incipit vita nova

Hoarders: Dead Cat

First off, if you're a cat lover, I apologize.  I indulged in two episodes of A & E's horrorfest Hoarders last night. As a proud HWA member based on a not-too-large number of horror stories (mostly crossover SF/F horror), and as a recovered aspiring horror writer - viz. Clarion "I'm going to be a horror writer!" - there's got to be a very scary, awful story here.  Somewhere.  If I could just find it . . . Maybe it's gone off hiding along with the other half of Augustine's teeth!

Like everybody else who watches this show, I feel like I'm watching a constant parade of "that's just WRONG" moments. 

Here is the end result of one of those moments.  Augustine, a Gretna, Louisiana mother of two adult children, had so filled her house with trash and debris that some of her cats had "gone missing."  During the cleanup, they found two of them.  Here's one, and his little screaming face inspired some internet commenters . . .

Augustine of the no-teeth was, look - I don't want to traumatize her two children, Sarah and Jason, any more than they already had been, so first I'll say that they were both very brave and caring. My heart went out to both of them so many times during the show.  I was cringing along with them and for them. The pain of having this type of situation in one's own family would be unimaginable.  But I'll go ahead and say it - whatever is wrong with Augustine, whatever happened to her, there wasn't too much of a person in there, she didn't seem to care much at all whether or not her house was cleaned up, and she was about the laziest, most ungrateful and uncaring human being I've ever remotely been exposed to.  The cleanup crew shoveled 8,000 pounds of trash and debris out of this ramshackle house that was singlehandedly ruining a decent neighborhood in Gretna - maybe even the whole town thanks to its obvious reek.  There was open sewage in the house, and the cleanup guys wouldn't even do the bathroom with hazmat equipment.  Finally, one of them went in with a shovel and rake.

Kitti here was buried under a mountain of trash and may have been dead as long as 10 years.  Augustine's family photos were buried willy-nilly under trash, feces, and rotting pieces of . . . well, after it's rotted like that, who can tell what it used to be?  The house was one huge compost heap.  You know how they say that disposable diapers will NEVER decompose in the landfill?  They found a large package of Jason's toddler diapers (he is now 27) in the "landfill"-like environment of the house, and guess what?  They looked to be decomposing into shreds.  Take that, eco-fanatics - just think things through (mother of two - I did - so can you!). I guess if one twists it around enough, Augustine was living the "ultimate" green lifestyle - she had no water for six years and it looked like she had a very small carbon footprint, and was basically living outside, having driven herself out of her own house due to filling it from floor to ceiling with trash.

Augustine, between bites of raw hotdog, grudgingly admitted to being an animal lover, yet showed no shock or surprise at mummified Kitty One or skeletonized Kitty Two.  As many have pointed up, one half of Augustine's long-lost dentures did turn up near the bottom layer of what I believe was the former "living room".  It's almost impossible to fathom the degree of mental illness involved, as Jason was removed from the home years before, and raised by his then-22 year old sister.  Augustine didn't seem to "get" that Jason wasn't coming back at that time, she had made no efforts to clean or provide him a decent environment, and he would not be becoming back now. He had just traveled there for one last attempt to help her, as she was on the verge of having the house condemned and being bodily removed to some care facility.  It was a very telling scene when her long-suffering daughter Susan pulled an old photo out of a 5-foot stack of trash and debris in the bedroom and identified her own grandmother, Augustine's mother.  They had previously shown Augustine's personal shrine to herself - while the house was horrific, top to bottom, this shrine was still visible.  Meanwhile, her own mother's image was buried under trash.  A terribly hurt Susan talked about how much she loved her grandmother and then said, "I'm taking this.  She doesn't deserve it."  

As far as Susan and Jason are concerned, this is abuse of monumental proportions.  I agreed with them at the end of the show, when they admitted that the cleanup wouldn't last long, and their mother would soon be back to her old habits. I know there's a story in there somewhere, but a very grim one that I'm not sure I want to face.

