The Code of Silence

The fires are still going, but I had something happen to me that made me grumpy, so I'll post on that.

I have discovered in the past year or so that there's a double standard. People are free to criticize my food, my clothing choices, and the fact that I'm raising my kids vegan. They're even free to imply that I'm a little screwy for caring about dumb farm animals. But if I say one word about why I do what I do, I'm the Preachy Vegan, trying to convert everyone.

I kid you not. People tell me that my food is gross (usually without trying it), how much they like fur, how farm animals are so stupid, or how it's so extreme to be vegan. But I can't say anything back and still be polite, even if I'm totally calm. People get really uncomfortable and tell me to stop because they like meat.

Today I actually had someone get passionate about how we're so mean to our kids to make them be vegan, because it's not giving them a choice. (We also don't give them a choice about brushing their teeth, eating nutritious food, bedtime, hitting the cat and about a thousand other things. Making choices and setting behavioral limits for your children is called parenting.)

The problem isn't so much about raising the issue of vegan parenting. I'm happy to answer. The issue is the way it was done, and that it was during lunch.

I guess he thought it was funny to tip his head sideways and do a falsetto imitation of me saying to my kids, "Would you rather eat this nice happy vegetable or this bad nasty dead animal. Now make your Mommy happy!"

Because raising your kids as vegans means you are a controlling bitch who emotionally manipulates your kids.

Admittedly, I'm sensitive about people criticizing my parenting, because I know we're going against the grain. And that's harder than you might think sometimes, especially when it comes to kids. Everyone thinks they should be part of the village raising your child. They don't really trust you to do it right if you're different than them.

Aside from the manner in which this "question" was delivered, over food is about the worst time to talk about being vegan. Because then I'm being pushy. And somehow, I think a few insecure people know this and actually want me to start in on the topic so they can defend themselves against some imagined judgment they think my meal makes about their ethics.

Maybe those few people really don't know what to do with quiet happy vegans who just do their own thing. Some of them just have to try to get a rise out of us, or tell us how our choices are too out-there. I think they feel better about their choices if they can make us into freaks.

It's odd how people bring veganism up over food. This makes some sense because we're eating, but it also sets up the situation for anything I say to be a personal criticism. When this happens over food, I kind of try to give a quick, short answer to close the topic. Most of the time, that's that. Most people are cool about it. Sometimes, a person is not dissuaded, and they really start in (today it was the nasty impersonation of me and how unreasonably extreme we are to our kids to deny them something so "normal"). At this point, anything I said would have been about ethics and the treatment of animals, and that would have led to someone at the table being uncomfortable and asking me to stop.

It's like, we have to be sitting targets, taking any barbs without ever answering or justifying ourselves. Because if we say anything, we're just playing into the preachy vegan stereotype.

I need to make peace with being the freak. I need to formulate a stock response so I don't get flustered or upset, even in the face of personal attacks. I usually just give a small, polite smile and don't say anything to the little goads people throw out. For some reason, it's very satisfying to just let their statement hang in the air. Because they don't really want an answer. They just want to discredit my ethics and justify themselves. I always answer genuine questions, but some people just want to passive-aggressively tell me that my ethics suck. (Conform damn it! How dare you question the norms of our culture? Your actions make people feel judged/guilty.)

And then there are the incredibly cool people that make up most of my group of friends. No harassment, no inane statements, just good people. All of our good friends are very nice about it. Many people at work tell me my lunches smell good or look delicious (or don't say anything if they think it looks yucky) and some people go out of their way to try to accommodate me if we're going out together. And I appreciate that tremendously. I have to remember that the vast majority of my friends and acquaintances are like this. And try not to be so sensitive about the tiny minority of acquaintances who feel the need to publicly ridicule me.

Fires

The hills near my house are burning.

The Santa Ana winds started up today. The air was hot and dry this morning. Not a cloud in the sky.

