In Oklahoma, my chicken coop was huge; I did it that way on purpose to keep the chickens from being able to kill all of the grass with their scratching. So when Jae recently suggested expanding our current coop, I didn’t really need a lot of convincing to agree to it, especially now that the turkey is starting to get big. So last week, Chekhov came over and we set up posts for another gate on the opposite side of the coop from the existing one, plus T-posts to hold up the fence (it only needs to be strong enough to contain chickens on the inside and withstand pig scratching from the outside). I’m not sure I have enough spare fencing lying around, so I may need to get some more welded wire to finish up. Then in August I’m going to put a new roof on the henhouse, and we should be good for another few years unless I decide I really like raising larger fowl (which, to be honest, seems unlikely at this time).
Archive for the ‘Biography’ Category
Diary #783
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset on July 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Links #782
Posted in Biography, Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Tyranny, tagged artificial stupidity, cops, domestic violence, drugs, illegal aliens, Kentucky, Mad Libs, Never Call the Cops, psychology, STEM, Texas, video on June 29, 2025| Leave a Comment »
This feels dystopian. – Theo Browne
I wish there were some single video that I could feature to honor Dr. Demento, but it’s impossible; there are just too many, even on this blog alone. The good doctor introduced me to Tom Lehrer, Spike Jones, Allan Sherman, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and innumerable one-off novelty songs of the sort that have littered my Links columns for the past 13 years. So I’m featuring another of these rolling ball machines I enjoy looking at, courtesy of Rikki de la Vega. The links above it were provided by Franklin Harris, Jason Kuznicki, Phoenix Calida, Mike Masnick, Radley Balko, and Jesse Walker, in that order.
- Dr. Demento is retiring.
- This week in artificial stupidity.
- No, your reason isn’t an exception.
- I refuse to believe this, unless it was the Sixth.
- Was this “protecting” or “serving”? It’s hard to tell.
- New communication technologies and the paranormal.
From the Archives
- Everyone who spread “sex trafficking” hysteria contributed to this tragedy.
- No public library is safe from censorship by politicians who hold the purse.
- Vast sums of time, money & energy, flushed down the “culture war” toilet.
- Why do we need “permits” to exercise our speech rights in the first place?
- Both sides in the culture war have completely taken leave of their senses.
- Cops, artificial stupidity, Donald Sutherland, Martin Mull, and much more.
- Australia expands Drug War, feigns surprise at predictable consequences.
- “Inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady” = “molesting a 12 YO”.
- The government thinks you shouldn’t be allowed any privacy whatsoever.
- SCOTUS expands one of the greatest legal abominations ever conceived.
- Cops aren’t the only violent trade whose members feel sexually entitled.
- Contrast the speed with which states pass laws increasing cops’ powers.
- I doubt this is the kind of lawsuit Louisiana politicians wanted to attract.
- Cops simply ignore putative cop-control laws without criminal penalties.
- A government allowed to censor one thing can also censor other things.
- Canadian politicians ignore events in other parts of the Commonwealth.
- The State’s insulting idea of compensation for a mass public gang rape.
- One who ruins lives over arbitrary diktats trips up over a similar diktat.
- Authoritarians love their wanking fantasies of mind-reading machines.
- Cops, fantasies, Sheldon Harnick, John Goodenough, and much more.
- This silly tale is more pathetic now that the trope has largely died off.
- This barbarity began using the excuse of “fighting human trafficking”.
- This is too useful a tool of state control for the rulers to give it up.
- Corporations have become the favored tool of censors worldwide.
- It’ll take a lot more such rulings before this political fad is buried.
- Reporter tries to bury the lede; headline writer won’t participate.
- Uber already encourages its drivers to spy on riders for the pigs.
- Retrospectives of my blogging from June 2012, 2013, and 2014.
- The claims in these nuisance lawsuits are increasingly absurd.
- Prohibitionists’ real goal is to completely ban online sex work.
