Wombat Health Update

I was going to lead off with something about still being wary when it comes to re-pledging my allegiance to Wambach, or the entire WNT, for that matter, after the Incident at the World Cup, but you know, meh. It's been hashed and rehashed to death (if you want one more go 'round, it's here; find the money quote explaining why my Wambach-related drool has stayed dried up and win a prize).

Anyway. Wombat's surgery was successful, and she now has a shiny new titanium rod to keep her tibia company on cold nights; no word as yet on whether Megan Rapinoe continues to be a component of those cuddle plans. However, the initial 12-week estimate for a comeback was probably premature and not realistic.

“She’s sustained a very significant injury to her bone,” said Dr. Valletta. “It can sometimes take a year to return a professional player to her previous level of activity, but the expectation is that we will have an aggressive rehab program and progress her weight-bearing rapidly to minimize her time lost for competition.”

Speaking from the pretty much completely unrelated experience of a bone bruise, that aggressive rehab will not be pleasant. She's proven the ability to gut it out through a broken toe and a split-open, stapled-back-together head, and she's seen teammates come back from equally bad injuries ahead of schedule without losing much of a step, if any, so I believe she'll get there. What the team she returns to will look like is the bigger question at this point.

People Are Starting to Notice

If I must share my massive crush with the rest of America, so be it. Le sigh.

Well, That Explains Why It Takes Me So Long to Get to Flagstaff

I've just been doing it wrong all these years! Cindy "Regular Folks" McCain sets me straight (click 'n' zip forward to the 1:30 mark).

If you don't have the patience for non-embedded video, this is her key point:

...in Arizona, the only way to get around the state is by small private plane.

Delivered without a whiff of self-consciousness, maybe because she specified "small" instead of "737." But Obama is the elitist in this election, and don't you forget it.

Oh, Sad. Sad!

Mmmm. Mmm, mmm, mmmm. The WNT finished up with a 1-0 victory over Brazil last night in a friendly that rapidly devolved into anything but. I didn't see any of the Peace Queen matches, obviously, and didn't follow it closely enough to know if Brazil carried their hack-a-minute defensive style straight through from the World Cup to Korea to San Diego, but if they did take a break in the last tournament, they were back last night with a vengeance.

Brazil play dirty. Period. And they don't need to. Jesus, they absolutely don't need to, at least not when their holy trinity of Daniela, Cristiane, and Marta--otherwise known on the BigSoccer boards as Fast, Faster, and Fastest--are playing. Which they were not, in this series of stateside friendlies, and the US still barely escaped each time. The only consolation from last night, the only thing that kept the Wambach injury in the ah shite category rather than prompting me to whisper in Dick Cheney's ear that Brazil harbors prime al Qaeda training camps, is that it came on a clean play. It's a microscopic consolation at best.

What's this mean for the Olympics, with the Wombat watching from the sideline on crutches with a titanium rod in her shin? Amy Rodriguez brings one-on-one creativity and fearlessness on 21-year-old legs. Lindsay Tarpley and Heather O'Reilly have shown great flashes of combining well when they're on the field together. Carli Lloyd has power, turns well on the ball, and isn't afraid to shoot from distance, but sometimes has trouble keeping the ball on frame. Tash Kai is a huge ball of random puppy energy. Just ask the Brazilian player she barreled into when she came on the field in the second half. Her entry into the game turned the fire back on in the US attack, and she did get the deciding goal, but can she magically find the focus knob and learn which direction to turn it in the next three weeks before the Olympics start?

Final notes. Things I was wrong about: Mitts can play after all. She was very strong last night, and obviously worked her ass off to come back from her ACL tear suffered just before the World Cup. Angela Hucles' continued presence on the roster is no longer a mystery to me. Solid. And a thing I wasn't wrong about: completely aside from Wambach's behavior during the Great Hope Solo Fiasco, completely aside from how she may or may not comport herself with teammates, damn. The woman is made of rock, iron, and any number of other extremely tough things. After snapping both bones in her lower leg (watch the replay for the rebound after her left leg hits the ground and then undulates up in a way it's really not supposed to), she calmly waved for assistance and smiled a little rather than doing anything I would have done in that situation, which probably would have involved scream, puke, pass out, repeat.

