"Single Ladies" Collection

Yes, it's true -- I'm collecting remakes of the "Single Ladies" video. Click here to check them out. Some of them are simply silly, some feature amazing dancing. Enjoy!

Purple Haze: my favorite

I tend to think of this one as "Brian Harlan Brooks' compliments to Bob Fosse": I first encountered it on Brooks' FB videos, and Fosse did the original choreography (yes, for the Beyonce version). Add in the queer sensibility... This is definitely my fave.



Brooks, Crenshaw, and Kingsberry performing this at Defying Inequality:



Whew! (*fans herself*)

Pomplamoose's "Single Ladies"

Country version of "Single Ladies"

Woo-hoo! Another one for my collection. ;-)

Magazine Preview - The Estrogen Dilemma - NYTimes.com

Wow. Amazing, amazing article on depression, estrogen, hormone replacement therapy, and the Women's Health Initiative Study. Long, but readable, and worth the read. - sm

Magazine Preview - The Estrogen Dilemma - NYTimes.com:

Berry turned out to be right, of course; she wasn’t on the placebo, which the N.I.H. doctors told her when she finished the study. And as she hurried to fill her own patch prescription, she found her gratitude mixed with more than a little frustration. “Why did my primary-care physician give me an antidepressant when I could have had something simple, like estrogen?” she asked. “Why don’t they know?”

We talked about breast cancer, because that is the nightmare illness in nearly all our calculations, for most of us the visual closest to hand. Three of my best friends have endured the full breast-cancer horror show and by now have retired their wigs. All have survived. None had been on hormone replacement. This is information that batters me steadily but not helpfully, like my ex-smoker paternal aunt’s fatal lung cancer and the fact that I’m a lifetime nonsmoker and regular exerciser with extremely good cholesterol levels. How do my lowered risks from one column balance against my question marks over in another column? What to do?

Read article...

Is Marriage Good for Your Health? - NYTimes.com

Is Marriage Good for Your Health? - NYTimes.com:

While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people...

But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.

All of which suggests that while Farr’s exploration into the conjugal condition pointed us in the right direction, it exaggerated the importance of the institution of marriage and underestimated the quality and character of the marriage itself.

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Donovan McNabb: 'I'd Like To Thank The Ungrateful, Over-Expecting,Oftentimes-Racist Fans Of Philadelphia' | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Donovan McNabb: 'I'd Like To Thank The Ungrateful, Over-Expecting,Oftentimes-Racist Fans Of Philadelphia' | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Census to Gay Couples: Call Yourselves Married - Bureau doesn't need to see a marriage license: 'We don't do that for straight people'

Census to Gay Couples: Call Yourselves Married - Bureau doesn't need to see a marriage license: 'We don't do that for straight people':

Only five states have legalized gay marriage, but the Bureau says same-sex couples in any state who consider themselves married should feel free to check the 'husband' or 'wife' boxes rather than 'unmarried partner.' Conservatives complain that allowing couples to define their own relationships is confusing and lends legitimacy to gay marriages, but the Census Bureau defends the practice.'There's a respect factor there,' one official said. 'We've never asked people to show us their marriage licenses. We don't do that for straight people.'

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h/t Maya!

ACLU Can Sue Catholic Bishops for Refusing Reproductive Healthcare to Trafficked Women | End Human Trafficking | Change.org

ACLU Can Sue Catholic Bishops for Refusing Reproductive Healthcare to Trafficked Women | End Human Trafficking | Change.org:

But the ACLU points out that since [the US Conference of Catholic Bishops] gets the overwhelming portion of federal dollars to take care of trafficked people, women who want access to birth control or abortions may not have anywhere else to go.

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h/t Jennifer M!

Cherokee Nation

Cherokee Nation:

Wilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, passed away this morning. Mankiller served 12 years in elective office at the Cherokee Nation, the first two as Deputy Principal Chief followed by 10 years as Principal Chief. She retired from public office in 1995. Among her many honors, Mankiller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.

Read more here...

A New Tradition at the White House - the Seder - NYTimes.com

I found this to be a moving story of a family Passover Seder, rather than a PR event. Gefilte fish in the White House!

