Boltgirl on the Loose

In the bustling run-up to Christmas, I often look around me and wonder what it's like to be a non-Christmas-celebrating person surrounded by nonstop Christmas crap from Halloween until Boxing Day. Would it be a drag? Would I sit back in detached bemusement watching everyone scurrying like panic-stricken rats?

Today I have the barest glimmer of understanding. It's New Year's Eve, and while the rest of the world is cranking out Best of 2007 lists and chilling the champagne and making resolutions and party plans, well, I'm sitting here at work with maybe six other people, fighting a nasty cold that's been hanging on since Wednesday, and wondering what to have for dinner.

Never been a big New Year's kind of person; flipping the calendar over really hasn't felt like a big deal since I was maybe twelve. The lone exception to that was the turn of the millenium--hey, how many times does that happen in your lifetime--although the anticipation was deadened a bit by the fact that I was camping outside Patagonia and was thus unable to ascertain whether the post-midnight silence heralded the spontaneous annihiliation of civilization or was simply an effect of being way out in the boonies.

So while I'm glad for the paid day off tomorrow, no major revelries are planned. I'm old and cranky. I may glance at a few bowl games tomorrow, may go for a walk, or may just come in to work since nothing else is going on. Is it the equivalent of Christmas Eve dinner at a Chinese restaurant? Hmmm. Now that I think of it, that's sounding pretty good.

It's been such a long hiatus I hardy know how to blog any more. The end of the year brought the usual mad cavalcade of gatherings with friends and the various permutations of family we have gathered around ourselves, all involving heaps of food, some overlain with a mildly acidic emotional wash. I survived. The details would make for rather dull reading if you weren't there.

The upshot is that while I haven't believed in any type of god for quite some time, I found at the close of this holiday season that I still believe in hope and take delight in total crap-ass situations improbably reversing themselves. When a week-long family gathering that had been a prickly incubator for arguments and general bad behavior resolved into four generations, at the close of an amazing meal, sing carols together to the squawky accompaniment of the youngest member of the cohort's electric guitar, well, hell, it gave me hope that everything just might turn out okay after all.

Busy, busy, busy! Wrapping presents and slugging down Jameson-laden wassail leaves little time for research and quality writing, so we are lucky to have guys like Jeff from Shakesville around. In the wake of this week's kerfuffle at work, I was happy to run into his well-written summary of precisely why it doesn't make a rat's ass of a bit of difference whether you wish someone a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays or Mithra-Rah-Rah-Rah at this time of year.

When someone says "Happy Holidays" to me, I take it as an expression of friendliness, a wish that I might enjoy whatever I celebrate, however I do it, and that is the wish I return when I reply "Happy Holidays" myself. Despite being a recovering Catholic who is far enough along in the process to be certifiably atheist, I still call my own celebration "Christmas" and do it up with all the trimmings and traditions from my childhood, just minus any belief in Baby Jesus. If somebody else calls it Solstice and someone else simply "Holiday," it doesn't diminish the season or insult anyone any more than does my retaining the name and trappings of Christmas without what would seem to be a pretty requisite underlying faith. For Chrissakes, it's all about kicking back with friends and family to celebrate generosity and a little bit of peace. The name slapped on the substance of the celebration is irrelevant. Besides, the fucking Puritans conservatives so love to invoke would have put us all in stocks in the town square for participating in modern American-style Christmas revelry anyway, since they thought Christmas celebrations were unbiblical and paganistic and--even worse--Papist, so don't give me that "traditional Christmas is under attack" bullshit.

Speaking of kicking back and promoting peace and Jameson-spiked hot beverages, it simply isn't Winter Holiday Time at Boltgirl's house without gallons and gallons of wassail. For your consumption:

Brew in large stockpot or cauldron:
1.5 quarts strong black tea, such as Irish Breakfast

Add:
1 gallon apple cider (unfiltered Gravenstein juice from Trader Joe's works well)
slightly more than half of a large can of frozen OJ concentrate
~2 pints cranberry juice cocktail
~2.5 pints grapefruit juice
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water (truly spitting in a hurricane, but it's in the recipe, so...)
handful of cinnamon sticks
handful of cloves

Bring to a simmer and adjust juices to taste, simmer for hours but don't bring to a boil. Fantabulous on its own, more so with the addition of some Irish whiskey, bourbon, or rum. Keep the pot on the stove until it's gone for continuous wassailing pleasure; it won't go bad on you in just a couple of weeks.

Events tend to tie themselves to me with threads made up of seasons, the feel of the air, and the angle of the sun. Sometimes all it takes is the particular way the light falls on the trees on cold mornings leading up to the solstice, with the ground heavy and wet from the dew, clouds of my breath drifting up to mix with the clouds, to put my mind and memories back on the highway leading to a parking lot in Burlington, Washington, where I waited for what was going to come next. For the next chapter in my life to begin.

Thanks to seven day weeks, it really was exactly seven years ago, another Thursday night. Another lifetime. Waiting. Wondering if she'd show up and meet me like we'd planned. Wondering what it would bring. Knowing nothing would ever be quite the same, no matter the outcome.

She did eventually show up, if two hours late. We embarked on 48 hours of pure fantasyland on Lopez Island to a soundtrack of Christmas music, fueled by wine and chai, surrounded by seagulls and sea lions, cut off from the mainland and the greater reality awaiting us there on our return by the green waters of Puget Sound, kept warm by a wood-burning stove and a flame that had to burn out sooner rather than later.

The rest of it, of course, was a disaster.

Seven years safely removed from that particular edition of the epic drama that only lesbians can bring to a breakup, happy and secure in my relationship with the woman I love, the night before the solstice still takes me back to that singular place after which there has been no turning back, as if Billy Pilgrim was right and we do exist in all moments simultaneously, forever. As if part of me will always be sitting alone in that parking lot at the end of a two thousand mile drive, bundled inside my truck against the cold, looking at the stars, watching my solitary breath fog the windows, quietly wondering, now that I have kept my part of the bargain, how the rest will unfold.

Two worthy of pointing out, bloggers I want to write just like when I grow up. The bonus is that by the time that actually happens, Scalzi should be out of his Month-of-Writers mode and back to the usual irreverance that makes him such a fun read. Coffee House Poetry! We like! Very much!

Somebody left a few advertising postcards in the bathroom at Bookman's. For this:

Yes. It does say Milf. Maternity wear.

I just had to go to the website. Just to see if maybe they don't actually know what MILF means, although the logo strongly suggests they do. Maybe...

This bold belly baring tank top say’s pregnant or not…I am hot! You will never want to take it off. This staple white tank will last you into post pardum.
Logo: “B2 Bare the Belly”

Or maybe not.

The proud mom of two who started this company claims MILF only means "Mothers In Love with Fashion," but rather disingenuously follows that up with

I hope you love my clothing line and you wear the Milf label with pride. Remember, you are "Always Hot... Pregnant or Not!"
Sincerely,
Stacey Latona
“A woman who personally considers being called a 'Milf' a compliment. You should too!"

Because nothing says pride like tying your self-worth to how you rate on a man's fuckability index, even--especially--if you've given birth or are on your way to the delivery room! Why settle for compliments like "nice" or "smart" or "stylish" when guys can--and should!--just cut to the chase and pronounce you someone they would Like To Fuck?

You can either let the world know you are "S2 Seriously Sexy" or declare yourself a "Knocked Up Knockout"! Can’t decide if you want to "Countdown to Cosmo's" or let your little belly be highlighted with the "My Pod" logo? Go for it and get one of everything. Isn't that what we women do when we can't decide?