Career-ender? I hope not. Her eyes as she rode the gurney off the field will haunt me for weeks.

Two ways to look at it. The door's open now for the young talent to show what they can do up top. Or there's now a huge hole up top left by the absence of one of the most prolific active goal-scorers in the game, who incidentally in the last year had added a decent amount of speed, foot skill, field vision, and distribution to her formerly head-based arsenal. Three weeks, Pia. Get to it.

Oh Dear

Uh, spoiler warning, sorta, if you're into the WNT and aren't either watching the game on Fox Soccer or following it online.

They were looking decent against Brazil, playing more of a control game with some tantalizing 20-yard through balls onto perfectly timed runs by the forwards, creating some chances.

Then Abby Wambach snapped her left leg.

Brazil have been fouling through the entire first thirty minutes, hitting Wambach in particular, but this was a 50-50 ball, no foul. Just a full-speed followthrough by the Wombat's left shin into the Brazilian defender's full-speed onrushing right knee. Still no score at the end of the first half, but my god. The decent crowd at Torero Stadium in San Diego is stunned and subdued. The team is soldiering on, almost scoring in near the end of stoppage time, but Christ.

Maybe it's not as bad as it looked. Wombat kept a brave face while being loaded into the ambulance, but her eyes told the story. Maybe it's not as bad as it looked. Maybe.

The Inevitable Next Step Comes a-Trip-Trappin' Down the Hall

Don't worry about that little Conscience Clause thing, they told us. It only protects the delicate sensibilities of fundamentalist pharmacists who don't want to hand you certain kinds of perfectly legal and prescribed medications. After all, you're an American, right? You like freedom of religion, right? So don't think of your inability to get contraception when you ask for it as the elevation of one person's religious beliefs over your own, or your lack thereof. Just reframe it as a constitutional celebration and you'll be fine! Would you like some pre-natal vitamins instead? I would be happy to give you those. What? You still want those birth control pills? Well, then maybe you should have thought about going to pharmacy school and opening your own abortifacient candy shop before you had sex, you stupid slut. Now step aside. The guy behind you needs his Viagra and has been waiting four full minutes while you've been here whinging.

Predictably, now the conscience meme has spread beyond the initially promised narrow spectrum of pharmacists, nurses, and doctors to the entire range of healthcare funded by the federal government. The Department of Health and Human Services, perhaps bolstered by the growing tendency of state education departments to decide "science" means "whatever we damn well say it is," has taken the mind-bending step of basing crucial biological definitions on public opinion polls. Zogby polls. Which typically have an error in the +/- four million percent range.

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. The "Definitions" section of the HHS proposal states,

Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49% of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term "abortion."

Something like 40% of Americans also believe in the Genesis creation story and eschew evolution, so I expect HHS to make the administration of medications based on evolutionary biology optional as well. Enjoy your camphor oil, people, and be sure to close up your windows tight so you don't get the night vapors!

Jesus. Why does this matter? It matters because of this:

Up until now, the federal government followed the definition of pregnancy accepted by the American Medical Association and our nation's pregnancy experts, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is: pregnancy begins at implantation. With this proposal, however, HHS is dismissing medical experts and opting instead to accept a definition of pregnancy based on polling data. It now claims that pregnancy begins at some biologically unknowable moment (there's no test to determine if a woman's egg has been fertilized). Under these new standards there would be no way for a woman to prove she's not pregnant. Thus, any woman could be denied contraception under HHS' new science.

