Congratulations to the Forbes 100 Best Blogs for Women!

Many of my favorites (links from here and from www.mysterymommy.blogspot.com) made it onto the list. YAY!!!

I'm disappointed that they left out Shakespeare's Sister, Hoyden About Town, and Shapely Prose, and some others but think it's a pretty good list!

NLS has a must-read post up (edited for proper link)

I mean it. Read it.

Roy Zimmerman talks (and sings) about Loving v. Virginia and Prop 8

More on Language

There's a terrific post up on Feministe about how to center people with disabilities.

Over at FWD/Forward, Anna recently linked this article on the media’s problem with coming up for terms to discuss disability. This problem is not limited to the media; a lot of people struggle with disability terminology. People want to use the right word, but they’re not really sure what the right word is, and sometimes some very intriguing circumlocutions and euphemisms are employed in the service of trying to be respectful.

I thought I’d write a very brief primer on some disability terminology in US English, to familiarise nondisabled readers with the language that has arisen as disability rights activists fight for the right to self identify, to resist ableist language, and to confront problematic framings of disability embedded in the way we talk about disability. The disability rights movement is much older than many people realise and from the start, people were tackling, confronting, and challenging language. Respectful language is already here; it’s been developed, refined, and used by people with disabilities for decades, it’s just disseminating to the general population very slowly.

It’s important to remember here that self-identification trumps all—if you are talking to or about a particular person, please ask how that person identifies or would like to be referred to.

Read the whole thing.

Beautiful

Go look at what Dave and Vita made!

Two of my favorite things in one place

Ms. Magazine and Shakespeare's Sister.

Interview with Stevens up on The Leader

(via The Blue Ridge Leader)

Dear School Board (edited for a clarification)

So you say you want to keep high school enrollments under 2000.

Board member J. Warren Geurin (Sterling) said the School Board believes high schools operate best with a maximum of 1,800 students. Schools with more than 2,000 students are not desired for educational reasons, he said.

I hate to bring this up again, but have you never heard of
Stuyvesant High School? Enrollment: 3300. How's about Bronx High School of Science? Enrollment: 2800. Brooklyn Tech? Enrollment: over 4900.

These are schools parents glory to have their children go to.

Stuyvesant:

According to a September 2002 high school ranking by Worth magazine, 3.67% of Stuyvesant students went on to attend Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, ranking it as the 9th top public high school in the United States and 120th among all schools, public or private. In December 2007, The Wall Street Journal studied the freshman classes at eight selective colleges (Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, U. Chicago, and Johns Hopkins), and reported that Stuyvesant sent 67, or 9.9% of its 674 seniors, to them...
...Stuyvesant has contributed to the education of several Nobel laureates, winners of the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize, and a host of other accomplished alumni. In recent years, it has had the second highest number of National Merit Scholarship semi-finalists, behind Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia...
...Stuyvesant, along with other similar schools, has regularly been excluded from Newsweek's annual list of the Top 100 Public High Schools. The May 8th, 2008 issue states the reason as being, "because so many of their students score well above average on the SAT and ACT." US News & World Report, however, included Stuyvesant on its list of "Best High Schools" published in December 2009, ranking 31st.

{Note: Wikipedia doesn't have the current college acceptance rate overall for graduates, but in my year (1987), only two of the 791 graduates did NOT go straight on to college. Of the surviving members of my class, to my knowledge only one has not graduated from a university at this date.}

Bronx HS of Science:

Bronx Science has developed a worldwide reputation as one of the best high schools in the United States, public or private, ranking fourth in U.S. News and World Report's 2008 list of America's "Gold-Medal" high schools. It attracts an intellectually gifted blend of culturally, ethnically,[7][8] and economically diverse students from New York City.
Every year almost all Bronx Science graduates go on to four-year colleges; many attend Ivy League and other prestigious schools. Bronx Science has counted 132 finalists in the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search, the largest number of any high school. Seven graduates have won Nobel Prizes — more than any other secondary education institution in the world — and six have won Pulitzer Prizes.

Brooklyn Tech:

Brooklyn Tech is a founding member of the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology. Brooklyn Tech is noted for its famous alumni (including two Nobel Laureates), its academics, and the large number of graduates attending prestigious universities. Routinely, more than 98% of its graduates are accepted to four-year colleges with the 2007 graduating class being offered more than $1,250,000 in scholarships and grants. It appears as #63 in the 2009 ranking of the annual U.S. News & World Report "Best High Schools" list.

I'm not saying that large schools always work, or that they are appropriate in every situation, but large schools can be educationally rigorous and can, in fact, beat the pants off Loudoun County's schools academically.

So, my dear School Board, you're going to have to come up with something other than "educational reasons" for why you won't even study the FEASIBILITY of expanding the size of the existing schools. Because I just gave you a total of over ten thousand reasons why that won't fly.

All my best wishes,

Liz Miller
The Doorbell Queen

The NARAL Prochoice VA CPC Road Tour

The NARAL Prochoice VA CPC Road Tour is headed to Purcellville tomorrow- not too late to attend! It's at 5:30 at the Loudoun Valley Community Center, 320 W. School Street, Purcellville, VA 20132

Constantly Surprised...

...by the otherwise seemingly intelligent, rational, sensible people who think that Fox News is a news channel.

And also constantly surprised that if I change the channel in the break-room to CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, Headline News, or ANY OTHER CHANNEL AT ALL, that within 20 minutes, the TV will be back on Fox.

Let me say first, that the primary reason I hate Fox actually applies to many other news commentary shows. I hate listening to people shouting at and over each other.

Listen to other people once in a while. You might learn something. You might hear something which makes YOUR argument stronger. If your argument can't hold up to the clear light of someone else picking it apart, then it's not a defensible position, is it?

(This is one reason I often read the transcripts of shows instead of watching them in real time.)

Another reason I don't like Fox can be summed up in two words: Glenn Beck.

I don't understand how someone who daily advocates for armed uprisings has a TV and a radio show.

Can you explain that to me?

And the third reason I don't like Fox News? Is their happy little habit of putting a (D) after the name of any Republican elected who has been caught in a scandal. Along with the many other little "mistakes" they make in editing video.

I accept bias in reporting, I really do. But don't lie to make your point. Don't edit in video from an entirely different event to make a rally look well attended. Don't misrepresent what party a person is from.

And stop yelling*. Seriously.



*I don't watch shows on other channels where the main form of communication is shouting, either. Chris Matthews, I'm talking about you.

Ambivalence

1 : simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings...toward an object, person, or action

Also, reasonable people can disagree on complex decisions where there are both benefits and drawbacks no matter which option you choose.