Ha ha ha, we women are so darn incapable of making decisions, we better just grab up everything within our field of vision! Why, you'd almost think we didn't have brains! Would you Like To Fuck us now?

Lots of shops have maternity lines now that look like actual clothing rather than tents. I'm all for it. But Jesus Haploid Christ, can we do it because the women involved like the clothes on their own merits, rather than echoing the message that women need to define and maintain themselves in service of male sexual desire at all times?

I feel like vomiting a little, and it ain't morning sickness talking.

Book sighting reported by Ian today:

The companion volume, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Maybe Not Being Quite So Much of a Total Fuckup, All the Fucking Time, But We're Not Holding Our Breath Where You're Concerned, I Mean, Seriously Now, is apparently out of print.

Chris Dodd was the lone angry voice standing up for principle this week--albeit with the able assistance of Russ Feingold, Ted Kennedy, and others--and his threat of a protracted filibuster forced Harry Reid to pull the FISA reauthorization bill that would have included immunity for telecom companies that were complicit in warrantless wiretapping of US citizens.

"Today we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy," Dodd said in a statement released after Reid pulled the bill. "The President should not be above the rule of law, nor should the telecom companies who supported his quest to spy on American citizens. I want to thank the thousands of Americans throughout the country that stood with me to get this done for our country."

The 64-year-old Connecticut senator indicated he would have been willing to keep the floor all night if needed to prevent the immunity provision from moving through the senate.

"I rarely come to the floor with this much anger," Dodd said. "I've never seen contempt of the rule of law such as this."

And good on him for it. AT&T may have jumped into bed--aw, who we crappin'--rather, hit its knees for Bush within two weeks of his inauguration, (h/t Top!Secret G-woman) setting up a system for combing all the phone and e-mail traffic routed through its New Jersey hub. Qwest, bless their crappy customer-servicing, rate-hiking souls, apparently told Bush to bugger off.

Reid is claiming Dodd's filibuster threats had nothing to do with him pullng the bill, saying instead that the year-end crunch caught up with him and left too little time to get the bill properly gift-wrapped and packed in peanuts. I mean, have you tried getting anywhere close to the post office this late in December?

Whatever, Harry. Thanks, Chris. Sorry for you that your presidential campaign never really got off the blocks, but glad for the rest of us since that allows you to have the courage to prove that, occasionally, Democrats can show some spine and challenge the administration in the service of what is right.

Annual [fill in the December holiday of your choice] party was yesterday. Hum. Okay, so all the decor and music was totally Mithramas, er, Christmas, but everyone was welcome. Much food, much drink, delightful presents of Irish alcohol from a couple of dear friends, and 50-odd people through the door, most of whom congregated in the living room and, in a new twist for this year, the hallway rather than out in the frigid-for-Tucson chilly night.

All the pre-planning and swearing up and down that this would not be like previous years went completely by the wayside, of course, as I was still scurrying around like a madwoman as the first guest arrived. Next year, goddammit, it will all be done a week ahead of time. A. Week. Ahead. During the course of the evening, I managed to forget one couple's names and so was a less than stellar host for not introducing them around. I also made an unconscionably sober pact with another friend to acquire, and learn to passably play, a set of bagpipes.

Yee hah. If you were there I hope you had a good time. Nothing caught on fire and nobody died, so a success all the way around.

Now it feels like winter, finally, so feeling like Christmas must be just around the corner. The last couple of days brought rain and glimpses of snow during the scattered minute-long breaks in the clouds that let us look at the mountains.

Rainbow (snowbow?) across the Catalina Mountains.

I particularly like the broken clouds and fog because they reveal the intricacies of the mountains, turning them from the usual sunny day's monolithic horizon to a much more interesting landscape with relief and depth.

Clouds, rainbow, mountain: mystery and majesty! Angel choirs!

Winter's second act opened this morning. Namely, thick thick fog. My office sits down in the cold-air drainage of Rillito Creek; driving in I could see the fog thicken with each declining temperature gradient.

Same view as rainbow/snowbow shot above, only slightly obscured by fog.

The sun may be making an appearance this morning. Hopefully there's still a nice snowcap up there somewhere.

The Pia Sundhage hire provided a glimmer of hope in the long, sad denouement of the US women's national team's World Cup. Reports from the current mini-camp in Carson are encouraging.

Sundhage preaches a European-style "total football" approach, where Greg Ryan, her predecessor as U.S. coach, emphasized defense first... Finesse and tactical awareness will replace brute strength and strategic naivete.

I have seen soccer dads with more tactical awareness than Ryan showed in the Cup. And having the defenders, midfielders, and forwards practice separately from each other? Wow. Very America, circa 1976. Had he survived as coach, I'm certain the vintage 3-3-4 would have made an appearance. If you played as a kid in the late '70s anywhere east of the Mississippi, you have a frame of reference for the regrettable "left inside forward." C'mon, you can cop to it--that was a long time ago, and it really wasn't your fault. Try explaining it to your kids, though, and watch them fall down laughing. Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah.

"The World Cup exploited our weaknesses," said Kate Markgraf, who played for Sundhage in Boston. "Brazil tore us apart."

"We were just trying to do the best we could, but we didn't know how to solve defenses and formations other teams were throwing at us," Wambach said.

Ya think? Well, if the first step is recognizing the problems that exist, I'd say they're on their way. Now that the College Cup is over on the women's side, I'm very interested to see what collegiate players might show up to be evaluated prior to the Algarve Cup in March.

Not that I really needed another reason to love LibraryThing, but the Early Reviewers bit is pretty cool--request an advance reading copy of a soon-to-be-released book, write a review, keep the book! I'm happily plowing through Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan, set in the Mississippi Delta right at the end of World War II. Well, happy to have a shiny new book with a compelling story, even if the story itself is somewhat wrenching. The overarching theme is intrenched, institutional racism, but a corollary is tracing hopes and expectations as they inevitably fail to materialize as envisioned, but instead twist and send lives spiralling in completely different directions. It's only at the very end that the sequence of events makes sense as an unbroken chain of causality, allowing us to look back and recognize the one pivotal moment on which everything else hung.

It's odd that I should remember my pivotal moment, the fulcrum of my life, with such clarity, given the combination of how innocuous it seemed at the time and my tender age. It was an evening at my dad's parents' house, summer of 1973. I was six. Maybe I remember it because it was heralded by Grandpa's front doorbell, a low, grating rumble that always made me look up in surprise because no one ever came to the front door and its treacherous, moss-slicked brick sidewalk. The kitchen door, through the screened porch at the back of the house near the end of the long gravel driveway, was the real entryway, the door anybody who knew anything knew to come through. Knocking optional. So the doorbell rumbled, and Grandma opened the door, and in walked the new band/choir director Grandpa had hired for the high school. Grandpa and Grandma had run the music program at the school (the only high school for the entire eastern half of the county) since the late '40s, and at this point Grandpa had retired from teaching and moved on to an administrative position. My mom was already a music teacher and assistant choir director there.

