zygote daddy

on my love of local news

         

As I've mentioned before, one of the things I love most about living in a place like Iowa is the wonderful local news. Just the right combination of ridiculousness and self importance. Exhibits A - D: a few headlines I found during a few minutes' browsing of recent issues:

Beer-drinking horse celebrates retirement

Teeth go missing from man's belongings

Dairy goat show participants gain lesson

Man from Hardy hopes to sell movie script

You know, Iowa is a funny place. It's redeeming qualities certainly don't leap out at you, but spend long enough and you find things to love. Even for someone with that irritating sense of entitlement universal among San Francisco natives.

next thing you know I'll be on myspace...

There was a cute little article about blogging in the Washington Post today. And of course by "cute", I mean it managed to reduce the storied newspaper of our nation's capital to a weird old guy ranting to whomever will listen. Or maybe it's more like in seventh grade when the headmaster at Town School for Boys addressed my classmates and me as "Dudes". I'm still cringing about it now.

So here is how the thing starts:

They consider themselves digital natives.

They're young. They're addicted to instant messaging and social networks. And they're more apt to dish about the drama at last night's party than the president's latest faux pas.

OMG, WP! You, like, totally know me and stuff! ROFLMAO! :D

Ahem. Sorry about that.

Because, you know, there's nothing I love more than "dish[ing] about the drama at last night's party". For example last night: d.w. and I hanging out with a friend and her 18-month-old twins, enjoying a tall glass of tap water and going home at ten because I had to work this morning. And there's no way I would ever imagine mentioning the creepy backrub given to the leader of the largest economy in Europe. Wouldn't think of it. 

Onward:

"Of all the bloggers out there, there are only about 10,000 that have an audience beyond their friends and families," said B.L. Ochman, a business blogger who tracks online trends.

"It astounds me that people are willing to do this stuff without getting paid," Ochman said. "I come from a generation that gets paid for our work."

I know! What a sucker I am! Who in their right mind would ever put pen to paper for enjoyment and catharsis? Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a date with B.L. to go kill some puppies and push a few blind old ladies into the street. That is, as long as someone pays for things like that. Because what's the point of doing something if you're not getting paid?

Alright, next one:

"The average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat," said Alexander Halavais, an assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

OK, just because I have a category dedicated to our cats doesn't mean I'm a cat-obsessed 14-year-old girl. But I have to admit that one hurts a little. I mean, until the zygote hatches, what else is there running around the house purely for my amusement?

But you know what? This is only the second most amazingly broad brush I've seen used this week. The winner of the award for "Most Appalling Generalization of Mothers and Tibetans" was presented this week by the peerless (and ruthless, in a ridiculously good way) mr. nice guy. Here you go.

frogs and pregnancy in the same post? nice.

Please forgive me for blogging about an article published back in September. Pregnancy wasn't exactly on the ol' radar screen back then, you know? OK, now that that's out of the way, let's move on, shall we...

Hold on, first just a little context:

Just about half the world's amphibian species (frogs, salamanders, and caecilians) are in decline because, frankly, they don't take too kindly to all the habitat loss, increased UV radiation, and climate change we throw their way. One of the main culprits to which people have been pointing in recent years has been the fungus Chytridiomycosis, or "chytrid fungus" for short, which has been found in frog populations worldwide. This fungus, which inhibits the uptake of oxygen through the skin, may explain why species are disappearing in what are obstensibly the most pristine of habitats.

Sorry for the Saturday afternoon science lesson. Now on to the post. For real this time.

So I was reading this article today on the BBC News site about the link between frog declines and pregnancy tests. The article stood out, seeing how one does not normally associate frogs and stick-peeing. The third paragraph said this:

In the 1930s, African frogs were exported for use in human pregnancy tests and it is suggested they may have carried a fungal disease with them.

Wait, what?

Did you know about this? This is completely new to me. Do you know what pregnancy tests used to entail? Well, thanks to the good people at the BBC News science desk, I do now.

It wasn't always a game of "Is that a blue line? Well, sort of, but it's more a kind of cool taupe. Does that count?" No, back in the 30's and 40's, a doctor would inject a woman's urine under the skin of a Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog. If the frog ovulated, you were pregnant.

Wow.

