Reading the website for Force Ministries is a forced lesson in the inclusive and exclusive power of context. I don?t live in the non-denom (and therefore evangelical) ?Christian? alternate America. So me no speaky lingo. Near as I can tell from their self-evident-style (and poorly written) text, Force Ministries is an evangelical organization dedicated to members of our armed forces. Near as I can tell, but this is as far as I get in that direction.

Perhaps the main problem I?ve been having is that the language of American evangelical Christianity has been melded here with the language of American militarism, and it?s not a happy marriage, either to my ear or to the part of my brain that wrests meaning from words. Here?s the ?Mission Strategy":

Mission: Christ-centered duty
Purpose:
- Impart faith in Christ.
- Instill patterns and principles for victorious Christian duty.
- Ignite individual calling and destiny.
Defining Passage: ?From the days of John the Baptist unitl now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it.? (Matthew 11:12) NIV

Elsewhere, the ?Mission Strategy? is broken down into three major areas: Evangelism, Discipleship and Deployment. ?Discipleship? is obvious: it is their program for developing a congregation among members of the armed forces. It includes bible study, online teaching and interaction, providing chaplains, etc. ?Deployment? is their missionary branch. How missionaries on military bases differ from chaplains is probably one of those things you have to be in context to understand.

What?s really interesting here, though, is the first component: ?Evangelism?. The Evangelism branch of Force Ministries is ? you guessed it, a skydiving team! ?FORCE skydiving is a ministry to the military and through the military ? comprised of current and former Navy SEALs.? Why? you might ask. Well, ?in this era of Gen-X extremism, it?s proving harder and harder to capture the attention of the world?s youth. If it doesn?t go over 100 miles per hour, make a lot of noise, put a hole in your lip, or turn your hair a different color, it probably won?t get a second glace (sic). This, no doubt, makes evangelism challenging for many of today?s ministries.?

No doubt. Thank goodness some evangelists have the ability to take the following flights of fancy:

?Imagine a group of today?s youth standing around with their skateboards and piercing?s (sic), when all of a sudden, one of them looks up and sees an aircraft at 12,000 feet, with a smoke trail. What appear to be 5 human beings have (sic) exited the airplane, all of them trailing a stream of smoke. Nearly a minute later, brightly colored parachute (sic) with the single word, ?FORCE? boldly visible, begin to open. All witnessing these daring stunts are curious to see if these guys can pull off a landing and live to tell about it. They quickly make their way to the ?drop zone? where they notice a thousand other kids watching the beautiful parachute formations and spectacular landings.

?Immediately following the jump the jumpers quickly make their way to a stage were (sic) they began (sic) to speak a truth never before heard by many in the audience and soon a life changing realization comes over the newcomers ?? etc.

What?s disturbing me about the whole scenario isn?t that evangelicals are missionizing the military ? in fact, good for them for doing it, for concerning themselves with the spiritual welfare of soldiers deployed in horrifying war zones. What?s disturbing isn?t evangelicals trying to borrow the cred of xtreme sports to appeal to youth ? in fact, good for them for doing it, for bothering to take note of our Zeitgeist and attempting to fit their spiritual message to the needs and interests of today?s youth. As the language makes clear, this stuff is straight out of the imagination of someone standing on the wrong side of the generation gap, but maybe today?s pierced youth will respond to sky divers.

What?s disturbing to me is the implication that Force Ministries is using military personnel to missionize non-military-affiliated kids for the military. It?s an indirect (and completely unacknowledged) military recruitment tool: first you get them for Christ, then you sign them up for Uncle Sam. No, there?s nothing on the website that says this, but why would you use an organization called ?Force Ministries", dedicated to the military, to recruit kids for Christ, unless the point was to also prepare them for military life? Why, otherwise, the military-style language on the website, and the glorifying images of soldiers holding weapons for Christ?

Force Ministries isn?t awkward or stupid enough to glorify militarism in its text, but it is savvy enough to call itself ?Force Ministries", with all the possible concomitant meanings and implications of the word ?force", and the power of the idea of ?force? to those who feel powerless. Do you really think that they haven?t thought that word through? So what is it that they?re really trying to do here? Recruit kids for Christ and then recruit Christians for soldiers? Sounds complicated, doesn?t it? Or are they maybe going to skip the first step (or leave the first step to other organizations) and just move straight to the second by ?deploying? sky divers over existing Christian youth gatherings? That is actually what the fantasy scenario rather sounded like: militarize the already-Christian and rake in a few unbelievers, too. Kill three birds with one parachutes (sic).

What do you suppose? Is this a solution to the Bush admin?s impending recruitment crisis? Onward Christian soldiers?

I?m deep in translating ?Cadáveres", a long poem by Nestor Perlongher. And I was thinking about all the things I read and hear that are in translation or aren?t. And I think it?s important to look at all levels of culture in another language, whichever language you choose, to make an effort not to be monolingual & an effort that goes beyond language classes or tourism.

How not to be a tourist? How to translate, and bridge between cultures/languages, without exploiting or ? er? engaging in cultural appropriation, a long mouthful of jargon for ?not being an asshole?. Translators lately talk a lot about this, about two-way translation, not expecting everything to be in English, about particpating in the culture you?re translating from, about being aware of your own subjectivity or subject position.

This weekend at , an anarchic nerdfest, I talked all morning with Peter Kaminski of Socialtext - about collaboration, wikis, science fiction, and translation? He believes strongly in reading newspapers in other languages that aren?t your first language; that you are jolted out of your perspective (and you learn the language too.) You can also try listening to the radio? try the Pocho Hour of Power, at Pocho.com.

