Cary Tennis

Very validating. When I grew up I was made to feel bad for being pissed
when my sister stole from me.

There's no way a family can live together if you can't put your wallet down
on a table and be able to grope around later that night, or in the morning,
and find it, and dig out that receipt for the lamp that you got overcharged
for and say, Aha, see, I told you they overcharged me! I mean, that's the
very definition of shelter. Since the very earliest humanids began living in
social groups for mutual protection, the wallet stuffed with receipts has
been the key totem that delineated the domestic sphere from the wild. Proto-
humanid wallets have been found in the oldest archaeological digs -- some
even with the credit cards still in them! Amazing! But true. Because the
wallet is the central item of domestication. Elephant skin. Buffalo skin.
The wallet and the hearth. That's home and family.



I'm not sure there is a whole lot more to say than this: You cannot live
with people who steal your wallet and scatter your credit cards on the
sidewalk in a bad part of town; when family members do that they forfeit the
privileges of the familial bond -- you know, that gray zone where you
tolerate stuff from family that you wouldn't tolerate from a roommate. Theft
of money puts them on the other side of the fence. You can still talk to
them, and they can still be your family. But you can't live with them.

Amazon.com Is For Republicans / Attention, liberal shoppers! Next year, screw those GOP-supportin' companies, and try buying blue

Amazon.com Is For Republicans / Attention, liberal shoppers! Next year, screw those GOP-supportin' companies, and try buying blue: "And the site, called buyblue.org (along with its more detailed but less intuitively named counterpart, choosetheblue.com), spawned a mini movement and the mini movement spawned this very column and now you are right now encouraged to go see for yourself and discover the moderately shocking truths regarding which big shiny companies suck up to the happy sneering homophobic enviro-slappin' warmongering Repubs and which give thousands to the whiny limping kick-us-when-we're-down Demos. "

Here's a few hints to help you watch those pounds this Christmas.

1. Tip: Eat a chocolate bar before each meal - It'll take the edge off your
appetite.

2. If you eat equal amounts of dark and white chocolate, that's a balanced
diet.

3. Chocolate has many preservatives. Preservatives make you look younger.

4. Put 'eat chocolate' at the top of your list of things to do today. That
way at least you'll get one thing right.

5. A nice box of chocolates can provide your total daily intake of calories
in one place. Now isn't that handy?

6. Chocolate covered raisins, cherries, orange slices and strawberries all
count as fruit, so eat as many as you want.

7. Two reasons why chocolate is a vegetable.
(a) Chocolate is derived from beans. Beans = vegetable
( Sugar is derived from either Cane of Beet. Both are plants, which
places them in the vegetable category

8. If not for chocolate, there would be no need for control pantyhose. An
entire garment industry would be devastated.

9. REMEMBER: "Stressed" spelled backwards is "desserts".

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Unembedded in Iraq

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Unembedded in Iraq: "The US Corporate media consistently characterizes the Iraqi resistance as 'foreign terrorists and former Ba'athist insurgents'. In your experience, is this an accurate portrayal? If not, why?

This is propaganda of the worst kind. Most Iraqis refer to the Iraqi Resistance as 'patriots.' Which of course most of them are-they are, especially in Fallujah, primarily composed of people who simply are resisting the occupation of their country by a foreign power. They are people who have had family members killed, detained, tortured and humiliated by the illegal occupiers of their shattered country."

Blonde Joke

Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with those expensive double-pane energy efficient kind. But this week I got a call from the contractor complaining that his work had been completed a whole year ago and I had yet to pay for them.

Boy oh boy, did we go around! Just because I'm blonde doesn't mean that I am automatically stupid.

So, I proceeded to tell him just what his fast talking sales guy had told me last year... that in one year the windows would pay for themselves. There was silence on the other end of the line so I just hung up and I haven't heard back.

Guess I won that stupid argument.