Also, apparently lab-raised frogs weren't good enough, so doctors imported wild frogs from Africa (OK, am I the only one who thinks this might be just a tad bit wasteful? Using wild-caught frogs from southern Africa? There I go again, recontextualizing my own specific moral framework... Bad z.d.! Bad!), and some of these frogs happened to carry the chytrid fungus that has been plaguing amphibians around the globe.

OK, but beside the whole pregnancy-tests-causing-worldwide-extinction angle, I still can't get over the idea of a frog pregnancy test. Can you imagine a frightened, embarrassed teenage guy going to the grocery store and nervously scanning the shelves looking for this?

Actually, I'd probably pay to see that. The box, I mean, not the suffering of others. What kind of person do you think I am?

water water everywhere...

Not many people want to teach high school biology. I happen to be one of them. I also happen to get straight A's, have damn good GRE scores, and will have 3 or 4 publications come out of my master's thesis. But according to most schools, I am unqualified to teach the Krebs cycle to ninth graders. I realize there are programs out there for people like me, like this one and this one. The thing is, with a spouse in school and a baby on the way, they don't make a lot of sense right now.

Although I actually want to go into teaching, I don't see how I can possibly afford to pursue teacher certification. There is no way I can saddle any more student loans, especially if they will have to be repaid on a teacher's salary. So I've basically skipped high school teaching as a job possibility, at least in the near-term, and as a result I am going after a Ph.D. so I can teach at the college level instead.

Getting a Ph.D. actually pays the bills, you see. Free tuition. Health insurance. Subsidized child care. A paycheck. Until either a) teacher education programs start treating (and paying) their students like professionals, or b) an advanced degree carries more weight in the hiring process, I have a feeling I am not the only qualified grad student passing over high school teaching as a career option.

Sad, but true.

As though he were reading my mind, Nicholas Kristof had an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times today (well, really yesterday; that whole working on my thesis until the wee hours thing, you know...) on the dearth of qualified teachers in public schools. Here is a good chunk of it, which I have (totally illegally, most likely) reprinted, thanks to the Times' insistence on making us actually pay for (some of) their work:

Suppose Colin Powell tires of giving $100,000-a-pop speeches and wants to teach high school social studies. Suppose Meryl Streep has a hankering to teach drama.

Alas, they would be "unqualified" for a public school. Elite private schools would snap them up, of course, but public schools that are begging for teachers would have to turn them away because they don't have teacher certification.

A white paper from the Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institution urged, "Rather than dig further down in the pool of those willing to consider teacher certification programs or raise class sizes, we need to expand the pool of those eligible to teach."

In a new book called "Tough Love for Schools," Frederick Hess argues that applicants should be eligible for teaching jobs if they have graduated from a recognized college, have passed a competency test in their field and have passed a rigorous background check. Principals may prefer to hire graduates of teaching colleges, he writes, but they should have the option to hire other outstanding applicants as well.

That's the situation in some of America's most elite private high schools. Phillips Exeter Academy, for example, says that 85 percent of its faculty have advanced degrees but probably only a handful are certified. (Since it is private, it doesn't worry about certification or even keep track of which teachers are certified.)

At Exeter, for example, biology is taught by a former doctor. Japanese is taught by a former businessman who worked in Japan. And a history teacher arrived with no teaching experience but has published five books.

The idea behind teacher certification is that there are special skills that are picked up in teacher training courses — secret snake-charming skills to keep the little vipers calm. But there's no evidence this is so.

Granted, intellectual brilliance alone does not make a great teacher. When I think of my best teachers, like Juanita Trantina in the fifth grade, they didn't just teach us but also inspired us, humored us, tamed us and enchanted us. Maybe it helps to be brilliant and to have studied teaching, but mostly it is personality. Colin Powell, Meryl Streep and many anonymous others would dazzle the surliest student, so why continue to bar them at the schoolhouse door?

Amen, brother.

it's no skin off my back. d.w. on the other hand...

It seems like every day some cool new ecological adaptation is discovered. The most recent is written up in this week's issue of the journal Nature, but I found it by way of the BBC. It turns out a species of caecilian (a homonym of Sicilian, but no, they don't live in Sicily) found in Kenya has young that feed by literally ripping the skin off the back of the mother.

Seriously, this one is just too easy.

Mark Wilkinson, the zoologist at the UK's Natural History Museum that documented the behavior, notes the following:

You can draw parallels between skin feeding in these creatures and lactation in mammals, so studying how this form of parenting evolved might shed light on how parenting developed in mammals.