Lying on LinkedIn and Resumes

I have experienced several extreme, notable situations in which an employee presented one sort of experience and education in their interview and on their resume which later proved to be false.  In each case, the person was terminated, usually immediately.  In only one case did the egregious liar get an "exit interview." 

By the way, do you see the word "liar" written in script on the t-shirt, or a man's face? Unlike the t-shirt, job experience and degrees are not in the eye of the beholder - they either are true, or they are not.

So, what's the deal?  Are all those job coaches and online experts full of sand, or is it true?  Is lying on your resume or, even worse, in a public site like LinkedIn potentially fatal to a person's employment prospects? Well, career expert Jame-ane Ervin recounts the story of a former co-worker who's got an ever-revised suspense novel going about his job experience on LinkedIn.  "Bobby" got called out in this article, and may have thought better of his dishonest ways.  Or not!  Others are starting to call for more verifiability on LinkedIn, and for good reason.

Ever-reliable About.com has a good article about how to handle job searches and job qualifications that a job-seeker might not possess 100%, although they believe they can do the job well.  Yet of course, there are still entire websites devoted to fabricating resumes, blatantly stating that everybody lies, so those who wish to be competitive had better lie too, because their competition will be lying more and better.  If job-seekers don't lie and pad their resume and give themselves degrees and experience they don't have, they'll be completely suckered by those who brazenly went ahead and gave themselves Ivy League MBA's and lengthy, successful management tenures at Fortune 500 companies.  "The majority of human resource managers assume that everyone exaggerates, puffs up, and basically lies on your [sic] resume."  If that's not an excuse to eliminate second-person from factual writing, I don't know what is.

It's pretty easy to trace the popularity of resume and LinkedIn lying on the internet.  Most of the posts favorable about, or even asking about it came from 2005 or earlier.  The resume-lying site looks very old-school, as if it's been around forever.  Fistful of Talent, in a 2008 article, moves toward the modern consensus:  resume and LinkedIn liars are total loser douchebags, and the problem will rear its ugly head when those who've gotten ahead by these techniques really get toward the top.  In other words - that old common wisdom:  you get back what you put into something, and why liars would think they deserved anything but a pink slip and a quick trip escorted to the parking lot is beyond me.

Today is a tough enough time for anybody to be looking for a job, and the sort of defective thinking that egregious liars use isn't going to be a winner in a) getting a job; b) doing it well; and the all-important c) holding the job down.  In today's hard times, character does count.  When times get tough, people need to trust and rely upon each other more than ever.  No one wants a cheating liar in the accounting or the IT department.  It should go without saying that K-12 public schools and public or large, sophisticated colleges and universities solved the fake degree or somebody-else's credential problem years ago.  The teacher's school must send a certified transcript before employment contracts and terms are finalized.  In addition, teachers and any others working around children and young people must be "live scanned" in California - a fingerprint and background check usually conducted at the Sheriff's office or a certified Live Scan provider.  This check not only verifies that the applicant is the person they say they are, and clears them from any criminal databases, such as the sex offender database (its original, primary use when instituted years ago), it also will turn up most arrests and all misdemeanor and felony convictions.

Basically, in employment situations, if a person is hired and later found to have misrepresented their education and experience significantly (i.e. a totally different job than what they actually held, gross salary misrepresentations, gross misrepresentation of time of service, and having degrees or qualifications they don't possess) that will be instant termination 99 times out of 100.  The 1% that aren't immediately fired will probably not hold onto their jobs for long.  And as LinkedIn becomes increasingly popular and well-used, people in various industries will soon detect fraudulent pretendees.  And it should go without saying, if one is going to invent various degrees, that should at least be vaguely plausible.  I was a genuine double major and I received two simultaneous Bachelor's degrees - which is possible, though not very common.  The purpose of this was . . . well, first of all, when I elected to try that, I didn't know how difficult it would be to complete (but I managed to do so).  The secondary purpose is that each different degree would enable me to apply to and gain admittance to Master's degree programs in two different areas:  Studio Art and literature.  Eventually, I obtained my MFA in creative writing, a 160-unit degree with more than 80 units in literature.  I do not, however, have an MA in Literature and would never say that I do, since I am in my 10th year of teaching and . . . er . . . only a retard would even think about doing something as stupid as saying that had a degree that they did not, in fact, possess.  Lying about this type of thing?  Just plain stupid from every possible perspective.