- Assange was freed as soon as it became politically expedient.
- When a woman dies by hanging, it’s nearly always a murder.
- Even cops are starting to admit Shotspotter is a boondoggle.
- Cops, futurism, dead people, Cab Calloway, and much more.
- Chinese rename other people’s villages against their wishes.
- Because obviously prohibition doesn’t ruin enough lives yet.
- Conditioning kids to accept constant, intrusive surveillance.
- Composing and performing a kind of music only I can hear.
- There are many ways for governments to steal things.
- The dystopian future of Minority Report has arrived.
- So many rapist cops, so many underage victims.
- Taking that nasty old roof off of the wellhouse.
- A curated selection of tweets from June 2024.
- Prohibitionism is a dangerous mental illness.
- Throwback Thursday’s Bloody Nightmare.
- Another barely-into-summer heat wave.
- The annex bathroom is almost finished.
- No woman is safe from predatory cops.
- The tiniest pullet egg I’ve ever seen.
- No, your reason is not an exception.
- Another curated selection of tweets.
- Working on Sunset’s outbuildings.
- 22 vultures coming in for the kill.
- Your “leaders” at work.
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
Throwback Thursday’s Great Love
Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, Words, tagged A False Dichotomy, agency denial, artificial stupidity, blogging, cops, imaginative fiction, language, Magic Formulae, Mechanocracy, neofeminism, prohibitionist myths, sex work is work, Twitter on June 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »
The only people who can truly claim to have made an absolutely free choice to do any kind of work are the Paris Hiltons of the world, those who have a guaranteed inheritance, income and secured future no matter what they choose to do with the present.
– “A False Dichotomy”
Though I will never set physical foot on another world myself, I have walked a thousand of them in my imagination.
– “Ad Astra”
If you meet a cop and he wants to arrest you he will do so, even if you aren’t even a hooker, and no magical formula will prevent that. – “Magic Formulae”
The whole “pimp” and “sex slave” mythology derives from the need to deny the legendary sexual powers of whores by pretending that we’re the pathetic, powerless victims of men. – “Don’t Try This At Home”
Computers are useful tools and (usually) dependable servants, but apparently generations of science-fiction writers have failed to pound into the heads of the intellectually lazy what a colossally bad idea it is to accept them in positions of authority. – “Mechanocracy“
Diary #782
Posted in Diary, Fiction, Philosophy, tagged Grace, imaginative fiction, Lost Angels, psychology, recipes, Sunset, Who in Review on June 24, 2025| 1 Comment »
We had another unusually-chilly spring this year, so I didn’t trust my tomato plants outside until this past weekend; if they can’t survive in the first week of summer, I’ll just have to throw up my hands in despair. But though the temperatures haven’t been quite summery, even by Olympic peninsula standards, the days are as long as they’re going to get, and that means my seasonal anxiety is back. As I’ve noted in the past, it isn’t nearly as bad since I moved to Sunset as it was in Seattle, probably because the quiet of the countryside counteracts some of it, while the noise and commotion of the city aggravates it. But this year, it sneaked up on me because I’ve been attributing my emotional stress to grief. It wasn’t until a week or so ago that I asked myself why that should be worse now than it was immediately after Grace’s death, or in the first few months afterward; I only just realized that as is typical for me, the anxiety runs under the surface and breaks out at weak points. Expressed another way, the anxiety is acting as fuel for my grief, making it just as intense as it was in January and February, and more intense than it was in March and April. But now that I’m done with Who in Review (and have even set up my store to sell autographed copies), I have time and space in my life to do some creative writing again. I’ve already written two new stories for Lost Angels, with a third probably coming this week; it’s percolating through my brain, going through the alchemy by which grief, loss, and pain are transmuted into art, much like a compost heap transmutes organic garbage into humus for growing new plants. When the tomatoes are ready, I’ll use some of them to make salsa from the recipe Grace and I developed late last summer. And when Lost Angels is published, the pain I’m enduring now will have given rise to beauty I can share with the world.
