I was so disgusted when I saw the cover of TIME – meant only to shock and provoke – that it has brought me out of my semi-retirement from this blog.  Boy, kind of thought this was a thing of the past, but lo! Our grotesque patriarchal society is alive and well and seeking to repress and oppress women.  This, the same election season where (yet more hysterical) Republicans are waging a war on women, TIME decides to take a side in the parenting/breastfeeding debate.  Should you or shouldn’t you, how long should you?

Those of us who adopted the theory of Attachment Parenting, which is a way of rearing children that shuns the modern theories (all written and promoted by men, mind you, seeking to take all of the power away from women – the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world and don’t forget it) and gives everything back to the mother (and the father, if they can dig it).  That means co-sleeping, breastfeeding not just for food but for comfort  and it means holding your kid a lot more than keeping them away from you – in a crib in a dark room by themselves and left to “cry it out,” or alone in their stroller and made to cry it out.  When a baby, still mostly reptilian, reaches out to be held, it is the notion of our society that you would spoil that baby if you picked him or her up.  What could more silly?

We evolved to drink water when we were thirsty, to eat when we’re hungry, to seek out others when we’re lonely and yes, babies evolved to want to be held.  They need to be held.

Okay, so some attachment parents use child-led weaning; they allow the baby to nurse until they’re ready to let go of it – that they are secure enough so that they no longer need the COMFORT.  I stopped my child nursing after 2 1/2 years.  I’d had enough and she was fine. She transferred to water and is now a healthy, independent, thoughtful, secure 13 year-old.  Watching my daughter evolve into the truly wonderful person she is today makes me completely sold on Attachment Parenting.  For life.

But what TIME did was shake a stick at a rattle snake. They tried to gross out the American population with the notion of a “big kid” – he looks, like, 8 – still sucking on the boob.  The mom stands there with a “so what!” look on her face and society is put in the position of judging. And judge they do. The comments range from “you’re going to raise a Norman Bates” to “you’ve humiliated that kid for life.” No one looks at it and feels supportive of it – why, because TIME deliberately manipulated and misrepresented what Attachment Parenting is – and it is the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever seen them do.

And in the end it always comes back to blaming the mother.  Blame the mom because she is warping society with her sick little ways of wanting to nurse way too long. Blame the mom because she didn’t nurse long enough.

The fact is that every woman SHOULD breast feed if they can. If they can’t, so be it. It is less a “choice” as it is a necessity for the child — remember, the desire to formula feed babies was mostly born out of the need to sell formula.  Far more horrifying than the TIME magazine cover was Jennifer Lopez popping out two accessory twins and announcing that she wasn’t going to breast feed them.  That was it for her. She had to get back to becoming more famous than anyone ought to be — it’s hard to imagine why she had kids at all. Yet no one really cares about that because the patriarchy has been preserved; J. Lo exists for the pleasure of men, mostly, and for women who long to look like her.  The TIME magazine cover is a way of yet again slapping women down and robbing them of the one thing they truly do control: food for babies.

I may never pick up another issue of TIME again.

Just read the simple description from the Washington Post and marinate in how far we’ve come as a nation and how disgusting we are as a people.  We really want our food THAT cheap?

Though the term “pink slime” has been used pejoratively for at least several years, it wasn’t until last week that social media suddenly exploded with worry and an online petition seeking its ouster from schools lit up, quickly garnering hundreds of thousands of supporters.

The low-cost ingredient is made from fatty bits of meat left over from other cuts. The bits are heated to about 100 F and spun to remove most of the fat. The lean mix then is compressed into blocks for use in ground meat. The product, made by South Dakota-based Beef Products Inc., also is exposed to “a puff of ammonium hydroxide gas” to kill bacteria, such as E. coli and salmonella.

…

But the opt out doesn’t go far enough for Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, who has asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to immediately ban the product from school lunches.

“The beef industry sent my office an email the other day describing pink slime as ‘wholesome and nutritious’ and said the process for manufacturing it is ‘similar to separating milk from cream.’ I don’t think a highly processed slurry of meat scraps mixed with ammonia is what most families would think of as ‘wholesome and nutritious,’” Pingree said in a written statement.

There are no precise numbers on how prevalent the product is, and it does not have to be labeled as an ingredient. Past estimates have ranged as high as 70 percent; one industry official estimates it is in at least half of the ground meat and burgers in the United States.