In the afternoon, my husband called to tell me they were evacuating part of our town - about 2 miles from our house. When we drove home, the tiny orange line of fire got more and more worrying since it was so close to our house. It was gorgeous and terrible the way that nature is sometimes. But not really terrifying, because it's highly unlikely our house will burn. This area saw worse fires in November of 2003.

We watched the fire from our driveway. We're close to a big hill, and could see the flames moving as the line of fire moved slowly, slowly down the hill. Helicopters came and dropped water. The neighbors chatted and shouted hello to each other as they passed each other. It was like a block party, but with a little undercurrent of danger. The neighbors who have been here for 30 years told us that our neighborhood never has to evacuate. There have been awful fires, but we're far enough into town to be safe. It's the people on the edges who are in danger.

I packed a bag of our clothes just in case we have to evacuate. We're probably fine though. I took a look outside a little while ago, and it looks pretty calm. The fire worked its way around the hill, but not down toward the houses. So I think all is well. But we'll leave the bedroom door open in case someone rings our doorbell late at night for an evacuation.

Book Review: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard Feynman

I was hoping to enjoy this book. I like Richard Feynman and his irreverent approach to physics. Unfortunately, it seems like this book is scraping the bottom of the barrel for Feynman speeches.

I'm not really knowledgeable about physics. I mean I know an atom from a hole in the ground, but not anything in depth. I thought this book was ok for laypeople. But no, a lot of it was just far too dense for me. It has the speech from Feynman to Congress about the Challenger disaster. (During which he dropped and O ring in a glass of ice water and then crumbled it in his hand) This is a cool story, but his speech was far too complicated for me. The only chapter that I really enjoyed was called Los Alamos from Below. Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and had all kinds of stories about cracking safes, sending secret codes with his wife and father, and causing his own brand of genius mayhem.

Beyond that - not much. I know he was a product of his times, but he kind of lost me about half way through when he wrote:

"I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equal and capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it."

Good God. This was in 1966. I don't expect him to be a total feminist, but this wasn't the dark ages or anything.

It did lead me to put down my sandwich and think about how far feminism has come. Just one generation ago, brilliant men were spouting this bullshit. And now, the world for my daughter is so different. I mean, Barbie is still around. And I have sneaking suspicion that all this "girl power" merchandising is just funneling girls into another mold that doesn't threaten anything. But overall, huge progress.

Then again, maybe Feynman was right. Most of the book was over my head, and I just liked the funny safecracking stories. Maybe I should go back to popping out babies and making casseroles.

I give this book 3 out of 10 boron atoms. (A nerdy side note. Boron has an atomic number of 5. I only know this because it was my assigned atom for our 5th grade atom model project. When the movie The Fifth Element came out, I was more than halfway through watching it when I figured out that there was nothing in it about boron. I kept waiting for them to make a boron-based bomb or something.)

Pamphlet Madness

Two cool things this weekend. Number one - Vegan Outreach just put out a new booklet on vegan eating, and I think it's fabulous. Man, I wish I had this when I went vegan. It would have saved me a lot of work.

http://veganoutreach.org/guide/gce.pdf

I added a link on the sidebar too because it rocks my socks.

The second cool thing is that the local library agreed to let me put a stack of Even if You Like Meat pamphlets near the door. I had gone in with some more tame pamphlets from Farm Sanctuary, counting on the fascist librarians to want to shelter the delicate public from the truth about where their food comes from.

I was so wrong! I first handed the lady the Even if You Like Meat pamphlet, and said it was my favorite, but it had disturbing images. We didn't even get to the other pamphlets, because she immediately told me it was fine, but they'd have to pull it if they got parental complaints. I told her I'd put it up on the top shelf of the pamphlet/flyer area where kids couldn't get it.

Hooray! So now I will go back every week to restock it. Who knows how many people will be popped out of The Meatrix, and learn about the realities of animal agriculture.

Homecoming Queen

It has been exactly one year since we moved back to our hometown.

