First, the bravery…
Nicola has an excellent article on tasers and the taser party fad up at the Huffington Post:
Apparently, many women who go to these parties live in constant fear of violent sexual assault. And they believe that having a Taser will protect them. Perhaps they imagine a hooded stranger in their apartment or their parking lot. Perhaps they imagine that they will whip out the Taser, zap the bad guy, and a few minutes later watch as the cops march him off. Bloodless and neat. Her Taser is a "safety blanket," says Dana Shafman, the entrepreneur who started the parties; if she leaves the house without one she goes "into panic mode."
But it’s not safety blankets that protect you. You do that.
I wish every girl and woman in the wide world would read the whole piece. And the Aud novels.
(This also reminds me that she has another blog, about the writing of her next novel, which sounds AMAZING. AMAZING. Three times AMAZING.)
And now the admin…
I toggled a few new settings on Typepad. Now there’s a Share This thingie under each post, which will let you easily save stuff to your various networking/bookmarky places or e-mail posts. There’s also RSS feeds for the comments on individual posts. And some other stuff you shouldn’t really see if it works right.
I’m sure this is all very unnecessary, but it makes me feel productive.