Caturday: Feline Swine Flu Edition

From ICHC?

Via Effect Measure, I learned that it’s possible for cats to catch swine flu from humans – something scientists didn’t know, either, until just this week. Tara Parker-Pope wrote in the New York Times about a 13-year-old cat in Ames, Iowa, who caught the virus:

The cat, a 16-pound orange tabby, began acting lethargic and lost his appetite on Oct. 27. He is the only pet in the house and never goes outside. The cat, described as “large framed but not chubby,” stopped eating and drinking and stopped cleaning himself. He also rested by hunching on all four feet, rather than sprawling out on his side as usual, a sign of respiratory discomfort. A few days earlier, two out of three family members in the home had developed flu-like symptoms, with fever and body aches. …

The next day, the cat arrived at the veterinary school, where he was seen by Dr. Jergens, a small animal specialist and immunologist. Upon examination, it appeared the cat had a respiratory condition, so Dr. Jergens performed a bronchial lavage, injecting fluid in and out of the lungs to collect cells to determine what was making the animal sick.

“It didn’t reveal anything that was consistent with what we typically see with pneumonia in a cat,” Dr. Sponseller said.

Although cats can contract flu from birds, this cat never left the house and was never exposed to any other pet. At that point, it occurred to the veterinarians that since the family members had been recently ill, they might be seeing a case of flu transmitted from human to cat. The school is the site of a major diagnostic lab, so the veterinarians were able to test the cat and quickly confirm he had H1N1, a finding that was later confirmed by additional testing by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. …

Dr. Sponseller says the cat is about 85 percent recovered. He was given fluids for dehydration and put on antibiotics to prevent a secondary bacterial infection. “He’s eating well, moving around well, and he’s back in his window watching the squirrels outside,” he said. …

It’s not clear how the cat contracted the virus, but given how easily flu is transmitted between family members, it’s not particularly surprising that a friendly cat would come into contact with the virus as well.

“He’s a very social cat,” Dr. Sponseller said. “He would visit with them in their laps when they were watching television or reading. He was known to climb up on the bed. He’s a very charming cat with a lot of personality.”

(The whole article is here.)

Just to be clear: No one is saying the cat gave the virus to his people. Cats tend not to sneeze much, plus the cat only had contact with humans. I’m glad that this furry fellow – who sounds adorable – is going to be fine.

The Risks of Outsourcing Immunity to the Private Sector

On the phone, during a short break from comforting her daughter who was suffering from swine flu, my sister tells me: “I am so angry at our government!” Now, this is not a woman who routinely turns to the government for help. She votes Republican, largely on fiscal grounds. But my sis has been trying for weeks to track down some vaccine, to no avail. She’s pissed. And like me, she sees that the government promised far more vaccine than it’s been able to deliver.

We here in Athens, Ohio, may yet get ours. My husband “got shotted,” as the Tiger says, last weekend, but only after passing through a strict triage protocol. Both the Tiger and the Bear are slated to get the intranasal spray on Monday at school. Originally I’d promised to accompany them – they’re both scared of needles – but they know how to “sniffle it up,” for which I’m grateful, since their immunization clinic overlaps with teaching times for both my husband and me.

And yes, since both kids are still slated for immunization, this means that we “have swine,” in the terms of my worried post two days ago, and we do not actually have swine flu. (Did I just bury the lede?) The Tiger spiked a vigorous fever at the start of a very mild cold. He stayed home yesterday out of an excess of caution. Today he went back to school his usual energetic, ornery self.

Judging from the hurried exchanges I had with other parents at tonight’s school carnival, many of us have been worried, and most of us are grateful that our kids are in line for the vaccine.

But my sister is right. These delays are unconscionable. Worse, they’re not even necessary. In Alternet, Barbara Ehrenreich writes:

In July, the federal government promised to have 160 million doses of H1N1 vaccine ready for distribution by the end of October. Instead, only 28 million doses are now ready to go, and optimism is the obvious culprit.

“Road to Flu Vaccine Shortfall, Paved With Undue Optimism,” was the headline of a front page article in the October 26th New York Times. In the conventional spin, the vaccine shortage is now “threatening to undermine public confidence in government.” If the federal government couldn’t get this right, the pundits are already asking, how can we trust it with health reform?

But let’s stop a minute and also ask: Who really screwed up here — the government or private pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and three others that had agreed to manufacture and deliver the vaccine by late fall? Last spring and summer, those companies gleefully gobbled up $2 billion worth of government contracts for vaccine production, promising to have every American, or at least every American child and pregnant woman, supplied with vaccine before trick-or-treating season began.

According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was “relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy.”

If, in fact, there’s a political parable here, it’s about Big Government’s sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health: Let the private insurance companies manage health financing; let profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let Big Pharma provide safe and affordable medications. As it happens, though, all these entities have a priority that regularly overrides the public’s health, and that is, of course, profit — which has led insurance companies to function as “death panels,” excluding those who might ever need care, and for-profit hospitals to turn away the indigent, the pregnant, and the uninsured.

(Read the rest here. She takes a couple of cheap swipes at drugs for ED and restless legs, but the rest is worthwhile.)

Exactly! We cannot expect a for-profit system to maintain massive facilities for producing vaccines that are needed only irregularly. So much of our economy relies on just-in-time deliveries. The pharmaceutical industry is no different – except that its “just-in-time” model for vaccines assumes several months’ lead time while moving from one seasonal flu virus into the next most likely mutation. The current system has no capacity for faster responses when a pandemic strikes.

