The Tory Party

Shirt with Ladies

Doing research for wardrobe for a movie, I encountered this shirt.

Feminism means I can find this hilarious and horrifying at the same time. Objectifilarious.

I Left My Heart in Aurora

My sister is affiliated with Planned Parenthood Chicago. That’s a bit of an understatement, but in the interest of her privacy I’ll leave it at that. At intervals our dad has been volunteering his military training and Doberman-mix dog should she have use of them. I cannot express the rain of hellfire that would descend, Bronson-style, on anyone… well, let’s not talk about it. The bulletproof glass installed at the new Aurora facility says enough.

There was a point in Dr. Sister’s medical schooling where she had to choose her specialty. She wasn’t afraid of performing abortions, since it was apparent to her what happens when abortion isn’t safe and accessible. Her concern was, as many OB-GYNs refuse to do abortions, that she in the minority would have to do them all the damn time. As we talked about it, I said something glib to the effect of, “If not you, then who?” I can say things like that, because I will never ever ever have to perform an abortion.

What Dr. Sister didn’t bring up were things like “getting to work safely” and “not being stalked and threatened” — though she has pointed out “I’m more likely to die from providing abortions than any of my patients are from having one.” It was sort of a given that, if it was the right thing to do, it was the right thing to do — and God and the occasional Doberman-mix would take care of the rest.

So she went into OB-GYN. A bad day is one with cancer, prolapse, coma, excessive bleeding (this is a line of work in which bleeding must be categorized as “excessive” to be identified a bad thing.) A good day is when Dr. Sister can make a bad situation better with the skills that are uncommonly hers — wisdom, deduction, bedside manner, surgical skill and recently-acquired Spanish. Abortion, like all surgery, is the last resort when all methods of prevention have failed — and all the more necessary a resort because it is the last.

Her job has equipped her with a dark sense of humor. She says, if it were up to her, she’d blow-dart people with Depo Provera like Chincoteague ponies. When a day’s work can involve an abortion consultation with a 12-year-old incest victim while protesters chant on the lawn outside, it’s easy to understand.

You can donate to Planned Parenthood or support them in other ways. But if you have a hot minute, write a thank-you note to the clinic in Aurora.

I would post their address, but by forcing you to look for it I ensure you have the logic and reasoning skills necessary to be pro-choice.

Iraqis Fleeing Iraq

BBC NEWS – Syria struggles with Iraqi influx

Gist: 2000 Iraqi refugees are fleeing each day — to Syria alone. They’re generally the educated and the trained, which means Iraq is hemorrhaging vital workforce.

I don’t think I knew this, or realized what it meant. Then again, I don’t get much news, and the news I do get is tabloid. If there were headlines like this at the checkout, I might be a smarter person. As it is, once in a while I pass a “USA Today.”

Invading Iraq was such a bad idea. Thousands of us protested. We asked questions like, “What then?”

Mostly it reminds me of this:

But I’ve said a lot on Iraq in the past. It’s all from the perspective of a comfy air-conditioned white girl who’s never been nowhere or done nothing, but it involves quotes and ideas from people smarter than me, and that’s nice.

The Virtues of Macs

Ah ha ha ha. Remember that time iPhoto crashed, destroying my libraries, so now when I open it, there’s nothing there? So the wardrobe photos of six actors are suddenly gone? Good times, good times.

I keep using “Finder” to search for my photos, since I’m confident they’re *somewhere* in my $1500 PowerBook, but Finder keeps crashing when I search.

Good thing that, distrusting my Mac, I double-uploaded all my pictures to my trusty PC, hand-built with $500 and several calls to a GeekSquad friend, so about twenty hours of work, twelve phone calls and fifty dollars in gas money isn’t thrown down the tubes.

I knew better than to trust a Mac. When I opened up iPhoto and saw all my stuff was gone, I thought, “Yeah, that’s about right.”

And you wonder why I f@#king hate Macs.

***Sept 2 Update***

A refreshed attention span and the wonderful world of Google reveal that when iPhoto dumps your libraries and complains that “”Unreadable Files: The following files could not be imported (they may be an unrecognized file type or the files may not contain valid data),” it actually just means you’re out of disk space.

Ha ha ha ha. Silly me. I would have thought when an application was out of disk space, it would say something like “Out of Disk Space.” I was lulled into a false sense of security by iTunes’ dulcet error messages. What a fool I was.

This is a ‘tude I reserve only for inanimate objects. If confronted with an actual Mac programmer I would probably pee myself and hide.