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The Breath I’m Not Holding

April 17, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, freethought/humanism, general ruminations, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, school, science, Wow, Yikes! antifragile things, breath and stress, Calm meditation app, CBT Therapy, David Sterling Brown, increasing depressing and anxiety among youth, productive discomfort, racial profiling, Rebecca Solnit, safetyism, SCOTUS Justic Sotomayor, SCOTUS preppie boy Kavanaugh, The Coddling of the American Mind, the ignorance of the powerful Comments Off on The Breath I’m Not Holding

Department Of Reasons For That Take A Deep Breath Truism

“The way we breathe has a direct and immediate impact on the state of our mind, emotions, and nervous system. When we’re agitated or anxious, our breath is often quick and shallow. When we’re calm, and grounded, it tends to be long and deep. So, it’s helpful to remember that we can deliberately alter our breath when we want to soften stress or anxiety.…
we can always call on this tool, lengthening our inhales and exhales, in order to regulate our stress response, and gain a sense of calm.”
( Calm meditation, app, “Breath in Three Acts,” 4-6-26 )

* * *

Department Of Powerful People Have The Privilege Of Ignorance
Sub-Department Of Reasons To Use The Calming Breath Tools

“It is an old truism that knowledge is power. The inverse — that power is often ignorance — is rarely discussed.
The powerful swathe themselves in obliviousness in order to avoid the pain of others and their own relationship to that pain. There’s a large category of acts hidden from people with standing: the more you are, the less you know….”
( excerpt, Rebecca Solnit, “Nobody Knows,” Harpers Magazine )

A few days ago, when moiself ran across Rebecca Solnit‘s above cited article, I was reminded of SCOTUS Justice Sotomayor’s recent and right-on critique of her colleagues’ obliviousness to the realities in daily lives of non-one-percenters such as themselves.

( excerpts, my emphases/additions, “Supreme Court’s Sotomayor slams colleague Kavanaugh for ICE ruling,” USA Today, 4-9-26 ):

“Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor took a swipe at fellow Justice Brett Kavanaugh… for his recent opinion in an immigration case….

Sotomayor spoke about the court’s divided decision in September 2025 that allowed the Trump administration to resume indiscriminate immigration-related stops….

Over the objections of the court’s three liberal justices, including Sotomayor’s, the court blocked a lower court ruling that said federal agents need to have reasonable suspicion that the person they’re questioning is in the country illegally…. [1]

‘I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,’ Sotomayor said, referencing Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion…. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.’

Sotomayor added, ‘Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person,’ she said of those detained. ‘And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper.’ ….

In his opinion for the court, Kavanaugh lied blew smoke out of his prep school Ivy League ass made up crap about something he knows nothing about said that legal residents’ encounters with immigration agents are ‘typically brief,’ and impacted individuals ‘promptly go free.’

* * *

Department Of New Great Term From A Book I Might Read

*Might read,* as in, Get in line with the 158 books ahead of you on my list. But, as is often the case with my reading list, the lastest, newest/shiny entry kicks the others to the rear. Sigh. There’s no fighting evolution.

Oh yes the term: safetyism. Before I even read the definition I suspected what it was;…moiself knew it was a name for something I’d previously had no name for – a phenomenon that both alarmed and infuriated me when I saw it creeping into my children’s college experiences. [2]

This term came from a book review of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. I’ll post my favorite excerpts of the review, with moiself’s sincere apology for my boneheaded neglect to note where I saw the review and thus give proper attribution. [3]

The Coddling of the … reviewer admitted being skeptical about a book whose title could have heralded a tirade from middle-aged professors about how “today’s students are too soft and whiny.” Instead, the reviewer noted, the book’s authors point out the disturbing data of what is happening on college campuses: the rise of trigger warnings, safe spaces, disinvited speakers, student protests shutting down debate – linked with the dramatic and documented rise in anxiety and depression among young people. The book does not blame young people for these particular problems; rather, it lays responsibility on the bad ideas that youth are being taught by well-meaning adults.

As someone even wiser than moiself [4] wrote,

“…despite their theoretical benefits, protected educational experiences [safe spaces] often fail to instill the most important attributes of a liberal education: critical thinking, persuasive argumentation, close reading, and cultural understanding. Indeed, students’ desire for safe spaces can limit their ability to traverse the real world—where strong disagreements and challenging experiences are part of life…. I know my campus is not a protective bubble that can shield students from reality. Rather, it’s a microcosm of the real world—and I’m not doing my job as an educator if I perpetuate the illusion of safety at the expense of challenging students’ ideas and beliefs.

As a Black man who teaches Shakespeare at a predominantly white institution, I realized years ago that the classroom can never be a safe space. When I teach Othello, a tragedy replete with anti-Black racism and misogyny, am I safe from silent criticisms that I’m an assimilated Black person with a ‘white voice’ teaching a white author? If there is only one Black female student in the class, is she safe? Rather than asking a non-Black colleague to teach the play for me, I lean into discomfort and use it to my pedagogical advantage. I carefully address whatever arises from the class’s collective exposure to the text and its racist moments, because that is my job as a professor.

In my classroom, I eschew safe space rhetoric—such as the truism that all opinions are equally valid—in favor of a pedagogical practice I call ‘productive discomfort.’ This practice leans into difficult discourses on a variety of contentious topics and fearlessly engages students’ personal backgrounds, identities, and experiences. It uses the learning process to expand the boundaries of students’ comfort zones by challenging their existing assumptions and biases.”

( excerpt, “Discomfort Is the Point: Why ‘safe spaces’ do a disservice to students,” by David Sterling Brown, AAC&U, Winter 2024 )

“Education should disrupt the status quo and promote critical thinking.”

Yet again, I digress.

What follows are excerpts from the The Coddling of the American Mind review, with my emphases. I have not yet read the book; thus, my emphases of the reviewer’s statements mark *my* concerns – ones I’ve amassed over the past decade, from my offsprings’ experiences as well as from my own readings and observations. One example: although content/trigger warnings and attempts to establish colleges as safe spaces where students are promised refuge from being “offended” may feel like a kindness in the moment, IMO these policies impinge on free speech, suppress open discussion of complex issues, throttle academic and intellectual diversity, and ultimately (and perhaps most importantly) hinder young people in building resilience.

“Lukianoff and Haidt [the books’ two authors] are not conservatives….both lean left politically. That matters, because this book is not a right-wing attack on campus culture. It’s a liberal critique of things that have gone wrong inside liberal spaces….

The central argument is simple: three bad ideas have spread through American universities (and increasingly through K-12 schools, workplaces, and families). These ideas sound good on the surface. But they are toxic. They make students more anxious, more depressed, and less prepared for adult life.

The three bad ideas are:

‘What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.’ This is the opposite of the old saying. It teaches that discomfort, emotional pain, and offense are dangerous. So, we must protect people from them. The problem is that avoidance makes anxiety worse, not better. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), one of the most evidence-based treatments for anxiety, teaches the exact opposite: you have to face your fears to overcome them.
‘Always trust your feelings.’ This sounds empowering. But your feelings are not always reliable guides to reality. Anxiety tells you there’s a threat when there isn’t. Anger can be based on a misinterpretation. If you always trust your feelings without questioning them, you become a prisoner of your own emotional reactions.

‘Life is a battle between good people and evil people.’ This is the us-versus-them mindset. It divides the world into oppressors and victims. It leaves no room for nuance, context, or good-faith disagreement. And it makes every conflict into a moral crusade where compromise is betrayal….

Here are four things the reviewer learned from the book ( again, excerpts from the review, my emphases ):

“1. Safetyism is not the same as safety.

The authors coin the term “safetyism” to describe a culture where emotional safety is treated as more important than intellectual freedom. Actual safety protects you from physical harm. Safetyism protects you from ideas that might make you uncomfortable. The problem is that you can’t learn in a discomfort-free environment. Learning requires challenge.

2. The rise in anxiety and depression is real and alarming. [5]

3. Antifragility is a real thing.

The book borrows Nassim Taleb’s concept of ‘antifragile’ things [6] that get stronger when they’re stressed (e.g. bones, muscles, immune systems) Minds can be antifragile too. But only if they’re exposed to manageable challenges. Protecting kids from every stressor makes them fragile, not safe.

4. You can be compassionate and still allow discomfort.

One of the book’s most important distinctions. Compassion does not mean removing every obstacle. Sometimes compassion means letting someone struggle, fail, and figure it out.

The book ends with a line that has stuck with me:
‘Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.’

That’s it. That’s the whole argument. We have been so focused on smoothing the road, removing every bump, every uncomfortable idea, every moment of potential distress, that we forgot to prepare the child. And now we have a generation that is more anxious, more depressed, and less resilient than any in recent memory.”

I’ll drink to that.

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [7]

* * *

May you remember that discomfort is the point of learning;
May you call out mind-coddling when you see it;
May you always have room for nuance, context, and good-faith disagreement;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] Other than what they’re doing now, which is blatant racial profiling.

[2] I don’t know if it went as far back as high school – I don’t recall K or Belle mentioning “safe spaces” or “trigger/content warnings” then – but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was already there.

[3] I copied/wrote down portions, so it must have been online…Facebook? One of my many newspaper online subscriptions? ACVATTWAFNB (All Cat Videos All The Time With A Few News Breaks)?

[4] Gasp – they exist. By the thousands…..

[5] Most of us have heard about the skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression; the book presents data linking this to social media, the decline of free play, and the rise of safetyism.

[6] Nassim Taleb is a Lebanese-American author, professor, mathematician. His book cited here is Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,

[7] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Healthy Skepticism I’m Not Having Trouble Applying

April 10, 2026

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life) Christianity is not Jesus, embarrassing surname, family stories circle to the present, Holiday traditions, Inner Anarchy, Jim Palmer, naughty holiday joke, the Easter Story, unfortunate name combinations Comments Off on The Healthy Skepticism I’m Not Having Trouble Applying

Department Of But First, Set Aside The Skepticism For:
More Proof That Everything Circles Around

Dateline: Tuesday 4:29p, reading a blurb in The Week magazine’s “guide to what’s worth watching.” I come upon a blurb that makes me shriek with joy, and search my blog history for the story I know is there. Here, from 10-27-17 ( The Studio I’m Not Touring ), is an excerpt of my relating a Parnell family story to my family

Remember the story I’ve told you, when I was in grade school, and one night at the dinner table my dad was teasing my mom about her name….

For the benefit of those not related to me or who haven’t heard the story, [1] a wee bit o’ background info: my mother’s birth surname was Hole. [2] Yes, Hole. I sometimes teased her, about why her own mother didn’t keep her surname Moran but instead was willing to take on her husband’s…unique…family name: It really must have been love, or desperation….

Yeah, so, the story. At the family dinner table, occupied as per usual by my parents and their four children (on this particular night oh-so-many years ago, my older sister, younger sister and I were all in grade school, and our brother was an infant):

After my father’s customary So, tell me about your day? query, we dove into yet another round of thematic banter. Our family dinner table dialogues tended to focus on one subject, which was never (or rarely) intentional or pre-planned, but rather tangential from something which had happened to one of the Parnell siblings [3] at school. On that evening, I shared a story about a kid who had been teased on the playground about his name: the combination of his first name and last name made for some tease-worthy rhyme schemes. [4]

Marion Parnell said she felt sorry for the poor boy. Growing up with her particular last name, she knew exactly how he felt:

“My father was always telling my sisters and I how, in Norway, Hole was a respectable, upper class, landowners’ name. I lost track of how many times he told us we should be proud of our name. He just couldn’t understand how it was for us, because in America, it was just HOLE. Oh, I heard it all the time, the jokes: ‘Look, here comes Marion Hole, hole-in-the-ground…don’t fall into a hole!’ “

(I had also lost count of how many times I’d heard about Hole-is-a-proud-Norwegian-name assurances, and had come to think that our maternal grandfather had made that up to make our mother feel better. I’d never heard of anyone, of any ethnic background, with that name.)

Still with me? You deserve The Order of the Pretty Purple Toe ® award.

My mother took little comfort from me telling her that her peers had been pretty lame in the joke department: ” ‘Marion Hole-in-the-ground’? I can think of a lot worse things to do with a name like…”

Chester Parnell jumped in, to save me from embarrassing my mother. Or so I thought.