You don’t have to adopt Ehrenreich’s basically socialist convictions to see that when vaccines mix with free enterprise, the results are bound to be deadly. On the one hand, delays are inevitable because profit-making enterprises cannot justify to their shareholder the massive “excess” capacity required to produce vaccines in a fast-moving and potentially highly virulent pandemic. This is capacity that must otherwise lie idle. On the other hand, as long as vaccine production is privatized, the pharma companies will beg for immunity from lawsuits in cases where rare side effects may have caused lasting harm. Even if these companies are fully indemnified, they’ll still have a strong disincentive to publicize such adverse effects, which can only bring bad PR.

Imagine, now, that instead of this swinish H1N1 we were instead facing a highly communicable mutation of the already horribly virulent H5N1 (bird flu). Even assuming the virus lost some virulence in exchange for better transmissibility, millions and tens of millions would be dead before any vaccine were available. And suddenly, the same pharma companies who’ve found vaccines to be unprofitable would be able to demand, essentially, menace money. They could charge whatever the market would bear. And the market could bear a hell of a lot. Seriously, how much would you be willing to spend on a vaccine that gave you any hope of escaping the near-lethal consequences of bird flu? How do you value the preservation of an individual loved ones’ life? What price would you put on your own life?

In short, a free market is bound to fail every whichway when it comes to vaccine production. The government needs to get involved, either by establishing strict regulatory standards, or – more likely, since regulation will push manufacturers to withdraw from an already risky market with low profits – by taking over production itself.

Infuriatingly, the technology for producing more vaccine faster already exists – just not in this country on the grand scale we’d need. Ehrenreich links to ex-Senator Bob Graham on this point, who notes that speedier technologies already exist; the U.S.  just hasn’t pursued them aggressively enough:

Part of the slowness is due to the fact that all six US manufacturers of flu vaccine use chicken eggs. A modern and faster method to make a safe flu vaccine uses a process called “cell culture.” Cell culture does not require eggs. Vaccines for polio and the modern smallpox vaccine have been produced for decades using this technology.

Abandoning chicken eggs for cell culture has several advantages:

• Rapid scale-up in production would be possible.
• Egg-specific steps in the production process would be removed, saving time.
• Vaccine can be given to people who are allergic to eggs.
• Chickens are susceptible to avian influenza infections, which could disrupt the supply chain of eggs and cripple vaccine production.

The U.S. has invested in cell culture technologies, but none are yet available.

(More here.)

We could also be taking advantage of adjuvants, which are essentially biochemical accelerators for vaccines. Revere at Effect Measure has been advocating for exactly this. He writes:

Europe’s adjuvanted flu vaccines don’t appear to be any less safe than non-adjuvanted ones and are far more effective and efficient in the use of the scarce active ingredient, the viral antigen. It is availability of viral antigen that is limiting vaccine production. Unadjuvanted vaccines require much more viral antigen than those with adjuvants.

(Do read the rest! I promise it’s highly accessible to non-specialists.)

Adjuvants aren’t new or untested. They’ve been used for years in Europe. Their safety profile is good. They could help us stretch our supply of vaccine not only in the U.S. but also in poor countries that will otherwise likely be last in line.

All of this wisdom comes too late for the current pandemic – though it’s worth noting that voices in the wilderness, like Revere’s, have been calling for adjuvants and more efficient vaccine production for years.

If we’re smart, we’ll learn from this pandemic and be sufficiently prepared for the next one, which could be a helluva lot worse. (But are we that smart?) We need more than just vaccines, anyway; we need more critical care beds, more capacity to ramp up ERs, and additional public education on the usefulness of social distancing. We further need research on drugs that disrupt viral replication more efficiently than Tamiflu and its cousins, and on statin drugs (such as Lipitor) that might damp down the out-of-control immune reactions (aka cytokine storm) implicated in the deaths of vigorous young people when the pandemic virus is especially virulent. Revere suggested back in 2005 that the threat of highly virulent bird flu ought to spur research on statins. We’re still waiting for that research.

Just as we’re waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. My niece’s father out in California is now down with a fever and probable swine flu. (We worried about him once before, but this time he’s the daddy of a known “vector,” also known as my sweet niece.)

And as for me? Well, I’m the only person in my little family who’s not clearly in a risk group. I’m uneasy, because I don’t know if my Mystery Disease would put me at risk. I know I’ve got some wacky autoimmune stuff going on, along with some obvious neurological and metabolic misfiring – not to mention a long rap sheet for broichitis. But you can’t really march into a high-risk immunization clinic and announce, “Hey! I’ve got Mystery Disease! And my students all cough and sneeze on me! My young children wipe snot on me!” Um, no. That won’t get me very far. But it also won’t quell my qualms.

Wish me luck. I’ll be wishing the same for you, dear readers.

The Wasilla Literary Renaissance

Apparently it’s poetry week here at Kittywampus. Following up on Rumsfeldian penis-spam poetry, we’ve now got the next literary contender from Wasilla. If you didn’t hear William Shatner’s dramatic reading of Sarh Palin’s tweets, you’ve got some catching up to do.

All caught up? Then you’re ready for Shatner performing Levi Johnston’s twitterpoems – if indeed you can ever truly be prepared. Just be sure you’ve swallowed that mouthful of coffee before you hit play. (Shatner comes onstage at about the midpoint of the clip.)

posted with vodpod

(click here if you can’t see the clip from your blog reader)

I guess we now know why Palin tried to ban a bunch of books from the Wasilla library. She was just making space on the shelves for the local literary output.

Do We Have Swine Flu? Or Do We Just “Have Swine”?

German has this wacky way of expressing good luck: “Schwein haben,” or having swine/pig. It’s clashing with the nomenclature of swine flu, which ain’t such great luck if you get it.

My sister tells me my niece is coming along well – she’s stopped puking, at least – but 19 out of 24 kids were absent from my niece’s first-grade class on Monday. Apparently one child went to school with a fever (we’ll reserve judgment on those parents – maybe they didn’t notice) and one case flowered into 19.

