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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 Psychologists I’m Not Disagreeing With

July 18, 2025

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), family life, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, Isms (religion), movies, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , Comments Off on The Psychologists I’m Not Disagreeing With

Department of Nine Out of Ten Psychologists Agree…

…that turning to familiar (“comfort”) activities in stressful times is an adaptive behavior.  Which partially explains why moiself  recently rewatched one of my favorite movies, Tootsie.  But really – who needs an excuse to watch that classic – which is perennially near the top of the American Film Institute’s list of best comedies – about a neurotic, out-of-work actor who becomes a better man after putting himself, figuratively and literally, in a woman’s shoes?

For y’all who haven’t seen the movie WTF is wrong with you ?!?!?!. ,  here’s a brief recap of what has led up to the movie’s final scene, which has one of the best ever, IMO, dialog endings of a movie.

 

 

(Jessi Lange as Julie, with Dustin Hoffman as Dorothy Michaels/Michael Dorsey )

 

Michael Dorsey is speaking with Julie Nichols, his fellow actor on a popular TV soap opera, where he pretended to be a female actor (“Dorothy Michaels”) playing a female character on the show.  Michael left the show after his dramatic, on-air revelation that he, a man, was in fact playing Dorothy Michaels.  Several weeks later, Michael has caught up with Julie outside the TV studio and tries to make small talk with her.  She blows him off until he drops his guard about why he did what he did.  Michael has fallen in love with Julie, while Julie, believing Dorothy was a woman, befriended Dorothy and came to deeply care for her as a friend and mentor, confidant, and even a mother figure.

Michael:
I just did it for the work; I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.
Especially you.

Julie (after a long pause, whispers):
I miss Dorothy.

Michael:
You don’t have to.  She’s right here, and she misses you.

Look, you don’t know me from Adam, but…I was a better man with you, as a woman… than I ever was with a woman, as a man.  You know what I mean?
I just gotta learn to do it without the dress.”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Questions With No Simple Answers

A little while back, moiself  read a post on a community social media bulletin board (the post in its entirety can be read in my longest blog footnote ever     [1]).   The poster wrote about her child’s school district’s proposal to bus children from one grade school to another one, to create a Life Skills classroom for special needs children. The poster adamantly insisted that all students be mainstreamed and was strongly against the proposal (as in, if you hold a different opinion, to quote her directly,  you are wrong!).

After reading the post my first thought was rapidly followed by a bajillion others, all of which kept coming back to this:  I have a feeling that this issue is more complicated than the poster made it out to be.  [2]   Will the well-meaning people on all sides of this issue be able to listen to one another with open hearts and minds?

Moiself  is no longer a parent with children in primary schools; thus, I’m not familiar with the current educational strategies for students with special needs/cognitive and emotional disabilities.  I *am* familiar with human nature, and so I’m crossing my fingers (but not holding my breath) that reason and compassion and open minds will prevail over Possibly Misguided-But-Good-Hearted-Intentions ®.

 

 

This issue is often referred to as mainstreaming vs. special or adaptive education.  Probably not a good idea to phrase it adversarial terms; it’s a not one size fits all subject, and each Special Needs Child ( acronym-ed here as SNC – I will be using the vocabulary used by others, although I’m not fond of that term ) is an individual, not part of some apocryphal, Special Needs Child Community® .  But, society being what it is, students can seemingly be pitted against one another when it comes to funding educational programs.

Both MH and I volunteered in our offsprings’ classrooms in their K-8 years (and MH in high school).  [3]   I’ve some opinions on this issue based on (1) what I saw/dealt with in the classrooms, (2) what my offspring shared with me, and (3) what some concerned (and sometimes frustrated) teachers confided to me.

First of all, there’s the poster’s lofty proclamation that “…your children learn compassion, kindness, and acceptance” by being in a class with SNC  (“who struggle to fit into the educational environment due to their unique and personal disability needs”) kids.  Yeah…maybe…sometimes.  But why do some adults seem to forget or discount how downright nasty children can be to other children?

 

 

 

In Belle’s kindergarten class there were two SNC children who were mainstreamed at their respective parents’ insistence.  My heart broke for one in particular, when, after repeatedly seeing his inappropriate behavior during recess,   [4]   I (privately and discretely) asked The Teacher®  about him.  TT®  had tried to get him help, but was dealing with the fact that he, along with another SNC child, was taking up so much of her class time…she knew it was unfair to the other kids, but even though it was “just” kindergarten, he was behind in so many areas….

I saw a similar dynamic in Belle’s first grade classroom.  Again, as a classroom volunteer, I discretely asked The Teacher®  for tips as to how to deal with a certain student during the reading groups I was leading.    [5]  He was disruptive to say the least, and the other students’ frustration with him was growing – it was *their* time he was disrupting, as well as his own.  And TT®, sadly and discretely, told me that she had at least five students who needed their own (as in, one-on-one monitoring) classroom aide, but only one of those students had an aide.  She then surprised me by apologizing to me for what, given the realities of the classroom, my daughter Belle was missing out on.  She explained it to me thusly:  by being one of the “smart” students (as in, hardworking, able to stay on task, eager to learn),  Belle didn’t get the attention *she* deserved – and still needed no matter how smart she was, by virtue of being a first grader – because of all the time that the teacher had to spend trying to keep the SNC students on track (or at least to try and quell the disruptions).

The teacher shared this privately, but it was no secret.  Even at age six the students had more social awareness than many adults gave them credit for – and their resentment (of their share of their teacher’s time and attention being spent on SNCs ) was palpable.

 

 

You know the thing that adults do with (so many issues, but in particular) regard to SNC – the trying-not-to-say-what-they-are-saying?  The euphemisms change every five years or so, but I saw that what was true when I was in second grade was still the case when my kids were:

  You can call the reading Groups A, B or C,
or The Red Group and The Green Group and The Blue Group,
or The Eagles and The Hawks and The Ospreys, or whatever….

Pick your code of choice, it doesn’t matter.  You and other adults may never use the words  (“the smart/advanced/gifted” groups and the “slower/special/challenged” groups); you may even banish such terms and labels from your classroom, but guess what?  The kids still figure it out.  And they don’t necessarily apply the terms in a negative way, but simply as another way of noticing who does and who is what.  Kids will do the seemingly instinctive, self-descriptive, sorting that kids do:

* I have blue eyes like my mom; I’m allergic to nuts;
I suck at jump rope; I’m in the advanced math group;

* I like kittens and puppies; I don’t like spelling tests;
I’m good at kickball; I’m a middle reader;

* I’m tallest in my class, I like reptiles and parrots;
I’m a fast runner; I’m in the slow math group…

 

 

There is an unintentionally cruel side to mainstreaming, that Belle’s kindergarten teacher described in a way that almost broke my heart, when she talked to me about the disruptive child I previously mentioned.  The child was frustrated; he was soooo much slower (in every way – speech; vocabulary, physical coordination; emotional self-regulation…)  than the other kids.  And his developmental delays were obvious to him, as well as to his classmates.

