The Wild Winds of Fortune

I haven’t forgotten you guys, really.  All, oh… six of you.  Although that’s not fair — I know more people who read me on RSS feed, which isn’t tracked on Sitemeter.

Life is what is what it is.  Which means right now, things are getting in the way.  And, yes, I know, if I were the writer I want to be I wouldn’t let it.

I actually wrote nearly two thousand words during the time I was computerless, all in a composition book.  I just have not had a chance to enter them into Blogger.  They are a variety of topics — some of them actually analytical and thought-provoking! At least for me.

So I’ll be back on a more regular basis when I can.  I’m working on it.

Every so often I stumble across something I should have heard years ago but somehow managed to miss. Like this morning…

I love Weird Al.  I especially love some of his original works — nobody does a better breakup (or dysfunctional relationship) song.  “My Baby’s in Love with Eddie Vedder,” “You Don’t Love Me Any More,” and, most wonderfully, “One More Minute.” (How can you not love a writer who thinks of images such as “I’d rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue than spend one more minute with you”?)  This morning, though, my iTunes tossed up a song I don’t remember hearing before: “I Was Only Kidding.” 

Um, yep.  Been on the other side of that one.  Ouch.  I love that it turns into a revenge fantasy.

Still not as good as “One More Minute,” but close.

Conversation with the Red-Headed Menace, concerning his track coach, who in addition to being a former Olympian attended Stanford Law and graduated a couple of years ahead of me.

RHM:  There are sports lawyers?!?!?
Mom: Of course there are sports lawyers.  Wherever a field of human endeavor exists, there are lawyers involved.
RHM:  Cutting down trees.
Mom:  EIRs, Endangered Species Act issues, suits from loggers, suits from the Sierra Club…
RHM: Nuclear power plants.
Mom:  Give me a break! Permitting, liability for negligent releases of radioactive materials…
RHM: Battlefield reenactments!!
Mom:  Potential personal liability issues, permitting and possible land use.
RHM:  Art.
Mom: Copyright.  And disputes over ownership.  And museum tort liability in slip and falls.
RHM, clearly frustrated, ponders….:  AHA! THEORETICAL ASTROPHYSICS!!!
Mom:  Patent law.*
RHM:  Dammit. 
At which point, he sullenly got out of the car and stomped off to Phys Ed.

Mom: 1
RHM: 0

Because Mom, trained as a lawyer, may not know the law anymore, but she still does know how to bullshit convincingly. 

*This is, of course, a totally bogus answer.  I have absolutely no clue whether patent law has any bearing on theoretical astrophysics whatsoever.  In fact, given that it is, um, theoretical, the only legal implications I can see (other than copyright issues implicit when one publishes work) are if two astrophysicists lose it completely and starting hitting each other with their Powerbooks.  And then the issues are potential claims of assault and battery.  If anyone can actually think about the ways in which lawyers could be involved in theoretical astrophysics, please let me know. 

My two younger children are arguing about the ethics of assassinating leaders.  One is studying W.W. I, the other W.W. II.

At least they are not discussing Halo or Pokemon.

So the 83rd Annual Academy Awards have come and gone.  Herewith, a few notes:

Dear red-carpet commentator:  given the term’s origins, calling a 14-year-old girl a “nymphet” is not really a nice things to do.

No egregiously bad dresses this year, but the sooner the bow-on-butt/bustle craze disappears, the better.  I mean, most of these women have no backside to speak of — do they really have to emphasize that fact?  And besides, those things just look silly.

I love Tim Gunn. Seriously.

The opening montage was far better than I expected it to be.  Franco and Hathaway make an adorable couple (chemistry, even!) and she is, as Kirk Douglas noted, gorgeous.

Speaking of Kirk Douglas and the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, Melissa Leo’s heartfelt acceptance speech — from her asking Douglas what he was doing after the show to her dropping the “f-bomb”(and even better, her reaction to herself) — was priceless.

The adapted screenplay included Toy Story 3 as being “based on previous movies”?  Really?   Of course,  I can only think of two cases where sequels were nominated in any of the major categories (Godfather II and Return of the King) and both of them were based on books.