“Well, Robbie Doll, you know what your mom’s middle name is?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “Alberta?”

“That’s right,” Chet nodded enthusiastically. “But you know, she was so beautiful, I never had any second thoughts about marrying an A. Hole.”

This produced shrieks of delight from the three Parnell daughters – first from me (my shriek decibel count was boosted by my pride in being the first one to “get it”), followed a few seconds later by my older sister, and then by my younger sister, who probably didn’t get the reference but knew something hilarious must have been said by the way her older sisters and father were reacting.

Mom had that tense/amused, try-to-be-a-good-sport look on her face. Dad gazed across the table at her with impish affection – I knew something even better was coming up.

Chester B. Parnell: “Tell them about your cousin.”

Marion A. Hole Parnell (baring her teeth): “I don’t want to tell them about my cousin.”

Chet: “Tell them about your cousin. What was his name?”

Marion: (muttering) “His name was Harry.”

Chet: “And it wasn’t a nickname – his real name wasn’t Harold? And he didn’t have a middle name – just a first and last name?”

Marion: “That’s right.”

Mom, of course, knew where this was heading. She tried to act as if she were miffed, but I could see the corners of her mouth beginning to twitch.

Chet: “And so his name was…?”

Marion (deep breath): “Harry Hole.”

Professional stand-up comics would kill to get an audience response akin to that which erupted that evening, in the smallest of venues, the Parnell kitchen dining nook.

* * *

Back to the present; specifically, Tuesday, when moiself comes across the blurb in The Week magazine and shrieks aloud, My mom’s cousin!!

* * *

Department Of Post Easter Reflections

It’s the week after the weekend of the most holy Christian festival that ironically [5] has the most un-Christian name. What we call Easter, as with most Christian holidays, consists in large part of the ancient rites and myths of paganism and other spiritualities which were incorporated into the Christian myths (see this Longest Blog Footnote So Far ® for details, should that float your boat. [6] )

Three years ago, around this time of year, this was included in my blog:

Department Of Uh, Since You’ve Asked, That Would Be, “No”

Last Sunday a FBF (Facebook Friend) began her post thusly:

Happy Easter, everyone! Can I share what it means to me?

FBF went on to – surprise! – offer her testimony for Jesus, without waiting for an answer to her question.

Moiself remembered that post on Monday, when I saw a different post on social media – a post which, if I had a different relationship with that FBF, I would forward to her, and possibly even ask for her reaction/opinion.

For my Christian readers, family and friends – and yessirreeebobsurprise! I do have them – I assume they call themselves Christian because they go to a Christian church and/or believe they have committed to “follow Jesus.”

Having been raised in that background, it has always – and especially around this time of year – been a source of forehead-bonking wonder to moiself that there seems to be little understanding by Christians that their Jesus is never quoted in their scriptures as saying, “Oh, yeah, along with the teachings and good deed admonitions I’m leaving y’all with, here’s the most important thing: please remember to start a new religion, and name it after me.”

Former Christian evangelical divinity student Jim Palmer’s new ministry seems to be to “minister” to former literalists such as himself ( from Palmer’s writings moiself has seen so far, I gather Palmer would still claim to follow [some] words/example of Jesus, but not Christianity). For the sake of relative brevity, moiself will assume that most Christians accept their Biblical scriptures as reliable. [7] It is to those Christians that I’d like to direct to one of Palmer’s writings, which contain some abundant food for thought (an entire life’s rations, I’d say) about how Christianity ≠ Jesus ≠ Christianity:

It still surprises people who haven’t looked closely that Jesus and Christianity are not the same thing. Not even close. Jesus was not a Christian. He didn’t start Christianity. He didn’t write a creed, build an institution, or outline a belief system that would later dominate empires. You can’t blame Christian nationalism on Jesus. You can’t even cleanly blame Christianity on him. What exists today under his name is something that formed after him, around him, and in many ways, in spite of him.

What we call Christianity is largely shaped by the Apostle Paul and later by the political machinery of the early church. Most of the New Testament isn’t Jesus talking, it’s Paul interpreting. Then you have centuries of councils, debates, and power plays where theology gets hammered into place by people trying to stabilize a movement that was never meant to be stabilized. Read the creeds. They are packed with metaphysical claims about Jesus, yet strangely quiet about the actual things he taught. It’s a lot of doctrine, very little Jesus.

Then Constantine shows up and everything shifts. After the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Christianity goes from a grassroots, disruptive movement to a state-sanctioned tool. Legalized, institutionalized, and eventually weaponized. What began as something subversive becomes something that props up empires. By the time you get to Nicaea, Jesus is being defined in ways that would likely leave him scratching his head. The question isn’t just who Jesus was. It’s who needed him to be what they said he was.

Christianity didn’t just elevate Jesus. It insulated people from him. Turning him into God conveniently removes the pressure of actually following him. If he’s divine in a way you can never be, then you don’t have to wrestle with his humanity or your own. You can worship instead of embody. You can believe instead of live. It’s a brilliant move if your goal is control. Not so great if your goal is transformation.

Strip away the layers of theology, politics, and institutional spin, and you find something far more dangerous than what Christianity preserved. Jesus wasn’t executed for starting a religion. He was executed for disrupting one. He challenged the alliance between religious authority and political power, and he did it without holding any official position himself. That’s what made him dangerous. He didn’t oppose the system by building a rival system. He made the existing one look unnecessary.

The Romans didn’t crucify nobodies. Jesus mattered. Not because he held power, but because he exposed it. His message stirred hope, and hope is not harmless. Hope destabilizes systems that rely on resignation. It wakes people up. It makes them harder to control. Jesus told people to stop outsourcing their authority, to stop deferring to religious gatekeepers, and to trust what was alive and true within themselves. That’s not religion. That’s a direct threat to anyone who benefits from people staying dependent.

Every time Jesus spoke, he was pulling another block out of the structure holding everything in place. He didn’t need an army. He didn’t need a platform. His clarity did the damage. He revealed that the system people thought they needed wasn’t necessary in the way they had been told. And once people start to see that, the whole thing begins to wobble.

What’s ironic is that the religion built in his name ended up doing the opposite of what he did. It rebuilt the very structures he exposed. It reintroduced authority, hierarchy, and dependency, then stamped his name on it for legitimacy. And now, two thousand years later, Jesus is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Talked about endlessly, but rarely recognized.

Jesus might be the most famous missing person in history. Not because he disappeared, but because the institution built around him made sure you wouldn’t find him.

(excerpts, my emphases, Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy )

* * *

Department Of A Blast From The Past

Dateline: January 2025. A new year; a new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month). My thought at the time: Perhaps moiself will like this enough that it will turn out to be a regular blog feature. So far it has, but time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.

This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?! ^[8] friend gave me, all those years ago, ^[9] as to why I should be writing a blog: a blog would serve as a journal of sorts for my life. Thus, journal/diary-resistant moiself would have some sort of a record, or at least a random sampling, of what was on my mind – and possibly what was on the nation’s mind – during a certain period of time.

Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago April to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

Here is an excerpt from my blog of 4-10-25 ( The Bird I’m Not Calling ).

Department of Seasonal Poor Taste

Content warning: Well, duh.

My (belated) Easter sex joke:

He is risen!
He is risen, indeed! [10]

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [11]

“I HAVE AN EASTER challenge for Christians. My challenge is simply this: tell me what happened on Easter. I am not asking for proof. My straightforward request is merely that Christians tell me exactly what happened on the day that their most important doctrine was born.

Believers should eagerly take up this challenge, since without the resurrection, there is no Christianity. Paul wrote, ‘And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain…. ‘ (I Corinthians 15:14-15)

The conditions of the challenge are simple and reasonable. In each of the four Gospels, begin at Easter morning and read to the end of the book: Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20-21. Also read Acts 1:3-12 and Paul’s tiny version of the story in I Corinthians 15:3-8. These 165 verses can be read in a few moments. Then, without omitting a single detail from these separate accounts, write a simple, chronological narrative of the events between the resurrection and the ascension: what happened first, second, and so on; who said what, when; and where these things happened….”

Protestants and Catholics seem to have no trouble applying healthy skepticism to the miracles of Islam, or to the ‘historical’ visit between Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni. Why should Christians treat their own outrageous claims any differently?…

[Thomas] Paine points out that everything in the bible is hearsay. For example, the message at the tomb (if it happened at all) took this path, at minimum, before it got to our eyes: God, angel(s), Mary, disciples, Gospel writers, copyists, translators. (The Gospels are all anonymous and we have no original versions.)

But first things first: Christians, either tell me exactly what happened on Easter Sunday, or let’s leave the Jesus myth buried next to Eastre (Ishtar, Astarte), the pagan Goddess of Spring after whom your holiday was named.

( Excerpts, Leave No Stone Unturned: an Easter Challenge for Christians
Freethought Today, by Dan Barker )

Then, like now, you’d think somebody at the time would have noticed zombies walking around….

* * *

May you enjoy the rites of spring, no matter what natural processes and/or mythical beings you attribute them to;
May you apply a healthy skepticism to all supernatural claims;
May you always notice when zombies are walking around;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] The latter group would not include anyone within a twenty mile radius of my dining table.

[2] Which is why, once my feminist worldview began to develop, I told her it was completely understandable that she never even considering retaining her birth name upon marriage

[3] Which translates into, usually moiself . Things were always happening to moiself .

[4] And although I remember with vivid clarity the conversation that ensued from me sharing that story about the kid being teased re his name, to this day I cannot recall what the kid’s name was – something along the lines of Bart Katz, which of course got turned into Barfing Cats or Fart Cats or the like.

[5] Or fittingly, according to your POV.

[6] When early Christian missionaries encountered the tribes of the north, they attempted to convert them to Christianity and, of course, alter their existing religious observations. They did so in a clandestine manner, as suggested by church authorities and finally “officialized” in 601 A.D., when Pope Gregory I issued an edict to his missionaries regarding the customs of peoples they wanted to convert. Rather than banish native customs and beliefs, the pope had his missionaries incorporate them (e.g., if people worshipped a tree, rather than cut it down, Greg I advised missionaries to consecrate the tree to Christ).

Early Christians holy day observances coincided with celebrations that already existed. And as with almost all “Christian” holidays, Easter was originally a festival of another religion, and derives from a variety of pagan celebrations. It made sense to Christians to alter the festival itself, to make it a Christian celebration. Still, every Easter, many Christian parents are put in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to the kiddies why the torture, execution, and supposed resurrection of Jesus is celebrated with colored eggs and cute widdle bunnies. Uncomfortable, in that most adult Christians have only a vague clue about the connection. Some grant that Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover celebration. However, seeing as how Yahweh didn’t send a plague of egg-hiding rabbits into Egypt, the link seems rather feeble.

The name of the holiday, “Easter,” is the name of a pagan goddess, and was identified as the source of the holiday’s name by “The Venerable Bede” (672-735 CE), a Christian theologian (in his book De Ratione Temporum.) The name “Easter” has many variations (Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Ester, Eastra, Eastur, Austron, etc.) but all of these come from the same Roman deity, the goddess of the dawn, named “Eos” or “Easter.”

[7] The refutations of that assumption, along with the problems which come from assuming such veracity and/or the reliability of scriptural sources, are just a google search away.

[8] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.

[9] Was it really over twelve years ago?

[10] For those not familiar with churchy stuff, this is the traditional Paschal greeting.

[11] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Matchmaker I’m Not Playing

April 3, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, exercise & fitness, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, Recreation, Wow, Yikes! Comments Off on The Matchmaker I’m Not Playing

Department Of Getting All Zen On Y’all’s Asses

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something,
loves something,
and has lost something.

And everyone feels better after looking at a picture of a baby sloth wearing pjs.

* * *

Department Of The Theory Of Let Them

I’m not sure if this can – or should – apply to politics in the wider sense; e.g., when it comes to the depredations of The Mandarin Turd Führer and company, we don’t just want to let them. But in one’s personal dealings, I have found this to be helpful.

