Monday, August 8, 2016

soldier's funny comeback/ inmates help guard

Jun. 27, 2016 Soldier's funny comeback:

According to a recent post on the website Reddit, a member of the U.S. Army decided to get cheeky when he was denied leave to attend a baby shower.


It features before and after photos of a form requesting leave. In the first image, the reason for request listed on the form is “baby shower.” Those words have been crossed out in red pen, and the phrase, “Men don’t attend baby showers” has been added. Apparently the specialist’s superior was displeased with his desire to attend an event traditionally frequented only by women.

So the specialist made a second request, and tailored it to the tastes of his CO, who apparently is fond of antiquated gender stereotypes. The reason for leave on the second image is written as follows:

“Going home to the Appalachian mountains to drink whiskey, wrestle bears, and shoot lots of guns. I also plan to grow out a beard, chop down 100 trees with my axe and eat 10lbs of thick cut bacon with my wife, whom I plan to have lots of unprotected sex with, because I am a man and that’s just what we do. Football.”

No word yet on whether the request was approved — or if the request was actually ever submitted to a CO — but with more than eight million views on Imgur, its author can rest assured his handy work gave the world a few chuckles.

Comments:

Dick Dasterdly -yesterday
As a former member of the RCN I can say that this type of request is not uncommon in fact there have been some absolute classics. Perhaps one day if I find the time I will write them out. It would be a best seller for sure.

For example, we had an XO [second in command] who had an unwritten policy that if defaulters [charged members of the crew] who had non-serious offenses could make him laugh than the charges would be dropped. So, a master seaman was charged for being adrift [navy slang for AWOL] and up he goes up on defaulters [Kangaroo court] Well the master seaman was asked what excuse he had for being adrift. " Well sir, I was up plenty early so I would be on time as I take that seriously, so I am walking down the road in proper military fashion when my glasses fall off, so I bent down to pick them up and a truck parks on my hand and there I was for 6 hours until I was released, but I didn't go to sick bay as my only thought was the safety and welfare of the ship so even though I was in serious pain I nonetheless put the ship before my own health"
Case dismissed.



Jun. 29, 2016 "Colour me Zen": I cut out this article by Natathalie Atkinson in the Globe and Mail on Feb. 12, 2015.  It talks about how coloring is relaxing for adults.  It's fun and you unplug.  It doesn't cost a lot of money and the artwork doesn't take up a lot of space.

I haven't bought any coloring books.


Jul. 1, 2016 'Fat' comment on store receipt angers Edmonton shopper:

“Fat” is a cruel label that Edmonton shopper Camilla Glowacki never wanted to see in writing. 

Glowacki is now speaking out, saying that she was “body shamed” by a store clerk earlier this week.

“I’ve been called fat, but not from a store,” she said.

“It just makes me think, ‘Is that what everybody thinks when they look at me? Do they hear me or do they just see how I look?’

"I was so embarrassed." 

Glowacki was shopping for presents for her daughter’s fourth birthday Monday afternoon at accessories store Ardene in Edmonton’s Northgate Centre.

“I stood there and started reading it, and the cashier ripped it out my hand. And she crumpled it up really hard into a tiny little ball, and threw it in the garbage,” said Glowacki.


Jul. 6, 2016 "Even zombies can lead us to God": I cut out this article by Bill Anderson in the Edmonton Journal on Apr. 25, 2015.  It's on Pressreader so I have to type it up.

"They (zombies) confront us with the fact that life is a profound mystery not explained by materialism.  They express our feelings of being trapped in a ceaseless cycle of hopeless meaningless.  They represent the apocalypse of our pain and suffering in the world.  They communicate our desire for something more to life than 9 to 5 and certain death.  Zombies are a dead end that spur us on to search for hope, purpose and a future (faith).  


Jul. 11, 2016 Inmates help guard:

The inmates managed to bust out of their locked cell, despite the possibility that guards would arrive with guns drawn for fear the inmates might have taken the sick guard's firearm and keys.

The ruckus was loud enough to get the attention of guards a floor above. Once they realized what was happening, one of them started CPR on the guard, who had no pulse.

