World Trade Center Twin Towers

World Trade Center Twin Towers

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This image probably needs no introduction…it’s all anyone’s talking about today.

You say, “some guy they interviewed on the street in NY…”
You say, “he was saying, ‘there are still bodies falling out of the sky'”
violent_blue says, “oh god, cnn tv is talking about the woman that called from the bathroom of the hijacked plane”
Hildegarde [to violent_blue]: “oh god”
violent_blue says, “they have a pic of her”
violent_blue says, “apparently she called her husband”
violent_blue says, “how fucking sad.”
violent_blue says, “and they’re totally interrogating this guy about details”
You say, “the husband?”
violent_blue says, “and she wasn’t even supposed to be on the flight, but it was her husband’s birthday and she wanted to get home to be with him”
violent_blue nods at you.
wu says, “thats fucked up”
violent_blue says, “barbara olson”
wu says, “fuck”
wu says, “i can see them bringing bloody people”
wu says, “outside my window”
You say, “oh my god”

Fan Sites: Turning the Tables

Fan Sites: Turning the Tables

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Tom over at Menucha Blog says about fan sites: There is a function for any fan page. Yes, I know this. People like to know things about their favorite personalities in the media, and to feel some connection. We all like connection. Also, In this day and age, knowledge is all the rage. We like to know things that we couldn’t possibly have any use for, but things that might come in handy at the next social gathering we attend. If you can’t say anything nice about yourself, then say something nice about Charlize Theron… or a part of her anatomy… or her career. Whatever.

He then goes on to add his own fan site details: does it make us know something about each other? Is it useful information? In a fan site, it’s typical, what’s the point of it? Since Tom did it, I thought I’d follow suit. (Blogging is, after all, a form of celebrity.)

Rochelle Mazar
Height: 5’6 and a bit-ish
Weight: the relationship between myself and gravity is very, very private.
Hair colour: brownish
eye color: random (bright green first thing in the morning, greyish most of the time, and occaisionally blue, depending on what I’m wearing.)
place of birth: Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Birthday: August 2nd, 1974
Age: 27

Rochelle’s favourite things:
place to visit: my bathtub
colour: yellow and pink
tv show: The star treks, Blind Date, Queer Television
food: chish and fips, cheese of most varieties, guacamole. I only order stuff in restaurants that I can’t make myself, so if I order a sandwich I usually spend the time kicking myself, unless it has grilled portabello mushrooms on it, or something complicated. I’m trying to go easy on the carbs too, and, again, since pasta is so easy to make, I prefer not to order it. But damn, there’s nothing like a good fettacine.
Band: Those ouchless clear elastics that make your braids look like their staying braided miraculously, though i can’t use them any more, as I have no more hair.
favourite thing to listen to: the radio. CBC radio one, This American Life (NPR), anything with reasonably decent talk.
favourite music: random. Whatever the people I love are listening to, unless they listen to something I can’t stand.
CD in the player right now: Shrek soundtrack.
Favourite books of all time: The History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters, Green Grass, Running Water, The Robber Bride, Not Wanted on the Voyage, How we Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Our Lady of the Lost and Found, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Edible Woman.
Favourite Historians: Katharine Park, Lyndal Roper, Deborah Valenze, Clarissa Atkinson, Jane Abray
Favourite academic monographs:The Holy Household, The Reformation of Ritual, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Local Religion
Favourite virtues: Honesty, integrity, nobility of spirit, decency, mercy, kindness, strength to avoid cruel and unreasonable behaviour
Favourite vices: blogging, MOOing, iced tea, Hogaarden, body shop salt body scrub, oversleeping
Folks: dad, Victor, currently not speaking to the celebrity in question because she’s not flawless; mom, Heidi, rock of the ages, joy to behold, 8th wonder of the world; sister, Melissa, artistic genius, crazy woman who only had two (count’em) wedding showers, resident non-hair-brushing expert.

That was fun. Did we learn something?

What Does your Name say about you?

What Does your Name say about you?

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What does your name say about you?
This is what they say about me….

Rochelle:

You make impersonal decisions quickly, but not so with personal concerns. You like to think things over carefully, but tend to be indecisive. You have a great deal of loyalty to those you love. You have much inner strength. You are clever, inventive, imaginative and youthful. You enjoy socializing. You work hard to achieve material success through your own efforts. You can be quite inventive and quite curious. You have a diplomatic flair to your nature. Equality and fairness are important to you. You must learn the lessons of self-worth; learn to love yourself before you can love others. You need to learn to be expressive. You are a person who cannot tolerate being misunderstood.

Mazar:

You want to be productive and feel useful, and enjoy helping solve problems. You like to be busy and not waste time. You have a need to be up front. You are compassionate, highly imaginative and creative. You have a need to be up front. You have a lack of confidence in your mental abilities and do not like being forced into giving your opinion.

