There have been a lot of controversies in the news lately, some real, some made-up, and some made out of smoke and mirrors.  Here are my thoughts on a few of them:

• It is none of my business who sleeps with whom, assuming they’re all consenting adults, or what sex/gender/whatever they decide/realize they are.  The only other thought I have on this is that it isn’t exactly brave to wait until your multi-million dollar TV show is over to do something controversial.  It would have been braver to do this while there were cameras in the living room.  It would have been really brave to do something like this in, say, 1976, when the spotlight of the world was squarely on you and society hadn’t become a heck of a lot more accepting of people who swing to different fences.
• Race ought to be a null value in society, but it isn’t.  Some can get past it, some can’t, and that’s on all sides of the argument.  To be honest, I don’t care what ethnic, racial, religious, or whatever pigeonhole someone wishes to slam themselves into.  Just be honest about who you are and how you got to where you are, and we’ll all get along a lot better.
• I write what I want, I read what I want, I watch what I want, and I play what I want.  If you can’t handle that, then leave. Feel free to take your ball and go home, because we’ll have at least as much fun without you.  It’s just that simple.  If you want to turn it into a fight over who gets what corner of the public space, just remember, most of the people on my side are highly trained assholes, and we enjoy our work.
• If your fiction can be easily described as gay cowboys eating pudding, then you’re missing the point of fiction.  I pick up a novel to be entertained.  If you can make me think while I read it, bravo, but I’m paying you to entertain me.  If I want to read something that will make me think, I’ll go back to non-fiction or a clearly-labeled book on religion, philosophy, or politics.  Now, bring on the exploding spaceships crewed by tall redheads who like medieval Japanese swordcraft.
• People who use words like ammosexual, tactard, fudd, nazi, threeper, teabagger, or whatever, are not serious and we waste our time in trying to engage with them.  That doesn’t mean that someone can’t use the term to describe a friend, because there isn’t a guy reading this that hasn’t been called every filthy, degrading term in the book by his buddies.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t the same with women.  I’m talking about the people who try to shut down debate by attaching an insulting term to their opponent, and both sides of the political spectrum do it.  If you do it to someone I admire, I’ll turn my back on you.  If you do it to my friends, then I will stand with them.  If you do it to me, don’t waste your energy. I’ve been insulted by the best, and there’s a good chance you won’t measure up to their standard.

• I am no longer allowed to use the phrase “Contingency plan includes reboot of all cluster nodes and holy water” at work.
• It’s never a good thing to stumble upon something really bad and have no idea how long it’s been like that.
• I think the biggest compliment I can give an author is to say that I got so absorbed in their work that it takes three requests from Irish Woman to get me to put the book down and go to sleep.  Michael Z. Williamson did that to me four times in the past week.
• My parenting style lately:  When I say “Boy, you better stand on your head and whistle Dixie”, I mean you better be into the fourth bar before you ask why.
• Girlie Bear has been watching a BBC television show that deals with midwives in rundown parts of post-war England, who bicycle around the slums, delivering babies and trumpeting the benefits of socialized medicine.  I think I’d rather have my gums scraped with a rusty coke can from the same time period.
• Since we can now decide what ethnicity we are, I respectfully ask that I be referred to a Barbarian-American.
  • Only I and people like me can use “barbarian.”  It’s our word.
  • The rest of you may refer to me as “green-eyed devil.”

• Girlie Bear begins one of her summer volunteer jobs this week, in which she will be assisting in the Louisville Zoo’s black-footed ferret program.  She likes to joke that she gets to work with her BFF all day.  Unfortunately, she is not allowed to give the fuzzy little varmints pat-pats, because they can’t be allowed to get used to attention from humans.  She, being a teenage girl, feels a little disappointment at that.
  • She describes baby ferrets, by the way, as ‘fuzzy little pink erasers’.
• Boo begins a week of “LEGO” camp at the zoo, which as far as I can tell, involves 3 hours a day of playing with LEGO’s, 3 hours of walking around the zoo, and an hour of doing something that keeps his counselors from jumping into the tiger exhibit.
• Irish Woman and I had another of our “Green goes with green, darn it!” disagreements this morning.  I guess this is why she buys all of Boo’s clothing, not me.
• Irish Woman is summoning dark magic.  She washed her car, parked it under a tree, and watered the lawn, the fruit trees, and the vegetable garden this weekend.  If it doesn’t rain tonight, then we need new dice.
• It’s a good feeling when you look around your home and say quietly “We need more book shelves.”
• Boo has reached that stage of summer life where vigorous nightly scrubs are necessary to remove the impression that he is spending his days in a coal mine.
  • For now, normal bar soap and a washcloth are working.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have to graduate up to Simple Green and a .50 chamber brush by the time school rolls back around.