As the guard returned to life, the inmates saw their risky move pay off. "He's a good man," Kelton said of the guard.

The guard is expected back to work next week. As WFAA notes, the cell the inmates broke out of has since been reinforced. 

Comments:

Chris G 12 hours ago

Just because they are there for possible crimes doesn't mean they are bad people, they have made some bad choices in life.

My opinion: That's some good news.


Jul. 15, 2016 "Germany honours resistance fighters, 60 yrs past due": I cut out this article by Hannah Cleaver in the Edmonton Journal on Jun. 25, 2005:

Vilified 'Edelweiss Pirates' are hailed as resistance heroes. Hannah Cleaver reports
A group of rebellious teenagers who formed a resistance network against the Nazis are being honoured after almost 60 years of neglect by the German authorities, who considered them no better than common criminals.

The Edelweiss Pirates, as they were known, were working class teenagers from western Germany who fought the Hitler Youth and helped resistance groups, risking imprisonment and death.

The Gestapo declared the group criminals in the 1940s, a tag which was allowed to remain for 60 years.
Six of their number were executed by the Gestapo and some have been honoured by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, for hiding Jews from Nazi persecution.

Tomorrow a small group of surviving Edelweiss Pirates will perform some of their songs on stage in Cologne, alongside local musicians at a festival which coincides with last week's official recognition of the group as resistance fighters.

"We were from the working classes, that is the main reason why we have only now been recognised," said Gertrud Koch, 81, who still goes by her Edelweiss codename of Mucki. "After the war there were no judges in Germany so the old Nazi judges were used and they upheld the criminalisation of what we did and who we were."

As a teenager Mrs Koch wanted to train as a Montessori teacher, but the kindergarten was closed by the Nazis.

She spent nine months in a Gestapo jail, was repeatedly beaten and was once thrown down stairs, breaking her arm.

The efforts of the White Roses, a similar, but much smaller group based at Munich University who were executed for distributing resistance leaflets, have been celebrated since shortly after the war.

But it has taken until now for the Edelweiss Pirates, who are thought to have numbered more than 5,000, to be recognised.

They not only produced and distributed leaflets, and wrote anti-war graffiti, they also took on groups of Hitler Youth in street battles and stole food, supplies and even some explosives to supply small local adult resistance groups.

Groups from different areas would meet in the countryside, to swap information gained from illegally listening to the BBC world service, or to plan leaflet drops in each other's towns so the local police would not recognise them - but also to sing songs and indulge in relationships, an aspect of teenage life frowned upon by the strictly segregated Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls.

To British ears the name edelweiss inevitably recalls The Sound of Music, but the pirates were often children of communist families or from rough backgrounds, far from the lifestyle of the aristocratic Von Trapps in the film. Many had seen their parents arrested and even murdered for their communist views.

Mrs Koch remembers her family hiding a Jewish musician in their allotment garden from 1938 to 1939. "We hid Julio Gossler, the music director of the Cologne conservatoire. We took him food there for about a year and a half," she said.

She was also involved with distributing leaflets urging German soldiers to put down their weapons and come home to the families that needed them.

She and Jean Juelich, 76, another former Edelweiss Pirate, have spearheaded the fight to have the group recognised as resistance fighters.

Mr Juelich, who will be also be performing at tomorrow's festival along with rap and reggae bands which have created new versions of Edelweiss Pirate songs, said he was still angry that it took Germany so long to honour his group.

"This should have happened 40 years ago," he said. "The families of those who were murdered have been denied any kind of justice until now. They were killed as criminals.''
Juergen Roters, whose office equates to chief administrator of Cologne, awarded the Edelweiss Pirates official recognition as resistance fighters last week, a move much appreciated but one which almost came too late.

"There are only five of us left in Cologne," said Mucki. "Four of the boys and me."


Jul. 16, 2016 Can you see the ghost?:


An image of a fatal highway accident in Kentucky has lead to a chilling online discussion about the existence of spirits and the afterlife.

The haunting photo was taken by Saul Vazquez, who happened to be driving by the crash in his truck earlier this week.

“I took this picture just few minutes ago from the cab of my truck…zoom in and pay attention to the shadow just off the top of the state trooper hat. All I say is I hope everyone involved is okay!!” he says in a caption of the image posted to his Facebook page.