The wins by The Social Network and The King’s Speech in the screenplay categories were completely predictable.

As was Randy Newman’s win for Best Song.

While I preferred the How to Train Your Dragon score, having the words “Academy Award winner” and “Trent Reznor” sitting next to each other creates a lovely sense of cognitive dissonance.  It’s always wonderful when the world turns out to be a much more complicated place than you imagine.

Christian Bale is English? Really? You could have fooled me.* And what in God’s name has Geoffrey Rush done with his hair?  I really hope that’s for a role he’s playing.

Cute musical number, Anne.  Totally irrelevant to anything at hand, but cute.  And that blue dress you changed into is absolutely killer.

Has Pixar won best animation every year it’s been offered except the first? When Shrek won?**

Inside Job is an important documentary about serious subjects. Exit Through the Gift Shop is a bizarre movie about non-serious subjects,*** which may or may not have been a hoax.  Clearly, the more significant film won.  Nonetheless, I was sort of hoping Exit would win, just to see if Banksy would show up.

No applause between dead people during the “In Memoriam” segment.  I guess the Academy realized that it was a little tacky to have people cheer a lot for Paul Newman and not so much for Sidney Lumet Pollack, as happened last year. [Sorry, Sidney Lumet died in 2011.  Oops.]

Bring back Billy Crystal!  Best Oscar host ever.

Of course Natalie Portman won for Best Actress.  Having a nervous breakdown on screen is the sort of thing the Academy just loves.  Also, she looks so cute pregnant.

Having Jeff Bridges speak to each nominee was a great touch.  Same for Sandra Bullock.  Her “Dude, Dude, Dude, you won this last year!” to Bridges was especially endearing.

I would give good money to see Colin Firth dancing after his Oscar win.  Of course, I would pay money to see Colin Firth do just about anything — I saw the film version of Mamma Mia!.

Sorry Academy, as much as I liked The King’s Speech (see Colin Firth, above, not to mention Geoffrey Rush, who was equally good) Darren Aronofksy took more risks with Black Swan than Tom Hooper did with The King’s Speech.

Wait, Tom Hooper’s mother found the story when attending a play reading ?  And it still fit in the Original Screenplay category?  How does that work?

And, while I disliked it intensely, Black Swan is simply a better movie (as a movie) than The King’s Speech is.

Can someone explain to me the rationale behind having a bunch of elementary school kids singing “Over the Rainbow” to end the show, which was, as usual, already running late?

In two more days I get the Entertainment Weekly issue with its usually somewhat snarky analysis of the awards and the fashion.  And it is only a few short months until the Tonys.

I can hardly wait.




*Actually, looking him up on IMDb, he’s Welsh. Wow.

**2001, in the first award in the category, Shrek beat out Monsters, Inc.  In 2006, Happy Feet beat out Cars.  Still, Pixar has won six awards in the eight years they have been nominated, which is a pretty good batting average.  I still think How To Train Your Dragon was a better movie than TS3, and Despicable Me — which wasn’t even nominated! — was a better movie still.

** Your Mileage May Vary on whether or not you think street art is important.  Maybe.  As much as I recognize it as art, and as much as I love art, it still pales in comparison to the major economic meltdown.

The Supreme Court just handed down their decision in Snyder v. Phelps.  They got it exactly right.

From John Roberts’ eloquent majority opinion:

Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech. 

     Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

 It feels weird to be cheering a win for the WBC.  But in the end this decision shields not only the WBC, but also war protesters, or environmental activists, or same-sex marriage supporters.  This “different course” Roberts speaks of has to protect all of us — or it can not safely protect any of us.

I have a loaner laptop.  Huzzah! I may get around to actually posting things I’ve written over the past two weeks as I have been away.

This weekend was “Psychotics in Media” weekend:  on Friday night the Rocket Scientist and I saw Black Swan and on Saturday the Resident Shrink and I saw Next to to Normal.  Nothing like watching crazy people on stage and screen to reaffirm one’s basic belief that the world is in fact insane.  Watching the latter with a psychologist was amusing, however.  She says they got the psychiatry basically right.

I have a backlog of posts about several different things which I really should put up here before they become too out of date.  On the other hand, right this evening I am feeling brain dead.