Today, I was that parent, and the Tiger was that child. The phone rang at 11:50, just as I finished reading an email from the school nurse, announcing further delays in obtaining swine flu vaccine. I was still home, about to swing on my bike for my 12:10 class. (Yes, my commute is the awesomest.) It was the principal. He said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. I’ve got [the Tiger]  here in my office. He’s got a fever. Just measured it at 100.8.”

I said: “Oh damn shit fuck fuck fuck!” Well, actually I didn’t, because if my kids ever got busted for cussing on the playground, I’d be on the hook. So instead, I hung up the phone and emitted a short primal scream. In a total panic, I momentarily considered taking the Tiger to class with me, but realized my students would hate me forever, after I’d inflicted first Judith Butler and now H1N1 on them. I got back on the phone, and Dr. Hydraargyrum and his dear wife, Dr. Hydraargyra, kindly agreed to move their romantic lunch date to the germ-infested petri dish that I call home. Then I ran to the Tiger’s school. Those who know me in real life know how rare a sight it is to see me run, and how very ridiculous.

I got to my class ten minutes late. My students were waiting patiently (the math department secretary had posted a note that I’d be late). They performed brilliantly, and the two hours flew past. My husband had taken over for our friends at 1 p.m., missing a critical meeting on our bloody budget cuts. I relieved him at 2. Somehow, it worked.

I’m still bemused by the “good news” that our principal promised but didn’t deliver. Was it simply that the Tiger wasn’t puking? Was it just that I’m lucky to be his mother? (Well, I am – most days!) Was it insider knowledge that the Tiger is often at his sweetest when sick?

The principle’s mysterious message remains, well, a mystery – as does the Tiger’s condition. His fever stayed lower for the rest of the day. He has a history of unexplained fevers from his toddler years, and even now he’ll run a higher temp than other kids with just a cold. He also isn’t really coughing and has no evident GI symptoms.

So do we have swine flu? Or do we just “have swine”? Worst case, the entire family gets sick but we don’t get diagnosed, and then the kids have to “get shotted” with the vaccine anyway.

I surely “had swine” today when it came to support. Most of my time is pretty flexible, but those two-hour teaching blocks are sacrosanct. As instructor, you’re allowed to stay home if your current residence is a casket; otherwise, you’re probably slacking. My husband and I usually stagger our teaching so one parent will always be available for emergencies, but we couldn’t quite swing it this quarter. I felt lucky to have friends (and probable survivors, already, of H1N1 2009) who were willing to drop everything and cover me.

Before this pandemic burns itself out, a lot of parents will face choices much more harrowing than mine today. Unlike me, they may have no flexibility. Unlike me, they may lose their job for any unscheduled absence. It’s workplaces that need to respond to this dilemma with greater flexibility; families can’t resolve it by having a Plan A, B, and C for childcare. It’s virtually impossible to find childcare when a child is sick, unless you’ve got close family nearby. It’s well-nigh unethical to inflict your sick child on someone else when the disease can be quite serious in some individuals – and we don’t know who those individuals are. And yet, millions of parents in America cannot count on a single hour off to cope with a sick child. (See Joan Williams’ excellent report, “One Sick Child away from Being Fired” – note: this is a pdf file).

Meanwhile, I noticed a scratchy throat this afternoon, then a sensation like a baby elephant sitting on my chest. I’m feeling somewhat better again by now – enough so to hope that the Tiger and all of us will “have swine” in the German sense.

Is Rumsfeld Writing Vi*gra Spam?

The one semi-redeeming quality in Donald Rumsfeld was his poetic streak. Who can forget this classic?

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

(From Hart Seely’s collection at Slate, “The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld”)

We’ve heard a lot from Dick Cheney since he crawled out of his bunker and left office, but what has Rumsfeld been doing with himself? Well, based on the deluge of penis email that is swamping me lately, I think he’s found a second career – as a spamwriter.

Consider these little gems, which are taken verbatim from the emails except for deleting the link in the middle of each one; I’ve only arranged them as I think an editor might do for Rumsfeld:

blithe spirit behind ocean
(link)
clodhoppers somewhat

overwhelmingly haunch inside pork chop
(link)
ruffians

around cough syrup
(link)
starlets often

shadows lazily
(link)
tenor toward photon

and hypnotic
(link)
abstraction inside related to host

stalactites inexorably
(link)
waif behind globule

because brides
(link)
assimilate for dust bunny

guardian angel inside philosopher
(link)
necromancers slyly

operate a small fruit stand with
(link)
beyond abstraction goes to sleep

The fruit stand is a recurring motif, by the way. I suppose it’s significant that it’s a small one.

Some of the subject lines have also been outstanding, if a bit less poetic:

• SexualAndEroticAnaesthetizeForMirths
• BelieveInViagraSlangDopeForFortitude
• ProfessionalDownerForGladnesssWillCareAboutSex
• StandardTestedViagraSuperActiveOpiateForMerriments

Here’s watching y’all lots of mirths and merriments without too much erotic anesthesia.

And on this Election Day, may we all be spared the poetry of Rumsfeld in our new officeholders.

Local Election Endorsement: Chris Fahl for City Council!

I don’t typically endorse candidates here, because I like to be an equal-opportunity critic, and because honestly Kittywampus is hardly the New York Times or even the Athens News. However, we’ve got a contested election in my ward, and a friend of mine is ably defending her seat on city council. For once, I’ve got only praise.

Chris Fahl has stood for wise development, sustainability, and foresightful planning. She is working to improve traffic safety in the neighborhoods and was the key council member in winning a grant for this purpose. She has a background in both environmental science and planning, so she brings real skills to the table. As she has demonstrated in her first term in office, she plays well with others and has won over a lot of folks who were initially skeptical.

