Syllabus #151

Wow, so, slow news week, amirite?

If only.  

It's Mother's Day, which makes this week's Supreme Court draft opinion leak all the more poignant.  Motherhood should be a choice.  Period.  Women deserve no less than full bodily autonomy to make choices about what goes into our bodies, what comes out of them, and what we put on them.  Case in point:  The woman in the picture below chose to be a mom, and an awesome one at that.  The baby you see here did not.  But she should be able to choose to wear those overalls without a shirt if that's what she's into.  Her body, her choice.

Summer, 1986

Ugh.  

Double ugh.

On Ben Franklin's abortion recipe:  "In this week’s leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” Yet abortion was so “deeply rooted” in colonial America that one of our nation’s most influential architects went out of his way to insert it into the most widely and enduringly read and reprinted math textbook of the colonial Americas—and he received so little pushback or outcry for the inclusion that historians have barely noticed it is there. Abortion was simply a part of life, as much as reading, writing, and arithmetic."  I guess Florida won't be including that math book in their curriculum either?

Who gets abortions?  Short answer, just about any type of person with a functioning uterus you can think of.  For every reason you can think of, and some you probably would prefer not to imagine, like a child getting raped by a family member, or a woman finding out late in a pregnancy that terminating is the only way to save her own life.  What do all the reasons have in common, though?  They are none. of. anyone. else's. damn. business.

In lighter news:

You can exhale now.  I know you were waiting with bated breath to find out if our boy Malcolm would ever have his new penis moved from his arm to his crotch.  Surely I can't be the only person whose recent YouTube for Roku search history includes the phrase 'british man arm penis,' can I? 

I can't even tell you how amped I am for this Weird Al mockumentary starring Daniel Radcliffe.  Will I actually watch it when it comes out in September?  Probably not!  Will I think about it from time to time and delight in the fact of its existence?  Absolutely.  

I made this tomato butter pasta because someone sent Andy the recipe and he was weirdly excited about it?  And it was just okay.  It was not worth the amount of time or butter required for its execution, but it was actually better as leftovers (probably because I didn't have to do any of the work). 

Analog Reading:

Read Other People's Clothes by Calla Henkel.  The description I read that prompted me to place a hold for the ebook sounded both fascinating and potentially vapid.  Thankfully it was much more the former, and, I suspect, only deliberately and self-consciously the latter, in strategic places.  It was excellent.

Now reading Lost in the Valley of Death: A tale of obsession and danger in the Himalayas by Harley Rustad.  It's a non-fiction investigation into the disappearance of a 36-year old American adventure dude who disappeared while on a spiritual quest in the Himalayas.  Interesting so far, but I gotta say that I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the missing guy (yet).