hello...

well i was just watching the Oprah show on The Desperate Housewives (not the desperate housewives that she searches all America for) and i just realised that Plath, in so much of her poetry meditating on women and post-marital life, was so far ahead of her time and society...

like wow...

i imagine that she too was once the picture perfect desperate housewife... a veritable celebrity in English poetic circles married to the wildly successful Ted Hughes from America... in a crumbling marriage and utterly trapped between the committments of her as a mother, wife and poet...

and she took her own life too...

i do well believe that the series will aid in the understanding of some issues... and in other circumstances lead the reader to interesting questions and discussions on the concerns of Plath... but since i'm writing this i might as well leave a warning to anybody reading this... that the similarities drawn between Plath and The Desperate Housewives are dangerous hypotheses to postulate... something that i in my currently non-acedemic employment can do with reckless abandon....

so if you're actually studying... well exercise caution...

and in the New Paper today...

A school for children with below-average IQ and learning disabilities was subjected to complaints and requests from parents to remove and replace articles that had come in contact with a certain teacher, on the grounds that as a homosexual, and involved in a public indecency charge, he was putting their children were in danger of being infected with the HIV virus. This was after he was issued a warning by the police for an act of public indecency in which he was involved in sexual acts with another man, which he claims was consensual.

i try not to be guilty of media conditioning in the above lines...
it shocks me when i read in the paper that parents "tear down the toilets"... there is clear exaggeration of the extent of aggression and even an implication of non-existent violence on the part of the parents...

When one is charged with a duty as important as passing on information, i believe that one should exercise prudence and caution in not distorting truth and fact. It is saddening to see that for some journalists this prudence has taken second place to writing the perfect attention grabbing headline, replete with alliteration. But I speculate, I emote, I imply, and i exaggerate. But I can; can they?

i have no idea whether the idiocy of parents or the flagrant disregard of journalistic ethics as seen in the paper disgusts me more...

As parents of children who have had the ill-fortune to be born with learning disabilities it is rather ironic, even shocking that rather than maximise their own knowledge to better mentor their children they remain stuck in such baseless and backward assumptions. For some of these children their lives will be lived in innocence, given their special needs; yet it somehow seems impossible, given the perceptions that their parents hold.

and still this human world rends and tears the compassionate bystander... for after all can we blame these people who would go any lengths to safeguard their children in these uncertain times where biological agents and viruses are real threats...?