor taisuuristä usein an sie a in sittä asia krista sillo si mien loinullun, herror os; riitä heitä suurinteen palve in kuk usemma. Tomalle, äs nto tai sattia yksin taisiä isiäk isuuri illää hetorista. Varsi kaikenlaineet ja pu distoja paikelmai en tulissa sai itsi mielim ssän jon sn ässäksi; yksen kos oihin! Jehovat oli kukahdol ten on teistä vak kkiasian aa itse ee eik tse sani olin mutta todistanut t llisivat oisessa sittä on raaj a vaisen opinen. Ihmisillee stajan opea tajat ja jumalang, sitten per sa ollut aantutta että voinen opeten. Ettuj, jon käs iv telijoitalikantaminun hä seen jälki yl nilla, kkeen, vaaraajil tuneitteistamaan same?

This was generated by a program based on trigraph (three-letter sequences) frequencies obtained from real Finnish text. And indeed, it does look fairly Finnish to a casual observer!

See Mark Dominus's blog entry for more details on this.

http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/350-the-number.html

The problem: 350.

One great solution: 350.org.

350. I should write it 350 times. We should all write it 350 times. Everyone on the earth should get out a pen, write down the number 350, and send it to their head of state. 350 times.

Now let me explain.

For the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord, the current international treaty on reducing the emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. In December 2009, heads of state will converge in Copenhagen to sign a new treaty that would forge a new international agreement on how we, as a planet, can limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to a level that would keep us safe from global warming's worst effects.

What is that level? How much carbon dioxide can our planet safely withstand?

350. As in parts per million (ppm).

The United States' most senior climate scientist James Hansen and eight other senior climate scientists have recently deduced, by studying evidence from previous climate swings in our planet's history, that we must reduce carbon dioxide to 350 ppm or below to avoid rises in sea level, severe changes in weather, droughts, lost of coastal habitat, plagues of tropical diseases, food shortages and on and on.

"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," Hansen and his colleagues write, "paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

According to Hansen and his colleagues:

A practical global strategy almost surely requires a rising global price on CO2 emissions and phase-out of coal use except for cases where the CO2 is captured and sequestered. The carbon price should eliminate use of unconventional fossil fuels, unless, as is unlikely, the CO2 can be captured.

A reward system for improved agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon could remove the current CO2 overshoot. With simultaneous policies to reduce non-CO2 greenhouse gases, it appears still feasible to avert catastrophic climate change. Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

The challenge is not scientific as much as political. Think about it. No electricity powered by coal. To institute these kind of policies, to achieve this goal on a worldwide level, to get the heads of state to put their names to 350 in Copenhagen in December, 2009 is going to take massive international political will.

The entire people of the world--including the Americans, the Indians, and the Chinese--will have to agree to the potential lifestyle change that working towards 350 may require.

Which brings me to 350.org. According to Bill McKibben, the writer, the climate activist, the hero:

A few of us have just launched a new [international] campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one light bulb at a time.

So tell everyone about the problem: 350.

And tell them, too, about 350.org.

Photo from The Day After Tomorrow, courtesy IMDB.com. I know it's not a realistic scenario but you gotta love a dramatic picture once in a while.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/parenthacks/~3/289918539/pccom-how-to-us.html

For the next couple of months, I'll be contributing tips to the new how-to site, PC.com. My latest piece was inspired by a Parent Hacks submission which I put into use minutes after it hit my inbox. I admit -- I'm a lazy digital photo uploader (sorry, Mom!). This tip helped me assuage some of my guilt.

Click on over and have a read: Use Your Digital Photos as Your Screen Saver

I dug around and found a few other PC.com articles you might appreciate:

• When Your Kids Know More About Your Computer Than You Do (my first PC.com piece)
• Teaching Kids About Internet Safety
• Figuring Out How Spammers Get E-Mail Addresses
• Make Calls Over the Internet
• Install a Wireless Webcam

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/05/what-you-cant-help-doing.html

Sorry about the font-mess of yesterday's post. I did it using Safari on a PC, and the result was hellish. Obviously these are not two things that work well together when playing with Blogger. And each attempt to clean it up on my part made it worse. (Thanks to the Web Goblin for fixing it.)