Baby Disaster Tweets

I agree with Madison McGraw - it's almost surreally-disturbing that a mother who lost her 2-year old son to drowning on Monday, December 14 was tweeting about the incident shortly after her son was taken to the hospital, while she was waiting to hear if he would make it or not.

According to ABC News, little Bryson Ross, the 2-year old son of mom-blogger Shellie Ross, was found floating in the family's pool only moments after his mother had tweeted that she was tending to her chickens and that fog had scared them.  The 9-1-1 call about the little boy being found by his brother was made at 5:23 p.m., and the paramedics arrived 15 minutes later, at 5:38 p.m.  

I have been in this game of inches and moments that stretch to hours that we will never forget, so I will never say anything to increase this mother's pain.  I know what it feels like to hold your baby in your arms, to try to clear his airway and to try to do CPR on a tiny body.  

Rush Limbaugh was mocking the recall of window blinds, because not a very large number of children have died by choking on the cords in recent years.  If something can be done to save even one young child's life, I think everybody, thinking about it for a moment, would want to do whatever is in their power to prevent a senseless, preventable death.  One baby's life really is worth a million window blinds and repairing or changing them so the child cannot become entangled and choke to death.  I really didn't like Rush's callous attitude about this, and I felt even angrier about it after viewing the video created by the organization that has been working for several years to improve window blind safety.  There were at least half a dozen young children who survived a choking incident shown on the video and a live home video of a child choking was shown.  It literally happened in a split-second, the child was freed within a few moments, and still nearly died.

We all know about pool safety, and swimming pools are one of the number-one causes of death for young children.  A two-year old cannot swim by themselves, and incidents like what happened to little Bryson happen every day across America, and it is every parent's nightmare.  Bryson's accident also happened quickly - and it was just that - an accident.  This is how fast it happened, and I now know that if I had made it home just 5 minutes earlier on January 11, 2005, I would have a dear little 5-year old boy getting ready to start school in fall 2010, instead of only fragile memories and tears.

I could be blamed for taking full-time employment and going to work, specifically for the health insurance and support of a caring environment that I found at Beyond Shelter, because if I had been with Lee, he would not have died.  Lee received 24-7 constant, attentive, experienced mother care from me in his brief six months of life.  He knew few moments of discomfort, being changed and bathed and played with constantly, and lovingly held and fed at all times.  By the time a child is the age of Bryson Ross, 24 months, they simply cannot be physically held and watched at all times.

However, only Shellie Ross will ever know what was going on, or why she did 74 tweets that day, even as she was working outside around her house, and her older son was tending to the pool area.  As to tweeting within hours of Bryson's death, or tweeting from the hospital while waiting to hear - yes, I do find it inexplicable.  But as a mother who has lost a baby to suffocation at home, my heart does go out to her and the whole family.  I especially feel for her 11-year old son who found his brother and called 9-1-1.  My daughter also found Lee - although she did not have to do CPR and didn't have to call 9-1-1.  She saw the whole thing and it will stay with her for her entire life.  I think with 74 tweets and going through this with one's blog fans - it's time to turn the computer off and tend to yourself and your family.

Write Anything: Ruth Shalit Barrett

Gender selection has been all over the airwaves, thanks to lots of articles in media about various procedures used to pre-select the gender of babies.  I listened to Bill Handel's semi-crummy solo show on the way to work from school, regarding this topic.  Bill knows a lot about it due to his side fertility and surrogate parenting business.  Then, I drove home all the way down Crenshaw and listened to John & Ken, who were covering the controversial topic of mothers who suffered extreme disappointment because they wanted a girl and got a boy, or vice-versa.

