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If you have a tendency to get sucked into bad movies starring formerly famous actresses, you've probably watched some “Fa la la la Lifetime”, a month-long event in which Lifetime Television brings out its considerable collection of Christmas movies.

Whether they're are about Christmas dating, Christmas engagements, or Christmas weddings, the movies usually to have a few things in common: sassy friends with Canadian accents, insipid male love interests, excessive seasonal decorations, embarrassing covers of Christmas carols, and unconvincing dye jobs. I watched enough this year to discover a sub-genre that’s even more unsettling than your average cute-heroine-finds-Christmas-love story. I call it the Second Chance Fantasy.

I was back in Minneapolis this weekend for the National Conference for Media Reform, an annual event organized by the folks at Free Press, a nonpartisan group focused on media reform and policy.

She turned Brutha against Brutha!

Here in Northeast Portland is a place called In Other Words Women's Books and Resources, a nonprofit bookstore founded in 1993. I've only lived in Portland for a year, so most of what I know I've learned from talking to people and reading news articles, like this.

A few nights ago I went to a screening of a short documentary called Moving In: A nonprofit feminist bookstore and the politics of place. The documentary, created by Dawn Jones (who's on the board of Bitch; photographed below), examines the bookstore's 2006 move, which resulted from being economically displaced from their original neighborhood, to a historically African-American neighborhood. The film is fantastic; you should see it if you have the opportunity.

I finally got around to seeing The Business of Being Born, which means I got very intimate with Ricki Lake and her female powers. Lake not only produced this documentary about the ever-increasing medicalization of birth in the U.S. but also included up-close-and-personal footage of the birth of her second son, at home, in the bathtub, attended by a midwife.