dna test for cervical cancer

I'd love to take this test instead of getting into the stirrups.

DNA Test Outperforms Pap Smear
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
April 7, 2009

A new DNA test for the virus that causes cervical cancer does so much better than current methods that some gynecologists hope it will eventually replace the Pap smear in wealthy countries and cruder tests in poor ones.

Not only could the new test for human papillomavirus, or HPV, save lives; scientists say that women over 30 could drop annual Pap smears and instead have the DNA test just once every 3, 5 or even 10 years, depending on which expert is asked.

Their optimism is based on an eight-year study of 130,000 women in India financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine. It is the first to show that a single screening with the DNA test beats all other methods at preventing advanced cancer and death.

The study is “another nail in the coffin” for Pap smears, which will “soon be of mainly historical interest,” said Dr. Paul D. Blumenthal, a professor of gynecology at Stanford medical school who has tested screening techniques in Africa and Asia and was not involved in the study.

But whether the new test is adopted will depend on many factors, including hesitation by gynecologists to abandon Pap smears, which have been remarkably effective. Cervical cancer was a leading cause of death for American women in the 1950s; it now kills fewer than 4,000 a year.

In poor and middle-income countries, where the cancer kills more than 250,000 women a year, cost is a factor, but the test’s maker, Qiagen, with financing from the Gates Foundation, has developed a $5 version and the price could go lower with enough orders, the company said.

“The implications of the findings of this trial are immediate and global,” Dr. Mark Schiffman of the National Cancer Institute wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. “International experts in cervical cancer prevention should now adopt HPV testing.”

At the moment, there are huge gaps in how rich and poor countries screen.

In the West, women get smears named for their inventor, Dr. Georgios Papanikolaou. Cells are scraped from the cervix and sent to a laboratory, where they are stained and inspected under a microscope by a pathologist looking for abnormalities. Results may take several days.

The DNA screen also needs a cervical scraping, but it is mixed with re-agents and read by a machine.

In poor countries, most women get no routine screening. Pain sends them to a hospital, by which time it is often too late.

But in some countries, women get “visualization,” pioneered in the last decade, also with Gates Foundation support: a health worker looks at the cervix with a flashlight and swabs it with vinegar. Spots that turn white may be precancerous lesions, and are immediately frozen off. Diagnosis and treatment take only one visit.

Pap smears fail in the third world because there are too few trained pathologists and because women told to return often cannot.

The Indian study, begun in 1999, divided 131,746 healthy women ages 30 to 59 from 497 villages into four groups. One group, the control, got typical rural clinic care: advice to go to a hospital if they wanted screening. The second got Pap smears, the third got flashlight-vinegar visualization, and the fourth got a DNA test, then made by Digene, which is now owned by Qiagen. The company did not pay for or donate to the study, its authors said.

After eight years, the visualization group had about the same rates of advanced cancer and death as the control group. The Pap-smear group had about three-fourths the rates, and the DNA test had about half.

Significantly, none of the women who were negative on their DNA test died of cervical cancer. “So if you have a negative test, you’re good to go for several years,” Dr. Blumenthal said.

The study’s chief author, Dr. Rengaswamy Sankaranarayanan of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, said, “With this test, you could start screening women at 30 and do it once every 10 years.”

Asked whether that advice would apply in the United States, Debbie Saslow, director of gynecologic cancer for the American Cancer Society, replied, “Absolutely no.”

“A negative test would mean a woman’s chances of developing cancer are small, but not zero,” she added. “But if he’d said five years, I wouldn’t have a strong reaction.”

Since 1987, she said, the cancer society and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have recommended Pap smears only every three years after initial negative ones. In 2002, they recommended the HPV test too, and evidence is mounting that the Pap smear can be dropped.

“But we haven’t been able to get doctors to go along,” Dr. Saslow said. “The average gynecologist, especially the older ones, says, ‘Women come in for their Pap smear, and that’s how we get them in here to get other care.’ We’re totally overscreening, but when you’ve been telling everyone for 40 years to get an annual Pap smear, it’s hard to change.”

Dr. Sankaranarayanan said most European countries screen every three to five years, and many do not start before age 30.

Cervical cancer is caused by a few of the 150 strains of the human papillomavirus. Women pick strains up as soon as they start having intercourse, but more than 90 percent of cases clear up spontaneously within two years. Early DNA tests would find these, but lead to useless overtreatment. So in women ages 20 to 30, doctors often order repeat Pap tests, which is expensive but may catch the tiny minority of cancers that develop in less than 15 years.

“The U.S. has high resources and low risk-tolerance,” Dr. Schiffman explained, while countries like India have little money and are forced to tolerate risk.

Dr. Jan Agosti, the Gates Foundation officer overseeing its third world screening, said Qiagen’s new $5 test — which proved itself in a two-year study in China — runs on batteries without water or refrigeration, and takes less than three hours. In countries where women are “shyer about pelvic exams,” she added, it even works “acceptably well” on vaginal swabs they can take themselves.

modern love: in a charmed life, a road less traveled

There are days when I feel so happy that it oozes from every pore in my body. I literally radiate it, and the optimist in me wants nothing more than to experience this bliss for the rest of my life.

The cautious optimist in me sometimes dwells on what my life would be like if fate (or a drunk running a red light) shattered that happiness. Because I've endured one Krakatoa in my life, I hope that the dark days in my life are not merely dormant, but forever in my past. I realize that it's not productive to spend time in the dark recesses of my imagination, so I usually don't. Then I stumble on an essay like this one that reminds me that no matter how awful circumstances can be, when there's love, there's hope.

Modern Love: In a Charmed Life, a Road Less Traveled
By LAYNG MARTINE Jr.
Published: March 6, 2009

MY wife and I were in a motel in Roanoke, Va., on our way home from three months at the Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania, where she had been convalescing after being crippled in a car accident. It was our first night away from the skill and comfort of the nurses we had come to depend on, and so far, so good.

Then we woke up and smelled something. It smelled like a bowel movement. I lifted up the sheets. It was a bowel movement, and it was in our bed.

We knew we had a lot to learn, but we had no idea how much.

Hearing the word paraplegic had made us focus on the big thing, the fact that Linda could no longer walk. Less anticipated were the smaller humiliations and inconveniences, like bowel movements in bed or on the way to a party, sores that came out of nowhere and took months or years to heal, and inaccessible restroom stalls that caused Linda to have to catheterize herself in the public area where people were washing their hands and talking.

And on it went, the list of indignities. She couldn’t watch “Good Morning America” if the remote fell off the bed when she reached for her glasses. She wet the seat on airplanes and in friends’ cars. She could no longer feel sexual intercourse (and the powerful muscle spasms in her legs threatened to crush anyone who tried).

But we’ve learned, and adapted. Now we know the places with good handicapped-access bathrooms (Starbucks), which airline makes things easiest (Southwest), which cities have smooth curb cuts (San Francisco), and which movie theaters don’t make us sit four feet from the screen.

Anyone who is in love is living a charmed life, especially if you’ve been in love for many years, through good times and bad. I have been crazy about Linda since the first time I saw her. We always felt we could handle any challenge because we were facing it together. This time we knew we had the will, but the demands were so exhausting, the changes so pervasive, that sometimes we wondered how we would cope.

This incredibly capable woman who loved to hike mountains, ride waves, and run marathons, who had cleared our sizable backyard of eight-foot-high brambles and helped me move all our furniture into three houses, suddenly couldn’t do any of those things, ever again.

Not long after getting home from the hospital, when we were having dinner by candlelight at our kitchen table, she burst into tears. “I don’t know if I can do this for the rest of my life,” she said.

All I could say was, “We’ll do it together.”

We began to think of what we could do to replace playing tennis, walking on the beach, working in the garden. Since Linda loves the ocean, a friend found a specially designed beach chair made of PVC tubing with wide inflated tires that allow it to be pushed across the sand. It’s yellow and white with a big red umbrella.

The first time I saw Linda sitting atop those tubes and under the red umbrella, I told her she looked like Ronald McDonald’s homecoming queen.

She laughed like crazy, then repeated it to everyone she knew.

A few summers later, one of our three sons suggested that he and I get on either side of the chair, slide Linda off, carry her into the ocean and drop her just beyond the waves so she could float calmly behind the crashing breakers.

At first we put her in a life preserver, but she tipped over and couldn’t right herself. So we took it off, and to our surprise she bobbed peacefully, looking once again like every other person lolling in the sea on a summer day.

You know those great old stores on Newbury Street in Boston with five or six steps up to each one? At first we could get up only about three of those a day. Now we can do every single store, one right after the other, all day long. My arms and my back are stronger — so are Linda’s — and there’s a rhythm to our teamwork that’s become second nature to us.