If the boy could have been in a class with other students at the same skills and maturity level he could, on some days and in some situations, excel, and maybe even have a turn at being on top.  He might learn to enjoy school and learning.  But by mainstreaming him, at least at his particular age, he was always going to be at the bottom of the heap, and school (and by extension, academics and learning) was going to be a painful reminder of that, for him.

 

 

Oy vey…I don’t know.  What a dilemma.

I have been fortunate. Through an inscrutable combination of luck…

* The genetic lottery?
Our kids’ respective,  “natural” or inborn temperaments and interests?

…and intention

* Mindful parenting? The history, on both sides of MH’s and moiself’s’ families,
of education being cherished, valued, and enjoyed?

…navigating the world of SNC has not been my parental row to hoe.

And I have felt the shame of resenting the SNC whose overwhelming needs/deficits took time away from other students; I have justified my resentment about the time and resources taken away from the others – aren’t all kids supposed to be *special* ?!?! –  when I saw how my own and other supposedly “gifted” kids didn’t have enough to challenge them, when they were given busy-work that bored them…or were given the label “gifted” with no accompanying programs or opportunities because, as one teacher told me, they didn’t have the resources ( several other parents of a child who’d tested gifted told me that they’d been told by their child’s teachers that getting SNC students up to grade level was prioritized over keeping the “higher level” students engaged)….    [6] 

I have seen and felt the teachers’ genuine devotion to and concern for their SNC students, when it seemed obvious to me that the kids were not only falling behind the rest of the class, but, worst of all, seemed genuinely *miserable.*  How could that kind of mainstreaming be in those children’s best interest?   [7]   

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [8]

 

My favorite part of the bible is when, after the flood, the ark landed, and all the carnivores waited until their prey reproduced before eating them.

 

*   *   *

May you menfolk “learn to do it without the dress”
(or hey, with the dress, if that floats your boat);
May we mindfully navigate the pitfalls of educational good intentions;
May we rejoice in knowing there’s less than 17 weeks until Exploding Whale Day ;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1]  “Local Friends and neighbors…. Please read and share my thoughts on this important change coming to our grade school! I am so mad, so sad and so very disappointed in this proposed change….

Our grade school is planning some really big changes that you may think does not impact you or your children, but you are wrong! The benefits that your children gain by having their friends and neighbors who struggle to fit into the educational environment due to their unique and personal disability needs are enormous. Your children learn compassion, kindness, and acceptance by just including those who do not learn as they do. We all have differences, and we need to learn to live together and accept one another. Not to exclude those who are different but to include them. Our society pushes those who do not fit into the traditional learning model out of society because they have been taught to do so by school programs such as these. This is not necessary! Please come to the meeting and say “NO!” Not at our school.

They are proposing bussing children in from ______(location redacted) grade school to _____(location redacted) to create a “Life Skills” classroom. I can tell you from experience that no life skills will be taught here, this is a place to put our children who are different so that they do not impact the learning of those around them. This is happening because our district has hired a Special Education Director who has absolutely zero experience with anyone who has special needs. This Director was head of a high school TAG program with no experience on how to support someone with high sensory needs so that they can learn alongside their peers and not be segregated and separate. I have heard rumors that they have allowed the placement of a 4th grade student to the preschool classroom to “hang out” for the day because they do not know how to support this individual. We need to hire someone who can support our children so that they can be accepted and included into society, not shoved into a separate room and forgotten about by their friends and neighbors.

Please come with me and help me tell the school district that we do not want this change! Keep our children at their local community schools. All children deserve an education alongside their peers regardless of their disability. Ask them instead to please hire experts who can teach from experience how best to support our children where they are because their lives are valuable too. Children with disabilities deserve an education alongside their peers at their local community schools and the other children deserve to know them, to be friends with them. This is a disservice to our entire community, not just the few children that are bussed in and forgotten about. This impacts all of us.”

[2] and I confess that I have not seen any follow-up reporting (nor read the comments) on the issue.

[3] With the exception of K’s first grade teacher, who made it clear that she did *not* want parent volunteers in her classroom.  She told me that, in her experience, she ended up spending too much time tutoring certain parents – and she couldn’t tell who were the quick learners and self-starters among them and it was difficult, once you had a parent volunteer and realized, “I’m going to have to hold this one’s hand,” to find a genteel way to “fire” them…so she found it easier not to have any at all and thus not have to make those distinctions and be accused of favoritism, etc.

[4] Read:  out of the blue/apropos-of -nothing, * violence* toward a classmate.

[5]  Reading select books to students, five students per group.

[6] Some administrators in our local school district apparently thought that parents would be placated by the Gifted label, even though there was no corresponding change in instruction or programs or opportunities offered for the gifted.  When I discovered that reality, I told son K’s teacher I didn’t want him tested for the program if there was no point to it – they weren’t going to pacify us with a feel-good label (and she told me, in confidence, that she fully agreed…then went ahead and had him tested anyway.)

[7] One of those kids was a girl in my son’s 3rd grade class.  I knew some particulars of her family life, and saw how lost and spacy she seemed  (her bio dad, along with a series of “mommy’s boyfriends,” passed through a revolving door between jail and her mother’s house, and her mother had been doing drugs while pregnant with her).  I was a math aide in that class; after noting the girl’s consistently abysmal worksheets and test results on the most basic of arithmetic skills, I asked the teacher if I might offer to tutor the girl after class.  I think the girl trusted me; after noticing how her classmates scorned and/or ignored her, I’d made it a point to always greet her during my volunteer shifts and find something nice to say to her.  The only time I saw a light in her eyes, which were consistently dull and glazed,  was when I complimented her (ratty, faced) red high-top sneakers.  The teacher had tears in her eyes when she told me that she so appreciated my volunteering to tutor the girl, but that the suggestion had already been offered, *several times* by both the teacher herself and other teachers and classroom volunteers.  The girl’s mother had vehemently refused (and seemed to resent) all offers:  Her daughter was going to be in the age-appropriate grade, and that was that.

