Well, speaking as a man, back in the day anyway, one of the deep pleasures of unwrapping the package as it were was to enjoy the surprise you found there.

How boring it would be if every christmas present was the same as the last one!

I call bullshit on the "male pressure" angle: any male that expects "porn-star" labia and is disappointed if things are otherwise is a complete weenie loser.

Anybody who thinks that this strip might be offensive has never read an arabic newspaper, where editorial cartooning is very much alive and well and, um, vigorous (if not downright vicious and offensive). The self-absorption and massive ignorance of the rest of the world is one of the things that makes americans so funny and tragic. Does anybody really believe that the average citizen of say Cairo or Islamabad really gives a shit what Joe Blow in Cincinnati is reading with his morning Starbucks?

Well, my spouse and I are still working down my spouse's "mompreneur" debt fallout, and we probably will be for most of the rest of our working lives. She actually had a good idea, and worked really hard on it, and did not dump family chores on me. I'm not complaining, I supported the idea fully at the time.

But it didn't work. That's capitalism; sometimes things just don't work. But in order to have a chance of making them work, you have to take risks, and so when they don't work out, you get hurt. Hurt in terms of kids' college tuition and housing arrangements and so on. Very real hurt.

Before we get all teary-eyed and proud about female entrepreneurship, we ought to take a little cognizance of the potential downside. Which is no different I suppose than the risks run by male entrepreneurs either. Anyway the risks are very real. Its called the free market, and it requires losers as well as winners, and losing can be pretty damn not funny at all. Especially for parents.

Over at Reason magazine, Radley Belko under "Another Isolated Incident" is keeping a compendium of misbegotten and horrifying SWAT team raids on innocent people, and the lame excuses the cops always give for them (hence the title). It is rather disturbing reading.

What on earth the SWAT team was doing responding to a disturbance type incident is beyond me, its not like it was a grow-op or something. Especially since it doesn't look like he did much that he could be arrested for (drunk & disorderly? noise bylaws? negligent handling of a firearm?). The whole thing reminded me just a little bit of the original Rambo novel. Incompetent/over-excited small-centre/rural cops can be freaking dangerous.

Lots of posters have been suggesting that you should never call the cops. Especially in a mental health situation. This isn't quite accurate: you should study up on your local police department, and judge accordingly. Here in Canada, for example, you should definitely not call the OPP or SEQ (Ontario & Quebec Provincial police). Probably not the Toronto cops either. On the other hand, the RCMP are probably a pretty good bet, as long as you aren't Muslim or Arab (or look like you are). The Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver police are probably safe, though they do all have SWAT teams they are awful proud of.

I have had occasion to deal with the cops a fair bit over the years, and they are as mixed a bag as any organization. Some are very sensible & compassionate indeed; others are revolting meat-heads. Unfortunately they have become mental health crisis workers far too often, which, especially in smaller centres, they really aren't trained for. If you really only have one tool (and the War on Drugs has overwhelmingly taught them to use that tool), you will tend to use it in every situation, appropriate or not.

Me, I just wonder about what all our conserva-fundie-macho-men's rights types will think, when they realize that globalization means that North America will be exporting surplus white women into the clutches of brown (short, penile challenged) Asian and South Asian men? (To say nothing of the reverse, which is indubitably happening right now.) Will we see the day of "minute-men" (hee hee) patrolling airports to keep straying Aryan females home, reversing the fence as it were?

And how stupid it is, those tall vaginally capacious white women are actually our best possible weapon in the war against small brown undemocratic people, they will subvert and feminize them in no time, by denying them sex and refusing to read Glenn Sacks and subverting them through trojan-horse Women's Studies departments and feminist blogs that ignore them everywhere!

Salon's troll brigade must spring into action immediately!

(Honestly, as a parent, I have found my female children to be a rather greater challenge overall than my male children. A bit easier as babies, perhaps, but early adolescence in females from a parental perspective has to be experienced to be believed. Given my druthers now, I honestly don't know which I'd vote for; certainly, I wouldn't pay out good cold hard cash to increase the odds of either. Some days, I wish wild dogs would eat them all; others, I am so amazed by all of them that I am speechless. And gender has precious little to do with it. Sex selection by young breeding age parents is just about as stupid as everything else young breeding age parents do; which is basically breed and get into something they simply cannot have any idea about. All of which has nothing to do with wiser older parents worried about genetic diseases.)

Patterson has been riding this publicity horse for some time now. Not that BroadSheet is wrong for picking it up, but the promised brothel has been no little time in actually getting to the point of turning a trick: maybe the streetwalkers don't wanna, maybe the evil establishment is keeping a lid on, who knows? Meanwhile, lots of press coverage.