Where's Our Line?

I'll be fascinated to know where we'll draw the line. Concentration camps? Death squads?

"We caution people not to write about bombs because if they're going on vacation, their travel plans will be disrupted," she said.

Random

Some random miscellany:

Plastic surgeons today warned people not to have cosmetic surgery to try to gain celebrity looks.

And, in case there was any further dissent about the reason there are still more dead people in the middle east: Saddam controlled a country at the centre of the Gulf, a region with a quarter of world oil production in 2003, and containing more than 60% of the world's known reserves. With 115bn barrels of oil reserves, and perhaps as much again in the 90% of the country not yet explored, Iraq has capacity second only to Saudi Arabia. The US, in contrast, is the world's largest net importer of oil. Last year the US Department of Energy forecast that imports will cover 70% of domestic demand by 2025.

Alternative energy source, anyone? Might be a lot cheaper than invading a desert country and killing thousands of people. Oh, right, but then all those US oil barons would be out of a job. Well, shit, then. There are some interesting predictions in this article. Maybe it's just too much to ask people to tell the truth before they start killing people. Maybe it would be a lot harder to kill people if we told each other the truth.

On a lighter, distracting note: I just can't stop laughing.

About Brutal Women

So, at some point, I should address the fact that brutalwomen.com is a rather bad porn site. That is, that's why I don't own that URL. Though I'd prefer to have it.

Of course, any configuration of URL that includes words like "women" or particularly "girl" are likely going to be porn sites. Porn sites jumped on this internet wave pretty quick and early (I wouldn't go so far as to say prematurely...).

I still stick by my decision to use brutalwomen.blogspot.com, and I apologize to those whose internet filters cull me. There's censorship for you.

Things I Can't Sell

Two Girls

Two girls, a he and a she, married along the far shores of the Shadow Sea. They were both very small, delicate in the wrists and ankles, light enough to fly. Frost kissed their eyelashes. They lay in the snow, dressed all in martyr's white. We stoned then to death at dawn. The blood was very beautiful.

The Women of Our Occupation

The drivers were big women with broad hands and faces smeared in mortar grit, reeking of the dead. Their eyes were filmed over with memories of dust. When we did not see them passing through the gate, ferrying truck loads of our dead, they came to us in dreams, the women of our occupation.

Wonder Maul Doll

We'd set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We're all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

Sho

There was a boy in the snow. He was not beautiful.

He was left to me because I am an old person, a man by right of absence, not presence. I had all those organs removed years ago. The boy was carried and set down -- not gently -- in the gutter along my street, three doors from my stoop. The streets were bitter cold. If I left him where he lay, no doubt, the unbeautiful boy would become as the trees, coated in icy frosting and pushed into the sewers by the street sweepers in their growling machines.

I'm thinking it has... ahem... something to do with the themes...