A New Tradition at the White House - the Seder - NYTimes.com

That event was the first-ever presidential Seder, and also probably “the first time in history that gefilte fish had been placed on White House dishware,” said Eric Lesser, the former baggage handler, who organizes each year’s ritual.

As in many Jewish households, the Obama Seder seems to take on new meaning each year, depending on what is happening in the world and in participants’ lives (for this group, the former is often the same as the latter)...

Indeed, the same group, with a few additions, has now made the Seder an Executive Mansion tradition. (No one ever considered inviting prominent rabbis or other Jewish leaders; it is a private event.)...

Ms. Tubman and Desirée Rogers, then the White House social secretary, tried to plan an informal meal last year, with little or even no wait staff required. White House ushers reacted with what seemed like polite horror. The president and the first lady simply do not serve themselves, they explained. The two sides negotiated a compromise: the gefilte fish would be preplated, the brisket passed family-style...

The Seder originated with Jewish staff members on the campaign trail who could not go home, but now some celebrate at the White House by choice. Participants say their ties are practically familial by this point anyway. “Some of the most challenging experiences of our life we’ve shared together,” Ms. Jarrett said.

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Op-Ed Columnist - Whose Country Is It? - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Whose Country Is It? - NYTimes.com

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy...

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.

You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.

Read the article...

Official member: Evil Gay Conspiracy

Oh, this is excellent.

Official member: Evil Gay Conspiracy

It ain't easy extolling the idea that God is not what you think she is, that you have far more spiritual freedom than they tell you, that gender is fluid and love is a liquid pulse, and you are already hot like wicked sunshine with divine perfection. Not to mention how Jesus was just a weird mystic anarchist who hung out with hookers and freaks and would have completely rejected/abhorred every megachurch, pastor, pope and homophobic GOP doctrine in world history.

Turns out many people hate hearing that stuff. Just can't handle it. Personally, I can't count how many times I've been told I'm going straight to hell for whatever reason: championing gay rights, sex-positivism, proposing free Hitachis for every 14-year-old girl, that sort of thing. A hundred? A thousand? So far, I feel pretty good. Nothing's fallen off. Nothing on fire. At least, not in a bad way. We'll just have to see.

Speaking of the kids, we all take turns with the tutoring. Every couple weeks I spend a solid day with a few dozen or so, training them in the Beautiful Dark Ways, filling their sweet, innocent heads with simply luscious lies suggesting that, say, homosexuals are very nice people, gender and sexuality are far from fixed in nature, history is mostly spin and PR, Catholic schoolgirls are shockingly/delightfully well versed in doing quite nasty things with their mouths.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/03/26/notes032610.DTL#ixzz0jJ9vGPqG

UC Davis Health System: UC Davis study finds reproductive coercion often is accompanied...

UC Davis Health System: UC Davis study finds reproductive coercion often is accompanied by physical or sexual violence:

Young women and teenage girls often face efforts by male partners to sabotage birth control or coerce pregnancy — including damaging condoms and destroying contraceptives — and these efforts, defined as “reproductive coercion,” frequently are associated with physical or sexual violence, a study by a team of researchers led by UC Davis has found...

“We have known about the association between partner violence and unintended pregnancy for many years,” said Jay Silverman, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of society, human development and health in the Harvard School of Public Health. “What this study shows is that reproductive coercion likely explains why unintended pregnancies are far more common among abused women and teens.”

...The study also highlights the importance of working with young men to prevent both violence against female partners and coercion around pregnancy.

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Op-Ed Columnist - An Absence of Class in the G.O.P. - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - An Absence of Class in the G.O.P. - NYTimes.com:

If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.

...A party that promotes ignorance (“Just say no to global warming”) and provides a safe house for bigotry cannot serve the best interests of our country.

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Payback for Prochoicers

Tell it, Katha.

Payback for Prochoicers:

NARAL, Planned Parenthood and NOW stepped back. You can call prochoice leaders hypocritical or cowardly or feeble or excessively deferential to the president's agenda. But one thing you can't call them is selfishly obsessed with their own political purity. That would be the antichoicers--the Catholic bishops, Bart Stupak, Ben Nelson. They were the big evil babies who were willing to let millions suffer and 45,000 people die every year unless they got to deprive women of their reproductive rights.