The past three weeks has seen quite a number of really misogynistic proposed bills at the state and federal level.  It’s quite disturbing.  It makes me feel relieved, sadly enough, that I do not have daughters.  I would not want to be a young woman now, and it would be very upsetting to think of what a child of mine would be faced with.  This does not mean that I do not fight as hard as I can against the terrible misogyny that seems to be rearing its terrible head right now, simply that it is not quite as immediate.  I recognize that this is a privilege that other mothers do not have.  My job is to raise up young men who are as appalled as I am about what is going on, and who are as determined to fight as I am.  I think I can do this.

I turn fifty in two months.  I am trying not to feel old, and also trying not to lie to people about my age. Both of them are proving difficult.  I have decided against having a tattoo, for medical-related reasons, so am at a loss to know what to do to mark this momentous occasion.  Going to a dive bar and getting really, really drunk, as attractive as it sounds, is not particularly noteworthy.  On the other hand, maybe the solution is simply to ignore it.  Age is just a number, right?

I am rereading one of my favorite “popcorn”* books:  Letters of the Twentieth Century: America 1900-2000.  It is by turns infuriating (the letters sent to Jackie Robinson after he crossed the color line), intriguing (Ayn Rand’s letter to Frank Lloyd Wright — sorry, libertarians, but she was a loon), amusing (Groucho Marx’s letter to Warner Brothers when they attempted to stop him from naming one of this movies A Night in Casablanca, or my favorite, a series of exchanges between an ad executive at Ford and the poet Marianne Moore regarding the naming of a new car, or Clyde Barrow’s letter to Henry Ford telling him what a great car he made) and moving (an Oklahoma woman’s account of life in the Dust Bowl, a Vietnam soldier’s letter to a friend regarding the killing of a nine-year-old child).  The human spirit is an amazing thing.

Goodnight all.  It’s good to be back, more or less.

*Popcorn books are books that are collections of items that you can read bits and pieces of.

“I’m a teenager.  Half of my motivation for anything is impressing girls.”  The Red Headed Menace (discussing why he’s doing track).

There is a reason I have not been posting the past few days.  I’ve had limited net access — the AirPort went kaput, so the only computer with access requires standing for a while, or sitting in painful (to me) chairs.  While this has proven acceptable for checking email and Facebook, it doesn’t allow for the lack of distraction needed for blog posting.

I have been writing, however: on paper.  So once I get a new laptop (which will hopefully be sooner rather than later), you may end up flooded with several posts all at once.

I was going to write something for the anniversary of the Columbia disaster, or at least link to what I wrote at the time, but my friend Bill Gawne pointed me towards the best tribute to Columbia I’ve ever read.  It’s a little long, but well worth reading.

Anything I might say feels redundant, somehow.

When is it rape?

That’s the question raised by a bill currently in committee in the House of Representatives, H.R. 3.  And the answer the bill gives is pernicious.

The bill itself purports to be about eliminating “federal funding for abortion.”  Bullshit.  There has been no federal funding for abortion — through any federally paid for health plans, including those offered to any federal employee — for years.  The bill really is about eliminating any health plan coverage for abortion:  it would make any premium paid for an insurance plan that covered abortion non-tax deductible.  Guess how many insurers would choose to retain abortion coverage under those circumstances?

However, there have always been those exceptions: rape, incest, and life of the mother. (Not the health of the mother:  even in this bill, if a pregnancy would result in a woman ending up in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, but it wouldn’t actually kill her, then there is no abortion coverage allowed.)  But apparently, “rape” was just not specific enough for the sons-of-bitches who wrote this bill.

The only recognized rape, the only rape that you will be allowed to have insurance coverage for, is “forcible rape.”

Forcible rape.

So, what does that mean? Do there need to be bruises or broken bones?  Does there need to be a knife or gun?  What if the woman is told about the knife or gun but doesn’t actually see them?  What if she is married to the bastard and the threat is not to her but to her children?  What if she is drunk? Drugged? Unconscious? In a coma?

Developmentally disabled?

What if she is held down?  How hard does she need to fight to get free?  If she doesn’t struggle enough, does that mean it doesn’t count?  What if she is just terrified?