I grew up in suburbia, though I didn't really recognize it as that until I had left. It didn't start out like that. My Southern California home town used to be semi-rural. It got its first real grocery store the year it became a city - 1986. We moved there in 1978, when I was three. The city changed, became a "bedroom community," added housing tracts, strip malls, a McDonalds, a Kmart. By the time I was in high school, I couldn't wait to leave.

After living with my best friend for awhile in the next town over, (where I spent about half of my life because all my friends were there and I went to school there for 6 years) I fled to Santa Cruz, the liberal mecca. From there, Santa Barbara for grad school, Napa, Alameda and Antioch. I've had the opportunity to live in some of the most beautiful places in California, and I enjoyed all of them in one way or another. Antioch wasn't so great, a distant suburb of San Francisco with a ramshackle downtown where no one goes. But we could afford a condo there, even if police were always around (helicopters, knocking on our door, arresting the neighbors).

Last year, the company my husband worked for was purchased by a company down here. And they offered us a transfer. We agreed. We could get a house - not just a house, but one in a safe neighborhood with a good school. In Antioch, I was planning on homeschooling since only 25% of the students at the elementary school could read at grade level. And the town had triple the national average crime rate.

We now live in the town next to my hometown, a few blocks from the place where my husband lived as a little boy. But I consider this place my hometown too since I lived so much of my life here.

There are things in this town that left permanent impressions on me. I suppose it's because I left at 19, and all my formative years are tied to this place. But I didn't recognize how much of it remained in me until years after I had left. Like a fossil slowly emerging as the encasing dirt blows away, it was there. The exact angle of sunlight at each time of year, the heat wave that always used to come right after school started, the Santa Ana winds and the smell of the pavement and the earth after it rains are all unique to this place. And they're comforting, the way that wearing your mother's jacket is comforting when you're small and sleepy.

Coming home felt great, and I was sort of ashamed of feeling that way. After all, this is white bread suburbia. I'm supposed to be past this, valuing ethnic diversity, an efficient public transit system, independent businesses and progressive politics. I mean, I still value those things, but I felt kind of like I was betraying my younger self to embrace this right-leaning place so gladly. My kids were the reason. Just like every other family, we want a good school and a safe neighborhood. And owning a house was a big deal for us too, even if it is a 1965 cookie cutter tract home. I love our house. And I love being near our old friends.

Driving the streets of this town is like looking at the years of my life laid out on a map. The preschool where I would cling to the chain link fence and peer out, the elementary school where I met my best friend of 21 years, the house where I grew up, the hill where my mom and I picked apricots to make jam, my high school, my best friend's high school where I first saw my husband when I was 15 and he was 16 (we didn't date until I was 24), the street where I had my first kiss while leaning up against my yellow station wagon, the upstairs window of the house where I lost my virginity, the run down parking lot of the Kmart where I had my first job, the train tracks where my boyfriend and I would lay pennies on the train track and then go back to the car to make out while waiting for the train, the park where I was harassed by the police. The other park where I was harassed by the police. (Did I mention it's a really safe town?)

And bringing my kids here is a trip. There's no treehouse in the kid's section of the library any more. And the library signs are now sagging under their own weight. We won't take the kids for the annual Tom Sawyer fishing event at the local park where they stock some unfortunate fish in the little pond. And they've removed the dangerous three story wood and metal play structure. But the parks are still there, as are the palm trees. The grid of streets remains the same. So do many of the stores. The clock on the front of the mortuary is the same, the rocks on the southeast side of the valley still glow pink in the right light, and the late summer hills still turn honey-colored when the first morning sunlight hits them.

I'm sad to see the Starbucks, Wal-Mart and In-n-Out Burger here. All the red tile roofed strip malls with their pseudo-Spanish architecture are both tragic and amusing to me. Rows upon rows of beige stuccoed houses march up into the hills now. The empty lots that used to have a pumpkin patch, strawberry stand or just weeds are now filled with Kohl's, Bed Bath and Beyond and a Wal-Mart. And our first real mall will open up in October, filled with upscale stores where I'll never shop. I know all towns are like this - changing and filling up with chain stores. Well, maybe not Santa Cruz. But everywhere else.