The product has been on the market for years, and federal regulators say it meets standards for food safety. But advocates for wholesome food have denounced the process as a potentially unsafe and unappetizing example of industrialized food production.

The phrase “pink slime,” coined by a federal microbiologist, has appeared in the media at least since a critical 2009 New York Times report. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has railed against it, and it made headlines after McDonald’s and other major chains last year discontinued their use of ammonia-treated beef.

After dwelling on the pages of Facebook for a while now I’m mostly convinced it’s a life-ruiner in all respects.  You have to see, on a daily basis, all of the things you were never meant to see.  It’s sort of like finding the secrets to life after death, or discovering the awful truth about Santa Claus.  There are just some truths you really don’t need to know.

It’s strange that, for instance, you have to know the whereabouts of all of the people you’ve ever known in your life.

It’s strange that, when people die, their Facebook pages stay up.  People write on them as a kind of floating memorial.  And Facebook helpfully suggests you friend a friend of a friend who is dead. The online person, the Facebook person, lives on.  The real body goes. So now we have the body, the soul and the Facebook identity.  It’s weird, isn’t it?  It’s different elsewhere online because Facebook is the only place where you are confronted with everyone you’ve ever known, all of your family, and the people you’re networked with, as well as just random strangers.  Who you are on Facebook is now part of who you are period.  And it’s freaky.

The first weird thing that happened to me recently was that a fried of mine from my childhood friended me then got frustrated when that magical relationship we were supposed to have wasn’t rekindled.  I’m busy, yo.  And so she wrote on my page, “too stuck up.” So I unfriended her, just like that.  And harmony was restored in my life. She was one less ghost from my past I had to worry about.

But the thing I hate most about Facebook is the way people torment each other.  They use status updates to taunt their successes — my daughter’s friends in middle school all flaunted and taunted with the various high schools they were accepted into.  Like just being able to do that on Facebook was the key. It’s a little puddle of ego and narcissism where that shit can fly around virtually unchecked.

When you have a relationship you change your status update and then break up via status update and everyone has to know about it. Well, that’s one thing. What’s worse is if you happen to hook up with an asshole who then pretends you don’t exist and never changes that relationship status.  So then you have to see how little you matter on a daily basis.  Worse, you have to watch that person actively flirt on their own profile page.   Or if you get dumped you have to watch that person flaunt their latest exploits with dumb, show-offy pictures.  One guy I know only reflects himself as someone who would attract only pretty girls and thus, every picture that is associates with his online persona is some kind of idealized beauty; none of the women he actually dates ever appear because that would then lower his status online.

So what is the good Facebook has to offer? I don’t really know.  To me I use it mostly for work but I hate this notion of everyone knowing every little piece of my business.  It’s weirds me out on every level.  I worry for the generations that are growing up with this idea that you have your regular life and then you have a Facebook identity to cultivate.  Everything you do has a societal echo that passes praise, likes, judgements…everyone puts on  a fake happy face, like here are all of the good times I’m having that you aren’t having. Here is my great marriage that you don’t have. I don’t know how I would have survived with the added dimension of Facebook.

I just don’t think we ever really stopped to think about what the longterm effects of something like this might be.  Oh well.  There are surely worse thing in life.  For now, though, I’m practicing disassociation.

Sometimes a man…
Sometimes the beauty of life…
Sometimes…it feels…

I don’t have a story to tell because all I did was turn on the television and call my best friend.  My daughter Emma asked me where we were saying her best friend’s mom was flying around Boston that day and just missed the flight that crashed into the first tower.  I only remember it for what I didn’t know.  I didn’t know that it was a terrorist act.  I didn’t know that Osama Bin Laden was that real.  I didn’t know that “they” hated us.  I didn’t know what we did to make them hate us.  I didn’t know that the towers would fall. I didn’t know that people would jump out of the windows to keep from burning or dying from smoke inhalation.  I didn’t know that the firefighters would rush in just before the towers fell.  I didn’t know there would be two planes to hit the towers. I didn’t know it could be so easy to execute such an elegant, well planned, unavoidable attack on American soil.  I didn’t know that it would be used to justify two wars that are mostly still ongoing.

What could I tell my daughter about that day?  How could I tell her that those two wars ended up killing over six thousand more American soldiers.

