What has happened this week?

Is Winter Ending?

Well, no, winter isn’t ending. We’ve had a bit of better weather but also some bitter weather. We took a walk under cloudy skies, but heard a Red-Winged Blackbird singing. At our house we are having a very quiet time, also pondering the rapid and increasingly alarming political and international scene in our national government. Not much to share with Deb’s Readerbuzz and her Sunday Salon on the weekend, but here it is!

Dreaming of summer and walks along the Huron River.

We cooked a bit, and had a few ready-made meals.

We shopped at the locally famous Zingerman’s Deli, and bought rye bread, salads, corned beef, and pastrami for sandwiches.

Now for my reading this week…. 

Sojourner Truth and Human Rights

The struggle to free the enslaved black people in the United States in the 19th century and the parallel and combined struggle throughout that century to endow men and women of all races with full rights of citizenship, property ownership, and voting, was a long and painful one. Sojourner Truth, who was born in slavery at the end of the 18th century, was a major figure in this struggle. She became a figure of legendary proportions, and in fact, her reputation depends on several anecdotes that were much embellished from the original events in which she participated.

Both the actual struggles, the political participation, and the myths of Sojourner Truth seem especially important now. As I have been reading about her life, I’m thinking about the horrifying way that the successes of that struggle are being reversed in our new political scene right now, this week, today.

Sojourner Truth’s Narrative tells how she was born in a Dutch community in New York, where slavery was less widespread than in the South, but where many Africans were held in bondage until New York ended legal slavery in 1827. Her narrative describes how she was enslaved until she was approximately thirty years old. She details her relationship with her owners, her family, and other people. She describes her religious development as a Pentecostal Christian, relationships with the preachers and leaders who influenced her, and her participation in various religious organizations and congregations. As she participated in many high-profile events of her time, she was conscious of her legend, and contributed in a positive way to being a leader and a proponent of human rights, freedom from slavery, and women’s suffrage.

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth was widely read throughout her life.

As the century progressed, antislavery activists conveniently forgot about Northern slave owners as they pursued the struggle to end slavery in the South. Thus Sojourner Truth’s origins were often forgotten, and she was sometimes thought to have been born on a Southern plantation rather than on a small-scale Northern farm where the language was Dutch, and where she would never have had the Southern accent that’s popularly associated with her. 

This association is especially strong with her most famous speech, delivered at a very early women’s suffrage meeting. You’ve probably heard the refrain of this speech known by the repetition of the words: “Ain’t I a woman.” These words were not reported at the time the speech was given, but were invented by a later proponent of women’s rights.  However, this legendary version of Sojourner Truth’s speech is so widely accepted that the author of the careful biography that I read feels it will never be corrected.

Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter.

What did Sojourner Truth stand for? Even her “Narrative” was the work of a white woman who took down her oral history because Sojourner Truth herself was unable to to read or write. In fact, Nell Irvin Painter’s biography summarizes it: “Everything we know of Sojourner Truth comes through other people, mostly educated White women.” (p. 207)

Painter’s book is fascinating, and very revealing about pre-Civil War attitudes and cultural stereotypes about the relationship of Black and White Americans, and the co-development of views on race and on slavery. Here is the passage that makes me tremble in fear that we are losing the progress that was made in that era and many subsequent eras when it comes to the rights of women, minorities. and non-white people:

 

“Women’s rights meant empowering women in a multitude of ways: securing women rights to their wages, their inheritance, and the custody of their children; admitting women to institutions of higher learning and the professions; and permitting women to vote, hold office, and serve on juries. This broad agenda dovetailed with the needs of Black people, who also lacked a wide range of civil rights.” (p. 261)

An article in the New York Times titled “Republican Men and Women Are Changing Their Minds About How Women Should Behave” summarized a number of recent studies:

“Surveys from 2024 show that support for traditional gender roles is increasing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is happening primarily among Republicans. Perhaps more surprisingly, it is happening among Republican women as well as among Republican men.”

Women being sent back from employment to stay home? Women being shut out of active high-level politics? In the most backward (but powerful) circles even questions of whether married women should be allowed to vote? 