We take many more drives now, preferably in our convertible, looking for pretty roads and funky hamburger places, especially ’50s-style drive-ins where they bring the food to our car. Before the car even moves an inch, though, Linda has to put on her seat belt, because even a semi-sudden stop at low speed will whap her face against the dashboard as if she’s a spring-loaded bobblehead. She has no stomach muscles. Her body works only from the chest up.

I remember the day we had to tell her that. She was in the I.C.U., tubes all over, machines and screens whirring and blinking, traces of dried blood in her gnarled hair. The doctor and I stood on either side of her bed.

“Linda,” he said, “this accident you were in was a rough one.”

“I can tell,” she said, her words warped by the breathing tube.

“At the moment your legs do not move.”

She looked at him. “Will they?”

“I doubt it.”

Her eyes shifted over to me. I squeezed her hand gently.

After the doctor left, tears filled her eyes. “It was all too perfect,” she said, “wasn’t it?”

And it did seem that way. It always had.

My first glimpse of her was through the screen door of her house; I’d gone there to see her brother. She was 21, and I was 22. She looked adorable in her orange dress, and I thought, “If that girl will have anything to do with me, that’s it.”

We married soon after.

We settled in Nashville, where I was an aspiring songwriter. A decade later we were able to buy a summer house on a harbor in Rhode Island. That’s where we were going when the accident happened. We had been traveling in two cars when something went wrong with mine and we stopped in Knoxville at a repair shop. Linda was wearing a blue and white seersucker dress as she and our youngest son, Mac, who was 15, walked to her car. It was the last time I would ever see her walk. As they pulled away, she called out, “See you in a few hours!” and blew a kiss.

I blew one back.

We planned to meet up later at a motel in Allentown.

Have you ever come upon a traffic jam on the Interstate and looked for an exit to try your luck on the back roads? That’s what I did the night of Linda’s accident. I drove right by my family without even knowing it. I bet I wasn’t more than 100 feet away.

It was late. I was impatient. Traffic was stopped in both directions. Finally I managed to move to the shoulder and scoot along to an exit, where I found an empty frontage road running parallel to the highway.

Barely onto it, I saw a cluster of blinking blue lights in the distance. Wow, what happened? I wondered if Linda and Mac were already at the motel, or if they were also stuck in this jam. Then I thought: Could they be in that accident? But wait — of course not. They were way ahead.

A while later I stopped at a diner, where I found a pay phone and dialed the motel. When I asked for the Martine room, the desk clerk said, “There’s someone on the other line calling for Martine, too.”

“Who?”

“Someone from the hospital in Hershey.”

“Can you connect me?”

“No, but they gave me their number.”

I hung up and redialed, my face hot. The woman who answered identified herself as the hospital chaplain. She said my family had been in an accident.

“Are they all right?”

She put the doctor on, who told me that my son was O.K. My wife, however, was a different story.

I listened as he described her condition, then asked, “Can she think?”

“Yes. Her brain is fine.”

And that’s when I knew we could do it, long before I had any idea what “it” was.

Now, 15 years later, we do know.

We know that most people — strangers, anywhere — will knock themselves out to help us if we explain what we need. We know to say “Yes” to nearly everything because there is probably a way to do it. We know there is happiness available every day, most of it requiring more effort than money. And effort seems like a small price to pay for a day at the beach, a trip to New York or for dinner up eight steps to a friend’s home.

A few months after the accident, Linda started driving again. Her car has hand controls. She thinks nothing of driving to visit her father two hours away by herself. She has rolled three marathons — yes, a full 26-plus miles in a racing wheelchair.

And now, so long since that fateful night, looking across the dinner table at my wife, or seeing her across the room at a party, the hopeless crush I have on her is as wonderfully out of control as when I first saw her more than four decades ago through the screen door. I still get excited after work when I pull in the driveway and know that I’ll soon get to see the sexy, beautiful, very funny person I live with. And, later on, snuggle up to her in bed.

We’ve rolled up and down the hills of Tuscany, squeezed into pubs in Ireland, explored narrow streets in Paris and Rome, gone to Red Sox games, had coffee in the sunshine in San Francisco, Portland, Chicago and Miami. And we’ve learned that alongside great loss we can still have a great life. We want it so badly, and we love it so much.

At sunset, as we sit on the deck of our house in Rhode Island in our side-by-side chairs — mine Adirondack-style, hers on wheels — we look across the water at Fishers Island and think we are as lucky as two people can be.

We don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or who will live how long. But we were young together. We struggled to make a life. We raised three great sons. We’ve each been the caregiver and the cared-for, and I suspect that we each have a little more of both in our future.

We are two, but we are one. And I love those numbers.

Layng Martine Jr. is a songwriter in Nashville.

the axis of evil supper club goes to uruguay

(Not literally.)

Last night, Leo and I hosted Ash, Holly, Bucky, Ophira, and Maria for an asadito. In the process, we discussed being put in the crappy line at Israel's border crossing, dealing with the Syrian and Jordanian border crossings, how many camels Holly was worth in Egypt, bombings in Lebanon and Israel, why the brown person always gets singled out at the Mexico-US border crossing, me (allegedly) attempting to have Leo deported, sibling rivalry, pregnancy, the scary things in our food chain, when Beagles fly, the relative social tolerance for women who cluster in the center of Kinsey's scale (as opposed to the social pressures for men to end up on the extreme ends of Kinsey's scale), the sexualization of women, Holly and Bucky's impending nuptuals, the difference between church cleavage and WOW cleavage, Prop 8, the Patriot Act, being strip-searched at PHX, executive compensation, how San Diego schools aren't laying off any teachers despite the current budget crisis, the fact that Holly finished the bottle of Chardonnay solo, and many other topics that currently escape me.

Today, I informed Leo that I'm re-forming the Axis of Evil Supper Club. That's because I can't think of a better way to spend three hours than eating great home-cooked food and discussing foreign policy, sexuality, dogs, travel, and social norms (for starters) with good friends whose intellect, experience, and humor leave me feeling stimulated and incredibly satisfied.

menu
starter:
Assorted cheeses (Manchego, Drunken Goat, etc.)
Chianti salami
Tobin James Rock-and-Roll Syrah, Purple Moon Chardonnay, Newcastle Brown Ale

entree:
Choripanes (Argentine chorizo on fresh bolillos with chimichurri)
Entraña (skirt steak)
Organic, locally-grown CSA salad with red butter lettuce, radishes, tomatoes, red bell pepper, and green onion in a white balsamic vinaigrette

dessert:
Twice-dipped chocolate strawberries with vanilla ice cream
Dried figs with pecans and agave nectar
EOS Novella Muscat Canelli

baaaamazing

tramp stamp barbie

I've officially seen it all.

At 50, Barbie's shaking things up. First, there was the awesome cougar Barbie parody. Then, I saw this picture, and thought "there's no way that Mattel would greenlight that -- it must be a parody," but some (undoubtedly now-unemployed) marketing hack did greenlight the Totally Stylin' Tattoo Barbie, complete with a heart-shaped "Ken" license plate. In China, she's getting anime eyes, a rounder face, and a softer (whatever that means) complexion.

TOYS: At 50 years old, Barbie gets tattoos -- and a megastore in China
By Tiffany Hsu and Don Lee
March 6, 2009
Reporting from Shanghai and Los Angeles -- Barbie turns 50 this month, and to shake off a midlife crisis she's getting tattooed and opening the doors to her first megastore in China.

The developments are causing a stir on two continents, not bad for a plaything whose global cachet has been sagging of late.

We begin in Southern California, where, just in time for spring, Mattel Inc. has released Totally Stylin' Tattoos Barbie. The doll comes with a set of more than 40 tiny tattoo stickers that can be placed on her body. Also included is a faux tattoo gun with wash-off tats that kids can use to ink themselves.

A spokeswoman for the El Segundo toy maker said it was a great way for youngsters to be creative with their pint-sized gal pal. But some parents are horrified by this body-art Barbie, labeling her the "tramp stamp" queen of playtime.

On her parenting blog, Telling It Like It Is, Texas mother Lin Burress sarcastically predicted that "Totally Pierced Barbie" would be the next to roll off the assembly line. Readers commenting on the blog chimed in with their own fictional "Divorce Barbie," who would take possession of Ken's accessories.

Burress, a 46-year-old mother of six, said she was fed up with companies pushing racy fare to kids to make a profit.

"It's just one more thing being added to the pile of junk, like push-up bras and Bratz dolls, being marketed to these ridiculously young kids," she said. "These so-called toys just create a sense of rebellion."

This isn't the first time Barbie has had some eyebrow-raising accessories. The Butterfly Art Barbie from 1999 had a permanent tattoo on her stomach. In 2002, Mattel released a pregnant doll -- not Barbie but her friend, Midge -- replete with an infant that could be removed from her midsection. Consumer outcry chased the product off shelves.

