Embryo of Philosophy

I've been putting off this post for too long.

On May 28th, two of the hosts of a Sacramento morning radio show called Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning spent over half an hour encouraging and promoting the physical and emotional abuse of transgender and questioning children. No, seriously.

( Read more... )

Well, it feels good to get that off my chest.


EDIT: Carl's Jr/Hardee's and Verizon have also pulled their sponsorship! Yes!

EDIT AGAIN: Well's Fargo is also no longer advertising on KXRQ!

EDIT TAKE THREE: Nissan's pulling their support as well!


RETURN OF THE EDIT: AT&T and McDonald’s are gone too! That's ten big name corporations so far.

Today's armchair activism opportunity is brought to you by Tyson Foods.

"Hunger is a serious problem in the Bay Area…
• Nearly 1.2 million people in the Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma and Santa Cruz counties) are living near the poverty line, at risk of going hungry. According to census figures, these people are making less than $26,000 for a family of 3.
• The California Budget Project estimates that a family needs to make more than twice that amount - at least $53,000 - in order to make ends meet in the Bay Area. People who can’t get by often give up food to pay for vital expenses like medicine, or fixed expenses like rent.
• 50% of the people Bay Area food banks serve are children – and many live in working poor families."

Food prices are going up, and government help for needy families is going down (after all, to the republicans, if a government is actually serving its people, it's clearly to big).

How is Tyson helping? For every comment to this post the company will donate 100 pounds of high-quality protein (up to a total of 200,000 pounds) to the six Bay Area (that's in California) food banks.

How can you help? Comment on the post! Seriously, it takes, like, a minute. Don't you love it when doing good is so easy?

Let's make this a feel good post all round, shall we? I have some serious problems with Google, politically speaking. They worked with the Chinese government to censor and restrict what the Chinese people could search for. That's bad, to say the least. But this latest statement from them...well, I can only approve and applaud it.

( GOOGLE takes a position on California's No on 8 campaign )

Go Google. More power to you.

Delicious thing that I am currently eating: butterscotch chip cookies. Mmm.

Delicious thing that other people ate yesterday: My practice batch of bourbon balls! They were a hit! Whoo!

And now, Veleda presents: stuff at livelongnmarry that is totally awesome.

First of all, there are five copies of Ellen Orlean's award winning book, The Butches of Madison County available. You can have your copy signed, personalized, or left blank. The starting bid is only ten dollars, and the seller (that would be me) pays for shipping.


Ellen Kushner, author of Swordspoint, The Privilege of the Sword, and The Fall of the Kings is offering an original comic script set in her fictional universe that the winner gets to illustrate! The finished comic will be placed on her website for all to see. (Note: fan rights only.)

If you can't draw, but love the idea, amazing artist Colleen Doran is offering to draw one scene from the script.

p_zeitgeist, has a gorgeous hand-dyed chemically-etched silk organza capelet up for bid. Even if you can't afford to bid, click the link just to see gorgeous examples of her work.

First off, some really awesome news: The Breast Cancer Site got the 8 million clicks it needed to earn to extra 10,000 dollars! Fantastic! And we helped, people.

However, that doesn't mean that you should stop clicking. All of these sites are an incredibly easy way to do good.

Save The World - One Click At A Time!

On each of these websites, you can click a button to support the cause -- each click creates funding, and costs you nothing! Bookmark these sites, and click once a day!





Click here to post this on your page or 'blog

Bidding at livelongnmarry has started, and there's some incredible stuff by equally incredible people. Tamora Pierce is offering stuff! Tamora fucking Pierce! A signed book, never-for-sale pins, and a chapter from her yet to be published new novel. There's also Pamela Dean, offering signed first edition copies of her novel, Tam Lin. I have never read it, but apparently it's really great. There's loads of gorgeous handmade jewelry and more offers to write fanfic than you can shake a stick at.

Also, I'm getting multiple bids on my bourbon balls. Yay!

I also hit on the ingenious idea to contact Andrea Gibson and Ellen Orleans about providing signed books. Andrea is a local spoken word artist who's a four time Denver Slam Champion, came in fourth at the National Individual Poetry Finals, third at the Individual Word Poetry Slam, and won the Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is also among the most incredibly awesome people that I know. A small selection of her poetry can be found on her website here

Ellen Orleans is humour writer here in Boulder. She's won the Lambada Literary Award for her book The Butches of Madison County, and she's also the author of The Inflatable Butch, Who Cares If It's a Choice (one of the funniest books that I have ever read), Can't Keep a Straight Face, and Still Can't Keep a Straight Face.

So far, Andrea has emailed me back, and I'm just waiting to see her opinion on the starting price.

I've finally got all my ingredients for the bourbon balls. It's turning out to be more expensive than I figured, but I don't care. The price had me wavering on whether to make a practice batch or not, but I decided that I should. I want to make sure that these turn out well.

And now for something completely different: a look into my life at the moment.

A few days ago, I found a book in my bike pannier. It was not my book. It's called The Seat of the Soul, and it appears to be a new age self help sort of book. It's not a cheap pamphlet type of book. It has a price tag for $12.00. I have no idea why someone would leave this book in my pannier. Did they just want to get rid of it? Were they trying to do an random good deed, and help a random person uncover the mystery of their soul? Were they simply looking for a place to put their book down, thought that my pannier would be a good place, and then forgot? The world may never know.

Work is going all right. They've increased my hours, which means more money, but less free time.

I rented two movies the other day. One was Blackbeard's Ghost, a cute family film that I remember really liking years ago. The other is called Walk All Over Me. The cover features two sexy women in fetish gear, and the tagline is "Love. Latex. Larceny." My complex and twisted psyche: welcome to it.