That’s just one example: many news stories have been detailing extreme racism in the firing of high government officials and many overtly racist and anti-woman statements made by the incoming and less qualified replacements. What will become of us? 

We need another distraction…

Another Distraction

What would you think about a few cute bunny images? Again, I’ve looked at the work of the amazing artist Hokusai from 19th century Japan. Here are a few pictures by him and by one of his students to share with Eileen’s Saturday Critters.

Dreaming of Spring

At the Peony Garden in June a few years ago.

 Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Books and Flowers

I’ve reread two Icelandic mystery stories by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir. Good ones! 
The series now has four books, and the author will soon publish another one.

What is a monster? Claire Dederer devotes this entire book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, to an effort define this term insofar as it relates to gifted men — geniuses — creators — who are abusers, sexual predators, racists, antisemites, or worse. Men whose brilliant creations are stained in the eyes of the audience member who loves their work but becomes aware of the reality of the artist. One way she says it:

“I realized that for me, over the past few years of thinking about Polanski, thinking about Woody Allen, thinking about all these complicated men I loved, the word had come to take on a new meaning. It meant something more nuanced, and something more elemental. It meant: someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms.” (p 46)

This is a terrific book, full of interesting insights into the consumers of great literature, art, film, and music who struggle with the sins of the artists. As a combination of memoir, literary criticism, and general observations about works of art, it's wide-ranging and readable. One very interesting theme is the contrast between men who create with women who create. Though  creative women and men can both be monsters, it’s never for the same reasons, and there are many examples to show the differences.

Another theme is how critics writing about the arts deal with the impact of a creative person's immorality or evil-doing on the audience for their work. The author tries to get to the heart of the claim that a critic can be objective and judge the art independent of its maker: “Authoritative criticism believes in the myth of the objective response, a response entirely unshaped by feeling, emotion, subjectivity.” (p. 73) Basically the author concludes that objectivity about art is a myth: a male myth. 

I enjoyed a lot of the varied accounts of authors/creators and their history:

• I enjoyed Claire Dederer’s insights about a number of creators that I haven’t thought about recently, such as Gertrude Stein, Doris Lessing, Jenny Disky, Sylvia Plath, Woody Allen, Richard Wagner, Picasso, and many more, and the varied ways their biographies might affect their audiences.
• I enjoyed it when she reminded me of the strange 1960s life of Valerie Solanis (1936-1988), author of the SCUM Manifesto, but better known for shooting Andy Warhol: in case you don’t know about Valerie Solanis, SCUM stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men.”
• I enjoyed her examination of the challenges to women who want to be both creators and mothers, and maybe do terrible things to their children (or maybe just abandon them, terrible enough). Or maybe abandon their art.
• I enjoyed her short biography of the little-known artist Ana Mendieta, whose death “makes a kind of parable about artistic silence.” A few weeks ago, I read Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez, thinking it was purely a work of fiction, but I checked up and discovered that it wasn’t simply fiction, but a fictionalized life of Ana, who was actually killed by her husband — also an artist. He was tried but let off, which is a scandal and clearly an example of an artist monster. I appreciated Claire Dederer’s insights about this particular example of the artist/husband who gets away with murder — and of a victim who was spectacularly diminished by her abuser.

The author presents the reader with many questions about those who love the works of genius/monsters, and those who justify the monstrousness. One possible explanation: “We want the asshole to cross the line, to break the rules. We reward that rule-breaking, and then we go a step further, and see it as endemic to art-making itself. We reward and reward this bad behavior until it becomes synonymous with greatness.” (p. 111) 

If you would like to read about fairness, this is not the book for you. The number of ways that society is unfair to women are unbearably numerous, from the unfairness to the victims of artists’ self-justified cruelty and violence to the unfairness to women artists. Even “cancelling” an artist for his vices isn’t very satisfactory. Quotes:

• “The very term ‘cancel culture’ is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim.” (p.133)
• “The violence of male artists is tied to their greatness. It’s an impulse. It’s freedom. The violence or self-harm of female artists can be a sign of sensitivity, a sign of lunacy, but it is rarely turned inside out to become a sign of creative and moral strength.” (p. 222)

In this review, I have hardly begun to explore the many-faceted content of this book. (It goes without saying that the author presents her own view of Lolita.) I’ll just leave you with this:

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of patriarchy.” (p. 221)

Next book:  Sojourner Truth by Nell Irvin Painter.