I did a second draft of the Waterstones "What's Your Story?" story (only a few words I wanted to change, but it meant handwriting the whole thing out again), and FedExed it off today.

My thanks to the Eagle Award voters -- I was thrilled that Absolute Sandman volume 2 won an Eagle Award for Best Reprint. (Last year it was Absolute Sandman volume 1. Next year the vote will probably be split between Absolute Sandman volumes 3 and 4, and something else entirely will win.)

(I was looking to see if there were covers for Absolute Sandmans 3 and 4 up yet at Amazon, and noticed that volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4 are all on sale for $62.37 [and that they are going to weigh a grand total of 29 lb altogether] and the last two have 5% preorders discounts up as well. Which I mention mostly for those people who write to me and grumble about the Absolutes being $100 books.)

Not sure if the cover for Absolute 4 is a mock-up or the real thing. I suspect it's not the final, mostly because I'm pretty sure that face is from Sandman #1, and for Absolute 4 we'll be taking a cover portrait from somewhere in the last 20 issues.

...

Regarding the Julie Schwartz Memorial Talk at MIT on the 23rd of May: To reiterate from the other day -- over at http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/tickets.html we learn that Tickets to the event are $8.00 and will be available at the door, pending availability. There won't be any available on the door, because they have almost all sold out. The website has a list of places selling the tickets -- yesterday there were about 60 tickets still out there. So this is a sort of a last call -- you can try phoning the places at the website to see if they still have tickets...


...

An ebay auction with a story... I've been rereading some old Batman comics recently, although I don't think I'd want these. But the story that comes with them is wonderful...

I'm worried and upset about the earthquake in China. From Nancy Kress's blog I learned that at least some of the friends we made in Chengdu last summer are okay -- and so are the pandas.

...

Rice pudding re-prompt! Once you get home to proper milk, of course. "Your general guidelines for a batch of rice pudding please, Mr. Gaiman!"Thank you!! ^_^b

I'm working on it, honest. Decided to figure out the proportions I'd used by a) finding a very similar recipe on the web and starting from there and then b) fiddling with it.

Two night's ago's rice pudding (the web recipe) was much too salty and wrong. I fiddled with the proportions and last night's was a lot better but now too sweet. Tonight's rice pudding would have been perfect I have no doubt but I forgot to buy more milk, so I didn't actually make one.

Dear Neil,

The press down here in Brazil have enthusiastically announced you'll be here for the Paraty International Book Fair, first week in July. But since you're also scheduled to lecture at Clarion, I'd like to ask if this is true. Or maybe you have a doppelganger. Or maybe the organizers here had a dream. Or maybe you're taking a weekend of from Clarion down here in Rio (if so, it'll be winter here, and rainy, not the best time to come...) Best regards,Eric

That sounds right, yes. (I teach Clarion the 3rd week in July.)

Hello hello hello,

To quote one of your other fans, “I have a question for you about writing”. I find that my own writing will echo the style of which ever author I am currently reading. Any idea how I might get around constantly mimicking others?

You write more.

I don't think there's anything wrong with copying other people's styles -- it's a skill you'll need, after all. Many actors begin as mimics. You don't worry about it, and keep writing, and after a while you'll have written enough that you can't help sounding like yourself, whether you want to or not.

Style is what you get wrong, that makes what you do sound like you. Style is what you can't help doing. Style is what you're left with.

(I just googled "style is what you can't help doing" because it sounded half-familiar, and I wondered who said it originally, and discovered that it may actually have been me, as I found myself looking at an extract from a speech I gave to an audience of comics artists and writers in 1997 at ProCon in Oakland:

We are creators. When we begin, separately or together, there’s a blank piece of paper. When we are done, we are giving people dreams and magic and journeys into minds and lives that they have never lived. And we must not forget that.

