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Men and Abortion

The South Dakota abortion ban and the issue of male reproductive fetal rights suggests we may soon be back into the Wire Coat Hanger debate as a nation. Morality is a personal choice that cannot be legislated from the courthouse or controlled from the pulpit. The abortion issue is, has, and shall always be, a force that rips apart families and pits men against women and governments against its citizens and churches against its believers.

When it comes to that kind of irrevocable change I prefer to turn inward for the intimate enlightening experience. About 18 years ago when I was 18, I dated a “good Catholic girl” who had five sisters and four brothers. Her church and family did not believe in birth control. She was sexually curious and active and the old, awful, chestnut that if you wanted to fool around as a horny young man, you only needed to find a sexually repressed Catholic girl and you each would find a pleasurable release together. I was not her first but she was mine.

I wore a condom during penetration but there were other times playing around naked when, we thought, no sort of protection was necessary. We dated for about a year and then broke up. Three months after the split she was back at my doorstep telling me she thought she was pregnant. I had no idea if I was the responsible party or not but her timeline seemed to mesh when we were supposedly exclusively dating — we broke up because of her infidelity — and I asked her if she had taken a pregnancy test.

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Bedtime Routines

When you head off to bed at night what are the routines you follow before your head hits the pillow?
Do you check to make sure the oven and stovetop burners are off?
Do you wash your face, brush your teeth and comb your hair?

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Plunging into Death

Two Jersey City police officers, Shawn Carson and Robert Nguyen, were killed on Christmas night when they were called to the Lincoln Highway Bridge over the Hackensack River to help set up road flares to protect drivers from motoring off the middle of a unique “vertical-lift” bridge that had its safety features disabled by a truck crash two days earlier.

Repairs would take two weeks of intensive construction so during that time police officers were called in to shield the public from the dangers of the bridge as it was raised for boat traffic. Some call this kind of bridge an “elevator bridge” because the center of the bridge rises straight up into the sky to allow boat traffic to flow below. Maritime law requires preference be given to commerce boats over motorists. The bridge is raised only at the radio request of boats and not on a predictable schedule. There are no angled ramps to indicate the bridge deck is no longer fit for cars and trucks — the middle of the bridge just disappears up into thin air.

Lincoln Highway Bridge

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Girl or Woman

If you are female, which term do you prefer if you had to be labeled by one of these words: “Girl” or “Woman” or “Female” or doesn’t it matter?

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln I was educated, roughly and roundly, by certain forces in the English Department that one must never call a female a “girl” if she has had her period — how one determines if menstruation has happened or not was never explained — and the correct term for the rest of her life was “woman” but never “lady” because “lady” was an Olde Englishe synonym for “bitch.”

Ladies and gentlemen rightly translated to the modern ear, I was told, as Bitches and gentlemen and it was an unfortunate, but culturally accepted, put-down of women who fought to advance their self-worth beyond being seen merely as property.

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Tommy Lee Does Lincoln

As a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln I am disgusted and disappointed UNL allowed felon/porn star Tommy Lee to “audit” classes for a fake reality television show that debuted on NBC last night in order to build a promotional bandwagon for the prairie school.

Five other universities turned down the Tommy Lee show before Nebraska bought into the idea. The phrase “whore for attention” immediately comes to mind as an entire university bends over. I am uncertain why UNL was eager to get in bed with convicted wife batterer Tommy Lee and let him pretend to be a “real” student at the university.

Did UNL want to example what school life is like? Is there no better choice to be found to demonstrate on a national scale the UNL experience than a 42-year-old washed-up rock star who kicked his wife and was sent to jail?

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Claes Oldenburg’s Torn Notebook

Another example of “Pretentious City Pretend Art” is Claes Oldenburg’s Torn Notebook currently found marring the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Claes Oldenburg created some magnificent and provocative pieces of art over his career but Torn Notebook is not one of them. I have felt that way from the moment the monstrosity was first described in the local Lincoln newspaper many years ago.

Here’s why: The good people of Nebraska have an identity crises.

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Linoma Beach, 1955

by Steve Gaines

He came up like a blue rag
from fifteen feet of cold water
like a diver in reverse
unaware of the faults in his form
draped in lake weeds
and no longer
among the living

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