Gardens Around Me

Allium, about to bloom.

On the Road Again

It’s Saturday, and we left home at 8 AM.
Our destination is St.Louis. We are half-way there, in Indiana, at my sister’s house.

We arrived in time for a fabulous lunch.

Blog post and photos © mae sander 2024

Voting

"I focused on images of voters, of all political beliefs, queuing up in circumstances as varied as rain in Georgia, cold in Montana and heat in Arizona. Older people with their walkers standing patiently for hours. Indigenous Americans on horseback riding 10 miles to vote. Parents, their kids on their shoulders. Lines stretching for blocks, nearly as long as the lines of cars at food pantries a few months ago. The vertical shapes of Americans standing in wait to vote one after another, in their masks and, for the most part, socially distanced. An estimated 100 million voters cast their votes early, with rounds of applause often greeting first-time voters." -- Nell Irvin Painter, November 5, 2020.

 

"The First Vote," Harper's Weekly, 1867

Nell Irvin Painter's op-ed in today's New York Times, "It Shouldn’t Be This Close. But There’s Good News, Too" described her feelings about Tuesday's election. Despite all the depressing news, she saw "An upwelling of faith in the epitome of citizenship, voting." Painter also talked about other countries and other times where voting represented citizens' faith in democracy. She linked to the above image of the first vote cast by Blacks in the South after the Civil War, an example of American voting history. She wrote:

"The American historian in me can reach farther back to envision determined voting, to Reconstruction, to the image on the cover of Harper’s Weekly of November 1867, with A. R. Waud’s illustrationof Black men lined up to deposit ballots into partisan urns.

"At the front of the line stands an old graybeard in ragged clothing, workingmen’s tools in his pocket. He is dark-skinned, evidently formerly enslaved. Behind him stands a light-skinned dandy in curls and cravat, and behind him, a decorated Union soldier. These three lead a line of voters of varied classes and darkness of skin."

I found Painter's op-ed to be a very comforting antidote to the pessimism and sadness I felt for the result of the election. There's still no clear winner, but the strong prospect of a Biden presidency with a completely nullifying Senate, where there will be no cooperation and no confirmation of an effective cabinet and executive branch of government, is horrifying. Fortunately it's less horrifying than four more years of the current executive. And Painter's words express hope for the more distant future, perhaps.

I'm grateful for Painter's attempt at optimism. Her book The History of White People taught me much about the history of racism and white supremacy (I reviewed it here).  The book I read this week, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson (reviewed yesterday) relates very much to this work, and when I looked up the author, I learned that Painter was Johnson's thesis advisor for his PhD. I hope to read more works by both authors.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander, image as credited.

Slavery

Personal narratives about the experience of slavery in America and in the Caribbean region were an important influence in the anti-slavery movement of the 18th and 19th century. Fictional treatment of the slaves' experiences also began in the fairly early days of slavery and stories of slavery remain a frequent theme in popular literature today.

The Life of Olaudah Equiano,
Dover edition, originally published 1999

The Life of Olaudah Equiano

A very early slave narrative is The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published 1814. It's tough reading the repeated acts of cruelty and inhumanity that the enslaved author experienced and witnessed, but there's a lot of very interesting material in this book.

Olaudah's childhood in Africa was very vividly described, although he was kidnapped into slavery at a very early age. He always speaks of his village in Africa as "we," indicating that he retained a strong sense of his identity. I enjoyed this description:

"Our manner of living is entirely plain; for as yet the natives are unacquainted with those refinements in cookery which debauch the taste. Bullocks, goats, and poultry, supply the greatest part of their food. These constitute likewise the principal wealth of the country, and the chief articles of its commerce. The flesh is usually stewed in a pan; to make it savory we sometimes use also pepper, and other spices, and we have salt made of wood ashes. Our vegetables are mostly plantains, eadas, yams, beans, and Indian corn. The head of the family usually eats alone; his wives and slaves have also their separate tables. Before we taste food we always wash our hands: indeed our cleanliness on all occasions is extreme; but on this it is an indispensable ceremony." (pp. 12-13).