* * *

Department Of Dude Doesn’t Waste Time
Getting Down To Brass Tacks [1]

Sub-Department Of Things I Learned From The Older [2] Man Who
Approached Me As I Was Waiting For The Door To Zumba Class To Open

Dateline: Monday; circa 10:55 am. An affable, petite, elderly man, [3] whose appearance and accent indicated he came from a culture different from mine, approached me and wished me a good morning. He looked familiar; I’d seen him in class at least once. Thus, after I returned his greeting, I passed on the information a staff member had given me when I first entered the Rec Center: the Zumba class was going to start a few minutes late, as another group was using the facility.

He nodded, said he’d just come from another Zumba class at Hidden Creek (another Hillsboro Parks & Rec facility), and asked if I was married.

The casual ease with which he spoke his question – which I found to be both a straightforward query and a non-sequitur, given the circumstances – took me by surprise…but not in a threatening way.

“Yes,” I said, “I am married.”

He looked at my left hand, his eyes widening and sparkling with mischievous disbelief when he beheld the modest band on my ring finger (MH and I currently choose to wear plain but colorful silicon bands, which, I have been told, “…don’t look like *real* wedding rings” ).

“You are married?” he asked again. I laughed, repeated my marital status affirmation, and decided to return the straightforward-ness: “I take it you are not married, and are looking to meet someone?”

He seemed pleased by my supposition. Yes, he enthused, he is looking to meet a woman for dating! He reached into his jacket pocket, retrieved a piece of paper that had his name and phone number on it, and asked me if I would be so kind to take down the information and pass it along to any women I know who might also be looking for companionship.

Moiself was feeling generous, and said that I would. As I reached for my phone to take a picture of the paper, I asked if he was using his family for matchmaking ( a common practice in his culture ). He said he’d decided not to go that route. I asked him what he sought in a date, and what should I tell prospective dating partners about him? He told me…

* He is 78 years old, a retired chemical engineer originally from ____ (another country);

* He was married for 43 years, has been widowed several years;

* He frequently visits his daughter, who lives nearby;

* He doesn’t ask his daughter to “fix him up” because she isn’t happy about him wanting to date;

* He has looked at online dating apps but is not impressed by them (and he doesn’t do social media);

* The age of the woman doesn’t matter to him;

* He offers companionship, kindness, and affection, and seeks the same;

* He has found that there are two things which people think are important to control in their life: their diet and their religion. But he wants people to know that he doesn’t care “about any of that;”

* “Everyone” at the Hillsboro Recreation centers knows him (he said that after an employee passed by and greeted him by name), because he is so friendly;

* He is open to meeting a woman from any background, *but* not from ____ (his home country). This is for several reasons, including the “fact” (as he put it) that after they (women from his culture) are widowed, they don’t look to date or remarry; rather, they join their children’s families and spend their time looking after their grandchildren.

I guess I won’t be passing his number on to June.

He asked me to stress that he is monogamous (“Not like many other men who,” he said, “flip around” [4] ), and that he goes to exercise classes and takes care of himself, “even though with age…” he glanced down, patted his protruding belly, and chuckled. He then complimented me – “And you obviously take care of yourself” – and touched my upper arm, very lightly and quickly squeezing my bicep. It was a gesture I might have found insulting and/or icky from someone else, but from him, it was almost…sweet? Is that ageist, or patronizing of me?

I found him wistfully charming; not creepy or threatening, and there was an air of both optimism and loneliness about him. As the Zumba classroom door opened I said something positive about networking ( “Well, that’s how you do it – let others know you’re looking” ) and wished him well in his search. We shook hands and he bid me farewell. It turned out he was not going to class. It also turned out (surprise! As in, not) “He does that to every woman,” I heard from another female class member, after she asked about the bemused look on my face and I told her about my gentleman solicitor.

* * *

Department Of Sometimes I Feel Like Moiself Should Wear
A Black Arm Band For My Country

Context: recently messaging a friend from high school, who has lived now for decades overseas, about The State Of Things In My (and formerly, his) Country ® . My friend’s past experiences include being in the US military and working in health care with mentally ill – life experiences which, along with being bicultural and multilingual and an expat ( a stranger in a strange land which he has now made his own) – give him a keen and unique perspective on what he sees going on in his native land. His pithy articulation shredded my heart.

“Do I miss my homeland? No, not really, but I do mourn for it.”

* * *

Department Of What’s The Best Advice You’ve Ever Received

While listening to the rebroadcast of the No Stupid Questions podcast, What’s The Best Advice You’ve Ever Received [5] moiself didn’t immediately come up with my alternative (as in, Ah, yes, and the best advice I ever received was….” Instead, I was intrigued by how many possible answers there might be to that question, perhaps as many different pieces of advice as there are advice givers, and seekers.

Podcast host Angela Duckworth:
“The first thing that leaps to mind is I was about 19 or 20 years old. There was a professor named Kay Merseth, who I’m still in touch with. And I remember being unhappy and going to Kay for advice. I can’t exactly remember whether it was another romantic breakup…or more that I was struggling with a career decision. Like: should I go into education, which I really wanted to do, but my dad wouldn’t speak to me after that, or should I become a doctor like he does want me to.

And I remember she said this: ‘Angela, it sounds to me like you really want to make the right decision, the best decision.’ And I nodded. And she said, ‘But life’s not like that. Life is a story. And your job is not to tell the ‘right’ story or even the best story. It’s just to tell a story that you can be proud of.’ And I went away from that day thinking, ‘What the hell did Kay mean? This is too deep for me.’

But I have actually used that advice when I talk to undergraduates in my own course. Now they’re the 19 or 20-year-old, and I’m the professor. And I do think the reason why Kay gave that advice to me — and why I pass it along — is that I think I was a little bit paralyzed by, like, ‘What’s the absolutely correct or best decision?’ And we can’t know. I mean, life is just mostly uncertainty. All we can do is act in a way where we can use the intuition we have. There are many, many paths in life, and who knows how this is going to turn out? But am I doing something that — at the end of the story, will I look back and say, ‘I’m proud of that?’

( Excerpt; my emphases, No Stupid Questions podcast,
What’s The Best Advice You’ve Ever Received ),

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [6]

“No myths need to be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No person god needs to be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need to be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.”

( Neuroscientist, philosopher, meditation teacher, podcast host, author Sam Harris,
excerpt from The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, And The Future Of Reason )

* * *

May you discern when or when not to just Let Them;
May we do more than wear a black armband for our country;
May your life be the best advice someone else has ever received;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] Whence that phrase, which means getting down to the basics or serious business? And can the tacks-one-is-getting-down-to be of an alloy other than brass? Getting down to pewter? Bronze? Sterling silver?

[2] As in, older than moiself.

[3] Not stooped with age; he had good posture but couldn’t have been more than 5’2″ (and even smaller, were he barefooted).

[4] I think he meant, flit around?

[5] originally aired 8-29-21

[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Best Picture Award I’m Not Voting For

March 13, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, extended family, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, movies, music, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, school, science, Wow, Yikes! Abbie Hoffman, Feminist Parenting anthology, hierarchy of isms, If You Want To Be Happy;Pi Day;AEDD month continues, Jimmy Soul, Oldies radio format, remembering a great young woman, sexism more acceptable than racism, Song of Myself, Steal This Book, The Life of Chuck, The Mighty Quinn, The Oscars, This Here and Now, Walt Whitman Comments Off on The Best Picture Award I’m Not Voting For

The only reason I’m not casting my vote for the 2026 Best Picture Oscar is because moiself is not a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences…either that, or the Academy misplaced my ballot. Not that it would matter, because I’d do a write-in; that is, I’d vote for a movie that didn’t win last year, because it was egregiously mistakenly not on the ballot: 2024’s The Life of Chuck.

If you hold as truth, as I do, the idea that we all contain multitudes, [1] then all of the movies which existentially and ultimately mean more than diddly-squat [2] can be contained in The Life of Chuck.

* * *

Department Of Helpful Reminders

Tomorrow is Pi Day. Do you have your recipes ready? Seeing as how it’s AEDD [3] month, y’all can guess what my entrée will feature.

“I think she means us!”

* * *

Department Of Tomorrow Is Pi Day And Today…

…is a significant day for my circle of loved ones. Moiself wasn’t going to mention the significance until I made a…perceptive typo, if there is such a thing. [4]

Background info: every Friday I write and send two letters ( yep, “snail,” in the mail), one to each of my offspring. I begin each letter with either a haiku or limerick, rotating every week. This week is a haiku week. The two letters I sent today began by noting the birthday of someone dear to us, who was taken from us way, way, way too soon. [5]

A Haiku For SEH
A wise life guide is
to “Love ’em while you got ’em.”
And she was so loved….

I can’t write about anything else today, which is SEH’s birthday. She would have turned 35 today. She’d have had finished her residency; I like to imagine her working…in one of her several specialties: family medicine; wilderness medicine; reproductive medicine? She loved the outdoors so much, and was concerned about this country’s eroding reproductive rights and access to medical care in underserved communities…. I like to think she might have stayed in Utah to provide women’s health care there, or in other more restrictive states. She shone bright in her brief but significant life, and her fabsence is keenly felt.

Yikes, did you see what I just did typed? I decided to let the typo stand; certainly her absence is keenly felt, but IMO she also had a keen fab sense.

“Sarah Elizabeth” English tea rose

* * *

Department Of I Guess I’ll Never Know The Answer
If I Never Ask The Question

Dateline: Sunday, ~1p.m., returning from lunch with MH. As MH steers our car into our driveway an oldie begins playing on the car radio. I recognize Jimmy Soul’s bouncy 1962 hit, If You Want To Be Happy. The song begins with its chorus:

“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life/
Never make a pretty woman your wife/
So for my personal point of view:
Get an ugly girl to marry you…“

The song goes on to extol the virtues of marrying an unattractive woman. The singer proclaims that, among other plusses, an ugly woman won’t ever leave you ( as per the stereotype, she’ll be grateful for any attention she receives, ’cause no one else would want her ). Oh, and she’ll be a great cook.

Har de har har!

The first time I heard that song ( Junior high? It was already an oldie) moiself was appalled. When I expressed my distaste for the lyrics, a guy friend accused me of being a Women’s Libber With No Sense Of Humor® ( “Oh c’mon, it’s an old song; a light-hearted joke of the times… “ ).

Skip to decades later, to the day when daughter Belle came home from high school in a grumpy mood. She told me about a boy who’d been sent home to get a change of clothing because he’d shown up to school wearing a t-shirt with a slogan on it that another boy objected to as being racist. What gave Belle the grumpies was that the previous week, when she and another girl had gone to the administration to complain about a couple of troglodytes male students who harassed female students and wore t-shirts with misogynistic slogans (e.g., with a drawing of a boy ordering a girl to “Shut up and make me a sandwich” [6] ), they were told by said administrative spineless lackies personnel that what those boys were doing wasn’t “illegal” and that there was nothing the school could ( read: would ) do about that.

I sadly confirmed to my daughter what experience was already teaching her. Yep, you are not imagining things: there’s a hierarchy of political and cultural concern with discriminatory isms and ists. Something deemed as racist is seen as worse than something deemed as sexist. It’s not (or shouldn’t be) a contest; still, isms/ists are often pitted against one another, as many a Black feminist has attested.

“As a black woman I’ve been told that…I’m supposed to be black first and stand in solidarity with black men. Focus on the impact of racism, specifically on racism that negatively impacts black men. Stop bringing up sexism so much.” [7]

If the student at Belle’s school had worn a short with a drawing of a white boy ordering a black boy to Shut Up And Go Pick Me Some Cotton, he’d be sent home/ordered to change his shirt and possibly even suspended. But wearing a shirt with a slogan meant to put a female in/remind her of “her place” – somehow, that was acceptable, or at least tolerable.

On the rare occasions when I hear that Jimmy Soul song – which still receives airplay on Oldies stations – I think of what moiself has long wanted to ask someone who whistles along to the up-tempo ditty: What if, instead of referencing a sexist stereotype of the early 60s, the If You Want To Be Happy song contained a 1962-ish, “light-hearted” reference to racism? Would the song have even gotten airplay, then or now? If it got airplay today, would its dodgy lyrics be excused as a relic of the times? Ala….