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Bleckley school officials allowing gay prom date - Living - Macon.com

A small town in GA does the right thing.

Bleckley school officials allowing gay prom date - Living - Macon.com:

Martin said he could have settled for what he did last year and simply attend the prom with a female friend, but he didn’t want to do that this year. “It’s standing up for the rights thing, especially after the Mississippi canceled prom,” he said. “It’s senior prom. It’s pretty big.”

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Twelve States Plan Lawsuit Over Obama Health Overhaul (Update2) - BusinessWeek

Via Otter.

If you live in AL, FL, MI, NE, ND, PA, SC, SD, TX, UT, VA, or WA, you might want to call your Attorney General's office and tell them you do NOT want them to do this.

To find your Attorney General's number, do a web search for "attorney general WA" (or whatever state you live in).

Twelve States Plan Lawsuit Over Obama Health Overhaul (Update2) - BusinessWeek:

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania are among 11 states that will sue “as soon as the president signs the bill,” claiming it places a burden on already cash-strapped states to pay for an expanded Medicaid program and build an exchange so individuals can find affordable insurance. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli also said in a statement his state would sue on the similar grounds.

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Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences - NYTimes.com

Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences - NYTimes.com

The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. One study of postdoctoral applicants, for example, found that women had to publish 3 more papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as male applicants.

Making judgments about an individual’s abilities based on his or her sex is a classic form of discrimination, said Nancy Hopkins, an M.I.T. biology professor who created an academic stir in the 1990s by documenting pervasive, but largely unintentional, discrimination against women at the university.

Even if male math geniuses outnumbered female geniuses 3 to 1, Dr. Hopkins said, it would be reasonable to expect one female math professor for every three male professors at places like Harvard and M.I.T. “But in fact, Harvard just tenured its first female, after 375 years,” said Dr. Hopkins, who, famously, walked out of the room after Mr. Summers made his controversial remarks.

The university women’s report cited research showing that girls’ performance suffers from any suggestion that they do poorly at math. In one experiment, college students with strong math backgrounds and similar abilities were divided into two groups and tested on math. One group was told that men perform better on the test, the other that there was no difference in performance between the sexes. Their results were starkly different: in the group told that men do better, men indeed did much better, with an average score of 25 compared with the women’s 5. In the group told there was no difference, women scored 17 and men 19.

Any suggestion of advantage based on sex affects results, the research shows, even where there is no cultural stereotype.

In an experiment ostensibly testing “contrast sensitivity ability” — a made-up skill — men and women in a group told there was no difference between the sexes in such sensitivity rated their own ability equally. But in a group told that men were better at it, men rated their skills far higher than women did.

Teaching girls about how stereotypes affect performance, the report found, can diminish such effects.

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How Christian Were the Founders? - NYTimes.com

How Christian Were the Founders? - NYTimes.com

The one thing that underlies the entire program of the nation’s Christian conservative activists is, naturally, religion. But it isn’t merely the case that their Christian orientation shapes their opinions on gay marriage, abortion and government spending. More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,” they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the intent of the founders.

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Talk Deeply, Be Happy? - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

Talk Deeply, Be Happy? - Well Blog - NYTimes.com:

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.

“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”

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Stuff My Children Will Eat -- and political rants: Bread is not simple

Stuff My Children Will Eat -- and political rants: Bread is not simple:

Bread is in many ways not simply a food, it is for us in the west the Ur food. It's nickname is The Staff of Life. The phrases 'give us this day our daily bread,' and living on 'bread and water,' suggest that bread is not just any old nibble, it is the one food we need every day, the one food that sustains life. (Recent low carbiness aside.)

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AL-KHALIIL (HEBRON): Unrest continues in Hebron | Christian Peacemaker Teams

AL-KHALIIL (HEBRON): Unrest continues in Hebron | Christian Peacemaker Teams

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced three weeks ago that the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem would be included in a national heritage restoration plan, many Palestinians saw decision as an intentional provocation. Netanyahu chose the week of the sixteenth anniversary of Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein killing twenty-nine Palestinians as they prayed in the Il-Ibrahimi Mosque to make the announcement. Palestinian friends of CPT Hebron told team members they thought Netanyahu wished to incite anger and violence, which would in turn provide justification for military crackdowns and increased land seizures in the West Bank...

