Sherry Chandler

From the Grant County News:

When Elizabeth Chandler Lester slipped into her robe Monday morning, it was in a role she’d never been in before.

Jan. 8 was Lester’s first day on the bench as a district judge. She is the first female elected in the 15th Judicial District, which covers Grant, Owen and Carroll counties.

“I think there’ll be a lot of eyes focused on me, more so because of how the election was than because I’m a woman,” said the petite, soft-spoken blond, prior to putting on her robe and taking her place on the dais at the front of the courtroom.

The petite, soft-spoken blonde is my niece. I’m very proud of her. (There’s a photo with the article if you want to see whether she looks like me.)

A little while back, Sour Duck asked this question:

Would you subvert community-agreed uses of technology for your political beliefs? Radical feminist bloggers have decided to rage against the machine by hyperlinking “Britney Spears’ crotch” and similar text to sites which are either feminist or hostile to visitors.

Some would say that’s one category, not two.

Either way, drive-by and search-engine visitors alike will be flummoxed when they click on Free Britney Spears Crotch Shots and end up at The National Organization for Women.

That’s actually pretty funny, and it’s good to know there are some active, clever young feminists out there battling the Brittany Spears image of woman. I’m not convinced it will do much good, though. And I tend to agree with Sour Duck that widespread use of this sort of activism could cripple search engines such as Google and Yahoo and wind up hurting us all. After all, what a feminist activist group can do, an anti-feminist group can do also.

I’ve always stood against censorship of any kind, have always thought that this is where my inner writer splits from my inner activist. The key question is who gets to be the censor? Who, in this case, gets to decide where to draw the fine line between pornography and erotica. And the answer, 99 times out of a hundred, is some prude who doesn’t want anybody to have any sexual fun. I associate censorship with repression and repressed societies seem more sexually dysfunctional than open ones.

But there is no denying that violent pornography is harmful to women and when I run across passages like the one below, I vacillate:

By “pornography” I meant women getting their nipples snipped off with garden shears, having meat hooks stuck into their vaginas, being disemboweled; little girls being raped; men (yes, there are some men) being smashed to a pulp and forcibly sodomized. The cutting edge of pornography, as far as I could see, was no longer simple old copulation, hanging from the chandelier or otherwise: it was death, messy, explicit, and highly sadistic.

— Margaret Atwood, “Laugher vs. Death,” from Writing with Intent, Article first published in 1983.

Compared to this sort of thing, looking at Brittany Spears’s crotch seems banal and not worth bothering about. (Is she an anatomically correct Barbie doll, do you think?) Men (boys) who find Brittany erotic should probably be pitied and recommended to a twelve steps program but if you’re going to fight porn, the stuff above is where you should put your energy.

And activities like that break so many laws they make censorship seem superfluous.

I was fixing my frugal supper tonight [alone, alone, all, all alone...] when a local weathergoit came on the telly all excited about “the brightest comet in the last 35 years” which could only be seen in the Northern hemisphere this evening. OUR LAST CHANCE! Apocalyptic Nowness!

This wanker is a global warming skeptic but I guess the scientific community’s word is law to him when it comes to the Extraterrestrial and the Spectacular.

The Elizabethans believed that comets portended all kinds of dire happenings for the State. Not sure what it would have meant to them if one petered out.

Well I went out after sunset with a digital camera and held up my fist next to Venus–when she finally appeared–and estimated another fist diameter to the right of the first and LOOKED for the “fuzzy Q-Tip” that was McNaught. Did not see it. Went out several more times, the last time with binoculars. Checked the internet for relative position of the comet. Never saw it in the sky. Nowt. Zilch. Zip. Its recent surge of gases and icy mist must have petered out as quickly as it flared.
Glad I did not phone Sherry who had gone off to a Green River Writers’ Do in Louisville so she was spared freezing her tuchis off for no good reason.
D’you suppose those naughty Global Warming extremists released some NY-style Stink-gas to obscure this wonderful Natural Spectacular?

Later I turned on the telly long enough to see that Fearless Reader is still perfecting that deer-in-the-headlights 1000-yard stare he learned from Dan Quayle. Seemed to be just as much substance to his speech there as there was to the comet. Later David Brooks admitted as much to Jim Lehrer, so it must be so.