we do not fault colors for being different.

Lenny:  Gosh, Homer, I would have thought a man with two wives would be happy!
Carl:  No, you're thinking of a man with two knives.
Moe [holding two knives]:  I gotta admit, this is pretty awesome.
- the Simpsons

this is from an article in The Age, a really stupid Australian newspaper.  it's one of those articles that reeks of popular unintelligence - completely pedestrian opinions based on trends that were read in People or the TV guide. 

Thomson says writing the series around two men would have produced a completely different — and probably far less interesting — dynamic. "Women tend to give you much more room to move in a character-based drama," he says. "Males generally — in life and in fiction — tend to fall into stereotypes. When you see a male character, you expect him to fit into a certain pigeonhole. And as a writer it's very tough to pull them out of those pigeonholes. With female characters, very rarely is what you see what you get. Life for women is never black and white. It never is and it never can be. So you automatically have conflict there. Drama is conflict, and inner conflict is the most powerful conflict of them all."

and because of this, we decide to write more female characters, the article argues.  instead, that is, of challenging male stereotypes, we reinforce female ones - that women are full of drama, especially around other women.

"With the super heroes there's that wonderful physicality," Turnbull says. "Xena was physically a very big woman but Buffy or the Cheerleader are these petite blondes who are also incredibly strong and resilient. They don't have to be butch to be powerful. And that's immensely inspirational for some people."

immensely inspirational that not only do the petite blonde cheerleaders have everything else, but they get to be all-powerful superheroes that beat people up as well?  who's inspired?

fragility and shrapnel

From Politeness and Authority at a Hilltop College in Minnesota.

And yet that is the writer’s work — to notice and question the act of noticing, to clarify again and again, to sift one’s perceptions. I’m always struck by how well fitted these young women are to be writers, if only there weren’t also something within them saying, Who cares what you notice? Who authorized you? Don’t you owe someone an apology?

Every young writer, male or female, Minnesotan or otherwise, faces questions like these at first. It’s a delicate thing, coming to the moment when you realize that your perceptions do count and that your writing can encompass them. You begin to understand how quiet, how subtle the writer’s authority really is, how little it has to do with “authority” as we usually use the word.

Young men have a way of coasting right past that point of realization without even noticing it, which is one of the reasons the world is full of male writers. But for young women, it often means a real transposition of self, a new knowledge of who they are and, in some cases, a forbidding understanding of whom they’ve been taught to be.

- Verlyn Klinkenborg

From Nine Lives: What Cats Know About War.

The bloodiest suicide bombings, even miles away, have the sound and feel of the apocalypse, causing humans to freeze, no matter how often they experience it. Cats need to hear it only once. As they skitter to the safety of trees and bushes, they enter the blast and the tremor on the hard drive of their brains. On the next occasion, come the blast, they barely stir.

Mongrels though they are, our Baghdad cats, we learned from a recent study in the journal Science, have a noble lineage of their own — as inheritors of the same terrain occupied by the felines that were the forebears of all domestic cats, wild families that lived along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates more than 10,000 years ago.

- John F. Burns

grainy, but filling.

Which HBO's OZ Character Are You?

You're Augustus Hill: down-to-earth . philosophical . independent .
Take this quiz!

I'm eating Father Ray Mukada's version of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich - one slice is layered with peanut butter, the other side with jam. I've always just put the jam right on top of the peanut butter.

Miguel Alvarez should have eaten his, instead of committing suicide. Yeah, I'm still thinking about last night's episode of Oz. I think Oz is going to get its own tag, separate from the generic "television", joining the ranks of law & order, x-files, and dbz. You know what that means - I'm in love. I always knew I would be. I actually know random tidbits of the plot from my brief obsession with the actors that were in it when I was thinking about who would play people in my own book 3. I didn't remember that Eames was Oz's only female prisoner, on death row for driving her car into a river and letting her child die, probably because I wasn't hardcore enough of a fan of LO:CI to recognize her as Kathryn Erbe yet. All I remember from that period of research was that nearly everyone dies. I've yet to love a series like that - I've always stayed the hell away from the Mahabharata - so this will be interesting.

I wonder what position I'd take if I had to join the staff of a prison. I don't think I'd be able to handle warden or correctional officer. I'm bad with blood and gouged out eyes, so nurse too is out of the question. Maybe I'd be a chaplain. Maybe I'll make a quiz about it.