This bill does not recognize statutory rape, either, except for incest.  If a 13 year old is coerced into sex (and let’s face it, there are a lot of ways to coerce a young girl into sex that do not involve “force”) by her father or brother, and gets pregnant, she can get an abortion and have her health plan cover the cost.  But not if she is coerced into sex by her 20 year-old camp counselor, or her 32 year-old next-door neighbor, or her 53 year-old gym teacher.

Presumably, too, in order to have coverage be allowed there would have to be a police report.  How else would you prove force?  There are women who do not report being raped, for some very good reasons, too: ranging from fear of public shaming, to desire to move past the trauma, to fear of what their attackers (or sometimes their own family members) will do.

The perniciousness goes even further:  do you really want your insurance company deciding if a rape is forcible enough to be eligible for coverage?  Do you really think they will ever find that force existed, unless the woman was left very badly beaten, with very visible marks of trauma?

I have had several people tell me this morning that “this doesn’t change the legal definition of who can be charged with rape.”  That is entirely beside the point.  The issue is of humane treatment for women* who have undergone the horror of rape, only to be faced with being forced to undergo a potentially hazardous experience (and make no mistake, pregnancy is a far more dangerous proposition than legal abortion) before she can heal from her ordeal.

Funny, anti-abortion activists spin this as a freedom from having to financially support a procedure they find objectionable on what are, at their heart, religious reasons.  Sort of a warped freedom of religion argument.   What about those of us whose religions require us to care for and take care of those among of who have been victims of violence? Who believe that God calls us to support the victimized in doing what they need to do for their own well-being?  I guess our religious beliefs don’t matter.

Please, please, write your Representative now.  I would say that this atrocity is dead in the water, given the makeup of Congress and a Democratic president who would surely veto it, but you never know.

*Poor women, that is.  Financially well off women will be able, as always, to pay for — and to travel to other places for — legal abortions.

For….

Francis R. Scobee
Michael J. Smith
Judith A. Resnik
Ellison S. Onizuka
Ronald E. McNair
Gregory B. Jarvis
Sharon Christa McAuliffe,

Rest in Peace.

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds…and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of…wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space…
…put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Also, the best speech Ronald Reagan ever gave.

On this day, twenty-five years ago, the world changed.

It is one of those “Where were you when…” moments.  Where were you when the planes flew into the World Trade Center?  Where were you when Kennedy was shot?  Where were you when…

Challenger blew up.

I have written about Challenger before.  In many ways, I’m not sure I can add to what I wrote then. But January 28 has a resonance for me that the other notable dates in what a friend of mine at Goddard Space Flight Center calls “dead astronaut week” don’t.  I was too young to be affected by the loss of three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire.  When Columbia disintegrated over east Texas, I was saddened, and worried about the impact, both professionally and personally, on people I or my husband knew, or on NASA in general, but its impact on me was more removed.


Challenger‘s destruction, though, terrified me.  Those twin spirals of smoke trailing off into the deep blue Florida January sky would crop up in nightmares off and on for years.

I was the wife of a man whose sole mission in life was to reach outer space.  The Rocket Scientist had wanted to  be an astronaut since the age of about four.  I have not met many people who have been so single-minded about a goal.

Even though I knew about his dreams, and knew at an intellectual level that spaceflight was dangerous,  I had not internalized exactly how dangerous an undertaking it was.  I was not alone: the fact that civilians  were being taken along shows how blasè we all had gotten about this space business.  (Senator Jake Garn* may have been a pilot, but that was not what got him his gig as the first sitting member of Congress to fly on the shuttle.) Christa MacAuliffe was on Challenger precisely because at some level it was thought a safe place for a teacher to be. 

Challenger changed all that.  As I looked at the television, and then looked over at my husband staring in horrified fascination at the smoke trails, I couldn’t help but think “that could be him, in a few years time.”  Even before asking him, I knew that nothing had changed.

I had a decision to make.  When someone you love desires danger, the time to figure out whether you can cope with that is not when they get what they want.  The time to decide whether you can stand watching your husband and best friend be strapped to a rocket and shot into the atmosphere is not when he is selected for a mission, or even when he is chosen for the astronaut corps.  It is before he even begins the application process.  