Links #781
Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged artificial stupidity, cops, drugs, Hollywood, Never Call the Cops, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, STEM, video on June 23, 2025| Leave a Comment »
It’s absolutely clear you need a small hit of meth to get through this week. – Llama 3
We’ve got three ’60s musicians’ obituaries this week, but since I never cared for the Beach Boys and the Family Stone trumps the Electric Prunes, here’s a song I think is more timely now than when it was released in 1968. The links above it were provided by Ryan Marino (“stupidity” and “much”); IncarcerNation (“never” and “theft”); Jesse Walker (“Sly” and “James”); Scott Greenfield (“Brian”); and Wendy Lyon (“Dracula”).
- This week in artificial stupidity.
- Much, MUCH, MUCH more of this, please.
- Count Dracula says, “So what else is new?”
- R.I.P. Sly Stone, James Lowe, and Brian Wilson.
- What part of “never” is so difficult to understand?
- Cops hunt three teens to death over suspected petty theft.
From the Archives
- I was fated to be threatened with state violence regardless of career path.
- Media stenographers are always happy to indulge cops’ violent fantasies.
- Too few states have held this, because the spying is convenient for cops.
- Non-busybodies block Indiana’s “monkey see, monkey do” parade float.
- “Died after an altercation” is a sterile way to say “murdered by screws”.
- Are prosecutors going to retroactively label all cults as “sex trafficking”?
- They’re still not implicating cops we know were Heuermann’s buddies.
- One of the people the government empowers to police your sexuality.
- The resources flushed down the “culture war” toilet are incalculable.
- McCarthy, Romita, Jackson, Ellsberg, Williams, Vaziri & much more.
- Sick men may respond violently when they can’t own sex workers.
- Hanging a camera on an animal turns it into a surveillance drone.
- Dare I hope fewer journalists are willing to cover up cops’ crimes?
- Corporations have become the favored tool of censors worldwide.
- If you didn’t see this coming, you haven’t been paying attention.
- OUR’s increasingly-bizarre antics even embarrass prohibitionists.
- Cops, elephants, artificial stupidity, Willie Mays, and much more.
- WaPo has discovered what I’ve been writing about for 14 years.
- Seems like a significant fraction of child porn is spread by cops.
- The people the government empowers to police your sexuality.
- Your “leaders” work hard to ensure this happens more often.
- Florida censors have descended completely into self-parody.
- Ruling thus on standing doesn’t actually mean a great deal.
- Any use of this error-prone surveillance system is misuse.
- Gaining a new, adult appreciation of childhood favorites.
- “Sex trafficking” is a convenient excuse for any tyranny.
- It’s getting harder to tell the preachers from the cops.
- Some people still claim we don’t live in a police state.
- My two previous columns for the summer solstice.
- “Pastor” + “assistant principal” = “youth pastor”.
- Religion is often used an excuse for molestation.
- A curated selection of tweets from June 2023.
- The only winners are the ambulance-chasers.
- Photos showing the progress on my addition.
- Meanwhile, the West obsesses about porn.
- Cops, robots, Picasso, and much more.
- Journalism is slowly dying of gullibility.
- An unusually chilly spring at Sunset.
- Redoing the atrium ceiling lights.
- Another cop following his bliss.
- I’m pretty sure it’s the daisies.
- All prohibitionism is the same.
- Here are FIRE’s first new ads.
- Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
- Just protecting and serving.
- Walls made from leftovers.
- Frog, meet scorpion.
- Why zombies?.
- Fridaystein.