The rest is, well, yeah. I never asked Grandpa if he felt weird later for bringing the new guy to town. That would have been poor form. Because mom and dad split up two years later, the new guy took a job at Saint Mary's and Notre Dame, and mom followed him to South Bend, with me in tow. And that's where the rest of my life took shape. Mom was sufficiently freaked out by the teeming metropolis we now found ourselves in (coming from a tiny farm-and-oil town surrounded by the cornfields of southern Illinois, South Bend was intimidatingly large) to put me in a private school, where good teaching and a challenging curriculum gave me a leg up in the subsequent Catholic high school, which in turn opened the door to a near-full scholarship to college in Chicago, where I met the guy I ended up marrying, but who, more relevant for this discussion, also suggested an archaeology class when I was casting about for electives, which was taught by the professor I ended up taking as academic advisor, who then took me Peru, where I learned archaeological fieldwork, and who recommended both the university and supervising professor for my graduate work and gave me enough probably undeserved A grades to sufficiently boost my GPA for a graduate fellowship, which taught me a specialization and introduced me to a classmate who came to Arizona for his doctorate and took a job in Tucson that he ultimately didn't have time to fulfill, and so suggested I give it a shot since I was having no luck finding a job in the midwestern town I really wanted to live in, and the guy who was hiring here couldn't find any better candidates and took me on a single-project trial basis in 1994... and here I am.

All because a guy with a music degree walked through my Grandpa's front door in 1973. I resented it when I was younger and filled with the self-righteousness of adolescence. Now, hell, whatever. Life unfolds no matter what. It's somewhat comforting to trace it back and recognize that balancing point. What is yours?

You know, I could probably change the title of this blog to "Idiotic Right-Wing E-Mail Forwards From My Brother" and never skip a beat. I'm grateful to him, though, as he provides me with a constant stream of content for those days when I'm too busy to formulate deep thoughts of my own.

This weekend's offering:

Hey, wanna have some fun this CHRISTMAS? Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD! As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of this holiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN, card to brighten up their dark, sad, little world.

Two tons of Christmas cards would freeze their operations because they wouldn't know if any were regular mail containing contributions.. So spend 37 cents and tell the ACLU to leave Christmas alone.

Here's the Address.

ACLU
"Wishing You Merry Christmas"
125 Broad Street
18th Floor
New York, NY 10004

I briefly mulled whether to slap him for uncritically forwarding something so out of date that it references the old 37-cent stamp rate--but hey, at least it means he's recycling--then ultimately settled on just because you get something from our uncle doesn't make it any less completely fucking retarded. He wrote back to say

The ACLU is filled with a bunch of sissies who get hysterical about meaningless things. Worthless organization.

What can I say in the face of that compelling logic? Boy, the family Christmas is going to be extra good fun this year.

I have written before about the the bubble-like existence I have been privileged to enjoy living and working as an archaeologist in Tucson who also happens to be gay. Really, it's the kind of fantasyland a lot people can only dream of--my family is finally just about at full acceptance (even my elderly Very Conservative Christian grandmother, sort of) and it's not even remotely an issue at work. So when I don't have to deal with active discrimination in my daily life, it's easy for me to forget exactly how not there other parts of the country can be.

Hell, to see the full force of vitriol I don't even need to leave the state, but merely trundle up the interstate a couple of hours. The city of Scottsdale (quite upscale suburb of Phoenix) recently added gender identity and expression to their nondiscrimination policy, and the howling nutjobs predictably came out of the woodwork to glom onto the comment section following the Arizona Republic's online story.

Several people apparently confused this employment nondiscrimination ordinance with a hate crime statute, but most managed to stay on-topic. The comments run about 2 to 1 for the anti-gay camp. The anti comments fall into the usual categories we've come to expect. As always, spelling and grammar take heavy hits.

Learning Someone is Gay = Having Their Sexuality Shoved Down Your Throat!

Look, for the most part, most people just don't like gays. But if you folks would just take it back to the closet, no one would know, nor would anyone care, and you wouldn't be chastised for it.

For God sakes, get a life and quit whining....if you love being gay, no one cares as long as you don't put it in other people's faces. Personally, I don't want anything to do with any of you and if you come into a bathroom when I'm there, I'll make sure you're removed.

Gay = Pedophilia! And Stealing!

how about N.A.M.B.L.A. are they the next protected group. I know, I know. It's not a choice, the nambla people where born that way, yeah, uh huh.

I wonder when equal rights and special protections will be granted to pedophiles also.

What is next, are you going to give thiefs special gights because they like to rob people??

Gay = Perverted! And Mentally Ill!

Gays don't have anymore rights than any human being. The only rights they should have is to be imprisoned for being perverts. Gays don't have any specific Constitutional rights. I don't think anyone except for the perverts (gays) would fight for this country if there was.

I have no sympathy for them. If they want to be treated like normal human beings than they need to act and live like normal human beings. They are deviant and to deserve to be treated as such.

There is nothing natural about being a homosexual. If you are a homo or "Gay" as they like to call themselves, you have something seriously wrong with the wiring in your skull!

It's Only About Anal Sex!

Equal rights are fine but why give the wierdos special rights. I like kinky sex myself once in awhile but I don't expect anything special because of it.

How can a guy look at another guy's smelly hairy butt and fall in love?

Equal Rights = Special Rights!

The fact is, the laws like the one passed in Scottsdale open the door for "hate crime" laws, which are nothing more than justification to silence the masses and impose harsher punishment on "gay bias" crimes than on those involving the average Joe. That is WRONG.

What a joke. The privileges of protection under so-called hate crime laws have NEVER extended to: whites, straight males or Christian.

It's a Choice!

I believe that sexual orientation is a choice one makes. There's no proof that genetics dictate sexual preference.

I choose every day not to be gay. So being straight must be a choice.

Maybe you don't choose your orientation but you still choose your sexual partners.

The Children! Think of the Children!

this presents a danger to everyone in Scottsdale. Imagine your child having to share a bathroom, a school locker room or some other restricted area with a person of the opposite gender?

We will not accept this disease and should eradicate it before it affects our children.

But Not the Suicidal Gay Ones!

33% of gay youth will attempt suicide? The natural "thinning of the herd process" in action.

Thanks for the reality check, Phoenix. Merry Christmas to you too.

Meanwhile, the state of Arizona appears to be on the brink of offering DP benefits to state employees, which would be very good for many reasons. One of them is pre-emptively loading the ammunition against the next inevitable push for a constitutional amendment reserving all of the rights, responsibilities, and incidences of marriage for male-female pairings, up to and quite possibly including the possession of a tiered cake and monogrammed bath towels. It's also sure to set off another round of refreshing comment-posting by our fellow Arizonans. Stay tuned.

This was posted very briefly last week and then taken down so as to not conflict with something similar going on at work. That being finished, I can now happily unveil yet another goddamn CafePress shop offering the finest nonsectarian archaeologywear on the planet for your Christmachanukawanzaakuh shopping pleasure. Browse the full selection to find something you can't live without; proceeds will be donated to Pretty Bird Woman House.

Favored by surly archaeologists throughout Tucson... and the world!

Don't forget the lovely holiday ornaments while you're there, cuz nuthin' sez XMAS like an oversized Basketmaker point on an oval plaque dangling from a fir tree. Ah, just do me a favor if you happen to work at my company, and if you're not sure if you do, please ask--be a love and and wear the stuff someplace other than the office (at least not to staff meetings) for the next couple of months, m'kay?

And here I thought it was just the fundamentalist fringe in Colorado pushing the fertilized-egg-as-full-person legislation. No. No, no, no. Five other states (Georgia, Montana, Oregon, Mississippi, Michigan) are considering similar ballot measures to give two-day-old, non-implanted fertilized eggs the same legal standing as you and me. More importantly to the walking incubators housing them, the two-four-eight-sixteen-cell clusters would have legal standing trumping the autonomous personhoods of the living, breathing women housing them.

Not surprisingly, the host of murky legal ramifications are being dismissed with a sniff by the pro-blastocyst contingent.

Any contraceptive that interfered with the ability of a fertilized egg to implant in the womb could be considered person-destroying and banned, reproductive rights groups suggested. Examples include intrauterine devices and birth-control pills, which may affect implantation in some cases.