“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life,
Never make a light-skinned woman your wife,
So for my personal point of view,
Get a colored girl to marry you…”

* * *

Department Of A Blast From The Past

Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago March to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

Here is an excerpt from my blog of 3-14-14 ( The Book I’m Not Stealing ) – two excerpts, actually, both of them book-related:

“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.”
― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away….

Okay, it was 1971. American anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman wrote and published Steal This Book. As intrigued as I was at the time – by the “counter culture” and social activism of the late 60-s–mid 70’s in general and by Hoffman’s cheeky chutzpah in particular – I declined to pilfer Hoffman’s prose. Stealing anything was not something I was inclined to do. I also did not buy his book because how in good conscience could I lawfully purchase a book that was, essentially if puckishly, advising me not to do so?

Thirty-three years later I find myself wondering: who, if anyone, bought that book?

* * *
( second excerpt [10] )

Belle leaned against the doorway to my office, respectfully but insistently reminding me that I’d agreed to donate copies of two of my books (my short fiction collection This Here and Now and my juvenile novel, The Mighty Quinn) to her friend A’s senior project…and…uh… A needs those books, now. Up in the attic, searching for a box to put the books in, I remembered I had copies of another book of mine – “mine” in the sense that my writing was in it, even if my name wasn’t on the cover – to donate.

Feminist Parenting: Struggles, Triumphs and Comic Interludes (The Crossing Press, 1994) – has it really been twenty years since its publication? My contribution to the anthology was an essay [11] wherein I juxtaposed the naming of my soon-to-be firstborn, K, with how I chose names for my fictional characters. I was honored to have my contribution included along with a variety of essays, stories, and poems – selections from literary luminaries like Robin Morgan and Anna Quindlen, [12] and literary ordinaries like…well, like me.

The publisher-arranged publicity for the book consisted of readings by the anthology’s contributing writers, held at select locations throughout the country. There were enough contributors from the Pacific Northwest to do a reading in Oregon, which took place one stormy January evening in Eugene, at the erstwhile vanguard of independent feminist bookstores, Mother Kali’s. [13]

May Mother Kali recommend some light reading-perhaps a political satire or a wacky historical romance?

MH, sitting in the in audience with our son K on his lap, later noted that I was the only one of the speakers F-parenting in what (used to be) the normative child producing/rearing relationship: I was a woman married to a man with whom I was raising our child. There were four of the anthology’s contributors present: One lesbian mom, two divorced/single moms, and moiself -mom.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [14]

* * *

May you find a way to use diddly-squat in conversation today;
May you know what it feels like to be the least normative in a crowd;
May you remember to love ’em while you got ’em;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] As per the movie’s “I contain multitudes” reference, from the Walt Whitman poem, “Song of Myself“.

[2] Sorry to get with all the graduate-level philosophy concepts.

[3] Asparagus Every Damn Day, as noted in the previous week’s blog.

[4] And now, I think there is.

[5] She was murdered, seven years ago. I wrote about it here: “The Life I’m Not Mourning” and here: The Speculation I’m Not Endorsing; and here: The Reality I’m Not Denying.

[6] The phrase has various attributed origins ( including a 1995 SNL skit ); whether it is aimed at feminists in particular or women in general, it plays off the sexist idea that it’s a woman’s place to be in the kitchen serving her husband or boyfriend.

[7] ( [Why] Do you think Black Men aren’t trusting of Feminists or on-board with Feminism as a movement? Reddit.com/r/AskFeminists )

[8] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.

[9] Was it really over twelve years ago?

[10] I wasn’t (consistently) using the Department Of format then)

[11] “What’s in a Name? Ask My Pal, Barry.”

[12] I particularly enjoyed Quindlen’s essay, “What About the Boys?”

[13] I know, I know. The bookstore was named in the 70’s, okay?

[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Nails I’m Not Perfecting

March 6, 2026

Robyn Parnell books & magazines, community, current events, exercise & fitness, extended family, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, music, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, sports, travel, TV, Wow, Yikes! advertising tag line fail, AEDD, asparagus every damn day of March, Gidget movies, Manzanita beach, Mormon missionaries, Mt. Neahkahnie, perfect fingernails, Porch Preachers, religious proselytizing, The Big Kahuna, witnessers are marketing reps 1 Comment

Department Of Can It Already Be Day Six Of AEDD?

AEDD. No, it’s not some type of learning disability…you could think of it as a culinary learning (or experimentation) opportunity.

It stands for Asparagus Every Damn Day ® . To honor both the impending arrival of Spring and my love for asparagus, I challenge moiself to cook and/or eat asparagus, in some form, every damn day of March. Last year I had some favorites creations; mostly, I defaulted to what’s-easy-but-I-still-love-it (e.g., oven roasted lemon garlic asparagus spears, creamy [1] asparagus and green pea soup….).

Gird your proverbial loins and let the wild rumpus begin.

* * *

Department Of My Favorite Blast From The Past

Were I asked by Someone to come up with an example of carefree bliss, I would show that Someone this picture.

Moiself, son K and daughter Belle (and Mt. Neahkahnie in the background), on Manzanita beach, circa…two decades ago. Picture taken by MH, existential protection provided by Mt. Neahkahnie.

* * *

Department Of Asshat Tag Line Of The Year [2]

Dateline: last Friday; driving to the Oregon coast, listening to one of my science podcasts. At the end of the podcast there is an advertisement from one of the podcast’s sponsors. The ad is for…some kind of service having to do with manicures. Repeated at least three times during the ad is the service’s enticement/slogan, something about how “…we all deserve to have perfect nails.”

And I find moiself thinking, do these people understand the target audience of this podcast? And how can the proverbial we all – or just moiself – deserve anything having to do with our fingernails? And is it deserve as in, how we all deserve basic human rights and to be treated with dignity (and not harassed about our less-than-perfect nails)? And what, exactly, constitutes perfect nails? And is there a committee, a governing board, which establishes and oversees such a standard of perfection?

And the sheer inanity of this ad is provoking way too many, And and and and questions – which made me want to (should moiself be offered a free sample of the product) take whatever was being advertised and heave it off the rim of the Grand Canyon. [3]

Important Note To The Advertising Industry, whether large scale Commercial/Industrial And/Or Small Business Owners: Struck as I was by the astounding vacuousness of the ad’s tag line, I can’t tell you what service it was for. Which is the ultimate failure of an advertisement, the very purpose of which is to get you to want (or at least remember the name of) the product.

I’m assuming these were not the top choice of the Fingernail Perfection Police.

* * *

Speaking Of Mormons…

…which I was, two weeks back ( 2-20-26, The Documentary I’m Not Inspired By, re the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping documentary)….

Department Of And Now Some Words About Witnessing

Relax; it’s a story about Porch Proselytizing®. There will not be pamphlets left on your front doorstep. [4]

The prompt for this story is…moiself saw an article online having to do with someone complaining about having to shoo Porch Preachers away from their front door.

The above is the sign I made and had laminated 10+ years ago, a larger version of which is on our front porch below our doorbell. The sign, in my estimate, keeps ~98% of solicitors away. Before I did the rewording I had another sign up, a cartoon illustrating how we do not want solicitors, but – surprise ! –there was always a Someone who thought it didn’t apply to him. When moiself answered the doorbell, realized who the stranger was on my porch/what he was up to, and pointed toward our no soliciting sign, that Someone would say, “Oh, I’m not *selling* anything. I have good news that’s free…”

Even before the signage, religious solicitors – Mormon “Elders” [5] in particular – left skid marks getting away from my porch, after I’d engaged them and they realized What Kind Of Uppity Woman They Were Dealing With ®.

What used to surprise moiself, about the solicitors I personally encountered as well as those I’d known over the years who’d engaged in such activities, was their seeming befuddlement re overwhelmingly receiving less-than-hospitable reactions from those whom they sought to evangelize. I had to wonder: from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Mormons to Evangelicals, in their witnessing training, was there not even a smidgen of attention paid to the basic human psychology behind someone not in *your* group being presented with *your* group’s message, with no request from them for your thoughts and/or opinions?

Was there no mention of the reality that it is highly likely that what you are indoctrinated trained to think of as informative/friendly/useful information, will be seen by others as presumptuous? And that’s because it *is* presumptuous. A friendly demeanor and/or beatific smile on your face does not dilute the ultimate cluelessness and arrogance of your mission: you are approaching a stranger, unsolicited by her, knowing nothing about her save for the (likely [6] ) fact that she does not share your spiritual worldview, which therefore in your worldview means her worldview is deficient…and you think you can (and even should) enlighten her!

I bet she can’t wait to hear the good news from white boys wearing even whiter shirts!

I remember seeing and hearing my mother deal with the Mormon “Elders” ( nine out of ten of the proselytizers we got were Mormon ) who would, every couple of months or so, ring the doorbell of our Santa Ana home. First off, no one who knew our family came to our front door (when I was a young child I didn’t even know if our front door “worked,” or if it was just for show). We all entered and left the house, along with our friends and neighbors, via our side door or backyard door. Thus, when there was a ring/knock at the front door we knew it was from a stranger; i.e., someone who didn’t know us. This Someone, experience taught us, most likely wanted to sell us something, and would ask to speak to “the adult of the house,” so I and my siblings would call for our mother to answer the front door. But I liked to lurk in the background, to…watch.

My mother would never confront the Porch Preachers, despite my advice that she should tell them the truth ( that you think they’re whack-doodles ) and not waste anymore of your or their time. But Mom came of age in the 1950s, meaning she was raised to be a Nice Woman®. She would listen to their opening spiel, then give her standard, gentle-but-firm, “No thank you; we have our own religion,” response, and wish them a nice day while she gently shut the door.

There was one exception (that I know of) to my mother’s unperturbable niceness with solicitors. This happened during a weekday, the summer before I entered eighth grade. A pair of Elders knocked on our front door. I heard the customary/brief exchange between my mother and the elders, then noticed it was going on longer than usual at the front porch. I was surprised to hear the rising pitch of a young male voice, followed by my mother sputtering, “Blasphemy!” before slamming the door.

After commending her display of backbone, I asked what they had said to her. Instead of simply accepting her brushoff, that pair of snot-nosed albinos [7] didn’t do what they should have done at that point – thank her for her time, apologize for disturbing her, and get the fuck off her property. [8] Instead, one of them challenged her. Yes, you may have your own religion, the cadaverously pale, just-past-post-adolescent pompous primnose [9] preached to a woman twice his age, but only *our* faith has the “true revealed truth“ (I can’t remember the verbatim exchange, but I remember that phrase, and how I’d guffawed at the redundancy).

“Yes, God is beyond our understanding…but let me tell you about him….”

* * *

Department Of And Now For Something (Not So) Completely Different

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [10]

( excerpt a scene from the movie The Big Kahuna. Three industrial lubricant salesmen, Larry, Phil, and the evangelical Christian Bob, are at a convention in Wichita. In this incisive scene, Phil is speaking to Bob, emphases mine.)

“You preaching Jesus is no different than Larry, or anybody else, preaching lubricants. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling Jesus or Buddha, or civil rights, or how to make money in real estate with no money down. That doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a marketing rep.
If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids, find out what his dreams are — just to find out — for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation, to steer it, it’s not a conversation anymore — it’s a pitch — and you’re not a human being. You’re a marketing rep.”

Or perhaps you prefer the wisdom of *this*Big Kahuna (on the far right) from the world of Gidget surfer-movies.

* * *

May we all have our own favorite example of bliss;
May you never give a thought to the quality of anyone’s fingernails;
May you enjoy all that damn asparagus;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] Yet, without cream. Yep, it’s those dastardly plant-based cooking tricks….

[2] Or more…the century is young.

[3] Please do not take this as any form of encouragement to litter in our beautiful national parks.

[4] At least, not metaphorically, from moiself. Who knows what happens in *your* neighborhood?

[5] I just love that title, once reserved for revered people of great age and wisdom in the community, now doled out by the LDS to pimply-faced boys who get the respected title simply by being a male age 18 and up, while a kick ass, grown-ass woman like moiself who is twice their age could never be an Elder in their world.