I wonder what imprint this place will leave on my children. Will they be dying to leave too? For Berkeley? For New York? For Bob Jones University? (nooo!) Will they have fond memories of the pumpkin patch (the one that is still left) and the taste of the air as summer approaches? Or will it seem like a bland and cultureless prison, a tar pit of conformity?

I guess all we can give them is ourselves. This town with the SUVs and tract homes. Our personal eccentricities, failings, and love. All mixed into this surreal Southern California stew.

Update on the Burgers

We talked with our daycare providers, and I wrote up a food plan to post on the wall. They're listing my daughter's requirements on the allergies board and we're going to be more diligent about specifying substitutions for the things they serve.

They have a lot of substitute caregivers in and out. I'm not sure why. But I guess the idea of vegetarian or vegan diets is foreign to them, so we'll just treat it like an allergy.

So far, so good.

And in a year, she'll transfer to my son's Montessori preschool where there are a couple other vegetarian kids. Then my pair can make everyone jealous with their vegan lunches. Inspired by Jennifer Shmoo, I got four lunchboxes from Laptop Lunches. They are super cool, and every day I think how lucky we all are to have such yummy food. It's far too cutesy to have our four little lunchboxes all lined up, filled with vegan goodies. The lunchbox is half the size of my daughter's body, but she insists on carrying it. So she toddles along with her torso at an angle, the lunchbox whacking against her legs.

Veggie Baby

I am pretty pissed off. My daughter's day care gave her mini hamburgers for a snack this week. Normally, I go through the snack menu and send substitutions, and a few weeks ago I sent a box of crackers and a 1/2 gallon of soy milk for snacks if we didn't send a substitution. And she had lots of things in her lunchbox that day too, so they could have used that. It's in writing on her child care plan that she can't have meat. Our company has on-site daycare, so it's not like they couldn't have called us. My husband is 2 buildings away. I'm farther off, but I have a phone.

What if it was a food allergy or something? I guess personal ethics don't really count as a reason to not feed my kid some prion-laced, antibiotic and pesticide laden hunk of carcass.

My sweet little girl had never eaten any meat before, and it makes me kind of sad. I know full well that being vegan or vegetarian isn't about personal purity. But she was the only one of us who had never eaten meat.

My husband was the one to pick her up, and the teacher said something about owing us an appology.

Yeah, ya do.

Our friend Julie babysat for us once, and gave my son chicken nuggets. But that was fine since we were still transitioning, and most importantly, I never told her our kids were vegetarian. This was like 8 months after my husband and I went vegetarian, and we were still transitioning my son, so he was still omnivorous.

There's a big difference now, because we put it in writing and talked to the caretakers when she first started there in August. Hell, we even loaned Peaceable Kingdom and Food Revoluion to one of them.

It's not so much the hamburgers, as the principle of the thing. To make the decision to feed her that without calling us or looking at all the other things she had to eat was crappy. Do they do that for Hindu or Jewish kids who don't eat beef or pork?

My son somehow ate some turkey during "dinosaur food day" at his school. And the teacher said some other kid gave him a hunk of chicken nugget and she couldn't grab it away fast enough. That's fine if it's accidental. It's the intentional thing that gets me.

So now on Monday we have to go in and tell them again how important it is to us. I really don't like having to be the fanatical vegan, but I really don't want it to happen again.

Product Review - Azteca D'Oro Hot Chocolate

I've had some pretty grumpy posts lately. So now for something purely happy.

As autumn and cooler weather approaches, I have to share an amazing hot chocolate. It's called Azteca D'Oro. It's chocolate with cinnamon and other wonderful spices. It's nothing like the Carnation crap or Hershey's syrup in milk/soymilk.