Also, the entire enterprise of in-vitro fertilization — which involves creating embryos in laboratories for couples trying to conceive — could be brought to a halt if these embryos were deemed to be persons with legal rights, others suggest.

In Colorado, Kristi Burton, the driving force behind the proposed “personhood” initiative, shrugs off questions about these potential impacts, calling them “pretty much scare tactics.” Referring to critics of her initiative, she says that “they realize this issue is simple and they don’t have an answer for it. They cannot say when this (embryo) becomes a person. We do.”

Hmmm. The cautions sounded by reasonable people following the proposed legislation to its logical conclusion are being pooh-poohed as "scare tactics" designed to discourage support for the referendum. Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes, I heard it in the runup to the 2006 ballot measures intended to ban same-sex marriage. When the reality-based community pointed out that the proposed constitutional amendments would prevent state, county, and municipal governments and institutions from extending healthcare benefits to the domestic partners of their employees (and any children in those relationships not legally related to the employees), the conservatives accused them of engaging in, yes, scare tactics to erode support for the anti-gay amendments. It's just about the sanctity of marriage, they tutted, and nothing else.

Except that it wasn't.

Shortly after the amendments passed, conservative groups filed lawsuits forcing states to rescind benefits to the domestic partners of state employees. The ink was barely dry on the freaking paper. Well, they said, after looking at it a little closer the new law really doesn't leave us any choice but to bring these suits. Who knew? Sorry.

And they expect us to believe that this will be any different? Learn to love condoms, y'all, since that's just about all you'll have left. Until, that is, sperm and unfertilized eggs are declared full persons too, which will put condoms squarely in dutch with the First Amendment's right to free association.

Arizona has tried to cash in on a limited but quite successful range of tourist-magnetizing images since shortly after gaining statehood. It's pretty much been Grand Canyon with a touch of other minor natural wonders and Old West with a touch of mining from the get-go, which has worked pretty well for the outer ring of the state. Grand Canyon, Sedona, White Mountains, Saguaro National Park, Sabino Canyon, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Bisbee, Tombstone, Jerome, Yuma Territorial Prison.

But, alas, as central Arizona increasingly adopts the guise of California del Este with the freeways and monstrous cookie-cutter red-tile-roofed tract houses of greater Los Angeles--only with even less available water--developers have eyed the big expanse of desolate, hot saltbush flats between Phoenix and Tucson and thought, naturally... Theme Park!

Not just any theme park. A rock 'n' roll theme park! In Eloy!

The question for Arizonans, as lawmakers consider creating a taxing district to pave the way for a large-scale theme park in Eloy, is whether Southern Arizona's extreme summer temperatures — which can climb as high as 115 degrees — are too hot for tourists to handle.

It's an issue that skeptics and critics of the park — called Decades and based around a rock 'n' roll concept — have raised since its developers rolled out plans early this month.

Because I-10 just isn't crowded enough. Of course, no one in their right minds would venture outduring daylight hours to a blacktopped venue anytime between May and... oh, let's be generous and say September in the oven that is central Arizona, so maybe traffic won't be an issue at all. Not that it would make things any better for the people who are stuck in the proposed 9 percent tax district that would be created to fund this bogglingly stupid idea.

But since even the prospect of acres of asphalt + 115-degree daytime highs doesn't provide enough stupid for some people, Glenna, a "writer" from Tucson, dials it up to eleven in this letter to the Daily Star this morning:

A theme park in Arizona is a great idea as long as it is a water park. Why not build something that makes sense, that will not only attract tourists but will also provide relief from the heat for natives. They have enclosed beaches in Japan, so why not here? We already have a theme song for the park: "Ocean Front Property" in Arizona.

When it's cold in the rest of the world, people can come play on the beach when it's hot here. People can surf in the indoor ocean. And don't say we don't have enough water. If we have enough for the golf courses, we have enough for a water park.

In the immortal words of the Scalzi LOLCreashun Contest winner,

Logic: You're Doing It Wrong.

We don't have enough for the golf courses, sweet cheeks. The 100-year water plan that allows new houses to spring up by the tens of thousands is predicated on increasing draws from the Colorado River, which supplies three other states on its way here and is in crisis already. And you want a surfable indoor ocean in Eloy? Please.

Meanwhile, the evil empire to the north is moving forward with plans for a monstrous, 125-acre water park that would suck up 100 million gallons of groundwater per year. Unclear on the Concept of a Fucking Desert Developer Richard Mladick offers up his unassailable reasoning:

Mladick, 39, said he wanted to create the kind of lush environment he remembers from growing up in Virginia Beach, Va., and surfing in Morocco, Indonesia, Hawaii and Brazil.
"I couldn't imagine raising my kids in an environment where they wouldn't have the opportunity to grow up being passionate about the same sports that I grew up being passionate about," he said.

Here's a thought. If you want to raise your kids in an environment where they will have the opportunity to grow up being passionate about surfing and snorkling, raise them in Virginia Beach. Arizona has an unbelievable number of settings for amazing outdoor activities--hiking, rock climbing, kayaking, fishing, skiing, snowboarding, hunting--but surfing just isn't one of them. Too many more asshole developers with far more money than brains might ultimately end up curtailing much more mundane activities, such as drinking water that isn't treated effluent. Tempe Town Lake is already the state's biggest evaporative cooler. With Mesa poised to take over the top spot, the aquifer doesn't need an additional assault from Eloy.

If you're looking for a worthy target for your charitable donations this week, please go read about Pretty Bird Woman House, a domestic violence and rape shelter for abused women and their children on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota. Native American women experience sexual assault at a rate several times higher than other American women, and law enforcement in their cases is generally grossly ineffective. Pretty Bird Woman House, named after the murdered sister of the woman who started the shelter, was burned to the ground by arsonists who broke in to steal electronic equipment, leaving many victimized women with no place to turn for shelter and aid. The people who run the shelter are attempting to buy replacement property in a safer location and have started a 501(c)3 fundraising campaign; they need another $9k or so by Friday to make the purchase happen.

PBWH provides emergency shelter, advocacy support, and educational programs for women on the Standing Rock reservation who have been victims of domestic violence or sexual assault. Its services are badly needed; according to the Amnesty International report Maze of Injustice - The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA:
High levels of sexual violence on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation take place in a context of high rates of poverty and crime. South Dakota has the highest poverty rate for Native American women in the USA with 45.3 per cent living in poverty. The unemployment rate on the Reservation is 71 per cent. Crime rates on the Reservation often exceed those of its surrounding areas. According to FBI figures, in 2005 South Dakota had the fourth highest rate of "forcible rapes" of women of any US state.

The whole thing is well documented and explained on the PBWH website. Give it a look and think about including the women of Standing Rock Reservation in your charitable giving this year.

It's been one long holiday weekend hangover here in the desert, where it still can't quite decide which direction to go on the seasons, vacillating between summer and fall on a weekly basis. Perhaps the climate took one look at the Christmas decorations that popped up at Target before Halloween had even come, and threw up its hands and said fuck it, if the calendar's not relevant any more then screw the moon and tilt of the earth's axis too.

So the calendar says Thanksgiving's gone and it's coming on Christmas. We got five days or so of glorious cold nights and mornings, with cloud cover tossed in as an accent, and now we're looking at four or five more of 70s and sun. It never quite felt like Thanksgiving, and despite the Celtic Christmas CDs spinning away in the living room, it doesn't feel like December is imminent either.
The streets have been pretty empty the couple of times I ventured out to reconnoiter the shopping prospects. Did everyone finish what they needed to do on Black Friday, or drop from exhaustion trying? I refuse to buy anything on Black Friday; my own shopping has been scattershot and opportunistic for the past several months. Upside? Not rushing around like a maniac at the last second and feeling a big hit in the wallet. Downside? Well, the last-minute rushing around did have a few festive overtones from time to time, and served to remind me what the date was.

