A blogger in Saudi Arabia tells of a scam that takes us back to the fantasies of men in the Middle Ages — and in their middle ages — when the virginity of their women was one of their prized possessions.
Read Lori’s post in her blog, Sand Gets in My Eyes, where she reports:

According to Peaceful Muslimah, the soaps are indicative of a larger problem in the Middle East (and likely other parts of the world), where a woman’s virginity is her most important asset.” Unfortunately in many Muslim societies, as well as non-Muslim underdeveloped nations, there is an extreme pressure brought to bear on women’s chastity. As I recently discussed here, lack of chastity or even the perception of it can lead to fatal consequences. So is it any wonder that Muslim women are willing to go to extraordinary measures to maintain the appearance of the virginal bride on their honeymoon.”

[snip]
I did some checking, and the soaps are readily available throughout the world, thanks in large part to the internet. The idea is that the soap’s astringents “constrict and tighten” , creating that coveted “look and feel” of virginity.
One manufacturer boasts their product is….”Used and enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of women in the Middle East and Asia, it has brought back youthful passions, rekindled sensual yearnings, and completely intensified sexual experience.”
Ha! What a lot of bunk!

Her entire post includes more links and info. It would be great if others would post about this issue as well.n I have cross-posted it at Blog Sisters.

At various times in my life I have made the statement that I’d like to be either famous or infamous. I didn’t care which. I’ve always known that my cavalier attitude was part of my rebellion against the constant maternal caution not to embarrass her, not to call attention to myself in any negative way.
Of course, there were also times in my life when I’ve stifled myself — you know, the expectations of family, employers. The need to keep being paid a salary is a great motivator to behave.
The great thing about combining retirement and blogging is that I no longer have to worry about keeping a job, and I have a forum wherein I can risk becoming either famous or infamous. (Not that I’m either, or expect to be either. But I’m free to not care — unless I choose to — if someone doesn’t find me acceptable.)
I no longer have to worry about my “permanent record,” unlike the two bloggers who resigned from John Edward’s presidential campaign because of something they posted on their blogs.
Reid Stott over at photodude.com has a realistic post about the situation in which those bloggers found themselves, explaining:

It’s like the phenomenon of someone who was “fired for their blog.” No, they were fired for saying or doing something they shouldn’t have. It just happened to be in their blog. But a blog is not a buffer from the real world. Your words there count just as if you’d said them to someone’s face, with the difference that they are archived for a very very long time

Rafe Colburn, in his post on “your permanent record,” adds another dimension to the issue:

This certainly comes into play when I’m involved with hiring people. I can find out more about anyone from their blog archives than I can by interviewing them. In interviews, people usually tell the interviewer what they think they want to hear. In other contexts, they are usually less circumspect. When I find I may work with someone, I look for blog posts, messages to mailing lists, comments on blogs, Usenet rants from a decade ago, and anything else I can find. There’s more to anyone than their persona on the Internet, but more information is almost always better than less.

All true. All true.
But not for me because I’m retired, and I’m wearing purple.

I like to play at taking pictures. This one I took on my walk yesterday. “Snow sculpture,” I thought.

It’s not a great photo, but, as I said, it’s one of the ways I play.
Taking really good photos — unique, creative, aesthetic — is both an art and a craft.
b!X has become very good at it.
So has my daughter, who has just launched her online photo business, 1505 Photovisions. Among her many subjects are the birds of Western Massachusetts, and she plans to offer a series of notecards with their images.
Check out her online gallery, and if you know anyone looking for photos or photo notecards, send them her way.

No, I’m not talking about Dumbya this time.
I don’t know why I hadn’t heard about this before, but I just followed a link from Jeneane’s post dealing with education and found out about Julie Amero, the seventh grade substitute teacher in Connecticut who is facing 40 years in prison after pornographic popup ads came up on her computer screen during a class in 2004.
Karoli at Odd Time Signatures explains the case, including the following:

When I first read about this story, Amero was on trial. I assumed that the defense would show that the ads were clearly the result of a spyware/adware infection and she would be acquitted. My shock went deep (along with just about everyone with an ounce of understanding about how malware works) when she was convicted of multiple counts of exposing children to pornography. My outrage is just as keen, knowing that she was not permitted to introduce evidence of a malware attack because the defense failed to do so at the pretrial phase.