Any woman could be denied contraception by HHS. If your employer-provided health plan continues clinging to a slender thread, you'll be okay, provided, of course, you have access to a pharmacy whose employees are required to do their jobs rather than proselytize. If you rely on federally funded clinics--in other words, if you tend disproportionately to be low-income and/or a woman of color--you're screwed. Twice.

All together, please. Science is indeed a consensus, but it's not a democracy. Public opinion is lovely but has exactly no relevance to the definitions portion of the program. Against abortion? Don't have one. Really super duper against it? Don't go into healthcare.

Thanks to Top!Secret G-woman for the tip, and for starting my day on a very stabby note.

Mmmmmmaddow.

Still catching up on several years of journal reprints and data tables I'm sure are important for something, because otherwise I never would have stacked them in teetering piles all over my office. And whilst doing the re-stacking today I am also catching up on a week's worth of Rachel Maddow guest hosting Countdown, so in lieu of anything resembling a thoughtful post, I give you Maddow's presentation of John McCain on reproductive freedom:

Back to the Grind

The falls, McCormick's Creek, southern Indiana.

This is where I was. And it's where my mind still is, mostly, when it's not off wandering North Side neighborhoods in Chicago looking for the next bakery with promising cupcakes. I came home to a Tucson that is much greener and damper than when I left, although the big monsoons have yet to fire up overhead since I've been back. Half the flowers in the yard are dead, a bumper crop of weeds is springing up, and green fuzzy stuff that is probably mold but that I'll hopefully call short moss has taken over one of the rock terraces in the back.

My office failed to spontaneously combust during my absence, so today I have to make good on a vague promise to myself that the piles of paper will be plowed under at least once a year.

Politics rage on. Bush is lifting the offshore drilling moratorium, causing Bomb Bomb McCain to clap his hands with glee. The New Yorker has put out a deeply satirical cover this week portraying the Obamas as angry black Muslim terrorists, forgetting that most of the country doesn't (a) recognize satire or (b) know that the proper response is not fuck yeah that's what Rush has been saying for months! And the people who led the fight against Arizona's most recent anti-gay-marriage amendment are admitting that they were only in it for the straight couples who might have been adversely affected, and so aren't really interested this time now that gays are the explicit, exclusive target. Awesome. Thanks for the welcome home, guys!

Will Somebody Just Hurry Up and Hand this Guy a Puppy or Something, Please?

Another day, another Obama moment that stops me in my tracks.

My only point is this--historically I have been a strong believer in a woman's right to choose with her doctor, her pastor, and her family.

This was part of his clarification of statements about abortion made in an earlier interview. Statements indicating that he thinks mental illness doesn't count as debilitating enough to terminate a pregnancy, that "partial-birth abortion" is valid terminology to continue slinging around, that women pop off to the abortionist on a whim because they periodically feel a little down.

Now, I don't think that "mental distress" qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term...

The new explanation:

It can be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling blue.

Okay, look. Even if the greater context of the statement was to take on the usual anti-choice meme that women in their 36th week get an abortion to counteract that nasty case of the Mondays, especially if they break a nail or something, he's not doing us any favors by phrasing it this way. I completely agree that feeling blue is not a valid reason for a late-term abortion. Good for you. Now maybe you can point out that feeling blue is really very probably and most likely never a proximate cause of late-term D&Xs anyway, and that suggesting it is in the first place completely trivializes an agonizing decision process and ascribes to women the agency of a five-year-old.

And the fact that you even made the statement that the only health exception you'd consider for a woman who, by the way, is not now and never will be you, would have to be physical? Not that I don't appreciate the clueless clarification, but that crap never should have fallen out of your mouth in the first place. Who are you preaching to? It sure as hell ain't the pro-choice choir. Oh, and you think I should be able to make the choice with my pastor? How wonderful. Because my pastor's always been a key player in my healthcare decisions. Especially since I don't have one. Quit sucking up to the goddamn religious conservatives who aren't going to vote for you anyway and remember the rational, intelligent bloc whose votes won you the nomination.

