Home

The Professional Title I’m Not Respecting

November 28, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, politics, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , Comments Off on The Professional Title I’m Not Respecting

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]

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Random Realizations That I Can’t Blame On The Post-Foot Surgery
Narcotics Since I’m Not Taking Them Anymore, But I’m Much Housebound,
And These Thoughts…Arise

I know – or, since I’m telling y’all, should that be, You Oughta Know – that, had moiself  been a freshman in college in 1995, my dormmates would have heard a lot of Alanis Morrisette blasting from my room.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Random Thoughts/Observation/Realizations That
I Can’t Blame On….  Chapter Two.

I was reading a newspaper article which contained an interview with a clergyman (who was quoted as some sort of expert on some sort of religious subject).  The clergyman’s title was given as, “The Very Rev. Nutsack.”       [2]

*Very* Reverend?  Since my stitches are in my foot, my ensuing belly laugh didn’t threaten to rip them out.

Excuze-moi; I know that Reverend is a professional title conferred upon someone who has ordered and paid for their degree certificate via the classified ads section of the Billy Graham Association’s  Decision magazine and/or The National Enquirer studied/met the requirements of certain theological institutions.  Still, I’ve little respect for anyone who has obtained the title (and sees fit to use it), Reverend.

What is a degree in theology, other than a degree in mythology and apologetics?  Theology is a field of “study” which, instead of employing the verifiable modalities of the sciences, is based on unproven, unverifiable assumptions (e.g. faith, and the existence of specific deities).

And how does one get the Very prefixed to one’s title?  Is there a contest, like Jeopardy or American Ninja Warriors, to determine the most Very of Reverends?

 

That’s *very* Reverend, to you!

*   *   *

Department Of More Notes From Recovery

Dateline: Monday; 6 am-ish.  After working from home last week, MH is going back to his non-virtual office.  I know he’s a bit concerned re how moiself  will manage on my own ( translation: Will she try to do too much and overdo it/hurt her foot?   [3]   )

Meanwhile, in our small, pocket-doored, downstairs half-bathroom, I’m feeling proud of moiself  as I begin the morning routine I’ve established:

* Step 1: Move from sleeping spot (family room couch) to bathroom. Crutches resting against the wall, kneeling on the padded-with-a-folded-towel  footstool in front of the sink, I remove my nightshirt, hang it on the koi painting, and wash my face and neck.

 

 

* Step 2: Balancing on my right foot, I wet two of the three clean hand towels (which I’d set out the night before, by the sink) with warm water.

* Step 3: I put the toilet seat lid down; place a dry folded towel atop the lid, sit on the lid and use first wet hand towel to sponge bathe my back, torso, arms, right leg and foot, and as much of the left leg as I can reach (the boot goes from toes to just below the knee).  I use the second towel to sponge bathe my groin and towel #3 to dry off, then slather my skin with lotion.

* Step 4: I don my underpants, carefully, over the booted leg first and then the right leg; I follow the same procedure with my flared capri yoga pants (chosen for their relative ease in slipping over my booted foot).  As I pull on my bra and shirt, I’m feeling rather smug about being able to craft and maintain this routine given my temporary limitations and in a usable space of 32 x 36 inches…until I realize that moiself  has put her bra on backwards.  [4]

Okay, back down to earth, Supercrip, Ms. Smartypants/Dumbassbra.  I appreciate my momentary humility before recalling one of my favorite quotes, from former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meyer:

 

*   *   *

Department Of The Latest Publishing Scam Marketing Opportunity

“As creative artists, we not only have to worry about our work being stolen… now we need to anticipate being assaulted with AI-generated scams, marketing pitches, publication offers….  This is an incredibly prolific scam that is aggressively targeting writers… It has spun up extremely fast.”
(author Victoria Strauss, whose Writer Beware website provides information and warnings on writing related scams.  Excerpt From her Wikipedia page  )

Like many writers, marketing publishing strategies (read: scams) have occasionally infested my email inbox.  But there is something more disturbing, even malevolent – yet also dystopian-ly entertaining, IMO – about these new ones.

The emails are similarly formatted.  They open by complementing me on my writing and listing several of my publication titles, indicating at least a cursory knowledge of my work.   [5]   The various setups all employ similar complements in their intro, then give the pitch for hiring them to “maximize your ___(blah blah blah consultant speech ).”

Nowhere is there a mention of their fees – surprise!  But since fewer publishers (even the legit, traditional publishers) are doing the actual work of publishing, this is a con that I can see novice/wannabe authors falling for.  World-weary sigh: one more way to separate authors from increasing dwindling royalties while, of course, proposing to maximize those royalties.  To adapt an infamous, curmudgeonly maxim, it is an unfortunate truism that no one ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of writers.   [6]

The most recent MSE (marketing scam email) I received purported to be from someone with a new (to me) title: a Professional Amazon Marketer Therapist.   

 

Tell me about zis marketing content platform, and about your dreams of trains going through tunnels and how your parents ruined your life….

 

Dear Robyn Parnell,
Congratulations on your outstanding literary career and creative versatility. Your works, from The Mighty Quinn ( Scarletta Press  [7] ) to This Here and Now and My Closet Threw a Party, reflect a rare blend of wit, heart, and depth that connects with both adult and young audiences alike. Your clever humor, inventive storytelling, and wide range of published pieces across anthologies and journals showcase a voice that is both distinctive and resonant.   [8]

As a member of the Authors Guild and Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), with a bibliography spanning multiple genres and age groups, your dedication to the craft is unmistakable. However, even the most talented and prolific authors often face challenges in ensuring that their books gain the global reach and visibility they *deserve* on Amazon….

This is where I come in.  My name is (redacted), a Professional Amazon Marketer Therapist with years of ___ (Six bullet points of blah blah sales BS blah blah  ensue ).

Through this structured and proven process, I’ve helped authors regain traction, achieve top-category rankings, and sustain lasting success in competitive markets. Your creative achievements and literary voice *deserve* that same global recognition and reach….
Amazon Professional Marketer Therapist.
( excerpt from email; *emphases* mine )

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Marketing Therapy, The Prequel

The first such email moiself  received (several months ago) began thusly:

“Hi Robyn,
First, let me say how much I admire your work. From your short fiction collection This Here and Now to your children’s book My Closet Threw a Party, you display a rare combination of humor, imagination, and literary skill. Your writing captures both the whimsy and the profound, creating stories that resonate with adult and young readers alike. Your playful yet insightful approach to storytelling makes your work memorable, engaging, and timeless….”

It was, almost word for word, a preview of the other emails I would be receiving, from “people” I don’t know/have never met who greet me by my first name and proceed with the kind of flattery a younger and/or less experienced writer might be impressed by ( “Wow, they really know and like my work!” ).

 

 

Swept up in the Sally Field-esque moment, you might neglect to notice that the complementary adjectives and descriptions of your work are either AI-generated and/or taken from reviews about your book ( if you were lucky enough to get any   [9]   ) or your book jacket’s description and promos provided by your book’s publisher.    [10]

Then, there’s one more booster before getting down to business:

“Your versatility as a writer navigating adult fiction, juvenile novels, and children’s literature positions you to connect with multiple audiences. With a targeted marketing strategy, we can expand your readership, amplify your visibility, and drive meaningful engagement across the literary community.
As a book marketing consultant, I specialize in helping authors like you….”

Marketing hype ensues.

There are slight changes in the wording – excuse me, the content   [11]  – but once you’ve read one of them, the template is easily recognizable.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Points Worth Remembering About Charlie Kirk
( excerpts from The Guardian  article:“Charlie Kirk in his own words.” )

“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”
( The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024 )

“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”
( The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023 )

“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?”
( The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024 )

“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”
( Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement,
 on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025 )

“America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.”
( The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025 )

“The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.”
( The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024 )

“The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”
( The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024 )

“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
( Charlie Kirk social media post, 8 September 2025 )

 

 

The following quotes are curated in the 11/25  Freethought Today  (my emphases).

 “Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be assassinated. But I am overwhelmed seeing the flags of the United States of America at half-staff, calling this nation to honor…a man who was an unapologetic racist, and spent all of his life to sew seeds of division and hate into this land…. How you die does not redeem how you lived.”
( Rev. Howard–John Wesley, of Alexandria, Virginia, in a sermon in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, Associated Press 9-24-25 )

“What Cardinal Dolan may not have known is that many of Mr. Kirk’s words were marked by racist, homophobic, trans, phobic, and anti-immigration rhetoric, by violent, pro-gun advocacy, and by the promotion of Christian nationalism. These prejudicial words do not reflect the qualities of a saint. It is giving undo sanction to words and actions that hurt the very people Jesus calls us to love.”
( The Sisters of Charity of New York, rebuffing comments made about Charlie Kirk by Cardinal Dolan, who said, “this guy is a modern day Saint Paul” and a “hero.”
Religion News Service, 9–28–25 )

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Publishing Scams Ain’t Got Nothing On
The Oldest Scam In The World…Which Brings Us To

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [12]

It’s an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now
in exchange for life after death. Even corporations
with all their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.
( Gloria Steinem )

 

 

*   *   *

May you know how special you are without
scammers telling you how special you are;
May you fall for neither the newest nor oldest scam;
May you live in a way so that no one tries to redeem your
legacy via the manner of your death;
…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] Not the Reverend’s real surname.

[3] Turns out I did, overdo it that is, and hurt something else, BUT  NOT  MY  FOOT.

[4] Note for men and or non-brassiere wearers, who might wonder how this can be possible: The bra in question is a pullover style, not one with the hook and eye backstrap thingamajiggy.  And now you know.

[5] that any 10-year-old with the knowledge of search engines could do.

[6] “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” – variants attributed to showman PT Barnum and Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken.

[7] Well, they got that only partly right – Scarletta Press changed its name to Mighty Media Press.

[8] Another such email used its AI thesaurus to describe my work as both unique and vibrant….

[9] The majority of published books never receive even one professional review.  These stats have only worsened since the Authors Guild Bulletin noted in 2008: “from Publisher’s Weekly: ‘Three thousand books are published daily (1,095,000 per year) in the U.S.  Six thousand were reviewed in 2007,  less than one percent of the total published. ‘ “

[10] or your parents and friends, if your book was self-published ( rim shot! )

[11] as I have learned, all writers now are “content providers“ who should be concerned with, as much or not more than the quality of their work, establishing and maintaining their “platform.“

[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 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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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.”

[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 Contraption I’m Not Underestimating

October 31, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, extended family, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, movies, music, radio & podcasts , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Contraption I’m Not Underestimating

It’s time for The Dropkick Murphys to usher in the holidays.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Can’t Believe I Just Figured This Out

This would be the appeal of the actor Jennifer Coolidge, who sashayed ( Tottered? Shuffled?  Stumbled?   [1]  ) to stardom, or at least notoriety, in supporting roles such as the awkward manicurist Paulette in Legally Blonde.