Mattel said the new tattooed Barbie, priced online at about $20 and up, was selling better than expected. There are no plans to discontinue the doll.

Meanwhile, Mattel this weekend will unveil the House of Barbie in Shanghai.

The six-story retail emporium is the brand's first stand-alone store in China. It's a multimillion-dollar bet that its 11 1/2 -inch plastic toy will appeal to Shanghai's material girls, even in this horrible economy.

"There's no reason why in five to 10 years, China shouldn't be the biggest market in the world for us," said Richard Dickson, Barbie's general manager, sitting on a lattice boudoir bench on the store's fourth floor, where girls can design their own dolls.

The store also contains a salon where moms and daughters can get facials and manicures. There's a restaurant and bar. Naturally it offers thousands of Barbie products, from branded chocolate bars that cost a buck or two to an adult-sized Vera Wang-designed wedding dress for $10,000.

Mattel is one of many Western retailers flocking to China to tap its growing middle class. Apple Inc. and Adidas opened their China superstores in Beijing before the Olympics last summer. Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. and others have beefed up their investments, even as piracy and tougher local competition have cut into their business.

At the moment, Asia accounts for less than 5% of Barbie's global sales. The doll has been showing its age in recent years; Barbie sales worldwide were off 9% in 2008, hurt by the recession and competition from rivals.

Whether China can give Barbie new life remains to be seen. Mattel's recently opened store in Buenos Aires has been drawing crowds. But there are plenty of doubters who point out that you need only go into a Chinese home. You won't find many girls playing with dolls, let alone dolls with blond hair and blue eyes.

Dickson concedes that China's slowing economy will be a challenge, but to appeal to local sensibilities, Mattel has come up with a Shanghai Barbie -- with bigger eyes, a rounder face and a softer complexion. The price: about $36. The doll has no tattoos.

bella & tara

Holy crap! I've gotta admit that this story about Tara and Bella, an elephant and dog who are BFFs, put a smile on my face.

zoo chimp stockpiles weapons

H: Call me the Great Santino.
L: A chimpanzee that stockpiles weapons. If this doesn't convince those GOP wackos that evolution exists, I give up.

As I read this article today at work, I completely lost it. I was laughing so hard that I was crying at David's desk. And by "crying," I mean that there were tears streaming down my face and I looked like Alice Cooper. David was also giggling and his face rapidly went from red to purple.

Fave lines in the article: "he could be a genius" and "he rarely hit visitors because of his poor aim, and no one was seriously injured in the cases when he did." Someone needs to tell the Onion, stat.

Health & Science | Study: Zoo Chimp Planned Weapons Stockpile
by The Associated Press

NPR.org, March 9, 2009 · A canny chimpanzee who calmly collected a stash of rocks and then hurled them at zoo visitors in fits of rage has confirmed that apes can plan ahead just like humans, a Swedish study said Monday.

Santino the chimpanzee's anti-social behavior stunned both visitors and keepers at the Furuvik Zoo, but fascinated researchers because his behavior was so carefully prepared.

According to a report in the journal Current Biology, the 31-year-old alpha male started building his weapons cache in the morning before the zoo opened, collecting rocks and knocking out disks from concrete boulders inside his enclosure. He waited until around midday before he unleashed a "hailstorm" of rocks against visitors, the study said.

"These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," said the author of the report, Lund University Ph.D. student Mathias Osvath. "It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events."

Osvath's findings were based on his own observations of Santino and interviews with three senior caretakers who had followed the chimpanzee's behavior for 10 years at the zoo in Furuvik, about 93 miles north of Stockholm.

Seemingly at ease with his position as leader of the group, Santino didn't attack the other chimpanzees, Osvath told The Associated Press. The attacks were only directed at humans viewing the apes across the moat surrounding the island compound where they were held.

However, he rarely hit visitors because of his poor aim, and no one was seriously injured in the cases when he did, Osvath said.

The observations confirmed the result of a staged laboratory experiment reported in 2006 by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In that case, orangutans and bonobos were able to figure out which tool would work in an effort to retrieve grapes, and were able to remember to bring that tool along hours later.

"Every time you can combine experimental and observational data and you get a consistent result, that is very powerful," said an author of the 2006 study, Joseph Call. "This is an important observation."

He noted that there are big individual differences among chimpanzees, so the observation might not mean all chimpanzees are capable of the same planning.

"It could be that he is a genius. Only more research will tell. On the other hand, our research showed the same in orangutans and bonobos, so he is not alone," Call said.

Osvath said the chimpanzee had also been observed tapping on concrete boulders in the park to identify weak parts and then knocking out a piece. If it was too big for throwing, he broke it into smaller pieces, before adding them to his arsenal.

"It is very special that he first realizes that he can make these and then plans on how to use them," Osvath said. "This is more complex than what has been showed before."

The fact that the ape stayed calm while preparing his weapons but used them when he was extremely agitated proves that the planning behavior was not based on an immediate emotional drive, Osvath said.

For a while, zookeepers tried locking Santino up in the morning so he couldn't collect ammunition for his assaults, but he remained aggressive. They ultimately decided to castrate him last autumn, but will have to wait until the summer to see if that helps. The chimpanzees are only kept outdoors between April and October, and Santino's special behavior usually occurs in June and July.

"It is normal behavior for alpha males to want to influence their surroundings ... It is extremely frustrating for him that there are people out of his reach who are pointing at him and laughing," Osvath said. "It cannot be good to be so furious all the time."

In Connecticut last month, a 200-pound pet chimpanzee once seen in TV commercials mauled a woman trying to help its owner lure it inside and cornered a police officer in his cruiser before the officer shot and killed it, authorities said

The owner has speculated that the chimp was trying to protect her and attacked the woman because she had changed her hairstyle, was driving a different car and was holding a stuffed toy in front of her face to get the chimp's attention.

el cuarteto de nos

El Cuarteto de Nos is in heavy rotation chez H&L. They're a band that Leo "discovered" a few years after his cousin Javier recommended them.

Cuarteto is the oldest active Uruguayan band and has gained praise by transcending local culture through universal themes and engaging everyday pathos in a humorous light.

Here are some of our favorite songs ...

Ya No Sé Qué Hacer Conmigo

Ya tuve que ir obligado a misa, ya toque en el piano "Para Elisa"
ya aprendí a falsear mi sonrisa, ya caminé por la cornisa.
Ya cambié de lugar mi cama, ya hice comedia ya hice drama
fui concreto y me fui por las ramas, ya me hice el bueno y tuve mala fama.

Ya fui ético, y fui errático, ya fui escéptico y fui fanático
ya fui abúlico, fui metódico, ya fui impúdico y fui caótico.
Ya leí Arthur Conan Doyle, ya me pasé de nafta a gas oil.
Ya leí a Bretón y a Moliere, ya dormí en colchon y en somier.
Ya me cambié el pelo de color, ya estuve en contra y estuve a favor
lo que me daba placer ahora me da dolor, ya estuve al otro lado del mostrador.

Y oigo una voz que dice sin razón
"Vos siempre cambiando, ya no cambiás más"
y yo estoy cada vez más igual
Ya no se que hacer conmigo.

Ya me ahogué en un vaso de agua , ya planté café en Nicaragua
ya me fui a probar suerte a USA, ya jugué a la ruleta rusa.
Ya creí en los marcianos, ya fui ovo lacto vegetariano.
Sano, fui quieto y fui gitano, ya estuve tranqui y estuve hasta las manos.
Hice el curso de mitología pero de mi los dioses se reían.
orfebrería lo salvé raspando y ritmología aqui la estoy aplicando.

Ya probé, ya fumé, ya tomé, ya dejé, ya firmé, ya viajé, ya pegé.
Ya sufrí, ya eludí, ya huí, ya asumí, ya me fuí, ya volví, ya fingí, ya mentí.
Y entre tantas falsedades muchas de mis mentiras ya son verdades
hice fácil adversidades, y me compliqué en las nimiedades.

Y oigo una voz que dice con razón
"Vos siempre cambiando, ya no cambiás más"
y yo estoy cada vez más igual
Ya no se que hacer conmigo.

Ya me hice un lifting me puse un piercing, fui a ver al Dream Team y no hubo feeling
me tatué al Che en una nalga, arriba de mami para que no se salga.
Ya me reí y me importó un bledo de cosas y gente que ahora me dan miedo.
Ayuné por causas al pedo, ya me empaché con pollo al spiedo.

Ya fui psicólogo, fui al teólogo, fui al astrólogo, fui al enólogo
ya fui alcoholico y fui lambeta, ya fui anonimo y ya hice dieta.
Ya lancé piedras y escupitajos, al lugar donde ahora trabajo
y mi legajo cuenta a destajo, que me porté bien y que armé relajo.