Now I'm mostly waiting. Waiting for the girlfriend to get home, waiting for her next trip before Christmas to come and go as quickly as possible, waiting for it to start feeling like the holiday season. Waiting for it to snow.

I'm very late to the table with this one, but hooray for the USSF hiring Pia Sundhage to manage the women's national team. She will bring a sorely needed outsider's perspective and international experience to the job. In her first interview with the Swedish press after getting the job, she stressed the need for dictating the tempo of the game (hello, midfield? apparently you've not been permanently forgotten after all) as well as the need for open communication and maturity (hello, queen bees? apparently you're not running the ship any more). So we can hope that Route One is a thing of the past and that creativity will be encouraged. Lori Chalupny, you're on notice: we are expecting great things from you now.

In other soccer news, Notre Dame ousted the Tarheel Mafia on Saturday, 3-2, to advance to the quarterfinals of the NCAA women's tournament, where they will play Dook. The quarterfinal game to watch, though, will be UCLA-Portland. Portland's been on a tear despite losing the Rapinoe twins to ACL tears, and UCLA has been nearly unstoppable all year. How Arizona held them to only three goals in the regular season is a mystery to me.

Final soccer note, that will likely appeal only the die-hardest NCAA fans out there, is that the Pac-10 all-conference selection committee must stop paying attention after filling the first-team roster. I have no other explanation for the choice of London King over Jasmin Day for second team honors. King is a fine player, but she's a forward who spent the season mostly lost in an unfamiliar midfield position; her forte is making runs onto through balls, not creating out of the middle. Day, a converted track athlete, is a natural forward who moves off the ball and challenges in the air better than anyone else for Arizona, and she runs like a freaking gazelle that is chasing the lion to stomp it into tiny little bits, albeit in an elegant fashion.

Final final soccer note: I may be retiring from competition after 31 years. Not sure, though, that I'm willing to hang it up before Brett Favre does.

I may have mentioned a while ago that people invariably transpose two of the letters in my last name, transforming my heritage from partly Bohemian to partly Hispanic, just like that. The NY Times last week published a study of surnames in America, and included a search form that tells you where your name ranked in the year 2000 and how that ranking has changed since the 1990 census (the point being to highlight the growth in Hispanic surnames).

Okay, so I gave it a whirl with my actual last name, and...

Sorry, the name

S****

was not one of the 5,000 most common surnames
in the nation during the year 2000.

Humph. Well, hell, I thought, let's see how the alternate last name fares. Aha!

214 S**** 47 occurrences per 100,000 people
254: rank in 1990

I bet at least some of those 47 are the result of people with my name having it officially misspelled, going from vice pivo, prosim to mas cerveza, por favor with the stroke of an Ellis Island pen.

In other surname news, my almost-name-doppelganger continues to follow me into the most unexpected places as our lives take eerily similar paths. We already share the same first name, and essentially the same last name given the world's propensity for changing my surname to hers, and the same general practitioner (where I first learned of the other Boltgirl's existence when my doc started rattling off a list of meds she wanted to see if I was still taking, before realizing she was talking to the wrong Boltgirl). Then last month, as I waited to hop onto the cardiologist's table for an echocardiogram, the technician confirmed my birthdate of 10/23/64. Which is in the right decade but otherwise isn't close to my birthdate. Confused, she asked why I was back since I was just there the previous week... which I wasn't. Oh my god, I screamed, she's here too?!? The other Boltgirl had been in for the same test I was about to take. Jesus. I feel like I ought to buy her a beer or something. I've seen more of her medical records than I have of my girlfriend's.

Lesson? Always confirm the birthdate. Spelling the name, spelling it again, correcting the spelling they write down, and correcting the pronunciation doesn't work.

I don't indulge in KFC, as a rule, unless (1) I'm starving and (2) my son was going there anyway. So today, still deeply engrossed in writing Very Important Archaeology, I was starving, he was going, so yeah. This was proudly stamped on the bag he brought home, and I promptly remembered why the Colonel and I parted ways a while ago:

KFC: We Cook Food Thoroughly.

McDonald's and Taco Bell, you have been put on notice. KFC cooks their food. Says so right on the bag. I don't remember seeing similar proclamations on your bags, Jack in the Box! What are you hiding?

Jesus. Is that seriously the best they could come up with?

As threatened yesterday, we are celebrating the inaugural Market Day today with moderate festivities that may or may not involve coffee, pumpkin bread, colored lights, and Irish cream. Unless you're the boss, in which case absolutely no Irish cream came to visit except in our imagination.

Imagination!

The rest of the festivities involve writing archaeology reports, which, I am happy to confirm, do tend to get finished much faster when the writing process is accompanied by coffee, pumpkin bread, colored lights, and not-Irish-cream.

Archaeology!

I confess that I didn't wait for Market Day to do my Thanksgiving dinner shopping, instead knocking it out last night in a fit of pique. Granted, it was only a bag of potatoes and two trays of rolls, but it's finished, and I may spend the evening making rum balls for Christmas instead. As for the big meal itself, my girlfriend is back east visiting her college-mired daughter, so I will be dining with my son, my ex, his wife, her kids, her mom, and her gay brother. Then the next night is dinner and drinks with my girlfriend's ex and his girlfriend. All in all, a pretty traditional lesbian Thanksgiving.

The collapsed Catholic in me still holds up Holy Week as the model for what all major holidays should be like. That runup to Easter contains specific special days with prescribed rituals preparing the faithful for the grand finale of Sunday, all with their own props and fun activities (wave palm fronds! watch people squirm uncomfortably when the priest washes their feet! take part in community theater! get copious amounts of holy water flung your way!). The other holidays lurk under the bed, rustling louder and louder as the calendar flips in their direction, but, ultimately, they still jump out, grab you by the shoulders and shake, and then sprint away again to hide until next year, leaving you rattled, hair mussed, glasses askew, unsure if you should be relieved or saddened, but thoroughly bewildered.

That's how they treat me, anyway, even in the modern era of Christmas decorations cropping up at Target before Halloween. No matter how much preparation goes into it, Thanksgiving is still just a single day on the calendar, with normal life expected to go on as usual right up until about five in the afternoon the day before and starting up again at the crack of dawn the day after.

I don't like it.

Tomorrow needs to be a national holiday too. Most people take at least part of it off already, to join the frenzy at Safeway or get on a plane to wherever they're having dinner on Thursday. The rest of us just get drunk at work. We should just call it Market Day or something and be done with it. And Friday, of course, should be Recovery and Leftovers Day. How much writing am I really going to get finished on a pie and stuffing hangover? Seriously. And that doesn't even account for all the wine that will need to be polished off.

List of things I am thankful for this year? Very short list, just one item, really. I have a sense of contentment I've not experienced in recent memory. All the relationships are clicking, and that's all I need. Even if it doesn't make for riveting blogging.

Your new blastocyst overlord.

Well, not quite yet, but that's the spectre that's on the verge of being released in Focus on the Family's Colorado.

A proposed amendment to the Colorado Constitution that would give legal rights to fertilized human eggs may be headed for the ballot next year...

The measure, just one paragraph long, would ask voters whether inalienable rights, due process rights and equality of justice rights as defined in the state Constitution should be extended to “any human being from the moment of fertilization.”