I'm still voting for you in the fall, but I'm less enthused about it by the day. If you come back from Iraq sounding more like McCain than McCain already does, we are going to have some serious issues.

Far more eloquent postings from Jeff Fecke here and Bitch PhD here.

4th of July Frippery

Because you can just never have enough Peeps. I'm off to the big city, although the Adler isn't on my list for the day. In the immortal words of the late Mayor Washington: Chicago, 150 years old! America, older'n that! Happy 4th. 

Ridiculously Predictable? Or Predictably Ridiculous? We Cannot Decide.

Not content to let the states be the only players in the tired yet true no-gay-marriage-amendment game, Senate Republicans this week trotted out the federal marriage amendment again.

`Section 1. This article may be cited as the `Marriage Protection Amendment'.

`Section 2. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.'

Yes, that one. That's not the ah shite moment, though, not yet. That moment comes when you read the list of co-sponsors. Who's lurking there alongside usual suspects Sam Brownback and James Inhofe? Is it possibly David "Whore Diapers" Vitter and Larry "Tappity Tap" Craig? Why, yes. Yes, it is.

I can sincerely think of no two better pure and holy warriors for the cause of marital sanctity than those two. I mean, at least Vitter chose a hooker who not only looked like his wife but had the same first name too! If that doesn't scream devotion I don't know what does.

Keep it classy, GOP!

Really, Barack? Really?

Obama's suddenly on the faith-based initiative bandwagon. Because it worked so well under Bush.

Courting evangelicals and other religious voters, Barack Obama today called for an expansion of President Bush's initiative distributing federal aid to church-based groups that provide community services.

"The challenges we face today - from saving our planet to ending poverty - are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need an all hands on deck approach," Obama said a few moments ago at a press conference outside a community ministry in Zanesville, Ohio.

Obama promised the faith-based initiative would be "central" to his administration if he is elected.

Oh, awesome. Just awesome.

Seriously, what the hell is this? How does Obama propose to conduct the oversight that will be necessary to insure that no proselytizing goes along with whatever government-funded service the individual faith-based programs are providing? And does he do it with a straight face?

Barack. Change-meister. Buddy. You can do better than this. I get it, really, I do--you're trying everything you can to pick up the Christians who are disillusioned with the Republican party--but can't you come up with a different, a better, a, a... a more Constitutional, perhaps, way of doing it?

Surfacing for Breath

After a mind-boggling ten days without Intarwebz access, I am safely ensconced in my uncle's house in far west suburban Chicago. The last week was spent in the haven of McCormick's Creek State Park in southwestern Indiana, a place my family has been retreating to in one form or another for the better part of eighty years.

I have pictures out the ass, but my laptop isn't cooperating at the moment, so I'm borrowing my aunt's computer.

Anyway.

Following the road from the park gatehouse as it curves past the tennis courts and runs through the woods, you don't notice at first that the cabins are perched somewhat precariously on a thin thumb of level ground surrounded on three sides by massive sinkholes. The sinkholes are a quirky byproduct of the limestone foundation underlying much of Owen, Monroe, and Lawrence counties south of Indianapolis. As water courses between the underground layers of stone, caves are hollowed out. When the ceilings collapse, voila. Sinkholes the size of Assembly Hall.

The trail to the creek starts at the rear circle of cabins and follows a narrow ridge as it slopes steeply down, a merely large sinkhole on the right, a huge one on the left. They don't photograph well. Beech, tulip, and maple trees march resolutely down the sides of the holes, the giants growing up from the bottoms matching the crowns of their higher cousins despite being rooted some fifty feet lower. One hundred, one hundred and fifty feet they tower, the canopy blocking all but a few thin beams of sun. Maple branches break the middle layer into horizontal planes; young hickories and muscle elms elbow each other for the dregs of the sunlight nearest the forest floor.

