Any of you read "A Wizard's Dilemma"?

That's the one where Nita's mom is dying. At one point, they describe the heart of NYC as being Times Square.

That always strikes me as being wrong. Times Square is for the tourists, as far as I'm concerned. My city's heart is at Union Square, and always has been.

Union Square was as far south as you could go after 9/11. Couldn't go below 14th Street. And the one memorial that was put up there that *stayed* up was just, on a wall in the train station, a series of stickers with names of people who died. Their birthdates and deathdates as well. Deathdate, yeah.

Well, it's been a while. Some of the stickers are missing now. Others are grubby - they've clearly been peeled off and put back too often.

And I'm just not sure what I think. Do I think it's a crying shame, and there should be a public outcry? That the city or whoever should shell out to make that wall a permanent memorial, with the names engraved in properly? Or do I think this is as it should be, that we can't remember people forever and ever, that we have to live our lives? People fade from our memories, and that's as it should be.

I don't know. I just noticed it today, and started thinking.

Link taken from sunnydale47

Or you can just read her entire post on abortion.

Now that that's said, and let me hasten to assure you that I don't see this as being useful anytime in the forseeable future, the (in)famous post on how to do an abortion.

I'm posting this not because it's useful but because there's no reason not to.

On a similar subject, I read a murder mystery a while back where one of the characters had suffered a series of miscarriages earlier in life. It turned out that her semi-abusive husband had been slipping her rue. This is the part where I crack up. We had rue growing in our yard for a while. Not sure why, the only purpose for that plant I ever saw was to "cause a period to come early" (as our herb books euphemistically put it). Nasty tasting stuff. I tried it once, just to find out... ick. (And then I took great pleasure in daring other people to try it. So worth the experience of trying it myself!)

Of course, that'd be just as potentially dangerous as trusting an autodidactic abortion clinic.

And god knows we don't want to have to resort to anything more desperate, stuff ranging from coat hangers to outright infanticide. Infanticide, remember, is the traditional recourse of people without decent birth control.

Which leaves safe, legal abortions. Or better contraceptives than we happen to have now. Believe it or not, I don't think that abstinance counts, other than in a very technical way.

Oh, and please note that I'm not advocating that anybody use any method to create an abortion other than visiting a reputable clinic with reputable, trained doctors. Please, think of your safety.

Y'know, it's not the news that upsets me...

It's the out-of-proportion reaction to it. Movies? Visits from quite famous people? WHY?

I just... I just don't understand why people are still chattering on and on about this. Isn't there something more interesting going on, somewhere? A genocide, perhaps? Maybe somebody being shot who shouldn't've been? Perhaps a scary new disease spreading all across hell and half of Europe?

I don't know. Maybe the news is slower than I realized.

Of course, maybe I'm just pissed that this kid met the alleged President and didn't, as near as I can tell, take the time to chew him out for being, well, evil.

I might just be in a bad mood, of course. That's always an option as well.

Gah.

Thanks, xmorningxrosex. I think. davidkevin, you were right. Funding for education in general is down (even his own stupid little pet project), including for IDEA grants.

Just great.

I'm going to bed. Wake me up when we get a new government.