Absquatulate

Hi. Whatcha reading? | MetaFilter

I also want to show why women might end up coming across "cold" to men, EVEN IF they don't think of a guy as a potential rapist.

Hi. Whatcha reading? | MetaFilter

An unusually good, long post on a MeFi thread about why women come off as cold sometimes. Read it and wonder why we are the way we are, men and women alike.

UPDATE: Here's the short article/blog post that started it all: Shrodinger's Rapist. Read that first for the 'theory', then the MeFi post for the 'reality'.

An Invite for Dinner

A fun game to play with your well-to-do friends on the third bottle of wine is the "What Famous Person Dead or Alive Would You Invite To Dinner" guessing game, wherein all the participants talk about what erudite dinner guests one would invite to talk to US, er, YOU, the layman. I could never really commit to anyone with any great conviction. There were the usual suspects such as Newton, Hitler, George Washington that would inevitably be brought up. My choices usually included a common medieval woman, Niels Bohr, and Abigail Adams. As for modern famous people... meh. For me they're all too recent to really want me to explore MORE about what things were 'really like' for the most part. It wasn't until tonight that I realized I was overlooking the most brilliant and obvious choice! Jon Stewart. Can you imagine a dinner with all those diners? What would one serve!?

The gentle art of selling yourself | Review | The Observer

Link: The gentle art of selling yourself | Review | The Observer. In particular:

In Kurt Vonnegut's words (there I go, quoting again): you are what you pretend to be.

Le Sigh

Crimney, who stuck the stick up my butt? That last post is a little uptight isn't it? To make up for it a list of five things I am doing/have done for the first time in the last month:

• Making Curried Chicken Basmati Rice Soup. It was very very delicious.
• Torturing my fingertips by learning guitar. Ouch.
• Reading comic books.
• Agreeing to participate in an adventure race. Let's see if it comes to fruition.
• A speech and language evaluation. Scary and totally intimidating at first, then okay and you want to do more to prove yourself, kind of like your first time on a roller-coaster. It would have been much better if I didn't have such a horrible head cold at the time.

See also...

Mr. Hussein, your slice of humble pie is up.

You'd think for a guy who spent months hiding in holes in the ground that he'd be aware of this thing we like to call REALITY. But you know, if you can keep lying to yourself then maybe the Fairy Godmother will make it real!

Bush the "real enemy"? As compared to YOU? Give me a break.

Hours of Testimony...

... summed up in this handy flowchart. The sad thing is, it really does sum up the proceedings (at least from what I've heard and read.)

Vote.

Today, I went to my polling place and I voted.

I don't mention this to sing my own praises, or pat myself on the back, or demonstrate some sort of intellectual elitism. I mention this because lately I've been thinking alot about what it means to live in a democracy such as ours (let's not get into the argument that it's really a republic, for now let me just use the democracy, okay? kthx. :^) as compared to Haiti, or Iraq, or Iran, or any of the countless other places in the world where the citizens are denied a voice in their own government, where they are exploited and used like a cheap tissue for the benefit of a chosen few. I am extremely thankful that I live in a part of the world where I can hear a presidential candidate speak without (much) fear of a bomb blowing the opposition to smithereens, where I can vote based on my own beliefs and opinions and not those of my husband, where my voice counts just as much as anybody else's.

I consider myself very lucky and implore the rest of the U.S. citizens reading this to go and vote when the time comes.

Caterina Hits Nail On Head

In this post on misbehaving.net regarding female execs Ms. Fake is spot on. I've always been irritated with the idea that women in high powered positions are leaving because they can't hack it in the competitive corporate world. While that may be true some of the time, I have a feeling that most women who can't hack it have abandoned that career path a LONG time before they've become VP of whatever. Their leaving shouldn't be cast in the light of, "What is wrong with them?" (which I think is applied way to often with women in the workforce) but rather, "What is wrong with the system?"

It is those stupid petty bullshit battles that drive me nuts in my job and I'm a peon!

Vigilante Justice, Catholic Style

According to CNN, a group of girls pummelled a man who'd repeatedly exposed himself to them while they were outside of their school. Neighbors, along with the girls, chased him down, tackled him, and a group of 20 Catholic school girls kicked and punched him. Now, we live in a civilized society MOST of the time, and so I try to side with civility over chaos. However in this instance I can't help but smile deeply at the thought of this 25 year old guy getting this tar beat out of him by a bunch of school girls. Yes he's probably got some serious psychological issues that need treatment, but come on folks. Sometimes you have to take off the kid gloves and administer good old fashioned ass whuppin's. That is precicely why I will always be Neutral Good, rather than Lawful Good.
/geek