On the floor itself, a profusion of plants covers the humus formed by fallen leaves. A grove of mayapples here, a riot of wild ginger there, nightshade and dotting everywhere. Occasionally a low moss- and fern-covered hummock of earth stands sentinel over a bleak oval depression, an open grave the sole monument to the giant tree whose falling and uprooting dug it. Eager saplings crowd the sun-soaked forest gap; only the fastest growing will eventually supplant the giant trees to either side.

Closer to the creek, the forest changes, a profusion of ferns and a parade of sycamores signalling greater proximity to the water table. Where the creekbend has washed away the soil beneath the sycamores, limestone cobbles are suspended in air by interwoven roots. Where the trees are long gone, the roots remain, a cephalopod of wood squirming in the mud, clinging to the rocks in futility. Dragonflies flit from weed to weed, water striders skim the surface of still pools, crawdads skulk beneath the rocks, and tiny bass and sunfish flee from your shadow.

The massive floods of early June have scoured the creekbed clean, leaving clear water mostly free of sediment, running cold and gurgling over the newly-dumped cobble bars. In the lower reaches of the creek you can stand on the bank eight feet above the water and look up to see muddy leaves and tree trunks above your eye level, a stark testimony to the volume of water that moved through here. The two-foot-diameter tree trunks piled like Lincoln logs speak to its violence.

On this day, though, the current burbles cheerfully along to the soundtrack provided by wood thrushes and the wood peewee. Notoriously difficult to spot, they are rendered even more invisible by a canopy that is twenty feet higher than the last time you were here. No matter. Simply hearing them is enough.

That's McCormick's Creek. For six blessed days, my heart was home.

Off to the Floody Midwest Edition

The annual escape from Tucson in June commences tomorrow; we hop the train in Flagstaff and head east and hope the railroad bridges in southwestern Iowa are still intact. The family is converging on a small state park in southern Indiana that has been our hearts' home for the past eighty years or so. Unfortunately, it's also located smack dab in the middle of the worst flooding Indiana has seen, ever. The park itself is up on a hill above the White River, but we buy our beer in the little town of Spencer, which is at the bottom of the hill and now under the White River. Hundreds of people have been evacuated so far. The river was expected to crest last night and recede through this week, but more storms are rolling in on Friday, right before we turn up.

McCormick's Creek usually looks like this:

A mellow little waterfall.

This is what it looked like last week:


Less so.

Anyway. Should we come through the floodwaters unscathed, I have an additional week and a half in the Chicago area, most of which is likely to be spent playing cards and drinking wine on my aunt and uncle's back porch. Intermittent nature, culture, and drunken birdwatching posting from Chicago is possible in a couple of weeks, but given the current sorry state of our laptop's modem, it may be a check-back-in-July kind of deal.

Headline of the Day

From the Chicago Tribune: Operation lets Muslim women reclaim virginity and lives.

To the Chicago Tribune (for that headline), the idiot men who view a rupturable hymen as a use-by date that supersedes every other attribute their brides have, and the doctors who perform the surgeries: fuck you.

Gynecologists report that in the past few years, more Muslim women are asking for certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.

Let's clarify a few very simple things. First, the presence or absence of a hymen is roughly as relevant to virginal status as the presence or absence of a hat is relevant to status as a Steelers fan. If you spend much time on a bike, or a horse, or a seesaw when you're little, chances are good your hymen is going to unzip itself without the help of a penis. Men who believe that blood on the sheets is the only guarantee they've married a virgin are ignorant; men who decide to punish their wives for not screaming and bleeding on initial wedding-night penetration are ignorant assholes.

Second, shelling out thousands of dollars to get a flap of skin sliced from your vaginal wall and sewn to the other side solely in order to enable your new husband to rip the surgical scar open and then thrust against the torn tissues repeatedly isn't reclaiming your virginity. It's just elective mutilation undergone to assure that your ignorant asshole of a husband will get enough of an ego boost from his bloody dick that he won't divorce you on your wedding night, beat you, or give you back to your father so he can beat you.