Jul. 20, 2016: Here's a picture of kids praying for their dad's safe return as a cop.


Jul. 21, 2016 "F--- Harper" article: Do you remember I wrote about seeing a car with the words on the back of it?  Well here's an article about it in the Edmonton Journal:


Jul. 25, 2016 "The drift to the sidewalk": I found this article by Christine Woodrow in the Globe and Mail "Facts and Arguments" essay.  She has mental illness and can't work.  She talks about how she panhandled one time and felt really guilty about it.  "I felt unworthy of their generosity.  I wasn't homeless."

She may not be homeless, but she has $6 in checking account, 2 dozen eggs and 15 cans of mushroom soup.  She deserves money because she needs it. 


Jul. 28, 2016 Save your money: I found this on Yahoo about these 2 The Hills reality TV stars who spent their millions of dollars on things like clothes and going out.  Heidi says the other cast members had houses and they didn't have anything to show for it.  However, if you read the article they talk about hardly ever eating out. 


Jul. 29, 2016 Sexual harassment in taxi:

A Brampton woman says she was sexually harassed — subjected to a barrage of vulgar, explicit questions and threats — while riding in the back of a Beck Taxi.

Nicole Vance had just finished work and called a cab to her office on Adelaide Street. When it arrived she asked the driver to take her to Fort York, where she was going to meet her brother and then they were going to carry on to Brampton.

That caught the attention of the company's operations manager, Kristine Hubbard.

As soon as she saw the Facebook note Hubbard checked on the case internally and found that the driver and vehicle had both been suspended. She and Vance then spoke, and Hubbard says she told Vance that Beck would cooperate fully with police and with municipal licensing and standards (which regulates taxis), both of which are now investigating.

Big Red
Big Red6 hours ago

Sounds exactly like a bad experience that I had when living in Montreal. Started out fine, then questions got vulgar and explicit. I stopped talking and told him to do the same. He got more and more vulgar. At the time I lived in a pretty secluded area. He didn't stop in front of my house, he stopped around the corner--more out of sight. Locked the doors from the inside after I'd paid so that I couldn't get out, and then started to lunge at me. Luckily I had a psychotic episode/panick attack that seemed to freak the &?%$ out of him. He let me go, but I was afraid he would change his mind, so I rushed into my apartment without checking the cab number. I've always regretted that and worried that he might have done the same thing to someone else.

I've only taken a taxi two times since that event (which happened about seven years ago), but always get the cab number and text it to my boyfriend and a friend BEFORE I get into the car.
  • R
    RICHARD
    RICHARD4 hours ago
    Texting the cab # is a good idea . Sad it should be done though . The idea of taking a cab was supposed to be for security as well as convenience .



My opinion: Well at least the driver got suspended.  I have ridden in taxis and it's mainly CO-OP because of easy phone number to remember: 780-425-2525.

I mainly have East- Indian guys and I talk to them, and they have never sexually harassed me.

My week:

Aug. 2, 2016 West Ed mall: I had a day off yesterday and it was probably my one day off this month.  I tried to get a day off on my birthday, Thurs. Aug. 11, but my manager at the 2nd job won't let me because she booked her vacation and she needs me to work.  I only have to work 4 hrs and I can still the whole day to have fun.

On Aug. 1 I treated it like it was my birthday and I went shopping from 10am- 5pm at West Ed mall.  The day before my manager told me that I needed to come to work tomorrow to sign some papers that were due.  So I got there by 10am.  Also since it was the 1st of the month, the accounting woman C always brings her pastries she bakes to the staff.  I had some small cinnamon buns.

Afterwards I was shopping and then I tried the Tower of London burger at the Sherlock Holmes pub.  It was big and filling, and good.  I used my gift card.

Then I got a free coffee at McDonald's with my "Buy 7 coffees, get 1 free medium coffee."  I rarely ever buy coffee there.  When I work at my restaurants, customers bring the McDonald's coffee cups in, they finish it and they don't always take off the sticker to put on the card so I do.

On the receipt it says McDonald's is hiring staff for $13/ hr.  That's a couple of bucks higher than the min. wage.  