The proposal must go through several other steps between now and Election Day 2008, including gathering of enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Really. Fertilized eggs get full legal rights. Full personhood. From the moment of fertilization.

And in his well-appointed lair somewhere in the Hamptons, the Law of Unintended Consequences pours a second glass of Glenfiddich and starts giggling uncontrollably.

Wow. Imagine. This brings abortion to a screeching halt, of course, as it is the underlying motivation for introducing this bit of ridiculousness in the first place. What else might it do? IUD possession will be tantamount to holding a smoking gun. Maybe lawyers will line up to bring suits against women on behalf of ectopic pregnancies (perhaps softeningly retitled "Managua Maternities?") everywhere. And nutter billionaires will no longer need to keep a small lap dog on the premises just to have someone to will their fortunes to in order to spite their ungrateful grown children--they can name any of the thousands of fertilized eggs languishing in a freezer somewhere as full beneficiaries.

Lost, as usual in this particular brand of asshattery, is the role of the woman, the woman whose uterus is the claim of squatter's rights by the now fully enfranchised fertilized egg. There is no mention of the fully formed, several-trillion-celled human being whose bodily autonomy is discounted in favor of the two-celled cluster being venerated by the forced-birth contingent. Woman? What woman? We have a blastocyst to defend here, people!

And lord knows the blastocysts need help. Roughly half of them fail to implant in the uterine wall anyway and are expelled from the woman's body without her having any inkling they ever existed in the first place. It's been remarked to the point of exhaustion that this one-in-two rate of failure to implant makes God the biggest abortionist in the world. The fertilized egg is indeed alive, but it doesn't come anywhere close to fitting the definition of viable. It's a potential-filled rogue, but a rogue nonetheless, floating in the general direction of the cervix, but sometimes implanting in the side of the fallopian tube instead, at which point--if we're going to carry the absurdity of full legal personhood to its conclusion--if left unchecked, it becomes the instigator of a murder-suicide. Even making it into the uterus is no guarantee of making it to the point of viabililty. A hundred years ago, that point was pretty much the moment of birth, providing the mother didn't die halfway through delivery, asphyxiating the infant. In 2007, viability means about seven months' gestation. Is that life? Well, it can breathe with a little help and has a shot at an unencumbered adulthood, so yeah, that's life. An egg that was fertilized an hour ago and has even odds of not surviving the next 72 hours inside the woman's body, and exactly zero odds of surviving outside it? Not so much.

Dale Schowengerdt, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal organization based in Arizona that supported the ballot measure before the Colorado Supreme Court, said the timing of the proposal was “pure coincidence,” to next year’s elections.
“It’s an important debate that people ought to have, and Colorado ought to have, about when does life begin,” Mr. Schowengerdt said.

Ah, that one's easy, Mr. Schowengerdt. It begins when it is politically expedient for you to have it begin. And if you really want "life" defined as "sperm crashes into egg; gains full legal standing as US citizen," well, sir, be really, really careful what you wish for.

Things I did not do last night:

Didn't go to the Arizona-Oregon game, even though I suspected this might be The One for this year, you know, the one game where the planets align and the 'Cats act like they know how to play football and drub a vastly superior opponent. And indeed, they flattened the #2 Ducks, 34-24. All this does, of course, is knock Oregon out of the national championship picture and give Mike Stoops another week's breathing room before the chorus starts up again after what will probably be an ugly result at ASU. Unless ASU's starting QB blows a knee in the first quarter too, a la Dennis Dixon.

Didn't go see Neko Case at the Rialto, which is even more disappointing than passing on the football game. My officemates went and said she was marvelous. Damn these kids and their late start times, but if she comes back to Tucson I'll coffee up and make it.

Didn't throw up! Although it was close for a while. Where that came from, I have no idea.

Didn't gasp in surprise when I watched ESPN's report on Barroid Bonds being indicted on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. Nor, it should be noted, did I shed a tear.

Oh, my. W vetoed the bipartisan-supported health and education bill because $606 billion is more money than he wants to spend on, well, health and education when he could be spending it on wars. That part is at least consistent with what we know of the president's priorities. The reasoning he claims for it, though?

Bush hammered Democrats for what he called a tax-and-spend philosophy:

"The Congress now sitting in Washington holds this philosophy," Bush told an audience of business and community leaders. "The majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far it's acting like a teenager with a new credit card."

Hold the phones, George. Wrong analogy. You see, taxes=income, which gives you the money to spend. That's actually more like a teenager with a new job planning how he's going to spend his first paycheck. Setting $4B a month on fire in Iraq while simultaneously cutting taxes and fighting to make those cuts permanent? Yeah, that's where your credit card analogy comes in, but in this case you're the teenager who doesn't get that the card comes with an insane interest rate and no personal bankruptcy escape hatch.

Good try, Mr. President! You almost have that simile thing down!

On a slow day occasioned by the need to really, really get some archaeology report writing closer to finished than it was yesterday, I offer up (via Pharyngula) these two instant classics from John Scalzi, an intrepid blogger who dared venture into Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky. The photo stream and accompanying essay should keep you occupied and spewing coffee for the next hour or so. Seriously, the funniest shit I have read in a while, even if it knocked back my productivity quotient by a factor of about a thousand this morning.

But their days were numbered!

Never let it be said that I ignore the good news coming out of Iraq. The paper had some just this morning:

Associated Press figures show a sharp drop in the number of U.S. and Iraqi deaths across the country in the past few months. The number of Iraqis who met violent deaths dropped from at least 1,023 in September to at least 905 in October, according to an AP count.

The number of American military deaths fell from 65 to at least 39 over the same period.Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. forces south of the capital, said Sunday he believed the decrease would hold, because of what he called a "groundswell" of support from regular Iraqis.

"If we didn't have so many people coming forward to help, I'd think this is a flash in the pan. But that's just not the case," Lynch told a small group of reporters over lunch in the Green Zone.

He attributed the sharp drop in attacks to the American troop buildup, the setup of small outposts at the heart of Iraqi communities, and help from thousands of locals fed up with al-Qaida and other extremists.

Well, there it is. If it reflects reality rather than wishful thinking, which I hope is the case--the reality bit, not the wishful thinking--then it's great, great news (although I'm not sure I'd characterize the drop in Iraqi deaths from 1,023 to 905 as "sharp," and that's still a big damn number to wrap up as good news). If the shine is starting to wear off some, you know, of the endless cycle of bombings and murders, and that means we can bring the guys home sooner, fabulous. I'm all over it. Let the good news keep rolling in so we can get the hell out of there.

And let's support the troops while we're at it. Of course, since I am a hopeless liberal, after all, by "support the troops" I mean "fulfill their immediate and long-term physical and mental health needs resulting from military service, in a timely fashion, with the best level of care, rather than seeing how many hoops they can jump through while seeking treatment before denying healthcare benefits on whatever pretext can be located or fabricated." John Edwards, who has similar notions, has proposed a modest $400 million plan for treating veterans afflicted with PTSD--in other words, a price tag coming in at less than half the cost of a month's worth of war--and, even if he wins neither the nomination nor the presidency, maybe it's an idea with legs enough to be picked up by a Senate sponsor at some point.

"I strongly believe we must restore the sacred contract we have with our veterans and their families, and that we must begin by reforming our system for treating PTSD. We also must act to remove the stigma from this disorder," Edwards said in prepared remarks his campaign provided to The Associated Press. "Warriors should never be ashamed to deal with the personal consequences of war."

Edwards said that despite his opposition to how the war has been waged, the enlisted men and women deserve the nation's support when they complete their service.