The furor followed the revelation two weeks ago that a court in Lille, in northern France, had annulled the 2006 marriage of two French Muslims because the groom discovered his bride was not the virgin she had claimed to be.

Some feminists, lawyers and doctors warned that the court's acceptance of the centrality of virginity in marriage would encourage more Frenchwomen from Arab and African Muslim backgrounds to have their hymens restored. But there is much debate about whether the procedure is an act of liberation or repression.

Wow, let me think about that for all of two seconds. Liberation or oppression, liberation or oppression... surgical mutilation designed to enable coital mutilation, the reduction of women's lives not to only to their sexual status, but to a small flap of tissue that may be absent even if the sacred virginal status is present, the complete focus on the woman's virginity and complete indifference to the man's, ownership of a woman's sexuality by her father... liberation or oppression? Do they seriously even need to ask?

I'm not even going to waste my time on the American women who apparently think this is the best Valentine's present ever for their husbands, independent of any medieval religious and cultural mores that threaten to destroy them if they don't comply. Because nothing says I love you like giving your guy the chance to rip you open all over again.

Vote McCain. Because He Understands Foreign Relations Like Nobody's Business.

It's so refreshing to learn that it isn't just Iran and al Qaeda that John McCain has ass-backwards.



So apparently the next time George Bush is in the mood for some German neck rubs, he'll be doing it with a guy whose eyes he's already looked into to see his soul. This is going to be AWESOME.

Summer Sporadicity

The combination of ungodly Tucson summer heat (it's been a cool spring by Sonoran standards, but once it gets about 85 I am effectively done until fall), gasoline price angst, and hopefully baseless terror over what my prospects would be should the contract archaeology market go belly-up are conspiring to severely limit my ability to churn out regular posts that are worth reading.

Do stop by regularly anyway; I'm sure I'll get over it in a couple of weeks.

John McCain is a huge douche. I'm just sayin'.

Well, This is Distressing

Not that I'm overly familiar with Bolthouse Farms, but the name is awesome enough. But no. They ponied up 100K for California's anti-marriage-equality amendment, so please eschew their products in favor of the far less awesomely named but more progressive Naked or Odwalla. Even though Odwalla kinda sucks, to be honest.

Other regrettably delicious foods to be avoided include Focus on the Family donors Chik-Fil-A and, if you're in the Chicago area, Oberweis Dairy. Both of these break my heart. Damn these fundamentalists and their delicious chicken and waffle fries! And their amazing chocolate milk sold in funky sub-rectangular glass bottles that clank together before pouring out sublime creamy chocolately goodness!

Who else has waffle fries? Do we know? Buffalo Joe's in Evanston has killer waffle fries, but that's a bit of a drive from Tucson. Mmmm... waffle fries.

After These Lovely Fermented Possum Brain Hors d'Oeuvres, the Main Course is Sure to be Lovely

So it's Obama, apparently and finally, please-Jesus-hopefully bringing the Democratic nominating process to a close, letting us snort awake from a restless series of disturbing images just long enough to roll over and fall into the nice deep nightmare of the next five months. The primaries were soaked in a distressing amount of sexism and racism, exposing America yet again as a place where racism is not Tony Snow's distant memory but an active enough force for one in five Kentucky voters to tell pollsters that they're voting against Obama solely because he's black, a place where young women claim they're not feminists because feminism is no longer either required or useful while another woman stands up in public to ask John McCain how he's going to "beat the bitch" and the only response is raucous laughter.