After the author's kidnapping and enslavement, he describes the various places where he lived as a slave in Africa, and then his agony during his time on the slave ship where he experienced the infamous middle passage from Africa. His next life was that of a slave in one of the British islands of the Caribbean. The starvation, the filth, the large number of deaths, and the insane abuse of the human cargo of these ships is haunting, and I have been horrified whenever I have read about it.

Violent and unjust laws that allowed any black man to be impressed into slavery were normal in the Americas at that time, and the author often was nearly a victim of these laws even after he had purchased his freedom from his original owner. In the islands, especially, the law always took the oath of a white man in preference to that of a black man, which meant that free blacks were often treated with great contempt, for example, the refusal to pay their wages after they had completed an agreed on job. The Quakers of Philadelphia were an exception, and were already opposed to slavery and unjust treatment before these were widely held views.

Olaudah worked at several jobs, especially as a skilled sailor, both before and after he was freed from slavery. He traveled to many places and met people from many cultures. I especially liked his description of the feasts of Caribbean Indian tribes -- how they made alcoholic liquor from pineapples, how they roasted alligator meat, and more. Shipwrecks, visits to exotic places, and descriptions of a great variety of work keep the narrative interesting. For example:

"When we had dispatched our business at Cadiz, we went to Gibraltar, and from thence to Malaga, a very pleasant and rich city, where there is one of the finest cathedrals I had ever seen. It had been above fifty years in building, as I had heard, though it was not then quite finished; great part of the inside, however, was completed and highly decorated with the richest marble columns, and many superb paintings; it was lighted occasionally by an amazing number of wax tapers of different sizes, some of which were as thick as a man’s thigh; these, however, were only used on some of their grand festivals. I was very much shocked at the custom of bullbaiting, and other diversions which prevailed here on Sunday evenings, to the great scandal of Christianity and morals." (p. 152)

Details of Olaudah's conversion and how he experienced the Christian faith no doubt made this book more attractive to the audience of his time. Besides his spiritual experiences, he often mentions his dreams, especially his frequent prophetic dreams that prefigure disasters such as shipwrecks and betrayals.

The narrative concludes with the hope that the British government will soon abolish slavery -- the issue was under debate as he wrote. Olaudah Equiano died in 1797, and in fact the abolition law was not passed until 1833.

Washington Black, published 2018

Washington Black

A recent and popular book about the life of a slave in the early 19th century is Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. This is a much more exciting narrative, as you would expect from fiction!

The title character of this novel is born into slavery on a Caribbean island. He has a complex relationship with his master and his master's family. After being taught to read and write and calculate, showing a great deal of intelligence, Washington Black dramatically escapes from  his master's plantation in a hot-air balloon, which was a rare piece of early 19th century technology. He has many adventures in the USA and Canada, and eventually England. This novel is fast-paced and not at all polemical as are the actual slave narratives that I've read. I can see why it's so popular today!

Other Books about Slavery

From my past reading: histories, memoirs, and historical fictions that emphasize slavery, slave narratives, and the role of African blacks in American history:

• Frederick Douglass's Autobiography
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston
• Out of the House of Bondage by Thavolia Glymph
• The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed our First Families by Adrian Miller
• A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America by James McWilliams
• The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
• The Last Runaway, a novel by Tracy Chevalier

This blog post copyright © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

"A Revolution in Eating"

James McWilliams book, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, contains a number of very fascinating historical details. The focus is on the British colonial areas of the New World, and how each one developed its own regional food ways and agricultural practices and products. Delightfully, the book includes many wonderful illustrations from the 17th through the 19th century, and is based on a great many early sources to provide details of American culinary history.

