By Naomi Stenberg - From Belltown Messenger #67 - May 2009

When I saw the title Lullabies from the Axis of Evil, I pictured a band, disaffected and grungy, wearing heavy eyeliner, glowering from a CD cover. The words evil and lullaby didn’t seem to fit in the cradle of the same sentence.
Not to worry.

Released in 2004, the CD contains “heartbreakingly beautiful songs for babies,” according to the Washington Post. Many of the musicians, all women, hailed from Bush’s absurdly misnamed “axis of evil,” countries such as Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

“In the world of today, there is a need of the power of lullabies,” Erik Hillestad, the producer, said. “…But it is not a given fact that all people hear them. It is not a given fact that the mothers’ voices are heard at all.”

But when their voices are heard, whether by the public or by their babies, the results are transformative.

According to parenting expert Dr. Carol Harding, “Singing lullabies is one of the oldest, most natural forms of interaction between...

By P.J. Glassey - From Belltown Messenger #67 - May 2009

Did you know that the calorie-in calorie-out theory has been debunked for years? It’s the type, the combination, and the timing of your calories that dictate whether you get fatter or leaner. This is because there are what I call “negative-fat foods” that burn fat off your body just by eating them. I know it’s hard to believe, but the more you eat of these foods, the leaner you get. You can literally “overeat yourself skinny!”

These foods come in two major categories. The first category is meat. Not all meats are negative-fat, however. Conventional beef, for instance, can make you fatter. Grass-fed beef, on the other hand, is a potent negative-fat food because of the type of fat it has in it.

Most wild game meats are also negative-fat foods. Organic free-range fowl and wild fish share in the negative-fat category as well. Non-organic sources or farm-raised fish, however, can be positive-fat foods.

The other category is green vegetables. The darker the green,...

Julia Oldham is a bug interpreter. She portrays insect mating rituals through dance and film. According to Erika Hobart of Seattle Weekly, the artist’s videos are “oddly captivating…. She wildly flails her limbs, hovers over dim lights, and slams prosthetic claws in the ground.”

Sounds like a scary B-movie to me, but fear is not Oldham’s intent. Oldham loves bugs. The reason she finds insects so endearing is “they present their bodies to each other in a way they hope is perceived as sexy, much as we do in our courtship processes.”

I am reminded of an outfit I put together in my early twenties to attract another bug, I mean, human. I hoped to capture her attention with my neon pink tie and matching socks, visible because my jeans were too short. I also sported a poodle perm.

In a photo, I am tilting towards “the girl” with an eager grin and a lit sparkler in each hand.
Could have put me on any very large cake. My sartorial choices possibly had less to do with bad taste and more to do with biology and the rules of...