Prom. No Prom. Prom. No Prom. Prom!

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know about the whole Constance McMillen thing. In case you have been living under a rock, allow me to summarize: Itawamba Agricultural High School (Fulton, Mississippi) had a regularly scheduled prom. Then, Constance McMillen asked to bring her girlfriend as her date, and to wear a tuxedo (Gasp!). Surprise! - they said no. When the ACLU informed the school district that this was all sorts of not cool, they canceled the Entire Prom. Even though they'd probably already paid the DJ. Then the prom was back on, but it was a privately organized parent-supported prom at a furniture store (what?), but Tuxedo Constance and her girlfriend were not invited. Then Constance (presumably the bravest 17-year-old girl Ever) sued to try to force the school board to un-cancel the original prom, and then the parents got scared that they'd get sued as well, so they canceled the Furniture Prom, too! So it was on, then off, then on, then off, and, you guessed it, on again! The parent-sponsored prom is now back in business, except this time at the local Country Club. Because Country Clubs are famous for their open-mindedness...


And get this, the school board testified - under oath! - that the "media attention generated [by Constance contacting the ACLU] distracted the school from its educational mission, and that the board canceled prom in an attempt to restore order." Imagine how much less distracted and disordered they'd be if they had just let the poor girl enjoy her prom in the first place.


Now, this is Mississippi we're talking about. We don't honestly expect all of our civil liberties to be upheld in Mississippi. "First Amendment? What's that? Is that the one with the guns?" But come on. It's also the twenty-first century. You can't openly discriminate (against someone who is clearly a very smart girl) and not expect to get called out for it. Well, I guess you can try. But then you get all flustered and have to cancel and un-cancel the stupid prom a million times. During all of these proceedings, it came out (hah!) that Constance wasn't the only student at IAHS to contact the ACLU this year. A transgender student who attended the school for one (1) day (!) was sent home on his second day. When he returned after his suspension, they suspended him again. When the ACLU asked the school district to provide reasoning for his suspension (which was conveniently left blank on his suspension forms), they refused to talk about it. Luckily, this student has since found a safer, more accepting place to be, but holy crap Mississippi. Not building a good reputation here with the American Civil Liberties Union. Or our first gay president.


Anyway...on to the historical part of this ridiculous ordeal...


Meanwhile in the Blue States, there has been an overwhelming outpouring of support for Constance from all around the rest of the country. Facebook's Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom currently has 423,000+ supporters. This is more than 100 times the population of Fulton, Mississippi. In the regular, slightly less bigoted world, people have crawled out of the woodwork to make sure this school district gets what it deserves. Dan Savage took it upon himself to sic his loyal, kinky readership on the Itawamba School District: "Now it's our job to make discriminating against (and retaliating against) vulnerable gay students a much bigger distraction for the Itawamba County School District understand than allowing Constance McMillen to attend prom ever would've been." Well put, Dan, well put. Thousands of people have written angry, distracting letters to the superintendent and school board (you can, too!). On March 19, Constance went on The Ellen Degeneres Show and was awarded a $30,000 scholarship (presumably for college learnin'). And best of all, a high school in Marin County, California has openly extended her and her girlfriend an invitation to their enlightened liberal prom. She hasn't RSVP'd yet, but they're hopeful. It's nice to see so many people outraged at such a ridiculously intolerant event. Bigoted school boards in Mississippi remind us that we still have a long way to go, but we've certainly come a long way, too.

Here's Constance's Thank-You message to everyone who has supported her (try to ignore the southern accent). I sure hope her prom date is worth all this trouble. Oh, and suck it, Mississippi.

Take THAT, Orthopoxvirus variola vera!