There are interesting explanations of early cooperation of Native Americans with British settlers throughout the book: the Natives helped the settlers to adapt to new environments, which were changed as the British introduced their domestic plants and animals as well as making unintentional introductions like weeds and rats. Though eventually the natives were forced out or brutally killed, their foods, such as the famous trio of corn, beans, and squash, were integrated into essentially British cooking practices. An example: the creation of bread, an essentially Old World food, out of corn, the New World grain.

While the colonies on the North American continent eventually united against Britain, won the Revolutionary War, and became the United States, in earlier times, the colonies in the Caribbean were equally important or even more important, and McWilliams explains this very clearly. The British establishment in the West Indies had a critical role in developing the economy of the North American colonies; thus presenting the history of these colonies as a unit, even if it didn't continue later on, is quite enlightening.

A Revolution in Eating. Published 2005.

The regions McWilliams discusses in addition to the West Indies are the New England States, the Carolinas, the Chesapeake Bay area, and the Middle Colonies including New York and Pennsylvania. In each region, the author considers the contributions of three groups: the English settlers, the Native Americans, and the Africans -- who were often, but not always, enslaved workers in the agricultural and culinary development of the region. I especially found this book to have an exceptional presentation of the details of how Africans contributed knowledge of rice cultivation and cuisine to the Carolinas.

The emergence of race as a key to classifying people occurred in the colonies during the era under discussion.  In The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter, (blogged here) I learned quite a bit about how at first in colonial America, Africans could be indentured servants or free people or slaves -- but the concept of race overtook the earlier less race-based views. In British colonies, slavery began in the West Indies, but spread north.

In A Revolution in Eating, I learned much more about how the enslavement of black people varied in different regions, depending on the demands of the agricultural setting -- with the most extreme exploitation and abuse occurring in the sugar plantations and sugar refineries of the Caribbean, but also in the tobacco and rice growing regions of North America, and to some extent even in the more northern colonies. The book documents the contributions to regional cuisine by blacks, as well as the way that racial consciousness enabled the poorest and least economically promising situations for whites to persist because there was always a group that they too could look down on -- in other words, the emergence of the worst of racism. McWilliams makes clear how racism meant that black people didn't -- and don't -- get credit for what they contributed.

This blog post copyright © 2019 by the author, mae sander, for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

It is being stolen by other blogs at other hosting services. Please do not read it there.

Nell Irvin Painter, A Fascinating Author

I have just read a fascinating book dealing with the intellectual and social history of the United States. I found it because its author, Nell Irvin Painter, wrote a very enlightening op-ed about the history of Jamestown that's being celebrated this week. The op-ed was "How we think about the term 'enslaved' matters: 400 years ago, the first Africans who came to America were not ‘enslaved’, they were indentured – and this makes a crucial difference when we think about the meanings of our past." (link)

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter describes the way that Western societies historically created the concept of races and at the same time, developed a wide variety of race prejudice and bigoted, unscientific racial theories. Simultaneously, Painter demonstrates the interconnection of racial theories with the institutions of slavery and social inequality. One reason I liked the book is that it so often highlighted issues that have plagued our country from the beginning; for example, consider this: "The U.S. census of 1850 was the first to collect statistics on immigrants." (Kindle Locations 2242-2243).

The History of White People begins in ancient Greece. The Greeks are relevant not because they invented modern racial consciousness -- they did not -- but because their views of who they were (and who other people were) influenced 18th and 19th century European writers' construction of racial definitions and racial inequalities. In turn, the European theorists provided American intellectuals with a theory of race that supported emerging injustice, exploitation, and abuse of a number of immigrant groups, as well as a justification of enslavement of blacks. While I had heard of many of the European and American thinkers and writers that Painter describes, I had a very naive and unformed view of how their ideas on race influenced American society and prejudice.

Among the many 18th and 19th century Americans Painter discusses, I was especially interested in her portrayal of Ralph Waldo Emerson -- a famous American whose essays I read in high school and who then basically dropped out of my experience with history and literature. Painter writes:

"Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) towers over his age as the embodiment of the American renaissance, but not, though he also should, as the philosopher king of American white race theory. Widely hailed for his intellectual strength and prodigious output, Emerson wrote the earliest full-length statement of the ideology later termed Anglo-Saxonist, synthesizing all the salient nineteenth-and early twentieth-century concepts of American whiteness."(Kindle Locations 2449-2452).