Y oigo una voz que dice sin razón
"Vos siempre cambiando, ya no cambiás más"
y yo estoy cada vez más igual
Ya no se que hacer conmigo. (bis)

Nada Es Gratis En La Vida (Note: Not a music video, it's a series of Argentine photos laced with social commentary and futbol, but the song quality is pretty decent.)

Mamá compró y se le rompió
El forro del que naci yo
La plata no pudo juntar
Y el embarazo cancelar

Ella invirtió en mi educación
Pero con una condición
Porque le tuve que jurar
Que de vieja no la iba a internar

Dificil de creer
Dificil de explicar
Dijo un troyano ojo con un griego que trae regalos
Sea con dinero o no
Siempre se paga un favor
Y si veo que algo es facil
Yo dudo enseguida

Pague antes o despues
La cuenta va a aparecer
Y esta claro de que nada es gratis en la vida

Papá pago una mina en un bar
Cuando me llevo a debutar
Y por curarme se endeudó
De la peste que me contagió

Sí sí ya se
Esperma done
Pero pobrecito el destinatario
Yo tengo alzheimer hereditario

Y como el jefe comento
Despues que mi sueldo aumento
Si la limosna es de cuatía
Hasta el santo desconfía

Sea con dinero o no
Siempre se paga un favor
Y si veo que algo es facil
Yo dudo enseguida

Pague antes o despues
La cuenta va a aparecer
Y esta claro de que nada es gratis en la vida

Si sera asi que lo jodi
Al diablo cuando le vendi
Mi alma que no vale un billete
Se la canjee por un clarete

Ni honorario ni voluntario
Soy un sicario y cobro salario
Y no pidan solidaridad
Que yo no hago caridad

No es gratis mi salud
Ni gratis sera mi ataud
Si es que no pide su tajada
Es que no vale nada

Sea con dinero o no
Siempre se paga un favor
Y si veo que algo es facil
Yo dudo enseguida

Pague antes o despues
La cuenta va a aparecer
Y esta claro de que nada es gratis en la vida

... nada es gratis en la vida
... nada es gratis en la vida
... nada es gratis en la vida
... nada es gratis en la vida

Hoy Estoy Raro

Hoy estoy raro, y no entiendo por qué,
Si nada extraño me tuvo a maltraer.
Hoy estoy raro, no sé lo que hacer.

Será que hoy me puse a recordar
los días de mi infancia cuando siempre estaba mal
hijo único de la casualidad
mi padre era hippie y mi madre era punk

Ah, capaz...fue por esa niñera
que para que no llorara ponía en mi mamadera
valium, y salio un día con sus amigos
y volvió con esa manga de drogados,
y acelerados, en un rito satánico
después de torturar a mi hamster cocinaron.
Fue un infierno, me lo hicieron probar.
¡Y no era tierno!

Depende, ahí yo era un jopende,
como dijo mi tío que es un tipo que me entiende:
el que no sufre no aprende,
y ahí me bajó un diente de una patada
y me robó la plata que el ratón dejó bajo mi almohada.
Todos se reían cuando arrastraba la erre.
Mi abuela me pedía que si moría no la entierre
y que subiera más:
"Quizás, quizás, quizás"

Hoy estoy raro, y no entiendo por qué
si nada extraño me tuvo a maltraer
Hoy estoy raro no se lo que hacer.
Sentarme a esperar, que se me pase y chau

Y ta, capaz, fue que quede marcado
por ser hijo de padres divorciados.
¡Qué tarado!, no lo había pensado,
pero si fuera así todos seriamos traumados.

Y yo a media luz, ponía un blues
y la abuela a Jesús le pedía que Gardel
no fuera de Toulousse.
Yo pinchaba con su cruz, los granos de pus
por mi alergia al mousse.

Achus!!! Será que fui a cenar
con la novia de mi padre,
que me invitó pero me hizo lavar las cacerolas,
y al ver que mi hermana desfilaba medio en bolas
me dijo: Mirá, las modelos son todas trolas.

Y se enfurece,
¡justo ella!, que cuando toma se emputece.
Me tuve que rajar cuando después del cuarto vino
me empezó a toquetear
y se rió y le vino...hipo

Y me contó como anticipo
que va a dejar al viejo por el tipo
que le pagó la lipo.
Será por eso que estoy sensible,
la vida es impredecible.

Hoy estoy raro, y no entiendo por qué,
si nada extraño me tuvo a maltraer.
Hoy estoy raro no se lo que hacer.
Sentarme a esperar, que se me pase y chau

Capaz que no le hizo gracia
al de la farmacia
cuando dije que yo defiendo a muerte a la eutanasia.
Decía que si todos se morían se fundía,
y me tiró con un frasco de homeopatía.

O en una de esas,
como decía el peyote estoy mal de la cabeza.
Pero no, el doctor que me curó me juró
que la herida del frascazo en la nuca ya cicatrizó.

Será ese copetín que tomé en el cafetín,
picando un salamín, escuchando led zepellin
o fue esa moza, con pinta de viciosa
que de babosa echó en mi vaso alguna cosa

¡Qué pedazo de guaso!
Si rompió el vaso
cuando mi faso
le quemó el brazo,
y por mi torpeza
dejó el barril gigante de cerveza mal cerrado
y el bar quedó inundado.
Qué acertado,
pensar que yo me quise levantar a la nami
hablando del tsunami,
y baldeando me dijo: "¿Viste? Volvé por donde viniste,
el cielo no existe".

Hoy estoy raro, y no entiendo por qué
si nada extraño me tuvo a maltraer.
Hoy estoy raro no se lo que hacer.
Sentarme a esperar, que se me pase y chau.

Pobre Papá

Papito tiene que ir a trabajar
no quiere
papá no quiere ir
pero tiene que ir igual
papito dice si es lo q papi adora
papito no nació para las 8 horas

Papá no quiere trabajar
pero lo obligan
papito prefiere quedarse panza arriba
papito quiere una vida mas relajada
papá quiere quedarse en casa
y no hacer nada

Pobre papá (Pobre papá)
Pobre papá (Pobre papá)
a él no le gusta trabajar
Pobre papito (pobre papito)
pobrecito papa (Pobre papá)
nunca lo dejan descansar

Papito no quiere trabajar tan seguido
papá preferiría ser un mantenido
papá piensa que un día manda todo al carajo
pero no encara eso porque es mucho trabajo

Pobre papá (Pobre papá)
Pobre papá (Pobre papá)
A él no le gusta trabajar
Pobre papito (pobre papito)
Pobrecito papa (Pobre papá)
nunca lo dejan descansar

Siempre pensé que trabajar
no era moderno
si el trabajo es salud,
que trabajen los enfermos
si el trabajo es salud,
que trabajen los enfermos.

mr. clean, meet mr. electrolyzed tap water

I love science. This seems like such a no-brainer that it would be great if consumers like me could purchase it for home use.

Simple elixir called a 'miracle liquid'
Electrolyzed water cleans, degreases -- and treats athlete's foot. The solution is replacing toxic chemicals.
By Marla Dickerson

February 23, 2009

It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it.

Sounds like the old "Saturday Night Live" gag for Shimmer, the faux floor polish plugged by Gilda Radner. But the elixir is real. It has been approved by U.S. regulators. And it's starting to replace the toxic chemicals Americans use at home and on the job.

The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water -- hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso -- the miracle liquid.

That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.

Used as a sanitizer for decades in Russia and Japan, it's slowly winning acceptance in the United States. A New York poultry processor uses it to kill salmonella on chicken carcasses. Minnesota grocery clerks spray sticky conveyors in the checkout lanes. Michigan jailers mop with electrolyzed water to keep potentially lethal cleaners out of the hands of inmates.

In Santa Monica, the once-skeptical Sheraton housekeeping staff has ditched skin-chapping bleach and pungent ammonia for spray bottles filled with electrolyzed water to clean toilets and sinks.

"I didn't believe in it at first because it didn't have foam or any scent," said housekeeper Flor Corona. "But I can tell you it works. My rooms are clean."

Management likes it too. The mixture costs less than a penny a gallon. It cuts down on employee injuries from chemicals. It reduces shipping costs and waste because hotel staffers prepare the elixir on site. And it's helping the Sheraton Delfina tout its environmental credentials to guests.

The hotel's kitchen staff recently began disinfecting produce with electrolyzed water. They say the lettuce lasts longer. They're hoping to replace detergent in the dishwasher. Management figures the payback time for the $10,000 electrolysis machine will be less than a year.

"It's green. It saves money. And it's the right thing to do," said Glenn Epstein, executive assistant at the Sheraton Delfina. "It's almost like fantasy."