Operation Iraqi Freedom: 4,442

Operation Enduring Freedom: 1,584

These deaths, I have to tell her, had nothing to do with 9/11 except in the way that it made us all so afraid that we would do anything, accept anything.  And then finally, I’d have to tell her that it wasn’t about us that day: it never should have been. It was only about those who died.  It was about them and it should always be about them.

And yeah, it changed everything.  My heart still breaks for the victims. And the anger at our government for what we did after that, even though the world maybe feels slightly safer without Saddam Hussein, still resonates.  But it’s not about me.  It never was.

If it doesn’t say everything about Los Angeles and urban Americans that there was city-wide panic in the streets about this supposed carmageddon. Since it turned out to be nothing spectacular in either direction, that is the news story: nothing happened. It was Y2K all over again and it makes you wonder what we’d all do if there was ever a realized catastrophe (be careful what you wish for, I know). What struck me about it was that it was only two days of the 405 (or as we like to call it, the 4-oh-five miles per hour) being shut down – they were on a weekend. The 405 is rarely jammed on the weekend anyway. Try shutting it down during the work week for more than two days – then you’d see people lose their minds. But two measly days? Saturday and Sunday? Really media?

What happened was that it got quiet. Really quiet. Too quiet. It was peaceful. There were no cars on the freeways. Can you imagine the revolutions and evolutions in the biology in and around the freeways on those days? Can you imagine how clean the air must have been?

It was yet one more reason not to trust the chattering media — radio, television, print – they all created unnecessary widespread panic. Even if the reason it was so quiet and calm was in direct response to their hysteria it does give one pause, makes one distrust – the way you would if you saw someone you thought you knew have a crazy person meltdown in front of you.

You would maybe continue to know them but it would never be the same.

And so it was with watching the impossible — empty freeways — that it seemed, for a brief moment, that this wasn’t a city where people stayed in their cars. LA can get to you after a while because it is so unwelcoming. New York City, for all of its imperfections, is a city for people to interact — not in a friendly way, particularly, but still – you are on a subway, on a sidewalk, in a store and everywhere there are other people. Here in LA it’s possible to go a whole day with no personal contact at all. You can go in your car somewhere, windows rolled up, air conditioner on – and then back to your place where you plugin and interact online – a virtual community suits LAers.

The day no one could ride the 405 forced people to think about how they spent their time. Some went to the Farmer’s Market, some just took a walk down the street. Some just thought about it: where can I go without using my car? See, it wasn’t just about staying off the 405, it was about not crowding the streets and alternate routes – either way, we were all forced to think about this. So, for two days it worked. Not designed to last, though nothing is.

Tomorrow morning at 7am a handful of devoted, fired up moms are going to stand outside my daughter’s middle school to protest the eventual laying off of way too many teachers in the LAUSD school district. This, in order to balance a budget that is 400 mil in the red. If they can ax these teachers, and a whole bunch of other stuff people don’t need, you know, really useless stuff like school libraries and after school childcare, they can cut the budget in half. And then we’ll only be 200 mil in the red. Closer to better but still terrible.

We parents have been protesting this for several years now. The message is loud and clear: ass fuck the teachers, raise an undereducated lower class. Believe me, that last part is one no one wants to say out loud, particularly to the zoned out liberals who take a pill to make the world go away. You sound crazy if you start talking about keeping down the lower classes by robbing them of a decent education.

What they’re hoping will happen is that they extend a tax – meaning, the public has to pay it, which they won’t want to do – for five years to give the district time to catch up, maybe fix things a different way…if that extension can be PUT ON THE BALLOT it can be voted on. We don’t yet know if it will be put on the ballot. They are urging us to urge our government, so-called, so-elected, to do something about this before terrible things start to happen.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
–Langston Hughes

The ugly truth:

In March of 2011, LAUSD laid-off over 50% of the work force of music teachers. This was a disproportionate number compared to 25 % of Art Teachers and 5% of Computer Science Teachers.
Music education has been losing funding for many years.
Music education has also been put into an Art category, blending music education into the same value as art, dance and theater. This has lead to a decreasing support from School District Executives.
DEMANDS:
Fund positions for music teachers at schools with proven programs.