In a later chapter on Emerson she says:

"Without his saying so directly, his definition of American excluded non-Christians and virtually all poor whites. Native American Indians and African Americans did not count. In English Traits, when he tallies up the American population, Emerson explicitly excludes the enslaved and skips over native peoples entirely." (Kindle Locations 3011-3013). 

Painter includes descriptions of many other towering figures in the American development of race-consciousness, race definition, and discrimination against an ever-changing list of "races" such as the Irish, the Jews, the Slavs, the Mexicans, the Chinese, and many more. She describes how each group gradually achieved the status of equality to the mainstream "white" race, obviously always leaving out black people.

She also describes the thinkers who contributed to a change in intellectual support of racist views. One of these was the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942), an immigrant from Germany. Several of his students including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, were important in opposing earlier anthropologists who propagated prejudicial views of races and immigrants. Boas was ahead of his time in challenging contemporary prejudice. Painter writes:

"In 1906 he made another brave gesture toward racial tolerance by accepting an invitation from the pioneering African American social scientist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) to deliver a commencement address at Atlanta University. Not only was Boas a white scholar willing to go to a black institution; he came with a message of encouragement for young people about to enter a hostile America. Quite amazingly for 1906, he assured them they had nothing to be ashamed of. Other races— the ancestors of imperial Romans and the northern European barbarians— had endured their own dark ages. Now, if educated young black people could understand the 'capabilities of [their] own race,' they could attack 'the feeling of contempt of [their] race at its very roots,' and thereby 'work out its own salvation.'" (Kindle Locations 3715-3721). 

The effect on American attitudes towards race of the two World Wars, the Depression, the New Deal, the post-war GI Bill, and a variety of other government programs are all presented in fascinating detail, but I can't possibly reproduce all of Painter's amazing way to look at 20th century history. One example: the following passage about the New Deal:

"The New Deal coalition, in fact, was as lumpy as could be, with certain parts working against the interests of others. The needs of working-class northern black voters, for instance, took a backseat to the powerful southern Democrats’ obsession with white supremacy and abhorrence of labor unions. Southerners in Congress kept the New Deal segregated, so that black people were largely excluded from policies regarding labor, housing, education. The newly created Social Security Administration, for example, excluded the two largest categories of black workers, those laboring on farms and in domestic service. The military, of course, remained either segregated (Army, Navy) or exclusionary (Marines, Air Force). African Americans got the worst of it, and President Roosevelt also balanced the interests of his Jewish constituencies against the preferences of his Catholics, as in the case of the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin." (Kindle Locations 5540-5547).

Painter's account continues with interesting summaries of the Black Power movement and other trends of the late 20th century. It ends about 10 years ago as the book's publication date is 2011. Unfortunately, many of the offensive ideas from early times that are described in the book seemed to have been put to rest by many events in society, including that when she wrote, we had President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama "whose skin color alone would have condemned her to ugliness in the twentieth century, figures as an icon of beauty and intelligence on the global stage." (Kindle Locations 6195-6196).

Unfortunately, we've now regressed, which makes The History of White People all the more important. On a recent trip to Detroit, I especially thought about how the centuries of mistreatment of Black people documented in this book brought about the terrible living conditions that you see when driving through neighborhoods of derelict homes, boarded-up businesses, and vacant lots. The contrast is painful between these areas and the prosperity visible just over the dividing line with Grosse Pointe. It's a tragic reality.

I think the following sentences make a good summary of the most basic premise of the book:

"In a society largely based on African slavery and founded in the era that invented the very idea of race, race as color has always played a prominent role." (Kindle Locations 2138-2139).

"No consensus has ever formed on the number of human races or even on the number of white races." (Kindle Locations 6103-6104).  

This post is written and copyright © 2019 by Mae E. Sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com. 

If you are reading this at another blog, it's been stolen.