Actually, it's chemistry. For more than two centuries, scientists have tinkered with electrolysis, the use of an electric current to bring about a chemical reaction (not the hair-removal technique of the same name that's popular in Beverly Hills). That's how we got metal electroplating and large-scale production of chlorine, used to bleach and sanitize.

It turns out that zapping salt water with low-voltage electricity creates a couple of powerful yet nontoxic cleaning agents. Sodium ions are converted into sodium hydroxide, an alkaline liquid that cleans and degreases like detergent, but without the scrubbing bubbles. Chloride ions become hypochlorous acid, a potent disinfectant known as acid water.

"It's 10 times more effective than bleach in killing bacteria," said Yen-Con Hung, a professor of food science at the University of Georgia-Griffin, who has been researching electrolyzed water for more than a decade. "And it's safe."

There are drawbacks.

Electrolyzed water loses its potency fairly quickly, so it can't be stored long. Machines are pricey and geared mainly for industrial use. The process also needs to be monitored frequently for the right strength.

Then there's the "magic water" hype that has accompanied electrolyzed drinking water. A number of companies sell so-called ionizers for home use that can range from about $600 to more than $3,000. The alkaline water, proponents say, provides health benefits.

But Richard Wullaert, a Santa Barbara consultant, said consumers should be careful.

"Some of these people are making claims that will get everybody in trouble," said Wullaert, whose nonprofit Functional Water Society is spreading the word about electrolyzed water. "It's time for some serious conferences with serious scientists to give this credibility."

Most of the growth has happened outside the United States.

Russians are putting electrolyzed water down oil wells to kill pesky microbes. Europeans use it to treat burn victims. Electrolyzing equipment is helping to sanitize drinking water in parts of Latin American and Africa.

It's big in Japan. People there spray it on sushi to kill bacteria and fill their swimming pools with it, eliminating the need for harsh chlorine. Doctors use it to sterilize equipment and treat foot fungus and bedsores. It's the secret weapon in Sanyo Electric Corp.'s "soap-less" washing machine.

Now Sanyo is bent on cleaning up Japan's taxis with a tiny air purifier that fits into a car's cup holder. The device uses electrolyzed water to shield passengers from an unwelcome byproduct of Japan's binge-drinking business culture: vomit.

"There was some concern about the spreading of viruses and bacteria via the taxi, not to mention the . . . stinky smells," Sanyo spokesman Aaron Fowles said.

Sanyo's taxi air washer isn't yet available in the U.S.; commuters will have to hold their noses for now. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have approved electrolyzed water for a variety of uses.

PuriCore of Malvern, Pa., and Oculus Innovative Sciences of Petaluma, Calif., have developed treatments for chronic wounds. Albuquerque, N.M.-based MIOX Corp. sells municipal water-purifying systems. EAU Technologies Inc. of Kennesaw, Ga., caters to both ends of a dairy cow, with alkaline water to aid the animal's digestion and acid water to clean up its manure.

Integrated Environmental Technologies Inc. of Little River, S.C., is working with oil companies to keep wells free of bacteria and with high schools to sanitize sweaty wrestling mats and grungy football equipment that spread skin infections.

Electrolyzer Corp. of Woburn, Mass., is going after the hospitality market. The Sheraton Delfina purchased one of its machines. So has the Hyatt Regency Chicago and the Trump International Beach Resort near Miami.

Patrick Lucci, Electrolyzer's vice president of marketing, likes to bombard prospects with scientific studies, then give 'em the old razzle-dazzle. He'll swig the processed salt water before he mops the floor with it.

"Try that with bleach," he said.

The unit in Santa Monica looks a little like an oversized water heater, with two tanks side by side -- one for making the hypochlorous acid sanitizer, the other for the sodium hydroxide cleanser.

Rebecca Jimenez, director of housekeeping, heard grumbling from the cleaning staff when the hotel brought the machine in last fall. Housekeepers doubted that the flat, virtually odorless liquids were really doing the job. Some poured the guest shampoos into their bottles to work up a lather.

"If it doesn't suds up, it doesn't work," Jimenez said. "That's the mentality."

Still, she said, most have come around and are enjoying working without fumes and peeling skin.

Minnesota food scientist Joellen Feirtag said she was similarly skeptical. So she installed an electrolysis unit in her laboratory and began researching the technology. She found that the acid water killed E. coli, salmonella, listeria and other nasty pathogens. Yet it was gentle enough to soothe her children's sunburns and acne.

She's now encouraging food processors to take a look at electrolyzed water to help combat the disease outbreaks that have roiled the industry. Most are dubious.

"This sounds too good to be true, which is really the biggest problem," said Feirtag, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. "But it's only a matter of time before this becomes mainstream."

smoke this recession

It's high time we did this. Bring it, Governator.

Smoke This Recession
It's simple: First we tax the booze. Then we legalize the pot. Done.
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, February 20, 2009

It is a time of strange bedfellows and bizarre contortions and extraordinary responses to extreme situations, all overslathered with gobs of panic and dread and oh my God, I might have to sell the Range Rover.

In other words, it is a time -- like you don't already know -- of plentiful alarmist rhetoric, resulting in weird outbursts of ingenuity and wanton ethics-loosening, all in a desperate effort to suck up some much-needed cash.

Translation: Money's tight, baby. City's in trouble. State's deep in the hole. Nation's broke.

Solution? Upend the system. Think differently. Get creative. Demolish Ye Olde Ways. And maybe get a really nice buzz on while you're at it.

Where to begin? How can the city/state refill their empty coffers and further gouge the populace to make ends meet? Increased bridge tolls? A new per-mile driving tax? Heavier parking fines? State parks abandoned and left to seed? Child's play, darling.

You want to raise funds in an instant? You want a sure-fire, double-barreled source of nearly limitless funds from a wary, burned-out citizenry? That's easy. Go after its biggest vices, its most beloved balms.

Up first: booze. Already local governments are quietly proposing jacking up the alcohol tax and loosening sales restrictions because, well, why the hell not? Aren't you, right this very moment, as you prepare your taxes and weep over your gutted portfolio and stare down one very bleak 2009, more in need of a drink or three than at any time in recent history except for the entirety of the last eight miserable, Bush-stabbed years? Well, there you go. Tax increases on cocktails, here they come.

But it's not just governments. Check out the happily shameless TV networks who, for the first time in a whocares number of years, are allowing ads for alcohol and K-Y lube during prime-time programming. Oh the outrage! Oh the debauchery! Who, pray who, will protect the children? Oh wait, the children are out buying daddy some more beer and applying for a job at Starbucks to help pay rent. Never mind.

New taxes on the other Great American vices: porn, gambling, prescription meds, pro sports, obesity, Mylie Cyrus? Watch for it.

Now, let's get serious. Because there are, of course, bigger fish to fry in the sea of potentially lucrative, all-American inebriates. There is a far more potent, obvious solution to the state's budget woes, a huge, untapped revenue source, and now might be the perfect time to, you know, light it up.

Really now, could there be a better time to decriminalize/fully legalize pot? Or, more fully, to decriminalize pot, and then spread respectable pot shops and vending machines and dispensaries far and wide, instill quality control and decent oversight and then tax the living hell out of the glorious, stress-reducing goodness, as we stop wasting billions fighting its grand ubiquity and instead sink into profitable pools of warm, hazy progress? Don't you already know the answer?

It's difficult to imagine that some intrepid legislator hasn't already walked into Arnie "Pot is not a drug" Schwarzenegger's office and said, "Governator, now is the time. Light it up. Inhale the new reality. Pot is, by a huge margin, the single largest cash crop in the state unless you count porn stars and celebrity rehab. It rakes in upwards of $14 billion a year -- maybe a lot more than that -- and that's just from five clever hippies and a couple intrepid grandmas in Ukiah. Imagine what we could do if we went all-in."

Are the discussions ongoing? Are they passing the bong of possibility around the state Senate chambers? You're damn right they are. What's holding them back? Probably the usual: the negative PR, looking "soft" on crime, encouraging permissiveness, pressure from prison lobbies, and so on. Don't worry, Sacramento. Everyone's already plenty drunk/high on prescription meds trying to alleviate fears of losing their job to care about that nonsense right now. Get to it.

There won't be much pushback from D.C. President Obama's already stated that his upcoming appointee to head the DEA is going to knock it the hell off with the insidious raids of harmless medical pot shops in California, and wants to quit using federal resources to bash hippies and circumvent state laws.

Look. Is there really anyone left who doesn't already know the "War on Drugs" is a pathetic joke, an abject failure and a taxpayer nightmare, and the only reason it survives at all is to fund the CIA and fellate the prison guard unions and support a shameful prison system, and to let politicians say they're "tough on crime" so they can to deflect all those uninformed parents who relentlessly whine about pot in public schools just before dashing off a wine-tasting party to snort a nice line of Bolivian coke?

