Welcome to the June edition of the Just Posts, a monthly roundtable of posts about topics of social justice and activism in all shapes and sizes. Holly and I are pleased to share this wealth of posts that inspire and move and make us think.

The beginning of June saw the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989. Not even two weeks later, the world’s eyes turned to Iran as news came through of suspected fraud in the results of the presidential election. Reports and images of large scale protests of the disputed results were followed by those of violent crackdown against the protesters.

Each month, I have been highlighting a protest song in my introduction of the Just Posts list. The Tiananmen anniversary and the ongoing crackdown against protesters in Iran bring to mind the song “Ohio,” by Neil Young:

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

The song was written in response to the the 1970 shootings at Kent State University in Ohio, in which 4 unarmed students were shot during a protest of the Vietnam War.

(This is a concert performance by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with not-so-great sound quality. You can find a better quality acoustic version by Neil Young here.)

Whether or not the Iranian election results are legitimate (and I’m inclined to doubt their validity), it has been inspiring to witness the passion of so many in Iran as they call for reform in their government and demand that their voices be heard and their votes be counted. It has also been sobering to see the violent and repressive response from the government of Iran and the conservative supporters of that government, who have been acting to suppress the free flow of information.

While there is little that we can do to help, as individuals outside of Iran, recent technologies (like Twitter) have empowered those who are speaking out within Iran, and provided tools for organization and communication in the face of official attempt to silence the protests.

I’d like to take this as reminder that the act of speaking out by an individual can be part of a powerful movement for change. To speak out against the violent crackdown against protesters in Iran, you can add your voice to those of others around the world, such as by signing the petition organized by Avaaz.

I would also like to cheer on those people in the list below for speaking out on topics that are meaningful to them. I’d like to entreat you to visit their posts and encourage them to continue to speak out. Please click on the links!

And now, here are the June Just Posts:

• almostidealist at One Year to Change the World with
  Take action for Tiananmen Square’s victims, Sexism sells,
  Free speech, free range and Going green for the Iranian protesters
• Barbara Drake at An American in Lima with Archbishop of Cusco to Evict More Local Restaurants
• Chris at Formerly Fun with Oh Oh, She’s Back on Her Soapbox Again
• Christine at flutter with The Luxury of Safety and an untitled post
• City Girl at Country Girl/City Girl with Oh, HELL no
• Emily at Wheels on the Bus with This is what a leader looks like, Education dollars at work, Questions (part one) and Rejecting Yertle
• Emily at LA Mom’s Blog with What kids need
• Erika at Be gay about it. with My, what a gayngled web we weave.
• emmy at Los Pininos with Revised Eulogy
• girlgriot at If you want kin, you must plant kin… with Voice of the People?
• Glenna Gordon (guest posting) at Scarlett Lion: Liberia with Global Post: Miss Coco’s Liberian Barbies
• jen at one plus two with the universal backbone and guess what’s coming to dinner
• Kyla at The Journey with My child, every child
• La Gringa at La Gringa’s Blogicito, with Relative calm in Honduras, despite what you might read and Honduran views on Mel Zelaya and the current events
• laloca at baggage carousel 4 with public health stuff
• Mary at The Eleventh with Fed
• meg at A Different View of a Good Life! with Prison in Belize
• Mouse at The Mouse’s Nest with The radical act of being ourselves
• papilio588 at Walk with Me with Nickelsville
• Paul Newnham at Give a damn about poverty? with Why is fighting poverty so hard? and 40 Hour Famine
• Rebecca at Flying Tomato Farms with Are you “Man Enough” for the Middle Border?
• redbird at A Gringa Diary with The Honduran coup was personal here
• Zack Ford at Zack Ford Blogs with Sorry white men (and Ann Coulter), Sotomayor is not a racist. You are.

This month’s readers:

Mad
Emily
Stacie
Holly
alejna

Please drop by Holly’s to see what she has to say this month.

If you have a post above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you are unfamiliar with the Just Posts, please visit the information page.

Since today is 7/8/9, it seems a good day to post this.

(It’s “7 8 9″ by the Barenaked Ladies.)