Watch the Netflix movie Single All The Way ,    [2]   and you’ll get it the attraction.   Coolidge, although female, is the quintessential Drag Queen With A Heart Of Gold ®.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Good Fortune

Last Friday daughter Belle and her coworkers took a company “field trip” to another Washington state cidery.  [3]   Belle wanted to make some treats for the bus ride    [4]   up the Olympic Peninsula and made fortune cookies for the occasion.  She sent me a picture of the fortunes she inserted into the cookies. With her permission, I’ve listed some of my favorites below.

Belle:
“These are the fortunes I’m using; ___ (friend from work) and I brainstormed them together.  We wanted most of them to be vague/ominous, with a few nice ones, too.  And some straight up silly.  Like the winning Powerball numbers from a month ago.”

* You will be evidence in the trial

* Remember the importance of load bearing walls

* You will face a life-or-death decision in February

* You would look great with bangs…if you dare

* You have forgotten something important – tomorrow you must remember

* In three days’ time, you will experience a fish

* You are being deceived

* Profit = revenue – costs

* Sat. Sept 6 Powerball:  11, 23, 44, 61, 62, 17

* Your anxiety is the gift of precognition, trust it

* You will encounter your next cat in a Fred Meyer parking lot

* Luck is coming your way! Remember to share it with rats

* Follow the next crab you see to receive a rare blessing

* Never underestimate contraptions

* Do: experiment with new fonts; Don’t: eye contact with mannequins

* You must atone in a bog for the offenses committed in a fen

* Your fears are well-founded

* The naked man fears no pickpocket

* Amphibians have no scruples, proceed with caution

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Finalist For Best Euphemism Ever

Dateline: October 21; 5:30 am; reading the Carolyn Hax advice column.  The woman writing to CH has a husband, who was raised by a “deeply spiritual” mother who forbade his childhood participation in Halloween activities.  Not only has her husband left those childhood superstitions and beliefs behind, as an adult he *loves* Halloween.  However, as a new parent, and he has had a sudden, panicked change of heart:  he is asking his wife to hide from his mother pictures of their 11-month-old old son dressed up in a lion outfit for Halloween.  This is because he fears it will distress his deeply spiritual mother:  “He says he thinks it will so profoundly upset his mom that she seriously could have a heart attack because she is very afraid of the devil.”   

 

 

Yep, really.  That’s what the LW wrote.

The source for Best Euphemism Ever came from one astute CH commentator, who noted:

“…’deeply spiritual’ is a euphemism for bat guano crazy. “

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Whatever Happened To….?

“…a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations, and the Church of Scientology.

Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan representing the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an ‘anarchic‘, digitized ‘global brain‘ or ‘hivemind‘. Anonymous members (known as anons) can sometimes be distinguished in public by the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks in the style portrayed in the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta….
( excerpts, Wikipedia entry for Anonymous [hacker group] )

 

 

Starting in 2003, The Anonymous collective became known for DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on government, religious, and corporate websites.  A few of their more (in)famous attacks were on the Syrian Ministry of Defense,  Scientology, the Westboro Baptist Church,  the KKK, and Operation Avenge Assange.  According to a timeline of events attributed to Anonymous, it looks as if they’ve been “silent” since 2024.

Are Anonymous freedom fighters or cyber mob terrorists?  Hmmm, that might depend on your POV.   A loose collective with no top-down organization (or organization of any kind, some say), Anonymous hasn’t been heard from since…well, since the world has *really* needed them, IMO.  There are so many causes to which I wish they would apply their skills – could it be that our democracy will be “saved” by an anarchist collective? – as long as they agree with moiself  re what those causes are.  [5]

 

 

Translation:  I realize that if the genie granted me such a wish, it should come with the caveat that Anonymous might apply their skills to causes I’d disapprove of.

Perhaps a general rise in their areas of expertise (hacking) means Anonymous are now more likely to be caught (and indeed, dozens people around the world have been arrested, prosecuted, and even jailed for their supposed participation in Anonymous activities) than when they first became active on the world stage, and thus…my pipe dream…they are still around but are temporarily keeping a low profile while calculating how to best save the world from the Frito-Faced Fascist.

*   *   *

Department Of Just Wondering
Chapter 103 In A Never-Ending Series

Can I be just…whelmed?  I think it’s an actual word – one with archaic origins, and nobody uses it anymore, although we do employ the modified versions.  As in, I know that at times I have felt overwhelmed or underwhelmed.  But moiself  cannot recall the state of being or experiencing an average amount of whelm.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of The Ghost Of Halloween Memories Past

The entrance to the now-defunct bar was in an alley between Bryant and Ramona in downtown Palo Alto.  42nd Street was a popular hangout in the 1980s.  It attracted a mostly young, college age/new worker bee crowd, although patrons ranged from big-haired, spandex-clad new wave/metal fans to pretentious grad students from nearby Stanford University to businessmen and tech entrepreneurs and soon-to-be/self-described “creatives,” the latter group fond of snarkily commenting on how the bar was *nothing* like the New York saloons it so earnestly wanted to imitate.

42nd Street did have its distinctive ambience, with an abundance of standing and hanging plants and ferns, dark wood paneling, an overhanging second floor and a system of ceiling fans propelled by pulleys, a small dance floor – at that time it was one of the more unique bars in Palo Alto.   [6]

 

 

Dateline:  Palo Alto CA; October 31, 6 pm-ish; 42nd Street.  Moiself, in full Halloween regalia – dark dress and tights, black clod-hopping boots, green face makeup, bridal veil, hair with a white streak running from forehead to the back of teased hair – is seated in a booth with a colleague who had not worn a costume to work.  We are engaged in an earnest discussion about the virtues of the so-called classic works of American literature,   [7]  including whether or not The Great American Novel®   [8]  was a thing, or just a promotional scam.

I notice that every now and then my work friend taps his pipe against the table’s ashtray  [9]  (that was back when you could still smoke in bars) and stifles a smirk.  The fourth time he performs his pipe-tapping ritual I catch the bemused look in his eyes.

“What?” I ask him.

“It’s just…” he shakes his head, “I’m having a serious discussion about the merits of The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick with The Bride of Frankenstein.”

 

“And your point would be?!?!?!”

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [10]

 

Hannibal Buress is an American comic, writer, producer, actor, musician and businessman.

*   *   *

May you never be the evidence in anyone’s trial;
May you remember the euphemism if anyone calls you, “deeply spiritual;”
May you make someone a sandwich when they’re struggling;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] It wasn’t leapt; she’s been a working actor for years. 

[2] It’s like a (Canadian) Hallmark Christmas movie.  Don’t ask how/why I know this.

[3] Belle is QA manager for Schilling Cider.

[4] Every field trip should have a bus ride, no matter how old you are.

[5] And, most importantly, what the solutions should – and shouldn’t – include.

[6] “Michael Patrick Partners, a nationally recognized design studio, announced today that its two founding partners…are retiring before year’s end…Communication Arts published a story that featured the creative chops of the local advertising, design, illustration and photography tribes of Palo Alto, California, being fueled by the early high-technology startups of Silicon Valley.  Within the story was a photograph of the 40 or so independent creatives at their favorite watering hole, a bar called 42nd Street. ”  (excerpt and picture from “Michael Patrick Partners: Last Men Standing, 43 Years and 500 Awards Later, San Francisco design studio looks back on surviving earthquakes, financial meltdowns, global pandemics and recessions.”   EIN Presswire, Feb 27, 2023 )

[7] We were both fiction writers, both working in “civilian” publishing jobs, both a few years shy of having our respective first books published.

[8] “In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting the American soul.” It would be called the Great American Novel, and no one had written it yet, DeForest admitted. Maybe soon.”  (excerpt, “The Great American Novel,” The Atlantic, March 14, 2024 )

[9] Yes, he smoked a pipe – fully admitting that he took it up because (1) it was different, and (2) he thought that it made him somehow seem more “literary.”

[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 Holiday War I’m (Still) Not Declaring

October 24, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, extended family, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, politics, science, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Holiday War I’m (Still) Not Declaring

Department Of Here They Come

Halloween (aka All Hallow’s Eve); Samhain; All Saint’s Day; El Dia de los Muertos; Mischief Night, Diwali…

In the USA and in northern hemisphere countries around the world, there are multiple holidays with a relationship to “our” Halloween.  The relationship is as per the time of year and/or the theme, underlying beliefs, customs or origins of the various celebrations.

Many of these holidays originated as dual celebrations – acknowledgments of times of both death and rebirth – as celebrants marked the end of the harvest season and acknowledged the cold, dark winter to come.

And after Halloween, the holiday season really gets going.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Life Is Tough But It’s Even Tougher If You’re Stupid
Chapter 22467 in a (never-ending) series

“The idea of a “War on Christmas” has turned things like holiday greetings and decorations into potentially divisive political statements. People who believe Christmas is under attack point to inclusive phrases like “Happy Holidays” as (liberal) insults to Christianity….
Christmas is a federal holiday celebrated widely by the country’s Christian majority. So where did the idea that it is threatened come from?
The most organized attack on Christmas came from the Puritans, who banned celebrations of the holiday in the 17th century because it did not accord with their interpretation of the Bible….”
(“How the ‘War on Christmas’ Controversy Was Created,” NY Times, 12-19-16)

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of If Something Seems Familiar, That’s Because It’s Time For
My Annual Holiday Traditions Explained ® Post

 What do we vegetarians, vegans, non-meat and/or plant-based eaters
do on Thanksgiving?
( Other than, according to your Aunt Erva, RUIN  IT  FOR  EVERYONE  ELSE.   [1]  )

The above question is an existential dilemma worthy of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who wrote eloquent discourses on the subjective and objective truths one must juggle when choosing between a cinnamon roll and a chocolate swirl.   [2]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of I’ll Take Those Segues Where I Can Find Them

Four weeks from today will be the day-after feasting, for many of us. Then, just when you’re recovering from the last leftover turkey sandwich/quiche/casserole/enchilada-induced salmonella crisis and really, really, need to get outside for some fresh air, here comes the Yule season. You dare not even venture to the mall, lest your eardrums be assaulted from all sides by Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, Feliz Navidad, ad nauseum.

This observation provides a convenient segue to my annual, sincere, family-friendly,  [3]

Heathens Declare War On Christmas © post.

 

 

As to those Henny Penny/Chicken Little hysterics proclaiming a so-called “war” on Christmas, a rational person can only assume that they are not LGBTQ, or Jewish or a member of another minority religion, or an ethnic minority – in other words, they’ve never experienced actual bigotry (or actual combat).  If they had, it’s likely they would not have trivialized discrimination (or war) with their whining.