I spend a bit of time puzzling out people?s blogs in Spanish. It?s harder than newspapers or books, and more like trying to eavesdrop on the slangy, intimate conversations of strangers who know each other well. Slash fanfic in Spanish is vastly entertaining, and you can warm up if your spanish is rusty with the Spanglish translation of Don Quixote by Ilan Stavans.

In my translations of Perlongher, a great poet who is foulmouthed in Spanish, Portugues, Portuñol, and French, I?ve had to look at a lot of tranny porn, or actually, travestí porn; in Latin America, LGBT organizations are LGBTT, because transexual and travestí are fairly well-defined different identities with specific political histories and problems.

Mmm, internet porn. It?s got so many serious literary and political uses! And you should read it in its original down and dirty International Espanglish. The Swearsaurus Global Swearing Archive at Insultmonger is a good starting point to understanding the dirty slang of particular countries, but going right to the porno source teaches you much faster. I?m being flip about it, but the dynamics of the international porn trade are complicated and important. Porn and sex work continue to become globalized, like most other industries.

Anyway, listen to Perlongher?s amazing poem Cadáveres and read along if you dare.

According to every blog I read, Scott Westerfeld?s new vampire novel . Very exciting, very exciting.

I haven?t read it yet (it?s just out today) but all signs point to a great reading experience: Peeps is apparently a new spin on the vampire legend, doing for vampires what 28 Days Later did for zombies. I can vouch for Scott?s writing chops; he has me completely at his mercy, awaiting the third installment of his Young Adult magic trilogy , and the second installment of the sci-fi teen cosmetic surgery trilogy (no joke, it?s great) that begins with .

Here are some reviews of Peeps. And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Okay. So it?s a tragedy that this teenage girl in Kansas got inside the tiger?s cage last week and was easily slaughtered inside its feline jaws. But cold-hearted question number one: Why didn?t anyone inform her that tigers and nature?s other megafauna weren?t made for cages or, in general, for humans to play with? Question number two: Since said tragedy occured in the enlightened state of Kansas, will we have to give her both a Darwin Award AND an Intelligent Design Award? Heartless question number three: If there is, in fact, no such natural principle as so-called evolution, will the filtering out of her genes in any way affect the collective intelligence of our species?

And in international news? Newsweek magazine outdid itself last week, and wrote a fairly even-handed, in-depth article about the pull-out of Jewish settlers from Gaza. It touched thoughtfully upon all the key elements of this historical moment: the woes of the settlers, the terribly young Jewish soldiers weeping as they led out the farmers who had planted their hopes in the soil, and the pathos of the Palestinians, their hopes, their suffering. There was even an interview with an orthodox settler who showed the Newsweek correspondant a potato he had dug out of the ground with his own hands. And he told the reporter to look closely at the earthy potato, with its lumps and eyes?wasn?t that obviously the face of Moses? Okay. So, forget that for a thousand years people have been seeing the Virgin Mary in their pasta fazul and that kind of thing, and now one Jewish guy in the middle of the summer in the southern desert under a lot of stress says something crazy, forget all that. My question is this: Didn?t the other settlers know that Newsweek would be coming? ?Avi, Avi, whatever you do, don?t tell the American press your potato story. The Jewish and Arab newspapers, they know you?re just the potato guy, but, please, Avi, please, it?s Newsweek, goyishe-kop, you know they?ll just eat it up.?

My other question: Is Thomas Friedman a piece of shit or what?

I love superhero comics. I wasn?t a big comics reader as a kid or adolescent ? I got into comics after I graduated from college and had a period of brain-mulching unemployment and temp jobs. I started buying lots of old superhero comics from the ?bargain bins? and found them a nice escape from the utterly cruddy life I was having at the time.

Since then, I?ve been into superhero comics, and I occasionally read other comics. I like some ?art? comics and ?indy? comics, especially Evan Dorkin, Adrian Tomine and Ivan Brunetti, plus of course Michael Kupperman, who did the cover for other #1. But I pretty much only read superhero comics ? if I want to read a serious literary story about ordinary people, I?ll read a novel. Or watch an indy movie. I know there are some ways comics can do the ?serious literary story about ordinary people? differently or better than a prose-only narrative, but I find I just prefer prose-only narratives. I went through a Manga phase years ago, but I?m not into Manga any more.

But when I want to consume a superhero narrative, I read comics. I don?t like movies about superheroes, and I?ve read very little prose-only superhero narratives. In other words, I don?t read comics to read comics, I read comics to read about superheroes.

Mostly I still read things from the bargain bin, plus the occasional new issue by a creator I especially like. But lately the new superhero comics seem to have gotten more boring and ?event-driven.? ?Event-driven? is a term of art in the comics industry that refers to comics where, for five months or a year, everything is about The Death of Superman, or the Gotham City Gang War. Plus, most comics are being written so they?ll read well in collected editions, meaning the story moves at a snail?s pace.

Online comics critic Paul O?Brien ripped the Internet in half when he announced he was . He cited creative stagnation at DC and Marvel, and the lack of any interesting new titles lately. And people jumped down his throat. Mostly there was a flood of people suggesting that O?Brien just wasn?t reading good comics. (Good defined as non-superhero comics, natch.) If he?d only stop watching Bruckheimer movies and start watching Aguirre: Wrath of God! Even though O?Brien very carefully included a caveat that said his column only applied to superhero comics, and he?s only interested in superhero comics, everybody assumed he must just be an idiot who didn?t realize that Peter Bagge is God!

