I found a few quotations from Gloria Steinem that impressed me.

"Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers."

"For women... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique."

"We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs."

"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."

"The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government."

"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

"Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days."

"From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence--and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified."

"For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable."

No commentary needed. Gloria is very assertive.

"It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself...." --Malcolm X

"I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none." --Macbeth

"Now we are all sons of bitches." --Kenneth Bainbridge, director of the Trinity nuclear weapons test

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." --Krisha as paraphrased by J. Robert Oppenheimer

Route 44

Did you know that Yamhill County Transit Area provides bus service from McMinnville to Tigard via 99W? A few weeks ago I noticed several nights in a row on my way to work a transit bus heading East on Haworth Ave. I first thought it was an extension of the Trimet system until I noticed the words Yamhill County printed on the side. Yesterday I found this website:

http://www.yctransitarea.org/

Please consider using public transportation the next time you have to travel to McMinnville, Tigard, or anywhere in between.

Trois Gymnopedies

I was listening to my new collection of classical music and heard a familiar tune. When I looked for the title, the song was called Trois Gymnopedies. I had to laugh when I deciphered the Greek into English: "three naked children." Now you can laugh too.

Here are the piano pieces if you care to listen:

http://www.pianosociety.com/cms/index.php?section=151

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." --George Orwell

What Humans Fear

In the book How the Mind Works, psychologist Steven Pinker makes so much sense it seems silly.

Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us. We ought to be afraid of guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighter fluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs, not of snakes and spiders. Public safety officials try to strike fear in the hearts of citizens using everything from statistics to shocking photographs, usually to no avail. Parents scream and punish to deter their children from playing with matches or chasing a ball into the street, but when Chicago schoolchildren were asked what they were most afraid of, they cited lions, tigers, and snakes, unlikely hazards in the Windy City.

Major phobias include fear of snakes, spiders, large carnivores, heights, darkness, blood, deep water, and social scrutiny. People can learn new fears and forget old ones, but instinctive fears are hard to unlearn while learned fears are easily forgotten. Major factors in successfully overcoming fear are predictability (implying that the subject has repeatedly confronted the fear and learned its patterns), a sense of competence and control, and the presence of allies. This is how our childhood fears fade as boys become men and girls become women-still-afraid-of-spiders. The things we still do not feel confident with continue to make us squirm.