No, no. This stuff is the best. It's sort of an unusual beverage, but with the comfort of chocolate and the complexity of interesting spices. It's similar to Ibarra, but without the torture of grinding up rock-hard blocks of stuff in the blender. Trader Joe's used to have it, but now you can only order it online.

I don't know how authentically Mexican it is, but the cashier at Trader Joes (back when they had it) told me that it was the only chocolate her Mexican grandmother would drink.

So there you go. It's Mexican grandmother approved!

Mix it in a pan with soy milk and heat on the stove, stirring often for best results. Best served with a comfy blanket and a trashy novel.

Grammar Police

I can't stand the inappropriate use of apostrophes. It drives me nuts to see menus that list crab's or potato's. I have been known to get up on a chair at restaurants and erase the offensive apostrophes off of marker boards or chalk boards. I can't help it. The words "it's" and "its" bother me too, but to a lesser extent.

Also I hate it when people say "excedra" instead of etcetera. Once I can handle, but for some reason the people who mispronounce this word tend to use it a lot.

I also get agitated when I hear people say "antidotes" instead of "anecdotes." In 11th grade, I took AP History, and one of our assigned books was Presidential Anecdotes. And the teacher called it Presidential Antidotes the entire year. It drove me crazy. Although I think we need a presidential antidote these last few years.

And one more kvetch. In Kill Bill, Uma Thurman is trying to will her legs out of entropy. That's what she says. Entropy is the tendency for all things to move toward chaos (or "inert uniformity" if you want to get nerdy). So what, her legs were disintegrating into their component molecules? She meant that she was willing her legs out of atrophy - muscular deterioration. I can't believe Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman and all the other people on that movie didn't get this. At first, I thought it was some kind of artistic statement about ephemeral human bodies decaying and becoming part of the universe. But then, no. She was in the hospital. Her muscles are atrophied. It's just that no one caught it through all the revisions of the script.

I never come down on people who are learning English - they're muddling through a very difficult language and they deserve credit for that. It's the native speakers who are too lazy to crack a grammar book or google grammar rules that make me batty - but only when they're putting the information out in public. Emails or casual correspondence errors don't get to me.

And boy do I get super embarrassed when I stick an apostrophe somewhere it doesn't belong when I'm tired or not paying attention. Naughty naughty. Too many offenses and they'll revoke my Avenging Grammar Angel wings.

Dr. StrangeCrop: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the GMOs

After my post a couple days ago on organic produce stickers, I figured I should write about GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

A few years ago, I read something about how GMOs were going to change food forever - make it more nutritious, keep longer, and be more insect resistant, without the use of sprays. What could be better? I heard about the wackos in Berkeley protesting against it, but I shrugged them off as Luddites. Same with the European Union. I thought they were opposed to GMOs solely because it involved us messing with Mother Nature and they had some sci-fi vision about square tomatoes. But if we had never messed with Mother Nature, we wouldn't have penicillin or ipods. Messing with nature was sometimes good, especially if it could increase crop yields to feed the hungry and put extra vitamins in foods.

I was wrong. Boy was I ever. I hadn't really considered that most GMOs are engineered by Monsanto and similar corporations, and that their motives aren't to save the human race, but to profit from it. I read Food Revolution, and memorized one terrible fact: That 80% of GMOs are meant to withstand massive doses of Roundup (an herbicide created by Monsanto). Farmers can then spray the herbicide with abandon, because it won't hurt their crop. The remaining 20%, (minus a tiny percentage of experimental "Public Relations" crops like Golden Rice which do actually have vitamins added) have pesticide within every cell. Every cell! The bug bites the vegetable. The bug dies. The plant itself is registered with the government as a pesticide.

And I was feeding this to my children.

Children don't have the same ability to excrete toxins that adults do, and in studies, they have found that there is a measurable difference in pesticide levels for kids who eat organic versus conventional.

