I'm not sure I can express how bad this week's been, what with the rising stress and the rising ... stress.  It's all workity, work, work, work.

So let me instead say I came home this evening and knowingly and willingly ate cookies, and multiple cookies at that.  They weren't 'dessert'; they weren't the 'only one treat a week' treat; they were ( Read more... )

'Drive-Thru' Mastectomies are when a woman is made to leave the hospital within hours of having a breast removed via surgery.  They are still dazed with pain meds, have shunts in the incisions, etc and are expected to go home and take care of themselves because insurance refuses to pay for hospital care.  [This doesn't even touch on the ( Read more... )

So this whole 'golly-gee shucks' image of the 'Real America' being living on wide-open land, farming or some such, and shooting things with guns?

So very far from even 'not so much.'

80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas.

Why does the Republican Party's attempt to harken to such an image work though?  It must speak to some ideal people cling to ( Read more... )

I haven't watched the first ep of DW S4 yet, but I did finish TW S2 and wanted to discuss how much I think the subtext of the show has improved since S1 in two ways:  its outlook on female sexuality and how it views groups who are othered as represented by aliens.

For a show that touts itself as being about pansexuality, female sexuality in S1 was ( Read more... )

I recently got Rabbit-Proof Fence from the library to watch.  For those of you not familiar with it, it tells the true story of three "half-caste" (ie, half white, half aboriginal) girls who attempt to escape from an internment camp after being forcibly removed from their aboriginal mothers.

It turns out that Australia had a policy that any "half- ( Read more... )

I'm really glad I didn't have to go off to a conference this last weekend because it gave me time to rest and get a start at kicking a sinus infection.  How do I do so?  Well, for me, I spray a lot of zinc solution up my nose, take a homeopathic remedy, and take zinc lozenges to keep it from spreading to my throat.  Then I try to sleep as much as ( Read more... )

Stevia - unless you've been in a health food store recently, you've probably never heard of this herb - at least not in the States.

Stevia is an herb that's been used in South America for centuries as an 'artificial' sweetener, only it's not artificial - it's only calorie free.  It's up to 300 times sweeter than sugar, and if you buy the SweetLeaf ( Read more... )

I'm trying to design a syllabus, but gorramit, this was too wtf to avoid clicking on.  I'm still processing what I think about it.  Tasteless or completely necessary in our apathetic, TV-driven world to make people realize how few organs are donated?

Ah, the past two weeks only confirm something I had already noticed in American culture.  My two favorite, currently running TV shows have been canceled.

Gilmore Girls - the critically acclaimed series tracking the lives of a single mother and her brilliant daughter was supposed to have at least half of a season 8 to tie things up.  But no - it's ( Read more... )

I needed a bit of a break from writing and betaing, so I took
( Read more... )