Author: Annie

Yes. I am THAT She Devil. The original, shedevil at vix.com. You know: I am: mom, attorney, fathers' rights advocate Actually, I'm a lawyer -and- I play one on tv. Yep..that's me.

Thoughts on the State of Fathers’ Rights

I’m not dead yet, as they say. Even though my primary practice is no longer focused on fathers’ rights, I still provide referrals, pointers, and information. Perhaps even more importantly, I still teach, and while I now teach spam law, up until last year I taught a family law course, and even now still discuss family law with law students and new attorneys. I’m still keeping my hand in it. You don’t just leave completely behind something about which you feel so strong.

Recently I tripped through some of the fathers’ rights usenet groups (similar to bulletin boards, for the uninitiated). I hadn’t read them in a few years, although I used to post regularly to them, and be something of a known quantity there.

It made me really sad to note that nothing has changed. Men are still being denied access to their children, and women are still bleating the party line about how women do all the work, are always the primary caretakers, men are uninvolved and don’t want access to their children except to control the women, blah blah blah. You know – all men are abusive rapists, and all women are victims (which means that there is no violence in lesbian relationships, and no victims in gay relationships, right? Shyeah, right).

I’m amazed that in this country, in this day and age, women are still so indoctrinated and inculcated, and so unwilling to remove the blinders and see how what they spew is so contrary to the *true* best interests of the children, not to mention reality.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be. Like any group which has been kept down in the past, they have far more to gain by perpetuating the old historical data as current ‘fact’ than by admitting the truth.

And interesting truths they are:

The vast majority of men who are disunited from their families are kept from being involved with their children, by angry controlling women, or women who don’t feel angry but who have swallowed the party line about how it’s “supposed” to be, and by the court system.

In the overwhelming majority of custody cases, despite the feminist dogma, custody goes to the mother, no matter what the facts of the case are, and no matter who has the most money or the most expensive lawyers.

The vast majority of children of divorce are denied a positive relationship with their fathers. Oh sure, women wrap themselves in self-righteousness about how the fathers weren’t involved when they were together so don’t deserve to be involved after the divorce (neglecting that by agreement of the parents, the fathers worked more hours outside the home so that the mother could spend more time with their children, never dreaming that this would be turned against them during divorce to deny them time with the very children they had blindly worked so hard to support). More importantly, neglecting that this isn’t about them, it’s about the childrens’ need to be able to be involved with their fathers.

Very few men going through divorce ever ask for custody; all they want is an ongoing relationship with their children. Women always demand custody. Men go into divorce court expecting fairness, women go in expecting to get it all – and they do. The women get the kids, the men get to pay.

Nothing has changed. Especially the players.

It’s so sad.

Check out Dads Rights.org for more.

No *wonder* people go postal at the post office!!!

I, like 100s of 1000s of people, have been known to use the services of a Personal Mail Box (PMB) provider, such as MailBoxes Etc..

Recently, the service I used lost their lease, and closed their doors. They very generously lined up another service to take on all of their old customers, at much the same price, and provided us all with the USPS mail forwarding forms.

I dutifully filled out and filed the forms. Days passed, and then nearly 2 weeks, and still my mail was not being forwarded, and was in fact still being sent to the *old* address.

So I called up our USPS station, spoke with the supervisor, who said that he had my forwarding forms in hand, and it would start “right away”.

Another week passed – now the old address no longer exists, and, mysteriously, no forwarded mail is showing up at my new address.

So I call back, get the supervisor, and this time I am told… ready for this? “We don’t forward mail from personal mail box services.”.

Excuse me?? Say..what???

That’s right. “We don’t forward mail from personal mail box services. It’s against our policies.”

After coming down from the ceiling (going to have to spackle and paint those nail gouges now), I called the national USPS customer service line, and complained, whined, bleated, and b*tched, all quite loudly. After being put on hold several times while the admittedly sympathetic CS rep checked things out, she came back to tell me, very apologetically “We don’t forward mail from personal mail box services. It’s against our policies.”

Did *you* know that if you use a PMB, and you then change addresses, the post office *will not forward your mail*?????

Now you do.

I see a serious legal issue here, because PMB providers are competition for the USPS in terms of renting mail boxes.

In the meantime, I, and all of those others in my same situation, are essentially threaded. All of my mail to the old
address is simply being returned to sender!!

HOW can it be that this is not common knowledge?

I have also called our local MailBoxes Etc. (now “The UPS
store”), and they not only confirmed this, but also acknowledged that they don’t tell customers about it if they don’t ask!!!
But they do have a service where they will forward your mail for you – of course, for a fee.

Quite a sweet little deal going on both sides: MailBoxes Etc. – you can check out any time you like but you can never really leave. And the USPS: use our competitor, and we simply won’t deliver your mail at all for you.

“We’re the postal service – we do it to you.”

What is WRONG with people???

Geezus!!! What is WRONG with people???

