Vegetarian Foxes and Chicken Coops

People who did it but don't any more should be the very last ones in line to regulate it, right behind those who do it all the time.

Of Panache and Pandering

I think that Vietnam Vets trump NASCAR Dads.... And why does Bush 2nd get away scott free for pandering to the same group that Howard Dean was pilloried for even mentioning?

For Valentine's Day...

... Let's all decide how to allow homosexual couples to pursue happiness without being punished by the rigid fears and hatreds of others.

Being gay in the USA means that your family can deny your true love access to your hospital bed. It means you can't include the other in your insurance coverage. Perhaps least fair, you can't receive government-mandated marriage benefits (taxes, death considerations, more) given to heterosexual citizen couples even though you're as hard-working as anyone else. Personally, I don't care what this legal construct would be called - marriage, domestic partnership, civil union, contract, whatever works to make it fair - as long as the same construct is available to heterosexual couples.

Phooey on the claim that marriage benefits should be "saved for heterosexuals only since the institution was really created for the sake of the children," as certain nay-sayers would have us believe. If that were the case, what about childless couples? By choice, my husband and I do not have (and will not have) children; would these people deny us the right to marry? If we step back even further, older tradition and law would make my daughter's father my husband forever, and he would have vast economic and physical power over both of us. I shudder to consider that possibility.

Western-style marriage is more likely a holdover from those European traditions in which a woman (as breeding vessel) was a valuable commodity and had to be protected and traded for the appropriate reasons - usually to form unions with other families.

I imagine that pervasive current conservative middle east Islamic attitudes toward women hints at the way it was for all of us until relatively recently, in spite of those apologists, sometimes female, who claim the letter of sharia law "gives" women equality and much respect. In my mind, it's not "respectful" to allow a schoolful of girls to burn to death because they weren't wearing headscarves when they tried to escape the blaze. "Equality" does not describe the plight of an entire half of a population who aren't allowed to drive (or ride bicycles on public roads), show their faces in public, or go anywhere without a male family member escort.

But we aren't there, thank God, and it's just too bad that a free people denies official acceptance and equal justice to two individuals who dearly love each other.

Of Mars and Rocks, and Blueberry Muffins

Here's an idea for an aspiring cottage industry mogul: figure out how to harvest and ship tons of those little round Martian rocks, the ones they're calling blueberry muffins. The pictures suggest lots of artsy possibilities and who knows what they'd look like broken in two or sliced. Selling the jewelry alone - buyers would be easy to find - should assure some auction site (think eBay) as a major anchor in the future of 'Net-based commerce. I can see it now ...

Erma closed her eyes and stretched.

"Thanks for taking care of the boys," she called. "I really needed to catch up on email!" She focused resolutely on the chaos she could see in the sunny yellow-and-orange kitchen as she pushed her gloves off and popped the earmic out, dropping them both on the coffee table in front of her.

The images on the 50" plasma HDTVPC/Mac, her favorite possession, faded to a sepia-toned picture-album show staring many scenes from Erma's childhood home in Kentucky. She'd snagged the display from a virgin seller at the bargain basement price of $586, including shipping, then worried until the big box arrived. It had been listed as a "thin monater PC/Mac-complient." The accompanying description had also been misspelled, and the category it was listed under was obscure. The seller would have done much better to have simply advertised it under "TV." He would learn, if he continued selling through online venues. Meanwhile, someone profited. Someone always profited - Erma liked being that someone.

Jackie, Erma's good friend and fellow jewelry maker, stepped out of the bright, noisy kitchen into the cool forest greens of the den.

"You've got mine Sunday afternoon," Jackie said. "Don't forget! Did you find any more of those rosewood beads? They look great on Katherine's mesh bags."

Erma rubbed her face. She always felt just a little motion sick after spending a big chunk of time online. It couldn't be helped, though; her special set of skills made her the buyer for their little cottage industry krew. Erma had a knack for spotting and capturing bargains, even if they didn't seem like bargains at the time.

"I found something that might be even better," she said. Jackie's raised eyebrows and pursed mouth silently asked "oh?" and invited enlightenment as she sank to perch on the couch beside Erma.

"Yeah, uh, they're supposed to be Martian rocks, with signed certificates of authenticity. They're not going to come cheap." Erma leaned back and watched the other woman's face. Jackie sat back.

"Oh, my," she said. She looked around and pursed her lips. "Not cheap." Erma shrugged. Jackie bit her lip and looked at Erma as though she were trying to read tea leaves in a cup. "How, how do you know they're for real? How are they for real?"

"The agent who is selling the rocks has a near-perfect rating. He says that they're some pea-gravel that came back with the most recent Mars workers."

"Back from Mars? I sort of remember people coming back from Mars, I think."

"Well, the seller said a few of those rounded rocks have been coming back with workers ever since the beginning, and those few who brought them back made pretty good money off of them. The Mars Consortium finally saw reality and agreed to let workers bring back three ounces apiece, over personal weight, of soil or rock from up there. The workers union got the Consortium to agree to allocate personal weight from the trip out, so that a worker could lose a bit of body weight while there, then carry enough rock back to make up the difference. Plus the allocated three ounces."

"He said these are fairly uniform, all taken with a sieve and three to eight millimeters thick." She paused. "If all else failed, we could package some for novelty. Mars is a good reference." She motioned toward the earmic and gloves. "There are perhaps a couple thousand of mostly large ones loose in the entire earth population. Check out some of the prices. This is the first time they've been available in any amount at all, and no one knows what you can do with them."