[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 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 Blog Post I’m Not Completing

June 27, 2025

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, nature, Oregon, politics, school, science, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , Comments Off on The Blog Post I’m Not Completing

As in, this is not the post that was intended for today.   [1]   But first, this breaking news:

Dateline:  Monday eve, 6-23-25.  Scott Harris joined us for dinner.

 

 

Several years back, when people were starting to post pictures of meals they’d eaten and/or dishes they’d prepared on social media, moiself  decided to do so, as a kind of joke.  The first time that I posted a picture  [2]  of a meal MH and I were enjoying, my friend Scott Harris   [3]  commented on the post with something like, “Oh, not, you’re not going to turn into one of those people who posts pictures of food, are you?”

Moiself  picked up that gauntlet he’d thrown down, and ran with it.

 

Here’s the gauntlet I picked up.  I’d assumed it was thrown by Scott.

 

From that time onward, every week or so I post a picture of a dinner I’ve prepared, along with a caption containing variants of, “MH and I would be delighted to share our stir fry with Indonesian peanut sauce with Scott Harris, were he in town;”  “If only Scott Harris could be here to help us finish off this grilled steelhead with lemony garlic greens, spice-roasted butternut squash, and MH’s homemade sourdough…”

 

 

 

It became a long-running joke, with several of my FB friends wondering/asking moiself  if there actually is such a person as Scott Harris?  Indeed there is, I assured them, but Harris and his family have lived abroad for many years (first Hanoi, currently Hong Kong).  He occasionally gets stateside to visit family in So Cal; we’ve tried to arrange get-togethers but nothing has worked out…until three weeks ago Scott messaged me with the news that, due to his youngest son’s participation in a touring baseball team tournament comprised of expat kids, he and his son would be in the Portland area,  and:

“…if you are around, I demand to be fed.”

We were, and he was.  Photographic evidence (yeah, I know, it could be AI-faked) is available, privately, for doubters.

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of If You See One Movie This Summer…
( You Need To Get Out More Often )

Dateline:  Tuesday.  Coincidently, the day after a long-time friend   [4]   visits – the kind of friend where you can both catch up on each other’s respective lives and discuss the state of/meaning to the universe in the same paragraph – I met my dear buddy and fellow Movie Buff® CC at a theater to see  The Life of Chuck.  This is the incident which made the title of this week’s blog appropriate.  Translation:  I’m not writing the blog installment I’d intended, because moiself  can’t get the movie’s themes from careening through my frontal lobe and my amygdala like a drunken sailor.

I felt odd, driving home from the movie theater, and actually wondered at one point if I should pull the car over and strip off my clothing and run into traffic whooping and yelping in both despair and delight  catch my breath, because my mind, and possibly body, felt… elsewhere.   After the movie was over I told CC, when we were both stumbling for words outside the theatre, that “…when I get home tonight MH will ask me how the movie was, and I’ll have no good answer, and then he’ll ask what was the movie  about, and I’ll say something like ‘it was about living life with the knowledge of the inevitable obliteration of the cosmos, whether physically or philosophically/personally…and I can’t explain it any more than that.’ ”

And then I’ll have to sit in one of our Comfy Chairs ® and stream a movie about dinosaurs or King Kong or something.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of…Or Something

The next day I saw one version of  Or Something: The Phoenician Scheme,   [5]   which, for moiself, is the existential opposite of The Life of Chuck.

I won’t bother to give even a rudimentary summary of The Phoenician Scheme’s plot line, because it doesn’t matter.  It was a Wes Anderson movie, in all its Wes Anderson-osity, with its plethora of *name* actors eager to play a part in his highly stylized eccentricity: Look at us – as actors we’re all individually and collectively capable of emoting our spleens off, but here we are in Wes Anderson ®  mode, so enjoy us being deadpan and quirky amidst the symmetrical, bright-vintage and hyperrealistic, Andersonesque set design!   [6]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of In Three Days My Mother Would Have Had Her Ninety-Seventh Birthday

To honor that, moiself  will be excerpting a blog from three years ago (  The Holiday I’m Not Renaming ), in which I shared one of my favorite memories of my mother:

Dateline: earlier this week.   A FB friend posts pictures of his grandchild‘s visit to what looks to be an amusement park, and a picture shows the child playing that classic arcade game, Whac-a-mole. Seeing this picture prompts a lovely flashback for moiself – a memory I’ve not thought of in decades.

Dateline of memory: A long time in a galaxy far far away (Southern California).  I am visiting my parents at their home in Santa Ana.  It’s summertime, and the County Fair is on.  My parents tell me they haven’t been to a state or county fair in ages, and suggest we go.  And so we do.  As we walk past the various cheesy games and merchandise and food booths, nothing catches our interest, until we come to an arcade. I espy a Whac-A-Mole game, and instantly am obsessed with getting my mother to play it.

 

 

My mother is hesitant, despite my enthusiastic recommendation. She knows nothing about it, she says  ( Even better!!!, moiself  thinks to moiself  ).  I assure her that it’s a straightforward game, no complicated strategy or levels or scenarios: she simply must hold the mallet and whack the heads of the moles as they pop up from the console.

“Why?” she asks me.

“There’s no time to get existential right now,” I reply.  I put my two quarters in the slot, press the game’s start button and put the mallet in my mother’s hand.  “You don’t want me to waste fifty cents, right, Mom? Look – there’s one!  Pretend it’s digging up your rosebushes!”

…my mother is exquisitely awful at Whac-A-Mole.  Her timing is atrocious; even so, she soon gets into it in her own way, emitting a high-pitched,  “Oh!”  whenever a mole head appears, followed by her delayed whack at its head. My father and I, standing to the side of the game console, are doubled over with laughter as we watch my mild-mannered mother, with an increasing maniacal look in her eyes, pursue those pesky moles:

“Oh!”
(whack)

“Oh!”
(whack)

“Oh!” (whack) “Oh!” (whack)

“Oh oh oh oh oh oh!”
(whack whack whack whack whack whack)

It is one of my favorite memories of her.

 

This is another one.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [7]

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”

( Carl Sagan, the late, great, American astronomer, planetary scientist, teacher,
author, science communicator…. )

 

 

*   *   *

May you realize that we’re all living  The Life of Chuck
May you have a favorite memory of your mother;
May your life never resemble a Wes Anderson movie;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Some musings on “special ed” programs.

[2] on Facebook, my only social media outlet.

[3] I’m making an exception here (in my blog) to identify a real person with his real name (and not an acronym or initials).  He deserves it, and also, being a journalist for years, he kind of qualifies as a person in “the public eye.”