The usage of   “Happy Holidays” as an “attack on Christianity” is an invention of right-wing radio talk show hosts.   Happy Holidays  is nothing more nor less than an encompassing shorthand greeting – an acknowledgement of the incredible number of celebratory days, religious and otherwise (aka “the holiday season”), which in the U.S. is considered to start in October with Halloween, moving on to November with Thanksgiving (although our Canadian neighbors and friends celebrate their Thanksgiving in October) and extending into and through January, with the various New Year celebrations.

It is worthwhile to note that while many if not most Americans, Christian or not, celebrate Christmas, there are also some Christians who, on their own or as part of their denomination’s practice or decree (e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses; The Worldwide Church of God), do *not* celebrate Christmas  [4]   (nor did our much-ballyhooed forebears, the Pilgrims).  Also, the various Orthodox Christian denominations use calendars which differ from most Protestant and Catholic calendars (a biggie for them at this time of the year is the Nativity of Christ, which occurs on or around January 7).

Happy Holidays — it’s plural, and for good reason.  It denotes the many celebrations that happen during these months.  People in the northern hemisphere countries, from North, Central and South Americans and Egyptians to the Celts and Norskis, have marked the Winter Solstice for thousands of years, and many still do.  And some Americans, including our friends, neighbors and co-workers, celebrate holidays that although unconnected with the winter solstice occur near it, such as Ramadan, Diwali, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

 

In 2025 the Chinese (lunar) New Year began on January 29; in 2026 it will begin on February 17 )

 

Most folks are familiar with the “biggies”- Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day. But don’t forget the following holidays, many of which my family has learned about (or celebrated with) via our children’s teachers and fellow students, and our neighbors and co-workers.

* The Birth of the Prophet (Nov. 12) and Day of the Covenant (Nov. 26) are both Baha’i holy days  (our family has had Baha’i teachers, childcare providers, and neighbors).

* St. Nicholas Day (Dec. 6).

* Bodhi Day.  Our Buddhist friends and neighbors celebrate Bodhi Day on December 8 (or on the Sunday immediately preceding).

* Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Dec 12).

* St. Lucia Day (Dec. 13) Our Swedish neighbors and friends celebrate St. Lucia Day, as did one of our daughter Belle’s and son K’s schools, when they were in grade school (Belle, as the oldest 3rd grade girl, got to play St. Lucia).

* Bill of Rights Day (Dec 15).

* Pancha Ganapati Festival (one of the most important Hindu festivals, Dec. 21st through the 25th,  celebrated by many of MH’s coworkers).

* The Winter Solstice (varies, Dec.  21 or 22, this year on the 21st ).

* Little Christmas Eve (Dec.  23) Celebrated by my family, LCE was a custom of the small Norwegian village of my paternal grandfather’s ancestors.

* Boxing Day (Dec. 26), celebrated by our Canadian-American and British-American neighbors and friends.

*Ramadan and/or Eid, the Islamic New Year (as Islam uses a lunar calendar, the dates of their holidays varies, but these holidays sometimes occur during November-December)

* The Chinese New Year.  I always look forward to wishing my sister-in-law, a naturalized American citizen who is Cantonese by birth, a Gung Hay Fat Choy.  (The Chinese Lunar calendar is the longest chronological record in history, dating from 2600 BCE.  The New Year is celebrated on second new moon after the winter solstice, and so can occur in January or February).

This is not a complete list. See why it’s easier to say,  “Happy Holidays?”

The USA is one of the most religiously diverse nations in the world.  To insist on using the term “Merry Christmas” as the all-encompassing seasonal greeting could easily be seen as an attack on the religious beliefs of all of the Americans who celebrate the *other* holidays and festivals.  At the least, it denotes the users’ ignorance of their fellow citizens’ beliefs and practices.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Did You Know…

…that the Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that, “the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”   [5]

…that because of its known pagan origins, Christmas was banned by the Puritans, and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts until 1681.   [6]

 

 

 “Do you celebrate Christmas?”

We Heretics/apostates non-Christians Happy Heathens ®  often hear this question at this time of year.  The inquiry is sometimes presented in ways that imply our celebration (or even acknowledgement) of Christmas is hypocritical.  This implication is the epitome of cheek, when you consider the fact that it is the early Christians who stole a festival from our humanist (pagan) forebears, and not the other way around.

Who doesn’t like a party, for any reason? And we who are religion-free don’t mind sharing seasonal celebrations with religious folk – sans the superstition and government/church mumbo-jumbo –  as long as they accept the fact that the ways we all celebrate this “festive season” predate Christianity by hundreds of years.

 

 

Early Roman Catholic missionaries tried to convert northern Europeans to the RC brand of Christianity, and part of the conversion process was to alter the pagan’s existing religious festivals. The indigenous folk, whom the RC church labeled “barbarians,” quickly discovered that when it came to dealing with missionaries, resistance is futile. The pagans intuitively grasped the concept of natural selection and converted to Christianity to avoid the price (persecution, torture, execution) of staying true to their original beliefs.  But they refused to totally relinquish their traditional celebrations, and so the church, eventually and effectively, simply renamed most of them.    [7]

Pagan practices were given a Christian meaning to wipe out “heathen” revelry.  This was made official church policy in 601 A.D., when Pope Gregory the First issued the now infamous edict to his missionaries regarding the traditions of the peoples they wanted to convert. Rather than try to banish native customs and beliefs, missionaries were directed to assimilate them. You find a group of people decorating and/or worshiping a tree? Don’t chop it down or burn it; rather, bless it in the name of the Church.  Allow its continued worship, only tell the people that, instead of celebrating the return of the sun-god in the spring, they are now worshiping the rising from the dead of the Son of God.

 

 

( Easter is the one/odd exception, where a pagan celebration was adapted by Christians without a name change. Easter is a word found nowhere in the Bible. It comes from the many variants (Eostra, Ester, Eastra, Eastur….) of a Roman deity, goddess of the dawn “Eos” or “Easter,” whose festival was in the Spring.)

The fir boughs and wreaths; the Yule log; plum pudding; gift exchanges; feasting; the holly and the ivy and the evergreen tree….It is hard to think of a “Christmas” tradition that does not originate from Teutonic (German), Viking, Celtic, and Druid paganism.   [8]   A celebration in the depths of winter – at the time when, to those living in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun appears to stop its southerly descent before gradually ascending north – is a natural instinct. For thousands of years our Northern Hemisphere ancestors greeted the “reason for the season” – the winter solstice – with festivals of light and gift exchanges and parties.  The Winter Solstice was noted and celebrated long before the Roman Jesus groupies pinched the party.

 But, isn’t “Jesus is the reason for the season”?

The reason for the season?  Cool story, bro.  Since you asked; actually, axial tilt is the reason for the season.  For *all* seasons.

 

 

And Woden is the reason the middle of the week is named Wednesday.   [9]   My calling Wednesday “Wednesday“ doesn’t mean I celebrate, worship, or “believe in” Woden.  I don’t insist on renaming either Christmas, or Wednesday.

 

“Now, go fetch me the brazen little sheisskopfs who took the Woden out of Woden’s Day!”

 

The Winter Solstice is the day with the shortest amount of sunlight, and the longest night. In the northern hemisphere it falls on what we now mark as December 21 or 22.  However, it took place on December 25th at the time when the Julian calendar was used.  [10]   The early Romans celebrated the Saturnalia on the Solstice, holding days of feasting and gift exchanges in honor of their god Saturn ( Other major deities whose birthdays were celebrated on or about the week of December 25   [11]   included Horis, Huitzilopochtli, Isis, Mithras, Marduk, Osiris, Serapis and Sol ).  The Celebration of the Saturnalia was too popular with the Roman pagans for the new Christian church to outlaw it, so the new church renamed the day and reassigned meanings to the traditions.    [12]

In other words, why are some folk concerned with “keeping the Christ in Christmas”  [13]  when we should be keeping the Saturn in Saturnalia?

 

 

*   *   *

Whatever your favorite seasonal celebrations may be, moiself wishes you all the best.

May you have the occasion to (with good humor) ruin it for everyone else;
May you find it within yourself to ignore the Black Friday mindset;
May you remember to keep the Saturn in Saturnalia;
…and may the fruitcake-free hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] You have an Aunt Erva, somewhere.  We all do.

[2] Damn right I’m proud of that one.

[3] Well, yeah, as compared to the usual shit I write.

[4] And a grade school friend of mine, whose family were Jehovah’s Witnesses, considered being told, “Merry Christmas” to be an attack on *her* beliefs.

[5] “Increase Mather, A Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New England” (London, 1687).  See also Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday,” New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

[6] Stephen Nissenbaum, “The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday.”

[7] “Paganism in Christianity.”

[8]  “Learn not the way of the heathen…their customs are vain, for one cuts a tree out of the forest…they deck it with silver and gold…” Jeremiah 10:2-5

[9] Wednesday comes from the Old English Wōdnesdæg, the day of the Germanic god Wodan (aka Odin, highest god in Norse mythology and a big cheese god of the Anglo-Saxons until the seventh century.)

[10] The Julian calendar, adopted by Julius Caesar ~ 46 B.C.E., was off by 11 min/year, and when the Gregorian calendar was established by Pope – wait for it – Gregory,  the solstice was established on 12/22.

[11] The Winter Solstice and the Origins of Christmas, Lee Carter.

[12] In 601 A.D., Pope Gregory I issued a now famous edict to his missionaries regarding wooing potential converts: don’t banish peoples’ customs, incorporate them. If the locals venerate a tree, don’t cut it down; rather, consecrate the tree to JC and allow its continued worship.

[13] And nothing in the various conflicting biblical references to the birth of JC has the nativity occurring in wintertime.

The Better Person Travel Is Not Making Me

July 25, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, music, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, sports, travel, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , 2 Comments

 

Department of The Retrievals is Back…

…and this second season is also riveting.  Have you ever been pregnant, known anyone who was pregnant, or are yourself the result of your mother’s pregnancy?  Yeah, I’m saying everyone should listen to this.

The Retrievals second season was inspired by the podcast’s first season,    [1]   which dealt with the broad (sorry) issue of women’s pain being ignored during medical procedures as seen through the lens of a specific scandal: a nurse was stealing painkillers from the Yale Fertility Center, and the saline substitute some patients received instead of a painkillers meant they were in agony during the procedures they were undergoing…and the medical professionals performing the procedures didn’t believe them.

Season 2 is a new story. It’s not about Yale medical clinics or fertility treatments, but it’s definitely a related subject. Susan Burton, the producer of the first season, goes behind the scenes at a Chicago hospital as a group of doctors and nurses struggles to address this issue of women’s pain after one of their own nurses undergoes an excruciating C-section.

