Is Blue’s Clues Going Black?

Via image.fishpond, used under fair use provisions of copyright law for educational and critical purposes. Welcome message to Viacom spiders: We love Blue’s Clues, so please consider this a free promo and don’t make me take the pic down.
I live very happily without MTV and VH1. I get most of my Jon Stewart [...]

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The Greying of Abortion Providers: Doing the Math

Anyone who follows reproductive politics is likely aware that the doctors who provide abortion services have been rapidly aging. Now, a new survey of abortion clinics helps us quantify the situation. It reports that nearly two-thirds of providers (63 percent) are aged 50 or older.
The survey has some limitations. It looks only at clinics and [...]

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Sadistic Coaching and Parenting

Before it goes stale along with my Christmas cookies, I just have to vent about this expose of Santa and his head reindeer, Donner, via Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake (caution: not suitable for kids):

It’s about time! Even as a kid, I hated Donner’s overbearing, unsympathetic attitude. Until now, though, [...]

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The Out-of-Control (Feminist?) Classroom

Control freak kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?
Historiann raises an interesting question of where professors experience the most control: research or teaching. In response to an MLA survey that contends professors, and especially women, may overinvest in teaching because it offers them a sense of control, she writes:
At least in my experience, research is the [...]

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A Tail of Two Tigers

What to do when the kids are burbling with post-Christmas energy and turning the house into a zoo? My little Tiger, in particular, has been bouncing off the walls, acting silly and obviously craving the company of his own kind. Frustratingly, nearly all of his friends are still out of town for the holiday.
And so [...]

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Merry Christmas Redux

The Brits have Boxing Day. The Germans have their Zweiter Weihnachtstag (second Christmas Day).
Here? The dang markets are open and so my poor little sister, who works for a major mutual fund company, has to go to work. That just seems wrong! I love the idea of a second Christmas Day and I think no [...]

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The Tragedy of the Elves

Today I have a horrible elf hangover. No, I didn’t fall too deep into the egg nog last night. I was up until the wee hours doing the work of the elves.
As always, this wasn’t how I’d planned it.
A few weeks back, the Bear mentioned that the one toy that caught his imagination in the [...]

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Christmas Wonder through My Little Bear’s Eyes

So last night we’re driving home from services, reflecting on the message of compassion and joy that we’d just heard. From the back seat, my little Bear asks:
Has the Earth existed for more than a googolplex seconds? Or less?
Let no one tell you that science and wonder are at odds.
(And don’t ask me how big [...]

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Belated Tuesday Recipe: Stuffed Mushrooms with Pine Nuts

Image from Flickr user One Good Bumblebee, used under a Creative Commons license.
Despite my last post, I’m not all gloom and politics, y’know. I’ve been enjoying some holiday cheer. Last night, the festivities included these stuffed mushrooms. The recipe is slightly adapted from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook.
The kids loved watching me make them [...]

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Bush’s Christmas Gift to Women

As any beginning student of the German language learns, the word “gift” is a false cognate. In German, it means “poison.” That double meaning seems just about right to describe George Bush’s parting gift to women: the new HHS rule that allows health providers to refuse women basic health services.
Jill at Feministe has a great [...]

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What I Never Knew about Sex and Anti-Depressants

From I Can Has Cheezburger?
By now, I think it’s pretty common knowledge that Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, and all the other anti-depressants in that class (SSRIs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) can cause serious sexual side effects. They can cause delays in arousal and orgasm. Some people lose the ability to have orgasms altogether. Some men [...]

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Our Most Naked Selves

Gustav Klimt’s Danae, posted on Flickr by freeparking, used under a Creative Commons license.
A couple of weeks ago, Cosmo got piled on – deservedly, in my opinion – for a headline on the cover of its December issue that reads “Your Orgasm Face: What He’s Thinking When He Sees It.” I haven’t read the article. [...]

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Persistence

It would be too easy to turn these little guys into an inspirational statement. So I won’t.
They are just themselves, my tough little pansies, rearing up through the snow and ice yesterday, the 17th of December. Today the snow melted and they’re still there, standing a bit taller.
I may see them as embodying persistence. You [...]

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Helicopter Parenting Goes off to College

Indulgent mama kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?
There’s humoring one’s children. There’s hovering. And then there’s outright helicoptering.
So this morning, I get an email from the mother of a student who’s enrolled in one of my classes winter quarter. She wants to know the names of the books for the course so she can buy [...]

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Tuesday Recipe: Pecan Tassies

Maybe you’ve had these miniature pecan pies. Unlike with my pecan-maple pie, I haven’t contributed anything original to this recipe. The tassies are one of the treats my mom used to make around the holidays, and I could eat them by the handful.
Since we had a snow day today (and another is likely tomorrow – [...]

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Not on My Wish List: Hello Kitty Undies

While shopping for my niece online, I came across a product I really, really don’t need for Christmas. This would be the perfect present for a frenemy to buy me if they want to make sure my partner keeps a chaste distance from me in the year 2009.
Never mind that I’m a cat lover. Hello [...]

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Farewell to Socks the Cat

This picture of Socks in his salad – um, catnip – days is ubiquitous on the web, but I swiped it from Chaos in the House of Cat.
I think it probably dates me that I remember when Socks the Cat moved into the White House. Back then, he’d just outgrown kittenhood. Now comes the sad [...]

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Orgasmic Childbirth – Unicorn, Guilt Trip, or Taboo?

Now that I’ve been nominated for the honor of Hottest Mommy Blogger, I guess I have to live up to it by promiscuously mixing sex and maternity in a single post.
At the New York Times Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin unleashed a storm of debate a few days ago by raising the question of whether childbirth [...]

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Hot Mama Blogger? Moi??

So awhile back, when I was bloviating on how Sarah Palin’s looks were one of the few things I did not hold against her, I mentioned I could be magnanimous because when I was a senior in high school, my friends nominated me for “basketball homecoming queen.” I was not the type of girl who [...]

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Of Housecats and Cat-houses

No, not that kind of cat-house. I mean home design that’s properly feline-accessible.
Back in Grey Kitty’s prime, when I first moved in with my boyfriend in Berlin (the same guy who’s now my husband), we slept in a loft bed in a one-room apartment. Well, two out of three of us did. GK was initially [...]

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