As a general rule, we humans think we're pretty special. Our collective species-ego is probably the biggest in the universe (except for maybe these guys, because look how badass! If only they breathed fire and flew around hunting women and children - then we could slay them!). Anyway, it is true that we have accomplished some pretty impressive stuff. If we hadn't, then I would have nothing to write about (the real travesty). One of these impressive things is the eradication of smallpox, which actually happened in the haze that was the 1970s (even more impressive). Just to give you an idea of how incredible this was: smallpox is thought to have killed somewhere around 300-500 million people in the twentieth century alone. This is roughly equal to the total number of people currently on Facebook. The World Health Organization reported two million deaths (out of 15 million cases) as recently as 1967. After some serious vaccinating, the eradication of the disease was certified in December of 1979. To this day, smallpox is the only human infectious disease to be successfully eradicated. Holy Awesome Batman!

Here's a quick and dirty background on the smallpox virus. It is believed to have emerged in the human population around 10,000 B.C., but who knows, really - we weren't keeping great records what with the Ice Age and everything.  It became known as "smallpox" in 15th century Europe to distinguish it from the "great pox" - syphilis. Silly, slutty Europeans. Transmission occurs through inhalation of the airborne virus, usually after close contact with an infected individual. The virus invades the respiratory mucosa or mouth and throat, spreads to lymph nodes, and eventually ends up in the bloodstream, spleen, bone marrow, bla bla bla, you get pox. Along with the characteristic skin lesions, smallpox causes fever, muscle pain, fatigue, headache, and digestive issues. Depending on the virus type (there are a few), fatality rate ranges from less than 10% to nearly 100%. So it's really kind of a toss-up.

Way back in 1796, we understood about vaccinations (we really are quite impressive). Edward Jenner discovered that inoculation with material from a cowpox lesion resulted in immunity to smallpox. Besides being ridiculously disgusting, this is where we get the word "vaccine." Vacca is Latin for cow. Today, the smallpox vaccine is less gross, but it does cause a pus-filled blister, and leaves a small scar.

Edward Jenner, cowpox pus extraordinaire

The eradication of smallpox required lots of intense monitoring, surveillance, and containment. Whenever an outbreak occurred, infected individuals were isolated, and everyone living close by was vaccinated. This prevented the disease from spreading, and the effort was helped immensely by the fact that smallpox has no animal host, and no carriers. By 1980, smallpox existed only in two laboratories: the CDC in Atlanta and the VECTOR Institute in Russia (it actually has a conservation status of "Extinct in the Wild"). Now we only have to worry about smallpox as biological warfare...

Now, I may be a bleedin' heart liberal, but who the hell are we to decide which viruses can continue plaguing us mercilessly and which cannot? I mean, it's cool and everything that smallpox isn't out killing millions of people a year, but if we learned anything from Jurassic Park, it's that "life...finds a way..." 

Thanks, chaos theorist Jeff Goldblum

This one might come back and bite us. Maybe not as an angry T-Rex, but still. Regardless, the score is currently People, 1, Orthopoxvirus variola vera, 1,000,000,000. It remains to be seen who will come out on top.

2009: Not a good year for famous people

So this is completely irrelevant in the larger scheme of things, but when you stop and think about it, the number of dead celebrities that piled up last year was pretty remarkable.

A quick rundown of the major ones:

Natasha Richardson - Reminiscent of the ski accidents that killed Sonny Bono and one of the Kennedys, but sadder. Poor Liam Neeson.

Bea Arthur - less surprising, since she was in her 80s, but still sad. Golden Girls = Olden Girls.

David Carradine - Oops. Turns out, not so kung fu.

Ed McMahon - I think this is the Publisher's Clearinghouse guy?

Farrah Fawcett - I felt bad for her. Sharing your death day with Michael Jackson is totally unfair. I suppose she was best known for Charlie's Angels, but I remember her best from a certain Jonathan Taylor Thomas movie called Man of the House, where she played a free-spirited (aka big-haired) single mom. Classic cinema.

Michael Jackson - are we done talking about this yet? I am.

Walter Cronkite - apparently, "the most trusted man in America." In 1972. Of course, now that title belongs to Dick Cheney.

Les Paul - legendary.

DJ AM - I don't know who this is. Fortunately, wikipedia does.