What bugs me isn?t the lack of reading comprehension of O?Brien?s column. It?s the silly snobbery, or the assumption that people who read superhero comics ?need to be gently led,? as one person put it, towards better comics. As if I?m too stupid to have noticed the huge wall of indy comics at my local store.

Daniel Clowes? main competition for my time isn?t Spider-Man, it?s Graham Greene and Ursula K. LeGuin, and a bunch of other authors I have unread books by. If I?m in the mood for something escapist and light, then Spider-Man gets to compete with television and movies. (And actually, that?s part of why mainstream superhero comics have gotten so boring: they?re not even fun escapist reading any more, because of the emphasis on some highly dubious sense of ?realism,? and the aforementioned five hundred-part storylines.)

It all started with those Dove ads that show all the hot, mostly naked girls in weirdly desexualized lingerie with the tagline: ?Real women have curves.? I can only assume it?s from this sentence alone that we are supposed to guess that the women in the ad are fat or have otherwise culturally unacceptable bodies (a few are people of color, one has a large tattoo, another is sort of tomboyish). The ads are part of Dove soap?s ?campaign for real beauty,? another tip-off that we?re supposedly looking at women larger than the usual ?unreal? models.

And yet if it weren?t for Dove?s helpfully-condescending slogans for these women, I would never have pegged them for ?real.? Sure, their underwear is kind of drab, but every model has flawless skin, shiny hair, a radiant smile, and not a dimple of cellulite anywhere on her ?real? body. None of them have flab or wrinkles. And their breasts are perfectly perktacular! I?m definitely in the audience of ?real-bodied? women the ads are aimed at, but I don?t see my body up there. I see the same old airbrushed cuties, except with less makeup, slightly more muscle, and no Victoria?s Secret.

In New York, people with magic markers started doctoring the ads with occasionally fat-phobic, occasionally anti-corporate, and occasionally utterly random comments. In Dusseldorf, a local branch of zippy advertising agency Ogilvy took up space on local bus stops with a parodic campaign for real men?s bodies.

That?s when the new craze for ?real? women took off. Nike launched its ?big butts, thunder thighs, and tomboy knees? campaign, which only exists in print and online ? perhaps because the TV audience isn?t ready for such ?frank? representations of unfeminine body parts on women. Like the Dove ads, these Nike spots revel in women whose bodies are supposedly unlike those of fashion models. They also include unusually beautiful women of color in with ?real? unskinny or boyish women. According to an AdAge story:

Trend expert Faith Popcorn of Brain Reserve, New York, said the shift did not start in advertisements. “No copywriter did this,” she said. “It started when we started to celebrate the black and Hispanic culture. In those cultures you can be a little ‘butty’ and even have a little mustache, too, and it’s considered cool and attractive. Now these white girls are looking at themselves and saying, ‘I don’t want to be a stick, I want to be natural.’”

One is left with the weird sense that not being white is somehow the cultural equivalent of being fat or hairy, two natural feminine states that advertising often tries to cure.

When I watched a commercial on Nike?s website of a woman caressing her ?thunder thighs,? I was once again struck by the unreality of the body in front of me. I saw two muscular thighs, not particularly large, framed by a pair of trim (Nike) gym shorts. If those delectable gams were supposed to be almost unacceptably heavy, then my own body is much farther beyond the pale than I ever realized.

As for the Gap?s new lines of women?s jeans – ?curvy,? ?original,? and ?straight? – I stared and stared at pictures of the three supposedly different body types the jeans are designed to fit, looking for differences. But I was only able to discern that the model who wore ?straight? actually stood perfectly straight, while the ?curvy? model had cocked her hip into an exaggerated C shape. An AP article about the new jeans tells us helpfully, ?The new curvy fit is for the woman whose waist is considerably smaller than her hips - whose jeans often gap at the back of the waistband. There?s a deeper curve in the seam shape, eliminating extra fabric at the top.?

What the hell does that mean? Julie Vaughan, Gap?s senior director of denim design, clarifies: ?We designed the jean on a curvy model. The curvy has a contoured waistband. It hugs the waist, and it has an easy fit through the hips and thighs.?

So curvy means curvy and you figure out what they?re trying to get at. You?d never know from actually looking at the Gap?s ads for the new jeans featuring preternaturally firm asses. The other day, as I headed to the men?s section of the Gap to buy pants, I reflected once again that I never see myself represented in fashion ads aimed at women. I only see myself in the men?s ads. Men have such reassuring ways of sizing their pants – I can buy 34 30 instead of ?curvy? or ?thunder thighs.? I guess I?d rather be a number than a ?real beauty.?

First off, my apologies to all Trekkers and Trekkies: I have no idea when it is appropriate to say which for whom.

That having been said, check out this bloggage about the link between Star Trek fandom and pedophilia, as reported by the L.A. Times. Apparently, 99 out of 100 pedophiles prefer Star Trek paraphernalia in their houses.

I don?t know if I believe it, but here?s my take on the whys and wherefores: Trekkers, Trekkies and other fans of Star Trek are nerds. Nerds inevitably gravitate towards Star Trek because, well, the nerd mansion has a special room for Star Trek and that?s where all the cookies and conversations are. Pedophiles are maladjusted, which means, among other things, that the world clocks them as nerds. (This isn?t true; there?s a huge difference between socially awkward and sociopath, but cheerleaders aren?t making that distinction this week.) So pedophiles tend to live in the nerd mansion too, and will, so to speak, inevitably pass the Star Trek room on their way to the bathroom or the kitchen at some point.