"We must stand by those who stand by us. When our service men and women sacrifice so much to defend our freedom and secure peace around the world, we have a moral obligation to take care of them and their families," he said.

To reiterate, standing by them means much, much more than slapping a ribbon on the car and cheering as more and more men and women get shipped over to the grinder. Most Americans' fondest hope is that they start coming home quickly (von dein Mund zu Gotts Oiren, Rick Lynch), and when they do they are going to need a hell of a lot more help than the Army is currently giving. If that little problem is another one Bush is happy to leave to the next administration, let John Edwards' ideas be in the forefront of addressing it.

Skimming the Daily Star this morning...

Court: Washington State Druggists May Refuse to Prescribe "Morning-After" Pill

In an injunction signed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton said pharmacists can refuse to sell the morning-after pill if they refer the customer to another nearby source. Pharmacists' employers also are protected by the order.

Two pharmacists and a drugstore owner sued the state in July over the new rule, saying it violates their civil rights. They asked the judge to halt forced Plan B sales while the lawsuit is in play.

Many critics consider the pill tantamount to abortion, although it is different from the abortion pill RU-486 and has no effect on women who are already pregnant.

In other words, many critics are fucking idiots. All together now, please. Emergency contraception. Does NOT. Cause. Abortion.

EC works, instead, by preventing ovulation. If you've already ovulated in the 72 or so hours prior to unprotected sex, EC will not help you, just as if you're already pregnant, EC will not terminate that pregnancy and will, in fact, probably give that pregnancy a helping hand by maintaining the richness of the uterine lining. If you have not ovulated, EC keeps your ovaries from releasing an egg into the hordes of sperm stampeding up your fallopian tubes for a few days until all the little buggers are dead.

That is not abortion. That is not the destruction of a fertilized egg. That is not even the frustration of an egg and sperm gazing at each other all moon-eyed through a veil of latex, because EC keeps the egg from being there in the first place. Sperm get to do their spermy thing, swimming in circles and snapping each other's butts with their flagellae and standing in the street looking wistfully up at the ovary and yelling yo, you coming down or what, but the egg stays snug up in the ovary reading Katha Pollitt with a cup of tea and says, no thanks, I'm busy tonight.

Not that it matters to the pharmacists trying to exercise what's pathetically titled a conscience clause. You know damn well they understand the physiological mechanism the EC pill triggers (considering that they got through pharmacy school and all), and that it's not even vaguely related to abortion. They are not attempting to escape being involved in an abortion. They're simply flexing a newly created muscle that allows them to intercede in a woman's life when she deigns to have sex in a context they disapprove of. That is, any context not precisely equal to married and desirous of producing children.

Pharmacy is not simply another service industry sector. The license required by state regulators does not simply indicate competence but grants pharmacists a quasi-monopoly on drug transactions. Because the only way people in this country can legally acquire the controlled medications they need is by (1) getting prescriptions from their doctors and then (2) having medications dispensed by a licensed pharmacist, pharmacists have an absolute duty to fill all prescriptions brought to them in a timely manner, and to stock all drugs that can be reasonably expected to be required by the populations they serve, particularly medications that respond to acute needs. Like nitroglycerine, or asthma inhalers, or emergency contraception.

The fact that EC may now be purchased without a prescription doesn't change this basic argument, because, while no prescription is needed, the drug still must be dispensed from behind the pharmacy counter.

The pharmacist's job is to check dosages and potential drug interactions the physician may have missed, and to make sure the patient is informed about use instructions and side effects. It is not to increasingly interfere in people's lives under the banner of morality, or to make value judgments predicated solely on the medication prescribed or sought without the context of the life of the person seeking the medication. RU-486 opened the gate to pharmacists who were able to make an accepted argument against being required to participate in abortion, and now that gate is in danger of being flung wide open by those who would us the RU-486 precendent as justification for refusing to dispense any medication to be used in circumstances that run afoul of their own personal standards of conduct. That alone is cause enough for concern. But when the focus is consistently narrowed down from any morally ambiguous circumstances to those specifically and exclusively relevant to sexually active women, and adjudicated on the basis of one particular strain of one religious sect, it's completely unacceptable and abhorrent.

Abstinence-only Sex Ed Ineffective, Study Finds

Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenager sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of millions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies.

"At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence or reduces the number of sexual partners" among teenagers, the study concluded.

The study found that while abstinence-only efforts appear to have little positive impact, more comprehensive sex-education programs were having "positive outcomes," including teenagers "delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use."

The study flatly contradicts the usual bogeymen trotted out by the abstinence crowd that giving teenagers accurate information about physiology, reproduction, and sexual health is akin to shoving them into a room with a rotating bed, mirrored ceiling, and chucka chucka bwow music playing. Kids who get that information actually tend to wait longer before having sex and use contraception when they do.

What's this tell us? Besides the fact that knowledge is the first, best line of defense against the crap life throws at you, it's instructive--at least to me-- in another direction I don't often see commented on. While federally funded abstinence-only instruction cannot include explicitly religious content, it places a great deal of emphasis on moral imperatives regarding sexuality and is most fervently supported by (and adopted primarily in areas that are home to) evangelical Christians.

The problem.

When kids from conservative Christian backgrounds stray from what they've been taught and have sex, a lot of them don't bother with contraception. The overwhelming reason for this is likely because they haven't learned accurate facts about their options, but instead have been told that condoms don't work to prevent pregnancy and work even less to prevent HIV. I suspect that a contributing factor, however, is the belief that simply hitting your knees after the deed and telling God you're sorry gives you a great big do-over that wipes your slate, penis, and uterus clean along with your soul.

The abstinence movement likes to be a big tent operation that welcomes even non-virgin people in, which is a good thing since it has to be in order to guarantee its continuing solvency in the face of the sky-high rates of teen sex, pregnancy, and repeat teenage pregnancy posted by its adherents. If you're not a physiological virgin, you can still re-pledge abstinence and get your virginity back in the eyes of God. While extending the olive branch to less-than-perfect people and declining to kick them out of the club for behaving like sexually functional beings is laudable, the availability of nightly get-right-with-God sessions likely goes a long way toward the development of a consequences-free mindset when it comes to sex.

We saw it with David "I Have Requested And Received Forgiveness From God" Vitter. We saw it with Ted "I Am One Hundred Percent Heterosexual" Haggard. We see it in statements from kids who regret past promiscuity and promise Jesus to be virgins forever this time, really. Until the next time. I have had conversations with people who readily admit to all manner of minor sins every day--'cause nobody's perfect--but believe they are washed clean each night because they tell God they're really, really, really sorry. Preventative measures don't go very far against that mindset.

I have been an archaeologist for a long time, starting with my first fieldwork in southern Peru in 1987, to lab work in grad school, to freelance artifact illustration after grad school, to the fulltime gig chasing rocks here in the desert since 1994. I have a few "real" publications on my resume and wheelbarrows full of CRM "gray literature" to my name. I've named a few projectile points and put together a regional typology other researchers have adopted. I'm teetering on the edge of putting together a definitive big-picture treatment of a major prehistoric arrowhead industry in Arizona. Grad students call me with questions. Professionals ask my opinion.

And I think I'm sick of it all.

During my freshman year in high school, we took a career aptitude test. Sister Jeanne told us to take it seriously, and I was thrilled to be missing her algebra class period for the test, so I cheerfully complied and answered the multiple-choice activity preference questions as thoughtfully as a 14-year-old can. The results came back some time later. My suggested future careers? Rabbi. Or handbag assembler.

Rabbi? I had checked the "Catholic" box on the form.

