Santorum Surge

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.... It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

-- Rick Santorum

Santorum has actually enjoyed a surge in the Republican campain for the Party's nomination, effectively finishing in a tie for first place in last night's Iowa caucuses with Mitt Romney, who won by a handful of votes. No one expects Santorum to build on this and take away the nomination, but it is striking that fundamentalist Christianity still has this kind of strength in the twenty-first century in an advanced nation, though this also might help to explain why America is falling and sliding behind.

Kissing Sylvia

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to. I've just got to put down what happened to me this afternoon. I can't tell mother; not yet, anyway. She was in my room when I came home, fussing with clothes, and she didn't even sense that something had happened. She just kept scolding and chattering on and on. So I couldn't stop her and tell her. No matter how it comes out, I have to write it.

-- Sylvia Plath

Thus our Sylvia begins her first extended journal entry, in which she relates how a blue-eyed boy put the moves on her, our tender seventeen-year-old girl, and the horror of how all the kids know about it.

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Remembering Reagan

I assume this is an old one, but I never saw it before, and the era is a big part of my life.

these January days

I'm loving these January days
that feel like the best of spring
so cool and clear and sunny and cool and cool.

Linnea Quigley

I forget the name of the movie, but this was a nice scene. It's a little hard to believe that this is the same actress who played the tween rape victim in "Savage Streets", in which she looked like a real tween.

Coco on the driveway

There's Coco on the driveway, going out on the neighborhood. I wish they wouldn't do that, but my wishing doesn't stop it. So many street-mean dogs around, not to mention wilder, feral cats, usually bigger than my cats.