Like Mmy, I'm happy I can pay taxes. I think the CEO of one of my former employers put it well one time when he said, "The key to making a lot of money isn't to pay as little in taxes as possible, it's paying a lot of taxes because you're making a lot of money." (In fairness, I'm not sure how well he put this into practice in his personal life.) That tends to be my mentality as well.

Trigger Warning: Misogyny, Rape Dave: I'd like to think all of this is implied. We lie in a society where women are frequently objectified. We have a rape culture where a number of men assume that a woman's choice to wear "revealing clothing," not remain a virgin, flirting, or even saying hello to a guy is an invitation to rape ("but it's not really rape because she obviously wanted it"). The women you're talking to may not feel they can assume that all that is implied, because for some guys, none of that is implied. So yeah, you'd probably be doing yourself a great service by clearly and explicitly stating all that.

Dave: You will notice that I never said you don't have the right to say "I just want to get laid." I'm simply pointing out how the person hearing you say it may perceive that statement and you as a result. You have a right to say whatever you want. You don't have the right to avoid the consequences of saying what you want. Even if what you say is honest.

hetero (as far as you know), O_o and your best friend is a girl woman who has zero sexual interest in you? If she isn't sexually interested in you, she isn't sexually interested in you. Full stop. Also, said girl woman is not in the mythological "Girl Womanwho is friends with lots of models and porn stars". Irrelevant. Cause seriously, I am down with a partner. Okay. This woman isn't interested in being partners with you. Keep looking. But, for the sake of argument, what if I said that? She might say, "Good luck with that." She might say, "We've been over this before. I'm not interested." She might quit talking to you. She might slap you. It's hard to say what she'd do. But I'd say it's highly unlikely she'd have sex with you. Also, telling someone "I want to get laid" -- particularly someone you're hoping will help you meet that desire -- generally is not charming, flattering, nor endearing. It tends to be a subtle form of objectification in that comes across as sounding like you're looking to get yours more than you're looking for mutual satisfaction.

I'll also note that some guys (and this includes me at times) often get pushed into the Friend Zone because they appear to offer no qualities to the woman (or man, in my case) in question other than "really liking her," "wanting to take care of her," and "being a Nice Guy." They present no interests, opinions, or thoughts of their own. They're constantly around the woman (or man) they want to be with because they have nothing else going on for them. I've learned from deep personal experience that this is a formula that really does make the idea of seeing the guy as anything more than a friend seem unappealing. And that's putting it nicely.

@kisekileia: I won't presume to answer for Literata, but I just want to say that I think it's incredibly sweet of you to ask that question.

@Kit, thank you for a summary of Ms. Nathan's position in the book itself. I do find that a much more nuanced position than was suggested by the Pandagon review.

I would say to not make an announcement and let it come out naturally -- your relatives and in-laws may surprise you by "figuring it out" and taking it in stride more than they would a right now announcement. I would hope so, anyway. Ana raises a good point here. I have found that when such things come out naturally, at the very least, it's likely to make the other person realize that if they choose make a big issue out of it, they're the one's making an issue out of it. On the flip side, if you make an announcement, they might accuse you of flaunting. Granted, it doesn't take much to get accused of "flaunting." Wear a nickel-sized pentacle pendant to work, and you might be accused of "flaunting." Hold your same-sex partner's hand while walking down the street together and you might be accused of "flaunting."

While there is a good bit of work in keeping a pony -- especially since most people want a pony in order to ride it -- the real difficulty isn't so much in the amount of work as it is in the amount of space you need for a pony. You can't just leave them cooped up in a stable. I used to know the exact figure. Part of me wants to say half an acre of pasture per horse or pony, but that actually sounds low.)

@Literata: I have no advice for you, but plenty of sympathy. I've often wondered (with no real solutions) of how to deal with my nieces' and nephews' occasional questions that border on my religious beliefs. I'm fortunate in which my sister and her husband no I'm a witch, so I don't have to worry so much about being "outed," but "keeping peace in the family" is still a concern. On a personal note, my mother dropped a complete bombshell on me Christmas day. She and I got into a conversation which turned towards my love life and certain bad experiences. As a part of this conversation, my mother said, "If I wasn't planning on retiring so soon, I'd get to know the new CPT at the hospital and see if he'd be interested in dating you." On the one hand, this is really cool, as it shows just how much my mother is now accepting my sexuality. But on the flip side, my mother was talking about playing matchmaker for me! Yikes! On the Pandagon review: I've never read anything about Sybil before, including the book being reviewed. However, as someone who has a handful of friends with Dissociative Identity Disorder (the most recent psychological term for multiplicity), I'm disturbed by what appears to me to be the reviewer's inclination to dismiss all cases of DID based on the problems with the Sybil story and similar stories.

And, amusingly, when I first read your post on "Mike the Knight", all I could think was DAVE THE BARBARIAN! I didn't make the jump from Mike the Knight, but I loved Dave the Barbarian. Of course, it has also ruined me. I can no longer hear the phrase "The Dark Lord," without immediately adding "Chuckles, the Silly Piggy" in my mind.

I'm going to ask the question that Rayford -- indeed, everyone so far -- has failed to ask: Was no one at Bruce's side when this tragedy stuck? Were there no visiting congregants, friends, and/or family members who might also be laying dead in the rubble? Here we have a comatose pastor -- whose comatose state at least some of the women of church have expressed worry over -- lying in a hospital. In such a situation, I imagine it would be pretty common there to be a steady stream of people from the church and others stopping by to watch over him and pay their respects during his hospital stay. Indeed, I imagine someone liek Loretta would actually make a formal schedule of church member visits so that there's always someone present in case Bruce's condition changes in any way so that the rest of the church can be immediately informed. I maintain that it's quite possible -- even likely -- that this means that there would probably be someone else in the room with Bruce who would share his fate when the hospital came crashing down. And yet, no one even stops to wonder about this. This tells me one of two things (and possibly both): 1. Not to further diminish the horror of the hundreds of "unsaved" who also died in this tragedy, our protagonists don't even care about other members of their own church who might have died in this tragedy. 2. No one at church was with Bruce, either because their head pastor has become that much of a recluse or people just can't be bothered to care. Any way you look at it, I say this demonstrates Bruce's complete failure as a pastor more than just about anything else.

