...just a random chick

January
Eat This, Not That by David Zinczenko
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
The Corset: A Cultural History by Valerie Steele
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin

February
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

March
How to Be a Budget Fashionistsa: The Ultimate Guide to Looking Fabulous for Less by Kathryn Finney

April
Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey

May
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King
Some Girls Bite by Chloe Neill
Naked by David Sedaris

June
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs

July
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

August
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
(I seriously need to read more. Sheesh.)

September
Shopgirl by Steve Martin
Magic Bites by Kate Daniels
Staying Dead by Laura Anne Gilman

October
Storm Front by Jim Butcher
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

And my Pagerank just went up to 4.

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I think it's a good thing.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/sumerians_look_on_in_confusion_as

Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

"I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."

"Everything is here already," the pictograph continues. "We do not need more stars."

Historians believe that, immediately following the biblical event, Sumerian witnesses returned to the city of Eridu, a bustling metropolis built 1,500 years before God called for the appearance of dry land, to discuss the new development. According to records, Sumerian farmers, priests, and civic administrators were not only befuddled, but also took issue with the face of God moving across the water, saying that He scared away those who were traveling to Mesopotamia to participate in their vast and intricate trade system.

Moreover, the Sumerians were taken aback by the creation of the same animals and herb-yielding seeds that they had been domesticating and cultivating for hundreds of generations.

"The Sumerian people must have found God's making of heaven and earth in the middle of their well-established society to be more of an annoyance than anything else," said Paul Helund, ancient history professor at Cornell University. "If what the pictographs indicate are true, His loud voice interrupted their ancient prayer rituals for an entire week."

According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God's most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings.

"These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant," one Sumerian philosopher wrote. "They must be the creation of a complete idiot."

Fucked. Up. If this was me, he wouldn't need to go prison because I'd beat the ever-loving shit out of him.

New Zealand man injects sleeping wife with HIV

WELLINGTON (AFP) – An HIV-positive man in New Zealand has admitted injecting his blood into his sleeping wife and infecting her with the virus which can cause AIDS, a newspaper reported Sunday.

It is believed the man wanted to give her the disease so she would start having sex with him again, the Sunday Star-Times said.

Court documents detail how the man twice pricked his wife with a sewing needle laced with his infected blood, and how she once caught him handling a syringe full of his blood.

The man, 35, admitted infecting his wife, 33, and faces up to 14 years imprisonment when he is sentenced in the Auckland High Court early next year.

The man discovered he was HIV-positive, but his wife and children were not, during health checks imposed on them when the family arrived in New Zealand in 2004.

The woman said she wanted to maintain the relationship for the sake of the children but refused to have sex with her husband as she feared she would contract the disease.

She described how in May last year she discovered a sting-like mark on her left thigh and two days later she awoke to a stinging feeling in her leg.

During a routine check-up four months later she found she was HIV-positive and confronted her husband who admitted dipping a needle in his blood and pricking her with it.

"All he said (was) he was sorry. He said: 'I used needles on you because I wanted you to be the same as me so that you can live with me and you won't leave me'," she said.

Very interesting and thought-provoking blog post which touches upon how those things we think of as "innately feminine" are highly racialized and incredibly biased.

An excerpt:

What if suddenly, instantly, the power of white femininity were transferred to black women?

The answer is clear: Black women would represent value, purity; and based on their natural traits would be worthy of protection and instantly become the objects of universal desire. White women would represent the opposite.

“Beauty tar potion” would become globally popular to get the “black look.” “Dove” would be replaced with a black soap called “Raven” to help exfoliate the skin and bring out subtle hints of melanin.

White female features would be declared violent. Their “jagged” thin lips, “knife sharp” noses, and “harsh” jaw lines would be nature's way of expressing why men have a natural preference for the soft features of black women. Soft lips, soft cheekbones, and soft, round noses would be proof of natural femininity. Full, pink lips and large, dark eyes would become associated with virginal black girls whose purity must not be compromised. Black female features would thus be said to represent youth.

Straight, blond hair would be considered “wild and unruly” because when the wind blew, it did not stay in place. Women with naturally straight hair would hide their “unruly” and “wild” stick-straight hair in public. The desire for “lightweight hair” that defied gravity would permanently end the use of blow dryers. Keeping one's natural blond hair wild and straight would become indicative of a political statement.

The anti-aging properties of black female skin combined with soft, curvy bodies would be proof of the overall reproductive health of black women. Scientists would argue that black women were naturally preferred as long term mates and mothers because they were “healthier.” Men’s attraction to women is based on overall health and fertility, after all.

I had dreams of a six year old boy being pecked to death by crows.

Glad I woke up.

Not sure why I dream about such disturbing things.