I am all "malled out."  I hardly ever go shopping.  The last time I went on a big shopping trip was in Feb. 2016 at West Ed mall.

I went to Pottery Barn to see if there's anything I can buy there.  None, but it did make me think to ask someone else to sell my gift card too.  I thought of my cousin D.

Comedy network: I also got this channel for free preview.  I thought it was going to end by Aug. 1, but I still have that channel.  For about a week and a half, I have been watching a lot of stand up comedy.  Now I feel like I overdosed on it.

The Simpsons: MuchMusic is playing it again from the 1997 episodes.  I like those episodes from 1997 to like 2002.  I watched these so many times before.  I watched a few last week and then I had to stop.  I feel like I overdosed on it too.

Summer: This is the routine for awhile now.  I go to work, and then I go home so I can read the newspaper while I sit on my lawn chair in my backyard. 

I have been doing this since 2009.

Ben Moss: I was at WEM and I saw this jewellery store closing down.  Today I put it on my Facebook status update.  I looked it up and it turns out all their stores are closing.


Aug. 3, 2016: I told this sister and dad at dinner.  They both said that the store wasn't really good.

I looked at my Channel 4 for my Telus free preview and it's now Nickelodeon.

I was going through my channels and I found Comedy Network is Channel 500.  However, I will take a break from stand up comedy, The Simpsons, and shopping.

Breakdancing Orangutan:

"Five-year-old Dewi has stolen the show at Melbourne Zoo, by break-dancing in front of the cameras. The zoo was holding a 13th birthday party for orang-utan Malu when Dewi showed her moves."


Action movies: The month of Jan. 2016, I got a free preview of Showcase and they aired all these movies from as late as 2013.  I then recorded a lot of them and watched them on the weekends.  One movie a day on the weekend.

Now that I watched a whole bunch of them, I then overdosed on that too.  Right now I'm writing all my reviews on these movies.

Aug. 5, 2016: I see that it happened again.  I find Comedy Network on a channel, and then I don't get that channel.  Same with Bravo.

I was writing my TV and movie reviews.  I like writing them even if it's for TV and movies I don't really like.

Aug. 6, 2016 Between: I watched the show when it came out in summer 2015.  Then it got a second season and I watched it too every week.  There are only 6 episodes each season.

"When every 22-year-old or older person in a small town dies, the rest of them strive to survive."

I just rewatched the season 2 eps, but I only watched it for Ronnie (Kyle Mac from Edmonton) scenes.  Then I deleted the episodes.  It's kind of like how earlier this year I had to reread my teen magazines before I donated them.

I would say it was average.  They introduced a couple of new characters like the scientist Liam and the bad guy/ Ronnie's love interest Renee.

The season 2 finale kind of gave us a sign of where they will go next season, if they get renewed.

I read this article and I kind of have low expectations of it getting a season 3.  At least the cast and crew got paid, and the cast got more exposure for themselves and can get more work.

The writer in me is like: "Are you inspired after watching this good show?"  I haven't been inspired a lot.




Aug. 8, 2016: I just posted this on my blog/ sent this email about the Sex and the City writer Celia Walden and country singer Kacey Musgraves.  I'm not a fan of either, but the articles/ interviews were really uplifting. 



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"Turning 'bad dog' into 'good job'/ "Wordsworth in the Ottawa Valley"

May 23, 2016 "Turning 'bad dog' into 'good job': I cut out this article by Anisa Arsenault in the Metro on Oct. 15, 2013.  I only found the Pressreader edition.  It's about Pascale Lemire who put a picture of her dog who ate and ruined a pair of underwear.  Then her Tumblr blog took off.  She then started getting lots of posts and emails and got her blog to book.  It's called "Dog Shaming." 

"Mr. Tiger Goes Wild": I cut out this article by Frida, Phoenix, and Andrew Kaufman in the Globe and Mail on Dec. 21, 2013.  They review a picture book by Peter Brown.  It's about a tiger and other animals that all wear top hats and mind their manners.  Then one day Mr. Tiger decides to walk on all fours and goes into the jungle. 

