Ampersand has been readings stuff lately, oh yes, my precious, he has been

Posted on December 12, 2003 by Ampersand
  • PinkDreamPoppies wrote earlier this week that “vacuums are from hell.” He didn’t know the half of it. (Via Skippy).
  • Echidne of the Snakes celebrates the latest milestone in women’s sports: The Lingerie Bowl.
  • Check out Noli Irritare Leones for a good critique of a bad Wendy McElroy article – this time on the father’s rights movement.
    OK, so McElroy has found several hundred different embittered men who believe women are heartless golddiggers. And “it becomes prudent to listen” – in other words, to take these testimonials, not as evidence of some men’s opinions, but as evidence of the way family law right now really is. Well, guess what? There are lots of embittered divorced women out there. There are stories like this one of a woman who traded her daughter’s college education to hang onto her house, and then lost the house anyway. And there are bitter single women to match the bitter single men. It’s not hard to find several hundred divorced people, men or women, prepared to say that they were screwed. Taking the stories of the men alone, even if you have several hundred of them, is not adequate evidence that family courts really are biased against men.
  • Dirk Deppey has a long, well-done rant about the state of the current comic book industry. Shorter Dirk Deppey: If superhero fans don’t learn to broaden their tastes, comic book stores won’t be able to survive.
  • Last week I linked to an article in Foreign Policy about Japan’s population troubles – basically, many young Japanese women are choosing to remain single and childless rather than subject themselves to the sexist norms of marriage in Japan. Trish Wilson has more commentary about the article, pointing out that women in many cultures could be making the same complaints.
  • Blueheron has some interesting thoughts on Christianity and Neo-Pagen Spirituality. Here’s a sample:
    Every pagan I know talks about how we shouldn’t insult Christianity and Christians, and yet almost all of us do so. I was amused at a comment years ago on alt.pagan about how the Wiccan declaration of honoring all gods in practice means honoring all gods except the Christian Trinity. This discomfort that most pagans feel with Christianity is troubling for two reasons. The first reason is obvious and honestly hardly needs to be repeated. Every pagan reading this knows that responding to intolerance with intolerance is useless and actively harmful, especially since there are many Christians who have no trouble with pagans. However, the other reason is somewhat more complex. From a historical and anthropological perspective, Wicca and all of the other neo-pagan faiths, from the OTO to the Church of All Worlds are in large part Christian variants.
  • Why wait until election day? ABC News has pulled its reporters from the Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun campaigns. Via TalkLeft.
  • Tod Lindberg discusses gay marriage. What’s interesting is that even a homophobic right-winger like Lindberg can see that the “secular” arguments against gay marriage are exceptionally weak.
  • Everything you could want to know about the McDonalds Spilled Coffee Lawsuit – and probably a good deal more – can be found in these well-done posts from The Curmudgeonly Clerk and Blog 702. Oh, and Blog 702 again.
  • The Fifty Minute Hour has a good post describing the French government’s attempts to outlaw Muslim women from wearing hijabs.
  • Chris at Crooked Timber provides this startling factoid from Amartya Sen:
    In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than then even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from relative deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also absolutely more deprived than low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.

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17 Responses to Ampersand has been readings stuff lately, oh yes, my precious, he has been

  1. 1
    bean says:
    December 12, 2003 at 1:01 pm

    For more on Wendy McElroy, you can read the article Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Wendy McElroy: Slipshod iFeminist Journalism in the NEW issue of Expository Magazine.

  2. 2
    PinkDreamPoppies says:
    December 12, 2003 at 3:44 pm

    Well, at least from the title of this post I know that I’m not the only one who has Lord of the Rings on the mind…

  3. 3
    Raznor says:
    December 12, 2003 at 6:22 pm

    I’m totally catching a midnight showing on Tuesday. Yes. So soon. Will kick so much ass.

    The only problem is after this, no more awesome trilogies to look forward to. All that’s left is Star Wars Episode 3. Ugh. Sure there’s the extended edition of The Return of the King, and Kill Bill: Volume 2, but that’s just not the same, man.

  4. 4
    JRC says:
    December 12, 2003 at 6:40 pm

    Yep, midnight show tuesday at the Vacaville Brenden Theatres. Oh lordy, I can hardly wait.

    BTW, if there are any Alasers in the Northeastern SF Bay Area, let me know, and we’ll get a group to go.

    —JRC

  5. 5
    PinkDreamPoppies says:
    December 12, 2003 at 10:27 pm

    As I mentioned before, I’m one of the Trilogy Tuesday crowd (ie, I’m seeing the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy on Tuesday). God, I can’t wait! It’s infecting my mind.

  6. 6
    Echidne says:
    December 12, 2003 at 11:42 pm

    Lord of the Rings should be read, I think. It’s especially good when one has a bad flu and can stay up at weird hours. I read it in one go, though my eyes got infected with something after that.

    There are, by the way, lots of women in that book, but they are called hobbits!

    Thanks so much to Ampersand for linking to my lingerie story. Now my blog is down…. :)

    Echidne

  7. 7
    --k. says:
    December 13, 2003 at 1:34 am

    It’s late, Echidne, and I’ve had a couple of very good martinis, and I’m overseeing some complicated print jobs, but still: could you stop putting images in my head of little hairy-footed people playing rugby in silken French unmentionables? It does strange things to my brain, it does.

  8. 8
    PDM says:
    December 13, 2003 at 2:54 am

    Gee thanks, Al Borg, for endorsingDean.

  9. 9
    mking says:
    December 13, 2003 at 1:40 pm

    actually it was Satchel who said “vacuums are from hell”

    ok? ok…

  11. 11
    Raznor says:
    December 13, 2003 at 6:49 pm

    But then there are also Eowyn and Galadriel. I’ve always loved Galadriel. Oh and Shelob is female too. Giant evil spiders of death still count.

  12. 12
    pseu says:
    December 13, 2003 at 7:29 pm

    I used to participate in an annual Middle Earth festival where a group of us geeks repaired to a remote campsite in the woods, dressed as our favorite ME characters, and participated in such activities as axe-throwing, archery, and poetry competitions, as well as drinking and other (ahem) chemical amusements. The women really had a tough time coming up with characters. Most of us had to go hunting around in the Simarillion (sp?) looking for more ancient women characters since Eowyn and Galadriel were already claimed. I ended up as Elwing, though I toyed with the idea of being an Orcwife. (Thought it would be much fun to be crude and nasty and talk with my mouth full.)

  13. 13
    Raznor says:
    December 13, 2003 at 8:25 pm

    pseu, if I was female and going to that, I’d totally do Ungoliant. In fact, I would probably do Ungoliant anyway. Or Melkhor. (and the proper spelling is Scilmarillian, I believe. Yes I’m a Middle Earth geek. You wanna fight about it?)

  14. 14
    Echidne says:
    December 14, 2003 at 10:29 am

    Yes, Raznor, Shelob is a worthy feminist role model ;)! I still think the hobbits are women (sorry about it, k.!). They are smaller, don’t have very good self-esteem, like their homes, and are looked at with some contempt by all the classical wizard and king types. But I’m quite willing to share them with guys. Now, gollum is someone I’ve come across in real life many times.
    Yesss, my precious, we has!

    Echidne

  15. 15
    JRC says:
    December 17, 2003 at 4:20 am

    This seems like the appropriate place to post this.

    I just got back from The Return of The King and I’m not kidding or exaggerating when I say I think it may be the best movie I’ve ever seen. Of course, you have to take into account that I’m both a big softie and a big geek, but even so, it made me cry no less than four times.

    Okay. It’s 4:30 AM. Goodnight, everyone.

    —JRC

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