in US, only female governor of WY. She later served as Director of the US Mint from 1933 to 1953.

Nellie Tayloe Ross was born in MO 25 November 1876, and died in DC Dec. 1977, age101. She was a teacher, dedicated Dem activist, staunch Prohibitionist. She succeeded her husband as Governor of WY, after winning the special election after he died in office.

A remarkable woman.

Lady Freedom Returns about "Cats, Witchcraft and the Black Plague", it occurred to me that the same kind of hysterical, irrational, illogical, anti-scientific fear and insanity that gave us the horrors of The Burning Times are present today in qanon and company. Same mentality. Same kind of hatred and fear and lust for violence and destruction. Same stubborn determination not to learn.

A very disturbing thought.

nothing left to lose, and zero f's to give. You do not frighten us. You do not intimidate us. You remind us of young children, overtired and throwing temper tantrums, and we are inclined to deal with you as we do those young ones, on an adult level.

The world has changed beyond your sad, limited ability to cope with it. Those whom you have always looked down on, denigrated, ordered, enslaved, isolated, beaten, starved and killed, are rising up despite all your frantic efforts to maintain your illussory safe and comfortable and in-charge world.

May you never know a moment of peace, comfort, or ease. May your dreams be frightful. May you know dread, and fears, and panic, and terror, all that you have inflicted on others, every moment, waking and sleeping.

I AM WOMAN!! HEAR ME ROAAAAAR!!!!





SO MOTE IT BE.

back to my college days (yes, back when the earth's crust cooled).

One of my friends and classmates was gifted with a really wickedly twisted sense of the absurd. Loved him for it. One day, he was not feeling well, and, at his fiancee's and my insistence, went to our college butcher shop. . I mean, health center. She and I were having lunch in the student union when he came in, grinning. We asked him what was going on, so he told us. While he was sitting waiting for the doctor, he overheard the doctor and a female student talking. Apparently the pregnancy test had come back positive. My friend heard her protest, "But, Doctor he told me it wasn't his fertile period." (Now, understand that my alma mater has a pretty sound academic reputation, with students from some of the best secondary schools in the country. But here was a student so ignorant of basic human biology that she actually believed that bs.) My friend's reaction was, "I want to find that guy and sign him up and bottle him. Anybody who could pull off a line like that. .he has a future in politics." (Told you he was weird.) His fiancee and I were horrified that the young woman could be so clueless.

Second story, related to me by a friend, a couple of years after the above incident. One of her relatives and her mate were "in the mood", but he was worried. She reassured him, "of course we are safe, it's right in the middle of my cycle." The twins turned out great.

so far, and one I look forward to continuing. To all my Sister and Brother DU'ers, thank you. Looking forward to so much more as we fight to save what we love, and to make things better for all.

Love you all (wellll, some more than others, but. . .).

to Enma Goldman*, is yet one that expresses perfectly my feelings over all the decades of activist struggles. The quote was brought to mind again after an encounter yesterday with a very earnest soul.

There is a certain mindset within any kind of activism that says that any moment of joy, of laughter, of enjoying a brief respite, in the face of the serious activist struggles, is somehow blasphemous. How DARE we laugh, or smile, crack a joke, look at beauty. The issues and causes for which we fight are too serious, too important, to waste time on frivolities, says this particular dour mindset. We have probably all encountered this thinking, been on the receiving end of its censurious moral superiority.

To this calvinist mindset, I have one response. MEADOW MUFFINS.** There is a strain if thinking that runs through many belief systems that declare that suffering, denial, unending toil and sacrifice are our lot in life, our way to salvation and the promised land, after we are dead. Now, I cannot speak for anyone else, but in my belief system, Joy and pleasure, love and beauty, ARE essential. They fuel and feed us, sustain us in our struggles, give us strength and hope. We NEED the smiles in the light moment, the joy of watching children and kittens ad puppies gamboling, the outstretched hand, the stunning beauty of a sunrise, a mountain vista. Without these things, what is the bloody point??

So, I don't know about anyone else, but I intend to laugh and wonder, to love my kittyand my fiends, to enjoy my chocolate and my wine, as I continue working with my sisters and brothers, to make this a world worthy of all of us.

*read Alix Kate Shulman on the origin of that meme.
**those in the west understand.

store.