This week, I took issue with Alisa Harris's tendency to project her own experience as a religious conservative onto other people, particularly members of marginalized groups (TRIGGER WARNING: Brief mentions of homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, and rape culture) in "Raised Right." I also continued my analysis of Peretti's book "The Visitation," noting how the experiences of his Pentecostal characters differ from the experiences of characters we've met so far. I followed up by noting how he described certain Pentecostal practices/phenomena in the book, and discussed what it might say about his intended audience. I also gave a brief introduction to a new anthology I recently acquired, which consists of essays describing various minority experiences in the Pagan community. Also, the geek in me reflected on a line from the 1992 movie, "Sneakers" and early attitudes about computers.

@spamflagger: I'd like to offer a suggestion that TBAT may or may not find helpful. Each comment is assigned its own link. The link for a comment can be copied to the clipboard by right clicking on the timestamp associated with each comment. It might be helpful to include the addresses of the spam comments when reporting spam. That way TBAT doesn't need to surf through comment threads to find the spam in question.

@Mmy, that is a perfectly lovely image. I agree.

I really agree with Kit and sarah's points. I think most people who are really, really opposed to advertising have ad-blocking set up anyway. Actually, my opposition to ads is based in a concern whether ads would provide the necessary capital to support the site. When I knew people who were looking to support sites with ads*, they found the revenue generated wasn't that great. In a few cases, I even heard the phrase "pennies per click." Note that's not "per click," not "per view." A few even had start begging their users to start clicking on the ads just to bring up the revenue. And to be frank, if a lot of people are using pop-up blockers, that could conceivably impact ad revenues as well. Maybe things have gotten better in the past few years and online ads have become a better source of revenue again. Maybe the readership here is large enough that it won't be a problem. If that's the way the community chooses to go, I hope that's the case. However, not everyone opposing hte ad routes is doing so merely out of a desire to avoid seeing ads.

Is $15 per month the only operational expense associated with keeping this site going?

@Rowen: Didn't Jarred just post something about the whole "I don't agree with/believe in homosexuality?" I suspect you're thinking of Yamikuronue's Saturday post over at Raven Wings. It's a very good post and the actual author deserves the credit for it. ;)

"Just a symbol." That's a phrase I dislike (intensely). Growing up Baptist, I heard it used in reference to communion: "Oh, we don't believe anything actually happens to the blood and wine like Catholics do. They're just symbols." The problem with that statement and the phrase is that it completly ignores the whole point of symbols and the power they wield. A symbol represents something else, a reality which that symbol is connected to. More importantly a symbol is a way of connecting to, accessing, and interacting with that reality. Wonderful post, Deird. Personally, I think "the priesthood of all believers" is a piece of Christian theology that is far too often undervalued among your fellow Christians.

But here's the thing, almost none of the movies I watched this year dealt with historical figures who had to be X gender and Y race or else be Historically Inaccurate. And 90% of the movies I watched this year could have been cast entirely from random selection of race and gender for 90% of the roles. And yet... for some reason... they weren't. I would also note that Hollywood has had no problems recasting characters from books as white for the movie "based on" said book. I'm particularly thinking of "Bringing Down the House" being morphed into "21." I think the thing I find so strange about Firefly's scarcity of scenes in which the women interact is that there were so many women on the show. The men only outnumbered the women on the ship by one. And yet, the number of woman-to-woman conversations in the show are still scarce.

Happy birthday, Literata.

Some of the search terms make sense to me (left behind) and some really do not (people apparently looking for rather freaky porn.) A few years back, I used to do a monthly post discussing all the strange search phrases that led people to my blog. I quit the practice after six months because I realized that it was actually increasing the number of hits I got from unusual searches. And let me just say, "rather freaky porn" was an apt description for some of the search phrases I saw.

@mmy: That should read Kotex, not Kodak. For a second there, I was worried. I know Kodak got into a lot of different things back when it was in it's hay-day, but I'd never heard them getting into feminine hygiene products....

I'd like to welcome you as a new writer here. I hope you'll share more of your thoughts with us as time goes on. Would you be willing to talk more about the messages you received as a child that taught you that you had to be better than the white girls (and practically perfect) in order to gain the same kind of attention they did? Did they tend to be more subtle, more direct, or consist of a broad spectrum of comments of varying degrees of subtlety/directness?

The math I'm using is "Lower google placement" = "less traffic." No, that is an assumption you're using. Truth be told, there's only one metric that accurately reflects Fred's total traffic: Site statistics. As I know I don't have access to his site statistics and I can reasonably guess you don't either, we have to work with what we have. We do know how many published comments Fred is receiving. While it certainly doesn't paint a complete picture of his actual traffic, it's the best we have. Google placement doesn't actually tell us anything about Fred's traffic, as we don't know how much of his traffic comes from Google as opposed to direct links from other sites, links/searches from within Patheos, and so on. And quite frankly, I find your "concern on Fred's behalf" a bit...strange anyway.... Its not enough to say that "Fred has plenty of traffic." He's running a business here, he needs all the traffic he can get. Strange, I've never gotten the impression that Fred considers his blog a business.....