[4] We’ve known each other since junior high ( I was in the 7th grade, and Scott the 8th).  Can you imagine the hideous (as in, embarrassingly adolescent) stories we could tell?

[5] Yep, I returned to the movie theater.  I’m trying to get back into watching a movie a week in the theater…which shouldn’t be so difficult given the plethora of summer releases but which in fact is difficult for moiself  when the majority of the releases are the seventeenth in a series of I Know What You Did/How You Screamed  Fast and Furioiusly Last Summer – Marvel Super Hero, Inside Out of Training Your Despicable Me’s Dragon, Mission Impossible: The Final Squeezing Of Blood From A  Movie Ticket Turnip…

[6] At least I didn’t pay for it…directly.  I have a movie club membership, and have amassed many free tickets.

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

The Big D**k I’m Not Swinging

June 20, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, books & magazines, current events, extended family, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, music, nature, politics, radio & podcasts, Recreation, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Department Of Thoughts While Walking Around A Farmers’ Market

Dateline:  Last Sunday, with MH, Orenco Farmers’ Market; ~ 11:45a. Moiself  is noticing a long line for one of the market’s food carts.   We approach the cart to see what it is selling, then exchange knowing snickers.  As MH puts it,

“… it is so strange to see a long line for a place serving food
you’d have to pay me to eat.”

That particular cart specialized in biscuits and gravy/biscuits and sausage and gravy.  Even way back when moiself  was the occasional meat eater, I disdained the dish – confession: I find its appearance so repulsive I’ve never even tried it.

To the minority (I’m being optimistic) of y’all who claim to actually like biscuits and gravy:   [1]   that homey dish, which may remind you of family comfort food, has always looked to me to be the result of feeding sausage to Grandma’s dog which then vomits all over a plate of Grandma‘s biscuits.

 

*   *   *

Department Of More Thoughts, These Which Occurred To Moiself @ 5:57a
  On A Father’s Day Sunday Morning

Who “invented” shaving?

Shaving was, for centuries, an already well-established torture grooming option for men before the Roaring 20s and flapper fashions revealed that adult female humans also grow hair on their legs and armpits.  Seeing as how there are few things more frightening to patriarchy – and the “feminine” ideal it created –  than recognizing the natural, biological commonalities of male and female bodies, razors and depilatories became marketed to (read: mandated for) women.

 

 

But Who was the ambitious Phoenician dignitary (or other post-caveman ancestor) to figure out that you could take a blade or hone a stone or another sharp surface and scrape it along certain parts of a man’s skin, to remove the hair growing on the skin   [2]  without removing the skin itself?  And why did that Who think that that – selective body hair removal – would be a worthwhile activity for human men to pursue?

And why were Certain Parts ® chosen for hair removal, while others were left alone?  Shaving targets a man’s face – chin, cheeks, upper lip…not his eyebrows for some reason,   [3] –  but not the hair atop his head.  Why, in most cultures, do men shave their facial hair, but not their forearm or leg hair?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of You Had Me At “We Don’t Understand Yogurt”

Moiself  has no idea what this “We Don’t Understand Yogurt” quote is supposed to reference.  But I had it set for today’s blog, and so it shall stand. Let your imagination run wild.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Big Swinging Dicks

Not my terminology, but that used by the OceanGate     [4]    CEO and founder Stockton Rush ( I don’t know about big or swinging, but that’s a dick name if I ever heard one).  Rush used the BSD term to describe the cadre of egotistical entrepreneurs ( alaJeff Bezos and Elon Musk) which, he told several of his employees, he aspired to join.  No doubt Rush imagined that he would one day be the exemplar of the ITAL Big Swinging Dicks he admired.  And now he is….although not exactly in the way he’d hoped.

In June 2023 Rush, and four passengers who’d paid OceanGate $250,000 each to ride in an OceanGate submersible to see the wreck of the Titanic died when OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded about 90 minutes into its descent, instantly goo-ifying/squashing killing all five people on board.   [5]   Investigations into the disaster   [6]  revealed that warnings had been raised by experts inside and outside of the company, from deep sea explorers to engineers and former OceanGate employees, about Titan’s unique carbon fiber design not being suitable for Titanic-style depths   [7]  – a design which ignored over 60 years of submersible design research and which was described by one former OceanGate employee as an “abomination” and an “inevitable disaster.”

 

Titan submersible, before….

 

Dateline:  last Wednesday, 7:30 am.  Moiself  is watching the Netflix documentary Titan: The Ocean Gates Submersible Disaster.  I’m not sure why I chose it; its near the top of my you-may-find-this-interesting list, and was something to watch while on my morning elliptical workout.  As it began with the recap of the disaster, I wondered to moiself , Other than being appalled by the public resources used (read: money and equipment and manpower wasted) trying to rescue a bunch of privileged multimillionaires from their ill-advised, thrill-seeking adventure, am I really interested in this story?

The answer proved to be yes, yes, and yes.  The film’s documenting of the rise and fall of OceanGate and its CEO is Shakespearean in its themes of ego and hubris, power and ambition, inevitable fate and coveted glory.   

The submersible Titan was made of a material (carbon fiber) that no other submersible – either in Rush’s own company or other companies that produce submersibles – had used, a fact which, to moiself,  screams the question, IF  NO  ONE  ELSE IS  USING  THIS  MATERIAL  TO  GO  THAT  DEEP  IN  THE  OCEAN, MAYBE  THERE’S  A  REALLY  GOOD  REASON  WHY ?!?!?  When Rush was interviewed by a newscaster who raised this fact, Rush actually said, on camera, that once they got through testing the Titan the submersible would be  “ invulnerable.”  The newscaster quickly reminded Rush, “Isn’t that what they said about the Titanic?”

 

“Come home to mama, little Titan.”

 

If you were fictionalizing this story you couldn’t concoct a more classic, almost stereotypical, self-aggrandizing, bullying, grandiose, and ultimately ignorant elitist lead character, whose background of privilege and wealth and money and connections got him a Princeton University degree   [8]  and seed money for his projects.  During the US Coast Guard’s investigation of the disaster, one former OceanGate engineer testified under oath that he quit the company after he asked Rush what would happen if the Titan failed a neutral/third party inspection, and Rush replied that he would “buy myself a congressman.”

 

 

Moiself  found the documentary both fascinating and unnerving.  It reminded me of Werner Herzog’s acclaimed 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man.     [9]    In both films you see a narcissistic megalomaniac unraveling on screen – making rash choices and brazenly overconfident assumptions which lead to their (and other people’s) deaths.  In Stockton Rush’s case, in the end he would literally rather get in a sub that’s going to implode than admit failure (or do what he really needed to do – get some therapy).

