(February 2006) Superbowl Sunday—the most dangerous day of the year to be female in the United States—came and went.
I guess the combination of alcohol and testosterone and heightened emotions and high-fivin’ with the dudes when your team scores big and hours of aggression must make some men feel the need to go home and assault the women who dare to love them.
A sad state of affairs indeed.
I did not watch the Superbowl (although I would have cheered for Seattle if I had).
Instead, I attended a wimmin’s gathering in which we formed a sacred circle and celebrated St. Brigit and our collective emergence from the dark winter into a season of new growth.
Our smudgesticks and poetry and candles lit in the four directions and laughter overflowed.
I read a Mary Oliver poem when the decidedly decorative talking stick made its way into my hands and believe it was well-received.
In between all of our ceremonial hoo-ha, we ate really good food and drank really good wine and ate delicious lavender- and chili-infused dark chocolate.
Mmm!
Of course, we also flipped on the game at halftime so we could watch Mick sing about his inability to get satisfaction, then wound up having an impromptu and quite spastic dance in the living room.
(I was hoping that Mick would “accidentally” flip open his shirt and expose his breast, but he showed more restraint.)
So yeah. Good energy abounded and the whole event reminded me of just how much I treasure women who have done their work and settled into who they are and are comfortable with themselves and aware of their power and who are not intimidated by mine or yours.
St. Brigit is the patron saint of writers, so I guess it was as appropriate day for Betty Friedan to die.
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I did not get to see Tree this weekend, even though she was briefly in the mountains. She had her lumpectomy today and they removed two suspicious lymph nodes ...
... and even typing that is making my blood run cold and my throat clamp down.
The randomness of this is just so unfair. I mean, I was living the rock-’n’-roll life style way back in 1988 when Tree and I got together and am still staying up too late and eating too much bad-for-me food and indulging in good bottles of vino as she counts every morsel and competes in triathlons ...
... and I can’t write more than that on this topic right now because this news is just too overwhelming.
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We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible.
That’s what a preacher at Al Omari mosque said in response to a cartoon depicting Muhammad.
This would-be beheader and other extremists consider it blasphemy to print the image of their god and they really consider it blasphemous to depict their god in a bomb-shaped turban.
(Yet they’re in favor of beheading people who see the world differently and expresse those beliefs openly.)
Maybe the cartoonist should consider this preacher’s protests and the actions of that homophobe in Boston who attacked three gay bar patrons with a hatchet and revise the cartoons, convert the turban into a robe, and depict an axe-toting Jesus as well.
(You know, like that old Molly Hatchet album.)
Nice to know that religious fanatics have not completely silenced dissent here though.
The Washington Post recently ran a cartoon that featured "Dr." Rumsfeld writing “battle hardened” onto the medical chart of a quadruple-amputee soldier’s chart. This prompted protest letters from all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
(The administration is still throwing out barbs about the so-called liberal media too but hey, no comparison.)
And here’s more hope.
Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation recently grilled former White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales about notifying the White House about the Plamegate investigation, then waiting till the next morning to inform them that they had to preserve all the materials relevant to an investigation (thus giving them time to destroy damning materials).
Now Scooter Libby’s lawyers say that emails from Cheney’s office were deleted contrary to White House policy or, to use their spin (which is reversible. See? You can flip it over to the corduroy side and apply it to those electronic voting machines that registered Bush votes when voters chose Kerry):
The computer system at the White House is supposed to automatically archive emails sent by the president and his aides. For reasons that are still unclear, these emails—which may or may not be relevant to the Plame investigation—were not preserved (from the NY Daily News)
As the church lady says, how conveeeeeenient.
For reasons that are still unclear? I mean gawddamn, how much clearer do they need to be?
And one writer accuses Gonzales of tipping off the White House five days earlier.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson notes that,
if there were justice in the world, George W. Bush would have to give his State of the Union address from Oprah’s couch.... Bush should have to face the wrathful, Old Testament Oprah who subjected author James Frey to that awful public smiting the other day.
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