What a good idea! That's cool, sarameg. I love those murals.

This morning's popsicle started off a little bitter, but now it seems fine. I wonder if I actually did anything different with the recipe - I made these a couple weeks ago, but I don't remember changing anything.

Nice pictures, Sara.

I never heard my 87-year-old mother use it or her mother, both born and raised in Tennessee.

I also need to point out that Paula Deen is 66. She came up during the Civil Rights movement. So I guess we know where she and hers stand.

Fireflies! I forget they even exist until I go to the Adirondacks in the summer. Enchanting. Of course we caught the slowpokes when we were kids.

I don't know what to think about the Paula Deen thing. I never heard anyone use racist terms until I moved to the South in my 20s. It always shocks me when I encounter it. We are products of our environment in many ways.

When I stub my toe I say 'ouch' when friends might use another expletive. I didn't even curse in labor! Our use of language in traumatic and dramatic situations is pretty core and hard to change.

In the example about her being robbed at gunpoint, I would likely refer to the gunman as a jerk or creep, other people I know would call him an asshole, Paula went for the N-word.

I do believe our cultural norms can be changed if we believe that they are wrong. What Paula believes, I really don't know. The one thing I know for sure is that her food preferences and mine are polar opposites. I suspect many other opinions are opposed as well.

I don't know what to think about the Paula Deen thing. I never heard anyone use racist terms until I moved to the South in my 20s. It always shocks me when I encounter it. We are products of our environment in many ways.

Yeah. I know there is racism in the north and that its no joke. But the casual use of slurs and tacit "agreement" that we can bitch about "them" when "they" aren't around isn't something I much experienced until I was in the south.

Where my brother and Mom and nephew live are "Blue Ghosts" - fireflies that have a blue glow. They don't blink on and off as quickly and they sort of hover near the ground. It's only during a short window of time and in a very small area. I haven't seen them but they sound cool.

I was pretty impressed by the fireflies when I was in Philly. See, this is the kind of thing that counts as exotic fauna for me.

I grew up hearing "nigger" in rural Missouri. A lot. There were NO black people around for miles and zero in my elementary school. I trained my father out of it ("It's OK if you use it in a joke, honey. Some of my friends are black." NO, DAD. You are an awesome person, but you were full of shit on this one, and to be fair, he got it) and got into a raging fight with my uncle one Xmas about him using it.

I have never once heard my mother, raised in the Northern South, say it. Ever.

I have never said it, except reading it aloud in class, used in a novel, with the caveat added before reading that were were offensive terms in the reading and if a student was uncomfortable saying it, they could skip it, or in an discussion with people about its usage.

I understand the sides of the argument that black people take it back by using it, like I call my good friends bitches all the time, but I hate the word, and will never use it.

I cuss like a fucking sailor, but even were a person chopping off my arm, I wouldn't use a racial or ethnic epithet. A lot of other choice words and phrases, though...

I never heard my 84-year-old mother or my late dad use the word and have never used it myself.

Even when I have used it in an academic way, it makes me physically uncomfortable. I really despise the word. It's a really visceral hate.

Maybe it's white liberal guilt; whatever. Fuck it. I HATE it.

Caveat: I heard my students (majority black) say it all the time. I didn't like it, but other than having some really good class discussions about it, I was OK with hearing it then. Like if my friends joking calls me a bitch/hooker/cunt, Idon't care. Someone uses those words AT me, though, and there wwill be some shit goin' down. I mean, I can and have been called those words when walking down the street from a car, but like when a person is RIGHT there in my face? Uh. No.

It's an official family story of when I was coming up the drive from school (Montessori) singing "Eeny meeny miney moe" and my mother holding her breath for the second line...

Turns out she didn't have to have that talk at that time.

It's a word we were exposed to a decent (applicable?) amount--we were fed lots of fiction and history with racists, so it was part of our vocabulary for discussing what we'd been exposed to. In that context, no language is explicitly banned--we just shouldn't use them as epithets.

Story of a woman diving into the deep end of internet dating (100 dates, 100 days): [link]