Rush’s conceit and aspirational insecurities are vividly on display.  He’d sunk his company’s money and his ego and reputation on this new design that would show all the naysayers what a BSD he was.  He ignored everyone and everything he’d used to help him on the project – his engineers, the test results, even his own monitoring system.  The filmmakers obtained footage of one of Rush’s solo test dives on Titan, which Rush filmed. When the hull began cracking you could see, you could *feel,* his anxiety.  It was all over his face, and he didn’t do another dive for four months after that, until he…until he what?  Just said, WTF?!?!?  He ignored the evidence that the hull would break.  He couldn’t deal with the failure; he pushed his luck…and when that luck ultimately and inevitably ran out, he took other human beings with him.

BSD.  Big Swinging Dick, indeed, that’s what Rush finally was.  But not in the way he’d envisioned.

 

Titan submersible…after.

 

*   *   *

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of A Recent Bingo!  Moment

Dateline: last Tuesday, 8:02 am, walking on the beach at Manzanita, listening to a Fresh Air podcast about stand-up comic and American immigrant,  [10]  Atsuko Okatsuka.  Don’t you love it when someone else, at least for a moment, has thought your same thoughts and/or has experienced your same experiences, and comes up with a pithy way to describe it – a phrase or explanation that you can use, then blame it on/attribute it to someone else, if anyone finds the description unpleasant or insulting?

As a standup comic Okatsuka puts herself at the center of attention when she is working, and thus by definition, is “on stage.”  Still, in the interview she showed a unique understanding in answering certain questions or prescriptions often posed to writers, artists and other “creatives” by folks not in those fields, folks and who conflate an artist’s wanting to do the creative work with wanting fame and acclaim for that work:

“Why do you do *___*” or, Why don’t you do *____*?

 

 

My response (often unuttered) has always been on the tip of my snarky little tongue when, over the years, people who’ve judged me amusing and/or clever felt the need to give me unsolicited career advice.  This advice, always phrased in ways to seem complimentary, comes out as some version of

* You should be (should’ve been) a stand-up comic!
*  You should be (should’ve been) an actor, or someone on stage!

Fact is, if or when y’all would truly pay attention and/or look beneath the surface (as did some editors and publishers, who were less than pleased with the results), you would surmise that although I’m one of the more genial people you will meet and am generally fine in one-on-one and very small group situations,  being “on stage“ (or even the idea of it) is something I truly abhor.

 

Yeah, kinda like this.

 

Translation: book fairs, book signings, author readings and appearances – while highly (and often desperately) sought by aspiring/newbie writers, and (usually) highly appreciated or desired by other, established authors –  were anathema to me.  And I’m fine with that.

Thus, my answer to the Why did you never pursue being a stand-up comic/more public speaking/presentation opportunities to sign books and bask in attention and acclaim…?”   [11]   question:

“Because I don’t have this hole in my heart that I have to fill
with the validation of strangers.”

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [12]

(Reason # 68). I’m angry that when people run for political office in the Unites States, it’s considered legitimate to grill them about their employment background, their positions on legislation, their positions on social issues, the taxes they’ve paid, even their sexual history… but, it’s considered invasive and intolerant to ask if they believe in talking snakes, demonic possession, magic underwear, magic crackers that turn into the flesh of their god, an earth that was created 6,000 years ago, or a god who put himself on Earth in human form and then sacrificed himself to himself to atone for sins that other people committed and to save humanity from the punishment he himself was planning to dole out.
If someone is going to make decisions about science funding, emerging medical technology, our educational system, and so on… I think it matters if they believe any of that shit, and I bloody well want to know.

( excerpt, Greta Christina’s informative, entertaining, passionately logical, both ferocious and calm, scathing and compassionate analysis of religion, Why Are You Atheists So Angry: 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless  )

 

*   *   *

May your life be free from BSD’s;
May your comfort food never look as though it’s been regurgitated;
May you, for whatever reasons, understand yogurt;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] And if this is you, you have my sympathy.

[2] Or so they thought, primitive humans not understanding how hair follicles function.

[3] Except for the occasional unibrow correction.

[4] OceanGate Inc. was a privately-owned company, co-founded by Stockton Rush, based in Washington state’s Puget Sound.  OceanGate manufactured and provided crewed submersibles for tourism, research, and exploration. It ceased operations after the Titan disaster.

[5] The five were Oceangate’s CEO Stockton Rush (who piloted the submersible), British explorer Hamish Harding, veteran French diver Paul Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.

[6] From the US Coast Guard, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, even the US Department of Justice (which was concerned about the company’s financial practices).

[7] The wreck of the Titanic lies some 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface.

[8] Even though his grades – the documentary shows his Princeton report cards – were hardly Ivy League bragging material (they ranged from B – to D’s and even Fs). 

[9] Focuses on the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, a self-proclaimed grizzley bear “expert,” who descends into grandiosity and manic delusion in his quest to “save the bear” and also get himself attention and jump-start his aspiring actor career.  Among Treadwell’s many peculiarities included him faking an Australian accent (he told some people he was from Australia; he was from New York state) or telling people that he was a British orphan (both of his parents survived him).  Moiself  highly recommends you watch this movie…but only once.

[10] technically an “illegal alien” – as a child she was brought to the US from Japan, without proper papers, by her grandmother.

[11] Translation:  I was the worst self-promoter, ever.

[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 Authoritarian Regime I’m Not Writing About

June 13, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, music, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Authoritarian Regime I’m Not Writing About

Los Angeles, and elsewhere.  The escalation – federal forces and incendiary rhetoric – to produce the violence #47 so desperately seeks.  Instigation, followed by justification.

Dictators; authoritarians…this is their playbook.  And one of the most essential – and the most heart-wrenching – chapter of the playbook is that their followers don’t, won’t, can’t, or refuse to see it. They vehemently and obstinately don their moral and historical blinders and bray,  “That was then; this is different,” as they slide into the putrid pit of “then.”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Win-Win

Dateline: Monday eve, watching the Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary.  Moiself  can’t remember exactly where I was or even how old I was when I heard Led Zeppelin’s first album, but the thing was that I heard it as an album.  Among the many insights presented in the documentary is the group’s strategy to *not* be a singles band – their albums were meant to be played and listened to us as just that: albums.   [1]   That differentiated them at the time (although, arguably, they were preceded by The Beatles’ Seargent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in terms of a band producing an album that was meant to be listened to as an album, and not just filler songs surrounding one or two singles).