You decide to deal with it, or you leave.  Those are your choices.  Trying to change someone who has their eyes on the horizon, for whom the dream of space is and always will be their first love, even above you, is hopeless and cruel.  For both of you.

I stayed.  All through the years of applying.  There was a callback, which in itself, given the numbers of people who apply, is pretty good — but in the end, my husband didn’t become an astronaut.  And through all those years, every once in a while, the nightmare would return, with the smoke trailing off into the sky — but instead of seven strangers in there, it was him.  The end of that dream brought its own issues — he had to find a way to channel that first love into other avenues — but at least the Challenger nightmares ended.

The day after Columbia disintegrated, I asked the Rocket Scientist (who at that point had passed the age where being selected for the astronaut program was realistic) if, having seen what had happened to Columbia, if he would still have gone in to space.  “I would go tomorrow,” he answered without hesitation.  I mentioned this online to my friend at Goddard, who said “Of course.  We all would.  This doesn’t change any of that.”

And if my husband had that chance, even given Columbia, even given Challenger, I would do what every loved one of every astronaut or every astronaut want-to-be must do:  I would swallow hard, smile, and say “Vaya con dios, love.  The kids and I will be waiting for you when you get back.”

So I find myself thinking today not just about the astronauts, but about their families.  About what it would be like to have experienced such a tragedy.  And about all those who send the ones they love into danger with a hug.**  And about the courage and conviction the families of those seven men and women showed in response to such heartbreak.***

And I salute them.

*Jake Garn was so spacesick on his flight, that a scale of spacesickness is named after him. [pdf. p. 13-35]  “One Garn” is the highest level of spacesickness an astronaut can experience.

**Not just astronauts: the families of soldiers, cops, and firefighters face this on an everyday basis.

*** The families of the Challenger astronauts founded The Challenger Centers for Space Education, a remarkable monument to their loves ones.

I am freaking coooooollllllddddd.  If I wanted to freeze to death I would have stayed in Massachusetts after I graduated Wellesley.  The next time I think, “Baltimore-D.C. in January, how bad could it be?  It’s not like it’s Chicago or Boston” please slap some sense into me? Please?

In the words of Jimmy Buffet, “I wanna go where it’s waaaaarrrrmmmmm!”

Eating at the bar in a hotel — especially a nice hotel — is freaking expensive.  Even if you did forego having breakfast at the hotel this morning in favor of Starbucks.

Being in a pissy mood is no reason to go out and buy not one but two books on crime, especially on murder.  And spending parts of today reading about serial killers.  You do want to be able to sleep tonight, right?

I am a very cheap drunk.  I had two (expensive — if I had known they were going to be that much I would have ordered the house specialty drinks which were cheaper) Apple Martinis, on the grounds that I am going to the National Gallery tomorrow. (Don’t worry, that last sentence makes sense, sort of, in context.) I did not have a third, and although a large part of my brain is screaming for me to call down for room service to bring me up an Irish coffee, the small portion of my brain which is in fact not inebriated at this moment is overruling it.  I desperately need to have more chocolate, however, and may go out in search of some, although, given the aforementioned inebriation, that might not be such a good idea.

I am writing.  This, under the circumstances is somewhat amazing.  I have to remember not to blog anything I would find embarrassing in the morning, however.  Of course, I may find this whole post embarrassing.

Damn, that was good onion soup.  The jazz trio was very nice too, as was sitting right in front of the fire and eating good onion soup and drinking Apple Martinis and reading Criminal Minds: Sociopaths, Serial Killers & Other Deviants.  I now know who Edmund Kemper is.  Oh, boy.

I wish Mythbusters was on. I feel like watching a good explosion.  Also, Tory Belecci is a seriously cute geek.  Of course, as far as I am concerned, most geeks are seriously cute.  I have a penchant for geeks.  As my Facebook interests say, “Smart People Turn Me On.”

I am trying to figure out what sort of trouble I could get into right now.  I feel like trouble.  Probably better just to go to bed with a good book. About serial killers.

‘Night all.