John & Ken featured Stephanie Lewis, whom they heartily trashed in John & Ken style, reading at length from an article by Ruth Shalit Barrett in Elle magazine.  Stephanie came on the air and said she'd been completely misquoted and misrepresented in the article.  Unlike many people who are interviewed and portrayed unflatteringly, and who later complain, Stephanie had numerous points of serious complaint.  First, the twin boys that were featured in the article making it sound as though they were babies are now 17 and getting ready for college, second, Stephanie now has 6 children, third, she and her husband later adopted a baby girl (which was misrepresented in the article as breaking up their marriage - a marriage that broke up later for unrelated reasons) and the various extreme methods for selecting gender that the article said that Stephanie used were not used - in particular, Stephanie said she'd never drunk "kefir," saying she didn't know what it was, and also that she'd never slept with a lime-soaked tampon, and never heard of such a thing.  It turned out that Stephanie had written a self-published novel (XLibris) that featured a mother with extreme gender disappointment that was inspired by her own life - and apparently the book's extreme plot ended up in the article presented as Stephanie's real life.

Stephanie shared the common ploy used by this type of writer - Ruth Shalit Barrett called her up and told her she was writing a sensitive article on the topic of parents who hoped for one gender of baby and got another, and had problems related to it.  She also told her that she'd read her self-published book and was going to write a positive review of it.

Uh.

Apparently due to the article's extreme portrayal, Stephanie says she's being trashed all over the internet, and I heard her receiving the John & Ken tongue-lashing before she went on the air and presented her side of the story.  Stephanie then said people should Google the author's name.  Ha ha!

Ruth is apparently nasty enough that this is her wedding announcement.  Her husband's father was with NY Magazine, and look!  Ruth also writes for them.  The article is down on Elle Magazine, but comments are still around. It's almost horrifying the degree to which others picked up on this article before Elle removed it.

The issue and circumstance is real in its basic essence - some people do want to select the gender of their baby so badly they'll go to an extreme extent.  There is a rare exception here in the U.S. that genetic testing may also be used to pre-select baby gender legally (it is disallowed in most other countries).  Some mothers experience normal post-baby hormonal fluctuations that cause "baby blues" and this can be made worse by expecting one gender, and getting another.  Baby girls are currently more popular and desired than baby boys in the U.S. - a very unusual and new phenomenon.

But bitchy prevaricating pieces of slag that humiliate the rest of us by their existence and set all of us back decades like Ruth Shalit Barrett?  They've been around forever.  I wonder what she's going to feel like when she stops being a "diminutive mantrap"?  Gosh.  I could not feel more sorry for her children.  You can read the reposted article here - at least for the time being.

  

It's So Hard to Cry With Botox

Listening to the radio on the way home tonight, Kennedy and Suits were making powerful fun of Nancy Pelosi talking about all the bad language back in the 70's in San Francisco that led to violence -- even assassinations.  If you watch the video, it looks even worse than it sounds, and I hadn't thought that to be possible, but . . . it's the botox.  Her voice is sad, choked up, and her face and especially forehead and eyes are barely moving!

So, Kennedy and especially Bryan Suits seemed convinced that Nancy was crying crocodile tears over Harvey Milk's tragic death in 1978 at the hands of jealous, unbalanced former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White - the man who also made the "Twinkie" defense famous. People forget - and I was just a kid at the time - that San Francisco Mayor George Moscone was also gunned down in the attack. The "rhetoric" at the time was from ANITA BRYANT.  Anita received a pie in her face for her anti-gay efforts, and if I'm not mistaken, she was let go as the spokesperson for Florida orange juice for being so outspoken against gay people.  Even worse, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was the person who was familiar with Harvey Milk during those early days.

But no matter what the facts are - it's really hard to cry crocodile tears with botox.  Yet another reason to remember my "no cosmetic surgery" pledge.  I really want to be able to smile, and cry - like a human being and not a "surrogate." Check out this cattery from 2007.  Awesome!

Protect Yourself From Credit Scams

The scary number of credit-related scams out there can be overwhelming.  One of the most serious is credit repair companies that take large sums of money from people who can little afford such expenses.  They promise all types of credit repair, and the truth is - most credit repair that is possible can be done by the customer themselves at low- or no-cost.  By low-cost, I mean the cost of time for keeping accurate records, writing creditors, and pursuing repair. 