[6] It’s more than a likely fact, if you are a Mormon missionary. Mormon missionaries are given a list in the neighborhoods they canvas; they don’t waste time showing up at the houses of other Mormons. They know whether or you are not Mormon, because they are given that info by the local Mormon church. Unlike other brands of Christianity, if you are Mormon you do not go to whatever LDS church you like, you go to a certain church – “chapel” – that has a specific geographical area assigned as “their area.” If you live in that geographical area, you are supposed to go to services at that chapel, and your address is noted.

[7] You’ve never seen how white the white boys can be until Mormon missionaries come to your doorstep. I used to think they were selectively bred for their lack of melanin.

[8] I probably don’t need to explain that that was *my* 12-year-old-smartass’s interpretation of their responsibilities as uninvited solicitors, and not my mother’s thoughts.

[9] Yeah, I made that up. But, you know, right?

[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Moral Consideration I’m Not Granting

February 27, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, exercise & fitness, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, music, nature, politics, radio & podcasts, sports, travel, TV, Wow, Yikes! are animals conscious?, chef Andreras Viestad, dance workouts good for brain, Emma Goldman;Norwegian salad dressing, Jane Fonda workout, Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, Kitchen of Light, Michael Pollan, Nordic lettuce, Norwegian Æsir, Winter Olympics, Zumba Comments Off on The Moral Consideration I’m Not Granting

Department Of Now That The Winter Olympics Are Over I Can Get Back To
Considering Issues Of Profound Ethical And Existential Importance®

Host David Marchese:
“What do you think we should *do* with the increasing awareness that more animals might be conscious than we previously thought? ….we *know* human beings are conscious and we exploit the hell out of other humans all the time.”

Guest Michael Pollan:
“…there’s this whole conversation…that if A.I. is conscious, then we’re going to have to give it moral consideration. Well, really: have we given moral consideration to one another? Have we given moral consideration to the chickens and the cattle that we eat? The answer is no. It doesn’t automatically follow. So, we’re going to have to sort out the ethics.”

Michael Pollan:
“Maybe it’s around the ability to suffer. Maybe that’s where you draw the line…but it’s not as easy as: Ital you’re conscious, therefore you have all these rights…. Who we grant personhood to is a very subjective human decision. We give it to corporations, oddly enough, which are not conscious, but there are all sorts of creatures we don’t give it to. I don’t think we’re entirely rational or consistent in our granting of moral consideration.”
( excerpt from journalist and professor Michael Pollan’s interview with David Marchese,
“Michael Pollan says humanity is about to undergo a revolutionary change,” 2-7-26, NY Times podcast The Interview )

So yeah, there’s that. Or….

I could search the incredible volume of available videos online and perhaps find an entire channel devoted to showing a continuous loop of All Races Won By Norwegian XC Skiing Æsir-god Johannes Høsflot Klæbo® .

You know what you need to do.

* * *

Department Of Five Words You Don’t Hear Me
(Or Anyone) Saying Very Often…Or At All

“This Norwegian salad dressing rocks!”

Holy Hel [2] and Herring Heritage – it seems moiself is producing a (unintended) Norski theme blog. [3]

Dateline: last week. I finally got around to making this salad dressing, from the innovative mind of Norwegian chef Andreas Viestad. I’d been intending to do so for some time; now, I want this dressing on every lettuce-based salad I eat, for the rest of my life.

Viestad, who also hosts the PBS show New Scandinavian Cooking, pissed off impressed the European gastronomic world by when his cookbook on Norwegian food was selected the “Best Foreign Cookbook in the World” and also was awarded Special Prize Of The Jury at the 2008-2009 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.

Norwegian Salad Dressing
(moiself’s adaptation of Andreas Viestad’s recipe; serves 2-3)

Viestad’s recipe uses juice from the lettuce offcuts to make a dressing with an intense lettuce flavor. Use your best lettuce for the salad, and the dressing (which will be an intriguing dark green color).

2 to 3 small heads of your favorite/most flavorful lettuce
– one small head of radicchio or other bitter salad green [4]
– 1 t Dijon mustard
– neutral oil (I use avocado)
– splash of lemon juice or any vinegar (optional)
– ground black pepper; and a pinch of fresh or dried dill
– sea salt to serve

(1) Rinse and tear the greens into bite-sized pieces; dry them in a salad spinner. Set aside the “cutoffs” (inner stems, core, and outer leaves) of the greens.
(2) Juice cutoffs in a juicer; strain juice ( you want ~ ¼ c ). [5]
(3) Add juice to a jar along an equal amount of oil as juice (or less, as moiself prefers) the Dijon, the spices, and lemon juice/vinegar; shake well to combine. Mix dressing into the salad leaves, serve w/sea salt sprinkled atop greens.

Many people who eat salad don’t tend to care about (or even notice) the flavor of the lettuce – it’s all about the dressing. [6] Viestad came up with a dressing that uses the bits and pieces of the lettuce that we tend to throw away but where the lettuce flavor is concentrated – almost more lettuce-flavored than the lettuce itself – which is why the greens you use should be your favorites. Y’all foodies may be thinking, Why would you *trust* any salad recipe from a Norwegian? Growing lettuce in the high north might sound like a bad idea, but as one Norski “salad farmer” explained to Andreas, [7] the far northern farms of Norway have good soil, good water, good light, and the cold night temperatures help the salad greens to grow “strong, crispy, and tasty.”

The only reason our household now has a juicer is because moiself wanted to properly make this dressing [1] . I *love love love* this dressing; please try it out, and I must emphasize again that you should do so using the best, flavorful lettuce you can find. On that subject, I hope I don’t have to remind anyone that storebought [8] iceberg “lettuce” is anything other than nasty and flavorless. My favorite description of iceberg lettuce came from an anonymous post on a food-related bulletin board, from a former restaurant worker: “…with the experience I got being an employee I can tell you that iceberg lettuce tastes as poor as my life’s decisions….at the end of the day it’s just water with a cell structure.”

In moiself’s opinion, it was the preponderance of iceberg lettuce in the Titanic’s food storage holds that actually sank the ship (there was a miscommunication when the first mate radioed for help…and the rest is history).

* * *

Department Of Every Senior Person Should Be Taking This Class-
Dang, That Means Me As Well…

Moiself is having a hard time identifying with that label, as, according to the various demographics (depending on which ones you consult), you enter senior territory at age 55, or not until 60, or 65, or 70, or 75…. I recently took a Zumba class labeled for that (“senior”) demographic. And now I’m thinking that every person, regardless of age, should also be doing so, if only to provide reason/excuse to get up and shake it instead of sitting on your ass all day commune with your fellow human beings.

I was trying to think of some activity something to stretch or even test my foot recovery. [9] At my most recent postop check (two weeks ago) I asked my doctor if a Zumba class might be good; I’d been searching for something other than what I do at home (neighborhood walking; elliptical and treadmill workouts; yoga; weights and core routines) to give my foot some new challenges. He asked if I’ve done any Zumba before my surgery. No; but I used to do a lot of Jane Fonda workout tapes back in 1990s.

I did the tapes, but not the spandex.

I told the doc that the classes were held at the local community/senior center, so it’s unlikely they’d include ski jump landing preps or ice-skating quadruple jumps or extreme…whatever. Thus, I told him, unless he said no, I was planning on checking out the Zumba class. After briefly examining my foot he gave me his thumbs up– “Feel free to resume normal activities but don’t push till it hurts/do anything stupid.”

So: moiself had my first class on Monday. [10] What can I say? I found it to be so delightful and stimulating that it’s probably banned in countries that frown on people of any age (read: females) moving in ways that distinguish them from infrastructure.

“Now, move to the music…can you even hear the music?”

And by moiself thinking that everyone should take the classes, I don’t mean only the specific brand of class called, Zumba – I’m referring to any exercise class incorporating movement/choreography/what might be called dancing.

Most of us have heard and/or read about how dancing is “good for us;” and most of us don’t have the time or inclination to take formal dance classes, often because we think that you must have a dance partner to do so. And the latter is not the case in a dance fitness class.

Research on multiple levels of study (involving brain health, psychological and social well-being ) suggests that dance-based workouts help protect against the cognitive decline that can happen as people age. From what I’ve read, learning dance/choreography workouts (I’m going to invent the acronym DCW [11] ) reduces stress by boosting your mood through the release of endorphins, providing an outlet for emotional expression, and, when it’s done in a class with other participants, [12] creates and strengthens social connections and a sense of belonging. DCW require focus as you listen to the beat, follow steps, and feel the rhythm – DCW require you to be mindful, as in, putting your mind in the present moment, or more colloquially, paying attention to what you are doing.

So, DCW aren’t just good for your mood – they’re also also great for your brain and your physical coordination. DW enhance cognitive functions, such as memory and spatial awareness and concentration…and yeah, all that’s fantastic, but it’s also just plain fun.

This move is not done in Zumba; still, I challenge you to be in a bad mood when you’re imitating a dog about to pee on a fire hydrant.

Oh yes, the class itself: the instructor (who was a sub for the usual class teacher) was excellent – both chill and enthusiastic. Also, it turns out she has a really great name (even though she spells it wrong [13] ). After the first two dance sections, in the five or so seconds of pause before the instructor queued up the next music, moiself inadvertently blurted out, “Oh, this is fun!” Apparently, in-class out-bursts are not the norm, as the teacher immediately assured the rest of the class, “She’s new.” [14]

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [15]

( Emma Goldman was Russian-born, radical anarchist activist and lecturer who opposed capitalism and fascism and promoted equality for women, workers’ rights, and free education during the Progressive Era. )

* * *

May your lettuce (or your life) be more than just water with a cell structure;
May you find make room for both Issues Of Profound Ethical And Existential Importance® *and* Norwegian sports videos;
May your revolution (and exercise) always encourage dancing;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] I tried it with a high-speed blender – nope.

[2] In the Norse pantheon, Hel is the god (female – let’s do away with this “ess” notation, as if the male gender is the default and the female is the decorative afterthought) of death and the netherworld. Just in case you’re thinking of getting on her good side, Hel’s favorite offerings are tea, chocolate, dried meats, preserved flowers, mead, and raw honey.

[3] Just for a couple of issues.

[4] Soak radicchio or other bitter greens in ice water (helps tame the bitterness) for at least 15m while you prepare the rest of the recipe, or scroll online for cat videos .

[5] You could also use a heavy duty/high speed blender, like I did the first few times, but this takes some time and it doesn’t work as well, IMO.

[6] Except for MH, who, much to many people’s bewilderment, has always preferred his green salads sans dressing ( he thinks that dressings are or can be a cover for less-than-tasty-greens/other salad ingredients.

[7] In this episode of New Scandinavian Cooking (for which you need a PBS account, I think)

[8] Some home veggie gardeners say that there are varietals that are more palatable. I think they lie, or at least, exaggerate.

[9] I had surgery on my left foot in Mid-November.

[10] The second today.

[11] For Cance Choreography Workouts…but perhaps for a catchier acronym, Damn Cute Wiggling?

[12] As opposed to doing it alone in your home, to a dvd or online class.

[13] Robin.

[14] Her explanation was probably not necessary, as, from what I could see, all I got was enthusiastic smiles, and no Debbie-Downer Stop Having Fun looks from the other participants.

[15] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Resume I’m Not Updating

January 9, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, health & wellness, Isms (religion), politics, school, Wow, Yikes! 1950s restrictions on married women, BLD-Boot Liberation Day, Dawn Villines, derailing conversations about misogyny, life at the Post Office, my mother's resumé, Not All Men Comments Off on The Resume I’m Not Updating

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard’s pear tree. [1] One last week for this, and then the holiday is officially over (in our front yard, at least).

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

* * *

Department Of Buh-Bye, Betty

Happy BLD (Boot Liberation Day) to moiself!

* * *

Department Of No Chairs Were Flung Harmed By The Making Of This Rant

When moiself has heard the “But, not all men…” line – spoken when someone attempts to derail the subject when I have been pointing out misogynist behavior and culture – I have somehow managed not give into my gut reaction, which is to fling a chair at the face of the “But, not all men…” (corollary, “But I’m a good Guy® … )”, spewer. [2]

Now I have another option. I can refer the misguided defenders of Good Men® to this explains-it-all essay by the astute Dawn Villines. Read it all after you enjoy this excerpt.