 

 

After The Retrievals season one, Burton received many, many letters from women sharing their stories of medical nightmares due to anesthesia failure.  Burton was compelled to focus season two of The Retrievals on a persistent problem with the most common surgical procedure performed in the US:  the inexcusably high rate   [2]  of inadequate anesthesia and/or anesthesia failure during cesarean sections.  As in, the patient can *feel* the operation, and too often (too often means even once – this should NEVER happen) is ignored or pooh-poohed by her doctor and/or anesthesiologist and/or nurse, with no acknowledgement of her suffering or investigation as to what went wrong.

This teaser excerpt, from episode three, is a conversation between podcast host Burton and one of her guests, Susanna Stanford, a British woman who undertook a graduate’s degree study into this issue after she endured agonizing pain during her own C-section.  And, yes, that quote from the doctor you will be reading was taken from this century, and not the 1800s.

 

 

Susanna Stanford, podcast guest:
…Just to give you a sense of how accepted this was, this is an editorial from 2006 in the International Journal of Obstetric Anesthesia.

Susan Burton, host:
The editorial, by a British doctor, was about the necessity of keeping good records in case you ever got sued by a woman who complained of pain during her Cesarean.

Susanna Stanford:
“Let me read to you the opening section:
‘It was all so simple in the old days. You simply injected the local anesthetic down the epidural, warned her that she’d feel a bit of pain, and told the obstetrician to get on with it. And then things began to become more complicated.
First, women began to complain more, no doubt fueled by general changes in patients’ attitudes as they made the transition from passive recipients of health care to consumers.’
Doesn’t that just tell you so much?”

Susan Burton:
“I mean, it’s just like, well, the women started speaking up.”

Susanna Stanford:
“Damn it. Those wretched women started complaining about pain.”

Susan Burton:
“I cannot believe this. This is 2007, 2006?”

Susanna Stanford:
“ ‘06. 2006. It’s not the 1950s.”

 

 

The Dowager is shocked.

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of A Different Kind Of Shock

“Culture shock is the growing pains of a broader perspective.”

Moiself  could summarize a recent Rick Steves podcast interview with that quote of his.  Travel guru Steves (whose recent book, On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer,  I highly enjoyed and recommend,) is known for his enthusiastic advocacy of cross-cultural travel as a political as well as recreational act.  And although I’ve been on three RS tours    [3]   (and, if I’m lucky, will undertake at least three more), one of Steves’  most treasured travel tenets is one moiself  disagrees with…slightly.

This precept is that travel changes a person – travel makes you a better person, in that the exposure to different people and cultures helps us celebrate differences and overcome misunderstandings and question prejudices and presumptions, large and small.

 

 

I think that *can* happen, but only if you are the type of person prone to introspection and open to change…and if you are, perhaps you wouldn’t have needed, ultimately or eventually, to go to Bosnia or Turkey or Greece to have discovered this (maybe just watching a Rick Steves Europe Travel Videos from the comfort of your den would do).

I think that instead of experiencing eye-opening, mind-altering change when they travel to foreign lands, more often than not, people take who they are and what they think with them – most folks pack their opinions and biases along with their toiletries and passports. For some travelers the opinions/biases can fit into a TSA-approved ziplock sack; while others will need to check at least one full-sized suitcase to accommodate their assumptions and expectations.  [4]

 

 

Whenever I hear someone repeat any variation of that optimistic cliché platitude – that travel makes you a better person – I immediately, unfortunately, picture (even if only for a moment) several people I’ve met who didn’t get that memo along with their passports, including  One Of The More Racist People I’ve Ever Known ® .

OOTMRPIEK, the father of a junior high friend of mine, was the first person I heard use the slur  jigaboo to refer to a Black person.  He did this openly, in front of me, when I was at my friend’s home and peeked into their TV room to say hi to her dad. OOTMRPIEK was watching an LA Lakers game, and after some spectacular play which brought the crowd to a roar he giggled and said to me,  “Those jigaboos sure can jump!”  I had no idea what he meant; I’d never heard the word.   [5]   But since that tittering comment of his was soon followed by another in which he (still giggling) used the N-word,  [6]  I knew it was not a complimentary term, no matter how happy he looked when he said it.

OOTMRPIEK was always nice to me and (as far as I know) to his daughter’s other (white) friends.  And OOTMRPIEK  was a world vagabond – the most well-traveled person I’ve ever met, then or now. Travel was his hobby, his passion.  His daughter and I used to speculate about how her dad must be a CIA operative, and his cover was that of a mild-mannered suburbanite – how else to explain why an otherwise meek-seeming husband and father and insurance agent was always heading off for exotic locations?

 

“I’m here to check if you have adequate coverage via your homeowner’s policy.”

 

Over the years when I asked OOTMRPIEK  to tell me stories about his travels, it became evident to moiself  that he traveled for his interest in the history, the geography, the scenery of places “exotic” to him.  I tried to elicit stories about the people he encountered and noticed the commonality among the nations about whose inhabitants he spoke disparagingly (African; Middle Eastern; Asian).  Even for the countries about which he spoke positively  (European), he honestly seemed, to me, to have had no great (nor even small) concern for the *people* living in the countries he traveled to. Therefore, he could enjoy a trip to the exotic Egypt and the intriguing Middle East and witness a spectacular Sub-Saharan sunset, and return home to joke about niggers and  jigaboos.

 

 

Sub-Department Of Speaking Of Perspectives…

Y’all may have noticed that with my first usage of that YOU  SHALL  NEVER  USE  THIS  WORD  word   [7],  I used the culturally-sensitive currently acceptable stunt double (“the N-word”).    Now, by not doing so with the second usage, moiself  is wondering if this post will somehow get flagged.  When on the rare occasion I’ve had cause to use that word – which is always quoting someone else who said it – I usually (when in the presence of those with delicate sensibilities) employ the euphemistic contraction.  But it seems rather juvenile to do so when quoting what another person actually said (and there is, to my knowledge, no  J-word substitute for jigaboo).  So maybe I’ll throw in some other words and see which one gets the most censorious reaction.

How’s about cocksucker?

 

 

“It is remarkable to me that people can travel
and not be impacted by what they see.”

That statement came from the person who interviewed     [8]   Rick Steves, when he mentioned to Steves about how he was once sitting at the foot of a melting glacier, next to a fellow traveler who announced that he doesn’t believe in climate change.

OK, so that was remarkable to Mr. Interviewer, but guess what?  For a significant amount of people, no amount of foreign travel –

– which BTW increases the amount of carbon into the air, which even We-Who-Are-Open-To-Change-And-Concerned-About-Working-For-Solutions-To-Global-Warming®  nevertheless contribute to the problem by taking jet planes to Europe or wherever –

– will likely change their perspective.  It’s not that simple.  People often come to such opinions via a complicated jumble of religious and cultural and political influences.  I think by the time Mr. Interviewer met the What Melting Glacier? Guy, WMGG had already, consciously or otherwise, decided not to see what he didn’t want to see.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [9]

 

*   *   *

May you listen to The Retrievals;
May you carefully employ your euphemistic contractions;
May your travels be respectful and bring perspective;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] The series, reported and hosted by Susan Burton, won a buttload of “best podcast” awards and a Peabody Award.

[2] Also inexcusably high is the USA’s rate of C-sections – one in three births.

[3] Three two weeks+  trips to the Adriatic (Slovenia; Bosnia; Croatia), Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark; Norway) and Ireland.

[4] So much for the suitcase metaphors.

[5] Really – later after I’d gone home, I asked my parents what it meant. Their first response: “Where did you hear that?!?!?”

[6] And that would not be the first time I head that word from my friend’s father.

[7] Unless you’re a Black rap star.

[8] Damned if I can’t remember which interview – I’ve head so many with RS, especially since his new book’s release.

[9] “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 TV Show Theme Songs I’m Not Singing Along To

July 4, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, nature, Oregon, politics, reproductive rights, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The TV Show Theme Songs I’m Not Singing Along To

Department Of Let’s Get This Out Of The Way

Uh…Happy Birthday, USA?

 

 

‘Twould be the under-est of understatements to say that, this year, moiself  doesn’t really feel much like hailing Independence Day.  The holiday, which commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, rings hollow this year, what with His Royal Orangeness – He Who Puts The Dick In Dictator (along with the vile Vance, traitorous Dick #2 ) – determined to send this nation tumbling ass-over-tit down the slope of authoritarianism.  Meanwhile, #47’s butt-snogging, morally-deluded followers seek to replace the independence celebrated on July 4 for the slavish insurrection he instigated on January 6.

Thus, moiself  be looking to the past for some wisdom…or just a moment’s diversion.  I think the last time July 4 fell on a Friday was in 2014; searching through my blog post of that day for a #47-free excerpt, I see that I had other things on my mind:

Excerpts from The (made-in-China) Flag I’m Not Waving (7-4-14 ),

I can think of few better ways to celebrate our nation’s independence from hierarchical hegemony than to kick a hallowed institution.  But, first….

 *   *   *

White People Problems – #568 In An Unending Series
The Warning That Ruins Lives

Don’t you, kinda yeah maybe well sure, want to know things?  As in, when a certain variation of A Good Thing to Do has a deleterious or dangerous side effect, and there is a better version of or way to do The Good Thing ®, wouldn’t you want to know about it?

 

Another helpful hint – it’s too much to handle! Let the little #$&!s get melanoma!

 

Dateline: A Sunday morning, at the Oregon Zoo’s Cascade Grill.  Two Mommy Friends ©, each accompanied by one ambulatory toddler and one infant in a stroller, are chatting outside the entrance doors to the café.  One of the women is pregnant.  Preggers Woman reaches into her stroller’s storage bag for an aerosol can of sunscreen and begins to spray her toddler’s legs.  As the sunscreen mist envelops her child from toes to torso she complains to her friend about how she just read somewhere that pediatricians are advising parents to refrain from using spray sunscreen on their children, because

(a) spray-on sunscreens are not effective as the rub-in lotions, and
(b) children can inhale the sunscreen mist, which is harmful to their lungs.

 “And I thought, really?”
PW rolls her eyes and snorts with disgust as she snaps the cap back on the spray bottle and tosses it in the stroller bag.
“I mean, really – it’s just so frustrating!  So now what else can’t I give my kids?!”

What else can’t you give your kids?

How about lead paint?

Or an overdose of Tylenol, or….?

*   *   *

And now, let the kicking begin.

The Honeymoon Is Over

Although the relationship was doomed from the start, I’m surprised more friends didn’t intervene and say, “He’s just not that into you.”