"Wordsworth in the Ottawa Valley": I cut out this article by Philip Marchand in the National Post on Apr. 30, 2011:

There is a Wordsworthian strain to Canadian literature that is embodied in Alone in the Classroom, by Giller Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Hay. I’m not sure what the antithesis of this strain is — perhaps the work of Mordecai Richler, whose heroes are city dwellers at heart, shrewd in the ways of the world, caustically articulate and for the most part comic rather than tragic figures.

In Wordsworth mode, by contrast, no smart-ass stuff is allowed. The hero humbly learns from the garter snake and the warbler. Nature, as the poet says, is the anchor of our purest thoughts, the guardian of our hearts, the soul of all our moral being. The Wordsworth hero is not bookish, over-educated, bent over a laptop, but works with his hands in a healthy outdoors occupation. “How it lulls a person, the sight of work done easily and well and without conscious thought,” muses the novel’s narrator, admiring the way a young man peels an apple with virtuoso skill.

In Alone in the Classroom, this skilful apple peeler is named Michael — the title, by coincidence, of a pastoral poem by Wordsworth. The reader never enters directly into the point of view of this hero — but then the Wordsworthian hero, the simple shepherd or leech gatherer or solitary Highland reaper, is always presented from the rather distant perspective of the poet. In similar fashion, Michael throughout this novel is always seen from the point of view of the two women who are his lovers.

We meet him as a student in an elementary school in the town of Jewel, Sask. His teacher, Connie Flood, is an 18-year-old from the Ottawa Valley, “full of stories and laughs.” It is the fall of 1929, and disasters loom — the Great Depression, the dust bowl, the Second World War — but the biggest menace is the school principal, a fastidiously dressed fellow native of the Ottawa Valley named Parley Burns. Burns is a frustrated actor, playwright and aficionado of the French language. “English has a monosyllabic soul,” he says scornfully.

Easy to spot this man as the anti-Wordsworth. “The children were more intelligent as soon as they stepped outside,” the narrator remarks, but Burns is “not an outdoorsman” and “there is nothing of the field” in his “dustless, airless room, hostile to children.” Partly no doubt as a consequence of his divorce from the outdoors, Parley has a mean streak, defying convention by strapping girls — with vigour — humiliating others mentally and physically with his “ranking, comparing, depressing mind,” subtly forcing the school to enter his moods. He even sports a Hitler moustache.

Naturally he despises Michael, a dyslexic, and denigrates Connie’s hopeless attempt to teach the boy to read. But Connie knows better. If the printed page defeats him, Michael knows plants and animals. What is it, Connie wonders, that “unlocks the mind and frees it to go deeper, unfreezes the mind and allows it to learn? In Michael’s case, the out-of-doors and doing things by hand and being left alone.” In later life Michael will tell Connie that “every day he heard or saw something so beautiful it was like tapping into all the sorrows of the world.” We can see Wordsworth gravely nod his head in approbation.

As the school year progresses, Burns becomes an ever more disturbing presence. He stages a dramatic adaptation of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles — somewhat improbably for a Prairie school in 1929 — a production that, like the school, is “bursting with sex and yet leached of it.” The girl who plays Tess is subsequently assaulted by Burns, with tragic results. Connie and Parley leave Jewel forever at the end of the school year, returning to the Ottawa Valley.

At this point we are little more than one third of the way through the novel, and the focus slowly shifts from Connie to the first person narrator, her niece Anne Flood, a sort of disciple of Connie’s. In the fullness of time, both women sleep with Michael, who has also settled in the Ottawa region and who seems to have parlayed his outdoorsy, “easy-moving body” into quite a magnet for schoolmarms and other men’s wives. This is not quite the note of Wordsworth and indeed, by the end of the novel, the reader wonders if Michael is a true child of nature, working with his hands as a craftsman, or merely another in a long line of exploitative males. (The only man in the novel who is clearly not exploitative is a fellow teacher named Syd Goodwin, briefly married to Connie. Michael calls him “the sweetest man alive.” Alas, he is no match for Michael in bed.)