This dude must never have had an s.o. going through a pregnancy. Hell, I've only gone through 11 weeks of one, and even I can tell the parallels emerge way, WAY before lactation ever enters the picture. Of course, there are the freakishly engorged mammary glands, but that's for another post. Well no, actually, it won't be. My mom reads this blog. Sorry, Mom.

What I allude to is this: the zygote is turning into a real asshole.

He/she/they (oh please God, no...) takes every nutrient and ounce of energy d.w. has, and still sends her running to the bathroom to hurl 10 or 15 times a day. Just 'cause, I suppose. Luckily, d.w. has grown so accustomed to the sadistic little one's devious behavior that during the course of normal conversation, she now just pukes mid-sentence, afterward finishing her thought without missing a beat. It is actually quite amusing, although she glares when I laugh too loud.

Pregnant women can be so sensitive sometimes.

no net loss...of golf course ponds

Thanks to the forward-thinking environmental policies of Bush & Co., our children can enjoy increasing acreage of wetlands in the good ol' U.S. of A.

Or something.

Actually, it seems the feds consider any land that is um, wet to be a wet-land. Man, you can just see the gears turning in little Dubya's head, can't you? So natch', with the incredible rates of sprawl being seen across the country, more impoundments are being constructed in subdivisions and golf courses, thereby increasing the acreage of wet land, just as the acreage of ACTUAL wetlands continues to decrease.

It is rather incredible that Bush & Co. can be so openly cynical about environmental policies that they can, with a straight face, announce with pride their environmental achievements while openly raping what's left of our natural heritage.

Every day under King George becomes more surreal than the last...

speaking of medical arrogance...

Actually, I wasn't speaking of medical arrogance, except a few days ago. But you probably don't remember. Anyway, moving on:

I just saw this article in the Times that discusses a lay midwife in Indiana who was charged with practicing a home birth without a license. Without opening the can of worms that is the politics of midwife licensure, let me say that the article really gets to the bone of the struggle between birth as a natural part of human life and birth as a treatable medical condition:

[T]he ability of women to choose to give birth at home is under assault from a medical establishment dominated by men who, for reasons of money and status, resent a centuries-old tradition that long ago anticipated the concerns of modern feminism.

"Midwifery is an autonomous profession," Ms. Ayres said. "It's an art and a science that predates the medical model of care. Midwifery sees birth as normal and basically safe.

"It's made safer by reliance on the woman's power," she continued. "The medical model assumes the woman is passive and her body needs to be acted upon. Every birth is presented as a potential disaster from which every woman needs to be protected and potentially rescued."

And then in waltzes the representative of the patriarchy:

Women choosing to give birth at home are taking a big risk, said Dr. Kevin R. Burke, president of the Indiana State Medical Association.

"Because routine things sometimes become very un-routine, the best environment for labor and delivery is in a hospital or in a facility that adjoins the hospital," Dr. Burke said. If some women say that medical settings can be sterile and demeaning, he added, "well, then, let's make the hospital a more friendly, user-comfortable environment."

Ah yes, that's the answer! Let's just make hospitals feel like our own homes. Because clearly, with our health care system in as good a shape as it is, hospitals have more than enough cash on hand to make their maternity wards feel like home. Obviously we can't trust those silly little women to give birth without getting anaesthetized and given heart-rate elevating drugs (because of the anaesthesia). Who do they think they are? Men? I mean seriously...

those lucky Ghanaians

Now how cool would that have been to see? If only I lived in Accra...

struck in Lodi again

Yes, yes, that was a terrible pun. My apologies.

So I read this article today that doesn't really have much to do with anything around here, but I thought it was amusing, so I'll share.

This guy in Lodi (for those not familiar with the place, Lodi is the Central Valley town known for the Creedence song, the juggling festival, and Ayman al-Zawahiri) is suing the city because a garbage truck ran into his car. Did I forget to mention that the guy is a garbage man, and that he was driving the garbage truck when he ran it into his own car?

Apparently the city threw out the case, argung that you can't sue yourself. So his wife decided to sue the city instead. For a larger amount of money.

Isn't the world amusing?

who doesn't like a hairy crustacean?

Just when you thought nature couldn't get any cooler, along comes this bad boy, 2300m down in the South Pacific. Oh yeah.