Amero and her husband are broke. A sad result of these specious accusations and mockery of a trial: Amero was 4 months pregnant when she was arrested, and lost her baby as a result of the stress. A miscarriage of justice, truly.

Karoli’s post links to a site that quotes the following from an article published in the New York Times:

Brian Livingston, editorial director of Windows Secrets, an electronic newsletter about the Microsoft program, said in an interview, “Prosecutors should be chasing the maker of these spyware programs, not hapless teachers who have nothing to do with the images.”

Ms. Amero’s husband, Wes Volle, was emphatic in saying she was clueless about computers and was in over her head once the pop-ups began. Mr. Volle, a graphics designer, accused the school system of sacrificing his wife to deflect attention from its own failure to install effective filters on its computers.

The ignorance that permeates this case is layers deep, and at the bottom is the defense lawyer who obviously didn’t understand the fundamental relevance of how internet technology works and apparently never brought it up at pre-trial. And, for a school administration to be that ignorant of howproblems with internet technology can run rampant is truly a dereliction of duty.
An artcle on alternet.net explains the problem clearly:

Adware, spyware and other infectious software are known hazards to security and privacy — and when lax cybersecurity meets anti-porn hysteria, a mailware infection can even land you in jail. Malicious coders are getting more sophisticated all the time, but law enforcement and the criminal justice system aren’t keeping up. A criminal conviction can hang on the difference between a deliberate mouse click and an involuntary redirect on an infested computer. Too often, even so-called experts can’t tell the difference.

There is a website to help Julie Amero and her husband raise the money that they need for their defense against the kinds of powerful people who are so ignorant about what is perhaps the most significant technological/educational/cultural phenonemon of this generation that their stupidity results in a tragic miscarriage of justice.
I have become used to people I know in real life not knowing much about the Internet and not knowing anything about blogging. But they aren’t lawyers or teachers or school administrators. They join AOL and learn what icons to click to use their email account occasionally. They are, as it’s said, out of the loop, and they don’t care. It’s all just too complicated for them to bother with.
But the people with power to destroy the lives of others because of their ignorance — well, it’s time they start caring and start learning.

The lesson we can take from

her life is to be open to wonder,

to look at the world as she did

at the end of her life, as a

garden of possibility.

The quote above is from the end of The Queen of the Big Time, a novel by Adriana Trigiani.
I have finished all but one of Trigiani’s novels, and this last one, Roccoco, is next on my reading list.
You don’t have to be Italian to find yourself immersed in Trigiani’s families, but if you have strong ties to any European immigrant culture, her stories are bound to resonate with you.
Trigiani creates characters that are neither heroes nor harlots. In their struggling humanness they are a compelling reminder that life is what it is, despite what we might have dreamed or hoped. And yet that can be OK too.

[The garden image above is used with permission from the photographer, Melissa Volker]

According to a piece in my local newspaper yesterday, sea lions and dolphins are being trained to by the Navy “to detect and apprehend waterborne attackers” who may be tempted to float by naval bases without benefit of a boat.
The piece, reflecting what was reported here, goes on to say that

…sea lions have been trained to carry special “cuffs” in their mouths, attached to long ropes. If the animal discovers what the Navy calls a “rogue swimmer,” the arresting sea lion officer can clamp the cuff around the swimmer’s leg. “The individual can then be reeled in for questioning…”

I’m just thinking — suppose those sea creatures are even more intelligent than we supposed. What if they decide we’re not the good guys.
My local paper also had a short article (also reported here) about a partially mummified man’s body being found in a chair in front of his still-on television set. Apparently he had been dead for more than a year. A report from someone about a burst pipe brought police to the residence. What a world!
And, tucked onto the travel page is a bit about the city of Paris starting it’s own blog, www.voiceofacity.com, where 10 Parisians give visitors their insiders view of the City of Light.
And now, back to the “what a world!” perspective, here in New York State, the number of moral conduct cases against teachers has doubled over the past five years. Full story here.
They say that all kinds of “immoral” conduct has always gone on, only there weren’t the kinds of mass media capacities for instantaneous comunication before. And mistreated individuals feel freer to speak up these days. Maybe that’s all true, but I still think we are a civilization on the downslide, taking with us the natural processes that keep this planet alive. We are doing our part to rev up the Big Entropy on the way to the Big Whimper.

