Author Archives: Leo Tarvi
Testing!
The post I’ve been working on is taking longer than expected, and I’m getting sick of working on it tonight. But I thought of something neat: MMS can send to email, and WordPress allows posting by email, so it should be possible for me to post from my phone!
Which is what I’m trying now, if you can read this, I’ve successfully posted to my blog from my phone, and that’s awesome.
Lazy Sunday.
I never managed to get any writing done at all today. Oh well, slacking off is what we have weekends for! Should be back tomorrow with something. Have a good night everyone.
Unearthing another old horror from the Catholic Church
You know, if any organization could properly be called “evil”, it must be the Catholic Church. It’s rare that a month goes by without some new atrocity coming to light, usually something related to covering up, enabling, or blaming the victims of child rape, but occasionally it’s something different, like telling Africans that condoms spread AIDS, or excommunicating a doctor for saving a little girl’s life, or ordering hospitals to let women die rather than terminate a lethal pregnancy.
This is bad even by those standards. Read the rest of this entry
The American Life League: Fun with Numbers!
Can’t believe I forgot this in my last post! On the bright side it lets me get two posts out of one subject, so that’s handy. (On the down side, it’s kinda dull)
In that video, the American Life League shows some numbers for abortions provided (329,445) and birth control pills dispensed (315,399,600). No sources are given for these numbers, nor is there a time frame provided, though I was able to find the abortion figure from Planned Parenthood’s report for 2010.
Trying to figure out the birth control figure was interesting. As you know, unless you’re a right-wing media personality, most birth control requires a woman to take a pill every day, regardless of whether she’s having sex or not. So on average a woman requires 365 pills every year. Simple enough.
Depending on what you use for the length of the year, whether you count leap years etc, 315,399,600 gives us 863,517.04 to 864,108.49 women who could be provided birth control over a one year period with that number of pills. For simplicity’s sake, let’s round that off to 864,000 women over one year. This is all still assumption, of course, because neither sources nor time frames were provided. But I wanted to run with it a bit because the perspective is interesting.
According to the US Census, in 2010 there were 308,745,538 Americans, of which 50.8% were women. That gives us 156,842,733.304 women in America. Since we’re already rounding off to the nearest thousand, let’s call that 156,843,000. That means that huge number of birth control pills, 315,399,600, is enough to provide 0.55% of American women with birth control for one year. A little over half of one percent, just five or six out of a thousand women.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood’s own information tells us that they provide various forms of contraception to 2.2 million people every year, about 39.5% of which are oral contraceptives. I fiddled with that a bit and came close to AL’s figure, but not quite there. Curious. You’d think all contraception would be equally evil, but for some reason the pill is worse.
It’s almost as if female sexuality is considered weird and bad, while male sexuality is normal. Thwarting God’s Will by taking a pill to get an erection is fine, but doing it by taking a pill to prevent ovulation is bad.
This is boring and getting depressing, so I’m going to wrap it up. Planned Parenthood is one of the few organizations out there that seem to genuinely make the world a better place with everything they do, or at least everything they aim to do. Their website is wonderful, filled with useful information that everyone should have access to, and I strongly recommend that you visit it. Maybe make a donation while you’re there.
You can click on over now, I’m done here.
The evil addictions of Planned Parenthood!
I’m running into Poe’s Law here. I genuinely have no idea whether or not this is a parody. If it were just the videos I’d assume it was, but after looking over the website a little I find it hard to believe that anyone could work this hard on a parody. Here’s the video:
It’s just amazing, isn’t it? I saw this Monday on a post by Christina at WWJTD, who probably wrote more coherently about it than I will. Frankly I’m tempted to just point and laugh.
If you don’t feel like spending six and a half minutes of your precious life watching this shit, and I can’t say I blame you, it directly compares Planned Parenthood to drug dealers. Seriously. Saying that PP gets kids addicted to sex so that they can sell abortions. I am not making this up, it’s right there in the video. You see why I’m not sure whether they’re joking or not? Read the rest of this entry
Abducted
I was kidnapped on Monday, and my day trip turned out a bit longer than expected. So now I’m playing catch-up, which probably means short posts, in theory, but I saw a video Monday that was so crazy I might have to do a detailed break down of it.
Anyway, should have something else up today, sorry for the delay!
Walking while black
17 year old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed on February 26 by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is claiming self-defense, and apparently the police believe him, because he hasn’t been arrested or charged.
That’s about all I know for sure about this. But if you click here you can listen to some of the 911 calls made on that night, and they’re certainly suggestive.
At the time Zimmerman spoke to police, he was in a car and had a loaded gun. He had all the power in this situation. It seems likely that if he’s stayed in the car and stopped following the kid, as he was told to do, this would have been just another case of cops questioning a boy for walking while black. In one of those 911 calls you can hear, in the background, screams for help which go silent after a gunshot.
I’m not going to say that Zimmerman is a murderer. It’s difficult for me to believe that it was self-defense, but I wasn’t there, I don’t know. In a society that has, or at least purports to have, the rule of law it’s not my place to make that judgment, that’s for actual judges and juries to do. Not me, and not the Sanford Police. Justice is clearly not being done, here.
Here’s a link to a Change.org petition to push for prosecution, if you feel like signing.
The Hypocratic Oath in Texas.
By now you may have heard about this week’s Doonesbury storyline, the one that many newspapers aren’t publishing. Here’s a link to the beginning of it, you can click on the strip itself to see a larger image. Just click through and read it.