I don’t want to sound like an inspirational speaker here. "Be you." "Be the best you that you can be." But this is really important. It’s something that we mostly lose track of when we starts, because when we start in comics we’re kids, and we have no idea who we are or what our voices are, as artists or as writers.

Young artists want to be Rob Leifeld, or Bernie Wrightson, or Frank Miller, just as young writers want to be Alan Moore, or Chris Claremont or, well, Frank Miller. You’ve seen their portfolios. You’ve read the scripts.

We all swipe when we start. We trace, we copy, we emulate. But the most important thing is to get to the place where you’re telling your own stories, painting your own pictures, doing the stuff that one-one else could have done, but you. Dave McKean, when he was much younger, as a recent art-school graduate, took his portfolio to New York, and showed it to the head of an advertising agency. The guy looked at one of Dave’s paintings—"That’s a really good Bob Peake," he said. "But why would you I want to hire you? If I have something I want done like that, I phone Bob Peake."

You may be able to draw kind of like Rob Leifeld, but the day may come, may have already come, when no-one wants a bargain basement Rob Leifeld clone any more. Learn to draw like you. And as a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help but tell, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world. It’s the point I think of writing as walking naked down the street: it has nothing to do with style, or with genre, it has to do with honesty. Honesty to yourself and to whatever you’re doing.

Don’t worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can’t help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you’ll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don’t worry about whether you’re "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

If you believe in it, do it. If there’s a comic or a project you’ve always wanted to do, go out there and give it a try. If you fail, you’ll have given it a shot. If you succeed, then you succeeded with what you wanted to do.

And it's still true. (That speech is, along with another speech about tulips and comics, and an essay on how to do successful signings, available in Gods And Tulips, illustrated by Chester Brown, price $3 from the CBLDF commercial website.)(And for those of you after instant webby gratification, the whole Procon speech is up at the Magian Line archives at http://www.woxberg.net/gaiman/magian/3-2.html. But the CBLDF Neil Gaiman store one has a pretty Mike Kaluta cover of me being dead on it. And it's cheap...)

http://deweymonster.com/?p=706

It was brought to my attention today that someone’s comments weren’t showing up. I did a search on her name and found five comments categorized as spam. I then found two other regular readers here who were categorized as spam. There may be more, I’m not sure. Real comments are buried in a huge pile of, um, disgusting and/or just plain weird spam comments.

Here are three tips if you’re being classified as spam on blogs that use Akismet:

1. Let the blogger know via email so he or she can find your comments by searching your name in their spam. Akismet has blocked 20,636 spams (compared to 6,010 real comments) for me since I started this blog last year, so I know that it’s not really feasible for a blogger to just scan spam all the time to see if real comments are in there. But if you think your comments are going missing, it’s easy for the blogger to put your name into the search bar on the spam page and get all your comments. Then, the blogger can mark your comments “not spam” which helps (somewhat) to keep your comments from being sent to the spam pile.

2. When you leave links, use a href to make your link a word or phrase. All the comments Akismet categorized as spam on my blog were links that were just pasted in.

3. You can fill out Akismet’s contact form and tell them your blog is not a spammer.

Hope this helps any of you who have been thrown into the spam pile and any of you who use Akismet.

I’m expecting my editorial letter at the end of May, and I’m already thinking about revisions. I finished FLASH BURNOUT in December 2005. Knowing how quickly slang goes stale, I avoided it as much as possible, but it’s a challenge to write a first-person YA without lapsing into some common usages.

I knew I could always edit later.

Here we are in the spring of 2008, and that day has come for ‘playah.’

Blake’s older brother, Garrett, uses it sarcastically to torment Blake. Here is the section where it’s used for the first time, in Chapter One:

“Haul ass, Playah,” says Garrett. “We’re outtie in five.”
Garrett started calling me ‘Playah’ after I acquired an official GirlFriend. I guess it’s better than Ass-wipe, my previous nickname.