Responding to the issue of rising tensions throughout the West Bank, a Palestinian member of the CPT Al Khalil Advisory Council told CPT "We will resist Israeli attacks on our holy places. But we will resist peacefully, not with violence."

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How Come Straight Girls Get to Go To Prom With Other Ladies, But Not Lesbians Like Constance McMillen? / Queerty

How Come Straight Girls Get to Go To Prom With Other Ladies, But Not Lesbians Like Constance McMillen? / Queerty

But aren't critics of McMillen — namely, her high school administrators — forgetting that girls go to prom with other girls all the time?

Whether it's because they are dateless or just want to send the message that "we don't need boys," straight girls have been arriving to hotel reception halls in limos, sans men, for decades. There has never been any serious criticism of this choice, at least no more than creepy father-daughter dance events. Not only do these girls sometimes arrive together, often, they dance together too!

Which is worth noting, because Itawamba High specifically told McMillen she cannot arrive with her same-sex girlfriend (who is also a student there, and whose name is, curiously, missing from press reports), and she will be asked to leave the prom if other students report they are made "uncomfortable" around McMillen and her date, presumably while they are dancing together and getting all lez.

Read more: http://www.queerty.com/how-come-straight-girls-get-to-go-to-prom-with-other-ladies-but-not-lesbians-like-constance-mcmillen-20100314/#ixzz0iXkgf174

NYC's St. Patrick's Day Parade Still Doesn't Want the Gays. And That's Their Right / Queerty

NYC's St. Patrick's Day Parade Still Doesn't Want the Gays. And That's Their Right / Queerty

The St. Patrick's Day Parade is a "private" event. It is not hosted or produced by the city or a government office. It is considered the "official" St. Patrick's Day Parade because it is the largest and most well-covered, but it is not the only. Being a private event, it maintains the freedom to discriminate — the same way any gay pride parade gives us to the freedom to exclude groups, sponsors, and citizens that terrorize, discriminate, or harass LGBTs. That's a fair policy, is rooted in the First Amendment, and one we entirely support, even if parade chairman John Dunleavy was stupid enough to say excluding queers was the same as excluding Nazis from an Israeli pride parade or the KKK from a black pride parade.

(The only grey area you'll find us wading through is Hibernians' use of taxpayer resources, including police security and post-parade sanitation workers cleaning the streets, to execute the event, although we understand the city is paid a fee to cover the costs.)...

But this isn't a debate over one of our "rights"; it's a debate over a privilege. Thankfully, and perhaps in spite of any of their delusions, the Hibernians do not represent all Irish people, and nor do their discriminatory parades.

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Shortcuts - When a Cap Full of Soap Is Not a Good Thing - NYTimes.com

Shortcuts - When a Cap Full of Soap Is Not a Good Thing - NYTimes.com

How much soap should I put in my washing machine and dishwasher?

Do I need to do more for my dryer than clean that little pull-out lint catcher?

Should I rinse my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher?

...“Nobody thinks they use too much soap,” said Vernon Schmidt, who has been a repairman for almost 35 years...

Too much detergent can make your clothes stiff and shorten the life of your machine. An excess of soap can also cause a buildup of mold and mildew, said Jill Notini, a spokeswoman for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, a trade group...

“If people see suds, they think their clothes are getting clean, but that’s wrong — it means you’re using a lot of extra detergent,” Ms. Notini said.

Here is Mr. Schmidt’s test to determine if you’re oversoaping...

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How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time - NYTimes.com

How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time - NYTimes.com

Even more unnerving to privacy advocates is the work of two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. In a paper published last year, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross reported that they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5 percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003 — nearly five million individuals.

Social Security numbers are prized by identity thieves because they are used both as identifiers and to authenticate banking, credit card and other transactions.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers used publicly available information from many sources, including profiles on social networks, to narrow their search for two pieces of data crucial to identifying people — birthdates and city or state of birth.

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