Ali Baba's a different species

I got your dogmatic, intolerant, proselytizing, anti-assimilationist Islam right here:



But, you know. Those mysterious Wahabis Shiites Sunnis Sufis. So strange. So hostile to modern culture. So very Not Like Us.

Maestro Sartori

So yesterday, for the first time since the millenium or so, I went and had most of my hair cut off.

Several factors came together for this. One is, yes, that I'm still unemployed, and I was starting to feel less and less in love with my hair more than it was a liability to me. It's stupid and unfair that it should be so, but stupid and unfair are, alas, still forces to be reckoned with in the world. Better to pick a fight that can be won right now, circumstances being what they are.

The other thing was that it was just exactly long enough again to donate to Locks of Love, which is really what threw the balance for me. Conceding to the silly prejudices of the mainstream doesn't leave nearly as bad a taste when you have the excuse of doing it for a good cause.

Anyway, thus I come forth new-made:


Not a bad look for me, actually. And if I get tired of it - it's hair. It grows.

(Photo by the Missus.)

Never Had a Way With Women

No one is ever going to mistake me for a political blogger, thank Heaven, but I'll say this about the outcome of the Iowa caucuses: Coulda been worse.

Some far better commentary from round the Blogosphere:

Alas.

Shakesville.

Scalzi.

Feministe.

Making Light.

Merry Measure: Coda

(I swear I was going to post this today even before I read Sarah Daisy's comment on the previous entry's LJ crosspost.)

DO I DETECT A NOTE OF UNSEASONAL GRUMPINESS? said Death. NO SUGAR PIGGYWIGGY FOR YOU, ALBERT.

"I don't want any present, master," Albert sighed. "Except maybe to wake up and find it's all back to normal. Look, you know it always goes wrong when you start changing things..."

BUT THE HOGFATHER CAN CHANGE THINGS. LITTLE MIRACLES ALL OVER THE PLACE, WITH MANY A MERRY HO, HO, HO. TEACHING PEOPLE THE REAL MEANING OF HOGSWATCH, ALBERT.

"What, you mean the pigs and cattle have all been slaughtered and with any luck everyone's got enough food for the winter?"

WELL, WHEN I SAY THE REAL MEANING...

"Some wretched devil's had his head chopped off in a wood somewhere 'cos he found a bean in his dinner and now the summer's going to come back?"

NOT EXACTLY THAT, BUT...

"Oh, you mean they've chased down some poor beast and shot arrows up into their apple trees and now the shadows are going to go away?"

THAT IS DEFINITELY A MEANING, BUT I...

"Ah, then you're talking about the one where they light a bloody big bonfire to give the sun a hint and tell it to stop lurking under the horizon and do a proper day's work?"

Death paused, while the hogs hurtled over a range of hills.

YOU'RE NOT HELPING, ALBERT.

"Well, they're all the real meanings that I know."

I THINK THAT YOU COULD WORK WITH ME ON THIS.

"It's all about the sun, master. White snow and red blood and the sun. Always has been."

VERY WELL, THEN. THE HOGFATHER CAN TEACH PEOPLE THE UNREAL MEANING OF HOGSWATCH.

Albert spat over the side of the sleigh. "Hah! 'Wouldn't It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice,' eh?"

THERE ARE WORSE BATTLE CRIES.


- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (obviously)

Also, Jeff Fecke at Shakesville makes a number of related and worthwhile points.

And with that, a very happy Solstice, everyone!

Flying and Changing and Living Without Death

Several times over the past year or so I've been reminded of the wondrousness of little light's incredible blog, Taking Steps, and yet neglected to add it to the blogroll. I've fixed that now.

If you want to know why you should be reading it, look here, and here, and here, and here.

William Carlos Williams, Kinsey, Asbury Park, and This

Okay, I am officially done slagging New Jersey now.

Garden State, you are hereby forgiven for Trenton.

Merry Measure

As I write this it is now (for the next couple hours, anyway) ten days until Christmas, and a week until Solstice. I've just about reconciled, though, that those two words mean pretty much the same thing to me.