So … yeah.

‘Playah’ is used up, and ‘outtie’ may follow it to the chopping block, too. Since the name of Blake’s brother was decided by poll, I thought I would turn you guys loose on my outdated slang.

Feel free to suggest alternatives in the comments. Please!

Okay, I'm off to bed with my stuffy head. See you - and your brilliant suggestions! - in the morning.

Poll #1187485 Fix the nickname!
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What word should be used instead of 'playah'?

If you're in Johnson City and you see a light green car staggering around an empty parking lot and doing strange parking and three-point-turn maneuvers, wave hello to us.

And....probably stay away.


:)

(she's actually doing pretty good for a beginner. she has had a little experience driving on the road to mom-mom's house, and driving a lawn tractor, stuff like that. it is just a lot of different things to be coordinating at once.)

Today we learned:

1. The left foot? Keep it away from the foot pedals. Pretend it doesn't exist.

2. When in reverse, don't turn back around forward until you have come to a complete stop.

3. The brake pedal can be pressed slowly, with building pressure, to come to a smooth stop. It does not need to be shoved down like a button all at once.

4. Lorelei needs a phone book (or two) to sit on while driving. She's been sitting on my purse, but that's not going to be good for my phone and camera. Or maybe a booster seat? lolz. ahem. Short people got, no reason, no reason to liiiiive.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Feministing/~3/289706710/009189.html

http://feministing.com/archives/009189.html

Miriam already acquainted you with the Wanderlust Reproductive Justice Bike Tour with the fabulous Nora Dye and the Pro-Choice Public Education Project. Well, this week they're holding a fundraiser in NYC to support the awesome bikers taking part in this trip for justice, so get your wallets out and drinking hats on and show Wanderlust some love. (Or donate if you can't make it!) In the meantime, check our their travel blog.

* Wanderlust 2008:
A Benefit *
featuring Mint Juleps and Southern Burlesque

Thursday, May 15th
from 6:30 to 11 PM
@ Stonewall Inn
53 Christopher Street at 7th Ave South

$10 - $20 Sliding Scale donation requested
(all proceeds go directly to the Wanderlust bike tour)

9 PM raffle with fabulous prizes from yoga studios, Good Vibrations, and more!

Click here to see full flyer.

Me: I'm thinking about having a restful evening when we get home.
Emily: I'm thinking about building a boat.

On the way home we stopped to watch a rabbit in a yard.
Emily: Why don't we have rabbits in our yard.
Me: We do. We just haven't seen them yet this year.
Emily:(hmph)

We pull in the driveway and voila! a rabbit in our yard.

http://deweymonster.com/?p=705

Thing 1: If you are interested in the Read-a-thon: I’ve decided to hold a June Read-a-thon!

If you think you’ll want to participate, either as a Reader or a Cheerleader, please vote for which date works best for you. Click here to take survey.

If you don’t know what the Read-a-thon is, you can check out this Estella’s Revenge article or if you want, you can read everything that happened in last October’s Read-a-thon by looking through my blog’s Read-a-thon category.

Also, you know, I could really use an assistant Read-a-thon organizer, so if you are organized, are willing to read through that category to get an idea about what we can improve this year, can stay up 24 hours and still not snap bloggers’ heads off, and would like to help out, please email me at dewpie at gmail dot com. I will love you forever!

Thing 2: If you are interested in the Bookworms Carnival: It would be great if you could help brainstorm themes for me to list at the carnival page for potential hosts to choose from. If you want to help with this, please see the list of topics we brainstormed last year, then leave any suggestions you may have in the comments on this post. I’ll add your new ideas to the list.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/parenthacks/~3/289719435/change-toilet-p.html

Duane, you're a brave man to put forth a definitive argument for toilet paper direction.