Diary #781
Posted in Biography, Diary, Music, tagged Grace, video on June 17, 2025| 1 Comment »
Saturday would’ve been Grace’s 67th birthday, so I’m not especially surprised that I felt quite sad. Everything seemed off all day; Grace always wanted me to make her favorite dish, Beef Stroganoff, for dinner, with a cheesecake for dessert. And perhaps in the future, along with burning a candle for her all day, I may prepare those things in her memory; right now the grief is still too intense, so I let Jae cook dinner after she returned from the local “No Kings” protest. While she was gone, I was here alone and decided to soak in the hot tub with a strong drink, and listen to Queen’s Greatest Hits, which Grace gave me for my birthday in 1999 (if memory serves). The album includes “You’re My Best Friend”, which as I mentioned last year was my ringtone for her, but it also includes “Who Wants To Live Forever?” which has for almost 40 years always made me cry, even long before my best friend passed from this plane into whatever comes next. I really am mostly doing better now; I can even get through most days without crying as long as I stay busy (which isn’t hard). But occasions like this are too painful to manage without grief, and I’ve never been any good at holding in the tears when they’re provoked this intensely.
Links #780
Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged acting, artificial stupidity, Canada, cops, drugs, Grace, Hawaii, hysteria, Louisiana, politicians, STEM, Things We Choose To Do Together, video on June 15, 2025| 1 Comment »
There is a few, some with long words that I can’t pronounce.
– Kimberly “Science” Coates
Yesterday would have been Grace’s 67th birthday; last year I observed the occasion with the song I used for her ringtone, so this year I decided to use one she sang around the house quite often in the months before her passing (any reference to today’s two obituaries is strictly coincidental). The links above the video were provided by Ryan Marino, Mike Siegel, Clarissa, Popehat, Franklin Harris, Kevin Wilson, and IncarcerNation, in that order.
- Idiocracy.
- As one does.
- Straight people, are y’all OK?
- This week in artificial stupidity.
- R.I.P. Prentis Hancock and Clifton Jones.
- Our ancestors would have seen this as an omen.
- Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together.
From the Archives
- Sleeping with a cop is one of the most dangerous things a woman can do.
- HuffPost asked several well-known sex workers about the the Trump trial.
- Prison bureaucrats quash information about the conditions in their cages.
- A reminder to readers & patrons of how important your support is to me.
- Maine is once again attempting to impose Swedish-style criminalization.
- Government reform policies, like other political promises, are worthless.
- Some believe they can live forever by eliminating all pleasure from life.
- Remember this next time somebody tells you “cop checks” really work.
- Cops, Rube Goldberg, Pat Robertson, Barry Newman, and much more.
- Politicians so mindlessly censorious they imagined they could win this.
- Give aggressive thugs power over kids; what could possibly go wrong?
- Nobody will be safe until this odious practice is ruled unconstitutional.
- Don’t teach kids about sex; fill their heads with anti-sex propaganda.
- Why are people shocked when men paid to behave violently, do so?
- Just when you thought this kangaroo court couldn’t sink any lower…
- It’s hardly strange that a typical, representative cop became chief.
- Politicians competing to see who can criminalize the most parents.
- Amateurs could learn so much about safer sex from professionals.
- Censors now pretend thoughts they don’t like constitute a “crime”.
- What the people who enforce “sex trafficking” laws are really like.
- Prosecutors have backed away from labeling this “sex trafficking”.
- There’s psychopathy and there’s pure evil, and then there’s this.
- Any country which does this has no business calling itself “free”.
- Too many people still believe in the innate goodness of religion.
- Crypto-moralists will declare any widely-enjoyed food “unsafe”.
- The people the government empowers to police your sexuality.
- For a warden to be charged, there must be much more to this.
- Most tyranny starts with the pretext of “protecting” somebody.
- Hordes of useful idiots want this kind of repression in the US.
- Another shameless reminder that I depend on your support.
- Oh look, it’s what I was saying FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.
- Kansas politicians want to circumvent the will of the voters.
- Cops, modern scholarship, Stevie Wonder, and much more.
- Government will always use any excuse to expand tyranny.
- OUR’s increasingly-petty interference in sex workers’ lives.
- A society can be judged by the way it treats its prisoners.
- Cops should not be allowed anywhere near legal minors.