Patrick Swayze - We all knew he was sick, but a world without Johnny Castle is not a world I want to live in. Who will keep Baby out of the corner now? We can, however, do without that pederast creeper guy from Donnie Darko.

Brittany Murphy - I had actually forgotten about this one already. Oh well.

There are also a whole bunch of people I've never heard of. I am ok with this.

Finally, this one is from 2008 (actually January 2008), but we are still talking about it. And we are probably always going to be talking about it, because somehow, Heath Ledger is STILL MAKING MOVIES!?! Baffling.

2010 does not appear to be relenting for doomed celebs. We've already lost Howard Zinn, J.D. Salinger, one of the Coreys, Fred Morrison (creator of this fantastic piece of plastic), the guy who invented SpaghettiOs, the Georgian luger with an unpronounceable name, Peter Graves, Rufus Wainwright's mom, Alex Chilton, Davy Crockett, and Marie Osmond's adopted son (actual celebrity status debatable).

And it's only March!

Bear is not the preferred nomenclature, dude. Koalas, please.

Did I ever mention how much I enjoy charismatic megafauna? (I did.) Here in the United States, we have always been fascinated with the creatures from Australia. Especially the rare non-deadly ones. The koala (not to be confused with the koala bear, which does not exist) is the epitome of Down-Under-Cuddliness: it's got fuzzy ears, it snoozes all day in a tree, it looks like it's drunk even though it is not, and it carries its tiny furry babies around in a freakin' pouch. Nothing could be cuter, right? WRONG! Check this out.

Disgustingly adorable, right? So, here's what happened. Due to the aforementioned climate change issue, Australia has had some problems with drought. And by problems, I mean Big Problems. Already a dry country, the past seven years or so have been Australia's dryest in over a century. The majority of the country's "agriculture" comes from the Murray-Darling River basin, which covers over 400,000 square miles. Think bigger than Texas but smaller than Alaska. Eighty (80) percent of the eucalyptus trees in this area, which is basically the entire southeastern quadrant of Australia, are either dead or dying. And what do koalas eat? That's right, eucalyptus. In fact, this is all they eat. Eucalyptus is comprised mostly of indigestible material (obviously), so the koalas have to a) eat a lot of it, and b) try not to move too much, lest they waste precious ATP. I don't know about you, but that seems like less than a winning combination when your food source is rapidly disappearing. Koalas are listed as a priority species for conservation, meaning they're not quite in trouble yet, but it's only a matter of time. Actually, depending on where you look, they range from "abundant" to "locally extinct." So we'll just average it out and say perhaps they're in a little bit of trouble...and just to make things more interesting, there is a koala chlamydia epidemic! Shit!

I'm getting off topic. Anyway, koalas get 90% of their water from eucalyptus leaves. It is rumored that the word "koala" comes from an Aborigine word meaning "no water," but this is unconfirmed. As we all should know by now, water is a crucial ingredient to survival. Unfortunately, for the koala, when there's not enough food, there's not enough water. This has forced a solitary animal to stumble down from the trees and ask people (actually, their primary predator) for a drink of water. Sad. But totally cute. Here are some more pictures:

Aw

Awww

Awwwww (does chlorine get them drunk??)

Holy crap. This is so cute it hurts.

As you can see, they are just hemorrhaging cuteness. Which is why this is sad. People who actually live in Australia rarely see koalas outside of zoos. They are the shy, loner type, and are smart to stay away from us. I actually feel bad for them that they had to swallow their koala pride and stoop to interacting with humans. Just to swallow some koala water.

On a personal note, I was lucky enough to see a koala in the wild. It was far away, up in a tree, and not moving, so it was not actually as exciting as it sounds. But in theory, it was grand. I also got to hold a koala in a koala sanctuary. What I remember most about this experience was that I expected this particular koala to weigh approximately as much as a stuffed animal in the shape of a koala. It did not.