I (eventually) bought all of the LZ albums and attended several of their concerts.  I also understood, intuitively if not consciously at the time, how LZ, and the heavy metal and “stadium rock” bands which followed, became partly responsible for the emergence of punk rock.  Several of the members of  The Ramones, as well as members of other punk bands, have spoken about how their approach to music (jackhammer, two-minutes songs; minimalist instrumentation and no solos by any member of the band) was a reaction to and rebellion against what they saw as the self-indulgent excesses of mainstream rock, which had abandoned or twisted the original energy of rock ‘n roll into, as an example, Jimmy Page’s and John Bonham’s respective, lengthy, guitar and drum solos.   [2]

Moiself  was a fan of Led Zeppelin’s music, then *really* loved The Ramones and punk rock as well, so it all worked out for me.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of A Blast From The Past

Dateline: January. 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.  So far it has, but time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.

This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a  YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?!  [3]   friend gave me, all those years ago,   [4]   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 June to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

 

 

Here is an excerpt from my blog of 6-14-18 ( The Match I’m Not Lighting  ).

Department of Will Someone Please Explain to Me…

As a kid, I didn’t understand the  light a match reference, nor the presence of a pack of matches in the bathrooms of most people of my parents’ generation.  Even after it was explained to me by an adult,   [5]   it still seemed rather silly.  Was it a last resort, an act of religious penance (  Forgive me, Father, for I have blown Satan’s bugle   [6]  ), or some kind of ritual atonement (setting oneself on fire rather than face the shame of emerging from the host’s bathroom after you’ve stunk it up)?

Matches eventually gave way to the Bathroom Air Fresheners industry – including the aptly if not discretely named Poo-pouri    [7].  This was a great loss to the budding pyromaniac that lurks in most six-year-olds, and also provided yet another variation on things that don’t make much sense.

Yeah, I get the point of, or rather I understand the supposed need for, commercial bathroom air fresheners.  But other than serving as an effective irritant to asthmatics and people with fragrance allergies I think it is arguable that they “work.”  In my experience in other people’s houses and in restaurants, businesses and other “out” venues, it’s a tossup as to whether air fresheners eliminate   [8]   or enhance the odors they are designed to combat.

 

 

And the varieties of masking perfumes, ay yi yi.  Here are just some of the olfactory auras available to you, Discerning Consumer, thanks to the scentmeisters of Glade, Renuzit, et al:

Frosted Pine
Clean Linen
Creamy Custard® & Apple Cinnamon
Angel Whispers   [9]

But really, who’s kidding whom?  Here are your choices:

*Bathroom usage sans air freshener:  it smells like someone took a dump in here.
* Bathroom usage with air freshener:  it smells like whispering angels stood by
 as someone took a dump on a pine tree,
in your clean linen, on your apple custard dessert.

Not to get all Bathroom Buddhist ® , but it is what it is.  Embrace the stone age, y’all: light a match.

 

*   *   *

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Born Too Soon To Achieve My Ultimate Sports Destiny
Sub-Department Of I Realize The Pressure To Fill Space With Content 24/7,
But, A Classic Sibling Bedroom Brawl Is Now A Professional Sport?

Dateline: Sunday night, at Manzanita’s San Dune Pub,  [10]   realizing that one of the pub’s five televisions which show a variety of sports was set to an ESPN channel which was broadcasting the PFC, as in…I can’t believe moiself  is typing this….Pillow Fighting Championship.

 

 

“PFC: Pillow Fight Championship is the world’s first professional pillow fighting league featuring professional fighters engaging in intense, fast-paced and all ages-friendly combat unrivaled by any other professional sports entertainment or fighting organization.

However, PFC isn’t just for professional fighters. We have developed a unique set of rules and regulations to complement our patent-pending and safe combat pillows that allow anyone to participate.

Pillow Fight Championship has been credited for being a safe alternative to traditional, violent combat sports and for it’s ITAL (sic) cardiovascular and benefits.”
( from PFC: About )

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [11]

 Zora Neale Hurston. Brilliant Harlem Renaissance writer. Anthropologist, ethnographer, folklorist. Best known and beloved for her 1937 masterpiece nove,l Their Eyes Were Watching God. Enormously influential in the worlds of literature, anthropology, oral tradition, African American folklore, and just about every other damn thing except maybe particle physics. She was a non-believer, and even as a child, she was beginning to question the unquestioning faith and dogma of her congregation. She wrote of those years she could not  “understand the passionate declarations of love for a being that nobody could see…. When I was asked if I loved God, I always said yes because I knew that was the thing I was supposed to say. It was a guilty secret with me for a long time.”
She eventually concluded, “Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.”    [12]

( excerpts, list of “7 Amazing Atheists Who Aren’t Old White Guys,”
By Greta Christina,   [13]  August 30, 2012 |)

 

 

*   *   *

May you no longer engage in pillow fights for free if others are paid to do so;
May you not say yes because you know it is the thing you are supposed to say;
May you find a way to torch the authoritarian’s playbook;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] And LZ founder/guitarist Jimmy Page was fortunate to get the contractual stipulations to be able to do that.

[2] Johnny Ramone’s one note guitar riff in I Wanna Be Sedated was his satirical nod to rock guitarists’ lengthy solos.

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

[4] Was it really over twelve years ago?

[5] By my uncle Joe, accomplished match lighter, may he rest in peace.

[6] a high-pitched, keening wail of a fart, as if summoning Satan’s minions from one’s nether regions.

[7] I am not making this up, and you have to read the product reviews.

[8] Sorry.  Potty-pun unintentional. No shit really.

[9] Because we all know what angel whispers smell like.

[10] Interested in a business opportunity?  The beloved Pub is for sale.  We want someone good to keep it going!

[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

[12][12] From Dust Tracks on a Road.

[13] Who herself is not an old white guy; rather, Greta Christina is a not-infrequently-quoted-in-this-blog author, atheist ad LGBTQ activist, and speaker.

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 Rejection I’m Not Minding

March 28, 2025

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Department Of A New Way To Handle Rejection

Context:  Although I am not currently   [1]  writing nor submitting fiction for publication, I do keep up with some fiction markets and occasionally send something I think might be a fit for a specific journal/publisher.  Dateline: last week.  I received a standard rejection email.  It was sent to my correct email address (robyn@ ____.com) , and disguised as a personal note:  it was longer than the standard, thanks-but-it’s-not-a-fit-for-us note, but when you read closely you realize the plethora of sentences after the no thanks are about the publisher and nothing about you or your work – all they had to do was fill in your name…which was done in this entertaining (to moiself ) fashion:

“Dear Sarah,
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to evaluate _____( name of work)
in view of its potential fit with (name of the publisher)….I’m very sorry to tell you that we regretfully….”