Apparently I really have a need to be up front. 🙂 (Is this why I blog so faithfully?)

Wil

Wil

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Did You know that Wil Wheaton keeps a blog?
This guy kills me. Get this:
You know what I did at the beach? I peed in the ocean. I just wanted to get that out of the way, because it’s something that everyone does, and I just HATE it when people act like they don’t. Like girls who insist that they don’t fart. Give me a break.

Helga’s Cowches

Helga’s Cowches

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blue found me this fabulous site, and after showing it around, it turns out that Wonder Yuka is enamoured and might even get one! The story: Helga, our friendly neighbourhood farm hand, gets attached to the cows who then are led off the slaughter. One night a horrible thunderstorm hits. She writes, when I went out to feed the cows, I found them beneath a split and blackened tree, all dead. Six little calves huddled together a few feet away. As I led the orphans back to the barn, something inside me changed. The years of accepting sad reality were over. If these little guys had survived an act of God as powerful as that storm, they sure weren’t going to be killed by an act of man, not if I could help it!

That’s how the cow sanctuary began.

Trouble was, I wasn’t a rich heiress. I was a farm worker making minimum wage. These calves weren’t even mine. They belonged to the man who owned the farm. How was I going to save the calves?

I exchanged six months’ wages for the lives of those calves. Never was money better spent, I thought as I hugged them. But what next? They were growing fast and would soon weigh at least half a ton each. No matter how hard I worked, farm wages weren’t going to be enough to feed them. “How? How? How?” filled my thoughts.

The answer came to me as I lay in the straw snuggling with my cow family: I’d make life-size stuffed cows for others to snuggle the way I snuggled with my real cows. And with that, Helga’s Cowches were born.

Living the Dream

Living the Dream

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I decided to enjoy a little This American Life this evening. Thank God for streaming radio. Tonight’s chosen episode: Living the Dream: There’s a deep impulse in American culture that says that you can make yourself into anyone. Today, three stories about people who tried to do just that.

Bad Girl Swirl

Bad Girl Swirl

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Bad Girl Swirl
Things to do with your old Bridesmaid dresses: Throw a bridesmaid beauty pageant for your friends, with prize categories like “most reflective”, “biggest butt bow,” and “all-around ugliest.”

Things to do with photos of your evil ex: Write embarrassing sexual stats on back, laminate, and trade with all your friends. Mail off to inmates in local prisons with a touching and titillating letter of introduction. (Include your ex’s return address and phone number, of course.) Spread one inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet and broil on high. Bury in backyard with a dead fish. Drain toilet and superglow to bottom of toilet bowl.

How to clean under the bed:
What you need:
* Endust, Pledge, or other aerosol dusting spray
* a long haired cat or small fluffy dog
* pet comb
What you do:
* Spray fur of cat or dog with Endust and bowl pet under the bed until all dust-bunnies are picked up and clinging to pet.
* comb pet’s coat thoroughly.

Wonder what it’s like to grow up a Scientologist?

Wonder what it’s like to grow up a Scientologist?

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Meet the The Woodcraft Family. Well, part of the Woodcraft family. Missing from this picture are mother, grandmother, and brother, who are sea org members who have been forbidden to speak to the members of the clan pictured here. The Lisa McPherson Trust has made a series of post-scientologist interviews available in streaming video. I’m conpletely addicted to these stories. The interviews are separated into parts (there are many parts per person). I began hearing Astra’s story. Astra was a fairly highly placed worked in Sea Org, which is a quasi administrative/religious order that requires members to sign a billion year contract. Astra worked with ethics branches, convincing people they couldn’t masturbate, couldn’t be pregnant, couldn’t leave the Sea Org, and knew all the arguments. Knowing how the Sea Org would handle her, Astra got herself pregnant and refused to have an abortion as a way of getting out. She’s bright and eloquent, and she charmed me.

Right now I’m listening to her sister Zoe’s story. Zoe is younger, and was atrociously mistreated by her mother and the few adults who were around to supervise young children. The hardest part of this is watching her father’s reaction to her stories. They did these interviews with Astra, Zoe, and her father all present together. I had no idea Scientology was this….organized, this….cultish.

When I’m finished hearing Zoe’s stories, I’m aiming to hear Lawrence Woodcraft’s story of Scientology…how does a parent let this happen to their children? How do they get pulled into this? I can’t see anything attractive about it at this point…

Things that make me smile

Things that make me smile

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The tremendously wild hair I woke up with this morning (a shower for bed is always good for morning entertainment), the lovely comments in blue’s LiveJournal, my new funkis in the bathroom; a transparent red phone; sunshine in the morning; email from Evita; blooming geraniums on my balcony; clocks of all varieties and sizes; my kitchen without any cabinet doors; a new song uploaded (a Dar Williams song about Mary Magdalene, with some mistakes in it and a very drastically messed up ending); eggplant parmigiana in my fridge (only one quarter gone); Sunday morning radio; warm days and cool nights; being me!