Me 'n' Sprite

So that was a Real Life example of how our changing climate affects the Real World. We're not just making it up. If you really want to help the koalas, you can. But if an animal as charismatic- and mega-a-fauna as the koala is in trouble, I can't help but wonder, what on earth will happen to the ugly ones?

Climate change: not just for crunchy liberals and nerds anymore

While the sane/intelligent/non-comatose population has been well aware of the climate change thing for years, the rest of us are finally starting to come around. It's hard (but apparently not impossible) to ignore the physical evidence that the global climate is changing. Yeah, yeah, it does that on its own....well, not like this. Sorry to have to tell you this Bush Administration, Michael Crichton, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Glenn Beck, the rest of the yahoos at Fox News, and 41% OF AMERICANS (!!!!)....but you are all craaazies.

I could rant/yell/spout statistics for days and days about how ridiculous it is that we are even arguing about this, instead of doing something about it. But I won't. I will simply point out a couple of FACTS that the crazies are going to be hardpressed to ignore/refute/conspire against.

So, basically, scientists went to Antarctica and analyzed air pockets in ice cores dating back to 800,000 years ago. They found (spoiler alert) that carbon dioxide was at significantly lower levels back then. That's statistically significant. Which is like, science. In fact, they found that the CO2 levels are higher right this very second than they ever were during any of those previous 800,000 years. "Hmm," you might think, "I wonder what was happening in that general time period." Only the emergence/expansion/explosion of a dominant group of organisms in the genus Homo. Oh wait, wait, that was us.

For a cogent/fascinating/eloquent explanation of the issues we face due to rising carbon dioxide levels, I recommend The Next One Hundred Years, by Jonathan Weiner. This guy won a Pulitzer (for a different book, but still), and does an excellent job of explaining the problem with having too much carbon floating around. In a nutshell: for a long time, the CO2 level held steady around 315 parts per million. During the mid twentieth century, it started creeping up. And by creeping, I mean skyrocketing. See:

It is currently at 389 ppm, a 25-ish percent increase. In 50 years. Holy. Crap. High levels of CO2 lead to ocean acidification, inhibition of plant growth, extreme weather events, sea level rise, species extinctions, and of course, global temperature increase. D'oh! Did I mention that this book was written in the scientific yesteryear of 1991? We've known about this for decades, and we are still arguing about whether or not it's real. Come on, crazies, we've got enough to worry about.

If you're not much of a reader, and all this carbon talk is like Greek (or Latin I guess, which is what it is), there are pictures, too! Believe it or not, there are satellite photos of this stuff. They were actually classified by the Bush Administration, and then Obama came in and was like "What? That's dumb." And he declassified them. So here, for your viewing pleasure, are satellite images taken one (1) year apart (!) of ice melt in Alaska.

See that big, ominous dark spot on the right-hand picture? Just one (1) year before that, it was full of happy/sparkly/crystally ice, as you can see in the left-hand picture. And now it's gone. Ignore that, bitches! Science 1, Crazies 0, Earth, totally screwed.

Charismatic Megafauna, Now With More Charisma

Ok, so this is a tiny bit pre-emptive, seeing as the superawesome groundbreaking thing I am about to share is still in the research and development stage...but - there are some really cool pictures to look at, and it kind of goes along with a good cause, so I'ma talk about it anyway. Here goes:

We might be able to learn whale language!!

No, seriously.

So this guy, Mark Fischer is a whale researcher and computer nerd, I mean programmer. He graphs cetacean calls using an algorithm he made, and ends up with pictures called wavelets. It's ok to giggle at the word "wavelet." I did. Not only are these wavelets really cool to look at (each species looks completely different), but he is looking for underlying patterns that might lead us closer to understanding the intricacies of whale (and dolphin, too!) communication. The word "language" might be a bit of a stretch, but in conjunction with the research being done on whale migration, feeding, reproduction, etc., there is totally some potential here. We could learn what they are saying when they are looking for whale food, whale homes, whale love, and whatever else it is that whales do all day.