Chris has been at the center of the grassroots movement to have Athens city government reflect the progressive ideals of its citizens. If I may go mildly negative for a moment, her Republican opponent has yet to put forth a real platform beyond beefing up the city police with money that would have to be siphoned away from other vital services. A vote for him is essentially a vote for the old regime in which the landlords call the shots and to heck with the future or keeping Athens a lovely place to live.

Chris is honest, politically savvy, and principled. She’s also a good friend; she has saved my ass innumerable times when I needed help picking up my kids from school, and she went with me to that awful doctor appointment last winter where I was given a diagnosis of possible MS. That’s the kind of person she is. (She’s also a friend of this blog, but don’t let that stop you!)

So if you’re eligible to vote in Athens’ Fourth Ward (much of the East side of town) and you care about the quality of life in our town, please be sure to cast your ballot for Chris Fahl. Since it’s a contested seat, every vote will count.

Swine Flu Hits Home

No, I’m not sick, nor are my kids – and my husband got the swine flu shot this morning, as one of those “lucky” people who are likely more vulnerable than average. But as I was stirring the dinner pots this evening, my sister called to tell me that her daughter (my six-year-old niece) has got swine flu. It struck with the GI symptoms are a hallmark of swine flu. By now, though, my sister suspects that Tamiflu may be making things worse, as my niece puked just once before taking the first dose and six times since. (She also has the other classic symptoms: a cough, high fever just short of 103, chills.)

I’m assuming – hoping – that my niece will recover quickly, as most kids have. But even “mild” flu is pretty wretched. I suspect there’s a lot of misconceptions afloat about what “true” flu is like. People think it’s just a little tougher than a cold, or they confuse it with “tummy flu,” which is not flu at all. By now, a couple of my local friends have nursed kids and spouses through what must have been swine flu, even though they didn’t go to the doctor. None of them suffered serious consequences. Even so, the flu hit them hard.

And that’s why I really don’t understand the suspicion people harbor about being vaccinated. Two-thirds of Ohioans say they don’t plan on getting the shot. That number may be inflated due to fatalism as vaccine deliveries take even longer than expected; people figure they will have been exposed anyway before they can even get the shot. Way back in June, Knitting Clio commented here that parents’ unfounded fears of autism might deter them from vaccinating their kids. I’m sure that’s part of the picture, too. Lots of folks seem to believe that the vaccine is “new and untested.” In fact, it’s produced in the same, depressingly slow process used for regular flu vaccine. (If you’re a fence-sitter, yourself, and you need data on the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, go on over to Effect Measure and read their recent archives.)

More disturbingly, health care workers – including those serving the high-risk group of pregnant women! – are highly skeptical about the vaccine. Consider this abstract for a study just published by D.E. Broughton et al. in the November 2009 issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology:

OBJECTIVE: To explore obstetric health care workers’ attitudes and beliefs regarding influenza vaccination in pregnancy.

METHODS: A survey consisting of 16 multiple-choice questions was administered to nurses, medical and nursing assistants, receptionists, and clinical administrators in obstetric settings. Survey questions addressed general knowledge of influenza and recommendations for vaccination during pregnancy, as well as personal beliefs about the acceptability of the vaccine in the pregnant population. The study was conducted at two sites, Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, RI, and Magee-Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA. Variables were compared by Fisher exact test.

RESULTS: Two hundred sixty-seven completed surveys were available for analysis, with a completion rate of 85%. Almost one third of health care workers surveyed do not believe that vaccines are a safe and effective way to decrease infections (31%) and a minority believe that vaccines are safe in pregnancy (36%). Just over half of health care workers know that pregnant women are at increased risk of complications from the flu (56.6%). Only 46% were able to correctly identify influenza symptoms, and only 65% would recommend influenza vaccination to a pregnant woman if indicated. A small percentage would be willing to give an avian influenza vaccine to pregnant women during a pandemic if it had not been tested in pregnancy (12.3%).

CONCLUSION: Many obstetric health care workers lack knowledge regarding the safety and importance of influenza vaccination during pregnancy. Misinformed or inadequately informed health care workers may represent a barrier to influenza vaccine coverage of pregnant women. This lack of knowledge among the health care workforce takes on added importance in the setting of the H1N1 2009 swine-origin influenza pandemic.

(Source: Abstract for D.E. Broughton et al., “Obstetric Health Care Worker’s Attitudes and Beliefs Regarding Influenza Vaccination in Pregnancy,” Obstetrics & Gynecology: November 2009, Volume 114, Issue 5, pp. 981-987; my emphasis)

Got that? Precisely the people who are gatekeepers in caring for a vulnerable group, pregnant women, are appallingly ignorant about the risks of flu in pregnancy and the safety of any vaccines in pregnancy, not just the one for swine flu. And yet less than half of them can even correctly identify flu symptoms. (Please note that the study did not look at doctors.)

It’s not alarmist to say that as a result of people’s ignorance, hundreds or thousands will die unnecessarily. A three-year-old in my town died in late October after testing positive for inluenza A. While definitive testing will take weeks, virtually all of the flu currently in circulation is swine flu. It’s reasonable to assume that swine flu is what killed this little person. It’s also reasonable to assume that many of us will know someone, sooner or later, who suffers the loss of a family member.

As usual, Jon Stewart got it right: It’s only us wimpy pasteurized milk drinkers who are sure we want to be vaccinated. Otherwise, we’d know the shot was only a government plot! Glenn Beck said it, so it must be so!

If you can’t view the video, please click here. Via Effect Measure, which is such an awesome blog I’d probably read it even if I weren’t worried about the flu.

Note: I intentionally refer to this illness as “swine flu” and not H1N1 because H1N1 is a broader subtype of flu, and because I don’t mind keeping the spotlight on reckless agribusiness practices that may foster the genetic reshuffling of the virus.