I refer to the liberal religiositati’s  [1]  high hopes for the latest head of the Catholic church, Pope Francis.  He threw them a few bones about caring more about the poor than about divisive social issues and they were practically tripping all over themselves, using their ACLU membership cards to mop up their deferential drool.

It may be true that, as one friend put it, P. Francis is “better than the Nazi,”   [2]  but talk about damning with faint praise.

PF has consistently dodged questions about raising the status of women in his church, and last week responded to a journalist’s query about the underlying misogyny in the Catholic church by making a “joke” :

Francis replied: “The fact is that woman was taken from a rib.”
PF then laughed “heartily” before saying: “I’m joking. That was a joke.”

 That’s one wacky dude!  Hard to believe he traded in a promising stand-up comedy career for vows of celibacy and poverty.

 

Living the vow of poverty, Vatican-style.

 

Not only is the latest high priestess of Isis/RC witch doctor/holy chicken bone mumbler pope maintaining his church’s separate and unequal gender wall, he seems prone to reinforcing it, as when he spoke a few weeks back about, the need for “… fertility in maintaining a Christian marriage.”

Frankie baby blamed a “culture of well-being” and comfort for convincing married couples that a carefree life of world travel and summer homes was better than having children.  He said married couples should look at how Jesus loves his church to learn how to be faithful, perseverant and fruitful in their vocation.

 

 

Pay attention to whatever the man in the dunce cap pointy hat – surely a signifier of supreme intellectual aptitude if there ever was one – tells y’all.

 

 

Yo, Catholic married couples: Your Jesus (according to RC doctrine) never married and was childless; therefore; it logically follows that to be faithful to this Jesus and his church you should marry and must have children.  If it breeds, it leads!  Or…something.    [3]

Why anyone heeds the admonitions of a childless celibate who presumes to lecture other people on the supposed virtues – and strictures – of a breeding marriage….  RCs, get your heads out of those orifices. 

 

 

Or perhaps Francis the talking mule O’Pope was trying to divert attention from the latest Catholic business as usual scandal. “Our own little Holocaust,” is what an Irish Mirror writer called the discovery of the bodies of ~ 800 toddlers and babies who died of disease and malnutrition in the Irish institutions that housed their unmarried mothers, who were shamed and damned by the cultural stigma against sexually active females and “bastard” babies – a stigma invented, promoted, and implemented by the church.

On the really, really dim bright side, will yet another set of these latest revelations finally help to break the RC stranglehold on Irish culture, law and politics?

“After the revelations that Irish priests raped countless little boys and Irish nuns beat and starved countless little girls forced to work in the Magdalene laundries, we can’t take any more. The children in the homes were even used as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies to test vaccines… Never again should the Catholic Church dare to point the finger at any young woman contemplating abortion, or lecture on the sanctity of human life.”
The Week (6-20-2014)

 

*   *   *

That was fun, wasn’t it?

 

 

*   *   *

 

*   *   *

Department Of They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To

Television show theme songs, that is.

 

 

They still make TV shows; however, it seems to have become more common in the “contemporary classic” era to repurpose existing songs – e.g., The Rembrandts’ I’ll Be There For You, which was used as the theme song for Friends .

But according to a study I just made up, you couldn’t do better than those Golden Years Of TV Theme Songs, ®  when composers were paid to come up with original instrumentals – such as the thundering, surf’s-up vibe of film composer Morton Stevens theme to Hawaii Five-0, (later a hit for The Ventures  [4]), and Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie psych-out theme for The Twilight Zone; Alexander Courage’s theme to the original Star Trek series.

Or you had actual, narrative,  songs-with-annoyingly-catchy-tunes-whose-lyrics-explained-the-show, ala the themes to Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch or The Addams Family.   [5]

But that melodious passage which awakened moiself  at 2:05 AM Tuesday morning – I figure if you’re going to have a bout of classic TV show theme song induced insomnia, you can’t do better than having arguably the best television main theme ever, with its urgent, hypnotic syncopation (notable for being in 5/4 time), Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin’s Grammy-winning  Theme to Mission:  Impossible.

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Pondering Life Choices

Dateline: Thursday, circa 1 pm.  Enjoying my sushi lunch at Happy Elephant restaurant    [6] in Manzanita, which now serves sushi as well as Thai food.

Sometimes, when I’m having a good meal in a restaurant, moiself  wishes I’d followed up on going to medical school, so when the server stops by after I’ve had a chance to sample my food and asked me how everything is, I can honestly say, “It’s just what the doctor ordered!”

 

 

*   *   *

Department of Employee Of The Month

 

 

It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself.  Again. The need for which I wrote about here.   [7] 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [8]

 

 

*   *   *

May you have the odd (and hopefully, rare) pleasure of classic TV theme song insomnia;
May you never take family planning advice from celibate men wearing pointy hats;
May you find reasons to be hopeful on July 4;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Yeah, not an OED-recognized word. But it should be.

[2] The always observant SCM was referring to Joseph Ratzinger, better known by his slave name, Pope Benedict.

[3] No footnote here. Move along folks; there’s nothing to see.

[4] Pride of the Pacific northwest, an instrumental band out of Tacoma!

[5] Just try *not* to snap your fingers.

[6] Formerly, A Mighty Thai.

[7] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg.  Until I did.

One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens.  No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.

[8] “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 Plans I’m Not 86-ing

May 23, 2025

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), movies, music, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, school, science, theatre, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , 1 Comment

Department Of Taking A Break For Art

Is it art? Or is it engineering?
Either way, I will appreciate it while I can,
until the next high tide brings its own critique.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Making A Java Junkie’s Day

Or, morning at least…

Dateline Tuesday; Manzanita (Oregon), 7:35 AM-ish;  walking past Manzanita Coffee Co. A car pulls over driver stays with it as a passenger gets out color.  I saw her reading the sign on the door which listed the shop hours – closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays  [1]   – and her countenance fell, in the way that only other coffee addicts (which I think of to moiself  as, Coff-Dicts, which is too easy to mistake for Coff-*dicks, so perhaps another nickname I should create?) can understand.

Coffee Seeking Woman turned around and looked plaintively at the driver in the car.  Without breaking my stride I approached CSW, waved hello and pointed up the street, and said, “Manzanita News and Espresso is open.”  The beam in her eyes nearly outshone her profusion of gratitude: “Oh thank you thank you thank you thank you!“

 

*   *   *

Department Of She Sells Seashells By The Seashore…Oops

I allude to the recent kerfuffle   [2]    about former FBI director James Comey, whose sharing of a social media post (a picture of the numbers 86 and 47 formed by an arrangement of seashells that he and his wife saw while at a beach) caused an uproar:

“We stood over it and I said, ‘I think it’s some kind of political message.’ She said, ‘86, when I was a server it meant to remove an item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients,’ Comey said. ‘To me, as a kid, it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place.’

“47″ was also understood to represent Trump’s current term as 47th president of the United States.

Comey added that it was his wife’s idea to post a photo of the message, a decision that sent Trump’s White House allies into a frenzy.

“She said, ‘You should take a picture of that,’ Comey said. ‘And I did, I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it.’

Many within Trump’s orbit interpreted the “86” as a threat to the president—with some even suggesting that it was a call for his assassination.

Comey strenuously denied these claims, and said he is “not afraid” of the Trump administration’s retribution. ”

( Excerpts, “James Comey Blames His Wife for Cryptic Post That Set MAGA Off,”
The Daily Beast, 5-20-25 )

 

 

I hadn’t heard the term *86* in some time.  Like Comey, I grew up with the idea that it meant to ditch, quash, or get rid of something (e.g., “At the cafe we 86’d our plans to go to the movies after dinner.” ).  I also sympathize with the *nasty* possible meaning behind the two numbers together, although I try to restrain such thoughts.  I keep hoping that #47 will die of natural causes…until I remember what we’re dealing with and remind moiself , Oh yeah, there’s nothing about that man that’s natural….

 

“If you weren’t an atheist I’d smite him for you.”

*   *   *

Department Of The New Podcast I’m Not Listening To

That would be Proxy with Yowei Shaw.  Shaw is a former host of the podcast Invisibilia, which is in my podcast feed.  I enjoy Invisibilia’s use of narrative storytelling to report scientific issues, so I decided to give Proxy a listen when a sample episode of the podcast showed up in my podcast feed.

A description from Proxy’s NPR link:

“ Proxy investigates niche emotional conundrums through conversations with
strangers who have relevant experience.”

The host describes herself as an “emotional investigative journalist.”  Okay; I’ll give it a go.  The sample episode (original airdate 4-22-25) in my feed was titled “Bisexual Wife Guy.”  Preview on the site (which I did not have access to when I began listening to it):

“The case of the bisexual wife guy who got dumped. In this episode, we find a proxy
to stand in for a listener’s ex – another queer woman who left her straight relationship….”

So, the podcast host is talking with “George,”    [3]  (the bisexual-wife-guy-who-got-dumped).  The episode opens with Shaw giving a few specifics about the case, then speaking with George, who says about his decade-plus relationship ending in divorce:

“…it gets really complicated and kind of pricky to talk about, but bottom line, two years ago my partner said, ‘Hey I think I’m bisexual.’….
ultimately, the elephant in the room is…‘Hey, actually, I’m queer and I’m not interested in being with a cis dude anymore.’ “

Then Shaw reads from an email supposedly written by George (which led to her inviting him on the show):

“I’ve not found any support groups or the like for people in my situation, and I’m not saying that should be the priority either.  I just want to better understand in what ways I’ve been perpetuating a system that oppresses LGBTQ people and how I can grow and be better in the future, and ultimately be a human who loves everyone, including myself.”

 

 

I was turned off immediately – which is why I included the modifier supposedly written by George from the email Shaw read.  My gut reaction was, What am I hearing – a pamphlet?  Where are the emotions, motivations, and sincere responses of an actual person?  At first (and second and third and fourth…) listen I thought it might’ve been AI-generated.

Moiself  did listen a bit more, but could not sustain an interest in the podcast episode after the initial setup of some guy claiming he “just wants to understand …” followed by what sounds like phrases he’d get from a cis-dude-reeducation camp.  Where is the anguish, the anger, the despair, of being dumped, out of the blue, by the partner you loved, for whatever reason?

It’s not fair to write something off so soon; I know this on an abstract, intellectual level.  But, in the here and now, I barely have time to keep up with the podcasts moiself  already subscribes to.  Although getting through the backlog is quicker than it used to be, what with my post-election policy of deleting episodes with such angst -inducing titles and/or subject matter descriptions as,

* How Our Democracy Is Going Down The Toilet;

* Fear and Fascism: How America Reached a Political Breaking Point;  [4]

* The Rise Of American Nazism;

*Why The USA’s (Former) Allies Now Despise Us…

I figure moiself’s  incapacitation from a bleeding ulcer is not going to help the cause.