“Good men care about oppression. They care about the lived experiences of women. They understand that, without listening to women, they cannot learn what women experience. They believe women. When women share their experiences and your responses is, ‘But not all men!’ you undermine those experiences. You show no concern for oppression. You are not behaving as a good guy.

Imagine a friend was sharing with you that they had cancer. You wouldn’t jump in and proclaim that not all people have cancer, now, would you?

There’s also the now-infamous thought exercise of not all snakes. Imagine being put into a box with snakes. Only a few are venomous. ‘It’s not all snakes! What are you so worried about?!’

This is what life is like as a woman. It is irrelevant that there are some nice guys out there. It’s irrelevant even in a world where most guys are decent, because so many guys are not decent. So we have to act as if all men are a danger, because we know also that when men victimize us, society won’t believe us—and that random people will pop into the discussion to tell us that our suffering doesn’t matter because it’s not all men.”

( excerpt, Hello You’ve Reached Not All Men hotline, by Dawn Villines, )

* * *

Department Of An Appropriate Container

Christian theology in a nutshell:

A Short History of God [3]

Creates Adam and Eve
Creates Evil
Populates the world through incest
Surprised that the evil exists
Clueless about how to deal with evil
Drowns the entire planet, saving one small family of very skilled ship builders
Populates the world through incest…again
Surprised the evil exists…again
Sends diseases, starvation, plagues, tsunamis, etc.
Still bewildered by the existence of evil
Blames the devil…that he created
Rapes a girl so she’ll give birth to himself as his own son so that we can torture and kill him/his son so that he can forgive us for being so evil
Says “just joking” three days later and brings his son back to life
Claims omniscience and omnipotence
Expects to be worshipped for his wisdom

* * *

Department Of A Blast From The Past

Dateline: January, last year. New Year; new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month). It turned out that moiself liked this enough that it was a regular blog feature for 2025. Will it continue throughout 2026? Time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.

This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?! [4] friend gave me, all those years ago, [5] as to why I should be writing a blog: a blog would serve as a journal of sorts for my life. Journal/diary-resistant moiself would have some sort of a record, or at least a random sampling, of what was on my mind – and possibly what was on the nation’s mind – during a certain period of time.

Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago January, to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

Here’s an excerpt from my January 8, 2016 blog (The Dr. Seuss Book I’m Not Reading). I spun the wheel, picked a January ten years ago…and now I’m reminded of why I write this blog. I’d forgotten this poignant memory, which wiped me out for the rest of the day, after I reread it:

My Mother’s Resumé

Last week my older sister forwarded a text she’d received from CG, one of our mother’s caregivers. The subject was, “Mom wants to pitch in.”

(It was a ) Good day here. Your mom was making her resumé for a while in her office. She feels that she should be working. I didn’t want to dampen her hopes but we talked about being a volunteer which of course would be too much….

I got a kick out of it…for a moment. The image of my mother making her resumé – is cute, funny, sweet – make that, bittersweet. And now a part of me wants to know: did mom follow through, and what would be on it if she did? What would this 87-year-old woman (who is not always cognizant of her own age [6] ) list on her resumé?

My mother was the youngest of four daughters – her parents’ midlife, “oops” baby. [7]

Like most women of her generation, my mother had little hope for independence as an adult and was, essentially, sentenced to life with her parents until/unless she married.

She moved with her mother and father to Santa Ana (CA) after her father retired from his job in Cass Lake (MN), an event which coincided with Mom’s high school graduation.

Mom enrolled in the local community college, got an A.A. degree, and managed to land a job with the Post Office.

I gathered from the stories she told me over the years that she loved her job. Although she still lived with her parents, [8] she was thrilled by the promise of even a modicum of independence that arose from earning her own money – she was saving up to buy her very own car; she really liked the styling on the Chevy Bel Aire! – even as she was less than thrilled (read: downright resentful) to be privy to the status and higher salaries of her fellow Post Office employees, all older than her and male, whom she described as slack-off, ineffectual, Civil-Service-for-life “geezers” whose jobs she felt she could do so much better (and sometimes did, but without credit) but would never be hired for or promoted to.

And then she got married.

She transferred her savings into the account of he-who-would-be-my-father, and their joint monies went for the deposit for their apartment, and a couple of years later, after my older sister was born, the down payment for their first house.

Oh, and she had to quit her one and only “real” job after she got married.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds…but married women give ’em the willies.

What do you mean, you had to quit your job when you got married? Why?

No matter how many times I asked that question [9] I never received a satisfactory answer. This was because

(a) there can be no satisfactory answer to a rational question about an absurd situation;
(b) my mother, hardly the bastion of feminist consciousness and one of the least
introspective and politically conscious persons I’ve ever known,
didn’t understand the why herself.

When I’d press her, she’d say that she didn’t know if it was codified Post Office policy, but it was common knowledge that only single women were hired for such clerical work. Her supervisor informed her, when she told him she was engaged, that she could remain at her position “until that time,” but that she’d have to quit her job when she got married.

It’s been 60 – sixty!? – years since my mother had worked for pay. She worked nonetheless and of course for all those years, in a job of total dependency – a job which wasn’t even called a job, and for which there was little-to-no recognition outside that from the family which “employed” her. She played by the rules; she heeded the porous platitudes from the male-worshipping culture which spawned, formed, defined and limited her:

We won’t let you be a scientist [10] but you will have
the-most-important-job-in-the-world-as-wife-and-mother!

That same ManSociety neglected to mention that, lofty rhetoric aside, it placed little value in that “most important” of jobs, which by the way and don’t you worry your pretty little head about this will leave you completely financially dependent upon your husband and without translatable, marketable experience and skills.

And now, ’tis 2016. Seemingly apropos of nothing, a sweet, memory-addled, elderly widow-woman wants to update her resumé. If she were physically and mentally able to seek employment, what would she be qualified to do? [11]

I won’t ask, in my next phone call with her, how her resumé is shaping up. It would only confuse and upset her; she’ll have no memory that she mentioned her project to CG. She will have forgotten; I can’t. It’s gnawing at me, in a wistful way that makes me think about the last book Dr. Seuss never wrote: Oh, the Places You Could Have Gone.

I’d like to think that, if only for a moment, when my mother was thinking about writing her resumé she was reaching for the proverbial stars, and genuinely if only fleetingly thought she had a chance at applying for something important and exciting. Astronaut camp counselor? Postmaster general? Chevrolet design engineer? Hell’s bells, what good is a stalling memory if you can’t jump start it and take a joy ride every now and then?

1954 Chevrolet BelAire

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [12]

* * *

May you never need a referral to the Not All Men hotline;
May you reach for the proverbial stars when updating your life’s resumé;
May we all go bowling instead
( and ride to the bowling alley in 1954 Chevrolet BelAire! );
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] Specifically, in the pear tree daughter Belle purchased and (with the help of MH) planted many years ago

[2] Lest you think me superior in my self-control, fact is there are rarely fling-worthy chairs in my vicinity.

[3] Would love to give attribution…but can’t find it.

[4] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.

[5] Was it really over twelve years ago?

[6] My mother suffers from a variety of age-related ailments, including memory impairments.

[7] And the fact that she knows the history of her “embarrassing” birth – that she was told by her parents that her “arrival” was an embarrassment to them – explains a lot, IMHO, about many aspects of her personality.

[8] Apartment complexes/landlords would not rent units to unmarried women.

[9] I stopped asking around the time when I was in high school, when, thanks to the Second Wave of Feminism, I “got it.”

[10] My mother’s high school physics teacher announced on the first day of class that he would not teach science to female students and fhe wanted them to leave the classroom. My mother’s mother intervened with the principal, and the teacher begrudgingly let the girls stay in his classroom but continued to slight them (including my mother, who would go on to be her class valedictorian). He never looked at them during his lectures and ignored their raised hands when he asked for questions…with one exception. He agreed to teach my mother’s best friend, Dorothy, because “It is obvious Dorothy will never marry,” and thus she’d need to be educated to support herself (Dorothy had been facially disfigured at birth by the inept, forceps-wielding doctor who delivered her). This story was first told to me when I was taking physics in high school. I’d commented on something we’d learned in class, and my mother told me she’d never found physics very interesting. Imagine that.

[11] Please don’t say, Walmart greeter. Gawdammit, I heard ya.

[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Resolutions I’m Still Not Making

January 2, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, extended family, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, Holidays, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! bland Chinese food, Born To Run, brown sauce, Bruce Springsteen, Fresh Air, gender harassment in science, Jane Goodall, misheard lyrics, New Year's Day food traditions for luck, New Year's Resolutions, Rosalind Franklin, Suzanne Mathis McQueen, The Mathlda Effect, Vance and Miller rant Comments Off on The Resolutions I’m Still Not Making

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

* * *

New Year’s Reflections [2]

I’ve come full circle, and perhaps another 45 degrees, on the whole New Year’s Resolutions Thing ®. As an adolescent I was intrigued by the idea of making New Year’s Resolutions – or at least I was the first time I heard an adult talking about it. Then in young adulthood [3] I thought, oh puhleeeease, what a crock. Whenever I was asked about my NYR‘s I’d reply that I had already, several years ago, made the only resolution I’d ever kept: to never make another NYR ( moiself’s past failed resolutions included, “Be taller,” and “Do not engage in audible eye-rolling when someone mentions their detox cleanse.” ).

Now, I think NYR are a fine idea. Yeah, resolve to “do better,” however and whenever you can and whatever that entails for you. Of course, you don’t have to wait for the start of a new year to do so, but after all, the world is full of arbitrary limits, guidelines and restrictions, [4] so what the heck.

Some of my resolutions for this year are more profound than others; all shall remain private, save for this seemingly hackneyed one which, if kept, has a good chance of turning out to be the most nourishing to body and psyche: Have more fun.

* * *

Department Of It is Too Early To Tell, But I Still Don’t Think It’s Working.

That it’s would be my father’s family tradition to ring in the new year.

☼ Hoppin’ John Spicy Collards and Black-eyed Peas Scramble [5]
☼ Green Chilie Corn bread

Yesterday moiself’s New Year’s Day menu (listed above) once again included a dish featuring black-eyed peas. I have done this for…decades, I guess. I do this in honor of my father and his heritage: specifically, his family’s tradition of eating black-eyed peas, collards and cornbread on New Year’s Day – an act of culinary optimism which was supposed to bring good luck for the coming year.

Despite consuming black-eyed peas every New Year’s day, my father’s family remained dirt-poor sharecroppers. [6] Every year, as I bring whatever black-eyed pea dish I’m making to my family table, I can’t help but wonder: just once, did a brave soul in my father’s family– possibly his adored, spunky younger sister, Lucile – when presented with yet another bowl of black-eyed peas and the directive to, Eat up, y’all, it’ll bring us good luck in the coming year!, look around at the ramshackle farmhouse and her barefooted siblings [7] and mutter, “It still ain’t workin.’ “

* * *

Department Of A Thing I Have Just Now Learned
Sub-Department Of WTF Is Wrong With Me, [8] Adjacent
To The Department Of Starting The Year With A Clean Slate

Dateline: last weekend; listening to one of Fresh Air’s year -end shows, when they replay some of their favorites of the year’s interviews/shows. This one was on the making of the now-iconic Bruce Springsteen song, “Born to Run.”

At the point in the show when FA host Terry Gross quoted some of the song’s evocative lyrics, I snickered to moiself, “That’s so funny – has Terry misheard that line, all these years, or is she being censored?”

I decided to look up the lyrics, for gloating purposes…and…

* apparently, someone was mishearing the line, all these years;
* apparently, that someone wasn’t Terry Gross;
* apparently, the line is indeed, as TG quoted,
“…baby this town rips the bones from your back,”
and not, as moiself has been hearing,
“…baby this town rips the balls from your back…”

* * *

Department Of May The New Year Educate These Abominable Twits

On 12-28 Suzanne Mathis McQueen, my right-on-sister friend who is also an author, entrepreneur, and feminist inspirational leader, [9] posted a most concisely articulate takedown of the right’s miseducation and hysteria re immigration. She was moved to do so in response to recent remarks made by Vice President J.D. “Jeering Doofus” Vance and top White House aide and racist policy formatter Stephen Miller – and oh please, ye deities who do not exist, ease the pain from having Vice President accompany the name of such a festering turd of political, spiritual, and educational fraudulence….

