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Please Sign

Monks have already been beaten and several people have been killed. Please sign this petition to get the UN Security Council to help protect them, to enable them to peacably assemble, as they have done for the past few weeks.

They are raiding the monasteries and cutting off contact with the rest of the world:

“The big missing piece of the puzzle is what is going on in the minds of the senior leadership,” said Thant Myint-U, a former United Nations official who is the author of a book on Myanmar, formerly Burma, called River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma. “Nothing that they have said in the last 20 years would suggest that they will back down,” he said.

(Get his book if you want more background on what’s going on currently, or if you want to know more about Burma and the 8888 Uprising.)

I’m worried now we won’t hear anymore, or won’t hear much, unless & until the UN gets more involved. It is quite odd to see actual video footage of what’s going on in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) on television. That beautiful huge gold pagoda you may see in the background is Shwedagon Pagoda, and the gold is – the real thing. But the demonstrators have been gathering at the oldest pagoda in Yangon, Sule Pagoda, which is the center of the city.

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Go Go Gowanus!

Betty & I are watching Law & Order SVU – of course that’s what we do when I get home – and we got to see a neighborhood right near us as they chased an ex-IRA hitman around the Gowanus Canal neighborhood. The SVU cops are coming in for him from either side, so he looks at the water, and one of the cops shouts, “Go ahead, jump in! You’ll die in a week.”

Ah. The polluted Gowanus Canal saves the day.

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SoCo Keynote: Jenn Burleton

SOUTHERN COMFORT CONFERENCE 2007
KEYNOTE ADDRESS – SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15TH, 2007

One Community, One Family

by Jenn Burleton, TransActive Education & Advocacy, Portland, OR

Thank you to the organizers of this amazing conference and in particular, Cat Turner, Lola Fleck and Elaine Martin. And I must thank my longtime friend, Mariette Pathy Allen. My life has been truly blessed as a result of knowing her and sharing many adventures with her…some of which are suitable for sharing with the whole family.

When Cat Turner called back in January and invited me to come to Atlanta I was of course, very honored. I was also surprised. After all, we’d never met. I’d never attended a previous Southern Comfort Conference and I am not, in my opinion anyway, one of the gender community heavy hitters.
Continue reading “SoCo Keynote: Jenn Burleton”

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Ruining India’s Women

A recent working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of India has posited that rural women in India, who tend not to be literate, learn a lot if they watch cable:

Women who were exposed to cable television over a 6- to 7-month period in India were less likely to report a preference for sons or complacency with domestic violence, and more likely to report autonomy in household decision-making, according to the working paper. In addition, more girls enrolled in school and fertility rates dropped.

But of course they’re talking about Indian television, not American, so let’s not send them Baywatch.

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The Soup

So are there any other The Soup fans out there? I don’t catch this show a lot, but every time I do it cracks me up. McHale’s delivery is spotless. He’s kind of bitchy but with a kind of post- post- take on the media and the stupidity of television.

A recent favorite, about Drew Carey being chosen as the new host of The Price is Right: “They didn’t have a problem with Rosie being gay, they were just looking for a butchier lesbian.”

But you can’t really get the full impact until you watch it with the clips. It’s just too damn funny. & He was just on my other favorite host’s show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

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Control Freak

I decided recently that Law & Order is satisfying in some deep, weird way: like it’s evidence that there’s order in the world even when you don’t have any sense of it in your own.

I was never ever interested in these shows until after I developed PTSD, which is why my conclusion. Some nights I can’t take watching, but I watch anyway; it feels nearly compulsive, good & bad for me at the same time. Good because there is always something satisfying about plot-driven procedurals and bad because it’s a reminder of all the ways you can die.

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What a Real Woman Needs

Okay, for whatever reason, the recent set of Quiznos ads plays while a lot of my Law & Order (my stories!) is on TV, & I cringe every time the Prime Rib on Garlic Bread one comes on.

That woman, at the end, is like nails on a chalkboard to me. No lack of meat, just what a real woman needs. Ugh.

What this real woman needs is for them to stop running that damn commercial.

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Killer Shoes

On tonight’s Law & Order:Criminal Intent

“Is crossdressing something people kill for these days?”

and later

“This is a straight guy who can only get excited by wearing women’s clothes. Tranvestism usually goes hand in hand with masochism.”

& Now Goren is interviewing the two prositutes who are explaining forced feminization.

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Nightmares

I’ve always expected I would die in my sleep of a heart attack, sweating bullets, outrunning some cauchemare of a beast.

Tonight, in the dream, Betty & I went to see a Shakespeare play, in a park. Maybe in England, maybe at Jones Beach. & My dream came up with a kind of Shakespearean joke, dreamt lines that were in the play we were seeing, in which one character asks another, “Where are you going?” and the other responds “To and fro, here & there, somewhere & elsewhere.” (There were seven words to the answer, but I don’t know which seven, because those six could have been “north and south, whence & hence” etc.) By the time we were leaving it was dark out, & we were being followed by a man, except Betty couldn’t see him, even though I could hear him asking me, “Where are you going?” just like in the play, except terribly ominously.

& I felt like a cat or a dog that’s gotten wrapped up in something that makes a terrible noise and that it can’t get off of its body no matter how fast it runs like the devil away from this thing that’s always just right behind it.

I did learn how to dream lucidly as a result of my nightmares, at least, and so in the dream we ran to the house I grew up in, & kept shutting numerous garden gates after us, into the back door (which we always left open, though we locked the front one) & finally into a house that was nothing like the house I grew up in on the inside, but inside, there was my niece watching television & my sister, her mother, chatting on the phone amiably. & We were fine.

But of course all that running woke me up.