We had a wedding to go to this weekend up in New Hampshire this weekend, and Phoebe got to be a flower girl. It was a fun trip, if largely hectic with various functions and family commitments. I’d write more about the weekend, but I’ve got some work to catch up on. I actually didn’t even bring my laptop on the trip with us, knowing how tight our schedule (and cargo space) would be.

On Sunday, one of John’s cousins invited us up to spend a bit of time with her family at a beach in Maine. So we headed up there after checking out of the hotel, and attending the last of the wedding-related gatherings.

The setting was gorgeous, and the weather was perfect.

This “summer” has been one of the coldest, rainiest ones I can remember, so it was a real treat to have warm sunshine this weekend. Now we’re back to chilly rain and thunder, the afternoon sky so dark outside the window that it makes me feel like climbing into bed. As I sit here hunched over my laptop trying to do work, I find it hard to tear myself away from the photos that tell a different story about these days of summer.

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p.s. I forgot to mention that it’s time for the Just Posts once more. If you have read or written posts on topics of social justice, send ‘em in!

Dee of On The Curb has posted a playlist of some of her favorite “vagina music,” with her post entitled exceeding my bandwith on the word vagina.¹ (You should go check out Dee’s blog, by the way. In case you haven’t guessed it, she’s freakin’ hilarious.)

Dee doesn’t quite give a definition of “vagina music,” but she gives quite a few examples. If I had to summarize, I’d say that the songs are ones that move her down to her…um…core, and tap into her emotions. And perhaps also those that remind her that she is biologically female.

Further, Dee has requested comparable lists from others. In her words, “I show you mine, you show me yours.”

Okay, Dee. I’ll show you mine. While I’ve never thought of this music in quite those terms², this is my response playlist:

1. Save Me – Aimee Mann (listen)
2. Thief – Belly (listen)
3. Lucky – Bif Naked (listen)
4. Bulimic Beats – Catatonia (listen)
5. No Need To Argue – The Cranberries (listen)
6. Virgin State Of Mind – K’s Choice (listen)
7. Autumngirlsoup – Kirsty MacColl (listen)
8. Your Ghost – Kristin Hersh (listen)
9. Famous Blue Raincoat – Leonard Cohen (listen)
10. De Cara A La Pared – Lhasa (listen)
11. Wild Is The Wind – Nina Simone (listen)
12. Down By The Water – P J Harvey (listen)
13. Dancing Barefoot – Patti Smith Group (listen)
14. Haunted – Poe (listen)
15. Glory Box – Portishead (listen)
16. Possession- Sarah McLachlan (listen)
17. i am stretched on your grave – Sinéad O’Connor (listen)
18. Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me – The Smiths (listen)
19. Anchor – Trespassers William (listen)

How about you. Wanna show me yours?

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¹ Dee is not shy about using the word vagina. In fact, in her post, she uses the word vagina no fewer than 38 times. (Yes, I counted. One vagina, two vagina, three vagina, four. Five vagina, six vagina, seven vagina, more…) And that, my friends, is a most impressive feat.

² The thing is, though, I’m not a big fan of the word vagina. In fact, this post here marks the first time I’m using the word on my blog. (Yes, I did a search.) Also the 2nd through 15th times. (Yes, I counted.) Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against vaginas. Or vaginae, if you prefer. I’m glad I have one of my own, and all. I just find the word vagina awkward.

Now spleen, on the other hand, there’s a word I like. Spleen. It’s a word that amuses me. I also appreciate its range of meanings. Some of you may know the spleen as an organ in the lymphatic system. But it was once esteemed as “the seat of spirit and courage or of such emotions as mirth, ill humor, melancholy, etc.” Me, I’m all about the mirth, the ill humor and the melancholy. Then there’s the whole archaic meaning of splenetic to mean “melancholy.” And my playlist is pretty darned melancholy.

So maybe you can consider this my spleen music.

One of the presents Phoebe got for her birthday, when she turned three back in February, was a “Pretty Princess FeltTales” felt board set. It’s actually quite a cool toy, consisting of a felt-covered board with some background scenery, and a bunch of smaller felt cut-out pieces. This particular set has three girls and separate clothing (a bit like paper dolls), a horse and carriage, a frog, a castle, and some other assorted princessy accessories:

The Pretty Princess FeltTales set, as shown on the company website.