ACTION
Step 1:
Parents call/visit local school board members, School District Executives with the above ARGUMENT.
Walter Reed
School Board Member for District 3 – Tamar Galatzan – 213.241.6386
LAUSD Executives
Robin Lithgow, Arts Education Branch – (213) 241-2466
John Deasy, incoming LAUSD Superintendent – 213.241.7000

There really isn’t any way to make republican legislators change their mind about this tax extension. If they gave a shit about the kids they surely would have voiced their outrage by now. No, they are going to stand alongside all of the wealthy Californians who baled on public school long ago, who pay a high price to have their kids schooled privately: the rich get richer, you see, because the rich have access to education.

There is a part of me that so badly wants to bale on public school. I’m disgusted by our lefty governor who would allow this to happen. Doesn’t anyone have low hanging balls anymore? What happened to just doing the right thing even if it was hard? The right thing is to keep music and libraries and after school childcare in our schools.

But hey, if you all want teens whose parents are in work roaming YOUR streets, hanging out in YOUR backyard? You got it. If you want a population of kids no one cares enough about to enrich their lives with the beautiful things? You got that too.

Tomorrow morning I will be out there handing out flyers. I will still do what I can to protest this thing because what else am I going to do? I fight because I have to fight for what I believe in even if it means I’m fighting a losing battle. And anyway, what’s that great line from Casablanca about lost causes being the only causes worth fighting for?

“Murdoch, I’m coming to get YOU.”

I just … can’t even go there except to say that: drug addiction does terrible things to us. It isn’t just the “bad” drugs that have us addicted either: we are a species easily addicted to things. Not surprising that it is so easy. Surprising that it’s still surprising.

But the odd and compelling thing about the Charlie Sheen cabaret show was that it started out as a provocative uncorking of the primal male. At least, this is what appeared to be on Twitter where the Charlie Sheen explosion could be measured in real time. They flopped around like happy fish trending the catch phrases, #winning, #tigerblood! Both terms had been used by Sheen in an interview on 20/20 that exposed the uncensored celebrity for all to see.

But once Sheen got that tattoo WINNING! and started broadcasting himself 24/7, yammering on like a generic crack head in the last gasps of a morning bender — the sun coming up, melting the wolf mask to reveal a wild-eyed baby conjuring his Charlie Sheen words – Morlock! Troll! The other shoe dropped. There were a few men and boys unwilling to give up their dream of a guy who could nail two bimbos with washboard abs and an eternally hard cock on the one hand and father his many children on the other. But they suddenly had to. Some of them are still leaning, reaching, flopping — can they be Sheen? Can they unleash? A population of anonymous commenters, angry white men, all feeling the rules pulled apart with a seam ripper: Charlie.

And he shall call it Sober Valley Lodge. And he shall have goddesses to serve his needs, and sometimes serve each other’s needs, which also serves his needs. And it shall be a happy place with rocks of cocaine, a workout room, mirrors on the ceiling, pink champaign on ice.

Some saw it as a manic episode: get the man some brain drugs and call it day. Some saw it as drug addiction: get thee to rehab. Others saw it as an unleashing of raw angry power not unlike Peter Finch in Network.

There is some truth in there but there is also a mental fracture. What really gnaws at me when watching Sheen – both at the outset and then later, after the party was over because Sheen got fired and then acted like he was in on the joke –was that he WAS clearly freaking out but pretending like he had it all under control.

It was sad to watch Sheen break down like that, but it was even sadder, I think, to see how much we lapped it up. Partly we’re just plain old celebrity obsessed but are we also part savage still, banging the gong when the flesh is cut and blood pours out. We like to watch the sacrifice and the beast is starving for it.

Twitter has gone quiet now. There isn’t even a faint drumbeat. One of the goddesses left, but, it was reported and then re-reported and then retweeted and facebooked, the goddess had returned. The babies, Sheen’s twins, have been taken away and given to their mother. Sheen is no longer admired. The worm has turned. Its mouth is open wide.

My guess is that he will go into rehab. He’ll come out cleaner and more sober than ever. He’ll have gained a little weight, he’ll apologize to everyone, especially his own worried father. He will be “reformed.” Rock bottom in America is always a great place to start.

But every so often he will grin and pin us with his two wild eyes and he’ll call us out for being stupid trolls. We can’t argue there.

My daughter, all of 12, had her first romance and her first heartbreak in the past few months. It went like this. Last night, as I was finishing up a podcast, I heard some chat noises. She talks to the annoying little dweep on Facebook chat. I reminded her it was time to get ready for bed. She said, “right, well [name] just broke up with me.” Nice move, [name]. The day before Valentine’s Day.