But setting aside the pesticide issue, are these GMOs safe? Well, as one conservative columnist (whose name escapes me) said, no one has ever gotten a sniffle from them. True, they don't give you a cold.

Quoted from organicconsumers.com

In 1999, front-page stories in the British press revealed Rowett Institute scientist Dr. Arpad Pusztai's explosive research findings that GE potatoes are poisonous to mammals. These potatoes were spliced with DNA from the snowdrop plant and a commonly used viral promoter, the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus (camv). GE snowdrop potatoes were found to be significantly different in chemical composition from regular potatoes, and when fed to lab rats, damaged their vital organs and immune systems.

The damage to the rat's stomach linings apparently was a severe viral infection caused by the camv viral promoter apparently giving the rats a severe viral infection. Most alarming of all, the camv viral promoter is spliced into nearly all GE foods and crops.

No one has ever done a long-term test on GMO safety. Unless you count kids today who are the first generation to grow up eating this stuff.

Monsanto says the USDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of these foods. The USDA says Monsanto is responsible. The technology is so new that there are few laws regulating it. And they aren't legally required to label the GMO's (which are now in something like 80% of all items in a normal grocery store) because Monsanto and friends didn't want consumers to get the idea that GMOs are unsafe.

Personally, I'd like to know where my food came from so I can make my own choice, thanks.

I could go on, but I think I'll just point my Dear Readers in this direction:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/geresources.htm

And lest you think they're all shrill hippies, don't be afraid to read about it for yourself. It's really a matter of trusting Monsanto with your food, or learning all you can to make your own decision.

We chose to opt out of this strange societal experiment. Organics are expensive, but I figure I'd spend anything on medical treatment to keep us healthy, so why not just spend a little extra money now instead of 20 years from now? Some studies show that more nutrients are retained in organics, and it's much better for the environment and poor farm workers who work in the fields. Plus, once we quit eating expensive meat and dairy, we had plenty of extra money left over for organics.

If people buy more organics, then that industry will be more profitable, so more places will sell it. The more people are educated about their food, the better. Unfortunately, as I have lamented before, most people get their nutritional information from TV ads (Got Milk?). But the knowledge that GMOs aren't some boon to humankind is spreading.

Katrina's Animals

I keep reading about all the animals being left behind in New Orleans, and the owners who refuse to evacuate because they don't want to leave their pets. There was the little boy who vomited from crying so hard over loosing his dog, the now-famous Snowball. For more details on these pets, a great commentary is on Vegan Chai.

One one hand, I'm so touched by people's affection for their animals. On the other, I'm wondering why people would risk their own lives for their animals. I feel like a horrible ice queen when I say that. I suppose if I didn't have kids, then the animals would be like my kids. But as it stands, I'll save my kids and the cat can fend for himself. I've had all kinds of animals, both before and after I had my kids. But if there was flooding, disease, no food or water and the rescue people were trying to get me to leave, I think I'd put out as much food as I could and cry while I left my pet.

It really impresses me how much people love these animals. They're pulling them out of buildings, carrying them to safety - extending such kindness, even at great personal risk. People across the country are trying to gather money to catch and care for them until they can be claimed by their owners (if ever). They're donating money to Noah's Wish and the Humane Society.

It's so strange to me how much compassion people can have for cats, dogs, horses or pet birds and how much contempt they have for pigs, cows or chickens. On one hand, they'll risk their lives for their pet, or they'll donate money to save anonymous pets, but they won't even consider rejecting the practice of eating other animals.

I'm not that bewildered, honestly. I ate the beast flesh for 28 years. So I'd be a hypocrite to call those people evil. They're not. It's just an odd societal division we have between pet animals and wild animals, versus the yummy animals. One we'll die for, one we'll pass laws to protect, but we pay people to hurt the others.

Gay Marriage

This bill just passed the California legislature and is now going to Governor Arnold's desk. I'm crossing my fingers.