Proud of My Students

One of my former students, who’s now graduated and out in the world, wrote a letter to the campus paper that just made me so proud of her. A rape case that I wrote about last spring was first tried in the local media, and now the defendant’s lawyers are pulling the same shenanigans in the courtroom. Here’s how my former student analyzed it:

It doesn’t matter if you’ve had sex with someone once, twice or 1,000 times – a sexual past does not make a sexual future mandatory. The current rape trial that has been reported in The Post (“Rape trial commences for former OU student” in the Tuesday issue; “Rape trial defense prompts questions” in the Wednesday issue; and”Victim details relationship with accused rapist” in the Thursday issue) highlights the misconception that if someone consents to sex once, it is etched in stone that consent is guaranteed at all times in the future, regardless of the circumstances.

I am not criticizing this case specifically, nor am I claiming to know the specific details of the case. Rather, I think this case follows the format of many sexual assault cases in perpetuating an attitude and obstacle that sexual assault survivors often face – that women can’t say both “yes” and “no” to sex with the same person. …

Lawyers often use someone’s sexual history against her, and it’s appalling. Constantly in court – and in society – people candidly tell women that, basically, they asked to get raped because on a completely different occasion they consented to sex. This notion is disgusting, and it is shameful to see women – who publicly take criticism in rape cases and get stereotyped as “promiscuous” or “asking for it” – get torn down, after already dealing with emotional and physical trauma and still having the strength to face their attacker (and possibly friend, boyfriend or husband) in court.

I don’t want other survivors of sexual assault and rape to read articles like this, see the tactics that go on in the courtroom and refrain from taking legal action because the decisions they made before they were aware their friend, boyfriend or husband was capable of sexual violence are going to be used against them after the fact.

(The whole letter is here.)

I can’t claim credit for forming her political consciousness as a student; she came to me as a senior, already clued in and extremely smart. Nonetheless, I feel really proud of her! I also know she’s not my only former student who’s doing wonderful things; she’s just left a public record of it. (For instance, a week ago I heard from another former student who’s working for Senator Sherrod Brown. She says he’s as cool as he seems.)

I only wish there were no cause for anyone to have written such a letter in the first place. The accuser in this case has lots of physical evidence and corroborating statements on her side. The defendant claims “rough sex.” I obviously haven’t been privy to all of the testimony, but I hope the jury will understand that when someone says “yes” it’s not a free pass in perpetuity.

Happy Silly Halloween

‘Tis the season for the annual handwringing about Slut-o-ween – the “sexy” costumes that have become de rigeur for women and now, it seems, prepubescent girls, too. Trixie at The American Virgin posted a picture of Miley Cyrus’ nine-year-old sister dressed up as … a dominatrix? Hard to say, but as my own nine-year-old Bear likes to say: “It’s a little inappropriate.”

I don’t really care how bare people want to go, though tonight’s massive street party in Athens will be chilly, and I’m not at all sad to be home writing and filching my kids’ candy, instead. It becomes a problem when “sexy” costumes are virtually mandatory for women, while scantily clad men are both rare and liable to take abuse for it. One of my former students told me her boyfriend was harassed on the street when he wore a half-nekkid costume.

Also, hasn’t it all been done by now? Sexy nurse, sexy schoolgirl, sexy vampire, sexy Minnie Mouse? (Really! And Minnie is on sale, so stock up for next year, gals, before that link goes dead.)

This year, I went trick-or-treating with my kids as “sexy grapes.” I did all the sexed-up costumes one better: I didn’t have just two large, squishy globules on my chest, I had dozens of them! All over me! And people could squeeze them!!

Seriously, what if we decided that costumes didn’t have to be sexy or scary? What if we just had fun with them? Zippa writes that all the fun has gone out of Halloween for her since she grew up, and I get why she’d feel that way. Having kids is one sure way to put the magic back into the holiday (though I wouldn’t advise tossing the birth control for that reason alone). But what if imagination were more important than being sexy? Hmmm … a good imagination is actually sexier than “sexy,” any day, in my book.

Those grapes are a very fine vintage, by the way. I sewed them myself from felt and polyester batting my last year in college. I probably spent more time making that silly grapesuit than on studying for exams that quarter. The grapes sag a bit but they’ve held up pretty well. I guess 1985 was a good year for Merlot.

(Behind me: the tulip and lavender bed, done for the year.)

The Perfect Modularity of East German Housing

The German Democratic Republic built a lot of apartments from prefab material in an effort to alleviate their perennial housing shortage. They had a great name for it, Plattenbauweise, which is only a long word when you consider the technique is called “Large Panel System building” in English. Basically, the builders took a bunch of concrete slabs and tacked them onto a frame. If you were really lucky, you lived behind a slab equipped with a balcony. I saw a lot of them in Berlin when I lived there, but I was lucky enough to never live in one myself. The apartments tended to be efficient (read: cramped and utterly lacking in character). And they were almost infinitely modular – so interchangeable, in fact, that you can play Tetris with them:

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Transformer Porn

The other day, a friend of mine mentioned that her son and a friend of his (both in middle school) had been discovered searching for porn on the Internet. Now, that probably describes a few million teenagers in this country, but they were searching specifically for transformer porn. It sounds like the parents were admirably cool in their reactions – no shaming, just a talk with the kids about how porn really, really doesn’t reflect the real world.

I have to admit, though, that I was curious if such a thing exists. It does! The Internet truly has everything! Transformer porn is apparently part of the whole strange-to-me genre of fan fiction. You can go here for an index of not-safe-for-work still illustrations.

These images all seem to feature transformers in their humanoid guises. It makes me wonder how their vehicle-like states could get it on. Would we even recognize it as sex? Or would their erotic machinations just look like a bumper-to-bumper collision?