Taken from Genderbitch:

The Ethical Basis for Bodily Domain and the Rights to Bodily Integrity:

What is Bodily Domain?

Bodily Domain is the medically defined area of your body, a territory of sorts, owned and controlled specifically by you and ONLY by you.

It is your skin and the all the area within your skin, it includes your organs, your bones and your blood and the spaces in between.

You are the sole determiner of what happens to those organs, that blood, and even the space within the area of your Bodily Domain.

That is your right to Bodily Integrity, which is also referred to as Bodily Domain.

The Basics

There are three basic categories that describe essentially every interaction that can be done between your Body and other things.

Intrusion, Occupation and Removal.

They are given negative names mainly because they are the self defensible rights within the Bodily Domain, Bodily Integrity, and Bodily Autonomy trio.

Self defensible means they are only negative if you yourself consider them negative, because if you consent to something, there is nothing to defend against.

Bodily Domain is a Consent Based Ethical Construct

BD is based on consent. Something is not a violation of your BD if you consent to its occurance.

However, this consent must be explicit. You must specifically state that you want this to happen to you. It is also based on current consent. A person can not hold you to a past contract made if your view changes and you no longer consent to something.

Otherwise I could be having sex and then if I suddenly wanted to stop for whatever reason and my partner continued against my consent, it would not be considered rape. This would be unacceptable to society from a logical standpoint.

The Three Interactions With Your Domain.

1)Intrusion:

Intrusion is any entry into your Bodily Domain that is negatively viewed from your perspective.

This makes it a violation of your Bodily Domain rights, normally referred to as Bodily Integrity.

It covers everything from rape, to delivery of injury (bullets, knives) injection of poisons, diseases, even non harmful or beneficial substances can be seen as a violation if consent is not given.

2)Removal

Removal refers to the taking of anything from your body. It can cover your own organs and blood, or even artificial or foreign material in your body, like prosthetics or substances that you wish to keep within you.

It is also a violation of your Bodily Domain rights.

It covers everything from organ theft, to blood stealing, to nutrient leeching.

3)Occupation

Occupation refers to any continuous presence of material or presence of living things within your Bodily Domain that is unconsented to. And therefore a violation.

It covers everything from parasites, unwanted implants and pregnancies.

But What About Clashes of Rights?

These are all things that no human being should be subjected to unless they themselves are causing a violation of the same set of ethical principles.

So Bodily Domain should only be violated if doing so will protect your own or the BD of others from being violated by ending a current violation in progress.

If you are violating someone’s BD, your own becomes forfeit if they decide to defend themselves from your actions, and their defense violates your BD.

Let’s make this nice and explicit for the more dense folks out there.

You can only violate the BD of another if and only if doing so is the only viable way to end a violation of your Bodily Domain by them that is currently in progress.

Conclusion: Why Bodily Domain Supports The Right to Abort

An unwanted fetus is violating a woman’s BD.

There is no way around this.

The fetus has no call to do so as the woman has done nothing to violate the BD of the fetus, and even if the woman had done something to violate its BD (Like drinking alcohol while pregnant), there is no concievable way that remaining inside the woman’s body would do anything to end that current violation.

Hence a fetus has no right to violate the woman’s BD.

But the woman does have a right to do so to the fetus in response to its violation of her, especially since that is currently the only way to end its Occupation of her BD and Removal of her resources.

To not allow a woman to defend her BD rights violates a set of ethical principles that protect us from having our organs taken for others’ use, to avoid being raped, to avoid being enslaved, to avoid having our bodies used as tools for the benefit of others.

To do so would strip the usefulness of society to the individual in terms of promoting survival and comfort.

It would make remaining within society less beneficial then leaving it, and to lose these ethical principles would degrade our society in many deterimental ways.

Therefore attempts to remove the right to abort from a woman is not only misogynistic, anti-woman’s rights, and ethically unsupportable from a viewpoint that values human rights to their own body, it is also a self destructive view that endangers all of us.

Have you ever stopped being friends with someone over differences in political views? Are there any issues that are so important to you that you cannot be friends with someone who holds a contrary opinion?

View 980 Answers

If you're not sure if you should be having sex with someone, don't have sex with them.

Easy-peasy.

Pandora's Choice is sponsoring a stockings giveaway on my blog. I'd like for as many as possible to enter and have the chance to win. Go to my blog for more info! http://bit.ly/stockings

Pandora (of www.pandoraschoice.com) and I are talking about having a stockings giveaway contest on my blog. We're still discussing what the rules will be (my suggestion is having people say what lingerie they'll wear the stockings with from her site), but it should be up on Saturday.

So...if you want free retro stockings, check the blog on Saturday. :-)

Advertisement