Anyone left, furthermore, who doesn't know that pot is far safer than booze, less addictive, nonviolent, more transportable, easier to light, and generally won't interfere with your ability to crawl across the carpet and lick cookie crumbs from your lover's thighs? And sure, while heavy, daily usage can make you slow and stupid and rather useless to the world, well, so can a six-pack of Diet Dr. Pepper and six hours of TV every day. Gateway drug? That's on Channel 2, right after "Oprah."

And another thing. Maybe it wouldn't be merely tax 'n' puff. Maybe California, already the pot-growing capital of the nation, could become something more. A hub. A world-class research center. Pot education, study, medicine, import/export, the works. We could ship our crop to various nations in desperate need of chilling the hell out, like Israel. Palestine. Pakistan. Russia. The N-Judah on a Friday afternoon. We could become the largest research and manufacturing center in the world. How proud we would be. You know, sort of.

Let's phrase this grand scenario in another way: Why the hell not try it? What have we got to lose? What, we could go more broke? We could get more desperate and anxious? Fact is, economic nightmares need not breed only miserable stories of lost homes and lost jobs and shuttered businesses. They can also spawn creative solutions, innovative thinking, widespread munchies. Now is the time.

Let's not get carried away. Pot's only one little inebriate, one mild and -- let's just admit it -- relatively boring feel-good plant. California is $40 billion in debt and we're running low on water and we can't give away those hideous tract developments out in Stockton. Milking the pot cow for all she's worth might net us, at best, a few billion a year. To get out of this massive hole, we'd have to legalize Ecstasy too. (Someday, honey, someday).

But it's something. It's radical new thinking that's not the slightest bit radical, or new, and in fact the notion is now even more obvious than it's been for the past 30 years. What are we waiting for? A match?
Via Aaryn

hey jealousy

I'm going to go out on a limb here and ask "baths, Sandra? Really?"

Chimp in Conn. attack had unusual bond with owner
By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2009
(02-19) 22:56 PST Stamford, Conn. (AP) --
Travis the chimpanzee's relationship with his owner was closer than those of some married couples.

Sandra Herold gave him the finest food, and wine in long-stemmed glasses. They took baths together and cuddled in the bed they shared. Travis brushed the lonely widow's hair each night and pined for her when she was away.

If she left the house alone, Travis would give her a kiss.

"If I left with someone Travis would get upset," Herold said Wednesday.

Experts say the unusually human relationship would have been confusing for any animal. It may have also played a role in Travis' savage attack Monday on Herold's friend, 55-year-old Charla Nash of Stamford.

"This is a crazy relationship," said Stephen Rene Tello, executive director of Primarily Primates, a sanctuary for chimps in Texas. "He was probably very bonded with her. I can kind of see it in his eyes this is his surrogate mother."

And chimps like 14-year-old Travis, who was shot and killed by police, protect their mates and turf.

"If there is another person entering his space, he might consider it a threat to his territory, or even his mate," Tello said.

Police say Travis attacked Nash when she arrived at the house to help lure the chimp back into Herold's house. Herold speculated that Travis was being protective of her and attacked Nash because she had a different hairstyle, was driving a different car and held a stuffed toy in front of her face to get the chimp's attention.

Nash suffered massive injuries to her face and hands, requiring more than seven hours of surgery by four teams of doctors to stabilize her. She was transferred in critical condition Thursday to the Cleveland Clinic, which two months ago performed the nation's first successful face transplant.

Hospital officials say Nash is being treated for her injuries and it's unknown if she will be a candidate for a face transplant.

Monday's attack was not the first time Travis bit someone, a former Stamford resident now living in Atlanta said Thursday.

Leslie Mostel Paul told The Associated Press the chimp grabbed her hand and bit it hard enough to draw blood in 1996, while the animal was sitting in Herold's car in a Stamford office parking lot. Paul said she had tried to shake Travis' hand after Herold gave her permission to say hello.

Paul described Herold as being more aggravated than upset about the incident, and said she had to get rabies shots because Herold was slow in producing Travis' medical records.

"My impression was she was more like, 'Oh, this is gonna be a pain in the neck,'" Paul said.

Paul said she reported the incident to police but received no follow-up calls.

"I told them this was serious," said Paul, who spoke by phone from New York, where she was visiting relatives. "If it was a child, it could have ripped the hand off or an arm out a socket."

In an earlier interview on NBC's "Today" show, Paul said, "I honestly believe if they had followed through, maybe the laws would have been changed sooner and this other woman wouldn't be in the hospital, fighting for her life now."

Herold did not return a call seeking comment Thursday about Paul's claims. Police say they have no record of complaints, aside from a 2003 incident where Travis escaped from a vehicle and led police on a two-hour downtown chase before he was caught.

Authorities have not said whether Herold will face criminal charges. Connecticut state law allowed her to own the chimp as a pet, though several state leaders are calling for tighter restrictions in the wake of Monday's attack.

Herold, who was known to buckle Travis in her car for rides and dress him in baseball shirts, tried to rescue Nash by stabbing Travis and hitting him with a shovel. "I stabbed something I raised as a son," she said Wednesday.

It's not known why the chimp suddenly attacked. Herold has given differing accounts on whether she treated the agitated chimp with Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug that had not been prescribed for him. She has also said it suffered from Lyme disease. A test for rabies was negative and results from a necropsy won't be available for weeks.

Lynn DellaBianca, a former Stamford animal control officer, said Thursday that she warned Herold after the 2003 incident that the pet's behavior was worrisome and that she needed to make sure he was kept under control.

"Certainly my concern was for public safety," DellaBianca told The Associated Press. "Male chimpanzees once they reach maturity can be aggressive. I'm sure I did express that to her."

Herold told her she expected to eventually have to give up the chimp, DellaBianca said.

"She did say that herself. She knew someone day he would probably have to go to a sanctuary," DellaBianca said. "She knew chimpanzees, they can get more difficult to handle as they get older."

Mental health professionals say a strong bond between pet owners and their animals is generally good because it can be therapeutic and comforting. The boundaries get blurred, though, when owners treat the animals like humans rather than pets, and expect a reciprocal relationship similar to what they would have with a family member.

David Baron, professor and chairman of the Temple University School of Medicine's psychiatry department, said in cases such as Herold's, the grief of losing loved ones could have made it easy for her to view Travis as a surrogate child and friend. Her husband died in 2004 and her only daughter was killed in a car accident several years ago.

"I wouldn't say that she shouldn't have a pet, but this may be something that should be looked at as part of a grief reaction that's beyond normal," he said.

Earl Mason, whose son married Herold's daughter, remembers when Herold got Travis. The chimp would ride a tricycle.

"He grew up like a youngster," Mason said. "He did everything a kid would do. He was a cute little guy."

Travis loved ice cream and even knew the schedules of the ice cream trucks, Mason said. He ate breakfast at the table with Herold and her husband.

But even was the chimp was a baby, Mason was amazed at his strength. When Travis would jump on him, Mason said he would slam into his chest.

"To me he was beating the crap out of me," Mason said. "He had just tremendous strength."

Don Mecca, a family friend, said Herold knew chimps became more difficult to handle as they get older, but she had a hard time parting with her beloved pet.

"Sandy would always say he would will himself to die if they were separated," Mecca said.

Mecca was reluctant to criticize his friend.

"I think he was lost," Mecca said of Travis. "He belongs in the jungle with the rest of them."

right-wing extremism, average writing skills and susceptibility to snow jobs

Zealotry + denial = hypocrisy.
As usual, Aaryn's Citybeat column made my morning. But I think she's being too generous on the writing skills.

Nefarious claims
Can we all just finally agree that the Holocaust didn’t happen?
By Aaryn Belfer

“At JP Catholic we have an event called On Mission. The night consists of a guest speaker speaking about living out your Catholic faith in business or media, and after that there is confession and Eucharistic Adoration.”

So begins a Feb. 9 student blog post on the website of the unaccredited John Paul the Great Catholic University located in Scripps Ranch. Now, maybe you’re snickering about the “speaker speaking.” Or perhaps the mention of “Eucharistic Adoration” gives you a mysterious hankering for a Carr’s Water Cracker followed by a session of heavy petting.

But what’s notable in the post is not the redundancy in an opening paragraph by a kid who needs the guidance of a publicly validated learning institution. Nor is it a sudden, overwhelming hunger for crudités and kink. Rather, it’s the who who spoke, and what he said.

“Recently at JP Catholic,” the blogger continues, “Jim Holman, founder and editor of The San Diego Reader and a pro-life supporter, recently spoke to the students about the recent election cycle and Proposition 4 in California.” I think it’s fair to say our author effectively established that the speaking happened recently.

