That bit about outsmarting Mother Nature? It always seemed to me to be a huge wink, actually. Contraception is really the way we outsmart Mother Nature, but you couldn't say that in a commercial, or anywhere in public, really, without getting the right wing and the "Motherhood is the greatest thing evar!" brigade in a big huffy snit. Menstruation is a safe surrogate.

As for tampons--I'm all for 'em, actually. I reached puberty around the time of the Toxic Shock Syndrome panic, so didn't start using them until my twenties, but once I did I was amazed at how much less troublesome they were to deal with, all around.

That is all.

For a long time there had been an 8x8' bit of land adjoining the back corner of our yard that looked to be a dumping ground for all kinds of trash--old lawn chairs, discarded Halloween pumpkins, Christmas trees and the like. Finally last summer Dr. Trench got back there and over the course of several weekends (it was a LOT of stuff) bagged it all up and set it out for the yard waste truck.

Just a week later he went back there and discovered that our cater-corner backyard neighbor, whose property is separated from this parcel by a fence, got the bright idea to use it as his own personal compost heap and had dumped a large quantity of straw there. Dr. Trench, rather irritated, went to ask him to clean it up, which he glibly promised to do but never made good on. (Compost is great, but we didn't want his vegetables rotting in what was essentially part of our yard.)

So Dr. Trench, rather than fuming, calmly spent an afternoon bagging all this straw up and putting it out for pickup. We then topped off the day by going to the local lumber supply company and ordering an 8x8' shed which, once delivered and assembled, fit perfectly into this little area with no extra space for dumping garbage. It makes our backyard look better, it provides useful storage for all our gardening equipment, and it solved the problem once and for all.

Sometimes, you just push back, politely and firmly, and that's enough.

All I can think whenever I hear a new development in this story is: what a bullet we dodged. All of us.

n/t

The whole world was watching our election with bated breath. Would the cranky old conservative, with his cancer in remission and his loony born-again gun nut sidekick, become the most powerful leader in the world, or would it be the straight-arrow overachiever with a cosmopolitan pedigree and a willingness to engage in civilized discourse? Because if the wrong man won, we were all doomed.

And the right man ran a perfect campaign and won by a landslide, and the world breathed a sigh of relief.

Yeah, it's been hard cleaning up the devastation of the last eight years. And anyone who thinks we should be out of Afghanistan and enjoying an economic surplus and health care for everyone by now is a moron. He warned us he wasn't perfect, and that it would take a long time to get out of the morass that the Chimp left us in. I can be patient. The missteps of this administration so far--and there will ALWAYS be missteps--have been trivial, blown entirely out of proportion by the wacko right-wing fringe.

We've gotten the Russians to cooperate with us and coordinated a unified front against Ahmedinejad. We've avoided a major depression. Just tonight it was announced that Armenia and Turkey have signed peace accords--thanks in large part to Hillary Clinton's efforts (not to mention Obama's influence). There's a reason the world loves him, and it's not just his speechifying; it's what he believes and represents.

why that kid did what he did, with a human rectum of a father like that. No, he hasn't done anything "wrong" in the legal sense, but he's not doing his son any favors. I'm not feeling so sorry for the wife--Japanese misogyny, from what I've heard, probably makes Heene look like a Sensitive New Age Guy.

It would be because he'd gotten into a balloon compartment that plummeted two stories into the yard of his parents' house. Actually, the outcome probably wouldn't be that tragic--he'd probably suffer broken bones.

A friend of mine who's somewhat of an expert on weather balloons because he uses them regularly in his funded, peer-reviewed cosmic ray background research (as opposed to the pseudoscientific ventures to investigate so-called UFOs on which this publicity hound embarks) says that it would be impossible for a balloon that size to carry the weight of a 6-year-old boy to 10,000 feet--at best, it would be a few feet above the ground, and he seriously doubts even that. I'm amazed at the complete gullibility and lack of understanding of basic physics on the part of the news media, the searchers, and all you goobers who were apparently watching this with drool trailing from your open mouths. If Heene was really the scientist he claims to be, this was a hoax.

I've come to believe that at least a third to half of all bad marriages could be prevented entirely by eliminating the whole "princess for a day" fantasy that infects girls when they're three or four (oh, you need a man for that--any man will do, really) and the inertia of invitations and gifts and enormous nonrefundable deposits that inexorably works to push anyone with nagging second thoughts to the altar.