I can take some comfort in knowing that it wasn’t *my* work that was so regretfully rejected, but that of my evil twin, Sarah.    [2]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Speaking Of Writing Adventures

My next project: I’m going to pitch Netflix with my idea for a historical series, ala  Bridgerton. It will be about upper-class women navigating the intricacies of their menstrual cycles during the Regency era. It’s a period piece.

 

 

 

Thank you; I’ll show moiself  out.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of But Before Moiself  Embarks On That Adventure,
There Is Feedback To Be Given

Feedback in the form of the following email, which I sent Monday afternoon, to one of my favorite podcast hosts (journalist Shankar Vedantam) of one of my favorite podcasts.     [3]

 

 

Dear Mr. Vedantam,

Big fan of your podcast here – I’m a regular listener, who often gives Hidden Brain a shout-out (and link to) in my blog.  I’m writing to give feedback on something that caught my attention in HB’s most recent episode, The Moments That Change Us.

Early on in the episode, you and the podcast’s guest, philosopher Laurie Paul, are discussing the life-altering events for John Newton, the 18th century English slave ship captain who later wrote the hymn Amazing Grace.  When Newton was very young his very religious mother died, and his father remarried, leaving Newton feeling abandoned.  Subsequently, Newton, as you put it, “soon found himself not only turning away from religion but against it…he became what you might call a *militant atheist*….”

Why did you choose to use the term  militant atheist, a derogatory neologism which certainly wasn’t in usage among Newton’s peers?

Militant atheist is a lazy rhetorical cliché, a label ala the (much wittier) “Four Horsemen of the New Atheist Apocalypse,” which itself is a riff on the violence-infused imagery of end-times Christian scriptures.  The “Four Horsemen of the New Atheist Apocalypse” refers to four particular scientists/philosophers/authors/journalists – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens – known for their respective, vigorous, droll, evidence-based critiques of religion.  Each of them have also been labeled as  militant atheists.

When did Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Hitchens ever arm themselves with AK47s?  Have they amassed a cache of IEDs?  Have they opened a school for training atheist suicide bombers?  The closest they’ve come to tossing grenades are the ideas they lob to point out the delusions of religious tenets and the dangers of applying religious-based constraints to politics and science.

When is the last time you encountered an armed, violent group of atheists bent on murdering a political cartoonist or stabbing a fiction author because they objected to the religious editorial content of the cartoonists’ and authors’ respective works?

How’s about we all agree to not precede the term atheist – which simply means, a person sans theism – with militant, unless that non-theist is actually engaging in the violent acts of a militia?

The main proponents of the term  militant atheist are religious propagandizers:  “You atheists are so militant!”  Translation: “I am upset that you who do not hold my religious beliefs are unapologetically and forthrightly invoking facts to support your critical thinking.”

(from Oxford Languages dictionary)
Militant: adjective – combative and aggressive in support of a political or social cause,
and typically favoring extreme, violent, or confrontational methods.

Being described as “militant” is dismissive to we who hold natural (as opposed to supernatural) worldviews.  We who are religion-free are not subject to the actual militancy of scriptural decrees and religious leaders’ admonitions, which are depressingly too common to list in their entirety.  A sampler from Christian scriptures includes:

 * “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34)

* “He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” (Luke 22:3)

* (from one of Jesus’s parables) “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.’”  (Luke 19:27)

* “For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”  (Romans 13:4)

*  “…whoever would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, should be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman.”  (2 Chronicles 15:12-13)

* “But if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword.  For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”  (Isaiah 1:20)

* “The high places of Isaac will be destroyed and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined; with my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.” (Amos 7:9)

Sure, many of us atheists/Freethinkers/Humanists/Skeptics get annoyed, frustrated, and sometimes even outraged at the supernatural folly we are surrounded by.   Human Psychology 101 alert:  People who are misunderstood, mischaracterized, denigrated, oppressed, and even attacked (physically as well as verbally) frequently become angry.  Remember how “militant” was applied to the Black Power and Feminist groups of the 1960s and 1970s?

We who are religion-free would simply like to be able to express our beliefs without encountering vitriol and discrimination.  We would simply like to acknowledge our views against and concerns about religious influence in public and civic life – yep, even in front of religious people, who have become accustomed to the arbitrary privilege of freedom from critique which is accorded religion in the United States (a country where seven states still have bans on atheists holding public office ).

Sincerely and compellingly (if not militantly) yours,

Robyn Parnell

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Letting The Mystery Be

Only two weeks ago I blogged about my wistfulness re the unlikelihood of successfully pulling off a prank in this there-are-cameras-everywhere world  ( The Pranks I’m No Longer Playing ).  However, one of my neighbors (?    [4]   ) has done so. 

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago MH showed me the above, which was tied to one of the branches of our pear tree in our front yard.  Yes, this is the same tree that gets a feature in this blog during the holiday season, when the tree hosts a rotating/weekly lineup of Partridge Family ® members, ala: 

 

 

 

 

Those omnipresent neighborhood  porch/house/garage cameras I mentioned?   MH and I have them, as well.  The cameras are sensitive enough (to our irritation) that they record when someone just walks past our front yard, on the sidewalk      [5]…which goes by the pear tree…which means we could figure out who did it.

Moiself  thinks it’s best to not know the specifics; rather, it’s fun to hold good thoughts for the entire neighborhood.  I’ll just let the mystery be.

 

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

 

*   *   *

May you be the grateful recipient of a heart-warming prank;
May you reserve epithets like militant for true militants;
May you, sometimes, just let the mystery be;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] As in 99.2% of the time not….

[2] who apparently has gotten hold of both my manuscript and my email address, that plagiarizing bitch.

[3] Which regular readers of this blog are aware of me recommending, along the lines of, “you must listen to this episode….”

[4] Moiself  is guessing/assuming.

[5] We receive a notification that someone activated the front porch camera , though no one in fact it is on our front porch, they’re just walking past our house.