Now we get to see a bunch of collective head explosions as Clinton supporters who swore they'd either vote for McCain or stay home should Obama get the nomination begin to weigh the relative merits of clinging to principle and choosing political expediency. I understand the frustration at feeling undercut, of having been undercut by the patriarchy one more damn time, but at the same time I would hope that the specter of a John McCain presidency would be enough to outweigh any compulsion to cast a fuck-you vote for the opposition. Just as I would expect Obama supporters to vote for Clinton were the situation reversed. Hey, I was an Edwards girl, so I'm equally disillusioned by certain things that have emanated from both the Obama and Clinton camps, was equally optimistic about others, and have always been firmly committed to keeping McCain out of the White House. There may be a time to take your ball and go home, but this ain't it.

Here we go, then, with the general election. You think the primaries were ugly? The Repubs have been biding their time, sharpening two sets of knives. The dick-handled sexism knives are going back into the box under the bed, for now; you can be certain the hood-handled racism knives are getting an extra kiss from the stone, the dog whistles getting a final tuning. How far have we come as a nation since July 9, 1868? We get to find out this summer. I'm not optimistic.

Product Review Monday

The former part-time housemate bought a Wii over the weekend and decided it should be our current and perpetual housemate. I thought I might be okay with that until I woke up this morning with a sore shoulder from two consecutive nights of 5+ hour Wii sessions. Forthwith, the verdicts on the Wii Sports pack that was bundled with the console:

Bowling: I am just as crappy at Wii bowling as in real life. It's a frighteningly accurate virtual recreation of my annoying hook that is juuuuuuust predictable enough to rely on for a decent first ball and juuuuuust inconsistent enough to bollocks up 4-9-10 splits every time. Major plus: no grimy hands and questionable rental shoe sanitizing. Major minus: no bowling alley fries and draft beer.

Baseball: Pitching is fun, since my real-life curveball doesn't break nearly as hard and my fastball tops out at about 50. Timing the batting is a bit tricky, but you're helped by realistic ball rotation that allows you to pick up on whether it's going to break outside or have the bottom drop out. Major plus: satisfying crack when you make good contact, no sunburn. Major minus: elementary schoolyard kickball baserunning where no one tags up or takes a lead, inexplicable fielding lapses.

Golf: As long as you don't overswing, you're not going to slice the shit out of your drive or skull your approach over the green, making this game the grand champion best escape into fantasyland offered by Wii Sports. Putting is every bit as dodgy as in real life, but since you're making it on in two, who cares? The nine hole course will probably become overly familiar after a few weeks, but changing wind conditions keep it interesting, and the wicked four-island par five is a heartstopper no matter how many times you play. Sure, you can just hit the shit out of it and bypass one of the fairways and just drive the green. It will work this time, honest. Major plus: ease of lining up shots and guaranteed good form means you don't even miss the absent curse like a sailor and wrap wedge around nearest tree functions. Major minus: can't think of one right now. No carts, maybe.

Tennis: Again, a frighteningly accurate recreation of my crappy real world tennis game, despite lessons as a kid and my parents' best efforts, although the game doesn't allow me to sky the ball over the back fence but instead funnels all that failure into simply missing the ball with great frequency and looking bad while doing it. Do be sure to move all the furniture up against the walls and leave yourselves plenty of space, especially when playing doubles. Major plus: working up a sweat while standing in the living room, killer slo-mo replays showing exactly how high you jumped and how many times you flailed your racquet before face-planting back into the court, puffs of dust. Major minus: the tendency to stand to close to your playing partners and maybe inadvertently whack them in the back of the head.

Boxing: Oh Christ. Does a major fucking gasping for air workout tickle your fancy? Then try boxing. Just make sure you're well-hydrated beforehand. I suppose it could be a handy election catharsis tool as well, especially if you just play against the other controller without an actual person holding it. Major plus: no actual blood or concussions. Major minus: you feel run over by a truck anyway.

So yeah, Wii. The games are wicked expensive, so if you're not a traditional console gamer or haven't been since the days of the Atari 2600, don't let Wii Sports fool you into thinking that fifty-dollar FIFA 2008 game will be a piece of cake.