Reminds me of my dad’s “penguins” story.
As a kid, he got a book about penguins from his aunt for Christmas. My father had never expressed, nor did he have a keen interest in penguins, but being a well mannered southern boy he wrote a thank you note…”Dear Aunt Mildred, Thank you for the book about penguins. It taught me more about penguins than I ever wanted to know.”
Still today, 70 years later, whenever someone in my family gives TMI, we just say “penguins”.

Mildred looks like a kernel of popped corn.

" DONT TELL ME WHAT TO DO MILDRED ! "

i watched this frequently when i was younger. loved it. had a massive crush on mildred, who also played dorothy in a return to oz (how scary was that movie??!)

interestingly, the actress who played the witch in this film became a 'neo pagan'

"She was a well known neopagan even before shooting 1996's The Craft. She provided some witchcraft information on set and helped design many of the sets to match real pagan rituals. From 1995 to 2001, she owned Panpipes Magickal Marketplace, billed as the nation's largest occult store, in Hollywood, California."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairuza_Balk#Personal_life

http://www.slate.com/id/2191500

This article sums up the problems with the "direct democracy" theory (or the idea that the will of the people is paramount) is a very funny way, particularly the first paragraph.

And California still has the option of amending its own Constitution to prohibit the reading offered by the majority in this case. And re-amending it when another majority takes hold, and re-amending . . .

In my view, the California Supremes both made the right call and fulfilled the role of a judiciary which is not merely to read the polls on a social issue, determine the majority view, and protect the majority. The facts of this case are no different than the facts of earlier miscegenation cases. The Mildred Loving case did not lead to polygamy and dogs and cats marrying each other. Southern Virginians in wide majorities also believed that a black person marrying a white person would lead to Sodom, Gomorrah, and biracial people becoming President (even Southern Virginians are right some of the time).

I have never seen an argument that convinces me that a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman harms civil society. No advanced criminal statistics, no economic indicators of commodity prices plunging due to gay people forming families, no social indicators of degraded schools and poor music in church. There are no compelling rational arguments against permitting two homosexual people in love to be recognized as a family by the State.

I have seen plenty of irrational arguments -- ad hominems, mentions of Greece and Sparta, empty slippery slopes, hell . . . Choggie's whole thread here. But we should try the best we can to avoid organizing society on the basis of irrational arguments. If the Bush Administration has taught us nothing else, it has taught us this.