My husband and I have a bet. We made it when our daughter was born. By the time she's 30 (in 2034) gay marriage will be legal all across the country. Not every state has to legalize it, but a same-sex marriage in one state will be valid in all states. Yup, even in Texas. My husband says it won't happen. I say it will because young people today are more accepting of gay/lesbian/bi/transgender etc. people. Twenty nine years from now, they'll be the voters.

I don't get the arguments against gay marriage. Why in the world can't consenting adults get married? It boggles the mind.

The thing about same-sex marriage threatening hetero marriage is silly. Adam and Steve down the street are going to make you get divorced? They're going to make your marriage a sham? I think Elizabeth Taylor and her numerous ex-husbands did more damage to the sacred institution than they ever could. They're just living their lives. It's not like they're rubbing their naked butt cheeks against your bedroom window.

Oh, but some people's religious and moral beliefs say it's wrong. But to legislate that is to impose one person's morality on other people. As for me, don't you think I'd like to make it illegal to cut up a cow if it's still alive? But I can't - because though I'll shout until the sky falls that it's wrong, it's not up to me. In our fine country, you have the right to pay people to brutally torture as many animals as you want. My ethical beliefs say that's wrong, but I can't force everyone else to adhere to my beliefs. And to deny a same-sex couple the right to make a lifelong commitment to each other based on someone else's religion is just twisted.

Just because you don't like the thought of same-sex couples getting it on doesn't mean you get to deny them the right to be married. Believe me, they aren't eager to imagine you getting it on with your wife. But they're not saying you can't get married on the basis of, "it's gross" or "it makes me uncomfortable."

I've also heard the argument that it's "hurting the children". It says that kids need a man and a woman to raise them so they get the best of both worlds - feminine and masculine. But of course, heteros can get married, even if they're elderly or sterile or don't want children. But gays can't, even if they were to sign some hypothetical non-adoption/reproduction thing.

And taxes! I get so pissed that all my income is taxed at my husband's highest rate because we're married. Domestic partners don't have that - they're taxed as two singletons. My husband and I can't get a domestic partnership, so we pay more in taxes than a gay/lesbian couple. You hate gay people? Let them get married and pay more taxes.

So in the article I linked to above, it says that California passed Prop 22, which banned gay marriage. I love the logic - we'll go against the will of the people when convenient, but use it as an excuse to be bigoted when it suits our purposes. Since when has "everyone else thinks it" been an excuse to support a position? Or "it's always been this way?" So was slavery, segregation, women not being allowed to vote, own property or be on juries, and laws against interracial marriage. Traditions are only valuable when they benefit society.

I know for sure I'm going to win our little bet. Maybe not this decade, but not too far in the future. Many young people are growing up with the idea that homosexuality is normal and fine. It's not some hushed thing like when I was a kid. And they'll vote, and the world will change.

This bill may not pass. But there will be others. Oh yes. There will be others.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it you religious funnymentalists!

Produce Stickers

I'm not sure if this information is accurate. I found it on laptoplunches.com.

"You know those irritating little stickers you find on fruits and vegetables? Well, as it turns out, the numbers on those stickers contain valuable information. If the sticker has a four-digit number, the fruit or vegetable was conventionally grown. If it's organic, it has a five-digit number beginning with 9. Genetically modified products have stickers with five-digit numbers beginning with 8."


I will check this out for my next trip to the market. If anyone knows if this is true or not, please leave a comment

Updated 9/6: Jennifershmoo (who also runs the vegan lunchbox blog, has verified this (it's in the comments, but I figured I'd pull it up to here in case people don't read the comments.)

Yes, I've read that before and you can verify it at the International Federation For Produce Coding (they are the group working to make a global standard for PLU numbers) website:

http://www.plucodes.com/plucodesfaq.asp

Under "choose a question", look at "how do I code organic produce?" and "how do I code genetically modified produce?"

As if it Wasn't Bad Enough in New Orleans

I wish I was smart enough to have thought of this, but I must give credit to a friend of ours who is from New Orleans and sent this info to my husband.