The affairs of Michael and the Flood women are not sufficient to carry the final two thirds of the novel and Anne subsequently finds occupation in the role of family historian, unearthing the reasons why unhappiness has stalked her own family. “It seemed to me that going deeper into my mother’s past would help me understand all the life that was blocked up inside me, that is blocked up inside each of us,” Anne Flood reflects. It’s a form of psychotherapy, which has some connections, to be sure, with Wordsworth and nature worship. There is also a mystery connected with the murder of a young girl, with a hint of suspicion falling on Burns, but Burns is only fleetingly present in the last two-thirds of the novel and so these plot and thematic developments sputter along. His villainy, and the conflicts he provoked, fuelled the first third of the narrative. Without him the novel is drained of energy. Oddly enough, for all the emphasis on his deadening, killjoy ways, Parley Burns is the character in the novel with the most vitality.

What remains of the Alone in the Classroom is a series of ruminations on the part of the author, some of them intriguing, some bordering on cliché. I like the rumination attributed to Connie by the narrator, early in the novel: “In those days nothing animated her mind more than fantasies of rescue, and of those fantasies, the most vivid involved rescuing not a friend, but an enemy. To rescue a lamb has merit; to rescue a wolf quickens the pulse.” There is a novel waiting to be written on that observation alone, although it is not this novel.



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"Life after Carrie Bradshaw"/ "Musgraves's message: Be yourself"

Jan. 24, 2016 "Life after Carrie Bradshaw": I cut out this article by Celia Walden in Edmonton Journal on Jun. 25, 2015.  It's about the Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell.  I never really watched the show, but the article is really good and it's about her being a writer.  It's also about feminism too:


Twelve years ago, Candace Bushnell and I spent a happy afternoon talking about death over a bottle of Pinot Grigio in her Charlotte Street hotel suite.

“I’m pretty sure my epitaph will just say, ‘Here lies Candace Bushnell: author of Sex and the City’,” shrugged the micro-mini-skirted blonde, fag in hand. A lot has changed since then.

At 56, Bushnell still looks like one of her thirty-something fictional creations, but she now reserves her “two glasses of wine – with ice” for dinners with friends and only occasionally allows herself to light up. Eschewing mad Manhattan (where she still owns an apartment downtown) for her house in Connecticut, she “lives a very, very disciplined life”.

“I eat a lot of asparagus,” sighs the best-selling author. “By 8pm I’m drinking tea and ready for bed. Because you know getting drunk is dangerous as you get older: you could fall down and break something.”

It’s the kind of pithy, Waughsian one-liner you’d expect any one of her literary alter-egos to come out with: if not, perhaps, the terminally girlish Carrie Bradshaw then certainly Samantha Jones, or PJ Wallis, the world-weary heroine of Bushnell’s new novel, Killing Monica.

Wallis inhabits the same brittle, elegant, pink champagne-infused world as the SATC, Lipstick Jungle, Four Blondes and Trading Up girls, but here’s the twist: as an author herself and the creator of the universally adored Monica (also the star of a blockbuster movie franchise), Wallis perpetually finds herself mistaken for - and gradually imprisoned by - her own creation.

“Of course it was totally tongue in cheek,” laughs Bushnell. “Yes, I took my life as a stepping off point but the reality is that I’ve never felt imprisoned by Carrie Bradshaw. In fact I’m the one who is always guilty of wanting more Carrie Bradshaw. And I’ve written so many books that weren’t about Carrie, three of which were also turned into TV series…” So she’s never had a Frankenstein moment when she wished she’d never invented her? “No!” scoffs Bushnell. “To me Carrie Bradshaw is every girl, whereas Monica is The Girl: nothing bad ever happens to her. She’s the perfect woman that looms over all of us.”


Being confused with her own glamorous characters is something Bushnell will admit she’s played up to over the years. On her forthcoming book tour, she knows she’ll have to “give them the full Bushnell” – as she puts it – “and that means the hair and make-up when honestly I just want to wear my ‘soft pants’” she groans. “The older you get, the less interesting clothes, shoes and handbags become.

"Of course it’s human nature for women in their 20s and 30s to be really focused on their looks and finding a partner. And it’s also about belonging. The mentality is: ‘This shoe will prove that I’m a part of this tribe’. But as a mature human being one should have less of a need for that kind of outside validation and be more interested in what’s going on in inside peoples’ heads.”

