The marriage of true minds

Today was the June ROLT Meetup, devoted to writing on love, which I called "The marriage of true minds."  There were just four of us, including me and Moira.  Joel turned up as usual, and there was a new member called Helen.  When we met Butler's Pantry was packed and so noisy that we had to move to the area out in front, but by the time we were finished it was almost empty again!

I read a section of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez' wonderful ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, about Aureliano being in love with Remedios, Shakespeare's "marriage of true minds" sonnet, and the section of the Book of Proverbs describing a virtuous wife.  Moira read something for the first time:  some fourteenth-century poems by the Iranian poet Hafiz, translated by someone from Oklahoma, which sounded very modern.  Joel and Helen both read poems they'd written themselves.  Next month our topic will be closing passages.

There was a report on THE HUFFINGTON POST about the cause of Stonewall Jackson's death.  It gave us a chance to post about the American Civil War, which I always enjoy discussing.  The other day they had a report about the Obama administration still resisting allowing girls to take the Plan B "morning after" contraceptive without parental permission, a subject I feel strongly about.  It's an emergency medication that has to be taken within a few days, and forcing girls to get up the courage to tell their parents they've been having sex first will mean more teenage pregnancies, and that isn't even in the parents' interest!  So I've written a lot of posts about that too.

Yesterday I got almost eighty pageviews!  My readership is still increasing these days.  My biggest traffic source just now is the website linked to Current TV, the channel Al Gore started which Al-Jazeera recently bought. (The second is filmhill.com .) Russia still leads in my individual pageview readers, but Canada and the US have both surpassed Germany.