Here’s how the website describes how a kid might play with the set:

“Pretty Princess” lets you get ready for a night at the castle. Dress your princess in her favorite ball gown, and add a cloak as the evening approaches. Gather her handmaidens and travel by carriage. Make a wish and kiss the frog, and perhaps….

Here’s how Phoebe set up the board.

Phoebe's version: The mechanic gets her bag of tools to fix the car after the accident.

A: So what’s going on here, Phoebe?
P: Well that’s the bag of tools.
A: Yeah? Now why do they need the tools?
P: Because that’s an accident.
A: Yeah.
P: It’s a car
A: Okay. And who’s got the tools?
P: That’s the mechanic, though.

Damn, I love my little girl.

The first time I ever moved was when I was three years old. My family lived in a rental house in Sausalito, California. It was a tiny house built into the hillside overlooking the San Francisco Bay, with 30-odd steps leading up to the house from the sidewalk. One of my earliest memories was of moving day. The movers put down big pieces of plywood over those steps so that they could slide the boxes down to the street level.

That move sent me and my things in two directions, as my parents were separating. My mother rented an apartment a few towns away, and my father rented a house in a neighboring town. My sister and I would go back and forth. A couple of years later, my mother left the apartment for a rental house in another town, and my father rented the same apartment vacated by my mother.

When I was six, my mother, my sister and I moved our things in with my new stepfather, into a big newly built house. My father died that same year, and my mother and stepfather cleared out the apartment that had been one of my two homes for three years. I remember trying to save all I could get away with.

When I was nine years old, my mother, my sister and I moved to France to start anew. We packed up what we could fit in a few suitcases and a big trunk, and headed to Paris. We travelled a bit, stayed in hotels here and there, and finally settled in an apartment in a Paris suburb, near the school my sister and I would attend.

We stayed there a year before returning to the US. We moved in with my Grandmother in her house in a small, rural town in the mountains of Colorado. The following year, we moved to another Colorado town, where we rented a log cabin-style house.

We stayed there for just over 3 years, which up to that point was the longest time I’d spent in any one residence. Part way into my freshman year of high school, we moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. We got rid of lots of things, put some into storage, and moved over with little more than a few suitcases. A few months later, it was back to the mainland, where we settled once more in California. A couple of years later, my mother married a Frenchman and moved back to France. It was the spring of my junior year of high school, and I moved in with a friend’s family for a couple of months to finish the school year. That summer, I moved to France with a few suitcases, though I recall I had my mother’s full sterling flatware set in my carry-on bag.

The next year, I headed back to the US for college. Over the 4-ish years of college, I lived in 2 dorms and 4 apartments. I also had a semester studying abroad in Brazil. If I’d had a car at that point, I could easily have fit all my belongings into it.

In addition to the homes I lived for stretches of months or years, there were more temporary places. Hotels or friends’ homes for a few days here, a few weeks there, filling in the gaps between moves.

How can I count the places I’ve lived? 5 US states and 2 other countries? (Do I count differently the times I moved back to a place after moving away? That happened twice. Unless you count coming back from Brazil, then it was 3 times.) Was it 15 towns, or do I count those other transitional towns? (There were at least 2.) Was it 9 schools during K through 12, or do I not count changes in the same district? (That happened once.) There have been 8 different houses and at least 11 different apartments. (And that one apartment where I lived twice.) Or do I just count the number of times I packed up all my belongings? (Because I doubt I can figure that one out.)

When I was 24, John and I moved up to Massachusetts. When we moved out of that apartment, four years later, it was the longest time I had ever been in one place. Amazingly, that was 10 years ago, as of last month. In May of 1999, we bought our house. That was the last time I moved.

I’ve been in Massachusetts for 14 years now, in New England for nearly 20 years. I never imagined myself staying in one place for so long. (And I never imagined how much stuff I could accumulate.)