Anyway, I think this clip says it all:

So Much for “Not Ready for Prime Time”

The Political Cat posted this clip of Al Franken questioning Mark de Bernardo, an arbitration lawyer and apologist for Halliburton subsidiary KBR. I was blown away by Franken’s intelligence and empathy. The clip is longish but it’s worth watching the whole thing to see him make mincemeat of Mr. de Bernardo in the last third.

Al Franken is definitely is ready for prime time.

I love how Franken uses “Sir” to punctuate his questions. He manages to be perfectly dignified even as he wreaks devastation on de Bernardo’s pathetic excuses for denying justice to survivors of workplace harassment and assault. I love how de Bernardo’s face collapses like yeasted dough that’s just been punched down (at 6:39, for instance).

The clip doesn’t show as much of Jamie Leigh Jones, but you see enough to appreciate her determination to make sure that what happened to her can never happen again with impunity.

Non-Jaundiced Memories of Newborn Days

My next-door neighbors, who just welcomed an infant daughter into their lives, had to make a trip to the ER today because she appeared jaundiced. She’ll be fine, the doctors said. She won’t need to be readmitted. They were lucky.

I was glad for my neighbors. But as I heard their story, I also flashed back on my Tiger’s first days. (This may be why parents sometimes seem overeager for their friends to reproduce: through them, we relive moments in our lives that might otherwise be lost forever.)

The Tiger, too, was slightly jaundiced as a newborn. But while today was a sunny, crisp slice of fall, he turned yellow in the late days of a golden June. The treatment was to take him outdoors, naked but for his diaper, and let him bask in the sun. The sky was cloudless. The air was dry and hot. I basked, too.

Medically, it worked. We, too, were lucky,. I was grateful. But what really sticks with me is the memory, etched into my flesh, of snuggling with him as he relaxed entirely into me, as if he were trying to approximate the warm watery cave he’d just left a few days before. In some ways, I felt closer to him than before his birth – maybe because he was now clearly his own person, and I didn’t take our closeness for granted. I no longer assumed a symbiosis. And that made the momentary  blurring of boundaries all the sweeter. Also, it surely didn’t hurt that I, too, was finally warm enough.

Sometimes I think it’s those body memories, intense but often buried under the sediment of visual and verbal memories, that make us who we are. I realize I’m privileged to have had lots of good body memories. I would wish that for everyone, because the habits and memories of the flesh constitute our deepest selves, and yet we are largely at their mercy.

The Family that Votes together … Stays Together?

Ever heard of “family voting”? I hadn’t, either, until I came across the term in a translation project on Eastern Europe. It might sound warm and fuzzy at first blush. It’s anything but.

Here’s what the UN has to say about family voting:

A particular issue that often affects women and merits attention in voter education efforts is the confidentiality of the vote. According to United Nations standards and international human rights law, each ballot must be secret and independent. Most national laws also have provisions to this effect, though such provisions are not always enforced. Men and women must both understand that “family voting”—a practice in which one family member casts ballots on behalf of the entire family, or in which a husband and wife enter the voting booth together—is not an acceptable practice in democratic elections. Family voting is particularly likely to detract from women’s ability to cast individual and secret ballots. In its worst form, family voting constitutes a type of fraud in which women are deliberately deprived of their right to vote. If perpetrated deliberately and on a large scale, family voting can bring into question whether an election outcome reflects the will of the people.

[emphasis mine]

You may be thinking: Okay, we know things are screwed up in Afghanistan. But wait! This is happening in Europe.

I ran across the issue of family voting while researching elections in Macedonia, where it appears to be a particular problem, but it’s not confined to one country. It happens elsewhere in Eastern Europe, too. In Macedonia, though, it seems to occur on such a large scale that it could tilt the outcome of elections.

The various NGOs working to eliminate family voting advocate better voter education, more professionalized training of poll workers, and enforcement of sanctions. Penalties could range from annulling a family’s votes to invalidating the votes from an entire polling station. Experts on the Macedonian situation observe, however, that such drastic measures would likely just be gamed by politicians, further skewing election results and creating new opportunities for fraud.

You won’t hear me say this often, but it seems to me that the root problem here is patriarchy. In Macedonia, the male “heads of households” are evidently powerful enough to dictate their wives’ behavior – and possibly that of other relatives, too). That doesn’t render the problem completely intractable, but it does make me wonder if it might be as deeply rooted as some of the ethnic hatreds in the region.

Update, 10/25/09, 11 a.m.: MM – who posted with a Macedonian IP number – remarks that “It only happens amongst the Muslims in Macedonia (especially the Albanians), not amongst the ethnic Macedonians.” None of the Internet sources have found address ethnic and religious differences. However, I’ve learned that family voting is also a significant problem in Kosovo (according to the UNHCR), so MM’s comment makes sense. Family voting is a rural phenomenon, which further makes sense because urbanization tends to undermine full-scale patriarchy.

Caturday: Scary Clown Edition

My kids are more creeped out than amused by clowns. They must have got it from me. One of my worst childhood memories dates from when I was 10 or 11. I was in the church basement with my Sunday school class, watching a movie in which a white-painted, bald mime was pursued by a violent mob. The mime was evidently supposed to represent Jesus Christ, but the scene made me, too, want to run away screaming. I was haunted by it for years. Some of the other kids mocked me for nearly as long. No wonder I grew up a skeptic.

Lately, the Tiger has been having lots of bad dreams. He’s been chased by ravenous giant caterpillars and attacked by pteronodons, but the clowns have left him alone. So far.

Insomiacat from ICHC?

