Posting for Debbie’s Six Word Saturday.
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My orchid is blooming again! For years, it never bloomed (I’m not even sure why I kept it — but in this case, indifference paid off), and now it’s bloomed twice in a matter of months.
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Living Roof, California Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park
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Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City
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What a great challenge from Lens Artists!
P. A. Moed explains:
- This week we’re showcasing cities, large and small, near and far. What are the features of your chosen city? Show us buildings, skylines, the streets, the people, and life in public spaces. Or, if you want, focus on two cities, and compare their features. Show us images that are part of your overall impression of the city.
The last big city I visited was Mexico City. I stayed in a newer area called the Polanco. Lots of fancy condominiums around (Sale price, according to a hotel employee: $2 million US). Here are some of the views from my hotel room.
Mexico City seems to be booming. The contrast between rich and poor reminded me so much of the Philippines.
I saw a lot of people walking huge black mastiffs, doberman pinschers and German Shepherds. Which is definitely not the type of dog I’m used to seeing as pets in the US.
I wondered if the dogs were part of hotel security. Imagine my surprise when I was told they were just “pets.”
Stay tuned.
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Leya is the host of this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge. The theme is circular wonders.
Without further ado . . .
- Picture # 1: Stafford Park, Redwood City, last summer
- Picture # 2: Parroquia de la Sagrada Familia, Roma Norte, Mexico City, the church where my nephew got married last week!
- Picture # 3: Main courtyard, Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City (That pillar is so imposing!)
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The first of my roses to bloom this year is:
TA-RA!
My Fourth of July rose!
Took this picture a few minutes ago. Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day.
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Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.
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“Bread” appeared in Cricket Online Review, Vol. VIII (Spring 2012)
- “Bread rises. This is something you know.”
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Mendocino Meadow, June 2023
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Now You See Him (an excerpt)
Unbelievable. Look where I am, just a year after I came to America: Planned. Fucking. Parenthood. ‘Shinjirarenai!’ In Japan, they call them reideizu kurnikku — straight up Ladies’ Clinics. Makes more sense, right? Like, who ever had an abortion ’cause they planned to be a parent?!
HA. HA. HA. HA.
Who knew it was possible to write a funny story about abortion?
I know Francesca from Twitter. We follow each other — or at least, I think we do. It would be bad to find out that I follow her and she doesn’t follow me back. Bad, but not that uncommon.
I don’t know, I think it’s my jokes. Some crazy guy who’s a real cinema maven BLOCKED me on Twitter after I started joining his hashtag games. Nothing I ever tweeted is worth blocking me for, even my snide remarks about TFG. He didn’t even bother arguing with me or saying, “You’re wrong.” Just straight up blocked me. I wonder if it’s because I said I walked out of Oppenheimer, and it was his movie of the year?
Stay tuned.
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As you probably guessed from the title of this post, I am still reading The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice, by New Yorker contributor Elizabeth Flock. Still in Part I, about the woman from Alabama who killed her attacker.
Reading Flock’s account of the trial is stressful, especially if you feel empathy. It’s clear that Alabama has a long, long way to go to correct gender bias.
Over the past several decades, the incarceration of women in the U.S. has grown at nearly double the rate of men. The Bureau of Prisons estimated that 230,000 women and girls were behind bars as of 2019. By 2020, that number had dropped to almost 150,000, due to many incarcerated people being released during the COVID-19 pandemic, though that decline was not expected to continue. Almost two million people remain imprisoned in total in the U.S., more than in any other country. No national data is available on how many women are, or have been, imprisoned for violent crimes claimed to have been acting in self-defense. For years, this missing number has frustrated women’s rights advocates.
— The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice, p. 85 -
This has been a very rainy month. My neighbors’ gardens look so lovely — around here, everyone has a front yard, but very few lawns. Most of the yards have beautiful blooming trees and artful arrangements of rocks, tulips, roses, wisteria — especially wisteria.
My white Madame Alfred Carriere rose has burst into glorious bloom! I count close to a dozen. And they opened all at once, too! When the rain lets up, I’ll try and snap a photo.
In the meantime, I do have an indoor plant that is blooming right now: my orchid! More of its buds opened yesterday.
Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day:
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Still reading The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice, by Elizabeth Flock. Please do not read this if you are in a bad mood because this part will only infuriate you.
Still on Case # 1, the Alabama woman who was raped by a drug dealer and sent to jail (for shooting and killing the dealer). Unable to afford a lawyer, she was assigned a public defender. She wanted the lawyer to build a case for her defense on the basis of “Stand Your Ground,” which had been legal in Alabama since 2006.
But when she went to court for a pre-trial hearing, in October 2018, she found that her lawyer, James Mick, had re-scheduled the hearing without informing her.
- Her hearing was canceled because Mick had requested the court have Brittney evaluated by a state psychologist, which she said Mick never told her. The evaluation would assess her competency to stand trial and her mental state at the time of the shooting. He told the psychologist that Brittney needed evaluation because her behavior was “erratic.” Mick also filed a motion to pursue a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. It is unclear if Mick intended to use the insanity defense to clear Brittany — a defense that is rare and hard to win — because, she and her mother said, he did not share his reasoning with them. Perhaps he thought claiming insanity would be more successful than Stand Your Ground.
Brittany’s strongest ally was her mother. We should all be so lucky to have a mother like hers.
When the time came for the medical evaluation requested by Brittney’s lawyer, the mother “was upset to see the psychologist was male.”
The interview lasted “several hours.” The psychologist described Brittney’s “compulsive eating” when Brittney unwrapped “nearly a dozen mini Snickers bars” she’d taken from the receptionist’s desk. “Brittany later said she hadn’t eaten anything that day and was hungry.”
I’m in agreement with Brittney’s mom: why’d the lawyer get a male psychologist to do the evaluation? He ended up being fairly condescending. It was already hard to defend Brittney, why add “compulsive eating” to the mix? (Conclusion: Not only was this woman a rape victim who killed her attacker, she was also a compulsive eater. Hello?)
Other observations made by the psychologist: Brittney was “frequently crying”, “acting panicked”, and constantly asked “questions about her future.”
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If you guessed that I have just started a new read, you would be correct! I got halfway through A Gentleman in Moscow.
Am now reading The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice, by journalist Elizabeth Flock, a contributor to The New Yorker.
Flock analyzes three separate case studies, the first of which is about Brittany Joyce Haley Smith.
Raped by a drug dealer, Brittany spends “several hours sitting in a patrol car,” before being taken to Crisis Services in Madison County for a sexual assault exam. (Several hours? wth)
- The office in Madison County is quiet but welcoming, with deep couches and warm yellow lighting. A patchwork of jeans hangs framed on the bathroom wall, symbolic of a protest by thousands of women in Italy in 1999, after a court there suggested a woman couldn’t be raped if she was wearing tight jeans. Bright-colored Post-its stuck to the bathroom mirror reassured clients: “Everything will be okay,” “You are braver than you think!” and “Every day is a fresh start.“
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One of my great Airbnb finds of the last couple of years was an East London flat facing Haggerston Park, where I stayed the summer of 2022. Not only was the flat homey and spacious, it had the most interesting collection of books (I looked up the flat, thinking to return the following year, but the rate had doubled).
Here was one of the books:
Posting for Debbie’s One Word Sunday.
Kanlaon 