 

 

*  *   *

Department Of One Of My Favorites Ethical Dilemmas…

Favorite because, unlike so many dilemmas, there are more than two or three or five sides to this issue, and no one compelling, *it MUST be this* answer….  Thus, it’s fun (and revealing) to discuss it with others.

This is from a podcast moiself  *is* listening to.    No Stupid Questions, which ended last year, has been replaying some of their favorite episodes.  NSQ’s  Should We Separate The Art From The Artist? episode, hosted by Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner, is as relevant as it was when it first ran (9-27-20).  Certainly, a consensus on the question has not been reached.    [5]

Moiself  tends to think of the question as an octopus-ical ethical dilemma, in that it has multiple tentacles of interpretation and application.

Do you have the right (or the obligation) to separate the art from the artist?

 

 

DUCKWORTH:
“Did you know that the Rhodes Scholarship was founded on blood money?”

DUBNER:
“Did you know that *everything* was founded on blood money,
if you go back far enough?”

“Today on the show: In the era of cancel culture, should we still be able to enjoy the art of
problematic artists?”   (excerpt from NSQ episode transcript )

Re historically great works produced by artists  [6]  whom we later discovered led ethically sketchy (or downright reprehensible) lives:  I am comfortable with people making their own decisions as to whether they will honor/enjoy or boycott the work of such artists.  This holds true (for moiself ) even if such artists’ work would be judged today as subtly or even openly promoting racism, imperialism, sexism, classism, nihilism, poor dental hygiene….

The past is…wait for the Zen-like profundity…the past.  That was then; this is now.  I’m not convinced of the value of spending time, money and emotional energy judging the centuries-dead by their descendants’ twenty-first century values.

That said, if you think you should never again read any book by Charles Dickens because you learned that the man who wrote so eloquently about the plight of the poor and downtrodden in Victorian England was a SOB to his own family, then…don’t.  Let that conviction float your boat, but don’t try to sell moiself  on the notion that I cannot be A Good Person ® if I enjoy re-reading A Christmas Carol during the yuletide season.

When it comes to the art of the present, I am more comfortable drawing harder lines. Some hip-hopper rapping about what he’s going to do to his bitches and hos – nope, sorry, he’s not getting any of my business.   [7]

Harry Sanborn:
“Hey, some people see rap as poetry.”

Erica Barry:
“Yeah, but c’mon, how many words can you rhyme with bitch?”

 

 

Doobie-drenched rapper Snoop Dogg is now more known for his commercial ventures – e.g., , his unlikely friendship with Martha Stewart and his amusing gig as the USA’s Olympic Games ultimate fan – than for his rap career of decades ago.   And he refuses to disavow his earlier work for its sexism and misogyny and violent imagery – he says that the existence of such in his lyrics is evidence of how much he’s changed and grown.

I’ve no idea whether Mr. Dogg is truly repent-ive, or just cannily re-inventive.  Since he doesn’t seem to run from the controversy, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Even if I were not so inclined, it’s not as if moiself  boycotting misogynistic and homophobic hip-hop songs would have any influence whatsoever.

 

 

Something closer to my intellectual and artistic home is the work of a comedian, writer and filmmaker whose books and movies I read and watched…until I didn’t.

I enjoyed much of Woody Allen’s work in the past, but there were always aspects about his movies that bothered me – recurrent themes and scenes (which were pooh-poohed by two boyfriends of mine, when I brought it up) which came to a stunning, forehead-slapping, AHA moment when Allen’s abuse of his biological daughter and his affair with his de facto stepdaughter were revealed. It was a no brainer – no more, for me.

But…damn.

There was – is – so much I loved about the movie Hannah And Her Sisters, including the fact that when I saw it in the theater  [8]   for the first time  the entire audience gasped – in astonishment, appreciation, and approval – as Allen’s character found love and unexpected joy, with a woman who was his equal on many levels (age, artistic talent, neuroticism…). It’s one of my favorite movie endings ever, and it used to be one of my favorite movies. And occasionally, I do want to watch it, again…. [9]

 

 

Many years ago a high school friend confessed to me ( as in, “Don’t tell anybody, but….”) that he liked the Frito-Lay commercials featuring the cartoon mascot, The Frito Bandito, despite having had many of his fellow Chicanos lecture him as to why he shouldn’t.  They warned him: if he said anything positive about the bandidto, or any other representation of Latino culture that could be seen as (read: that those self-appointed gatekeepers had interpreted as ) racist, or promoting ethnic stereotypes, that meant he was a coconut.   [10]

 

 

I’ll leave it to my Jewish friends to decide for themselves whether or not to listen to Ride of the Valkyries (or any works of the German composer Wagner ), or whether or not to enjoy or boycott the entire bibliography of William Shakespeare because among the works of that brilliant poet and playwright is the widely (but not exclusively) held as antisemitic play, The Merchant of Venice.

My feminist sisters are welcome to listen and even sing along to last century’s “Baby It’s Cold Outside,“ despite the fact that when I listen to it with contemporary ears, there’s no way around it, that holiday classic is…uh…kinda rapey.  But there are bigger feminist fish to fry, and many people listen to that song because it reminds them of their grandparents’ generation. Now, were a contemporary singer to record a holiday tune about a man insistently inviting (pressuring?) his reluctant date to spend the night with him, to the point of intimating that he was spiking her drink? Yep, that would raise my cancellation hackles.

 

 

John Lennon created some of my favorite music on the planet.  Lennon was also – by many accounts of those who loved and admired him – prone to bouts of jealous, narcissistic, violent rages (primarily expressed emotionally, but also physically).  Knowing this about him, can I still enjoy his great body of work, during and after The Beatles? The same musician who wrote the spiteful, Run For Your Life –  with lyrics ( “Well I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man…” ) I recognized as creepy/controlling/stalker-y even when I was a third-grader –   later wrote the beautiful/haunting/yearning/evocative songs In My Life, Imagine, Across The Universe….

If moiself  demanded total ethical and human rights purity from people working in any art form, I could never again watch any movie or TV show, listen to a song, appreciate live theater, or read a book, because until these art forms have all been taken over/supplanted by AI, they will continue to be produced by flawed human beings. It’s a line I think all people with EQs and IQs greater than their shoe size should endeavor to carefully discern and not write in stone.

Yes, that means constant…vigilance, or maybe, mindfulness?  Or maybe just the simple dictum of paying attention to what, by your patronage, you implicitly or explicitly support.

DUBNER:
“…it’s the slippery-slope argument….a philosopher named Janna Thompson….

made an argument against cancel culture: ‘If the character of the artist becomes a criterion for judging art, then the door is open to the exclusion of artists because they belong to a despised group, or because they’ve said or done things that many people do not like.’ So, going back to the Nazis — because all roads seem to lead to the Nazis today — that’s what the labeling of ‘degenerate art’ was all about. Some of it was based on aesthetic principles, but it was also based on the ethnicity or politics of the artists who created it. So, do you want that too?”

…I will make one last argument against canceling, just generally. Let’s go back to politics for a second. So, one thing I personally find suboptimal about the American two-party duopoly is that it essentially forces people to go all in on either the red team or the blue team. If you want to be blue, you’ve gotta be all blue. If you want to be red, you gotta be all red.” 

DUCKWORTH:
“No purple.”

DUBNER:
“No mixing and matching of policy—”

DUCKWORTH:
“No plaid.” 

DUBNER:
“…Yeah. No plaid….

that’s the kind of doctrinaire cancelation that, in my view, harms the political process more than anything. This deep, deep, deep self-siloing. So I would say that, yes, we probably should learn to separate the politician from the policy and the art from the artist. I would take it as a sign of maturity, a sign of thoughtfulness and consideration. And I’m in favor of all of those things, for the record.”

( transcript excerpts my emphases, Should we separate the art from the artist?
NSQ Episode 20 )

 

What if you’re self-siloing, but in a purple silo?

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [11]

“What is wanted is not the will to believe but the will to find out,
which is the exact opposite.”

( Bertrand Russell, 1872 – 1970, British pro-pacifism anti-religion philosopher, logician, mathematician, politician, author. )

*   *   *

May we all, when it comes to politics and art, learn to accept the purple;
May we see art in engineering and engineering in art;
May we express ourselves in ways that do make us not sound lik
AI-produced pamphlets;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] This is often the case with coastal businesses.  They are open on the weekends and on Mondays (for the spillover tourist business), but closed Tues & Wed.

[2] What a great word.  I’d like to think it’s Irish in origin.  Let’s all strive to use it in a sentence today, shall we, class?

[3] The usual disclaimer:  not his real name.

[4] Actual title of this Institute For New Economic Thinking podcast.

[5] I’ve blogged about it in the past, and doing so surprisingly (to no one) did not settle the matter.

[6] painters; composers; authors; playwrights…

[7] An I’m sure he’s losing sleep over that.  Middle aged white ladies don’t like my shit – I’d better change.

[8] an “arty” cinema in Palo Alto, where everyone in the audience gave off the vibe of being familiar with all of Allen’s movies

[9] If there’s some way to do so without funneling any money to Allen, I mean, not even a 5₵ cent royalty.

[10]  Pejorative for a Mexican-American who by not conforming to ethnic stereotypes was also somehow seen as ashamed of their heritage: “brown on the outside, white on the inside.“

[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 End-Stage Capitalism I’m Not Practicing

April 18, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, extended family, freethought/humanism, general ruminations, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, politics , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The End-Stage Capitalism I’m Not Practicing

Department Of They Nailed It, Again (damn!)

Once again, a well-researched, well-written, well-postulated, intriguing, provocative article from The Atlantic … And, once again, because said article observes the truth about our society, it is also well-effin’ depressin’ in some ways.

“The internet’s biggest by-product is loneliness; porn isn’t special in that regard. You and I weren’t made to live this way; we barely are living this way. Many of the traits that make us human—our compassion, our ability to devote sustained thought to a problem, our capacity to fall in love and to sacrifice for the people we love—are meaningless to the algorithms that rule us. They’ve deformed us.
Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price.”

 ( Excerpt, “Sex Without Women – What happens when men prefer porn?”
The Atlantic, by Caitlin Flanagan )

 

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of Things That Never Get Old   [1]

Welcome to yet another new feature of the new year, which may continue on the third Friday of each month.  Or…not.

 

 

*   *   *

Department of Holy …

Cow?   Mackerel?  Matrimony?  Shit?
Holy Uncanny Photographic Mental Processes, Batman!   [2]    

 

 

Ahem – make that, Holy Week, ®  which, in the Christian tradition (or most of them  [3]  )
is this week.