Generics Day

Generics Day

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Well…today I build a silly generic room, and finished off the last little bits of the Generic Talking Stick room. And I spoke to my lovely friend Evita today, who’s sounding sort of blue. I discovered that she works on a moo more local to her, which is sadly lacking in tools. This isn’t their fault, it’s not really anyone’s fault, it’s just that the basic moocore doesn’t come equipped with a whole lot of stuff. Well, comparatively speaking. Especially these moos that don’t have a) any programmers, and b) a whole lot of people to know what else is out there and what can be ported over.

Well, I love Evita. Though I know I shouldn’t talk about it right now, it’s one of my greatest hopes that I’ll see her living in my neck of the woods shortly. And for the most selfish of reasons. I just think my life would be so greatly improved by her presence…she’s one of those people, you know, the ones who will understand (and take seriously) some of the sillier things in your mind that you really want to take seriously. I’ve never met anyone like her. It would just be nice to be able to hop on the subway and end up at her doorstep, bottle of wine in hand, and spend an evening talking shop/fun/social/chicks and so on. But we can do that in any case, even if she’s NOT in my neck of the woods. Ah, the dissertation drama….

Anyway, so I found out that Evita has her own MOO to deal with. Well, perhaps you already know that I have commited myself to building generics of late. Initially I was commited to building Bingen, but lately I’ve been thinking about generics. This started when I built the keyword bot (which shockingly worked completely reliably!) because I accidentally deleted the parent of the fake-out kw bot I’d been using up until then. The new was was a kid of $thing only, so no traceback and no conflicts. And solid as a rock. It was pointed out to be pretty quickly (the next morning) that this bot had many more uses than just fixing my own characters in Bingen. It immediately went into use in Marlene’s Russian-English tutorial, and was a hit at the teacher workshops last week. Evita was saying today that it would be ideal for tutoring, because you can program it to repeat information that teachers don’t need to type in over and over again. This pleases me greatly. After the kw bot, I managed to get the whole world to help me get my Talking Stick Room working (it’s perfect now, thanks to leigh). I built a very simple room that you can add and remove noises from as well, for truna, another fabulous MOOprof from Australia whom I simply adore. So I was sitting on a series of generics that were, for all intents and purposes, mine.

And Evita’s moo needed some tools. So I ported them over. Because I love Evita and I want all her pursuits to be as simple and successful as possible. And a lack of tools shouldn’t stand in her way.

Besides, it feels GREAT to be the author of tools people can use. I hope someone does. 🙂

Tuscans and their Families

Tuscans and their Families

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This is just unbelievable…I’m sitting in the library reading this and exclaiming aloud as I do. People must think I’m insane. But read this:

Prevailing attitudes toward children, of both sexes, also led to oversight and confusion. Adults tended to ignore, neglect, and forget their offspring; infants in early life possessed a kind of transparency. It may be that their slim chances for survival prompted adults to keep a certain distance from their infants, to avoid cementing emotional attachments with them until their chances of survival susbtantially improved. Moreover, it is probable that the scant value accorded female babies multiplied the instances of simple oversight. The underreporting of female infants may thus be futher evidence of the negligence or indifference with which a father of this epoch regarded his daughter. Herihy and Klapish-Zuber, Tuscans and their familes

You see what I have to work with? Sheeesh.

Our lady of the Lost and Found

Our lady of the Lost and Found

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Time passes, we say: like a football, a parade, a ship in the night. Time flies: like a bird, a plane, like Superman. Time flows: like a river, like sand, like blood. Time, we have been told, is a reef, a hand, a wheel, a gift. Time is avenger, devourer, destroyer, a subtle thief of youth. Time, we hope, heal all wounds.

We talk about spending time (like money), serving time (like dinner), doing time (like lunch). We talk about buying time (like a car, a refrigerator, a new pair of shoes), borrowing time (like a library book, a cup of sugar, an egg), stealing time (like hubcaps, third base, a kiss). At one time or another, we have all had time on our hands, time to squander, time to kill. Most often we say we are pressed for time: like a shirt, like grapes for wine, like a flower in a book, like a hand against a heart. Time, we say, has run out on us, like milk, luck, or an unfaithful spouse. So much time, we complain, is lost: like mittens, sheep, or souls.

“Some wounds never heal,” Mary said. “People should know that by now.”

–Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found

Marriage

Marriage

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Must…blog…this backwash conversation….

It was all about marriage. That’s how it started. And while people were talking about the advantages of getting married, I posted this:

Its a step you take, a life step for lack of a better description.