I know that the direction the toilet paper should roll is a borderline religious debate in some households, but it dawned on me that if you've got a toddler running around who slaps the roll repeatedly to unroll it, then feeding from the back/under side will prevent that. It won't prevent it if he's the sort who likes to grab the end and run around the house with it, but I figured I'll take what I can get.

Related: Cottonelle Kids shows kids how much toilet paper to use

http://www.dooce.com/2008/05/13/didnt-woman-blog-about-al-rokers-nipples

When the producer for NBC called me and asked if I'd be interested in flying to New York to be on a live segment of the Today show to talk about the business of mommy-blogging — okay, wait a minute, I think I should address this right here, right now, this label MOMMY BLOG. Do I consider my website a mommy blog? Not really, no. When I sit down to update my website I don't think to myself, "What will I say today on my mommy blog?" The first thing I think is, how can I give my father a heart attack? And then I back up a second and go, nah, I'd miss him too much, I will just have to write this story about Jon's Brazilian wax in my personal diary. Dad, are you paying attention? It's because of you that the world does not get to hear about Jon's genitals. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY.

But I also don't get offended when people call this website a mommy blog. Not at all. Because even though some people use that label to belittle the fact that there are women out there writing about their experiences as mothers, how dare they? Who do they think they are? NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR KID, YOU MOMMY BLOGGER! Yeah, that. Turns out lots of people want to hear about your kid. Oh, and did you hear? All this writing about motherhood is bringing people together and changing lives. So you go ahead and wrinkle your nose and dismiss those mommy blogs. And I'm going to sit over here at my laptop and be totally flattered that someone thinks I'm worthy to be among their ranks. Hell yes, I'm a mommy blogger.

So I was prepped for an interview about mommy blogs, the lot of us, how this thing we started to document the tiny and intimate moments of our lives has transformed into our jobs. Our jobs that pay us money. And I was totally under the impression that it was going to be a more in-depth interview than the usual, so, tell us about your blob, is it? Your blop? Your blonk? Little anecdote here, the driver they sent to JFK to pick me up turned out to be Chelsea Clinton's personal driver when she's in New York, which does not have anything to do with the point I'm trying to make here other than that he said she is always shouting from the backseat, "GO FASTER! GO FASTER!" And I don't know why but just knowing that about Chelsea makes me want to invite her over to play Scrabble while chugging Kentucky bourbon. It just makes me love her even more to know that she gets impatient at stop lights, and that maybe she has once or twice waved her middle finger at a stranger, not because it would make any difference or cause traffic to go any faster, but because IT FELT SO GOOD.

Anyway, the driver asked me why I was in New York and what I did for a living. My friend, Maggie, is going to be so proud of me for this because I told him, "I'm a writer." And I thought it was going to sound natural coming out of my mouth but in fact it did not whatsoever. I could have said, "I teach English to genius pandas," and the look on my face would have been the same. He asked me what kind of writing, and that's when I looked around to see if anyone was within earshot, and duh. It's New York. At any given moment there is someone having intercourse with a goat within earshot. So I whispered A BLOGGGGG. And I am not even kidding, his whole face shriveled inward as if he had just been sprayed with mace, and he said, "Does that hurt?"

Yes, it hurts. But I'm taking antibiotics.

So I got a call from the producer about 20 seconds before boarding the plane to New York telling me that they had bumped the segment to the fourth hour of the show, and that I'd now be interviewed by Hoda and Kathie Lee. I knew right then that the interview that was supposed to happen was not going to happen, but I still had hope. I knew that a taped segment featuring other bloggers (Kristen Chase, Mir Kamin, and Jill Asher) was going to run before me, and I thought I'd still be able to get in a word or two about why I think companies are so interested in marketing to this group of people, why they are sending us thousands of PR emails saying DEAR BLOGGER, PLEASE WRITE ABOUT MY PRODUCT ON YOUR WEBSITE. Except how many times have we been sent an email addressed to the wrong person? I've been called Heather Anderson, Sarah Armstrong, Hannah, Halley, and one time someone even called me Jim. Note to PR people: maybe pretend that you are paying attention.