You know all the alligator farms in the New Orleans area? They're gone now, and those alligators are loose. Eight feet of dark water, lots of debris to help them hide - it's alligator heaven.

Here's a pic of a former alligator farm. See the little "log" at the top of the screen?

Time Travel in movies, books and TV

We just saw Donnie Darko, and after thinking about it for awhile, I realized that I love time travel stories. Done well, they can be mind-bending or just plain fun.

Figured I'd share some movies, books and TV shows with time travel themes.

Books:
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This one requires some suspension of disbelief. The main character has a disorder that makes him pop in and out of his own life at various points. So one minute, he's working in the library, the next, he's naked in his parent's kitchen during his childhood (except he's an adult). This is the story of him and his wife.

Best parts - the main character is a punk-music-loving librarian who always ends up naked when he jumps. What can I say - I like 'em geeky.


Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
The main character was born in 1917 and is 4000 years old, due to a genetic glitch that won't let him die. He ends up traveling back to his own childhood, sleeping with his mother (who lusts after her own father) and having a grand time. Later, he sleeps with his own clones - identical to him in every way except they're female.

Best parts - Heinlein is like the Beatles - the early stuff is cute and great for children. The later stuff is messed up in a fantastic way. In his late books, Heinlein has his characters actually travel to Oz. I'm pretty sure Heinlein was senile at that point. Group marriages, lots of naked people and consentual adult incest abound. Amazingly, the incest is done so well that it's not offensive. Seriously.


The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon
This isn't "high art" but it's a good fun read. I love historical fiction, and a little romance thrown in makes it great. Clair accidentally falls through a time portal to find herself in 18th century Scotland. Don't be put off because the novel is marketed as a romance. It's mostly historical fiction with steamy, albeit a teeny bit cheesy, sex scenes. The series is still in progress, so if you get hooked, pace yourself. The sixth book, A Breath of Snow and Ashes comes out soon, so I need to actually finish the fifth book before then.

Movies:
Donnie Darko
Like I said, I just finished this one last night and I loved it. It was kind of marketed as a horror movie, with that spooky fanged bunny guy. So I was scared to see it, not because I'd be scared during the movie, but because I am prone to very vivid dreams - including the scary ones. I got to wake my husband a couple nights ago with screaming in my sleep, (again) so I try to toe the line with filling my mind with spooky crap.

Best parts - Great performances from almost everyone, a time travel mind bender that goes beyond the usual dual-existance and can't change the future/past paradox. Great 80's music, used to its best advantage. Set in the 80's, but doesn't beat you over the head with nostalgia.


Cowboy Bebop
This TV show doesn't really deal with time travel, but a main character, Faye, was in an accident in the early 00's and is revived 80 years later. She has to deal with living in the future, having everything and everyone she knows be gone. The character is past the "how do you flush the toilet" type of thing. She's fully integrated into society when we meet her, so no slapstick with new techno-gadgets. Just a sad part where she gets a tape from teenage self and can't find a VCR to play it on.

Best parts - Faye isn't the best part of the show and later, the movie. Best parts include Spike kicking ass with a cigarette in his mouth and Radical Edward, a hacker child, using her toes to work the computer.


Glass Teat:
Farscape
Oh, my love of Farscape. I am dreading when we will finish the series. We get them the DVDs on Netflix. John Crichton falls through a wormhole into a distant universe. Not technically time-travel, though he doesn't ever really know if he fell through time or just space. And since time and space are the same thing... I'll classify this under time travel. The characters are great. They argue and are flawed and selfish and heroic and just plain bizarre.

Best parts - Somehow keeps the fugitives-in-space theme fresh and interesting. Lots of sexy characters, but not distractingly so. It's not a crutch for the show like with Lexx. Can totally be a tear-jerker at times.



There are other great time travel shows- Quantum Leap, some Star Trek episodes. But almost everyone knows those already. Just wanted to share some more obscure ones.