Archaeology is very much a jack-of-all-trades sort of profession, incorporating elements of history, biology, anatomy, geology, geomorphology, soils science, hydrology, chemistry, physics, geometry, metallurgy, tribology, agronomy, botany, zoology, sociology, political science, cartography, art, technical writing, essay, and landscaping. First-aid skills are a plus. What other work does this actually prepare me for? Fuck if I know.

Training assistance dogs would be rewarding. I don't know how you break into that field. Engineering awesome prosthetic limbs for people who got blown up in Iraq would be extremely rewarding, but I'm thinking that takes higher level math than my brain can handle. I like hiking, picking up rocks, taking pictures of dramatic scenery and pretty flowers, and writing about it afterwards. That probably doesn't pay too well; actually, it's what I mostly do on this blog, and no one has yet come forward with a fat contract for me to sign.

The dream job, really, would be running an independent bookstore with a good coffee bar inside, next door to an Irish pub, with a good bakery down the street. Boltgirl Books. Did I mention the coffee bar also has Guinness on tap?

Spectacular. The Attorney General nominee isn't sure whether waterboarding is torture or not--no word on whether he takes the Giuliani "it depends on who does it" tack or the Limbaugh "splashing a little water in a guy's face" angle--and Bush says it's an unfair question because he hasn't been briefed on top secret enhanced interrogation techniques and Feinstein and Schumer say he's the best we can expect from this administration and he promises to enforce any future laws that may ban torture, should the Congress ever grow a spine, so bam, there you have it.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) spoke out furiously against Mukasey's answers on torture, specifically dismissing the assurances the nominee gave to Schumer last week that he would enforce an anti-torture law if Congress were to pass one.

"He will in fact enforce the laws that we pass in the future? Can our standards have really sunk so low?" Kennedy said. "Enforcing the law is the job of the attorney general. It's a prerequisite, not a virtue."

In related news, reported by The Guardian,

The top legal adviser within the US state department, who counsels the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, on international law, has declined to rule out the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding even if it were applied by foreign intelligence services on US citizens. ...

When Mr Sands said he found Mr Bellinger's inability to exclude waterboarding on Americans very curious, the US official replied: "Well, I'm not willing to include it or exclude it. Our justice department has concluded that we just don't want to get involved in abstract discussions."

I am not sure where abstraction comes in to this discussion, unless the question of precisely how inhuman it is to convince a person he's seconds away from death by drowning has suddenly moved from the concrete, material world to the lofty sphere of philosophy. Perhaps by "abstract discussion," Mr. Bellinger means to say "hypothetical question," such as "when George Bush and Dick Cheney attempt to travel to their retirement estates in Uruguay in January 2008, will they be subject to arrest and prosecution for crimes against humanity, much like Augusto Pinochet was and, more recently, Donald Rumsfeld almost was?"

If Mr. Bellinger and Mr. Mukasey require more information to help them move from abstraction to reality, they can give waterboarding.org a look; the site was helpfully put together with people just like them (actually, people exactly them) in mind.

Waterboarding.org would like to offer to help the nominee become more familiar with water-based coercive interrogation techniques. Using unclassified sources, news reports, and historical records we are attempting to put together as clear a picture as possible of this technique, its history, its legality, and the scope of its use. We are also attempting to organize a group of doctors, paramedics, lawyers, and volunteers to allow anyone who remains confused or unclear on the details of waterboarding to safely subject themselves to as much of the technique as they are willing to endure.

We look forward to advising, educating, and assisting Michael Mukasey, future candidates, public figures, and anyone else who professes ignorance of our nation's most controversial coercive interrogation technique.

I spent this past Thursday and Friday tramping along creeks and down the sides of highway road cuts outside Payson, in search of the sources of the many lovely varieties of chert people at one specific site used to make bucketloads of arrowheads way back in the 11th century. It was a mostly successful venture.

The Home Depot of A.D. 1000 Payson, located roughly between the two large alligator junipers (red arrows) near the top of the right side of this ridge. Click to supersize.

Four or five different cherts outcrop here and roll down the hill in the form of fist-sized nodules. Some of the people living in the small settlement below scooped them up, knocked thin flakes from them with round stone hammers, and turned those flakes into arrowheads by pressure-flaking tiny chips from their edges. The analytical problem I'm exploring is how the staggering number of artifacts--mostly waste flakes that are the byproduct of the manufacturing technique and broken arrowheads that got thrown away--can be used to infer the scale and organization of the little industry centered here at the base of an otherwise unremarkable hill, one among dozens in the immediate area, but one that just happened to be loaded with the kind of stone favored for arrowheads back in the day.

One of the larger nodules on the hill (above handle), with prehistoric flakes (below handle). Click to supersize!

I came home with a backpack full of samples and a roll of maps I have yet to mark up. The scenery was lovely, even if fall has been a bit late in coming this year.

Oak leaves against a brilliant blue sky.

Butterfly on thistle, with inquisitive bee making an appearance at lower left.

I leave you with this image from Star Valley. I do not know why the adult cabaret chose a giant steer as its mascot, except that there are a lot of ranches in the area. We tried not to think about that one too hard when we drove by.

Mass hysteria! Logic felled by punches below the belt! And a perplexing revelation. Just one more day in the most recent flag kerfuffle to strike our great nation. On Monday the papers carried the story of the Veterans' Adminstration deciding to ban a commonly used "Meaning of the 13 Folds" script from the funerals of military personnel and veterans at the 150 National Cemeteries across the country in response to one person's complaint about one line in the script referencing the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Christian persecution complex, please pick up the white courtesy phone.

House Republicans responded predictably on Tuesday, introducing a resolution condemning the VA's condemnation of the script, with several legislators writing outraged letters to the VA demanding the return of the ceremony.

"The VA is being manipulated by out-of-control secularists," said Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif.

Deep breaths, people. What the VA directive actually does:

In a memo last month to directors of the agency's 125 cemeteries, a senior VA official said they should not distribute or post non-government handouts on "The Meaning of Each Fold of an Honor Guard Funeral Flag."

The memo said the handout and its religious references shouldn't be used as a script at committal services unless the next-of-kin requests it.

House Republicans? There's really nothing to see here. The VA correctly recognized that while explicitly religious texts are permissible when delivered by private parties in national cemeteries, they cannot be mandated in official military regulations. All these legislators saw was single atheist bitches and brings military funerals to screeching halt, spits on God for good measure, and leapt into condemnation mode. Little problem there. About that single complaint? It turns out that the complainant wasn't offended by the reference to God, but by the mangling of the line from glorifies in the Hebrews' eyes, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to glorifies in the Hebrews' eyes, the gods Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Given that... uh, major misunderstanding, the VA eyeballed the whole script and figured out that it might be problematic in a lot of ways should it be construed as an official government-issued ceremony.

The complaint prompted the VA to focus on the recital and determine that it shouldn't be used by VA employees or honor guard volunteers from the American Legion or other veterans organizations unless specifically requested by family members. [VA spokeswoman Lisette] Mondello stressed that honor guards would also honor requests from families of any religion to recite texts of their choosing.

"The key is that the family has to request this, and we would acquiesce to any family's particular religious views and/or traditions," Mondello said. "I would describe it as a clarification of a policy so that we make sure that everyone throughout our system knows that there is consistency."

The policy was not clear to lawmakers Tuesday who interpreted comments from VA officials to mean the 13-fold recital could no longer be recited at all by cemetery workers or volunteers.

Derrrrrrrr.

(for a fine discussion of the misconceptions surrounding the flag and the inane folding script in question, please see this post at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub)

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