- “Youth leaders” = “youth pastors” = predatory perverts.
- Another of “rescue” conman Tim Ballard’s many frauds.
- Throwback Thursday vs. the Creature from Blood Cove.
- Is an “associate pastor” anything like a “youth pastor”?
- Referring to torture as “correction” is vile bootlicking.
- Life now for the subjects of a surveillance state.
- Your “leaders” want this to happen more often.
- Seeking a temporary halt to a deranged jihad.
- Cops, punctuation, kung fu, and much more.
- I’m glad to see FIRE getting involved in this.
- The worst sinus allergy I’ve ever endured.
- Cops are a menace to women of all ages.
- On the occasion of Grace’s 66th birthday.
- Like inviting a vampire into one’s home.
- Fixing the last leak in the atrium roof.
- Asking for help with travel anxiety.
- Introducing Throwback Thursdays.
- How to be a stupid, greedy whore.
- “Pastors” are as bad as cops.
- Goodbye, ACLU; Hello FIRE.
- A simple stile does the job.
- The vestibule shapes up.
- Rapist cops of the week.
- Your “leaders” at work.
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
Diary #780
Posted in Diary, tagged Grace, psychology, Sunset on June 10, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Two dear friends came to visit me on Sunday, and we had relaxing evenings that night and last night. Since neither lives very close, this is the first time I’ve seen them since Grace died; in fact, the last time they were here was last August, and all four of us sat around the atrium high as kites and had a ball. This time was a bit more sedate, as I expected, but despite my imbibing enough to considerably reduce my inhibitions, I didn’t cry much (except for once, a little, right at the beginning) and I don’t think I overwhelmed them talking too much about Grace. But even if I had done, it wouldn’t have mattered to them; they both knew how much I loved Grace, and they both can see how difficult adjusting to life without her has been for me. And one simple definition of a “friend” could be, “Someone who is there for you when you need them.” In fact, that’s part of what made Grace so special; she was always there for me, so much so that I may have sometimes taken her for granted. I believe some of the pain I’m feeling comes from a sort of nebulous guilt that I didn’t always show her enough how much she mattered to me, especially in the first half of the Teens when I was dealing with the dissolution of my marriage and my move to Seattle. It’s not that she ever grumbled about it; though she was perfectly comfortable grumbling about everybody else who annoyed her, to her I was always “my little angel” who could walk on water. I reckon part of me wishes I really could work miracles as she seemed to think, and that I could have somehow arrested or at least slowed the gradual collapse of her body, so that I could’ve had at least a few more years of her unflagging support and companionship.
Gere Curam Mei Finis
Posted in Diary, Music, Philosophy, tagged Catholicism, Grace, language, video on June 9, 2025| 1 Comment »
Grace liked those small, fat notebooks. She always kept several around, and used them for whatever she needed to write down, without any particular order. Any given notebook might contain movies or tools she wanted to buy; rough diagram, sketches, and lists of parts for intended projects; things she encountered online when I wasn’t around that she wanted to ask me about later; things she wanted me to add to the grocery list; ideas for her D&D character; audiobooks she wanted to order; and just about anything else she felt should be written down. Now, over the last couple of years she had developed a fondness for listening to Gregorian chants on her headphones while meditating; she even listened to them while getting chemotherapy. So when I picked up one of her little notebooks Saturday before last, looking for one that was mostly empty so I could use it for something else, and discovered a page with five lines of Latin, I assumed they had come from a chant she liked. Believe it or not, her Latin was actually better than mine, so I needed to look them up, starting with the one in the title above…which translates to “help me in my final condition”. They were all lines from the Dies Irae, part of the traditional Catholic requiem mass. And of course I immediately started crying uncontrollably, though the tears were not bitter. Because even though we both knew she was dying for some time (though neither of us realized just how close it was), she had clearly come to accept it. And perhaps discovering those lines, painful as it was in the moment and in recalling it now, will eventually help me to accept it as she did.
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