Caveat for those of you about to defend nerddom to me: me nerd. In fact: me Star Trek fan, although not a fan of the original series. My irony doesn?t extend that far out.

I?m sure everyone?s heard about how great the Austin music scene was in the 80s until they want to throw up. And in writing about musicians when they?re dead, they?re always saints. Well, brace yourselves because I?m about to wax sappy.

But? Biscuit is dead! I?m a sad fan girl. Imagine me in 1986 as a little pink-haired kidlet newly hatched into the world, and bopping around Austin with my neurotic performance artist junkie girlfriend. We?d dress up in lime-green pantsuits, carry clipboards, and demand of everyone we met to let us draw mustaches on them in charcoal. Fu Manchu? Hitler? Walrus? Dastardly Dan? Which mustache would you like? In the 100-degree heat at some party or at Liberty Lunch or something. And there was Biscuit. He was cheerful! He was never serious, never pretentious! I feel like I?m praising the family dog from 20 years ago, like Karen Finley?s essay on Dead Pets in Shock Treatment. ?She was a bad dog, she peed on everything, but that?s Lady. Yup, she barfed on everything, but she was Lady.? Biscuit was Lady! Up with a microphone telling everyone to get on up, and he meant it, and everyone would do it. ?Go start your own band, now, y?all hear?? Dressed in something strange and fluffy with plastic dinosaurs epoxied to his head and an enormous grin. Biscuit was about infectious artistic empowerment. And I totally worshipped him! His art was good? I remember him doing an elvis shrine for the huge Dia de los Muertos exhibit one year. He made people feel like anything was possible in life, art, whatever.

And all I have is some 20 year old audio mix tapes. I got to get downloading! There do seem to be CDs? The Fat Elvis & the Skinny Elvis are definitely available.

I loved how they could play anything and mixed everything up. The happy funk of ?We Got Soul", ?Funk Off", ?What?s the Word?"— witty pop of ?Influence", ?Self Contortion", or ?Identity Crisis? like the happier moments of Glass Eye or the Dead Milkmen — glorious punkosity with a velvet underground/MDC/Ramones beauty to the driven guitar in songs like ?Authority? ? thrashing rhythms but with velvety textural complexity. Or just plain silly a-la-Ed-Hall? ?Frat Cars! Frat Cars! I can?t stand those Frat Cars! Fucking with the freaks!? & the later psychedelifunkpunk discoqueer weirdness of Cargo Cult?.

I was thinking of this just last night because of something Pandagon said in her blog about an Austin-American Chronicle article on Biscuit. And remembering him fondly, and thinking of his band?s swirling legacy in the late 80s in Austin where he would come into a party and the party would suddenly reconfigure. Because ? BISCUIT!!! In little reality-warping ripples all around the room. And then I woke up this morning to final_girl?s lj and ? he?s dead.

As for the mixing-up of the music, it was beyond genre-crossover. The Big Boys just had fun and didn?t give a fuck what genre people expected. Again like Glass Eye, who refused to market themselves as one slick thing. That in itself is admirable even without Biscuit?s larger than life glowing saintlihood.

When I say that I love porn, I?m not speaking rhetorically. I didn?t adopt this stance in an enlightened, women?s studies kind of way. It?s just that ever since I got my sweaty hands on my junior high school best friend?s mom?s tattered copy of Nancy Friday?s , followed precipitously with my parents? stash of Penthouse Variations, I?ve been a porn fan. I just love reading the stuff, especially now that the internet brings it to me fresh and free everyday. And yeah, I read it for wanking. As it turns out, my textual habits are now being defended by none other than President George W. Bush and various religious right wing zealots.

It all started when Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln proposed a 25% porn tax on internet porn sites. She and several other Dems hope that their wildly unconstitutional Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005 will help make the internet a more ?child safe? place by forcing adult website owners to pay a ridiculous, blood-sucking one quarter of their revenues back to the government (who can then, one supposes, use it to subsidize defense spending which makes the real world child-unsafe). But here?s the beauty part: the religious right opposes the proposed law.

Randy Dotinga at Wired News reports that Rick Schatz, president of the religious advocacy group National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, told him: ?We?d not necessarily be pleased if the U.S. gets into what some people would call a ?sin tax.? There would be the concern that the government would change its focus to tax pornographic materials rather than control production and distribution.?

In other words: to tax a thing is to legitimize it. I?m glad my Christian allies are keeping my favorite mom ?n pop porn sites afloat by fighting this evil sin tax. But I think their strategy may be more canny than it seems at first. Let?s leave aside the fact that taxing a form of speech based on content is unconstitutional on its face. And let?s also leave aside the fact that it will be impossible to determine which kinds of sites should be taxed because there are so many kinds of sexual and erotic expression on the web, both commercial and noncommercial. (Although the bill?s architects say their definition of adult material will be based on the same rules that define ?sexually-explicit conduct? in Title 18, section 2257 of the US Code ? note that these rules are actually borrowed from section 2256 ? that isn?t much help. This definition of sexual explicitness was developed in the context of identifying child porn, not ?adult material.? It?s vague and strange, and its use in the application of a sin tax would no doubt lead to a whole host of litigation epiphenomena.)

