My husband worked closely with an Episcopalian parish while studying to be a priest himself; they had both male and female priests, and the congregation and administrative staff had no difficulties using Father and Mother as forms of address. Not only did it seem to work well, but it brings back the respect the term Mother should have, and helps reduce the sexism and blindly patriarchal attitudes inherent in much of Christianity.

It's fascinating how decriptions and names change across the board as spin takes hold. In the early '90s I vividly remember following news about the Superconducting Supercollider (I was a physics major at the time, and had a friend who worked there). News anchors and experts referred to the "SSC" or "supercollider" or "particle accelerator." Then, as Congress began looking for a budget scapegoat, suddenly phrasing changed and I began hearing not only politicians but theoretically neutral reporters referring to the SSC as the "giant atom smasher." I didn't hear this stop until after it was shut down, when it was acceptable to discuss the "particle accelerator" again, expressing sadness at 14 miles of tunnel, at least one life, and 2 billion dollars lost.

People might mourn the opportunity to have a prestigious, knowledge-expanding supercollider, but no one wanted to protect a bizarre "giant atom smasher." And scientific progress in the United States took a giant, smashing blow.

I hate seeing the effect of spin on progress, whether in the environment or science or health care or any important issue. Thanks for pointing it out in the alternative fuel debate!

We don't need any more 'maid' or 'mother' or 'battleax' imagery from Jack White or anyone else. We'd like accurate images about what nurses really do.

Hello?! The nurse imagery is the metaphor.

Jack Bauer never has enough time, but he has time for Calorie Mate. There's a cute comic on the web site, too, where Jack's enemies, eating pizza and soda, spill soda all over their computer keyboard.

This is excellent! As a former Premium subscriber who's too broke to renew, this policy has given me access to my old letters history. And as someone recently attacked by anonymous letter writers, I appreciate the pause this may give other letter writers of that ilk.

Thank you, Salon :-)

You can't really ban an IP address. What about a large business with multiple people using the same network? What about dynamic, changing IP addresses?

Also, if you ban anonymous, then you make it impossible for people to describe some things without risking their job, or to discuss personal issues freely; and of course some have concern over the government not caring for some of our comments.

I like to post under my name 99% of the time, but if I'm sharing a personal issue that concerns someone else, then I'm sharing their secret as well as mine if I post under my name. Say I had a coworker friend with AIDS (I don't) who hadn't told her boss; I would want to be anonymous because I wouldn't want her boss to fire her. Or say I wanted to share useful legal information I learned during a lawsuit, but the information was sealed as part of the ruling. I would like the option to speak hypothetically and generically, hiding it under anonymous to keep people's personal details from being revealed.

Also, things aren't formatting correcly anymore. Unless it's been fixed in the past 10 minutes, these will not appear as they do in the preview page to me.

This was marked as italics.

• This is an unordered bullet.

If Salon needs a web guru, I can be tempted from my contract job ;-)

Thanks!