Tamora Pierce's Blog, page 14

Boring teen shelves

I went to my local drug dealerbookstore yesterday for a YA fixbook, and had the most depressing experience standing before the shelves I've ever had. I know that I'm overdramatizing, but really, I have never seen bookshelves with so many dead, rotting, and dark, tormented, sepulchral themes/characters in my life. Which is still my life. I am not dead, haunted, cursed, bitten, winged, pursued, born of hinky parents, or in love with totally inappropriate people. I have made no agreements wi...

Grifter mail

cross-posted to my fan lj

What did I do to rate this sudden flood of con artist e-mail?

It's always the same: a distinguished person or banker from a foreign land announces I have won a humongous prize/have an account all in gold/have an inheritance which someone else is trying to claim and I must get in touch with them immediately or the next winner/the banking laws/the other claimant will block my receipt of this fortune. I will be asked to provide information--like my social security number...

Missing 16-year-old/DeKalb-Carbondale IL FOUND

EDITED TO ADD: She's found and on her way home! Thanks, all!





We've got a missing daughter and a mom's who's well-nigh frantic with worry. If any of you in the area see Morgan, would you let her mom know? Sixteen's a tough age to be away from home and discover you're not as ready for the world as you thought you were, if she wanted to leave on her own.

Missing 16-year-old/DeKalb-Carbondale IL

We've got a missing daughter and a mom's who's well-nigh frantic with worry. If any of you in the area see Morgan, would you let her mom know? Sixteen's a tough age to be away from home and discover you're not as ready for the world as you thought you were, if she wanted to leave on her own.

Luna Vachon

On August 27 one of professional wrestling's female stars, Luna Vachon, was found dead in her home by her mother. It's beginning to look like a drug overdose, not suicide. Given the injuries that wrestlers pile up over the years, they try to have plenty of painkillers on hand, and the temptation to abuse must be overwhelming. (I don't say this in a nanny-nanny-boo-boo way--I am a child of the 1960s and 70s, remember.)

She was 48.

Luna was never one of those women wrestlers who was put in the...

Pakistan then and now

cross-posted from my fan journal, because it's just too big to keep just on one

This link, courtesy of angel_9_lives , shows us before and after satellite pictures of what's happening to the Pakistan landscape as a result of the flooding.

And it ain't over yet.

Guidelines for disaster charity

cross-posted to my fan lj

I'm posting the link to this article from Aidwatch--please look at it before you donate. It makes a lot of really good general points and, in the case of donations for Pakistan, it supplies links to aid organizations that are in pakistan right now, outfits they say are going to be helpful there. We went through this with the Haitian earthquake, too, discovering we could do a lot more good with organizations that were already there or organizations that weren't getti...

One quarter of Pakistan under water; China under mud and rock

cross-posted from my fan lj

I should have posted about the Pakistani flood victims and those of China's succession of mudslides. You'll see from the article I found on Xinhuanet, a Chinese English language newsnet, that China is sending out strong signals that they prefer to do the bulk of their rescue efforts themselves. They're turning away rescue teams; their own are doing a tremendous job at serious risk to their own lives. They are accepting funds from relief organizations like the Inte...

More on the Taliban

This thought-provoking and heart-breaking article on two doctors recently killed by the Taliban also explains the Taliban's expansion of its limits on who to kill. It made me sick.

I know there are people here who think it is wrong for us to expend American lives if Afghanistan. Believe it or not, I don't want our people to die needlessly any more than you do. I want our soldiers to come home in one piece, and I want them to get the benefits they are owed for their service to our country.

Bu...

I hate them and their works

The Taliban.