Once again, I digress.

Veep J. D. “Judgmental Dickhead” Vance, speaking at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2025 in Phoenix, Arizona on 12/21, hyped up the slavering crowd of religious and racial bigots attending the event by claiming that, thanks to the current administration’s war on DEI, “You don’t have to apologize for being White anymore.” A few days later, top White House aide Stephen Miller, after chugging too much bootleg eggnog, [10] posted a batshit crazy anti-immigrant rant after watching a 1967 TV ( The Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas ), featuring two of the USA’s favorite entertainers at the time and – heads up Miller – both sons of first generation immigrant parents.

Really. I can’t make up this shit.

Here is SMM’s post ( my emphases ). The fact that those whom SMM addresses evidently lack the introspection and cognitive flexibility to consider (much less understand, or agree with) her lucid presentation in no way negates the observable truths she so forthrightly states.

Dear JD Vance:
No one’s asking you to apologize for being white.
I’m asking you to apologize for being so appallingly stupid about being white.

Dear Stephen Miller:
My guess is that you have zero percent indigenous (to this landmass) in you
– ya know, the folks who were on this continent for 23-30 THOUSAND years –
which includes the Mexicans.

Whenever your white family came to this land, from wherever they came, they did so to find a better life, which was no more than 400-ish years ago, or less.

Which means, like me, you are a descendant of immigrants.

And…if you came from these first immigrants, your family, as part of a societal group of immigrants, did not assimilate into the local culture. They took resources, were a burden on the local society, nearly wiped them all out, and cruelly forced them out of their lush homelands onto desolate land.

And if your family doesn’t come from these first immigrants, your immigrant family benefitted from what had been set up for them by the first ones.

Stephen, again, you come from immigrants.

Perhaps this is why you’re afraid of not-white people or other immigrants. Perhaps you’re afraid they’ll take back the land of their people, or not assimilate and instead conquer – physically or intellectually. Your fear lives steeped within your cellular memory of history – of not wanting the same to happen to you.

While we can’t change that history, humans are designed to grow and learn if they want to. We can create win-win immigration standards that serve, protect, and respect all.

Repeating history that caused harm is dangerously ignorant.

Repeating history that caused harm and claiming to love Jesus
all in the same philosophy, is blasphemous.

Jesus wasn’t a bigot. End of story. Let’s move on.

* * *

Department Of Maybe Next Year We’ll Tweak This Holiday Tradition

Background: Over the years several of moiself’s Jewish friends, acquaintances and/or coworkers/co-travelers, who told me that they were convinced that I was Jewish but “didn’t know it,” recommended that I go out for Chinese food on Christmas day. I decided that this was the year…so…where to go? When MH and I moved to Hillsboro [11] we were profoundly disappointed in the quality of the Chinese eateries available. [12] Eventually we stopped asking for recommendations from friends and neighbors, so as to not have to disappoint them later when they asked for our reviews. We’d moved up from the San Francisco Bay Area, and had taken for granted the plethora of outstanding Chinese restaurants (not, ahem, Chinese American restaurants ) available…and in our experiences/opinions, none of what Hillsboro (or even Portland) had to offer measured up to Jing Jing. [13]

Dateline: Christmas Day, 12:20 pm; getting ready for our 12:30p lunch reservations; donning my Yule season sock and shoe (singular this year – only my right foot can accommodate festive hosiery as the other is in a surgical boot).

My phone beeps; friend JWW texts me her season’s greetings, which I return.

Moiself:
“And Merry Christmas to you!
MH and K and I are about to celebrate our inner Jew and
go have Chinese food for lunch.”

JWW:
“Great idea. Where are you going to eat?”

Moiself:
” ( restaurant name redacted ). Haven’t been there in years.”

JWW:
“American Chinese. Let me know how it is. I miss American Chinese.”

One hour later, at the restaurant waiting for the check, I let her know.

Moiself (texting) to JWW:

“You *miss* American Chinese? Seriously?
I could make food just as bland and never leave home….
Actually, it’s pretty funny.
I ate all of my dish ( aptly described on the menu as tofu and vegetables with brown sauce, and although there was no discernible flavor, the sauce was indeed brown) because I was very hungry…
but this is some of the most boring food I have ever had.
I guess it’s a good sign when you’re at the type of restaurant where the server never bothers to ask you how things are, because then you don’t have to lie about the food, or say something like, “Well, it’s in my stomach….”

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [14]

One of the many things moiself dares to hope that, in the new year, scientists like the late greats Rosalind Franklin and Jane Goodall will experience less of the “damage of gender harassment” and The Matilda Effect [15] (note that I am not wishing for a complete elimination of the gender bias – I’m not that naïve).

* * *

May you decide what kind of difference you want to make;
May that difference be the “luck” you make for the New Year;
May you have good luck no matter what you ate on January 1;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] Specifically, in the pear tree daughter Belle purchased and (with the help of MH) planted many years ago

[2] As in, from the beginning of my blog of seven years ago.

[3] I think that should encompass ages 20 – 56.

[4] e.g. you are no more capable of making discerning political choices the day before your 18th birthday than you are the day of your 18th birthday; still, you can’t register to vote when you are age 17 years 364 days….

[5] What made John hoppin’ was the addition of black-eyed peas.

[6] Make that, “tenant farmers,” as sharecroppers was considered a pejorative label.

[7] My father’s parents couldn’t afford shoes for all six of their children, so as the elder kids got shoes they handed them down to the younger siblings. You got to wear shoes if there were a pair that happened to fit you. My father went to his proverbial grave not knowing that my mother had shared the story, with my sisters and I, of how our dad was embarrassed as a child when he showed up barefoot at school and was teased by the townie kids, who called him a dumb barefoot farm boy. And the shack house he was raised in literally had dirt floors in some of the rooms.

[8] Don’t answer that.

[9] As per her Wikipedia page, so there!

[10] Can you think of any other reason he made the connection?

[11] Thirty five years ago as of next month. Yikes.

[12] And not just in Hillsboro, even in Portland.

[13] Which closed after 38 years of business – they got priced out of downtown Palo Alto. DAMN.

[15] “Gender harassment…defined as disrespecting, demeaning, and deprecating women and their work, abilities, and accomplishments, simply because they are women…is by far the most prevalent form of sexual harassment in academic science…. (Rosalind) Franklin…is among history’s most prominent subjects of…the Matilda Effect: the practice of ascribing women’s accomplishments to men. An expert in x-ray crystallography, Franklin led the team that created what has been called ‘arguably the most important photo ever taken,’ the celebrated Photo 51, which revealed the helical structure of DNA. When the structure was published in 1953, however, Franklin…was not among the authors. Her crucial contribution was mentioned cursorily at the end of the article as having ‘stimulated’ the authors, James Watson and Francis Crick…who, with their paper, gained priority as discoverers…. Comments from Watson and Crick reveal the gender harassment that Franklin endured in the lab. Throughout The Double Helix, Watson’s famous 1968 book recounting the race to the famous structure, Watson condescendingly refers to Franklin as ‘Rosy,’ a nickname never used to her face. ‘There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents,’ he writes, though neglecting to critique his male colleagues’ cosmetic or sartorial choices…. He adds that her ‘belligerent moods’ interfered with Wilkins’ ability to ‘maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA.’ For that reason, ‘[c]learly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.’ In the 1993 book Nobel Prize Women in Science, Crick was quoted as saying, ‘I’m afraid we always used to adopt—let’s say, a patronizing attitude towards her.’ ” ( Excerpts from ITAL Rosalind Franklin and the damage of gender harassment, by Beryl Lieff Benderly, science.org 8-1-18 )

The Sun Salutations I’m Not Performing

December 19, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, movies, TV, Wow, Yikes! 108 Sun Salutations for the Winter Solstice, Carl Reiner, Carolyn Hax, Edward Sorel drawings, FFRF 2026 calendar, going to eleven, Rob Reiner, The American President, the everyday stench of misogyny, The Princess Bride, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally Comments Off on The Sun Salutations I’m Not Performing

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

* * *

Department Of ( the upcoming ) Happy Winter Solstice To All

And to my fellow yogis, if this tradition is in your practice, moiself hopes you have a memorable 108 sun salutations. Since I am recovering from a surgery which requires that I put *no* weight on my left foot, throw in a few sun salutations for me, if you will.

Or maybe moiself will just engage in some adaptive yoga to mark the occasion.

* * *

Department Of Our Window Is In Solidarity With Jewish Neighbors
And Friends And Coworkers…

and in this sad year, the Australians on Bondi Beach, and a certain, gone-way-before-his-time filmmaker….

* * *

Department Of There Goes Another Piece Of My Heart

Rob Reiner was one of those artists whose name would not immediately spring to mind if I were asked to name either my personal favorite or the most influential contemporary movie directors…. Then, I heard the heart-twisting news re his death, began to consider his body of work, and realized that Reiner had directed many of the gems on my 100 Favorite Films List ® , [2] including

* When Harry Met Sally
* Spinal Tap
* The Princess Bride
* The American President

Reiner on the set of “The Princess Bride”

As is the case when a Famous Artist® dies, every news story about the demise includes a rundown of the artist’s résumé. But something is missing/is in error in all of the encapsulations I’ve seen (so far) of Reiner’s professional life: he did *not* get his “start” (however one calculates that) by co-starring in TV show, All In The Family. Before that, Reiner was a writer on the subversive, cutting-edge-at-the-time, comedy-variety show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. [3]

“Steve (Martin) and I wrote the first fart joke ever done on national TV.”
( Rob Reiner, ” ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’ at 50: The Rise and Fall of a Groundbreaking Variety Show: Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, brothers Tommy and Dickie Smothers and more look back on their experiences transforming TV comedy with the innovative and controversial series,” The Hollywood Reporter, 11-25-17 )

Moiself found much to respect about the man. [4] Besides the excellent and varied films Reiner wrote/produced/acted in/directed – and it’s mind-boggling to fathom that the same guy who directed This is Spinal Tap also helmed Misery and Ghosts Of Mississippi – I admired Reiner’s political and community involvement, and what seemed to be his general sense of decency, kindness, perspective and humility. In all the interviews I heard/read about with Reiner over the years, he seemed well aware of the leg-up advantages/entry to showbiz *he* had, that others equally (or more) talented and driven lacked, via the connections that came from being the son of Hollywood icon Carl Reiner (and thus he counted among his family friends such comedy legends as Mel Brooks and Normal Lear).

Bravo, Rob Reiner. When it comes to your contributions to the cinematic arts, on a scale from one to ten, you go to eleven.

* * *

Department Of Nailing the Reason Why In Eighteen Words…

Dateline: 12-9-25; The Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax, responding to a Letter Writer’s dilemma. LW seeks Hax’s perspective in a why-do-does-he-do-this-and-what-can-I-do-about-it situation:

The LW’s father-in-law does not like the name the LW and her husband chose for their daughter, and he keeps insulting LW’s toddler daughter’s name ( yes, this child is the FIL’s granddaughter!), in front of the LW *and* the little girl. FIL continues to do this, even after LW asked him to stop. However, FIL no longer taunts his granddaughter about her name when his son is present, after his son (LW’s husband) asked his father to back off.

“…. But that’s why misogyny is so persistent and so insidious:
You get nose-blind to an everyday stench.”
( Carolyn Hax, from Father-in-law isn’t subtle about hating his granddaughter’s name )

* * *

Department Of It’s So Difficult To Choose….

…but this might be my favorite of the Edward Sorel drawings in my FFRF 2026 calendar.

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [5]

* * *

May you not go nose-blind to the everyday stench of prejudice;
May you treat yourself to a Rob Reiner film retrospective;|
May you take the opportunity to go to eleven;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] Specifically, in the pear tree daughter Belle purchased and (with the help of MH) planted many years ago

[2] Which is something list makers list, and although I’m a list maker I haven’t done that one yet, but it does seem to deserve some kind of special notation….