I'd been to Rockefeller Center before but never inside the Today Show studios, and I don't know how to say this without someone deliberately misinterpreting it, so I'll just go ahead and blurt it out: it was kind of sad. The green room was tiny, and the make-up room looked like it had been haphazardly set up in someone's garage. Not that I was expecting the walls to be lined with gold, but you look at the set and see how sharp and clean it is, and then you go backstage and, oh my god, has my daughter been playing in here? Because there was stuff and paper and little bits of things everywhere. Like, I had a thought that if I took off my shoes and walked around for a little bit back there that I'd stumble over a Barbie corvette and maybe cut myself on that missing Polly Pocket shoe.

And that is less a judgment than it is an observation, because the experience I had with the make-up people was more than professional. They handled me with great care and made me feel like a million bucks and didn't mind Jon as he furiously circled the room with our camera:

Just as I was about to walk back to the green room I asked Jon if he thought my make-up looked okay, and in front of about 10 people on the Today show staff he said, "Okay? OKAY? I'd lick you right now if we were alone. COME ON!" Someone started laughing, so Jon continued: "What? WHAT? Doesn't my wife look good? I'm allowed to say that about this woman because I saw a baby come out of her body!" And thus commenced a chorus of disgusted EWWWWWWing. And I was all, okay Jon, you can stop. And he was all, "Not just ANY baby! MY BABY! OUT OF HER BODY!" This is obviously proof that one side effect of Prozac is acting like you're drunk when in fact you are not.

15 minutes later I'm sitting on a couch opposite Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb. And we're making small talk in the four minutes leading up to my segment. They're asking me all sorts of questions about my website and where I'm from, and then I think but I can't be sure that Kathie Lee Gifford winks at me. Just out of nowhere. WINK WINK. And I'm so caught off guard that my face changes its expression involuntarily, and she says something like, yeah, that was a wink, it's something we do on television. I go, okay, so you weren't trying to hit on me, just clearing things up. And she says, no, she wasn't hitting on me, but honey (she called me honey), I am totally her type.

I am Kathie Lee Gifford's type. You know what? I am not even going to start decontructing that, and instead I'm going to let you consider what that says about my husband.

And then she said something to me that made the rest of my day one giant confusing puzzle that I have still not been able to put back together. I don't remember her exact words, but she asked me if I get a lot of criticism for writing about my family on the Internet, and when I said yes she said she could totally relate. Because people were all over her back in the day when she talked about her kids on television. She told me she could empathize. For those of you who have not seen the segment I'm going to post it here, and afterward you're going to think to yourself, "HUHHH?"

I don't know what happened to frighten Kathie Lee in the span of four minutes, but my guess is that she had either been instructed to bring up that controversial aspect of mommy-blogging, or maybe she herself thought that she needed to layer the interview with that perspective. Either way, it did not make her a friend of this community from what I've read on other websites and forums.

And here's my take: this is obviously a case of an interviewer not being adequately familiar with the topic at hand (also, probably not a good idea to have someone afraid of computers interviewing someone about their job using computers). And I'm not about to jump into the crowd and start calling Kathie Lee names, she does not deserve that from me. I'm not so much angry at her as I am disappointed that this topic was not given the service it deserves. Blaming Kathie Lee for that would be misguided, and in fact, I don't think there's really any one entity responsible for how this played out other than the beast that is broadcast television. The segment got bumped, things were shuffled around, and maybe because of some miscommunication here and there it wasn't the piece it was supposed to be. Instead of looking at this as a setback I'm thinking that this is a great opportunity for someone out there willing to take a look into the heart of this community. Start the interview with the fact that you are uncomfortable with what we do, and then let us answer you. Unless you are afraid of us, and if that's the case, well, here, let me rub your head, you poor little bunny.

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by dooce in Daily

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A woman in Burma. Photo: Will Baxter / WPN

With recent devastating news of the