We at the Pants Institute are dedicated to education of the public on the many contributions that Pants have made to our culture and society. In our previous monographs, we have been pleased to share with you in-depth discussions of great works of Classic Pants Literature as well as more popular media, such as critical analyses of the genre of Pants Horror Cinema. Our next installation of this ongoing series of Great Seriousness and Importance delves into the pants classics of the stage:

Pants of a Salesman
A middle-aged man discovers that his pants are both terribly unflattering and decades out of fashion.

Waiting for Pants
A story of time wasted away in the laundromat when the dryer cycle is unbearably slow.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Wear Pants
Two men hang out at the laundromat playing quarters while waiting for Hamlet to finish his laundry.

Pants on a Hot Tin Roof
When a family’s dryer is broken, they consider laying their laundry out on the roof to dry.

A Raisin in the Pants
A legal drama about the status of a raisin left in a pocket on laundry day.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Pants?
An inebriated couple exchange verbal barbs as they sort through their dirty laundry.

The Importance of Wearing Pants
Two young men practice deception by frequently changing their pants.

Oedipus Pants
The story of a man’s unholy love for his mother’s pants.

Barefoot in the Pants
A newlywed couple find how hard it is to put on pants when you are already wearing shoes.

A Doll’s Pants
A marriage falls apart when a woman discovers what a small pants size her husband really wears.

The Pants of Dorian Gray
A young man’s pants increasingly show the stains of his escapades.

The Pants Menagerie
The story of a blogger who writes obsessively about pants.

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Thanks to Painted Maypole, thespian and pantsblogger extraordinaire, whose recent flurry of pants posts has given me the much needed kick in the pants to get back to pantsblogging. Thanks also to John, who suggested the addition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Wear Pants.

I’m ever-so-pleased to announce the winner of this year’s coveted Golden Pants Award:

Painted Maypole!

Painted Maypole is no newcomer to pantsblogging. Her highly acclaimed 2008 post, The New Pants Network, is considered one of the finest pieces of contemporary American pantswriting, and is frequently discussed in upper level college pants seminars.

This year, Painted Maypole has added to her pants repertoire with three stunning new works of pants under her belt this year: Shakespeare’s Pants, More of Willy’s Pants, and undoubtedly her finest pants oeuvre to date, Showtunes in the Key of PANTS. This latest work explores the gamut of pants emotions, from sheer pants exuberance to pants melancholy, and will have you singing in your pants:

When you are PANTS,
You are PANTS all the way
From the first time you’re worn
To your last dyin’ day.

Truer words were never sung.

Congratulations, Pantsed Maypole. You are invited to try these pants on for size.

The historic and highly coveted Golden Pants Award was first awarded in 2008.

Something that you may not have known about me is that I have a bit of a soft spot for British cars.

I fell in love with the Austin Mini when I was 9 years old, living in France. Over the years, others caught my eye, like the little MG and Triumph convertibles I’d see from time to time in the San Francisco Bay Area. When I was 16, I became enamoured of the Lotus driven by Mrs. Peel, my idol. And what fan of the Prisoner could forget 6’s Lotus 7?

So when John told me he’d heard of a British car show coming up nearby, I put it on the calendar. We went this past Sunday.

The car show was held on the lawn of the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, MA, which is in an incredible park.

We picked a shady spot to picnic near this sweet purple MG.

Phoebe and Theo enjoyed the sunny day at the park.

John and I enjoyed taking pictures of the pretty cars, most of which were polished up to a high shine, like this Triumph GT6+.

This little Berkeley, though, appeared to have its original paint.

The paint showed some really cool cracking patterns, like this spider-like one.

There was quite a variety of unusual sports cars. Here’s an Allard and a Jaguar. Note the leather straps fastening the bonnet of the Allard (left), and the third headlight on the Jaguar (right).

I didn’t see any wicker seats, but there were a few wicker baskets, like the one strapped to the boot of this classic MG (left). There were lots of two-seaters at the show, and at least one single-seater, like this Lotus (right).

Here’s a row of Triumphs.

I wanted to get a closer look at this (more humble-looking) Triumph, but it drove off as we were walking towards it. (Yes, it started!)

This new Mini was parked next to a hand-built reproduction of a Lotus 7.

This was the only classic Mini we saw. I wanted to take it home with me.