A little knowledge can be a knee-jerk thing

there's a poster going around Facebook that celebrates American women in a way that's meant to contrast American attitudes toward women with Taliban attitudes toward the fairer sex.
It's pretty in your face, but doesn't it feel good to see those attractive American women in flight suits laughing it up on the flight line. (Never mind that they're all white and all but one of them is blonde, the picture looks like a screen shot of some new television series.)
And the message is--America, where women can be anything they want!
But not so fast... There's a really interesting website called Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership that has some sobering  statistics that suggest (and I know this will be a shock to you) that perhaps the United States is not quite as progressive as some people would like you to believe.
On NationMaster.com, there's a list of countries by percentage of women in government. Belgium is number one, with a whopping 55 percent. Care to guess where the US fits in?  We're at number 92 with a shameful 7.1 of women in government. (And remember, women outnumber men in the US by almost 5 million.)  The list only encompasses 112 countries (Good news, the US is ahead of Tajikistan, Benin, Syria, Chad, and Iceland (a surprise). But the countries with a better track record for women in government include Iran (27.1 percent), Saudi Arabia (33 percent), Libya (11.8 percent) nd Rwanda (10 percent).  Something to think about before dancing around singing "Neener, neener, neener."

He was the first, he won't be the last

Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon (the first man, we're still waiting for the first woman) has died. He was 82. R.I.P.

Shakespeare Trivia

I've just landed a job with a company that sells trivia games to the hospitality sector and one topic that we can't use for questions is Shakespeare because Shakespeare is everyone's go-to topic for trivia and has been overused. No kidding. If you Google "Shakespeare Trivia Game" you get more than 2.5 million responses in 0.29 seconds.
The first site listed on the first page of responses is Fun Trivia, which has a whole assortment of Shakespeare Quizzes and Trivia Games. Games are divided up into individual plays or lines and quotes. Other examples is a game called "Sad but true" (a phrase Shakespeare created) and one that asks you to identify the true source of a quote. The games are all silly, English geeky fun if you find yourself between seasons of Game of Thrones with nothing to do. (Seriously, Ned Stark could have been a Shakespearean character, not unlike Coriolanus in that he just couldn't learn to go along to get along.)

Feminist Fiction Friday--the Lists

I love lists. I could not function without my to-do lists (daily, monthly). But I also love lists that people post on websites, especially lists of recommended books. Sometimes the lists are disappointing--like lists of vampire books that begin with Twilight but don't include Barbara Hambly's Those That Hunt the Night. Sometimes they are great places to find a new book to read. On a whim, I Googled "Feminist Fiction" and the first thing that popped up was an amazing list--more than 600 books--on Goodreads. Crowd-sourced (anyone can add a book to it), you'll find the list here.
It's an eclectic list of books and includes the usual Kate Chopin, Jane Austen, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood titles you would expect. But it also had some books I wouldn't have thought of right off the top of my head. One of those books is Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Hosseini wrote The Kite Runner, which was excellent, but A Thousand Splendid Suns is whatever comes after excellent. The friendship of two women is central to the story and there is a section in which a woman desperately tries to get medical aid in a country that forbids male doctors from touching female patients that will have you reaching for a checkbook to donate to Doctors Without Borders.
I wouldn't have chosen Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials for the list, even though there are so many female characters in it. But then I only read the first book in the series, which seemed to me all set up without real thought into the practicalities of having daemons with you everywhere.
But I digress.

The word you're lookiing for is "pay"

Samuel Johnson once famously wrote that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." These days, writing for non-paying markets is just part of the landscape of marketing your work, and there's no shame in it.
My attitude toward the issue of paid versus unpaid is embodied in a quote from the movie Honeysuckle Rose. "I did it for the love, but I was not above the money." (And if I'm not ashamed to admit that I paid money to see Honeysuckle Rose, I'm certainly not going to blush at admitting I sometimes give it away.
What annoys me, however, is the way some sites try to sugar-coat their non-paying status. My favorite is when, rather than admit it's a "4-the-Luv" kind of a deal, they point out you'll get "lots of exposure" and virtual "clips" you can then use to get a better (one that pays) gig.  I'm not talking about a site like BellaOnline, which doesn't pay but which does provide its editors with incredibly useful training, a lot of support for their side projects, the opportunity to put advertising on their pages and much, much more. I spent a year as a BellaOnline editor and it was a fantastic experience and I'll do it again if the right topic becomes available. (Right now BellaOnline is looking for editors to cover dozens of topics from adoption to African-American lit to Water Gardens and Women's Sports. If you're interested, go here to learn more.)
I'm talking about the brand-new literary magazines that promise pay as soon as the revenue starts rolling in. In the meantime, though, "we can't afford to monetarily compensate you." 
Whenever people use two big words in place of one small one, I start to worry. (And don't get me wrong. I am a huge word snoot. I delight in the more ornate words out there and relish precision of their use. But often, when overly flowery language is used where plain speaking should be, the writer is a) trying score points by making whoever they're talking to feel dumb; b) trying to hide something. (It's the old "baffle 'em wiht bullshit" ploy.)
If you want to say that you don't pay your contributors, just say it. You don't have to use fancy words. I'll get the message.

Picture of the Day--Owl

My brother is an amateur photographer who frequently gets great pictures of critters in his own yard. One of the best pictures he ever took was of a pair of reclusive little owls with violet eyes. Today he sent me this picture that was taken by a friend of his. He doesn't know how or why the owl ended up in someone's hands, but the picture is wonderful. (And all my brother's friends love animals, so I'm sure the owl is in good hands, so to speak.)

Planting Shakespeare--the Shakespeare Garden

The Shakespeare Garden at the Huntington Library

William Shakespeare's plays are filled with quotes about flowers, with the most famous probably being "That which we call a rose would smell as sweet" from Romeo and Juliet. Over time, gardeners developed a very special, formal version of an English garden termed a "Shakespeare garden." As the name implies, these gardens feature plants and flowers mentioned in the plays, or typical of the Elizabethan period but not mentioned.
Here in LA, there's a gorgeous "Shakespeare Garden" at the Huntington Library. (For information on the garden, go here.) There's a Shakespeare Garden in Central Park and also in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. for a list of other, public gardens, see the Wikipedia article. Shakespeare's favorite flower (at least in terms of how often he used it) was probably the rose. the Garden Web has a section on Elizabethan roses, and there are lots of forums for gardeners who want to grow heirloom roses in their own gardens.  "Elizabethan Roses" became a popular design motif for china.
Here's an excerpt from Folk-lore of Shakespeare that talks about his knowledge of plants.