Now, we all know that breastfeeding confers all sorts of health benefits and immunities, right? But it does *not* keep you safe from your mother being a MORON and breastfeeding you WHILE DRIVING THE CAR!!!!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3293447.stm

Honest to gawd!!!

It’s people like this bimbo, and I use the term advisedly, who give women/breastfeeders/Christians/drivers/husbands/humans/you-name-it a bad name.

It takes a village idiot.

Anne

Putting the “juice” in Brahmastra juice

We’re all sick here at Chez Devil. That yukky crud kinda sick where your sinuses pound and you cough up a lung an hour. Yuck.

So what to do? Well, I’m going to share a little secret with you.

Back during my ashram days, which were somewhere between my street days and my army days, I learned to make something called “Brahmastra juice”. This is some kicking stuff which will help to clear out your sinuses, and a few others things as well. It’s great when you have a cold. Try it!

Mix the juice of 3 lemons with a thumb of fresh ginger, cut into chunks, 3 cups of water, and a teaspoon (more or less to tolerance) of cayenne pepper. Simmer for about 5 minutes or so, and add a bit of honey to sweeten it just a bit.

Now drink it.

It should make you sweat.

It *will* clear your sinuses.

Make it for your loved ones. They’ll accuse you of trying to poison them, until they realize that it *works*.

The ultimate truth in advertising?

In a new ad campaign which would be worthy of the Onion, if only it weren’t an actual campaign, the fast food chain Wendy’s has a new advertisement out which pictures two sandwiches clearly containing some sort of meat, with a caption which reads, and I kid you not, “Finally understand the phrase “Whoa, Nelly!”

Obviously this is the answer to “Dude, what’s that meat in the sandwich?”

No wonder poor old Clara Peller kept asking “Where’s the beef?”

Christmas in July, Christmas in November, Christmas all year long

I used to laugh at reports of stores pushing Christmas merchandise before Thanksgiving had even rolled around.

Not any more.

This year it hit the Bay area with a vengeance. The day after Halloween many of our local stores seemed to have bypassed turkeys, pumpkin pies, and cranberries, and gone straight to Santa windsocks, illuminated animatronic reindeer, and remote control vehicles the size of a Saint Bernard. And that’s just in the grocery stores!

Remember the days when you went to a grocery store to by your ..um… *groceries*?? And to the sundry store to buy your sundries, and the department store to buy your..well..you get the idea.

“Look Momma”, says our son, “look how early the stores are celebrating Christmas!”

Yes, I suppose, for certain values of “celebrating”.

Certainly not a version which I will support. But that’s ok, I’ve got it all worked out – I’ll just buy my groceries at the drugstore down the street.

Give a little, mean a lot

Will Bontrager (http://www.willmaster.com) is someone whom I respect a great deal, for a number of reasons.

So when Will mentioned to me the plight of the Pine Ridge Reservation Lakota people (for those not familiar with this South Dakota reservation, the reservation boundaries and history include Wounded Knee), and urged me to visit the site which has been put together and is being maintained by volunteers in an effort to lend a hand, I of course did just that.

Now, I’ve been on the streets, been penniless, been a single mom, and had to rely on the kindness of strangers, but I have also been very fortunate, and never have I had to experience such bleak and abject, close-to-the bone poverty. And for that I am eternally grateful.

These are real people, real families, real children, real teenagers, for whom a few dollars can make all the difference in the world. As the website will tell you:

“Families live in overcrowded, substandard conditions–no insulation, no central heat. Some sleep on dirt floors. Fifty-nine percent of the homes are substandard. Many don’t have running water and occupants must carry water from the local rivers daily for their needs. Many don’t have sinks with piped-in water, stoves, refrigerators, or heating and plumbing.”

Where do your gifts go?

Well, that’s once of the nice things – one of the main organizers, Pat Perkins, keeps a running list of urgent needs – so that you can donate (they make it easy – donate through PayPal) directly for, say, the single mom who needs heating propane in this blistering cold region, or to the expectant mom who needs baby clothes, or to the senior meal center which needs a working stove so that the seniors can have a warm meal, for goodness sake. The urgent needs page is here:

http://www.pineridgerez.net/urgent.php

The main site is here:

http://www.pineridgerez.net

Go ahead. Make a difference.

Is it an adhesive? A strap-on?

Just found this lovely spam headline in my inbox this evening:

“The Penis Patch is amazing”

My first thought is “is this to patch a hole, like when you get a hole in an inner-tube?” Maybe it’s to patch a hole in a blow-up doll!

Or, maybe it’s a strap-on, like those eye-patches you get as a child for “lazy eye”. Imagine all those penises with their eye covered by a little black strap-on eye patch.

Or perhaps it’s a patch like a nicotine patch, and you slap that baby on and all of your cravings for penis are satisfied.

No matter which of these is correct, the visual images are pretty amusing!

Thank you!

Thank you for supporting Mange Merde and my caffeine habit!

I, and all of your fellow readers (I hope!), thank you!

Annie