“During Holy Week, Christians recall the events leading up to Jesus’ death by crucifixion and, according to their faith, his Resurrection.
The week includes five days of special significance. The first is Palm Sunday, which commemorates Jesus’ humble entry (on a donkey) into Jerusalem to observe Passover….Maundy Thursday marks Jesus’ institution at the Last Supper of the Eucharist, thereafter a central element of Christian worship  [4]  …. Good Friday commemorates Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross….Holy Saturday, also called Easter Vigil, is the traditional end of Lent….Easter Sunday is the celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection, according to the Gospels, on the third day after his crucifixion….”

( excerpts; Brittannica: What is Holy Week? )

 

 

“The Easter celebration is a bit of a strange holiday. Is it about bunnies and eggs? Is it Pagan, or Christian, or Jewish? Why does the date move?…

What is Easter?

Easter is a Christian holiday celebrating the day Christians believe that Jesus returned from the dead after being killed.

So why does the date of Easter move?
And where did the eggs and bunnies come from?

In early Christianity, the Christian church moved the celebration of Easter to coincide with an existing pagan festival on the first full moon after the spring equinox, which is why Easter moves every year. In old pagan customs, eggs were a symbol of new life, and rabbits a symbol of fertility. These ‘Easter eggs’ became ways for Christians to talk about the “resurrection” (when Jesus Christ came back to life) they celebrated.”

( excerpts, “What is Easter:  A Timeline of Holy Week,” Westminster Chapel )

We (MH and moiself ) are heading up to visit daughter Belle for the weekend.  Weeks ago, when moiself  began looking at lodging and restaurants for the trip, I wondered why venues seemed to be so crowded or unavailable…oh yeah, it’s a holiday weekend.  MH and I had to be reminded that this week, for many, is Holy Week.   We’ve often remarked to each other that it’s funny how, once you’re out of religion and your kids are out of their school cycles, the breaks/holidays at this time of year (Spring Break;  Easter, which sometimes coincide but not this year) just aren’t on your radar.

So, Happy Holy Week to those of you who observe it.  [5]   Just please remember   [6]  where your observances come from  (  moiself’s  primer follows; you’re welcome ) before y’all go around proclaiming holy this and holy that.

 

 

As with almost all “Christian” holidays, Easter was originally a festival of another religion, and derives from a variety of pagan celebrations When early Christian missionaries encountered the Northern European tribes they attempted to convert them to Christianity and, of course, alter the peoples’ existing religious observations.  They did so somewhat stealthily, 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 ban outright the native customs and beliefs, the pope had his missionaries incorporate them (e.g., if people worshipped a tree at Yule time, rather than cut it down, Greg I advised missionaries to consecrate the tree to Christ – thus, the Christmas tree).

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-bitty bunnies – uncomfortable, in that most adult Christians have only a vague clue about the connection.  [7]

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 a Christian theologian, “The Venerable Bede” (672-735 CE, in his book De Ratione Temporum).  The name Easter  has many variations (Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Ester, Eastra, Eastur, Astarte, etc.) but all of these come from the same Roman deity, the goddess of the dawn, named “Eos” or “Easter.”

The Saxons also celebrated the return of spring with a festival commemorating their goddess of offspring, fertility and springtime renewal, Eastre, and other ancient peoples had similar celebrations.  The Scandinavian deity was “Ostra” and the Teutonic “Ostern” — both goddesses signifying spring and fertility, and their festivals were celebrated on the vernal equinox.  Christian apologists often insist that the name of the goddess Easter is just a coincidence, and that the name actually came from the Germanic word “ostern.”  Cool story, bros, but this doesn’t explain all those bunnies and eggs.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [8]

Special Easter Edition

 

 

 

*   *   *

May you strive to see the value or meaning of everything other than its sale price;
May you appreciate the origins of rites and rituals and their variants;
May you celebrate Spring, no matter what you call it;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] At least, to ever-youthful moiself.

[2] Robin’s 20 Weirdest ‘Holy Batman’ Lines From the TV Show

[3] Easter is celebrated on two different dates depending on which church you belong to.  The Great Schism of 1054 caused “The Church” to be divided into the Catholic and Orthodox Church.  Later, the Catholics switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, while the Orthodox Church followed the original calendar system of the Julian calendar.

[4] Which most Christian churches refer to as Communion; which most non-Christian religions view as a bizarre, ritualistic quasi-cannibalism.

[5] And if you do celebrate Holy Week, what the holy hell are you doing reading THIS blog?

[6] Or learn, for the first time, if you’re like the majority of Christians who have no little idea of the histories of their holidays.

[7] Some remember that Easter is somehow 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…tenuous.

[8] “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 Hippie Trail I’m Not Taking

April 11, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, science, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Hippie Trail I’m Not Taking

Department Of Something You Might Never Guess About Me…

 

Booooorrrrring

 

Yeah; well, there’s that.  But on the unlikely assumption that you might want to guess, moiself  will share the following.

If I were to rank various Household Upkeep Tasks ® as to their relative difficulty and/or boredom/frustration/loathing-inducing quotient, here is the task that, although it would be near the bottom of the scale in terms of difficulty, would top the scale for  I-really-hate-doing-this:

Changing the pillowcases.

 

 

Yes, really.  As in, stripping the pillowcases off the pillows, then putting them back on the pillows after they’ve been laundered.

It’s been this way for as long as I can remember…I think.  But I can only remember this  loathing-for-pillowcase-wrangling arising in my later young adulthood, as in, married life and through the present moment.   [1]   Was I like this when I was a child, living with my parents and helping with chores, or in college and afterward, doing laundry on my own?   Where is the self-help book for this kind of personal neuroses analysis, especially since there are so many more involved and or icky tasks when it comes to home upkeep?   [2]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of How I Didn’t Spend My Summer Vacation Sabbatical…

…but it warms the cockles of my heart to know that there are smarter, more visionary, and “better” people than moiself  who are working on ways to save us from ourselves.

Most people take sabbaticals as an extended form of vacation, or to fine tune career and/or personal goals.  Too often the career goal seems to be, How To Spend Less Time Making More Money.  Imagine what the world might be like if more Brilliant Minds ® used their time as productively as did the founder of Impossible Foods.

 

 

 

 

Sixteen years Stanford biochemist Pat Brown took an 18-month sabbatical, during which he considered how he wanted to spend the rest of his professional life.  Brown’s research showed him that the world’s leading environmental problem wherein he felt he could have an impact was animal agriculture – the use of animals to produce food.

Writer Jasmine Singer    [3]   interviewed Brown for the current issue of  VegNews, re why he left his “dream job” in academia to tackle the problems of global warming and environmental degradation through food production innovation.  Here are some excerpts from that article, a read that moiself  and my Roving Rodent Reviewer highly recommend y’all check out in its entirety.

 

 

PB:
“…I started educating myself about global environmental issues and realized the two greatest threats to humanity are climate change and the collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity—both caused by our use of animals. Animal agriculture takes up 45 percent of Earth’s ice-free surface, displacing healthy, biodiverse ecosystems. In the oceans, it’s overfishing. Phasing out animal agriculture could actually unlock negative emissions that would have the power to offset more than two-thirds of projected CO2 emissions this century. Once I realized that, I felt I had to do something.

JS:
Could you elaborate on how replacing animals in food systems
addresses this crisis?

PB:
Biodiversity loss is overwhelmingly driven by the land use of animal agriculture. That land that was once used to support diverse ecosystems is now used as grazing land or to grow feed crops. We’re seeing catastrophic consequences—populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish have dropped to less than a third of what they were 50 years ago. Phasing out animal agriculture can reverse these losses by restoring ecosystems. This isn’t just about food; it’s about the survival of humanity.

JS:
Why focus on replacing animal-based food rather than advocating for dietary changes or legislation?

PB:
You’re not going to solve the problem by persuading people to change their diets or legislating what they eat.
The issue isn’t that people love meat; it’s the destructive technology
we use to produce it….We need to offer better technology for producing delicious, satisfying food.
The challenge wasn’t matching the nutritional value of animal products—that’s easy. It was about replicating their sensory experience: taste, texture, aroma.
By applying biochemistry, we realized we could create plant-based foods that not only matched but outperformed animal products in deliciousness and environmental impact….”      [4]

 

 

PB:
“…Eliminating the demand for animal agriculture is essential, but it’s only part of the solution. The opportunity created by freeing up 45 percent of Earth’s land is massive. Restoring healthy ecosystems on that land can halt biodiversity collapse and capture the 800 gigatons of carbon released by clearing it in the first place.
Unlike fossil fuel emissions, these land-use emissions are reversible—plants can pull the CO2 back.

 (  Excerpts, my emphases, “Impossible Foods’ Visionary Founder
on the Fight to Save the Planet…Pat Brown is using science to take on animal agriculture—and its devastating impact on the planet….
VegNews, Spring 2025 )

 

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Thoughts For The Day (Or A Lifetime)

Moiself  has never before considered the supposition that one’s happiness might depend on living in a place that (or being the kind of person who)  has nothing that other people want; thus, you are left in peace.

This idea comes from one passage in the book I recently finished reading,  about the travels taken by Rick Steves and a friend in 1978.  Now a renowned travel writer, Steves was at the time an enthusiastic if somewhat “square” college grad in his early twenties, who undertook the  celebrated “Hippie Trail” backpacking trip from Istanbul to Kathmandu. He kept a journal while on the trip, and all these years later, published his edited journal entries and the photographs he took during the trip, which document his life-changing journey through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.

This passage was from the last chapter of the book: where Rick and his travel companion have finally entered Nepal, and are journeying on a rickety old bus.  Rick notices that, for the first time on the trip, there are no other Westerners in sight.  As Rick hangs his head out the window, taking in the sights of “…a vigorous river, long and lonely rope footbridges, thatched huts, and green, dipping terraces…”  he marvels at the sincerity and friendliness and serenity of every Nepali they’ve encountered, despite (or because of?) Nepal being the most impoverished country they’ve visited, in terms of Western metrics (e.g. average household wage, technology access).

“The kilometers passed slowly. I thought of a book I enjoyed – Reflections on the Basic Causes of Human Misery – that made the case that some of Earth’s happiest people were happy because they lived on land poor in natural resources and difficult to live on… land that no other group of people wanted. Perhaps this is why the Nepali expression, when at rest, seems to be a gentle smile.”

(  excerpt, chapter Nepal; On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the
Making of a Travel Writer,  by Rick Steves )

 

 

*   *   * 

Department Of A Blast From The Past

New Year; new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month).  Perhaps moiself  will like this enough that it will turn out to be a regular blog feature for 2025?  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?!?!?!  [5]   friend gave me, all those years ago,   [6]   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 April, to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

 

 

Here is an excerpt from my blog of 4-10-15   [7] ( The Bird I’m Not Calling ).

