you are so good to me eggplant mike

Take my uterus, please!

I'm still sitting here trying to pick my jaw up off the floor after reading this article in the New York Times, by a doctor who was asked to perform a tubal ligation on a patient:
Earlier this year, a patient of mine in her early 20s who was expecting her third child asked to have her tubes tied. A mother of two, with a full-time job and part-time school classes, she saw a fourth child as an impossible burden....My patient’s request wasn’t unreasonable. She was choosing a form of birth control favored by millions of other American women. For her, I just felt it was a bad choice because in 15 years, much could change: her children might go off to college, she might be remarried, she could have a higher income.
He apparently tried to talk her out of it, by among other things, asking her "What if your children died in a fire? Would you want more children?"

The condescension and the patronizing attitude that not only does he know what's best because he's the doctor, but that a woman can only be fulfilled if she has children, is something I would truly not have expected to hear in 2006, and it makes me very nervous about my ob/gyn appointment next month.

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you are so good to me eggplant mike

FIC: Redirected Prologue: Test, 1, 2, 3 (RPF; Jason Isaacs; PG)

FIC: Redirected Prologue: Test, 1, 2, 3 (RPF; Jason Isaacs; PG)

Title: Redirected Prologue: Test, 1, 2, 3
Author: darkrosetiger
Fandom: RPF, "Redirected" AU
Pairings/Characters: Jason Isaacs, 2 OMC's
Archive: Please ask.
Rating: PG
Summary: In a world where everyone is divided into tops and subs, 16-year-old Jason Isaacs is going to be a top--no matter how many times he has to take the placement test.
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Not RL; didn't happen. Jason's family as depicted here is absolutely nothing like his real family. If you think this has anything to do with the real actors involved, then you need to put down the crack pipe.
Notes: Set in 1979, roughly 27 years prior to Redirected 1. More notes follow at the end.

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you are so good to me eggplant mike

Hypothetically speaking...

...if I was looking for good SGA fic, where might I start? I'll read het as well as slash  and I'm not an OTP-er so it doesn't have to be John/Rodney.
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you are so good to me eggplant mike

FIC: Redirected 1/? (RPS; Jason Isaacs/Ben Daniels; NC-17)

Title: Redirected 1/?
Authors: darkrosetiger and telesilla
Fandom: RPS AU
Pairing: Jason Isaacs/Ben Daniels
Archive: Please ask.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: In a world where people are divided into tops and subs as a matter of course, Ambassador Jason Isaacs, a top, and MI6 agent Ben Daniels, a sub, have to deal with their attraction to each other as well as the sometimes conflicting roles they play in society.
Warnings: BDSM
Disclaimer: Not RL; didn't happen. If you think this has anything to do with the real actors involved, then you need to put down the crack pipe.
Notes: There are extensive notes below the fic, but we wanted to link to a picture of Ben Daniels--a British actor who was Jason's co-star in The State Within--so people have a face to go with the name.

"Why do you always get yourself into these situations?"
you are so good to me eggplant mike

The view from inside

In this post, researchgrrrl wrote about her experiences as a rape survivor, and how it informs her belief that writing rapefic about real people is wrong. I admire the courage it must have taken for her to write that post, and to make it public, and I am in no way denying that she is entitled to express her opinion. However, I have to disagree with her comment that:

I feel that we have a responsibility as humans first and fans second to not use the imagined violence and victimization of real people as the basis for any sort of erotica or romance.

To me, the implication is that there are some things that it's unacceptable to think about, and that thought and action carry the same moral and ethical weight.

I don't believe that.
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you are so good to me eggplant mike

Cat Blogging

This is the coolest thing ever: the store for rathergood.com, the people who did the Viking Kittens, has a feature where you can design your own T-shirt. It's not cheap, but I'm seriously considering ordering something.

*****

oystergal introduced me to Two Lumps, a great cat webcomic. It centers on two Russian Blues. Ebenezer is the cat most of us fear we have: a smart, scheming alien anthropologist with fur and no opposable thumbs. His brother Snooch is the cat most of us really have: concerned only with food and attention and dumb as a box of hammers. Since we started reading it, telesilla and I have begun to refer to Joxur's wet food as "gooshyfood". Today's strip is especially apropos.

*****

...speaking of which, I'm happy to report that Joxur has gone for several days without peeing on the landing. It's still possible that he's got an infection, but since he's not showing any signs of distress and he is still usiing the box most of the time, I strongly suspect that something's wigged him out. We've been giving him half a can of gooshyfood every day, and I've become fanatical about cleaning out his box. Someone commented in my previous post asking if he was getting enough attention. While I'm sure Joxur would say that he is horribly neglected, the truth is that he gets all kinds of loves from the Thur-Mom during the day, and then I come home and give him more loves. We've even been giving him kitty treats without making him dance first.

I'm going to get him a new scratching post for Christmas. I can't get him what I think he really wants, judging from the way he sits in front of the hole in the bathroom where the mice came out last year. In a way, it shows an glimmer of intelligence: he understands that mice came out of the hole once; therefore, it's reasonable to expect that they will, at some point, do so again. Or at least they would, if we hadn't covered the hold with duct tape. That's where the "dumb as a box of hammers" comes in.
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you are so good to me eggplant mike

What year is this again?

In The State Within, following an incident in which a British Muslim detonates a bomb on a plane leaving Dulles Airport, the fictional Governor of Virginia orders all British Muslims in the state rounded up and put in a detention camp. Attempting to get them freed, the ambassador, Sir Mark Brydon--played by Jason Isaacs--talks to Madelaine Cohen, one of the senators on the Homeland Security Committee. In an interesting bit of meta, Sir Mark points out that the governor's response is eerily similar to the German government's response to the Reichstag Fire in 1933.

Think that's an exaggeration of the current climate? Think again:

WASHINGTON (Reuters)- When radio host Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band, the phone lines jammed instantly.

The first caller to the station in Washington said that Klein must be "off his rocker." The second congratulated him and added: "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country ... they are here to kill us."

Another said that tattoos, armbands and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver's licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough. "What good is identifying them?" he asked. "You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans."

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

The saddest thing about this, for me, is that once again, I am not surprised in the least.
you are so good to me eggplant mike

World AIDS Day: One day, I won't have to make this post.

Support World AIDS Day


Sadly, today is not that day, because despite the fact that there are better drugs available (for some, anyway), the fight isn't over yet. Particularly troubling to me is that the CDC's statistics for 2002 showed that HIV/AIDS was the leading cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 25 and 34, and the second-leading cause of death among all African-Americans between the ages of 35 and 44.

Click here to light a virtual candle, and Bristol Meyers Squibb will donate $1 to the World AIDS Fund. It may not be much, but everything helps.
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