All done? Good, now read this actual account of an actual woman going through that actual nightmare. Especially if you’re Texan, Republican, or male, don’t make excuses, fucking read it. Imagine it, try to visualize going through that. Imagine someone you love having to do that. Read the rest of this entry
Search the Ides of March
Great to see you everybody! Did you all bring your knives? Julius should be here in a little while, he’s going to be so surprised! While we wait, here are the search engine queries that led people to my blog over the last 30 days. As usual, search terms are bold while my commentary is italic. Read the rest of this entry
Dance with me
A friend sent me a link to the AXIS Dance Company. This innovative dance troupe “paved the way for a powerful contemporary dance form called physically integrated dance.” What this means in practice is that about half of the dancers are physically disabled.
It’s a really neat concept, and they do some very creative things. Until you’ve seen a woman spinning on the wheel of an occupied wheelchair lying on its side, you can’t really appreciate it. While many of the individual movements are fascinating to me, the actual performances don’t really interest me that much. I’m not sure if that’s a stylistic thing or if I’m just too much of a philistine to appreciate them. Read the rest of this entry
Fashion statements
It’s well known that things tend to happen in cycles. Apparently men’s tights are coming back into style now. To be honest, I’m a little angry about that.
Oh, I don’t mind the changing trends of fashion or that something could go from men to women and now both, or that these arrive just as I’m starting to really enjoy loose clothing. No, what really pisses me off is that they’re calling them “mantyhose”. Fucking mantyhose, people!
But, disgust over nomenclature aside, it raises some interesting questions about style. Male fashions separated from hosiery a long time ago, (I think during the 17th century, but I may be mistaken) and most menswear today is just so very different from then. I think it will take a while for the evolution of fashion to reach a point where you’ll see guys wearing them on casual Friday.
Personally, I’d love to see this combined with this. Don’t know what else to wear with that, but black leather and shiny steel comes to mind. Any suggestions?
Untitiled
Today’s topic is burlesque. Specifically, this question a friend tossed at me while I was whining that I didn’t know what to write about.
blog on whether burlesque is a celebration of female sexuality or an objectification of women, and is it really objectification or just good advertising if it’s consensual and it’s the woman herself who is objectifying herself?
On the first part, the short answer is “it depends”. Burlesque is simply too broad a category, taken as a whole, to be classified like this. You’ll find shows that are either, neither, both, or even “reply hazy, try again later”. Worse, celebration & objectification are both subjective concepts with fuzzy edges. Thanks to confirmation bias, watching the same show with different expectations could give radically different opinions. Read the rest of this entry
Hot Water on Wheels
No real point tonight, just some random thoughts strung together. While I was casting around for blog ideas I got a couple that combined in an interesting way. They’re mobile hot tubs, burlesque, and the objectification of women. I just imagine a sort of huge limo with a hot tub and a stage and a camera crew.
On the subject of mobile hot tubs, they sound pretty sweet in a limo or a luxury RV. I don’t think I would enjoy actually driving around in one, but hey you could park it somewhere. Also I really prefer to be outdoors for my hot tubbery, so I kind of like the idea of a self-contained hot tub that you could take camping or something.
I’m too tired for a longer post tonight, so the burlesque will have to wait til tomorrow.
Zombie Dream
So last night I dreamt that there was a zombie plague spreading across the world. This probably has something to do with my company today. Anyways, in the dream it turned out to be not as big a deal as everyone expected, because social instincts didn’t change much. Social animals continued their lives without much change, they’d lose their sex drive and want to eat brains, but their willingness to kill their own kind didn’t change much.
So your average human zombie was a little more resistant to change and didn’t care about sex, but otherwise not very different from the general populace. Go ahead and make your own GOP joke.
I dimly remember an encounter with a zombie version of a large bird of prey, a solitary predator that was extremely aggressive, and attacked us on sight. Someone mentioned that there weren’t any unzombied ones left in the wild, that species had gone over to the undead completely. Seems very sad now, at the time I was too busy keeping track of those talons to think that they were effectively already extinct.
Well, that’s about all I can remember. Have a great day!
The Kiss
She sat in the wheelchair and waited, doubts gnawing at her. She wasn’t sure what to expect, he would arrive any minute and see her in the chair for the first time. She’d been dreading this day as the growing weakness in her legs made walking an increasingly limited resource, finally she could no longer pretend. Even though she’d warned him that this day was coming, quiet fears whispered to her. “Can I still be sexy?”
She was so lost in her thoughts she didn’t hear the door open, and suddenly there he was, closing the door behind him. Their eyes locked and for an instant she thought she saw sadness flicker across his face before he smiled. He stepped forward and knelt before the chair. Looking at his face this close, she was certain that a little sadness tinged his smile, and that made her hesitate. Torn between reaching for him and pulling away, she parted her lips a little. As though taking it as a signal, he leaned forward and kissed her.
Time stopped for a breathless instant and she sat completely still, her eyes closed, her mind focused on the warmth & pressure of his lips. Then she lifted her arms to embrace him and inhaled deeply, smelling soap and aftershave. Suddenly aware of his hands on her back she leaned into him, the kiss growing more intense as she ran fingers up his neck and into his hair. The tips of their tongues touched as his hands slid down her body, curling fingers around her hips and pulling her to him, pressing as much of their bodies against each other as possible. Her legs wrapped around him, holding him with all the strength they could muster. Her fingers contracted, grabbed one handful of shirt and another of hair, and she felt his breath hitch in a tiny shudder as his arms lifted to enfold her.
After what seemed like a long time, the intensity started to wane and they began to relax. Gradually they disentangled themselves and looked into each other’s eyes. She started to say something just as he did, and they both laughed. Her fears at ease, she smiled and pulled him forward for a second kiss.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 