Einstein Fail: I Want My Money Back

So I read in the New York Times that the Baby Einstein company is offering a money-back deal for those of us whose kids watched their silly videos and didn’t turn out to be the next Stephen Hawking … yet. I’ll confess to owning the original Baby Mozart, plus Baby Shakespeare and a couple more. I didn’t let either kid watch TV during the first year of life, but once the Mammary Channel went dark, they seemed to be casting about for new entertainment. The alternative was Teletubbies or Barney. Einstein was a no-brainer. So to speak.

The jury’s still out on whether my kids are geniuses (evil or benign), but I’m pretty sure a critical mass of my brain cells dissolved while watching those puppets and hypnotic mechanical toys. (It says something about our kid culture, I’m afraid, that one last refuge of mechanical toys is the television.)

So I’m thinking about demanding money back – not because the kids haven’t yet managed to fold gravity into the grand unification theory, but because my repository of names is shriveling and the rest of my brain is sure to follow. I figure my gray cells might be worth 4 x $15.99. But that would require me to remember where I stashed my stamps.

I will say one thing for the Baby Shakespeare video: It had the wonderful W.B. Yeats poem, “The Cat and the Moon”:

The cat went here and there
and the moon spun round like a top,
and the nearest kin of the moon,
the creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
for, wander and wail as he would,
the pure cold light in the sky
troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the grass
lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
what better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
tired of that courtly fashion,
a new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
from moonlit place to place,
the sacred moon overhead
has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
will pass from change to change,
and that from round to crescent,
from crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
alone, important and wise,
and lifts to the changing moon
his changing eyes.

Oooh, that makes me shiver – with the beauty, not fear.

But then again, there’s that line about spinning ’round like a top:

Moon kitteh from ICHC?

In all other ways, though, the big “baby video” winner at our house was the highly obscure “Baby Babble.” Next to the slick Baby Einstein series, its production values were based on string and chewing gum. “Baby Babble” showed two speech therapists playing with toys and puppets, making noises like “pop pop pop pop pop pop.” The intent was to get your kid to talk – to the TV, which seemed a little twisted – but hey, the Tiger had no stable words at 18 months and we were getting nervous. We tried “Baby Babble” when the Tiger was two years old but still not even saying “no.” And guess what? He started to say “pop pop pop pop pop pop.” From there it was a short skip to “cookie” and then “Mama, can us eat some candy for desert? Why not? But you said I could have a Tootsie Pop! You did! Did you know there’s Tootsie Roll inside?”

That goofy “Baby Babble” video did more good than all the Baby Einsteins put together. It might even trump the year of speech therapy that the Tiger put in as a small cub.

Now, I’m just wondering where’s the video that would get my kids to listen when the grow-mutts talk?

Literally Squeezing the Joy out of Fashion

I really appreciated Melissa’s fierce post on fashion earlier this week at Shakesville, wherein she pillories the industry for selling shame as much as clothes. She laments long-mothballed bridesmaid dresses and this recent shopping tribulation expedition:

We go to a plus-size store. Immediately upon entering, I feel overwhelmed and anxious. I hate shopping. I hate clothes. The entire process of shopping for clothes brings me perilously close to hating myself. So many of the clothes are cut in ways that don’t flatter my body, because they are designed to conceal it. I am reminded at every turn that I am meant to be ashamed of my fat body. We leave. We go to another plus-size store. Everything is too old for me. Iain says, “This is stuff for women twice your age.” He’s right. My anxiety increases. We leave. We go to another plus-size store. Everything is too young for me. Weirdly, it somehow still all feels the same—and I realize the three stores are all owned by the same company. …

I complain about the cuts of the clothes; I point out how the biggest sizes are the first gone; I grouse that the prints aren’t flattering to large bodies; I note the preponderance of empire waists and the lack of diversity in lengths and shapes of clothes, as if fat female bodies are all shaped the same, as if fat women shouldn’t even try to make their bodies look good. I’m trying to be analytical, to intellectualize what, precisely, about this experience is anxiety-provoking.

When we get to the car, despite my best efforts, I cry.

Melissa’s experiences are especially awful because of the extra shame reserved for fat women. But they illuminate more than just her personal struggles, because her quest for stylish, flattering “fat clothes” reveals the shopping experiences of women of many sizes – writ large. Despite having what you might call slender privilege, I too have cried in anger and shame. I’ve ranted about my frustration finding pants that fit. My latest foray into the pants department was fueled by a massive adrenaline/endorphin rush in the wake of a nasty medical test, and even so, I barely got past the first rack.

I just do not understand WTF anyone would need “tummy control” on size 2 or 4. And yet I saw just that at Target. Coldwater Creek, where I eventually found some stretchy, flattering jeans, markets the stretch as slenderizing. I do not require slenderizing. I require pants that are fitted enough to wear ‘em to work while still letting me breathe free. Big bonus points if they don’t give me a massive wedgie or make me look like I’m going as a Sexay Plumber for Halloween.

I’ve noticed that I’m a tad more neurotic – pinched, if you will – when I’m being squeezed by my clothes. But it’s not just the literal squeeze of recalcitrant flesh. It’s also the emotional squeeze that says our bodies are always shaped wrong no matter how hard we try. The squeeze is harsher on large women, but scarcely a woman escapes its clutches. Today the HuffPo made a fuss about Katie Holmes wearing a sheer shirt over a black bra …

… as if women didn’t routinely bare far more at the beach! I’m down with the bra and shirt, and I think this “article” proves that HuffPo deserves an award for Baseless Titillation. It might be hilarious if it weren’t so routine and mind-meltingly stupid.

There is a problem with Holmes’ outfit, though. While it likely cost her thousands, it still hasn’t stopped putting the squeeze on her. The elastic waist is constricting enough to make even an actress with a presumed personal trainer look, well, lumpy. The ruffles don’t help one bit.