The cousins. Fourteen of them representing three generations. They came, yesterday, for a birthday lunch with my mother, who turns 91 today.
They came with flowers and cookies and photographs. They came with delicious Polish babka, three kinds of home made pierogi, and good spirits, wishes, and love.
We notice that we are mostly female — not suprising, since we have always known that our clan is a matriarchy. The only males at the party were my brother, a first cousin, and a cousin by marriage (who took a videotape of the rest of us gathered around my mother singing both Happy Birthday and Sto Lat. ) Only the older ones of us remember the words to Sto Lat, the Polish version of “may you live a hundred years.” When my generation is gone, so will go the memory of those words. Our kids have married into other nationalities — great for genes, not necessarily so for native traditions and languages.
We were a noisy group, but then we always are when we get together. My mother, being somewhat deaf, couldn’t sort out background from foreground conversations; she sat in her favorite rocking chair and watched and smiled.
She is the oldest of her clan. Here is a photo of her with the youngest in attendance, her great grandniece, Olivia.

Today, she’s very tired, a little disoriented. She keeps reading through her birthday cards, crying because she misses my dad.
I have blogged before about how, as I get older, my ties to my family become stronger. Before my cousins left for home yesterday, we shared emails, vowed to get together at least several times a year. My mother is the last of her sibling generation, which, when they were all alive, held family gatherings at the drop of a hat.
Now it’s up to us. The cousins.

From This Week:

Apparently spam is becoming one of those things people are learning to live with — like death and taxes.

Actually, SpamFighter (there’s both a free and a cost version) works pretty well on Outlook Express to filter out most of my spam. A few do get through, but not in the numbers that used to before I downloaded the software.

My mother and I sit at her window next to the bird feeders and watch the tiny creatures battle the storm. It is so windy that they are often blown backward even as they try to fly forward.
“How beautiful!” she says over and over again as the three male cardinals flit from feeder to snow to tree to fence, struggling for a solid perch to wait their turn for the goodies I have left out for them. There also are three female cardinals, and I watch as the genders take turns waiting in the tree from which one of the feeders is hung. I notice that they don’t use the feeder that is right outside the window. Too close for comfort, perhaps.

There were dozens and dozens of birds here all morning, braving the pellets of sleet to feed their all consuming energies. I wonder where they go to get warm. I have never found any of their nests, but the woodland here is thick, so that’s no surprise.
The sleet turns to rain, the rain to snow, the snow to sleet, and the winds turn the bird feeders and the trees into rollercoasters. But the birds hunker down on the branches, still hungry. Hungry and determined.
I will go now and throw some food on the frozen snow for them.
And then, hungry and determined, I will sit at the window and eat my lunch.

“During the last three months of 2006, we began to receive reports from commercial beekeepers of an alarming number of honey bee colonies dying in the eastern United States,” said Maryann Frazier, apiculture extension associate in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences in a written statement distributed by the university. “Since the beginning of the year, beekeepers from all over the country have been reporting unprecedented losses.”
[snip]
In total, honey bee pollination contributes about $55 million to the value of crops in the state. Besides apples, crops that depend at least in part on honey bee pollination include peaches, soybeans, pears, pumpkins, cucumbers, cherries, raspberries, blackberries and strawberries.
The above from here.
They say it could be pesticides or some organism that is running rampant because of an upsetting of the natural balance.
We humans are the scourge of the earth. We are also a very weird unbalanced species. The following from Harper’s Weekly, to which you can link to check out sources.