“He made an interesting comparison that rocked my world,” the blogger wrote of Holman, whose speech centered on his beloved-yet-failed parental-notification initiative last November. The conspicuous overlord of the gay-loathing, right-leaning, dressed-up-in-alt-weekly-clothing publication best used as an Ambien substitute—since it’s both sleep-inducing and non-addictive—inspired this student to “stand up vocally” on behalf of the unborn, by comparing abortion with the Holocaust.

Which raises the question: Didn’t Holman get the memo?

Pssst! Holman! The Holocaust never happened! And I’m not just making this up on a whim. This information is all over the news lately and is being spoken about quite matter-of-factly by a representative of the very church to which you and Blogger Boy belong.

The newly re-embraced Bishop Richard Williamson has stated repeatedly—and, it should be noted, recently—that roughly 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in World War II and not the radical, yet widely accepted number of 6 million. It is tough to get one’s head around a number that big. It seems so entirely impossible that it must be. Williamson also has it on good authority that there was never any gassing. Auschwitz, mouschwitz.

Certainly, there are the conspiracy theorists falling over themselves to ostracize the bishop. These wild-eyed Holocaust historians seem to have him outnumbered; their outcry was so deafening that Williamson was removed from a seminary post last week in response to his unwavering comments.

But these folks are mere outliers in a giant fairytale, the nutty hook-line-and-sinkers demanding Williamson recant his denial of what purportedly took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau. And Belzec. And Chelmno and Majdanek and Sobibor and Treblinka. Who can pronounce those words, anyway? As if innocent human beings really died there: Men, women and children separated from family, huddled naked with strangers and dumped, still clinging to each other, into mass graves. It’s preposterous. Never happened.

Bishop Williamson is nothing if not open-minded. Though he doesn’t have any plans to stand with ghosts while touring the Auschwitz showers or contemplate his reflection in the ash pools there, he’s agreed to give the record another long-distance glance down his turned-up nose. The bishop would like historic evidence.

It’s not unreasonable for Williamson to demand proof. After all, this is a stance he’s maintained for more than three decades. Williamson is a proof-or-pudding kind of guy, not a show-me-a-miracle kind of guy. It’s not as if he bases his entire existence on something as flimsy and unreasoned as faith. For example, rather than relying on stories originating with Jews, I’m sure he has impervious proof of Jesus’ existence, more solid even than a crematorium, more permanent than tattooed registration numbers. The bishop must have in his possession a shroud. Or some DNA. Or at least a hair sample. Or a rusty nail with dried blood stains.

Speaking of blood stains, I disagree with the self-important Jim Holman when he equates the mass deaths of human beings to the removal of a clump of unviable cells from a uterus. In fact, not only do I support a woman’s right to choose every single time, but I’m in favor of retroactive abortion—an abortion time machine, if you will.

It could be made available to people like, say, Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother. Or Dick Cheney’s. Or Hitler’s. Then again, that last one may be unfair given the Holocaust fable. In reality, Adolf was probably little more than a misunderstood regular guy, looking for a girl to love him. Sure, it sounds like something straight out of Notting Hill, but the only thing more improbable than Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant falling in love has got to be the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and extermination of 84.5 Qualcomm Stadiums-full of Jews.

But it didn’t happen, and if the Holocaust didn’t happen and the Catholic leadership backs this notion, then comparing abortions with it at a Catholic “university” seems to be a self-defeating analogy. An educated person would be skeptical of, and offended by, such an argument. Unless that “educated” person holds a degree equivalent to one earned from Sally Struthers, in which case, it’s world-rocking material. Thanks to JP Catholic and its speaking speakers, we can be assured of a whole bunch of mini-Holmans flooding the business and media industries in the near future with their right-wing extremism, average writing skills and susceptibility to snow jobs.

Write to aaryn@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.

crazy little thing called love

quotable

Holding grudges against people is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die. (You only hurt yourself. The other person is usually clueless.)

Via Kristen

it's probably time

oaf of office

I'll admit that I've got a nasty case of corrective tourette's. But I would never dream of modifying something as important as the Presidential oath of office, as written in the United States Constitution, much less eschewing notes and doing it from memory. Too bad Chief Justice John Roberts did. And that he flubbed it and had to re-administer it later.

Op-Ed Contributor: Oaf of Office
By STEVEN PINKER
Published: January 21, 2009

IN 1969, Neil Armstrong appeared to have omitted an indefinite article as he stepped onto the moon and left earthlings puzzled over the difference between “man” and “mankind.” In 1980, Jimmy Carter, accepting his party’s nomination, paid homage to a former vice president he called Hubert Horatio Hornblower. A year later, Diana Spencer reversed the first two names of her betrothed in her wedding vows, and thus, as Prince Charles Philip supposedly later joked, actually married his father.

On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts had him “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” When Mr. Obama paused after “execute,” the chief justice prompted him to continue with “faithfully the office of president of the United States.” (To ensure that the president was properly sworn in, the chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the arbiter of usage for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has found that many lawyers have “internalized the bogus rule so that they actually believe that a split verb should be avoided,” adding, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no longer distinguish alien speech from native speech.”

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.

Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard and the chairman of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.

'cause it's my right

This morning, as Ruby was kissing me after her walk, I started singing "Passionate kisses" to her. Then I asked Leo if he could play the song. He explained that the country version by Mary Chapin Carpenter was actually a cover of Lucinda Williams' original. And then he played both, kissed me, and headed to the gym.

Is it too much to ask?
I want a comfortable bed that won't hurt my back
Food to fill me up
And warm clothes and all that stuff

Shouldn't I have this,
Shouldn't I have this?
Shouldn't I have all of this, and
Passionate kisses
Passionate kisses, whoa ohh oh
Passionate kisses from you

Is it much to demand
I want a full house and a rock and roll band
Pens that won't run out of ink
And cool quiet and time to think

Shouldn't I have this,
Shouldn't I have this?
Shouldn't I have all of this, and
Passionate kisses
Passionate kisses, whoa ohh oh
Passionate kisses from you

Do I want too much?
Am I going overboard to want that touch?
I shouted out to the night:
"Give me what I deserve, 'cause it's my right!"

Shouldn't I have this,
Shouldn't I have this?
Shouldn't I have all of this, and
Passionate kisses
Passionate kisses, whoa ohh oh
Passionate kisses from you.

the best prayer nobody heard

Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson is the first openly gay, non-celibate priest to be ordained a bishop in a major Christian denomination.

He gave the invocation at Sunday's "We Are One" concert, kicking off this week's inaugural events. The big Lincoln Memorial show was billed as the "We Are One" concert, intended to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama with a spirit of unity. But his prayer was excluded from HBO's coverage.

Here is his awesome prayer.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama
By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire
Opening Inaugural Event: Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

mission accomplished

I can't remember the last time I watched an inauguration. That's because, until yesterday, I never had.

I and about 150 of my colleagues sat in the cafeteria and watched as history was made, agendas were outlined, and hope was personified. I've never been prouder to be an American than I was yesterday.

Op-Ed Columnist
Radical in the White House
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: January 20, 2009

For one day, for one hour, let us take a bow as a country. Nearly 233 years after our founding, 144 years after the close of our Civil War and 46 years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, this crazy quilt of immigrants called Americans finally elected a black man, Barack Hussein Obama, as president. Walking back from the inauguration, I saw an African-American street vendor wearing a home-stenciled T-shirt that pretty well captured the moment — and then some. It said: “Mission Accomplished.”

But we cannot let this be the last mold we break, let alone the last big mission we accomplish. Now that we have overcome biography, we need to write some new history — one that will reboot, revive and reinvigorate America. That, for me, was the essence of Obama’s inaugural speech and I hope we — and he — are really up to it.

Indeed, dare I say, I hope Obama really has been palling around all these years with that old Chicago radical Bill Ayers. I hope Obama really is a closet radical.

Not radical left or right, just a radical, because this is a radical moment. It is a moment for radical departures from business as usual in so many areas. We can’t thrive as a country any longer by coasting on our reputation, by postponing solutions to every big problem that might involve some pain and by telling ourselves that dramatic new initiatives — like a gasoline tax, national health care or banking reform — are too hard or “off the table.” So my most fervent hope about President Obama is that he will be as radical as this moment — that he will put everything on the table.

Opportunities for bold initiatives and truly new beginnings are rare in our system — in part because of the sheer inertia and stalemate designed into our Constitution, with its deliberate separation of powers, and in part because of the way lobbying money, a 24-hour news cycle and a permanent presidential campaign all conspire to paralyze big changes.