It’s a step straight people take, since they have the option. And it’s lovely to call it a ‘life step’, but all of this seriously degrades relationships that can’t be taken to that official step.

Straight girl: Like it or not, marriage IS how society validates relationships. The fact that you “can’t get married” is moot. You CAN get married, you just choose (yes, choose) not to date men, and same-sex relationships are still, for whatever reason, very taboo.

Cool straight girl Gem: just because that’s how society validates relationships doesn’t mean that it’s right. you’d think the divorce rate would be enought to show just how very silly that is.

The fact that you “can’t get married” is moot. You CAN get married, you just choose (yes, choose) not to date men,

what? i’ve never in my entire life thought of homosexuality as a choice. i am not sure why some people are homosexual and others are not. i have not done a lot fo research. i don’t know if it’s a nature or nuture thing. regardless, i don’t think it’s a choice.

Annoying straight girl: I merely thought it was semi amusing that someone would point out how they felt cheated by not being able to take said “life step”. I’m sure if you really wanted to, you could date elephants; just don’t expect to get married.

Me:Ah…..I see now. Thanks for the clarification. To further your argument….let’s say we have generic woman working at generic factory, making 30 cents less per hour than her male conterparts, just because she’s a woman. She shouldn’t argue that women deserve the right to make as much as men, and therefore the wage gap is unfair. She shouldn’t point out that it’s wrong, that it’s problematic, and that they make that wage on the backs of women like her. That would be silly! Clearly she is choosing to be a woman, and choosing to bear the social penalties that come with that choice. What she should do is go out and get a sex change.

Heeee……(waits for the next segment)

Female Circumcision

Female Circumcision

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Women being genitally mutilated…and paying for it
I just can’t believe this. These women are going in and getting themselves sliced up because of someone’s stupid idea of what we’re supposed to look like. This really really sickens me. Dr. Alter, put the scapel down. Put it DOWN. Go read bust, bitch, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and all that literature on male circumsion. Sheeeesh. Oh, this is the saddest thing I’ve seen in a really long time.

Blue’s visit

Blue’s visit

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My friend blue is planning a visit to Toronto! Yay! I’ve decided to make a little list of things we could see while she’s here.

First, of course, the ROM has to be on the list, as far as I’m concerned…I love the ROM. Best museum ever. 🙂 Well, as far as I’m concerned. It’s got so much diverse stuff. And I love those dinosaurs, of course. And then how about St. Lawrence Market, which is just down the street from me? Mmmm….good food, good cooking, fabulous bread and cheese. Mmmmmmm…..and then…some serious cheap shopping at Honest Ed’s! Let’s see, what else…

Oh, well, Casa Loma, which was built by a very rich man who always wanted a castle. We could head over to the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the famous Bata shoe museum! But, you know it’s all happening at the zoo…I do believe it. I do believe it’s true. Or…for the historical touch, we could hit Blackcreek pioneer village. Or, for that foreign flavour, head out to African Lion’s safari, which is just the most obvious thing to have in southern Ontario. Mmmm….we could even take in a very expensive meal at CN tower! And I haven’t even mentioned the island yet….

5110294

5110294

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Reader response to the Hero contemplation

Now lemmee get this straight

You say
You’re tortured because you can’t write
Or
You can’t write because you’re tortured

You say
These times have made me cynical
Or
These times confirm your cynicism

Now lemmee say one thing
I’d rather rope steers
Than talk politics with you

I’d rather get skunk drunk
Under a goose-neck trailer

Your despair is more boring
Than The Merv Griffin Show

Your sniveling whine
Your dime-a-dozen solutions to crime

Get off your tail and cook
Do time
Anything
But don’t burn mine

2/80
Santa Rosa, Ca.

Sam Shepard

Oh yeah……….

Backwash

Backwash

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I have recently acquired a column at Backwash. It’s really a very amazing place…because it focuses on personality, people are actually encouraging me to talk about myself. I mean, do they know what they’re in for?

So far the only complaint i really have is that I can’t update the journal section without wiping out all the links I posted. Bah. Some of us write a lot more than that…i have to stop thinking about that journal thing as a blog and thing of it more as a column that requires more THOUGHT than a blog does. Once I get a better grip on the whole thing, yes, then you’ll see additions to this page to reflect that….*rubs her hands with glee.*

Well, I’m happily in the a/c’ed office this afternoon, though only an hour to go. The one time this shift seems to go by quickly is when I’m afraid to go outside. I’ve decided that I should definitely eat out today. It takes too much effort to make myself something to eat, so I just won’t do it.

Oh, and I should point out that it was Pound that brought me to backwash in the first place….another almost-blog that I saw listed in Bust, a mag which I should read more often, but in reality I only ever see when my sister buys me a copy.

In an hour I will have eaten something, and I might be slightly more coherent.