Posts from — December 2007

Merry Holidays, whatever ones you celebrate.

In honor of the holiday season, here are a few bang-up ideas.

Let’s save all human joy for a roughly one month period starting in late November.

Let’s be caring and give to charity and think about the other people in our lives when we are at a sales rack, instead of just ourselves.

Let us treat each other like crap the rest of the year, so that we can make the holidays feel really special.

Let’s overeat and underappreciate.

I can get in trouble for anything, I swear.

I once worked in an office full of Christian Republicans. I was in Tennessee, so there you go. 

When I wore a Madonna shirt to the office, printed t-shirts became off-limits.

The woman I shared an office with for the first year I worked there was a Jehovah’s Witness. No one seemed to find it offensive on her behalf that they hung up Santa Claus everywhere and put up a tree during the holiday season.

A teacher from Britain who is teaching in the Sudan has been jailed over the name of a Teddy Bear. A fellow teacher took offense and turned the woman in. The bear’s name? Muhammad. The people who chose the name? The teacher’s young students. Some Sudanese people are marching and calling for the woman’s death, an option in that country for naming a teddy bear Muhammad.  Do you know what the most popular male name in the world is? You guessed it. Are they gonna go around killing, or calling for the death of everyone, who named their sons Muhammad too? And you wonder why religion makes me queasy.

Wow. That sounded decidedly too upbeat, didn’t it? But anyway…

What a damn mess. Seriously.

World Aids Day isn’t actually intended as a holiday (I don’t think, though I’m sure some greeting card company has jumped all over the chance to make cards commemorating the occasion). It’s actually meant to remind people that AIDS is an ongoing crisis, that just because they know how to prevent the spreading of HIV and now have drug cocktails with the ability to stave off death, it isn’t over.

But is it working?

Go here and check out some statistics.

Here is one of the most interesting:

Young people (under 25 years old) account for half of all new HIV infections worldwide.

Lack of fear and an ability to treat the illness leads to a dangerous kind of complacency.

Looks like people just aren’t getting the message.