Jamie (Internet remix)

alinasmith:

sblaufuss:

clapifyoulikeme:

The nation’s leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is halting its partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates — creating a bitter rift, linked to the abortion debate, between two iconic organizations that have assisted millions of women. The change will mean a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.

Planned Parenthood says the move results from Komen bowing to pressure from anti-abortion activists. Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress — a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups.

I used to buy every pink thing I saw. Now? Not so much. This is fucking disgusting.

I’m just going to copy and paste this whenever someone complains that religion doesn’t hurt anybody.

You know what I used Planned Parenthood for? Condoms, STD testing and pelvic exams. You know what 99% of women use Planned Parenthood for? NOT ABORTIONS. Jackass anti-abortion groups.

That’s exactly the problem. The anti-Planned Parenthood forces know quite well that nearly everything Planned Parenthood does is not related to abortion. They aren’t anti-abortion, they’re anti-sex and anti-women’s health. This proves it better than anything else could.

thingamonth:

One of the (many, many) skills that I’m lacking is the ability to sew. I can re-attach a button, given enough time, but other than that, I’m useless with a needle and thread.

Part of the reason is because my mother and my aunt are both skilled seamstresses. Another part is that I’m lazy.

So to remedy my lack of sewing skills, I am going to make between five and 10 pocket squares this month.

I’m going to work from this tutorial, and I’m going to use old shirts that I don’t wear anymore, but aren’t in good enough shape to give to a charity. I’m planning to make at least two by hand and then christen the sewing machine Emily and I got for our wedding (four and a half years ago!) and do the rest by machine. 

By the time February is over, I should have at least one pocket square for each work day, and I’ll start wearing them to work in my jacket pocket.

For this month’s thing: Jamie learns to sew OR There Will Be Blood.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother lately. Part of that is probably because each year for Groundhog Day she would use a butter knife to draw a groundhog in the peanut butter of our sandwiches for school. Part of it is the fact I just realized she died 15 years ago, on Dec. 4, 1996. And part of it is that today is 10 years since the house she lived in when I was growing up burnt down.

After she fell, broke her hip, and came to live with us in 1990, one of my uncles moved into the house. The house I grew up in is the last in a row of four houses, and my uncles and aunts lived in the other three.

I was living at home when the fire happened, and I was home from work early. I had grand designs on writing all about the fire for today, but it would have taken weeks, and a narrative of a fire and its aftermath doesn’t really capture what happened.

It’s hard to watch the house where some of your earliest memories happened burn. To see the huge plate window where your grandmother taught you to identify birds blackened with soot. To have the linoleum floor that supported the kitchen table where you learned to love to drink coffee heat up, sag and collapse. To watch the ivy that had been growing along the front of the house since long before you were born burn off and never return.

The weeks after the fire were spent cleaning out debris, burying the dozen stray cats my aunt had taken in, rolling out the project cars my uncle kept in the garage, even though everyone knew he was never going to work on them, putting the things that escaped the flames but were saturated with the woody, sharp smell of smoke into plastic bins so they could be cleaned.

It’s a brick house, so it’s still standing. It took most of two years, but my uncle and aunt moved back in. Now it’s their house. And though I’ve been inside dozens of times since the fire, I can’t tell you what the inside of the house looks like. I can’t shake the memories of the hardwood floors, the white metal beds my brother and I slept in, the big console TV and bigger console record player. When I visit, I half expect to sit at a table that’s been stopped from wobbling only by a piece of cardboard folded up and wedged under a leg, and sitting on high-backed green vinyl chairs that your legs would stick to in the summer. I think I might catch a glimpse of elementary-school-aged me sitting at that table, watching “Reading Rainbow” on a television sitting atop an old foot-powered Singer sewing machine, or my grandmother, still on her own in her 80s, using the yellow push-powered vacuum to clean the area rug in the dining room. Maybe I hope to see the blue glass vase that sat on top of the perpetually out-of-tune piano—the vase that my mother told me dated back to before the Civil War when a pillow fight with my brother nearly knocked it to the floor.

But though I’m welcome whenever I want to come over, the house where my grandmother lived is gone now, just as she is.

cdnelson:

So, Rules For Radicals is changing up my game in a big way. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in social activism (shouldn’t we all be?), I encourage you to pick it up.

First, the rules:

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you

have

2. Never go outside the experience of your people

3. Wherever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy

4. Ridicule is a person’s most potent weapon

5. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy

6. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag

7. Keep the pressure on with different tactics

8. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself

9. Maintain constant pressure on enemy

10. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it