As someone who seems to have heartbreak on an endless loop in her life, I am horrified to see this happen to my daughter. I have to remember, she’s only 12. She has a lifetime ahead of her to get it right. This boy told her it was awkward between them, “we never hug or anything.”

I think the dweeb wanted to move things too fast. The little fake romance wasn’t working for him: he will grow up to be a jerk, right? He is all of 13 so I think we can cut him some slack, still, she learned a lesson and she learned it early. Is it a good thing to know that giving away your heart means it can sometimes get stomped on? What is the alternative? Stay single, marry someone who will never hurt you but may never set those hearth fires ablaze … or get lucky and find a guy you love AND who won’t break your heart. Tall order.

So I try to give her advice, which is like the lightbulb telling the Sun how to rise: what do I know about anything. I am the worst to ask. But yet, I’m all she’s got. So it’s up to me to try to tell her how to handle this, her first break-up.

I made up a list of ways to try to get over heartbreak fast — being that I’m pretty much the Heartbreak Kid at this point:

1. It’s not you, it’s them. No matter how many times people tell you this stuff you can’t hear it. To you it is always you: you weren’t something enough, not pretty enough, not thin enough, not normal enough, not nice enough, not popular enough – whatever it was, you think it’s you. That makes it feel a lot worse than it actually is. Most of the time, let’s face it, it isn’t you because they wouldn’t have chosen you in the first place. It really is them – their feelings changed. They met someone else, their desire faded – whatever it was it was their emotional shift and no amount of fixing or changing can alter that. Lest we forget Shakespeare who said, “love is not love that alters when alteration it finds.”

2. There are plenty of fish in the sea – it’s always hard to let go because when someone dumps you they take on godlike proportions – they suddenly become a lot more than they were before. Try to keep it all in perspective. Who they were when you first met them, before they tore your heart out with their teeth, ripped it apart savagely and cast it aside. Who were they? They were fairly ordinary, no? Maybe next time you start to fall in love quickly jot down the things about them before you really start falling hard. Or maybe just choose more wisely next time. There are plenty of fish in the sea – nice ones, kind ones, red ones, blue ones.

3. If you make a mistake it is not the end of the world. It only hurts for a little while. I told my daughter that heartbreak is like a virus; it passes fairly quickly, though it might keep you in bed for more than a few days. In the end, the sun comes up the next day and you will survive it.

4. School is more important than boys. This one needs no explanation except to say that we women are a lot of things on this earth – part of that is mothering and wifing. The other part is contributing brilliant things to society, helping those in need, having a self, a real self to foist upon the world. School is where it’s at, kid.

5. There’s always mom. Or dad. Or if there isn’t a mom or a dad there’s someone who will let you put your teary head on their shoulder and let you feel badly. My daughter let me let her feel badly. She plunked down and cried on my shoulder. I was glad I was there.

Back in the 1980s we all loved Laurie Anderson. There aren’t Laurie Andersons anymore. Young woman of that level of talent and intelligence are wearing fuck-me pumps and g-strings. The Kardashians rule the world now. But in my day there was Laurie. And she ruled. Performance art? A woman? Short hair? It was so new and cool and it kicked open so many doors for us girls coming of age. I wish for my daughter to get to know Laurie Anderson who doesn’t have to sell herself for public consumption but rather comments on it.

In O Superman she gets down to it: “There’s always mom. Hi mom. So hold me, mom. In your long arms…” Chills.

I’ve been running my Oscars website for eleven years. It used to be called Oscarwatch.com until I was sued for copyright infringement. I changed the site to Awards Daily and it has never been more popular, or profitable. I have always been embarrassed to admit to “real people out there in the world” what I do because their answer is always the same: The Oscars are meaningless. That is when they are being charitable. What they usually say is “the Oscars are so lame.” And that has been sort of true but for every once in a while when their role in the whole ugly game shifts ever so slightly in a more interesting direction.

What I have finally concluded, though, after these many years of day in and day out Oscar watching is that they don’t vote for the best. They vote for their favorite. They vote for what they “like” best. That makes it far less of a meaningful award than if they were looking at things that matter in the long run. Films that have lasting impact are not films that are easily digested in one viewing, I don’t think. Frankly, it’s a miracle the great films that have won managed to impress the 6,000 people who vote on the awards, chief among them the last four of five wins: No Country for Old Men, The Departed, The Hurt Locker. Slumdog Millionaire is even a better film than the film that is about to sweep the Oscars.