I had a chargeoff account on my credit for a period of time that was not mine.  I tried many times to remove it.  What it turned out to be was some sort of bank artifact related to my former husband Mike's and my long, long ago checking account.  It wasn't an unpaid bill, but when it was discovered, bills somehow were sent to an address where neither I nor Mike had ever lived.  The terrible total was around $80.  For this, I was slagged 50 or more points on my credit for a long time.  Finally, after spending quite a few hours on this, I first talked to a horrifying woman in the Bank of America "delinquent accounts" department.  You don't want to have to talk to those people.  Ever.  This bothered me so much that I put my corporate cap on.  I wrote a letter to the President of the Bank of America.  Two days later I received a call from his assistant.  The next day, the horrid thing was off my credit report.  And it did not return, not even to the MacArthur of Credit Bureaus (Equifax).  I call Equifax the "MacArthur" because if there's ever an old account that you EVER had, it will return.  Two, three, four times - maybe more.  I don't necessarily mean any credit mistakes.  In just one example, Equifax "discovered" the information that I had a Target Card back in the dark ages.  They readded it to my credit report, even though I cancelled the card in 2002 or 3 and it wasn't much of an active account to begin with.  What will they add next - the auto loan for my Ford Escort, paid off between 1989 and 1993?

Other really bad scams are payday advance loans which charge exorbitant interest, and people who advertise they can improve your credit through file segregation, which is illegal and can produce terrible consequences for the people who try it.  This is a good article about scams to watch for in brief.  Here is the straight info about file segregation direct from the FTC.

As to scam-busting, I might have vague ideas I might bust some kind of scam someday.  Younger, better, stronger, faster than me has already jumped out ahead of the pack.  These guys are smart, fast, and any complaints they receive merely indicate what an amazing job they did.  Even Meredith and her friends have heard about the ACORN scams, and seen some of the pimp and ho videos.  Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, I salute you.  In the real world, I've never known of anybody to successfully work with ACORN, and never known of a single beneficial project they've carried off.  The only thing I've ever known of that they did with any vigor was the voter registration.  I also worked with voter registration organizations previously, and I wasn't favorably impressed with what I saw and heard regarding ACORN in this regard.  Signing up a person to vote who hasn't done it before is a good thing.  Dragging corpses out of their graves or repeatedly pressing the fingers of convalescent patients in the voting booth?  Not so much.  Prior to busting ACORN, James' previous expose consisted of writing donation checks to Planned Parenthood and filming them agreeing to put the money toward aborting African-American babies.  Niiiice.

This is the way I feel about this stuff now - Can we as a society afford it?  People have lived beyond their means for so very long.  But the first things cut are things that just aren't productive or important.  I watched the "San Bernardino" ACORN video - about half.  It was so horrendously dumb and awful that was all I could take.  ACORN is actually alleging that the big hair woman who was going along with each appalling request and statement of Hannah and James was "playing along."  Riiiite.  I bet if he would have given her a check to abort black babies, she would have agreed to that, too.

And plus - if you're "liberal"?  Don't condone this crap.  This is no more condonable than Fairy Larry's wide stance, after years of persecuting gay people.  It's wrong either way and any way.  None of this is about politics, really.  It's about decency and honesty.  

U.S. Banking System: Kaput?

Having just finished Bank Failures, I am able to share the wisdom that one of the reasons the Canadian banking system is stable and reliable, while the U.S. banking, savings & loan, credit union and other financial services corporation system is, how do they say in Yiddish - verkakte - is that the Canadians originally based their banking system on Scottish banking, while the U.S. chose as its model that which was used by those who so recently had put their leather boot upon their necks, the employers of the infernal Hessians . . . yes, the banking system known and loved by "Mad King George."  Otherwise known as the British system.

The Brits, though they like not to mention it, have suffered nearly as mightily as we have here in the U.S. due to the recent "recession."  I can say from careful study that this is not, as some people say, a depression.  It's also not yet the early 80's, with 21% mortgage rates, a 21.5% prime rate, 14% inflation, and a decreasing GNP, otherwise known as "Thank You Jimmy Carter" or "stagflation."