“The system is built for stalemate,” said Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political theorist. “In ordinary times, the energy and dynamism of American life reside in the economy and society, and people view government with suspicion or indifference. But in times of national crisis, Americans look to government to solve fundamental problems that affect them directly. These are the times when presidents can do big things. These moments are rare. But they offer the occasion for the kind of leadership that can recast the political landscape, and redefine the terms of political argument for a generation.”

In the 1930s, the Great Depression enabled Franklin Roosevelt to launch the New Deal and redefine the role of the federal government, he added, while in the 1960s, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and “the moral ferment of the civil rights movement” enabled Lyndon Johnson to enact his Great Society agenda, including Medicare, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

“These presidencies did more than enact new laws and programs,” concluded Sandel. “They rewrote the social contract, and redefined what it means to be a citizen. Obama’s moment, and his presidency, could be that consequential.”

George W. Bush completely squandered his post-9/11 moment to summon the country to a dramatic new rebuilding at home. This has left us in some very deep holes. These holes — and the broad awareness that we are at the bottom of them — is what makes this a radical moment, calling for radical departures from business as usual, led by Washington.

That is why this voter is hoping Obama will swing for the fences. But he also has to remember to run the bases. George Bush swung for some fences, but he often failed at the most basic element of leadership — competent management and follow-through.

President Obama will have to decide just how many fences he can swing for at one time: grand bargains on entitlement and immigration reform? A national health care system? A new clean-energy infrastructure? The nationalization and repair of our banking system? Will it be all or one? Some now and some later? It is too soon to say.

But I do know this: while a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so too is a great politician, with a natural gift for oratory, a rare knack for bringing people together, and a nation, particularly its youth, ready to be summoned and to serve.

So, in sum, while it is impossible to exaggerate what a radical departure it is from our past that we have inaugurated a black man as president, it is equally impossible to exaggerate how much our future depends on a radical departure from our present. As Obama himself declared from the Capitol steps: “Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.”

We need to get back to work on our country and our planet in wholly new ways. The hour is late, the project couldn’t be harder, the stakes couldn’t be higher, the payoff couldn’t be greater.

white like me

Op-Ed Columnist
White Like Me
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 17, 2009

I cannot testify to what black Americans feel as our nation celebrates the inauguration of our first African-American president. But I can speak for myself, as a white American who grew up in the segregated nation’s capital of the 1960s. Barack Obama’s day is one that I never thought would come, and one that I still can’t quite believe is here.

Last week I joined a group of journalists at an off-the-record conversation with the president-elect, a sort of preview of the administration’s coming attractions. But as I walked some desolate downtown blocks to the standard-issue federal office building serving as transition headquarters, ghosts of the past mingled with hopes for the future. The contrast between the unemployed men on Washington’s frigid streets and the buzzing executive-branch bees inside was, for me, as old as time.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly. Even an 11-year-old could see that the sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era was waking up, electrified by youth, glamour and the prospect of change.

But some of that change I didn’t then understand. J.F.K.’s arrival coincided with Washington’s emergence as the first American city with a black majority. Many whites responded by fleeing to the suburbs. My parents did the opposite, moving our family from the enclave of Montgomery County, Md., into the city as I was about to enter the fifth grade.

Our new neighborhood included the Sidwell Friends School. My mother, a public school teacher, decreed that her children would instead enroll in the public system that had been desegregated a half-dozen years earlier, after Brown v. Board of Education. In reality de facto segregation remained in place. Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.

I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.

Gradually we would learn more — from our parents and teachers, from televised incidents of violent racial confrontations far away, and from odd cultural phenomena like the 1961 best seller “Black Like Me.” In that book, a white novelist darkened his skin for undercover travels through deepest Dixie, whose bigotry he then described in morbid firsthand detail to shocked adolescents like me.

Surely such horrific injustices could not occur in our nation’s capital.

But as an unintended consequence of Washington’s particular brand of Jim Crow, white public school students got a tiny taste of what racially mandated second-class citizenship could mean. In those days, the city didn’t even have the bastardized form of “self-government” it has now; it was run as a plantation by Congressional District panels led by racist white Southerners (then Democrats). These overseers didn’t want to lavish money on an overwhelmingly black school system, and they didn’t. By the early 1960s, per-student spending in Washington was less than that of any state, impoverished West Virginia and Mississippi included.

If Washington’s white schools received a larger share of that meager budget, as they no doubt did, it was still obvious that our teachers had far fewer resources than their suburban and private school counterparts. Extracurricular activities could be curtailed by the costs of light and heat. The curriculum was also abridged, lest anyone get too agitated by America’s racial inequities. In my history class, the Civil War was downsized to a passing speed bump. In English, we read “Tom Sawyer,” not “Huckleberry Finn.”

Now that we were teenagers, we had both the curiosity and mobility to investigate the strangely undemocratic city that dealt us this hand. In the words of Constance McLaughlin Green, a Pulitzer Prize-winning urban historian, the District’s black population had long occupied “a secret city all but unknown to the white world round about.” We wanted in on the secrets.

There was so much we didn’t know, so much Americans still don’t know. Take the Lincoln Memorial, to which the Obama family paid so poignant a nocturnal visit this month. If you look up coverage of the memorial’s 1922 dedication ceremonies in The Times, you can read of President Harding’s forceful oration commemorating the demise of slavery. You also learn that Dr. Robert R. Moton, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, was invited to pay tribute to Lincoln “in the name of 12,000,000 Negroes.”

Here’s what The Times did not report about Moton: “Instead of being placed on the speaker’s platform, he was relegated along with other distinguished colored people to an all-Negro section separated by a road from the rest of the audience.” So wrote Green in “The Secret City,” her landmark history of race relations in Washington. This was no anomaly. A local Ku Klux Klan had been formed months earlier, with no protests from either Congress or the white press, and the young Harding administration had toughened the exclusion of blacks from the city’s public recreation facilities.

The eye-opening “Secret City” recounting this secret history was not published until 1967, some four years after the Lincoln Memorial served as a backdrop for “I Have a Dream.” It was also in 1967 that I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High. As a valedictory, a bunch of us on the school paper voted to publish an editorial in favor of home rule for D.C. “Washingtonians have to beg, plead and cajole members of Congress for funds to renovate slums and slum schools,” it read. That was putting it mildly; we still had much to learn. But the editorial was enough of an irritant that our principal tried to censor it, which prompted a brief civic kerfuffle (“Student Editorial Banned at Wilson” read the headline in The Washington Post) and jump-started a few starry-eyed careers in journalism and political activism.

It was one year later that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Washington’s secret city exploded. The fires and riotscame within a block of the building where the Obama transition set up shop.

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

Looking back at my high school years, I’m struck by how slowly history can move. The great civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration had been accomplished in 1964 and 1965, but by the time of my graduation the impact was minimal — even in the city where the laws were written and passed. Today the nation’s capital still has no voting representation in Congress and is still a ward of the federal government, reduced to begging, pleading and cajoling for basic needs. Some 19 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and that 19 percent remains a secret city to many who work within the Beltway.

Washington is its own special American case, but only up to a point. For all our huge progress, we are not “post-racial,” whatever that means. The world doesn’t change in a day, and the racial frictions that emerged in both the Democratic primary campaign and the general election didn’t end on Nov. 4. As Obama himself said in his great speech on race, liberals couldn’t “purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap” simply by voting for him. And conservatives? The so-called party of Lincoln has spent much of the past month in spirited debate about whether a white candidate for the party’s chairmanship did the right thing by sending out a “humorous” recording of “Barack the Magic Negro” as a holiday gift.

Next to much of our history, this is small stuff. And yet: Of all the coverage of Obama’s victory, the most accurate take may still be the piquant morning-after summation of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” it reported that our new president will have “to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.”

Those messes are enormous, bigger than Washington, bigger than race, bigger than anything most of us have ever seen. Nearly three months after Election Day, it remains astonishing that the American people have entrusted the job to a young black man who seemed to come out of nowhere looking for that kind of work just as we most needed him.

“In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” Obama is fond of saying. That is true, and that is what the country celebrates this week. But it is all the tragic American stories that came before him, some of them still playing out in chilly streets just blocks from the White House, that throw both his remarkable triumph and the huge challenge ahead of him into such heart-stopping relief.
Via Aaryn

i've got it something fierce

Then again, it might be the jetlag ...

Kitchenheimer's: When you're in the kitchen going around in circles because you can't remember what you were doing there.

I was in the kitchen this morning walking around in circles wondering what the hell I was looking for when the microwave beeped reminding me I was heating up my cup of coffee. My Kitchenheimer's is getting worse!
Via UrbanDictionary.com

and a totally insufficient dowry ...

I'm admittedly behind on Christmas and other things, given my trip to Southeast Asia. Anyhow, this 12 days of (Indian) Christmas video from Aashish killed me. Be sure to watch the whole thing.

Via Aashish