More neat stuff to share with you today, although this is beginning to make me feel like I am being lazy.

After all, commentary on links is literally the easiest form of blogging for me. I don’t have to figure out what I want to talk about, I don’t have to think of anything to say, I just plonk the link out there for you and write down whatever pops into my head about it.

Not exactly effortless, but it is the low energy state of my blogging. Oh well. I promise that tomorrow, I will do something more personal.

First up, we have the strange and touching story of the kidnapped baby that wasn’t.

Here’s the story : In 1964, a baby goes missing from a hospital. A woman dressed as a nurse had asked to take the baby to another doctor in a different part of the hospital, then both baby and “nurse” disappeared. This set off a nation-wide search for the baby. This search yielded no results.

But then, eighteen months later, a baby of the right age is found abandoned on a street corner in Chicago, and the FBI identified it as the missing child, and returned it to its parents.

Except it was not, in fact, the missing baby. It is another child entirely, and the original child has never been found to this very day.

Meanwhile, the baby the original family got has grown up thinking that his biological parents are raising him. But as he grew older, he began to have suspicions. He looked in the mirror, and thought “I don’t look anything like these people. ”

Finally, at the age of 49, he gets his DNA tested, and sure enough, he is not related to either of the parents who raised him.

In fact, he has no idea who he really is. And I find that quite tragic.

He told his parents about it (while assuring them they are still his parents in every respect except biological), which some people think was a bad idea. But I can’t imagine keeping a secret like that from them. Some secrets just have to be told whether it is a good idea or not.

From my own point of view, I don’t look a thing like either of my parents, and honestly, neither do any of my three siblings. But that’s just genetic diversity.

In the world of genetics, every child is a different variation on the parent’s two genomes.

Moving on. Next up, a very funny response to some of the Shit People Say To Lesbians.

LOL. I love that she made something funny with nothing but a watermelon, a very understanding Mom, and a willingness to be extremely silly.

As comedy, she belabors the point a tad and does not quite keep the ball in the air. The video could do with an edit to tighten things up.

But that’s not the point. The point is that the whole “if you love women, why don’t you dress like one?” question is a particularly stupid one.

After all, straight guys love women, and most of them don’t dress like them. And gay men love men, and some of them do dress like them.

There is really no connection. A more proper question would be “if you are a feminist, why do you reject all things feminine?”.

But even that has a whole Lilith Fair’s worth of cultural baggage about gender roles encoded in it.

After all, I am quite happy being male, yet I am not interested in most ‘masculine’ things.

And speaking of nontraditional gender expression (and funny lesbians), Ellen.

Her ultra sheltered childhood fits in with what I have been thinking lately about how conservatives basically construct an alternate reality and then go live there. Presumably, that’s what her Christian Scientist parents did. Their home life was their controlled universe where by never talking about unpleasant things, you could pretend that they do not exist.

And like all things conservative, it is basically childish. The ‘unpleasant things’ are almost always the difficult realities of adult life, like sex and politics, and by creating this alternate world for themselves to live in, the conservative avoids having to deal with them.

Christian Scientists even take it to the point where they do not even having to deal with the truths of frailty, disease, and doctors. Scared of the doctor’s office and hospitals? Just pretend that they are bad places and you can make people better with the power of wishing real hard.

Also, wow, super young adult Ellen! I forgot her hair used to look like that. She looks so much better now. Even in the Carson clip she looks frumpy.

Now she is all short-haired and well dressed. I bet that’s three quarters coming out of the closet and one quarter Portia de Rossi.

I still can’t watch her actual show. It has a vibe to it that all female-centric daytime shows seem to have, that women’s magazine feel that I just can’t stand.

But Ellen will always be tops in my books, because not only is she funny AND adorable, she has dedicated her life to the idea that you can be funny without being mean, and that makes her aces to me.

Finally, another bit of excellent poetry with a great message like we had yesterday.

I have often thought that the whole “they’re taking our jobs” thing was bullshit. It is just basic ignorant xenophobia and racism finding a tissue-thin justification that keeps people from blaming the people who are actually at fault when unemployment is high.

After all, economics is hard, and requires the kind of high level abstract reasoning that today’s conservatives vociferously reject.

Better to just go from the gut and blame the thing you don’t like on the people you don’t like. Simple.

In fact, I reject the very assumption that there is a “they” who can take “our” jobs. I am a hardcore humanist and therefore I don’t believe in such artificial and harmful divisions between people.

The whole idea that it is somehow a tragedy when someone who is not like you prospers is a deeply primitive, tribal, racist point of view, and should be treated as such.