[3] Whose other writing alum included comic/actor/author/banjoist/perennial SNL host Steve Martin and musician Mason Williams.

[4] Including that ground-breaking fart joke, for which I will be forever grateful.

[5] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Sandwich I’m Not Eating

November 7, 2025

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), music, radio & podcasts, school 15 minutes of fame or shame, Andy Warhol, appetite stimulant, contact highs, Led Zeppelin concerts, lurkers, message boards, Milwaukee Brewers Karen, Monica Lewinski's TED Talk, National Sandwich Day, Ologies podcast, pronoun usage and misusage obsession, the evil of faith, the munchies, the study of evil Comments Off on The Sandwich I’m Not Eating

Department Of Sober Memories

Dateline: Monday, November 3; 5 a.m.-ish; playing my morning wakeup/online games, one of which informs me [1] that it is National Sandwich Day.

Which assumes the question, What’s your favorite sandwich?

Sandwiches formed the bulk of my daily lunch items during my (pre-college) school years; however, moiself isn’t much of a sandwich eater these days. Thus, no name of a favorite sandwich pops into my mind. But I do have a favorite sandwich story.

Dateline: High school; my senior year, if memory serves. [2] Moiself is driving my friend MB and I back from the Long Beach Arena, where we ‘ve seen Led Zeppelin in concert. We arrive at her house, realize that we are both famished, and head for her kitchen. MB rustles up a loaf of bread, two plates, and various utensils while I empty the contents of her refrigerator onto her kitchen table. We proceed to construct sandwiches of…yeah…of things I would never consume in combination today. I cannot recall every ingredient we used, but the point was that we used almost every available ingredient. What sticks in my mind is three kinds of mustard, mayo, pickle relish, cottage cheese, raisins, peanut butter, olives, marmalade, some kind of roasted or peppers….. We called our creations – which we consumed with I-can’t-believe-we’re-eating-this?!?!? gusto – Led Zeppelin sandwiches.

And if any of these items had been available that evening
we would have put them between two slices of bread.

Moiself has never been a toker, not even in my younger days (nor, to my knowledge, was MB). So, although I was not a conscious (as in intentional) imbiber, unlike Bill Clinton I did inhale. It was either that or suffocate at most of the rock concerts of that era. And the “air” at Zeppelin concerts set the EPA record [3] for particulate matter (read: wafting weed fumes).

I can’t believe [4] that it took moiself *years* [5] to realize that the only logical explanation for post-Zeppelin concert sandwiches MB and I made and scarfed down with the last-meal desperation of death row prisoners was that we must have gotten a contact case of the munchies.

This was pretty much the scene at the Long beach Arena balcony seats. [6]

I can’t remember having been that hungry since the time I gave our cat Nova an enthusiastic, several minutes long head rub, forgetting that MH had previously applied a transdermal appetite stimulant gel to her ear. [7] Apparently, the medication works on all mammals – or at least cats *and* humans – as I discovered during the ensuing 24 hours when I emptied our kitchen cupboards and tried to eat everything in the house.

Yeah, blame the old sick kitty.

* * *

Department Of Name Your 15 Minutes – Shame, Or Fame?

Last week, due to several current events prompts, moiself relistened to Monica Lewinski’s TED talk. The Price of Shame is one of the best TED talks, or public service presentations of any kind, I’ve ever heard. If you haven’t listened to it and/or you think you know what you think about Lewinsky, listen to her recount her unique situation (read: ordeal) of being one of the first cases of the internet being used as a forum for public shaming and cyber-bullying.

I relistened to her talk after reading about a recent public incident which brought to mind Andy Warhol’s [8] famous proclamation, that in the future “…everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”

Moiself thinks that not only are we’re heading for (if not already occupying) Warhol’s prediction, our present is morphing into a future where “…everyone will be shamed for 15 minutes.” The particular example I’m thinking of is the already infamous Milwaukee Brewers Karen incident at a baseball playoff game last month:

“A Milwaukee Brewers ‘Karen’ who went viral after threatening to call ICE on a rival Los Angeles Dodgers fan has reportedly been fired from her job.

The spectator, named online as Shannon Kobylarczyk, was seen in a racist rant towards Ricardo Fosado – a US citizen and war veteran – in footage that has been viewed more than a million times on X.

During Dodgers’ 5-1 win in the MLB playoffs…Fosado can initially be heard saying to the home fans around him in the stands: ‘Why’s everybody so quiet? What is this?’

His remark appeared to clearly irk the ‘Brewers Karen’, who fired back with a jibe about Donald Trump‘s immigration agents, saying: ‘Let’s call ICE.’

Fosado replied: ‘Call ICE! Call ICE! I’m a US citizen, war veteran baby girl. Two wars. ICE cannot do anything to me.’ At one stage of the video she seemingly tried to slap Fosado’s phone out of his hand while also calling him a ‘p***y’….

it took less than 24 hours for the woman in question to be fired by her employers….”

( excerpt, “Milwaukee Brewers ‘Karen’ fired from job after disgraceful racist rant towards war veteran at Dodgers game,” Daily Mail, 10-16-25 )

As repulsed as I was when I read about MB Karen’s bigoted bluster, I didn’t think she should necessarily lose her job due to her public display of drunken [9] asshattery. And apparently, neither did the target of her racist rave.

“An American citizen of Mexican descent who was on a business trip to Chicago when he decided to attend the game, Fosado said he thinks Kobylarczyk ‘made a mistake….
I feel bad for her…..We cannot be judged on one mistake and a lot of emotions were involved. It was just hurt feelings, nobody physically hurt anybody.’ ”
( excerpt, “MLB Fan Reportedly Loses Job For Terrible Remark During Playoff Game,”
yahoo sports, 10-16-25 )

Certainly, MB Karen earned her moment in the Shame Spotlight®. And she’s going to live with the consequences of her revelatory rant for at least the internet equivalent of 15 minutes (and it will be Google-able for much longer), until the internet shame/lynch mob moves the spotlight to yet another guano-for-brains loudmouth.

* * *

Department Of Giving The Annoying Thing Another Chance…

That annoying thing would be a certain part of the podcast Ologies, 95% of which I genuinely enjoy and find informative…but it’s that 5% that frosts my butt. I’ve whined written about this before: the 5% annoyance involves one of The Reasons The Good Guys Lost The Election ® issues ( namely, the Left’s obsession with pronouns and labels, and with critiquing how someone says or asks something vs. focusing on the content of what someone is actually trying to say or ask).

Ologies podcast host Alie Ward, in her intro to each episode, talks about her guest using they/them pronouns. Okay; fine; whatever floats her (their?) boat…except that she records this intro *after* she’s already done the interview. And she begins each interview with the annoying-to-moiself part, where she asks her guests to introduce themselves by stating their names and pronouns. The majority of the time, when Ward’s guest is female, that guest says she uses she/her pronouns, and if the guest is male, he says he uses he/him pronouns. Thus, Ward already knows what pronouns her guest prefers. Yet, when Ward is in post-production for the episode, doing the intro, she refers to her guest using they/them pronouns.

Yep. She asks her guests to state their preferences, then later ignores their stated preferences, which I find incredibly patronizing and WTF-ing-point-is-there-in-asking?, face-palm-worthy.

A recent example of that was in the episode Critical Ponerology (WHAT IS “EVIL”?) with Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick.

Once I got over the irritation (Ward referred to the he/him -self-identified Dr. Ken as they), I was intrigued by the episode’s subject. What a topic for study – what is ‘evil’!? It is a word – a concept – that is exceedingly difficult to define, and perhapss even trickier to understand the history of the word, and who has been allowed to define it. And that sent me on a flashback…

…this once-upon-a-time was some 30 years ago. Pre-social media; pre-Twitter, X, Reddit, et al, for a period of about four or five weeks I used to check a certain message board. [10] Moiself had found this message board via a reference from MH about a colleague of his who’d made commentson the board, on a subject MH thought I might find interesting. After several weeks of checking the board twice a week (I suppose that qualified me as a lurker?), I was moved to make my first (which turned out to be my last) comments on it.

I posted said comments one day when the message board topic focused on what one of the posters termed the “evil” of natural disasters. This One Particular Poster® was getting all hot under his metaphorical collar, referring to a recent hurricane which had brought extensive wind and flooding damage to the southeastern seaboard of the USA. He did this – called the storm, *evil,* – several times, which brought out the Let’s all be clear about our terminology cop in moiself. I felt moved to offer that I found the use of the word evil, when applied to an explainable phenomenon of the natural world (e.g., earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes), problematic, as in, factually incorrect.

I gave my brief definition of evil as that which involves the motivations and intents of sentient beings. As devastating as the effects of, say, a tornado can be for humans, tornadoes have neither the agency nor the intent to deliberately and maliciously cause harm. The hurricane has no ill will toward the coastline residents who live in its path; it simply forms due to the particular physics of wind, ocean temperatures, currents, et al.

Before making the above fairly innocuous (IMO) comments, I had looked up records of other recent storms. I found several other major hurricanes and typhoons which had formed and then dissipated in open waters, either never making landfall or doing so on the shorelines of deserted islands, thus causing no damage to humans or human structures. I referenced those storms in my comments, and wondered if OPP would consider those storms *not* evil?

OPP’s response was a hurricane of vitriol, as he blew his hot air into me: “LADY, you don’t think that the hurricane was evil?!?!?!? Just ask the people whose homes got smashed, whose lives have been destroyed – LADY, *you* think the storm was not evil? Just ask the people who experienced….”

Yada yada yada. OPP kept on with his emphasis of how wrong LADY was. He had clearly misread or did not understand my point… Which other message board commentators quickly noted on my behalf.

Those others also noted OPP’s repeated use of the term LADY to address me, as if he were flinging a pejorative. And BTW, there was nothing my comments nor in my online posting name which would indicate my gender identification…which caused the other message board commentors to speculate if there was more than a wee bit o’ misogyny in OPP’s LADY assumption?

PP’s switched his LADY tempest tantrum to my defenders. Meanwhile, moiself lost interest in the silliness of it all. So much for my one foray into the online chatroom world.

One more thing, re the podcast’s subject matter of what is evil. Whatever you might hold the definition of evil to be, moiself thinks there are plenty of sufficient synonyms for that which is intentionally malicious and/or harmful. Evil is a word I’ll use hyperbolically or sarcastically but never seriously, as, IMO, evil, like sin, is one of the conceptual stones around humanities’ neck with which religious thought has burdened us.

* * *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [11]

“Faith is the process of granting assent without proof, especially to supernatural claims. Faith is what you use to oppress, to justify, to judge in the name of (your) god – faith is the means to rationalize more evil in this world than anything in history. If there were a devil, faith would be his greatest invention.”
( attribution…unsure? )

* * *

May you remember that nothing in the natural world is inherently evil
May you have a favorite sandwich (or sandwich story);
May you never cross paths with anyone (including Jerry Lewis)
who would call you LADY;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!

* * *

[1] I don’t know why…but, why not?

[2] And it does, although sometimes the serve is an ace, and other times it’s a foot fault.

[3] In moiself’s not-so-scientific estimation.

[4] But I have to, since it’s true.

[5] Really. Like, two decades.

[6] Actually, it’s a still from the 1938 movie, Reefer Madness.

[7] Nova was experiencing loss of appetite and weight due to kidney disease, and was prescribed an appetite stimulant by her vet.

[8] Warhol, according to his Wikipedia bio, is “generally considered among the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century.” Well, certainly he was one of the most self-important, self-proclaimed artists, surpassed by none when it came to promoting himself.

[9] I’m assuming.

[10] Message board? Chat room? I can’t remember what it was called…I think MH alerted me to it, thinking I might find the discussions therein “interesting.”

The Blog I'm Not Writing

The Breath I’m Not Holding

The Healthy Skepticism I’m Not Having Trouble Applying

The Matchmaker I’m Not Playing

The Best Picture Award I’m Not Voting For

The Nails I’m Not Perfecting

The Moral Consideration I’m Not Granting

The Resume I’m Not Updating

The Resolutions I’m Still Not Making

The Sun Salutations I’m Not Performing

The Sandwich I’m Not Eating

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