The same day we start planning our festive autumnal gathering...

This morning Martha Stewart reported to prison, a minimum security facility in West Virginia, to begin her five month sentence. Finally justice can be done. Because Martha's freedom really flew in the face of all we hold dear about our legal system. Well that and Ken Lay and Dick Cheney. But they are old white MEN, you see. It's the women folk we need to keep in line.

On the bright side, the prison that Stewart will be serving her sentence, though not in Conneticut as she hoped, resembles the campus of Bucknell University. This all-female penitentiary was the brainchild of a young lady by the name Eleanor Roosevelt. You may know Mrs. Roosevelt as our first lesbian president, but she was also a great humanitarian and feminist. Now, I'm not saying that Martha is on any level with Mrs. Roosevelt, but she has done a lot towards empowering women and turning traditionally "woman's work" into something to be proud of, which incidentalyis also enormously profitable.

Now I know that Martha asked to start her prison term as soon as possible in order to get it over with, but I find it horrible that she will be locked away during the entire holiday season. That seems to be cruel and unusual punishment to the utmost degree. Who will teach us the perfrect recipe for cranberry stuffing or champagne cocktails? Who will explain to m the importance of doily making and decorative candellabra centerpieces? How am I going to make me own Christmas wrapping paper without some sort of direction from the domestic goddess? What thread count is best when using bedsheets to hang myself on November 3rd if Bush steals the election? Why have you abandoned us, Martha? Now, when the world needs you most?

I just hope this doesn't harden her warm, fuzzy demenor...