 Those Who Live In Glass Houses Shouldn’t Cast the First Stone
After Walking A Mile In Someone Else’s Shoes

As much fun as I’m having with the latest batch of the Scientology exposés (including documentaries and books from journalists and former Scientologists alike), it’s just as much fun hearing criticism of Scientology coming from other religious believers.

 

 

In this country, most religious believers who diss Scientology self-identify as Christians. Christians, as in, people who go to a temple or church or some other kind of worship box to grovel to/”invite into their hearts” the ghost    [8]  of a 2000 year old Jewish zombie who, according to their holy book and their 2K+ year old theologies, was his own father (and who, therefore, impregnated his own virgin mother). This father-deity ordered mass murders of Egyptian babies and men women and children of other religions, sent a bear to maul children the for the crime of teasing a man about his male pattern baldness, hates foreskins for some reason but loves the smell of sacrificed animals, and, as per that book again, says that says disease comes from sinning and that a complicated ritual involving killing birds and wiping their blood on human body parts will cure leprosy…and then to worship this god you symbolically eat him (via crackers and juice or wine, which turn into the Jewish zombie’s skin and blood in your tummy  [9]  ) and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in all humans because 6,000 years ago a rib-derived woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical but forbidden tree….

Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Cool story, bro.

Anyone who swallows that shit believes all or even some of that has little business criticizing Xenu, engrams, thetans, auditing, and the whole lot of wackadoodle Scientology tenets.

Oh, but the fun continues. Many religious believers cap their anti-Scientology statements with, “Besides, it (Scientology) isn’t even a real religion!”

Excuse-moiself?

Scientology teaches crazy shit and asks you for money – of course it’s a real religion.

 

 

*   *   *

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [10]

 

 

*   *   *

May you wean yourself from the products of animal agriculture;
May you make peace with your most loathes household task;
May you leave other lands in peace even if they have resources you want;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] And it’s not because I am unequally burdened by this task – ours is an Equal Opportunity Bed Linen Stripping Home ®  : both MH and I do the sheets, and each does their own pillowcases.

[2] Some but not all of which involve toilets and cat barf.

[3] Her website boasts more descriptors than you’ll ever shake a carrot stick at:  “Author.  Editor.  Speaker.  Actor.  Activist.  Lesbian.  Vegan.”

[4] And they did it, via the discovery of heme: “Heme was a critical discovery because it’s one of nature’s best catalysts. It drives the chemical reactions that create the explosion of flavors and aromas when meat is cooked. Using heme and basic biomolecules like amino acids and fatty acids, we could reproduce the sensory experience of meat.”

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

[6] Was it really over twelve years ago?

[7] TEN years ago !?!?!?!?!

[8] Aka “The Holy Spirit.”

[9] the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation. The understandings of the communion rite varies among the many flavors of Protestant and Orthodox Christianity, but the majority of sects still practice some form of the body-blood-of-Christ consuming ritual.

[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 Pranks I’m No Longer Playing

March 14, 2025

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, extended family, foodie, freethought/humanism, general ruminations, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

 

Happy Pi Day, Y’all

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Things For Tomorrow’s To-Do List

Beware the….

Tides that arch?  Brides that parch?  Sides of starch?  What was that…thing?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of A Blast From The Past

New Year; new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month).  Perhaps moiself  will like this enough that it will turn out to be a regular blog feature for 2025?  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?!?!?!   [1]   friend gave me, all those years ago,   [2]   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 March to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

 

 

Here is an excerpt from my blog of 3-10-17 ( The History I’m Not Reading ).

 “For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.”[3] 

MH and I are traveling ’round Ireland in the late spring.

 

 

Thank you! We’re excited, too.

I try to read up on the history of places I’m going to visit, and also sample the destination’s contemporary art (in the form of fiction and films). As per the former endeavor, I am currently and once again reminded of why I loathe reading history: because war and religion, two of the most despicable human enterprises, IMHO, almost always figure so prominently. And in Irish history, the combination of the two is a feckin’ load of ballsch to curl your clackers.   [4]

I cannot recall the source of the nailed-it!  quote I ran across, several years ago (I believe it was from an Irish novelist, not a historian), which went something along the lines of this:  Ireland’s cultural and political woes can be attributed to the fact that the Irish are

“a twice colonized people – first by the Catholics and then by the British.”

There are many ways to interpret history, and two “sides” I keep encountering, each which urges the reader to keep in mind either (1) “History is written by the winners,” or (2) “History is written by the literate, whether or not they were the ultimate winners.”

 

And your point would be?

 

Whatever.  In either case, and especially with regards to reading Irish and European history, it’s the nomenclature, for lack of a better term, that gets to me. Consider the many, many, many – and did I mention a whole lotta? – pages devoted to the various invasions of “The barbarians.”  Some of these pages are contained in a book I recently finished, the presumptuously titled, How The Irish Saved Civilization.

HTISC, by its very title, presents a (dubious, in some critics’ eyes) supposition as fact. The book essentially argues for the elevation of the importance of the Irish Catholic clergy in preserving Western culture after the collapse of the Roman Empire, when western Europe was “…being overrun by barbarians” (aka Huns, Visigoths, and other Germanic tribes).

So. We have the entrenched residents, whose beliefs and actions I would not hesitate to call barbaric, whose priests waged wars and inquisitions to subjugate, torture and kill “heretics” (defined however they chose, from those who simply disagreed with official policy, to philosophers, Jews, “Witches,” Protestant reformers, and other fellow Catholics – the various factions who slaughtered each other over nuances in theology)…  But it’s these guys coming over the hill,  they are the barbarians, because….uh…because they are illiterate and thus can’t cite their magic holy books to justify their atrocities.

Pot, meet kettle.

 

 

My impression and subsequent summation of centuries of Irish history, after reading 600+ pages (and more to come!) in various books, is almost Tweetable     [5]   in its brevity:

The _______(civil articles; treaty; king; bishop) promised religious toleration;
the _______ (king; landlord; bishop) saw no advantage in a peace now that victory was secure;
the Gaelic infantry was slaughtered.

Lather; rinse; repeat.

 

 

Department Of And Then There’s This

Slogging through the pages of history, I am occasionally rewarded with a gem hidden in the festering bog. Such as this sentence, from a passage about kinship ties between Gael lords and the Catholic clergy:

“One sixteenth-century bishop of Clogher was eulogized on his death as ‘a very gem of purity and a turtle dove of chastity,’
this despite his leaving behind at least fifteen children.”

(Ireland: Land, People, History, by Richard Killeen)

 

Not tonight, dear, I’m the turtle dove of chastity.

 

*   *   *

 

*   *   *

Department Of You’re No Fun Anymore

Moiself  still gets a great idea,    [6]    every now and then, about pranks to play.   Such as the one that often returns through my twisted wistful little mind when I’m returning from a morning constitutional and, depending on the route I take, walk past a house near my ‘hood that fills me with pranks-that-were-not-to-be-realized  regret.

Said house has a three-car garage.  The third garage door, when open, reveals the setup of a home electronics/wood shop and sometimes the shop dude, either working on a project or, on a warm, late summer day, sitting in a lawn chair in the driveway, in front of his shop, working on a brewski.  Also…

 

 

….make that, up until a couple of years ago, when that third garage door was down you could see a metal plaque affixed to the middle of it which read:  MEN ONLY.

Moiself  actually looked into the cost of getting a stick-on plaque, made of the same material and using the same font as the one on Shop Man’s garage door, which would have one word on it: GIRLY.  My fantasy prank was to (can you guess where this is headed?), one day at the end of one of my early morning walks, stick that plaque above the MEN ONLY one.

I woulda done it, except for this Sad Fact Of Modern Life ® : from more elaborate ventures (such as my plaque-trolling) to the simple/youthful pleasures of playing dingdong ditch or planting gnome statues or other tacky knickknacks in a friend’s Sunset magazine-worthy landscaping, ‘tis almost impossible to “get away with” playing tricks on anyone, anymore. 

 

 

Seriously, you need to ask that?  Because:  from elaborate, motion-activated porch and yard security devices to cell phone cameras, every person, every house or apartment or dwelling, has recording devices.

A couple of years ago the owners of the MEN ONLY garage shop house had the entire exterior of the house painted.  The plaque was taken down as part of the paint prep, and has yet to be reinstalled.  Perhaps (presumption or fantasy on moiself’s  part) the girly occupants of said house took that opportunity to ask the manly shop man to leave it down.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [7]

“There is no good evidence that gods do exist, and lots of good evidence that the idea of gods was invented by human beings. It was realising this that enabled me to feel comfortable describing myself primarily as an atheist rather than an agnostic.

Atheism is also a better basis for investigating morality. Right and wrong are ultimately about how we affect the suffering and wellbeing of other sentient beings. Helping other sentient beings to flourish is good, and causing other sentient beings to suffer unnecessarily is bad. It is complicated to figure out what is right and wrong in any given situation, because there are so many permutations of the effects of your actions.

However, religion distracts us from identifying what is right and wrong by adding in answers that are unrelated to suffering and wellbeing in the real world, but are based on imaginary souls and imaginary consequences in imaginary afterlives. And so you get contradictory messages in books like the bible, which tell us to love our neighbour but stone him to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. We know that this last command is morally wrong, and so we ignore it. This shows that we do not get morality from the bible, but apply our morality to what we read in it.”

( excerpt from “How And Why I became an Atheist,” by Michael Nugent.
Nugent, a writer and Dubliner, is chairperson of the advocacy group Atheist Ireland,
which promotes atheism, reason and ethical secularism in Ireland and around the world. )

 

 

*   *   *

May you have a tasty Pi Day celebration;   [8]

May you be on the lookout for Ides  mischief after that, and then…
May you have a happy
day-of-celebrating-being-Irish-in-America (aka St. Patrick’s Day);
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

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

[2] Was it really over twelve years ago?

[3] From The Ballad of the White Horse, by G. K. Chesterton, English Critic, Essayist, Novelist and Poet, 1874-1936.

[4] For the Irish slang impaired, feckin’ = fucking; ballsch = rubbish; clackers = testicles.

[5] If I were a Twitter kind of person, which I am not.

[6] Well, great to moiself.

[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

[8] If you don’t celebrate Pi Day, why not?  Where would we be without this fundamental mathematical concept of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, which helps us set up equations to understand circles, and objects which oscillate/repeat, and thus allows us to, for example, get precise measurements (via geometry) for construction.  Add it to your calendar  – and it’s a great excuse to make savory and or sweet pies.

Older Entries Newer Entries