The funny part is, I got into the Oscar watching business knowing this. My premise when I started was “how was it that a movie like Citizen Kane lost against a movie like How Green Was My Valley.” My pursuit of this question took me, again and again, down the road of cynicism, like everyone else in the world who thinks the Oscars are meaningless because of their bad choices. Well, it’s a mixed bag, isn’t it. The Oscars have many fans too – they have fans who love their history, for instance. Journalists will always lead an obit with “Academy Award winner so and so” as if that means anything at all. What it means is that they were once popular with their peers.

The King’s Speech is a very very good film. It is held up by one of the year’s best performances in Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. It is a film that is affecting people everywhere. Who wouldn’t be affected by it though? It is a tried and true sentimental formula that works. There is nothing new here. There is nothing innovative. It is simply a good story that may or may not be completely true. It’s mostly true. The performances are true. But what is most astonishing about this year’s Best Picture winner (all over but the shouting) is how bland it is standing next to the admittedly more difficult to respond to emotionally but brilliant nonetheless main rival, The Social Network.

Nothing about The Social Network makes sense to people “out there in the world.” They see it and they think it’s good – but they don’t recognize its greatness right off the bat. The critics did. The critics put their full might behind the film because, guess what, it needed it. And even that wasn’t enough.

Why does it matter to me that a film like The Social Network win the Best Picture Oscar? Because it would mean that, as my friend Scott Feinberg once said, the Academy Awards can step out of their pre-programmed go-vote-like-a-lemming mold and give a better written, better directed film their win. It would be nothing short of a miracle if this happened. It won’t. And this year will go down as one of the most baffling of all. The King’s Speech winning not just over The Social Network, but over Black Swan, Inception, True Grit, Winter’s Bone — it is such a giant mistake on their part. The actors should win. The screenwriter. But the best picture of 2010 is, in no way, shape or form, The King’s Speech. No one can even argue that with a straight face. People vote for it ONLY because they like the characters.

And if that’s so, if that’s what it really is when you boil it down, then there is no point in thinking or hoping that anything is ever going to really change. So, it’s now a matter of seeing them for what they really are: one small step up from the People’s Choice awards.

I make a living off of the Oscar race. I make a good living, in fact. But I have never felt so much like it was the grandest of all time-wasters as I do during this, the worst Oscar year since Crash. Even with Crash, we didn’t see it coming. With the King’s Speech I saw it coming but I couldn’t believe, refused to believe, that any thinking body would give that film its award for Best Picture with all of these other magnificent films to choose from.

It is the Oscar race itself that is wrong. The King’s Speech people did not want to be in the Oscar race particularly (although you don’t make a period film with hints of Nazi-ism and not think about the Oscars). But it was a formula that was having an impact on audiences. It was testing extremely well. The critics tend to vote on films that are different from what came before. Or they vote on cinematic excellence. We are now seeing just how the Oscar race really works and believe me, folks, it is not a pretty picture.

I have to admit that my opinion on the whole thing, on the Oscars, on my participation in the race is at an all-time low. I’m simply grossed out by the process anymore. It’s just such a grand waste of my precious time I don’t even know where to begin to try to dig myself out. I can’t imagine beginning another year of a futile exercise of choosing the most watered down winner.

The only way to continue with it is to recognize them and accept them for what they are. It’s like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People (a great film that beat a better film, Raging Bull) — Judd Hirsch tells Timothy Hutton that he just has to accept the limitations of his cold, unfeeling mother who loved her other son more. Her lack of love for him was no reflection on him. Just as their majority vote is no reflection on the better films that were made this year. Only conclusion: they mean nothing.

So I will have to be satisfied with this conclusion. Eleven years later. Why did Citizen Kane lose the Oscar for Best Picture? They liked the other movie better.

The story goes that her uncle was going to pick her up to take her to see Congresswoman Giffords because she had an interest in politics. Who knew that she’d be shot dead that day. I don’t understand people, and I don’t understand this world. But it does make a good point for the need for religion in daily life; how else does one reconcile stuff like this happening? Even though any god that could allow such a thing to occur clearly has a mean streak, to be sure, is moody and unreliable. It’s a wonder He has any believers left, considering.

It’s a sad day.