NEW YORK -- "I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine," one person wrote. "I immediately turned the magazine face down," wrote another. "Gross," said a third.(Read the rest of 'Breast' Cover Gets Mixed Reaction)
These readers weren't complaining about a sexually explicit cover, but rather one of a baby nursing, on a wholesome parenting magazine--yet another sign that Americans are squeamish over the sight of a nursing breast, even as breast-feeding itself gains more support from the government and medical community.
Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo--a baby and part of a woman's breast, in profile--inappropriate.
"I'm totally supportive of it _ I just don't like the flashing," she says. "I don't want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn't want to see."
Suppose you and I are discussing this matter in a coffee-shop. I look around on the table for things to use in an experiment. There is a bottle of ketchup on the table, and, perhaps, an old-fashioned salt-shaker, both shown [below]. I ask you ‘Which one of these is more like your own self?’ […] you, your own self, in your totality.
I make it clear that I am asking which is the better picture of all of you, the whole of you: a picture which shows you as you are, with all your hopes, fears, weaknesses, glory and absurdity, and which - as far as possible - includes everything you could ever hope to be.
I don’t think "demotivated" is a word that appears in the dictionary, but I saw it in yesterday’s Dilbert.
Anyway, I want to have a better attitude at work, but I am seriously demotivated. No one at my company has had a raise in 5 years, and no sign of one coming anytime soon. I’m a good, but imperfect, employee, interested in improving my work performance because I will feel better about myself and my job if I do. But the wage situation is so dismal, it’s hard to keep that want going.
Want to try making your own yarn? Here is everything you need to start making your own, all in one box! As featured in Bust Magazine (April/May '06)
it includes:
- 1 beginner drop spindle. Can be configured 4 different ways, so you can try out different spinning styles.
- 1 oz each of FOUR different breeds of wool. 2 are handpainted, 2 are white. This wool sampler gives you a chance to start with an 'easy' wool and work your way up to scrumptious merino. NEW: all wool in this kit now comes from local, independantly owned farms. You get a chance to try a variety of types of wool, but also support indie business!
- 'So You Wanna Spin Your Own Yarn?' Spinning Instruction booklet written and illustrated by Skeintily Clad! unique, can't be found anywhere else. This is completely unique and not available from any other beginner spinning kit out there.
- Informational pamphlet of my favorite resources for spinning and dyeing.
Colors vary in every kit. If you have specific requests, let me know and i will try to accomodate.
Very attractively packaged, it makes a wonderful gift for your knitting friend that mentioned wanting to learn spinnig. Maybe your SnB buddy? Hello, Secret Pal gift?! Also a great gift for crafty kids, its SO easy for them to pick it up and get started making their own yarn!
LAST week, New York’s highest court voted 4-to-2 that a legislative ban on same-sex marriage did not violate the state Constitution. In doing so, it added to the patchwork of state rulings on the issue, including those of Indiana and Arizona (which similarly upheld legislative bans) and Massachusetts (which struck down a legislative ban).
What’s noteworthy about the New York decision, however, is that it became the second ruling by a state high court to assert a startling rationale for prohibiting same-sex marriage — that straight couples may be less stable parents than their gay counterparts and consequently require the benefits of marriage to assist them. (click the title above to read the whole editorial)
Naturally, it pains me that the court struck down gay marriage. But what interesting reasoning.... In this opinion piece, Yoshino eventually concludes that this reasoning is given because it just sounds better. You know, less bigoted. I agree. Because since when do we give special rights to people for being unstable, immature, or otherwise unfit? You know, "special rights," like the "special rights" anti-gay bigots are always accusing glbt folks of wanting.
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.
Internet Explorer's Main Problems
There are countless bugs in Internet Explorer, but here are the main reasons to choose a free alternative.
- Prone to viruses and worms
- Renders pages incorrectly. Web designers then need to spend extra time working so that pages work in Internet Explorer. This puts costs up, and slows the web down.
- Doesn't let people resize certain text sizes. This means those with poor sight cannot read small text on many sites.
- Far slower program than other web browsers
- Far larger program than other web browsers
- Isn't as user-centric as other web browsers. It lacks many handy features such as tabbed browsing and integrated search
- Doesn't support PNG images properly
Me? I recommend Firefox. I love the tab feature and the addons. In fact, I found this StopIE site by using a Firefox addon called Stumble Upon. While we're talking about how awesome Mozilla is, I'd also like to mention that my favorite email client of all time is Thunderbird, which, like Firefox, is completely free.
AS I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, my husband paces behind me, irritated. "Have you seen my keys?" he snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Dixie, at his heels, anxious over her favorite human's upset.
In the past I would have been right behind Dixie. I would have turned off the faucet and joined the hunt while trying to soothe my husband with bromides like, "Don't worry, they'll turn up." But that only made him angrier, and a simple case of missing keys soon would become a full-blown angst-ridden drama starring the two of us and our poor nervous dog.
Now, I focus on the wet dish in my hands. I don't turn around. I don't say a word. I'm using a technique I learned from a dolphin trainer.
I love my husband. He's well read, adventurous and does a hysterical rendition of a northern Vermont accent that still cracks me up after 12 years of marriage.
But he also tends to be forgetful, and is often tardy and mercurial. He hovers around me in the kitchen asking if I read this or that piece in The New Yorker when I'm trying to concentrate on the simmering pans. He leaves wadded tissues in his wake. He suffers from serious bouts of spousal deafness but never fails to hear me when I mutter to myself on the other side of the house. "What did you say?" he'll shout.
These minor annoyances are not the stuff of separation and divorce, but in sum they began to dull my love for Scott. I wanted — needed — to nudge him a little closer to perfect, to make him into a mate who might annoy me a little less, who wouldn't keep me waiting at restaurants, a mate who would be easier to love.
So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.
We went to a counselor to smooth the edges off our marriage. She didn't understand what we were doing there and complimented us repeatedly on how well we communicated. I gave up. I guessed she was right — our union was better than most — and resigned myself to stretches of slow-boil resentment and occasional sarcasm.
Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.
I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
(Read the rest of: What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage)
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