I am not and never have been a Christian, except maybe in the vague fluffy Unitarian sense of "what Jesus said was so nice, who cares if he was God or not" (and, when I'm in the right mood, the even vaguer and fluffier Alan Moore sense of "the idea of a god is a god," of course); as you can well imagine, the neocon War On Christmas paranoia reads to me like dispatches from Bizarro-World, because from where I sit, Christmas qua Christmas is freakin' everywhere, a cultural default. I've always sort of been of two minds about it, I suppose, because while the assumption that I'm buying into the same theology has made me uncomfortable for most of my life, I harbor a deep and shameless and uncompromising love of Christmas itself. I adore the lights, the decorations, the gifts, the overeating, and, unlike almost everyone else I know, I like to see it all get started just about as soon as October is through. Holly and evergreen and strings of light obviously speak to something profoundly resonant in me, which I suspect is nothing more complicated than the same thing that inspired folks in the northern hemisphere to first want to light fires and quaff wassail in the long nights of the year aeons past: it's cold and it's dark and if we don't do something fun we may give up and die of despair.

So I've come to understand that what I'm really celebrating at Christmas is the Yuletide, "older than Bethlehem and Babylon" (as Granpa HPL put it in a much creepier context), and calling it Christmas is a matter of cultural convenience and shorthand. I used to feel weirder about that, when I was first working out my identity as a pagan and aspiring magician and making like the important thing for me was observing the Solstice, but keeping Christmas at a distance never quite took. (Nowadays, I'm still inclined to want some sort of quasi-religious ritual on the Solstice proper, but it's in addition to, not instead of, the presents and revelry of the 25th, and I'm more and more of a mind that it's all part of one big Yule festival anyway.) I am in my heart a syncretist, which I suppose I must irritate alike both the religiously orthodox and the critics of cultural appropriation, what with my pentacle and my Ganesh puja and my heretical DIY patchwork pantheism; but I'm convinced there's a lot of good in the squishy lumper magpie approach to culture, collecting the shiny bits of diverse things together and discarding the parts that don't fit. So it is that I've come to understand that I've been observing the Good Parts Version of Christmas, and all the sanctimonious moralizing in the world about the "reason for the season" isn't going to make my experience of it any less authentic, even if what I mean by "Christmas" is something very different than what They do.

And what's in a name, anyway? Christos means "annointed one"; whether Son of Man or Sun Unconquered, the Mass we enact at the close of December is a crowning - a new day, a new beginning, the Kingdom of the world remade in a better and brighter light. Let Heaven and Nature sing! You don't need a Messiah in order to take comfort and joy in the hope that this time around will be better than the last, or just to be glad that it's only going to get sunnier from here for a while. (Although, while we're at it, you also don't need to believe in miracles in order to honor a great teacher who spent his life trying to convince people that charity and mercy and forgiveness are better than the alternatives, should you want a reason to keep the Christ in Christmas that's less vague and fluffy than mine.)

All of which is to say: Merry Christmas, everyone, whether you keep it for yourselves by that name or not; I trust that a bit of Midwinter cheer and Peace on Earth are things we can all get behind, even all you hard-line Scrooges out there. (And a very happy whatever-else-it-is you may observe around now as well, needless to say.) And here's a Yule cup raised to you as well, for the sake of good company in a dark hour and a warm hearth on a cold night. Gaudete, all; winter is coming, but there's light and green lingering yet, and soon the night will begin to fall back. If that's not reason enough for the season no matter what you call it, I don't know what is.

Blameless and Amazon

Elizabeth Bear (whose books you should read, and on whose livejournal I've found myself of late engaging in the Wednesday night Criminal Minds fansquee, because I am the King of the Chubby Nerds) has written a self-described feminist screed on the Subterranean Press website that pretty much sums up exactly how I feel about this gender-and-society stuff:

Dear Patriarchy:

I don’t care what you think.

I’m not here to convert you. I’m not here to enlighten you. I’m not here to try to earn your respect. I don’t need it.

I am not scared of you.

It is, as the kids these days say, made out of awesome. RTWT, right now.

(And it occurs to me that this is more or less exactly the sort of thing I mean when I say, "I'm a feminist. Not the nuts kind.")