Back to the bizarre canniness of Schatz? camp. I think they?re opposed to the bill because it will impose such a burden on sites with sexual material that it could actually tip the balance of the nation?s sympathy back towards pornographers. After all, these are just Americans out to make a buck on sex. If it appears they?re getting beaten down by a tax-happy government, they may become martyrs rather than evildoers. So I say: bring on the porn tax. I want to watch the legal smackdown. I want to see anti-tax right-wingers and pornographers fighting side-by-side, shaking their fists at Big Government.

Today the right wing made another move to help me get more internet porn. The Bush Administration, possibly in response to a call from the conservative Family Research Council, has asked that ICANN delay plans to implement a ?xxx? top-level domain on the net. ICANN ? or, for non-wonk, non-geeks, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ? is a controversial US nonprofit which serves as a domain name gatekeeper. In June, it suffix [note to self: buy www.othermag.xxx!]. You?d think conservatives would rejoice, right? Instant porno ghetto, complete with a really easy way to filter out ?nasty? material based on the domain name.

But no! Conservative website FamilyNews :

Daniel Weiss, Senior Analyst for Media and Sexuality at Focus on the Family Action, says there are nearly 260 million porn web pages already. A .xxx domain would only make matters worse. “Basically they’re creating an entire new domain that can be populated with pornography.” Weiss says once a .xxx domain is officially established, there would inevitably be a feeling that pornography is normal and given an official stamp of approval.

So now I have the Christian right?s full approval to keep surfing porn in all the usual places ? no pesky changing my bookmark file; no rules forcing adult sites to get ripped off when they buy those $75 xxx domain names.

Damn I love America.

One of the most frustrating things about the federal government?s obsession with cracking down on is that it diverts resources away from serious drugs. Now one serious law-and-order Republican, at least, is admitting that other issues are way more pressing. In a Aug. 1 letter Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) takes the Office of National Drug Control Policy to task for ignoring the rise in popularity of methamphetamines. Not only does meth destroy people?s lives (and facilitate the spread of HIV), but meth labs leak toxic chemicals into water supplies.

?Marijuana is a much more popular drug in terms of the number of people who use it. However, methamphetamine causes much more destruction in a much shorter period of time than marijuana. We believe that reducing drug use is not just about reducing the number of users of a drug, but reducing the overall harm to society caused by the drug,? Grassley writes. ?While we agree that any drug use is harmful to users and those around them, the problems associated with marijuana are not comparable to methamphetamine in terms of cost to society.?

He goes on to list positive steps to curb the spread of meth that the Bush administration either hasn?t taken or has actively opposed. I don?t have much to add, except that it?s refreshing to see a hard-line Republican talking sensibly about drugs.

A bizarre adoption case in Indiana has taken a strange turn recently, begging questions about race and adoption policies.

A 58-year-old single male New Jersey school teacher wanted to have kids. Through a surrogate birth adoption agency in Indiana, he arranged to adopt twin girls, born prematurely (in Indiana) to a surrogate mother from South Carolina. Problems arose at the hospital when nurses became nervous about the adoptive father?s seeming lack of child rearing skills for the medically fragile preemies and alerted authorities.

What came out of an ongoing investigation is that the father, Stephen Melinger, apparently went to Indiana to adopt because New Jersey law renders surrogacy contracts illegal, while Indiana law is ambiguous on this point. The surrogate mother gave birth in a different county from the agency that arranged the adoption, apparently because the agency had had problems before. Also, the home study required by law before adoption was never performed in Melinger?s home (which is in New Jersey.) Further, it is illegal, according to Indiana law, for someone from out of state to adopt an Indiana-born child unless the child is ?hard to place?. No one would have caught any of this if the nurses at the hospital hadn?t become suspicious of Melinger himself.

The twins were originally reported in the legal papers to be the biological children of the adopting father, Melinger, and of the surrogate mother, Zaria Nkoya Huffman. However, Huffman is black (and was incorrectly reported in the papers as being white) and the children appear to be white, not biracial. The most recent twist, reported in the Indianapolis Star, is that Melinger now appears not to be the twins? biological father after all. All this should, in hindsight, be obvious, since why would a biological parent need to apply for adoption of his child?

The report in the Indianapolis Star does not state for a fact that Huffman is not the biological mother. The speculation around the identity of the mother appears to be based solely upon the appearance of the babies, which is white, compared to the appearance of the mother, which is black. And now it seems that if Huffman is not the biological mother, if, in fact, the biological mother was a white egg donor, then the monoracial children will no longer be the ?hard to place? adoptees that biracial children would be, and therefore will no longer be permitted to be adopted by someone out of state. This raises the question then of why Melinger chose a black surrogate mother. Was he playing the laws the whole time? Was this a strategy to get the kids born and then get them out of the state under the rules governing ?hard to place? adoptees?

Simply the reporting on this story raises a whole host of issues, aside from the issues of the story itself. Is there really a medical question as to Huffman?s biological motherhood or is it entirely based upon appearance? Is it the reporter questioning her relation to the babies or is it the investigators? And if there?s really a question as to the provenance of the girls? DNA, then why don?t they just do a damn test already?

As everyone should know, but most people don?t seem to, the background of multiracials ? especially newborn babies ? cannot easily be determined by appearance, especially when the interpretation of appearance is so subjective. It?s rare to find a child whose appearance is an exact 50/50 meld of its two parents?, or whose hue is exactly midway between that of its ethnically varied parents. Babies? complexions ? ALL babies? complexions ? are lighter than their complexions as older children, which is lighter than their complexions as adults. Furthermore, the way this story is reported underlines the one-drop rule: Huffman (the surrogate mother) is black, period. There?s no room in this ?assessment? for a description of her actual appearance, which could range from dark-skinned and African-featured to light-skinned and European-featured. African America is a very multiracial community to begin with. As we?ve all seen time and time again, but have not seemed to recognize, there?s nothing to prevent a ?black? mother from having very white-looking children.