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

The Green Flags I’m Not Missing

February 14, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, extended family, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, politics, radio & podcasts, science, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Green Flags I’m Not Missing

Department Of A Blast From The Past

A new year; a 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 February to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

 

 

Here is an excerpt from my blog of 2-8-19 ( The Speculation I’m Not Endorsing ).   [3]

Department Of Preview Of Coming Attractions:
How the Religion-Free Think About Death & Grief

Here is (an excerpt of; my emphases) what a religion-free journalist wrote to his (religious) friend who had recently suffered the loss of her father. This friend asked him to tell her what he thought was the “next step,” and to “please lie to make it more interesting” if his answer might not suit her.

  You asked me what I think is the next step.  Well, no one has reported back from the other side, none of us who are alive have been to the other side, and we don’t have any factual evidence supporting a life (as we know it) after we die.

To me, believing what I want to be true can be very comforting (like my unshakable belief that Jessica Alba wants all my babies), but that doesn’t make it true.
I find more comfort in what I know to be true. For the things I don’t know, I prefer saying just that — I don’t know — instead of entertaining supernatural guesses or made-up answers from a time when humans didn’t know about the carbon cycle or the structure of the DNA that your father passed on to you, his living, breathing daughter.

You said that if I didn’t have the answers, I should “lie to make it more interesting.” But I have always found things most interesting when I didn’t have to lie. That is why I am an atheist.

Admitting ignorance is humbling. It reminds us that as fleeting inhabitants of this vast universe, we are part of something much bigger. It forms a foundation for the curiosity that defines us as human beings, that drives us to contemplate our existence, educate ourselves, and to grow and evolve as individuals and as a species.
 
To lose that is a much worse death than physical death.

I wish you the strength and resolve to cope with your loss. Mourn his death, but also celebrate the life that he helped give you. That’s what he would have wanted.

(“Grief Without Belief – How Do Atheists Deal With Death,”
Huffington Post, 10-22-13, By Ali A. Rizvi, Pakistani-Canadian author
of The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason)

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of There’s Another Trip To Croatia In My Future

Dateline: Tuesday am.  Always-on-her-toes-and-ever-vigilant-re-the-cultural-zeitgeist  friend LAH alerted me to something which sounded too good to be true.  Oh, moiself  of little faith!  I doubted her at first…until I remembered that the internet would never lie to us; thus, after several hours minutes of googling I can attest that the HaHa Museum, aka the “museum of laughter,” is a real thing.

 

 

“Visitors to the HaHaHouse in the Croatian capital Zagreb are blasted with a puff of white smoke once they step inside to blow away their worries before climbing into a ‘giant washing machine.’  The ‘centrifuge of life’ then whips them away Willy Wonka-style down a twisting slide into a pool filled with little white balls where their journey to a happier place starts.

Its creator Andrea Golubic said she had the idea for the museum during the pandemic when many were feeling down, depressed and isolated.  ‘I realised that I had a mission – to heal people with laughter,’ added the upbeat 43-year-old….

Visitors press a button to be ‘disinfected from negativity’ as soon as they step inside the museum, which has eight interactive zones.

One has a rubber chicken choir cheerfully cackling out hits like ABBA’s ITAL Dancing Queen, there is a karaoke room with distorted voices and a ‘Sumo Arena’ for wrestling in puffed-up costumes….

The museum also explains humour styles, from word play, slapstick, toilet and dark humour to satire with the help of some choice one-liners….”
( excerpts from “Croatia laughter museum aims to blow away the blues  – A new museum of laughter is offering to put people through the spinner to wash away the negativity of modern life.” France24.com  )

 

They had me at the Rubber Chicken Choir (and, of course, a mention of “toilet” humor)

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Another Great Concept I Heard About On A Science Podcast…
This One Kinda Valentine’s Day-Related

We’ve heard about the red flags to look for in a potential spouse, or relationship:

* thinks his seven-day-binge of eating nothing but McDonalds French fries
counts as him trying vegetarianism for a week;

* thinks the Blue State/Red State divide means people are sad or embarrassed;

* claims that MAGA hat-wearers are showing solidarity for a particular state’s
Olympics Team ( Minnesotans Are Great Athletes! )…

Er, make that, the *Big* Red Flags, such as….

 

 

Certainly, being aware of these harbingers of doom warning signs is one of the keys to a happy life and minimizing the number of How-did-I-not-see-that-coming ?!?!  incidents, whether you apply the RF criteria to choosing romantic partners or friends or business associates. But what about green flags?

If I were in the dating world right now,   [4]  as much as I might be on the alert for red flags, I hope I would have the good sense to spend as much if not more time recognizing and appreciating green flags. As in, I hope I’d know what a healthy relationship looks and feels like, and accept nothing less.

 

 

Laundry-list specifics of what constitutes Green flags  might vary from person to person; still, moiself  feels comfortable generalizing about would most green flags lists would include (modify the gender – or species? – indicators to suit whatever floats your boat):

*  he expresses appreciation for the good people in his life, from family members to coworkers;

*  he treats restaurant waitstaff, grocery clerks, baristas, ticket checkers at concerts or movie venues – in other words, people who “serve” him – with respect, and shows patience if they are testy, not particularly competent, or obviously having a bad day;

* he pays attention to your friends and family and coworkers when he meets them, and tries to remember their names and important life details;

* he “walks the walk” as well as talks the talk;

* he asks people about themselves and listens to their stories and answers;

* you, as well as other people in his life, feel relaxed and calm in his presence;

* he has longtime friends from before he met you, and maintains those friendships, no matter the geographical separation;

* even if he’s had a bad/less than desirable breakup with an ex (or former friend/employer/employee) he does not disparage her; rather, he can speak of the hurt involved but also of what he learned, and even tries to see things from the exes’ POV;   [5]

* he asks those in need (including you) how (or if) he can help before offering advice;

* he can take legitimate criticism without getting defensive;

* he likes cats, even if he doesn’t have any (yet);

* he appreciates a good elephant fart joke, even if he never tells any…

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Apropo Of Nothing…

Who am I kidding?  Apropos of a lot of  caca that’s going on. Anyway, FYI for whoever needs it, here is a movie I watch to get cheered up, as in, when moiself   finds herself despairing about the character of my fellow human beings:

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

 

*   *   *

May you be the example and not merely the opinion;
May you find a safe way to be “disinfected from negativity;”
May you never have to “lie to make it more interesting;

…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] Warning:  the speculation mentioned in the blog title is the topic of the first part of the blog, which deals with the then-recent murder of a friend.

[4] And moiself  be oh-so-happy not to be, for a variety of reasons and not to rub it in to those who are single and looking to change that status….

[5] Unless she was an axe murderer or stalker or an objectively proven extortionist or pathological liar or some dangerous shifty character…

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

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