Statements like these are likely to enrage the same die-hard fans who accused Bushnell of being "a traitor to singletons" when – having dated the likes of media tycoon Bob Guccione Jr and publisher Ron Galotti, who inspired Mr Big – she finally married Charles Askegard, a 6ft 4in principal dancer for the New York City Ballet ten years her junior, weeks after their first meeting in 2002. There may even have been a touch of schadenfreude when they divorced in 2011. Certainly, the news that she is back on the dating scene is likely to please her acolytes.


“Still, I look at pictures of myself now and I see the wrinkles,” she says. “There’s no getting around it: I’m a 56 year-old woman and that’s how I look now. So my attitude is: ‘take it or leave it’. And it’s not like I’m trying to get a 25-year-old football player. I’m not even sure I’m trying to get any 25 year-old...” Not sure? Would she date a much younger man again? “Sure I’d date ‘em,” she sasses, “but I’m not going to marry ‘em.”

Bushnell doesn’t sound unhappy to be out there again. Nor should she be. After all, it was her wild dating adventures in the early Nineties that spawned the Sex and the City column (in the New York Observer), book and hit TV series (estimates of the deal she struck with HBO range from $50,000 - $500,000) - and two films.

Until the Connecticut-born daughter of a scientist (who invented the fuel cell used in the first Apollo space mission) and travel agency head hit Manhattan, she was “a skinny, flat-chested kid in cat’s eye-glasses” who spent her time at the local library penning short stories and sending them off to every agent in The Writer’s Handbook. At 19, Simon and Schuster paid her $1,000 to write one of a series of children’s books, Dress The Bear. “They never published it. Turns out people wanted Pat The Bunny but not Dress The Bear. Still, it taught me that if you wanted to be a writer, you had to deliver. And ever since then I’ve been big on delivering. I can’t tell you how many times I found myself writing the Sex and the City column at 4am, while all my friends were still clubbing.”

A regular at Studio 54, the young Bushnell “wore outrageous clothes and was always partying".
“I was like Miley Cyrus back then,” she smiles, “so wild and so full of myself. Had social media existed I would have been just like Miley – all over the show.”

Although feminists have questioned the messages in Bushnell’s oeuvre (many of her heroines are on a quest to find Mr Right), the author has described herself as a feminist “stealth bomber”.

“Today, it makes me sad when I see feminists attacking other women,” she tells me. “Because maybe we can do that a hundred years down the road, when we have dealt with real sexism towards women, but for now, let’s keep the focus where it belongs.” That focus, she believes, should be on changing the male psyche.

“Which is why we need more women scientists: to tinker with men’s brains. I know a lot of married women who feel like their husbands don’t see them or are dismissive. Because marriage is not equal. There is no way around that. It’s a job,” she says with a hoarse laugh, “and that job falls upon the woman. So sometimes women just get sick of it. The sense I get from women now is that they are very angry at men. They’re angry because of sexism, disrespect and their sense of entitlement - and that was exactly the same thirty years ago. Essentially, men haven’t changed.”

Bushnell’s fear is that change won’t be possible until male violence is addressed on a large scale. “I wonder if in a sense we are genetically breeding men for violence,” she laments. “Because the violence keeps perpetuating itself. As women we accept violence as part of male nature, and that’s where we have to start saying ‘no’.

"I’ve been in a couple of relationships where a man got violent. I’ve never actually been hit, but I’ve certainly seen inappropriate and illogical displays of male anger where I’ve known that I have to get out of there immediately. And when that happens a relationship cannot be fixed. But for women – who are still dependent on men, and men know that – one of the hardest issues is to really be able to draw that line. It would take a lot of courage and a big group of women to do that, but if in my lifetime it is acknowledged, I would be happy.”

The seriousness of Bushnell’s discourse shouldn’t come as the surprise that it does. Hers has always been the kind of sharpness that operates on a higher level to her subject matter, cutting straight through the froth. And although she confesses, like Killing Monica’s writer heroine, P.J. Wallis, to “literary” ambitions, she is also rightly scornful of the term.