"Why do you think we would have enough money to buy them?"

"I'm not sure we do, but bidding isn't as vigorous as you'd think. It's a small amount of goods, not really worth it for the big guys. Maybe people aren't sure they want to figure out how to craft these things, much less package and distribute. There's enough here to keep us all busy for a few years, but we're going to have to figure out how to use them. It would be a pain to have to cage them, but I don't know how hard they'd be to drill or how they respond to glue." She shrugged again.

"Maybe everyone's waiting to see how it goes. Maybe everyone believes this is out of their league. Maybe some real rich playboy will decide he wants them for his aquarium." Erma watched Sam and Josh carry their glasses and plates toward the kitchen sink. "It's interesting, is all."

Jackie nodded. Their home-based concern was much too small to buy or store big batches of supplies, so they had done the same as many small crafters, purchasing beads, wire, and other necessities in manageable quantity from resellers or others who treasured them and their small-lot-buying compatriots across the globe.

Every now and then, they came across real treasures, for example, the one-time sellout by the heirs of a small, privately owned diamond mine in Colorado. Although not of particular quality, the gems made their homemade items sparkle and sparked interest - and they'd came cheap enough to make it profitable. Flawed diamonds from America held an odd worldwide appeal, who knew? Erma had found the diamonds "interesting," too.

The profit from that buy allowed the craft cooperative's members to take a giant step forward and assured Erma's position as chief purchasing agent. The krew had to agree before she made a buy as large as this one could be, though.

Want to hear more? Send email to  lightningstruckfirewood at mindspring dot com; remove all spaces, replace at with the @ symbol and dot with a period. Sorry to make you work, but I hate spam. I will never sell or give away your email address.

Romance in a Teacup

(An original 53-word story)

Born on opposite ends of the country, the tracks, and the racial divide, they met and married on golden autumn afternoons.

The children they made on cold winter evenings grew to their legacy; one chose black, one white, and one the Marines.

The night her heart quit, his tears rolled down her cheeks.

Subject: Re: Re: Why the superbowl boycott

Dear B,
I couldn't git it to go.....was it funny?
... Lulu

Dear Lulu,

The commercial was not funny. It featured somber-faced kids - say, 6 to 9 or 10 years old - doing grown-up style general service-job-type labor (dishwasher, mechanic, etc.) with the tag line "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion deficit?" CBS refused to air it....

The commercial is titled "Child's Play" (if you can't get that link to work, try one of the other links at bushin30seconds.org).

As you are finding out, it is causing quite a little brouhaha. In addition to the MS/NBC article cited in the original email, Salon has an article (you have to sign in or read an ad to read). Googling it (cbs + commercial + "Super Bowl" + moveon) returns a list of lots of Internet people who have something to say about it, as well as a bunch of articles.

Most are like the Ad Age article....

Reacting to the winning ad, Republican National Committee press secretary Christine Iverson said, "They should have called the contest 'Twenty seconds of fear and loathing of George Bush.' It proves what we have said all along: The Democratic presidential candidates have a message of protest and pessimism but bring no positive ideas to the debate."

The RNC press secretary ignored the fact that neither MoveOn.org nor its pet, bushin30seconds.org, is affiliated with any Democratic candidate, presidential or otherwise. (Yes, the bushin30seconds panel of judges for the commercials does read like a Who's Who of Liberal Celebrities.) Iverson is pretending that the whole thing is a setup... a little FUD factor element, GOP style.

(That's "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt," the most favored rhetorical tool in any would-be free-world oppressor's kit. It's how Bill Gates gets people to buy his fat, buggy products and it's how Bush II et. al. sold the Invasion of Iraq to the American people.)

Since it's all a conspiracy, we can just go back to our beer and cigarettes, folks. Nothing to see here.

A MarketingWonk article explains:

The CBS release cites the company's written policy: "CTN will sell time to political candidates, to those authorized by candidates to purchase time on their behalf and to political parties. CTN also sells time to groups supporting or opposing significant ballot propositions."

And also...

The CBS press release, taking a clear swipe at MoveOn's successful campaign to stir protest against CBS, says, "In recent years, a cottage industry has arisen among groups that submit advocacy ads that they know will be rejected. They then resort to press releases and Internet diatribes about the rejection to reap considerable free media attention and financial contributions to support their cause. Editors and potential contributors beware."

Yeah, sure. The spokes-writer apparently didn't know (or care) that this ad was selected by an Internet poll rather than by cottage industry moguls. Hey, the GOP doesn't go for "popular" stuff anyway, but farting horses, graphic violence, inter-species sexual innuendo, and male virility make great ads.

The reaction has been a mixed bag. Child's Play could be seen by more people than it would have been if it had aired without controversy. The stinky part of the mix is that CBS also refused to run an ad from the nutcases at PETA, who wanted to hawk vegetarianism by sexual innuendo (e.g.., those who eat meat are impotent); it would have fit right in with many of the ads that did run (Viagra et. al.). Unfortunately, Child's Play is now part-and-parcel of the "shunned by CBS" 2K4 Super Bowl ads. Their take on the issue shows that Republicans understand just how juxtaposition muddies the human mind, particularly if helped by a little muddy writing....