Well, after months and months of utter neglect I have made up my mind.

 I’m sick to death of this blog.  It’s too damn ranty and doesn’t contain nearly enough gleeful female domination.  I’m a very different person now than when I started this two years ago, and I just don’t wanna write here any more.  So this will officially be the last entry.

 Stay tuned for the next phase in my evil plan to take over the world with kinky sex…The Kinky Courtesan

My mom asked me today what I thought of the whole cloned meat thing.  I said:  Hell, yes; bring it on!  Better yet, take it a step further - give me full on McMeat!  Better a burger made from mindless flesh grown in a vat than from a living, thinking being.  Who also required a pretty large chunk of resources - significantly larger than the bits of flesh and skin we humans were interested in - to nourish.  I also think this is a step down a path that will ultimately lead to a product that’s healthier for us as well as tastier than “natural” meat.

Then again, I read a lot of science fiction.  :-p

Gay marriage is a moot point.  For all the arguments and fuss, the truth is that the entire concept of gender as an opposite-and-clearly-divided-poles thing, the very foundation of the religious right’s “traditional” marriage, is dying out.

It’s not only the way in which the social roles of men and women have merged either, though there’s been an awful lot of that about.  Medical technology has progressed to the point where it is virtually impossible (at least without medical tests) to distinguish between the born male or female and the made one.  What becomes of the sacred cow of traditional marriage, when one of the partners goes from being the opposite sex to being the same sex?  Is that union suddenly nullified, never worthy of having been blessed in the first place?

The transexual population is growing, and a substantial number of people are choosing to become neither male nor female, but another gender entirely.  This will, I believe, ultimately turn out to be the larger population as these sorts of transformations do not necessarily require the radical and expensive medical procedures which are typical of full sex reassignment.  Furthermore, as the field of genetic manipulation becomes commercialized (as it inevitably will), I believe we will see things that we can only begin to speculate about now.  How can you frame the debate as marriage = 1 man + 1 woman vs. marriage = 2 committed lovers when the people in question are as likely to be a feathered biped and an ocean-dwelling furry thing?  Requiring such fanciful beings to adhere to strict notions of “male” and “female” seems downright silly.  

This, of course, is what really terrifies the fundies.  All their public bluster right now may be about gay marriage, but they’re trained to work in steps, to sneak their Jesus-based version of Sharia law in while regular folks are looking the other way.  Interesting though, isn’t it, that the folks who claim to speak for God have so much less imagination than God does?  I mean, whatever being created this planet had no problem at all with oddities of gender and sexual expression.  This is the being that created earthworms (bisexual hermaphrodites), anemone fish (change their sex so they can mate with whoever happens by), and slime molds (500 different “sexes”).  God obviously doesn’t have a problem with all this stuff, so why do “his” people have such difficulty with it?

You ask me, it’s because organized religion isn’t really the voice of God - it’s the voice of the other guy.

I wish somebody would invent a remote control with a locator function.  A simple little button on the tv, dvd player, cable box, anything that has a remote control, that causes the remote to beep when pressed.  So you don’t have to stick your arm down the back of every dang piece of furniture in the room before hitting on the secret location the children chose to hide the clicker in this time.

A hundred years from now, Katrina Cottages will be as famous in architectual history as Craftsman Bungalows.

I’m a webwhore by trade, but one of my hobbies is what I like to call practical prophecy. I like to think about what the future will be like. (I also like to think I’ll be there to see it, but that’s another discussion)

So I’m checking out digital video editing software and most of the commercial packages come with a set of templates for stuff like birthdays, weddings, holiday at the beach and so on, and I wonder…

Will there come a day when “naughty home movies” is one of the template choices? And would that be a good thing?

As I was rubber-necking at the destruction in Louisiana and Mississsippi yesterday, it occurred to me…

The same storm that killed hundreds and caused billions of dollars worth of damage in human terms will have stirred up a rich soup of nutrients from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, which will precipitate a bloom in aquatic (and correspondingly in terrestrial) life.

I’m still goofing off (which means I’m only minding the munchkins and not trying to work on the website too :-p ), and I can’t help but be riveted to The Weather Channel. One of the fiercest hurricanes ever recorded is blasting through New Orleans today. Here in Tampa Bay we watch these things go past us time and again, always knowing that it’s not a matter of if one will hit us, it’s a matter of when. The legendary (at least to us weather junkies) Jim Cantore has, as usual, been reporting from “ground zero,” which in this case is a concrete building sitting 27′ above sea level, and 1/2 mile north of the shore. He’s been telling us about the water filling the lowest level of the building, and the cars floating by - and how the surge of water came in in about 20 minutes. It’s the kind of thing you hear people say “I can’t imagine” about, but I think everybody who lives here can imagine. The clouds that are dumping rain onto Mississipi, Alabama, and Louisiana today have been pouring a little on us too, the winds that are tearing apart buildings and trees have knocked down a few branches here as well.
Last year, when folks were excaiming over the extraordinarily severe hurricane season, the weather dudes were quick to remind us that such severity was the average, that in fact we’ve just been going through a bit of a lull the past few decades. Add the effects of global warming to that, and I’m seriously concerned that the land my house sits on - about two miles from the ocean - will be waterfront property by the time I leave it to my kids. Or worse, underwater property. After all, waterfront property might actually be worth something if sold to one of the damn fools who apparantly think rebuilding their palatial homes every decade or so is a sort of status symbol. *eyeroll*
Hurricane Katrina will, I expect, claim a couple hundred lives when all is said and done between the floods, tornadoes, and falling trees. (six fatalities in Florida already, five due to falling trees - must be some kind of record) It’ll be listed as one of the most dangerous storms ever. What’s astonishing really, is how a storm that’s if anything fiercer than, say, the Indian super cylone of 1999, will take a few hundred souls here where the Indian storm killed 138,000 people.
Why? Well, we have better warning systems. But mostly, I think, it’s that a lot of folks over here have the means to get away. They’ve got cars, and money for hotel rooms (or relatives on higher ground). Some folks didn’t have the means to get away from this one either. Many of them are huddled inside the Louisiana Superdome while the wind tears pieces off the roof, the levees fail, and Lake Pontchartrian fills the basin the city sits in with water.
I wonder if someday my family will be one of those who haven’t the means to get away.