One big problem though: we can't hear everything the whales are saying. They don't exactly operate within the spectrum of our hearing range. What? The whales aren't there just to entertain us with their gloriously soothing songs?! Anyway, the recordings that are made tend to miss some of the frequencies, and therefore make it much more difficult to look at the whole picture. Even though it is a pretty picture regardless.
All in all, it's a fascinating idea. We'd finally find out if Moby Dick actually was evil, if chomping Jonah was really worth all the trouble, and if Willy actually wanted to be free. Either way, we get to look at these:

Humpback Whale

Minke Whale

And my very favorite, the beluga. Don't you just want to have that? A baby beluga swimming so wild and so free?



Which brings me to my next point. These wavelets (and more) are available as artwork, and you can put them in your house! Through an organization called Interspecies, you can donate money toward "healing our own species' emotional, spiritual and cultural ties with nature." It's something about using art to bring humans and other species closer together, bla bla bla. Whatever...they send you a cool picture in the mail. (Sidebar: Another artist, Jim Nollman, also has work available on Interspecies for a pretty donated penny - totally worth it though, he's pretty awesome). It is entirely possible, however, that all of this is totally useless - maybe Dory had it right all along, and wwwhhaaaaaallllessssss jjjjussssssst ttaaaaaalllllkk llliiiiiikkkeeee ttthiiissssssss......


As a complete non sequitur, I think the phrase "charismatic megafauna" might just be my all time favorite in the English language. That is all. Check out interspecies.com and aguasonic.com.

He-Who-Must-Be-Read

In our land of video games, ubiquitous wi-fi, reality tv (see below), and a general saturation of visual stimuli, kids these days have kind of forgotten how to read. Maybe not quite how to read, but why to read (unless good old W is your teacher, a la this gem). There's no time for old-fashioned books if you're busy shooting aliens, being a guitar hero, and trying to keep up with the latest episode of American Idol. Then, along came a run-of-the-mill impoverished single mother. She wrote down her ideas for a story on some cocktail napkins, and fifteen years later, she's worth nearly 800 million dollars. Bloody hell!

I am talking, of course, about J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter universe. It's a little bit difficult to be snarky about Harry Potter, because, well, I love it. It's simple, it's fun, and wizards are really cool! I'm not saying it's brilliant literature or anything (quite the opposite actually - J.K. only knows a handful of adjectives, but luckily the plot can usually make up for the lack of literary genius), but who says you can't be an intelligent human and appreciate a well-crafted fantasy world?

With the exception of the fifth book (hundreds of pages of excruciating teen angst followed by thirty pages of action), all of the volumes make for a quick and enjoyable read. One of the things that makes the Harry Potter books so different from other kids' series is that they were written for a maturing audience. The first book was full of flowers and puppies (murderous flowers and snarling three-headed puppies, but flowers and puppies nonetheless). There was a hint of danger and that whole good versus evil thing, but nothing too scary and/or thought-provoking. By the time we got to the last few books, we were facing some seriously dark stuff, and beloved characters started dropping like bludgered Quidditch players (oops...spoiler alert?). Regardless of the content, the length of the books alone demanded much more from young Muggle readers: even the nerdiest of pre-teens are unlikely to tackle 900 page tomes. So, um, these ones must be awesome!

Anyway, the point of all this is that no matter what you think of the Harry Potter books, there is no denying the impact they had on our culture. Not only did they get kids to read again, they got kids to read hundreds of millions of copies in 67 different languages. And according to Wikipedia, the last four books have set consecutive records for fastest-selling books ever. Ever. Not to mention the movies, merchandise, websites, blogs, even podcasts that have resulted from the Harry Potter explosion. The word "muggle" is actually in the OED. Pretty soon, we'll be referring to him as Sir Harry Potter. That might sound ridiculous, but he's done a lot of Actual good for a fictional character by singlehandedly yanking the youth of the entire world out of an illiterate stupor. Seriously though, if you haven't read them....lame.


Well done, Harry, well done. Mischief Managed.