RevCyn

So I spent some time on Healthcare.gov today, the questions being 1) How hard is this, really? and 2) Is there a comparable plan to my employer's healthcare plan (the UUA's Highmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield) that would cost less money? Last night I created my user name and password, and then was booted out of the system because it was under maintenance.  Fair enough. I went back in today.  I had to answer some security questions that prove that I'm me.  It turns out the government has more handy access to facts about myself than I do.  I had to chase down the information of what year my car is.  Then I had to provide information on the members of my family, including how much money we make, before taxes.  That's complicated.  How do I classify my housing allowance?  I decided to just put it in as income before taxes, even though it won't be taxed.  What about my husband's income?  Well, he's an adjunct professor.  We never know ...

**SPOILER WARNING** This is what is on my mind this morning, as I come back from a weekend where I went out to the movies twice, once to see Catching Fire and once to see the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special.  There's a common thread that runs through both the recent Doctor Who seasons and the Hunger Games trilogy, and that is the effects of war on the survivors and the ethical struggles before and after making a decision to kill innocents in order to end a war. It's not really in Catching Fire that this question occurs; it's actually in the next book, Mockingjay .  In it, there are two parts that I'm thinking of -- first, there's the decision by District 13 to bomb children and aid workers to advance the rage against the Capitol.  Here's the description of when Katniss learns about the weapons that will eventually be used in that way: This is what they’ve been doing. Taking the fundamental ideas behind Gale’s traps and adapting them into weapons ag...

The fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is tomorrow. And with this anniversary I'm reminded of what a major moment this was in the history of our country and in the lives of most Americans who were alive and old enough to understand it fifty years ago.  It's one of those moments where people remember where they were and what they were doing when it happened or when they heard.  People remember it as a " Turning Point " where there was a " Loss of Innocence ."  I don't remember it.  I was born after the fall of Camelot.  I was born into a world where the Loss of Innocence had already happened, the Turning Point was past, and we were in the age of cynicism.  I have some sympathy for Steve Friess who wrote an article in Time titled " Five Reasons People Under 50 Are Already Tired of JFK Nostalgia " and Nick Gillespie who wrote in The Daily Beast , " JFK Still Dead, Boomers Still Self-Absorbed ."  Those of us yo...

I was once a big Orson Scott Card fan.  The number of Orson Scott Card books I own may still outnumber any single other author on the dozens of bookshelves in my home.  I read his works voraciously in college and in my early 20s.  I read the Ender saga, the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoing Saga, and assorted other books and short stories of his.  I recently re-read Ender's Game and still enjoyed it.  At some point in reading his books, however, I suddenly stopped, because I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again -- the same boy messiah saving the human race -- and I disagreed with the theology underpinning it.  But I enjoyed all those stories of his up until that time.  I still do, when I read them.  I recently re-read Ender's Game and found myself wanting to read them all over again, or start reading the later books in the series that I never read, or the Shadow Saga. But between the time I was the big Orson Scott Card ...

I had a great time at SUUSI this year leading a workshop on Science Fiction and Fantasy and Religion.  One favorite part of the class was the great reading/viewing list we generated.  I hesitate to some degree to share it with those who weren't part of the class.  On the other hand, it's such a great list of works that others may find engaging.  Please be mindful that this is partly a result of where our particular conversation wandered.  The categories that are short are usually so because they are categories we didn't get to, so they just have my starter items in them.  And yes, there are a couple of things slipped in there that you might not consider SF/Fantasy, but which were a part of our discussion. Science Fiction and Fantasy and Religion Works SUUSI 2013 Workshop #152 – Cynthia Landrum The Nature of God Avatar (Film) The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley...

I'm leading a workshop at SUUSI this year on "Blogging for Beginners."  My mom (herself a former director for on-line learning for a university) pointed out to me that I should have handouts of my PowerPoint slides for the participants.  Handouts for a class about blogging?  That's so low-tech!  But I was trying to decide, indeed, how to share these -- whether to upload the file and share the URL or to e-mail them, or what.  Finally, I thought, "Why not just blog them?  The class is about blogging, after all!"  I remembered that I had found a way to do this once with some web-based application.  Turns out it's even easier now than it was before. If you're not in the workshop, keep in mind that these are just slides for some basic information and URLs that I thought might be helpful.  It's not everything we'll cover.

In the wake of the verdict about the Trayvon Martin case, there are a lot of protests going on, and petitions calling for a civil rights case against George Zimmerman.  With all honesty, I think that George Zimmerman is innocent under the law.  And what we need to do now is channel this energy, this passion, and change those bad laws, state by state. Michigan is a "Stand Your Ground" state.  There have been rallies and protests going on in Detroit.  What we need to do is get this base mobilized to change these laws.  The Stand Your Ground laws perpetuate and exacerbate an already large problem of racial bias in our sentencing.  In states with Stand Your Ground laws, a new study has shown that whites who kill blacks are more likely to be found to be acting in self-defense than any other racial combination.  It's true in all states, but more so in Stand Your Ground states. The studies aren't as thorough as they could be -- they don't compare hom...