Preschool Puberty, and a Search for the Causes
a whole new meaning to growing up too fast

As Exemptions Grow, Religion Outweighs Regulation
on the growing trend of religious institutions not being required to comply with regulations that analogous non-religious institutions are subject to

Zafu
find your perfect jeans!! this site is awesome.

VW Ads Take Aim, Don’t Care If The Seat Gets Wet
‘for boys who were always men’ - i think that says it all…

actually, a further comment. scroll down a little further and you’ll see a playboy left by the potty. now what exactly is the significance of this? let me see if i can figure it out: if when you were a 3yr old child you found it arousing to look at pictures of naked woman WHILE peeing standing up, a VW car is perfect for you!!!

okay, i can take that. the WHY part is where it breaks down a little for me… maybe the new Golf GTi has controls that can be figured out only by wildly advanced puberty-onset heterosexual boys? perhaps there is some kind of waiting list that requires at least 19 years of playboy history knowledge to move up on? there’s an insurance issue where producing an infathomable amount of pee as a small child is highly correlated with safe driving?

i guess i’ll leave this one to the market forces.

Museum Field Trip Deemed Too Revealing
so now you can be fired after ‘letting’ students see nude art in a museum… like we can really afford to lose teachers who communicate the value of art??

Students Killed by Gunman at Amish Schoolhouse
the second time in a few days that a gunman entered a school, released the boys, and lined up and shot the girls - this is fucking terrifying.

Trapping Sunshine in a Jar
i think this is fabulously beautiful in so many ways

More Macaca-gate: Allens’ racist “wink”?
george allen finds it necessary to wink at his all-white audience during his apology speech

George Allen, Republicans, and Racism towards Indian-Americans
from the same blog, a great piece on attitudes towards Indian-Americans being verbalized in campaign speeches

Yaknow, I really wasn’t that struck by the whole incident. It was terrible, awful, bad, horrible, all that, but it was life. Any non-White immigrant to America can tell you that they’ve heard it before: in forms obvious and subtle, tokenizing and attacking. But the follow-up is disgusting. Disgusting.

Hostage Horror
gunman takes schoolgirls hostage today, kills one

Male Terrorism, Today’s News: Colorado Gunman Wanted the Girls
a blogger on the ordinariness of this killer:

“The fact is, these are everyday acts of everyday terrorism committed
against women by everyday, ordinary men. And so, as women, we are
made to fear men, serve men, we are kept subservient to them.”

“If I had it in me to kill someone/I would kill you./Instead, I’ll curse you./And my curse will haunt you forever./If you ever return, my curse will savage you to death./If you return,/my hate will destroy you./For the rape of a child.” -Antonia’s Line

(thanks to Woman’s Space/The Margins)

Are American Newlyweds Blending Their Last Names?
tracking the “trend”

The name question jumps at me - there are a number of phases of my life where I’ve had mutually exclusive opinions on this issue. I remember being young and wanting to marry someone with a simple last name. In retrospect, it seems like this would have been a deal-breaker for me at the time. Now it doesn’t make any sense to me to take another name, both practically and politically. On the other hand, I am scared that my parents will feel that this decision reflects my disapproval of their own, and that saddens me. What really scares me is this thought: for a long time, I thought things would be perfect if my partner took my last name. Then I realized that the world would just assume that I had taken his if our names were the same. I don’t want that. It makes me wonder if and when my thoughts on this will develop past representation.