To be clear: I’m not criticizing Holmes (except for her religion and choice of husband, ’nuff said). I’m criticizing a fashion industry that manages to relegate even the richest and thinnest women to a fashion lumpy-proletariat. The logic of the system dictates that it will penalize poorer and larger women far more harshly. But no one gets away scot-free, not even the size twos.

So is tummy control – camouflage – ever okay? Well, I’m not much interested in camouflaging my figure flaws. Nor am I eager to dress my little boys in camo before they have any idea about what military service can mean. But yes, there may be a time and a place for camouflage … it just requires us to love our butts and bellies and, well, chill out. Then again, if you’ve evolved such a zen approach to your body, you’re probably already wearing a perfectly fitted, always stylish fur coat …

From ICHC?

Classical Gas Approaches Plasma, Asymptotically

I haven’t been very bloggerific lately. Real life – teaching, grading, watching kids’ soccer – has cut way into my time for writing. So in lieu of my half-baked thoughts, this (via Jim Yeager at Skippy the Bush Kangaroo):

Tommy Emmanuel shows his virtuosity, but his technical brilliance is never overshadowed by the fire of his interpretation. There must be a lesson for us in there, somewhere.

Four and a half years ago, right after my husband was sprung from chemotherapy, I got to hear Tommy Emmanuel play live at the paradisiacal Fur Peace Ranch, Jorma Kaukonen’s place a few miles outside of Athens, Ohio, near the oddly-named town of Darwin. (I always expect to run across the HMS Beagle on the drive out).

Whenever I’ve heard him on CDs since then, I wonder why I don’t just assign random grades to my student’s work and spend two hours a day on the piano. I’ll never ever be transcendently good; I’m not even in the same universe. But if you play enough music, however ineptly … well, once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

Plasma ball from Flickr user naughty architect, used under a Creative Commons license.

An Unusual Case of Father-Blaming

One reason I remain fascinated by the Heene “balloon boy” spectacle is that you don’t often see such a blatant case of father-blaming in the media. I can easily name famous mothers who murdered – Susan Smith, Andrea Yates – but I can’t think of a father who killed his kids and drew similar media attention. We all know that the mother of Britney and Jamie Lee Spears is a lousy mom. I can recall the name of JonBenet Ramsey’s mother (Patsy). Who are their fathers? No clue. [Update 10/22/09, 12:30 a.m.: I'm not suggesting Patsy Ramsey murdered her daughter, and in comments Mandolin notes that she was exonerated. My intended point was the media and much of the viewing public - myself included - forged a broad consensus that sexualizing one's child prematurely and letting them be judged on appearance is not healthy. The media blamed Patsy for this almost exclusively.]

And even if you’ve forgotten who Nadya Suleman is, you likely remember “Octomom.”

I’m not defending the actions or judgment of any of these women, just observing that it’s unusual for media attention to focus on fathers’ misdeeds. To be sure, not every last commentator is pouncing on Richard Heene. At the HuffPost, Norman Lear expresses empathy for Heene, saying he just wanted to grab his 15 minutes. Lear conveniently ignores the fact that most fame-hungry adults neither break the law nor drag their kids along for the ride.

It’s telling, though, that Lear doesn’t see any need to defend the kids’ mother, Mayumi Heene. Why, exactly, is the media focusing on the “bad dad” this time, and practically giving the mother a pass?

Well, for one thing, in their TV interviews Richard has done almost all the talking. Mayumi has hovered at the edge of the spotlight. That makes him appear more culpable, even if they both agreed to the hoax.

For another, his overbearing attitude makes it easy to believe that he hatched the balloon scheme and bullied the rest of the family into going along with it.

Racism just might play a role, too. Tracy Clark-Flory of Broadsheet reports that when the Heenes were on Wife Swap, Richard yelled to his ersatz wife:

“You’re a man’s nightmare. I’m so glad my wife was born in Japan” — presumably because Japanese women like his wife, Mayumi, know how to be appropriately obedient to their husbands.

It’s possible that the media are cutting her more slack because she’s assumed to be stereotypically subservient. If so, that’s the kind of “understanding” that mothers really don’t need.

More optimistically, it’s even possible that our culture is starting to turn allergic against the sort of toxic hypermasculinity that Richard Heene exudes. (Jeff Fecke of Alas just beautifully dissected this brand of masculinity.) We can hope, right?

And then there’s the fact that Richard Heene is an obvious whackaloon. He calls himself a research scientist though his last paid job was laying tile. He believes the world is due to end in 2012. His motive for doing reality TV is evidently to raise enough money to opt-out of world destruction, possibly by building a bunker.

Am I missing anything? And can you think of other “bad dads” who’ve captivated the media? Surely there must be some that I’m forgetting.

Four-part Harmony Collides with Wookies; World Does Not End

Maybe it’s just ’cause I’m the daughter of a mother who has sung in barbershop quartets for the last quarter century. Maybe it’s because I remember Jaw, ET, the original Star Wars trilogy, and Indiana Jones from their big-screen debuts. Maybe I’ve got a secret Wookie fetish, but if so, it’s hidden even from me. Anyway, via Renee of Womanist Musings, here’s a tribute to all that. I am impressed – knocked flat on my  behind – by the creative arrangements and the singer’s kick-ass vocal range.

Enjoy!

Oh man. Upon hearing this for the fourth time, I’m starting to worry that I do have a thing for Wookies. Here I thought I’d moved up from Luke Skywalker to Han Solo as I grew up. But Chewbaca? This is very concerning.

Update, 10/20/09, 10:30 p.m.: In comments, Sugarmag pointed out that this video is lip-synched – so much for that Bobby McFerrinish vocal range! – and KRS posted a link to the (apparent) original version by an a cappella group called Moosebutter (if, indeed, the concept of “original” still exists on the Web). Here it is: