This twit has never spent time around actual Asian women, especially my wife, her mother, grandmother, aunts, friends and cousins. Hard-headed and strong-willed every one of them, and that's not at all unusual. They back their husbands up in public. They defer on matters that are understood to be the husband's concerns.

But it's understood that their men back them to the hilt in public and keep husbandly hands off things that are the wife's domain. That includes the home and, more often than not, finances and the family business.

I've known a fair number of White men who thought that Asian women were meek, submissive doormats. They learned differently. And "traditional" Asian women are changing. A lot of Chinese, Japanese and Korean women are staying single rather than marry a little Emperor who expects his wife to be a slave to his parents.

Some of them are even kissing more than one person! And a few of them are having sex! Won't someone alert the press?

What we have here is a classic Deviancy Amplification Spiral - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviancy_amplification_spiral

They're a lot like the old Charleston contests. When times are bad people love to see others suffer. So we watch these people pushed into exhaustion, disappointment, despair and shame. It's bloodsport at its most nauseating.

It also falls right into the New Right Wing Vision. Compassion is for the weak. Everyone works, but only one gets the prize. Don't cooperate or you'll get screwed. Right is whatever you can get away with. We watch it. We eat it up. We claim it's "just for fun" as if watching misery and wasted effort is the epitome of "fun". And we internalize it and believe it.

Here's my idea for a real reality show.

It's like Survivor. But people aren't playing stupid games in a tropical paradise. They get put down in a marginal, somewhat hostile environment with enough equipment to make it. Every week the people decide by ballot who most contributed to the success and survival of the group. That person gets a share of the prize. At the end of the four months the prize is awarded, with extra to the one who got the most votes over the whole thing.

That would be a true-to-life survival/reality show. Men die. Teams survive. You can survive on you're own if you're really good and really lucky. But it's damned hard. You need others, and it only works if everyone pulls his or her weight.

But I can't see Fox agreeing to something like that.

Attack the policies. Gush about how wonderful it is that the Palin's have the money to take care of her and the baby, and wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone had that sort of safety net.

Take a closer look at the rumors about this being Bristol's second pregnancy and the fact that the Gov may have falsified the birth certificate, which is a crime.

You're months behind the times. This is "Olds". So far the sky hasn't fallen.

Lilies of the Field or Exclusive Sexuality. Watch out, girls. If he's a Jealous G-d this week you could be in trouble.

Bruno's execution didn't have anything to do with science. It wasn't about heliocentrism per se or the scientific method or anything like that. That's not to say that it was anything except vile or that the Church doesn't have a lot to answer for. But it's best to hang the Holy Office for what they did, not what you think they might have done.

Some time back I was on a Hermeticism and the History of Science kick and read a couple biographies of Bruno.

The first thing to realize is that he wasn't any sort of Martyr for Science. The only reason he adopted heliocentrism is that it went with his own quirky (and self-centered) cosmology. He wasn't consistent enough to be in the close neighborhood of science for more than a second or two at a time.

Yes, he had a well-trained memory. Memory palaces and similar technologies were important back then. We read. We record. We have disc drives. So memory isn't as important as it was back when literacy was scarce, paper was expensive and everything was hand-written. It doesn't really signify.

Bruno really did like to push things. He was a renegade priest or monk. He thumbed his nose at what was considered public decency. He was a heretic, a philosopher of questionable standards and what passed for a Black Magician in his day. He might not have disrupted the Mass, but the authorities were justified in considering him a threat to the standards of the day. And in those days heresy and sorcery were serious things. If he could have kept his damned mouth shut he probably would have escaped the fire. But he was too narcissistic for that sort of self-preservation.

It's a shame he was killed. But he worked hard for his martyrdom. And it didn't have diddly to do with science.

If I were to have an affair my wife would find out. Life would suddenly get a lot shorter.

"New: You can play sex games with your Wii!"

There are some shots that are just too cheap to take.

http://knockingfrominside.blogspot.com/2008/04/1000-pieces.html

http://knockingfrominside.blogspot.com

Some of the poems are religious. Some are secular. Two of my favorites are the ones she opened and closed her first book with: "Drinking From the Source" and "Bitter Wells". And a short story - "John Henry and the Golem" - not a bad Jewish story for a Muslim girl :)

Of the most recent poems, let's see...

Eclipse, Flight, Soul Train Depot, Abrasion, Half-Moon, Dervish Lion, Trumpet Rose, Glass Knives and God Train are all explicitly religious.