That aside, adoption policy needs desperately to be cleaned up, if multiracial children can be blithely assigned to a ?hard to place? category based upon the racial categorization of those who contributed their DNA. These rules originate in the practice of not placing adoptees interracially; i.e. not placing black children in white homes and vice versa. This is a serious problem for multiracial children, for whom almost ANY adoption would be interracial, unless it were by an already multiracial family of their exact mix. Add to this the fact that, in essence, all adoptees are interracially adopted, since there are infinite significant variations in ethnicity and family culture within the monolithic structures of single races in this country. I?m not suggesting that the rule against interracial adoption should be entirely dropped. But this case shows to what a ridiculous extreme it can be, and is, taken.

Spoilers ahead for the new Harry Potter novel?
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OK then. So apparently it didn?t take long for super obsessive compulsive fanboys to create a site called Dumbledore Is Not Dead to advance the view that, well? you can guess. The site includes tons of ridiculously detailed ?clues? that Dumbledore didn?t die at the end of Half-Blood Prince as well as lots of wacky speculation.

But one of the main reasons why people seem to think Dumbledore lives is because he appeared to plead for his life. When Snape shows up, Dumbledore gets all freaky and desperate and says ?Severus? please?? a few times. So the theory goes that either Dumbledore wanted Snape to kill him, or Dumbledore wanted Snape to help fake his death. They refuse to accept the idea that, at the moment of imminent death, Dumbledore simply freaked out and didn?t want to die.

After all, didn?t Dumbledore say in an earlier book that he saw death as the next great adventure, and didn?t fear it? Well, then, he obviously couldn?t change his mind. Or realize when it came down to it that, yeah, death actually freaked the shit out of him. Because that never happens in real life. People are always completely consistent and live up to things they said years earlier.

In fact, Dumbledore?s last night on Earth is sort of an interesting encapsulation of what it?s like to watch an aging relative or friend careen into the grave. It?s not generally crisp or glib. You have to watch all of the structures and ramparts of their personality melt a little. Even if they don?t have Alzheimer?s or dementia, just the process of a body ceasing to function by degrees is sort of infantilizing. So in the book, we have Dumbledore being force-fed the nasty potion and becoming increasingly whiny and incoherent. It?s a really disturbing scene as all of his trademark serenity vanishes. And then he stumbles into a trap, almost talks his way out of it, and winds up pleading with his murderer.

Part of what makes dying of ?old age? so demoralizing and humiliating is that you get poked and prodded a lot by medical science. Half the Medicare patients who died in Miami spent time in an ICU in their last six months of life, and nearly a third saw ten or more doctors, according to testimony at a conference on end-of-life care. And yet Medicare patients who died in other places were much less likely to see as many doctors or spend time in the ICU. And yet their ?outcomes? were much the same as the people in Miami.

Here we have to pause and ask what they mean by ?outcomes.? Well, duh. Everyone died, that?s how they got included in these statistics. But we don?t know if the people in Missoula would have lived a few more months if they?d gotten the same care as the people in Miami, or if they?d have considered those months worth having.

It?s a cliche to say that Medicare could save billions if it didn?t go overboard on ?heroic? measures for people in the last six months of life. The trouble is, you never know when someone?s in his/her last six months of life. Patients don?t wear T-shirts with their approximate date of death on them.

By law, patients can?t get hospice care under Medicare unless a doctor is willing to certify that they?re in the last six months of their lives. In some cases, a doctor will swear that a patient has less than six months to live, and then the patient will fuck everything up by living another few years. A few years ago, the federal government tried to investigate doctors for fraud if their patients lived longer than the doctors had said they would. Because the doctors had sworn the patients only had six months to live, and obviously they had lied.

I?m not sure where I?m going with this, except that the issue isn?t as simple as anyone would like it to be. We?d all like a dignified death, and less medical poking and prodding after there?s already no hope. But at the same time, sometimes the medical poking and prodding actually works, and people get a few more good years. And it?s really hard to predict which people will benefit from more care.

Once again Kos of the popular political blog DailyKos puts it out there that ?women?s rights? as an issue is interfering with ?politics?, which is way more important than any petty single issue. Therefore, obviously, we should vote for an anti-abortion Democrat over a pro-choice Republican. It?s not just what he and his toadies are saying it?s how they say it?

?? clearly they don?t understand that good politics ? turning the Senate Democratic is far more beneficial for their issue (women rights) than anything the Republicans can muster. Until NARAL (and the rest of the single-issue groups) understand that building a movement is more beneficial to their causes than singular devotion to their pet causes, I can?t take them seriously.?

?There is no issue ?much, much bigger? than abortion rights? responds fedupnyc in the comments. ?Roe v Wade is about the very humanity of women.?

Oh, those silly women ? I can never take them seriously either. If only they understood what?s really important! You can see them chasing their tails here on Mediagirl.org, Rox Populi, and Feministe.

Imagine if it were all about men. If men got pregnant, or even just ended up with the kids and a whole lot of downward mobility, maybe they?d be fighting bravely for the right to vasectomies. There?d be do-it-yourself vasectomy classes becasue the clinics were being blown up by mad-eyed fundamentalist militia.