That’s why it’s so depressing that Lou Dobbs falls for this shit. He is smarter than that.

But age makes primitives of us all, it seems.

Tonight, it’s videos.

Well, and this. It’s a picture that is such amazingly pure and potent nightmare fuel that I am not even going to paste it into this blog entry, just give you a link to it.

So fair warning, it’s ultra fucking creepy. Brace yourself. And then…

Click at your own peril!

Now, being fucked up beyond belief, I love that picture precisely because it is so deeply disturbing. It makes for an incredibly potent example of the horrors of war. It offends on such a deep level that it instantly creates a strong aversion.

And yet, that is what war looks like. It’s not heroes and villains and an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil.

It’s children wearing gas masks so that mustard gas doesn’t burn the lungs right out of them.

And just think, there are millions of children living with just as much danger right now, all over the world, in every war torn area of the world.

But they’re not white, so it’s OK.

Or is it? The people who made this video sure don’t think so.

I applaud this video because it presents its message so well. The simple, somewhat child-like art style, the very carefully chosen and effective way it presents Katie’s story as one that any family that has suffered from the economic downturn, regardless of social status, can identify with it and sympathize.

They are even careful to add that Katie’s family has sold everything they could in order to make sure the audience understands that Katie’s family is at rock bottom.

And in doing so, it appeals to people’s basic decency. Asshole right-wingers might be able to convince themselves that all poor adults deserve whatever happens to them (because otherwise, they might have to care, and they hate caring, ergo all poor people are just lazy), but it’s hard to argue that anything their parents do means a child deserves to starve.

I have used food banks in the past. I really did not have much of a choice. I had so little money for groceries that my health was suffering. I was eating two meals a day and they tended to be mostly low value carbs like pasta or ramen.

With the food bank’s help, I could actually eat things with protein, like canned chicken, or beans.

I am so glad I don’t live like that any more!

And speaking of kids these days, rock this.

Now that’s the kind of shit that makes me reconsider my decision to ignore poetry as a potential creative outlet, because that shit is the fucking bomb.

As spoken word poetry, it is powerful mojo indeed. I have watched the video three times now and each time I was blown away by the incredible use of language as a weapon against evil.

I mean, that kid drop bombs like both World Wars plus Vietnam. And he’s doing it to fight something that I no-shit totally deep down nuke-it-from-orbit hate myself, which is all this beauty shit that the ladies (and worse, the girls) go through these days.

Caught in a world full of images of perfection that are one quarter genetic lottery winner and three quarters make up and fucking Photoshop, the females of this modern madness are locked in competition with a million women who do not even really exist.

That’s why broadening the visual palate of broads is so important. We need as many images of as many shapes of women out there as possible so that we can break this curse and release all those future anorexics from its wicked spell.

But enough of the sad stuff. It’s time to have fun, girlie style!

I am totally loving the current Cyndi Lauper revival. I have loved her ever since I first saw the video for She Bop (which is about masturbation) and it is totally awesome to see her showing up on the media to promote Kinky Boots and generally be awesome.

And that song was also quite revolutionary for its time, even though it seems like simple bubblegum pop of the most basic (and catchy) kind. It told girls that it was OK to go out and have fun and not take everything so seriously in an era when that message was very much needed.

Seventies feminism was an amazing force for good, but one of its unintended legacies was a very serious case of being very serious. That was a hell of a thing for the teenage girls of the Eighties to inherit, and so they escaped into the sort of girlie hedonism represented by Cyndi’s song.

There is a time and a place for getting really serious about How Hard It Is To Be A Woman, and that time and place is college.

And finally, we have this simple, powerful message aimed at ladies but applicable to everyone.

It’s a very simple question that really cuts right through all our neuroses, fears, hesitancy, and depression. What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

It immediately made me think of this song by TMBG :

I am increasingly of the opinion that the book this video is based on, Lean In by Cheryl Sandberg, got off on the wrong foot with people because of how the press interpreted some of the things it said, and that its message is actually quite awesome and applicable to damn near everybody.

I mean sure, boys are encouraged to lead and girls are not, but that does not mean all men are good at leading and love to do it any more than all women are good cooks and love to do it.

And it’s a damned good question. What would I do if I wasn’t scared?

It’s a very tricky question with me, because my fear often manifests as indecision, so trying to decide what I would do without the fear is like trying to catch smoke in a bottle.

But without the fear, I would certainly go out into the world more, meet more people, make connections, develop my social skills, and with any luck, find my niche in the world.

But right now, that all sounds very scary indeed.

But every day, that wall of fear gets… thinner.