It's equally hard to feel good about a system that gave us "ninja" mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, and whatever the hell they were doing with Fannie Mae.  Not "helping people buy homes," that's for sure.  More like ripping them off, putting them in debt for life, foreclosing on them and making them homeless, and then sticking the rest of us with the bill.  That's Fannie Mae in a nutshell, and the humiliating reality of FHA mortgages - many of which ended up being written with zero money down, and "signing bonuses" of various amounts that were just tacked onto the horribly inflated mortgage price, which was quickly abandoned and devalued down to nothing - and who cares who was left sitting in the musical chair or holding the bag?  Angelo Mozilo, my hero!  I can't believe I thought the guy was a "success" - six months before the mortgage crisis burst on the scene.

Here is an article with some sound advice from Pepperdine's Graziado School of Business Professor Joetta Forsyth.  And another article with solid information about the differences between the U.S. and Canadian banking systems and the global credit crisis by Peggy Crawford and Terry Young.

What does Professor Forsyth suggest?  Well, biting the bullet on the bad mortgages and not bailing out people who are already far behind on their mortgages.  She suggests it would be best for those people to downsize a little, rent for a while, have a little extra money to enjoy life some for a while, and also save money for the future, and perhaps a home purchase that will be successful.  In other words: common sense.  What I know from writing Bank Failures is that the magnitude of the toxic mortgage loans out there is almost incomprehensible.  The degree to which these were products of the horrifying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac system, which basically enabled throwing any person off the street into a home with low introductory rates soon to skyrocket - and even added "incentives" that the poor sap didn't realize were just getting added onto their mortgage in the end . . . all those people should march to Washington all right.  They should march to Washington and demand that Barney Frank tell them why it was such a good idea to "help" poor people by saddling them with mountains of debt - and not even a house to live in at the end of the line after all that!  Truly, truly shameful and a crying shame.

Mountain of Debt Makes Summiting the 14 Peaks Look Easy

I'm finishing a book about bank failures for Rosen Publishing Group.  This has been interesting and challenging to write.  It's impossible to examine bank failures in depth and not notice other economic facts.

So, for all those politically-invested out there, I have a simple question.  Will President Obama pay your American Express bill?  How about your grocery bill?  Your car repair bill?  Would President Bush have done any of those things?

It really doesn't matter who is President or not.  The Federal debt is mind-boggling.  The national debt, which is comprised of a number of liabilities that outweigh federal assets, grows by $3.9 billion a day according to the U.S. National Debt Clock.  The overall total is approaching $12 trillion.  The US government receives between $3 and $4 trillion each year from all taxes combined.  I earn about $100,000 a year.  So, the national debt is equivalent to my having between $300,000 and $400,000 in debt.  Personally.  I don't know if that would include a mortgage or not, but I do know that the Federal Debt is so large, and has skyrocketed so much in recent years, that much of the debt - is comprised of more debt!

I really don't know why these people would put this type of information, but it's pretty obvious that the sudden increase in "savings" and reduction in credit use isn't due to virtuous behavior, it's due to people flat-out being unable to pay bills or anything else, and the debts being written off as - hold a moment - BAD DEBT.  The more "liberally" inclined the website, the more they downplay the amount of personal, individual debt of consumers in the U.S.  One website grossly misreports the amount of personal debt, then links to the Federal Reserve Board's debt monitoring page. USA Today reports a staggering increase in personal debt, with the average household responsible for $668,621 per person in debt.  Sure, this includes mortgages.  And taxes.  And credit cards.  And everything else.  Of course, this is wrong.  It is wrong right up to the point that the honest bill-paying customer will have such a heavy debt burden, that the mason jar in the back yard is looking better and better.  Or the barter system.

Wikipedia Ludicrously Sexist and Racist - Part II

I've been pretty academically-sound directing students away from Wikipedia for any research involving literature and literary history.  It was just a personal happenstance that I noticed a while back that Wikipedia seemed cheerfully, unselfconsciously and happily sexist and racist.