Here?s a plan. Make a law that whenever a woman gives birth, a random guy who voted against abortion rights is selected from the population in her neighborhood. Force-feed him to be 30 lbs heavier, operate on him to make his boobs sag down to his belly & give him hemorrhoids, and tax half his paycheck for the next 20 years. Also: as an extra-refined torture, make him join the PTA.

No, wait. Here?s an alternate plan.
You know those pregnancy simulation vests? All guys should have to wear them for a few months, maybe when they hit 16 years old. At the *very least*. Nevermind simulating the hemorrhoids and lifelong downward mobility. The state?s brutal interference with their bodies should go a long way to scare ?em.

And to get the simulation vest thingie removed they should be required to travel to another state, run a gauntlet of Operation Rescue simulators, spend at least 500 bucks - or they have the choice of back-alley vest removal which involves a life-threatening unsanitary rectal exam with a coathanger.

That?s disturbing isn?t it? That packs a punch. I really shouldn?t say things like that. It?ll just alienate people! I shouldn?t sound like I want the government to have scary power over men?s bodies. That would be SO wrong!

A few thoughts about life in the age of the sound-bite. Why, when speaking to the nation that invented the t.v. dinner, would anyone use the phrase ?Global Warming"? Americans all secretly think it sounds like a dream come true. Not so with the phrase: ?Global Climate Destablization.? Likewise, ?Ozone Hole? doesn?t sound nearly ominous enough?most Americans secretly suspect ozone to be the problem. A better phrase: ?Punctured Oxygen Layer.? This is all so obvious that eight year olds should be laughing about it in Mad Magazine.

I sometimes think that the Left is losing the media war for the same reason nobody liked my film studies teacher in college. Whatever brilliant ideas he might have had were immediately disqualified by a humiliating nervous tic: He could never respond to his students without eventually relating everything back to ?the great poet Bob Dylan.?

On a lighter note, regarding the intelligence of the American public, two weeks ago I finally read an article that gave me hope. A study has shown that the average IQ in America has gone up dramatically among youngsters born in the last fifteen years. This was being attributed, of all things, to Harry Potter. (The people doing the study belonged to the less intelligent generation.) Funny. Just a few days earlier, I had read an article suggesting that, due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline in the seventies and eighties, the amount of lead in children has gone down by 8600 percent in the last fifteen years. Anyways, just surfing some food for thought.

I don?t have time to do justice to the subject, but I?d like to mention two events: this year?s Blogathon and the Blogher conference.

I participated in the Blogathon a couple of years ago. For 24 hours, I posted every half hour. For me this translated into nearly continuous writing with bathroom breaks & interludes of reading other people?s Blogathon entries. I didn?t sleep. I raised a few hundred bucks for charity through reader pledges. It was a wild rollercoaster of a writing exercise! It was writing as a spectator sport or as performance art. This year?s Blogathon looks exciting? I have only cruised a few of the ongoing 24-hour freakouts, revelations, streams of consciousness, explorations, and art projects, so this is not a ?best of? list. Take a look at:

Seeworthy?s 24-hour exploration of fat lib and body issues
Portraits for a Purpose: two artists draw portraits of each other every half hour, and post the results. Watch them go insane for hours!
Three Moms and a Single Lady - ?Four sexy ladies talking about sex?. It?s sort of touching and earnest. Oh, those ladies!
Disconnected - Driving around posting from a different hotspot for every post. On the Road! this guy doesn?t have a huge amount to say, or time to say it in, but you have to admire the extreme nerdiness.

The Blogher conference was a hoot. Reality and the recording of reality were happening at such a fast pace no one could keep up. I skipped all the political panels and talks about technology & instead went to storytelling, identity blogging, and mommyblogging sessions. What a lot of fierce mouthy loud activist right-on feminists! It was like flying an airplane into a hurricane. I?m still reading the fallout on blogs like I am Dr. Laura?s Worst Nightmare, Multidimensional Me, and .

I?m so out of touch that it surprised me that some women dissed the idea of mommyblogging as ?dumb arguments over whether to breastfeed or not.? Stuff like that, as if just because we were breeders and talked about it, we had no brains and as if everything we talk about must be takedowns of each other?s parenting. NOT. The mommybloggers were powerful strong women who never shut up. Never! Part of what makes it political to blog and be a mom is the immense pressure on women, once they breed, to be self-abnegating. Case in point, people think that blogging as a parent endangers children. ("What if some creep off the internet stalks your kids?") We heard stories like Alice?s from fussy - how one of her readers threatened to call Child Protective Services on her because she wrote about her 4 year old son?s penis. ?Try getting HIM to shut up about his penis,? she responded. Take my word for it, the pressure is huge on moms to stay out of public discourse, or to keep their mom-ness out of it and live out a schizophrenic divide that does no one any favors. What the mommybloggers think of each other is that it?s a brave political act to refuse to divide whatever else you?re writing about from your role as a mom and a feminist.

For example, Jo Spanglemonkey?s discussion of an obnoxious transphobic post by Ambra Nykol, a conservative Christian attendee of Blogher:

What I was thinking about Ambra was that she thinks she is exempt. She thinks that because she knows herself to be an individual, not actually reducible to her skin color or her gender (or god only knows how she thinks of herself: the mind boggles to think of the kind of self-co-opting and self-flagellatory participation in one?s oppression that is implied by her political affiliation) that she can rise above the kind of discrimination that might be aimed her way. She thinks, in other words, that it won?t happen to her.

