I was reminded of this book (how many of my reviews start that way?) while I was writing some travel tips based on our recent trip to France. One of my recommendations, passed on from Rick Steves, Mr. European Travel himself, was to wear a money belt. His statement brought to mind the so-called “security pocketbooks” that Cornelia and Emily were forced to wear during their own trip to 1920’s France. This was, of course, during the days before women wore pants very much, and while they weren’t wearing layers of petticoats their skirts were longish and baggy. So see if you can picture this: an elastic belt around the waist with a narrow band attached to it hanging down and a purse thingy attached to that, dangling between the wearer’s legs. As long as you stand still or walk slowly the thingy should be unobtrusive, but if you’re at all active it will start swinging. There’s a very funny scene early on when Emily and Cornelia are dancing (I think it’s onboard their ship) and their purses start bumping into the knees of their dancing partners. Both girls exit the dance floor looking embarrassed, followed by their partners who look puzzled.
Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense
by Mona Charen, 2018, available in several formats. Audio version is read by the author and is highly recommended. Author’s website is at 
Well, we take off on Wednesday for a three-week trip to France. Now that the Chorale concert season is over and I’ve done the shopping for tomorrow night’s member dinner, I’m sitting down for one last post before we leave. Don’t know if I’ll get anything posted during the trip. May I encourage you, by the way, if you enjoy my posts, to forward your e-mail to someone who might also enjoy them? You can pick an individual post that you think will be particularly interesting to your forwardee. I’d like to see the blog grow.
I was struck with this thought while working on the material I presented a couple of weekends ago at a Christian women’s retreat. My actual topic was about the different choices we make about the food we eat, which I placed in the following hierarchy:
I just had a wonderful weekend at Camp Elim, a Christian camp near Colorado Springs, where I was privileged to speak in a couple of workshops. My two topics were “What’s Your Tendency?”, an examination of Gretchen Rubin’s theory about the four ways that people respond to expectations, and “How Food Fads and Myths Can Harm You,” in which I took on some of the current ideas floating around in the eating theories world, with a few side trips into my views on alternative medicine. I may get myself into trouble with that second one! My actual group for that session was small as I was competing with a very popular one on marriage, and they all seemed very receptive to my ideas. I gave everyone who attended the sessions the opportunity to sign up for a resources page, so I decided to just turn that material into a post for all my readers to access. Here ’tis:
Did you watch the Oscars this past Sunday night? I don’t always do so, but KRMA was having yet another set of fundraising programs, and the guys were playing a game that I didn’t want to participate in, and I always like to see at least a little bit of the show, if for nothing else than to observe the crazy outfits that the women wear. Honestly! If we women don’t want to be treated as sexual objects, why do we put ourselves on such display?
. And didn’t the sea creature somewhat resemble a character in a movie that all three of us
Yes, you should go see “Black Panther.” I felt during it the way I’ve felt during the best of the Tolkien films—that I never wanted it to end, that I was completely sucked in. That praise doesn’t mean that wasn’t totally confused a few times, but in the end pretty much everything was explained. Jim and I were on one side of a dispute about a certain plot element, with my brother-in-law and son on the other. You wouldn’t want to agree on everything, would you? It feels as if so much of our society is in flux these days, so the zeitgeist (a word that means pretty much whatever you want it to mean) favors a film such as this which breaks so many cultural barriers, but really—the movie stands on its own..png)
Well, I’m still plowing through 
by the great Yuval Levin, a book about the warring philosophies of Edmund Burke (often seen as a great figure in the history of conservatism) and Thomas Paine (often seen as a proponent of radicalism in the pursuit of freedom). It’s an audio book of ten and a half hours, and I’m only at 4:10:59, so I’m not even halfway through. The ideas are really very interesting, and the writing is clear, but boy is it dense! I can only get through so much at a time. Every time I listen to a section I feel as if my mind is being expanded, but then I have to take a break.