I "assumed" it would be getting better about that as time went on.

Oh, what happens when we assume . . . we make an A## out of U and ME.

Wikipedia's main page TODAY features the following information about a female, nearly at the bottom of the left side of the page:

. . . even though Karen Platou in 1921 was the first woman elected to the NorwegianParliament, the first woman to sit in that assembly was Anna Rogstad, ten years earlier?

The only non-western information was that Takashima Shuhan was the first proponent of western firearms at the end of Japan's period of seclusion in the 19th century. 

One needs only to read the Village Pump (or possibly - "Village Tool?") to see why the situation is hopeless.  No one with a brain or talent would want to hang around these people and tolerate this type of absurd, Thwackum-and-Square-like pedantry.  Unlike, I believe, Square, I very much doubt any of these Wickensians is going to get lucky with any of Tom's castoffs.

Information must be free?  Well, another tried-and-true saying is "You get what you pay for." It would be nice if Wikipedia wasn't the compendium of all the useless knowledge of its contributors, seasoned with a generous dollop of prejudice, myopia and pig-headed ignorance.  It would be nice to get a free vacation in French Polynesia, too.

* * * * *

* I called Wikipedia pedants a bunch of TOOLS - i.e. "Village Tools". 

The "featured articles" section is nearly 100% male-dominated, and nearly 100% "Western" dominated.  In the 84 listed featured articles on "art, architecture and archaelogy," there are only 3 immediately-identifiable female-oriented feature articles, and one of these is "Lisa del Giocondo," i.e., the female who sat for the "Mona Lisa."  Another is "the building projects of Catherine de Medici," and the third that I saw was the "Rokeby Venus" - so, 3 featured articles out of 84 or 3.5%.  The only easily-identifiable non-western architecture listings I saw was Quirigua and Western Chalukya architecture - two out of 84 - or 2.3%.  I saw no featured article listing on any of the "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World," nor any on any of the current "Wonders" recently selected.  They do, however, have a featured article on "The Museum of Bad Art." No Louvre.  No Hermitage.  Xanadu Houses - no Frank Lloyd Wright.  My point being, if students are researching various topics, the coverage is not adequate.  Again, I can only speak with authority on some aspects of literature, single-author studies, and certain sorts of art and artists.  I've yet to see an adequate one in Wikipedia, and worst of all, the sources available show the limited resources and knowledge of the wikipedists.  Again - "You get what you pay for" and the problem, without a professional approach, is not going to solve itself.  As instructors, all we can do is ban Wikipedia as a source, deduct points, and insist on real research.  So one must ask; what is this - for free, reliable information, it is not.  It is merely - free.

Does Pres. Obama Want Us to Stop Wearing Makeup?

I was charmed just now, because UK YouTube makeup artist Lauren Luke was on my Channel 11 news. Lauren is so talented that her YouTube videos have launched a big career as a makeup artist, and selling products that are currently featured at Sephora (where else!). 

You have to go to Lauren's website, not just to see the makeup tutorials, but read her adorable commentary.  She said she was super-scared when she made and uploaded her first makeup video, but soon she was a success.  She is the cutest ever, commenting on her younger sister and family.  She's a very down-to-earth person, and this approach is perfect for showing women how to apply makeup to get the effects they want.

So, here's a completely "homegrown" internet-based success story.  Lauren's making her own videos, she came up with idea, and she obviously has a lot of creativity in all aspects of her business.

My question is: does the President want everybody to stop wearing makeup?  Because there's been a bill floating around since this spring that, if passed, would give the Executive branch the power to cut anybody off the internet.

The now-55-page bill will "permits the president to 'direct the national response to the cyber threat' if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in 'periodic mapping' of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies 'shall share' requested information with the federal government."

Like, totally cool or what?  There's some freedom for ya.   Next election, if we vote the "wrong way," maybe the'll cut our fingers off too.  Seems to me this "bill" began around the time that news was coming out of Iran via Twitter, and the Iranians were fighting hard to keep people from getting messages out, or back in, via private networks, like Twitter.