A final note about Blogher: Everyone should take a look at Ka-Ping Yee?s nifty tool, Regender, which he developed the night before the conference. It lets you surf the web with pronouns and first names gender-swapped. I can?t recommend it highly enough! It?s mindbending to read the news, or just everything you normally read, with genders reversed. You can neutralize gendered language too; try the other buttons at the top of the page once you start surfing.

Ok, I was supposed to post yesterday and I forgot. Besides, I don?t have a whole lot to say. Though I did notice that one of my fellow bloggeteers below made reference to the infamous 1986 Incident at Lake Forest, which is well on its way to being enshrined in urban legend. The truth, as far as I can make out, is that when Mr.T bought his estate, he had all the trees cut down because of his allergies. And as someone who was up ALL NIGHT two nights ago with sneezing, watering eyes, and asthma, I sure as shit would?ve chopped down the offending tree that has done this to me if I had a chainsaw handy. The T-man said, in a 1993 interview with the Onion A/V Club:

?Back in 1986, I bought a mansion in Lake Forest, Illinois, and then I cut down my trees and the neighbors got mad. How dare my neighbors get mad about my property? But the issue wasn?t the trees, as if they don?t cut down trees; the issue was that I was the only black man moving to a town of about 15,000 people. Stuffy people. Some of them were rich, some of them barely scraping. Actually, the really rich people didn?t even say nothing. The people that got little houses, their house ain?t bigger than my garage. So I?m sort of the black version of the Beverly Hillbillies. My driveway?s about a block and a half long, most unusual for a black man to have.?

He did not, as some claim, chop the trees down to ?piss off the white man.? He chopped them down so he?d stop sneezing, and it was only the middle-class, striving white man who got pissed off. The very rich don?t feel threatened by other people?s tree-chopping habits. The anxious middle class do. If I had the time and energy, this could actually be a complex and compelling discission about race and class and entitlement over the environment. But I?m sneezing too hard. Anyone want to tak eit up, feel free?

The American Society for Journalists and Authors has changed its collective mind, and decided not to give Judith Miller the prestigious Conscience in Media award after all. The original vote to give her the award was a narrow one, but the new vote was unanimous. The society apparently yanked the award after looking at the whole of Miller?s career. Were they concerned by her hyping of incredibly flimsy evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or maybe her hijacking of an army WMD search unit?

Actually, Anita Bartholomew had it right: the real reason not to give Miller the award is that she was protecting confidential sources who were trying to silence whistleblowers instead of blowing the whistle themselves. It?s a pretty basic distinction, and one the mainstream media seems to have forgotten. Back when I was starting out as a reporter, we were warned to use confidential sources sparingly and to be aware of their agendas if we did use them. If your source works for the government and is pushing the government?s agenda (or ditto for a corporation) then he or she is just a cowardly shill. Forbidding reporters from talking to off-the-record-but-official sources would be the first step towards cleaning up the putrid relationship between the media and the establishment.

Have you noticed, these last few years, the striking preponderance of wood grain in the ?fine arts"? Next time you go to a show at any contemporary gallery or museum or leaf thru an issue of Art Forum or any other trendy art magazine, keep your eyes peeled for: faux wood grain, actual chunks of wood grain, drawings of wood grain, or anything else either faintly or boldly suggestive of wood grain.

So, what?s up with the wood grain? Is it all a coincidence? In those arts we used to call the avant garde, which, whatever they are called these days, are still supposed to over-exert themselves and remain ever on the unfamiliar edge of the new, how could one ?original? or ?maverick? artist after another be inspired to use wood grain? Does this dangling signifier hold some key to the modern condition? Is it an inside joke? Clearly it is a trend?but in that case, is it *gasp* trendy?

& what does wood grain mean to the art world? Does it signify, um, Authenticity, which is not actually authenticity, but rather, um, the campy and ironic appropriation of ?natural? texture into the artificial ?canvas? of Big Art, as if to say, ?In our lives, as in art, the Authentic is dead"? Is this a reference to, or a recapitulation of, that by now ancient cubist piece by George Braques, the famous one, where he pasted a sort of hardware-store-grade linoleum wood grain panel onto his illustration of a chair, so that the fake real is glued onto his real fake? Yawn. Am I missing something?

The whole thing reminds me of the alleged time in the 80s when Mr. T, star of the A Team, bought a house with acres of lovely property in a lily-white wealthy suburb north of Chicago. For the benefit of his stuck-up neighbors, the week he moved in, he fired up a chain saw and took down all of the old beautiful trees on his property. But to really mess with his neighbors, he made sure to leave the ugly stumps. I myself am not into cutting down hundred year old trees, but of all the people working in wood grain, I appreciate Mr. T as truly an artist.

Just in time for you to be finishing up the latest Harry Potter tome, there?s the world?s cutest and most subversive web comic to read. It?s called ?HD Comic,? and it?s made by a friendly livejournaler who posts regular updates for many adoring fans. For anyone who is familiar with Harry/Draco fanfic ? in which fans recount the glorious, queer love affair between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy ? this will be an amusing delight. For people who have no idea what I?m talking about, reading the comic will be like traveling to another planet where homosexuality is accepted by all and giant entertainment corporations don?t sue fans for creating their own stories using copyrighted characters.

Imagine a Ziggy cartoon entirely devoted to the snuggly, magical romance between a lightening-marked sorcerer and his devilish blond boyfriend. HD Comic is sweet, friendly, and happily queer. Every strip is a silly affirmation of love, with just a little bite to it. Check it out ? you may find yourself hooked.