“What’s funny is that Sex and the City came out in the UK at the same times as Bridget Jones’s Diary was published. Helen Fielding and I met at a party and exchanged books and when I read it I remember thinking: “Damn! She nailed it!” So that whole thing of literary/not literary is really a ridiculous concept. Because what’s important is whether the book is successful at what it sets out to do. And a great many literary books fail in that way.”

With that in mind, Bushnell feels that the epitaph she conjured up all those years ago shouldn’t be set in stone quite yet. “Although Sex and the City was huge and fantastic, I feel like I’m going to do other huge things. In some ways, I feel like my career is just getting started, which is ridiculous. Or is it?”



"Musgraves's message: Be yourself": I cut out this article by Chris Richards in Edmonton Journal on Jun. 25, 2015.  I'm not really a fan of hers, but it was a good article:


When Kacey Musgraves showed up two years ago singing about drags of weed and same-sex smooches, she wasn’t necessarily plotting an insurrection. At the time, the soon-to-be country star said she simply wanted to “create the new normal.”

Musgraves’s sturdy second major album, “Pageant Material,” finds the 26-year-old retrenching in her own brand of normal. Set to a series of svelte, mid-tempo country songs, she sticks to a message that’s both important and banal: Be yourself.

Because all of those small towns that have been glorified in all of those big country hits? They’re actually filled with petty, judgey, ornery, back-biting jerks. And those people should be ignored. “You can’t set sail if your anchor’s down,” Musgraves sings on “Miserable,” a song about those who seem to derive happiness only from being just that.

But throughout “Pageant Material,” Musgraves hews so tightly to this theme, she might as well be stitching sassy truisms onto throw pillows. “Mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy,” goes the hook of “Biscuits,” the album’s lead single. “I’d rather lose for what I am than win for what I ain’t,” she sings on the title track. “Nobody’s everybody’s favorite,” she shrugs on “Cup of Tea.”

This folksy style of shade-throwing is both a fine art and a necessity in Nashville, an industry town with a low tolerance for boat-rockers and an allergy to game-changers. On Musgraves’s superb debut album, 2013’s “Same Trailer, Different Park,” she found smart ways to speak her truth, waltzing across the industry chessboard while projecting the image of a young woman following her own rules. Branded as a rebel, or at least an agent of change, she magnetized non-country listeners and won a couple of Grammys in the process.

The biggest bomb Musgraves drops on “Pageant Material” is aimed directly at the Nashville ­cognoscenti through a song called “Good Ol’ Boys Club” in which she declares that being “another gear in a big machine don’t sound like fun to me.” It’s a winking jab at Big Machine, the record label that Taylor Swift calls home. “If I end up going down in flames, well, at least I know I did it my own way,” Musgraves sings.

This posture feels a little same-old, but we have to assume it’s purposeful. For starters, nine of the 14 tracks on “Pageant Material” were co-written by Shane McAnally, a songwriting assassin who helped launch Musgraves and Sam Hunt, two of country music’s most exciting new stars. As the brightest mind and sharpest pen on Music Row, McAnally doesn’t make many missteps. Maybe McAnally and Musgraves are simply firming up that “new normal” she once promised.

But if you listen to an entire country album wondering about its strategic intent, it means the music hasn’t really whisked you off your feet. And on occasion, it does.

Musgraves can still do dazzling things with her plain singing voice, and she knows how to sell a punch line with deadpan sweetness. “Family Is Family,” a zingy ode to the unbreakable nature of blood ties, is filled with those kinds of laugh lines, for instance: “They own too much wicker and drink too much liquor.”

And because Musgraves’s singing rarely feels overtly performative, she often sounds like she’s reciting these songs to herself, perhaps in an attempt to better figure out who she is.

So who is she now? The album’s strongest cut, “Dime Store Cowgirl,” comes closest to answering. “It don’t matter where I’m going,” Musgraves sings. “I still call my home town home.”

That might seem like faux humility, but the song ultimately suggests that Musgraves doesn’t want to be a part of any narrative other than her own. Maybe she’s singing all this “be yourself” stuff into the mirror. And maybe she hasn’t figured out who that self is just yet. Do we ever?



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