Archive
Toronto Mayor’s Lawyer Says Crack Expert Needed
Mug shot of Rob Ford taken by the Miami-Dade Police Department in Florida upon Ford’s arrest for drunk driving (DUI) and marijuana possession charges in 1999.
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If you’re not up to date on Canadian political scandals, here’s The Daily Show clip from last Tuesday and an explanation of Canada’s longstanding tradition of sucking dick for crack.
Man, all New York has is a guy named Weiner who was sexting semi-erect penis pics. We should be ashamed at the caliber of our scandals.
“We’re just trying to see whether or not such a video exists and whether or not any video has been doctored or altered,” Dennis Morris told the Toronto Sun. “I think unless one has expertise in crack cocaine smoking it is very difficult to gauge what a person is actually doing in an alleged video.”
For some reason, probably because I wouldn’t be surprised if the government did get a crack expert to testify against him, that quote reminds me of this old campaign video.
Newt Gingrich Doesn’t Know What a Smartphone Is
I haven’t been posting a lot lately because I want to not turn this blog into a re-blog wonderland or a second youtube favorites playlist, but this one was too good:
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“We spent weeks trying to figure out what you call this… if it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cell phone.”
Oh, Newt, I’m sad the effort to Santorum-ize your name never really took off.
I really hope Colbert addresses this tonight.
New The Lonely Island and New Hyperbole and a Half
I do think The Lonely Island is overrated, but I do love anything with Ed Norton in it:
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The Lonely Island’s new album The Wack Album drops June 11.
Meanwhile in the vast ocean of entertainment the Internet loves and shares…
Allie Brosh is not dead! She updated Hyperbole and a Half yesterday with a “Pre-Post Transition Post” and again this morning with a post titled “Depression Part Two.”
I sure hope this update is a precursor to more updates.
And something maybe like a book:
Oh, wait, yes. Defintely a book.
Pre-order Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened [Paperback] on Amazon right now for $12.98. Will be released October 29, 2013.
She even came out of hiding on reddit today to talk about it:
I’ve had a few people ask me if the preorder is a scam, and I just wanted to let you know it isn’t. The manuscript is all finished, and it will indeed be an actual book in October.
I just wanted to clear that up. I’ll talk more about the book later if anyone is interested in specifics. I mean, you guys can ask me stuff now if you’re curious, I just don’t want to be disingenuous/opportunistic about book promotion stuff. How horrible would it be for me to be like “Oh, hey, I wanted to kill myself a little while ago. NOW GO BUY MY BOOK.”
Maybe I don’t have many feelings, but I know what shame feels like!
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“Your local pharmacist is not who you think they are.”
Back before my fake freelance writing gig fell through, I tried to maneuver into a niche as a healthcare writer.
One of the articles-for-moms I wrote was about how pharmacists are vastly underutilized as health care providers. (Tl;dr-Lifehacker edition: If you have a medical question or want a second opinion on meds, you should just go up to the counter at a store pharmacy and ask. Pharmacists have 7 years of medical education and they’re free.)
I found a TedxTalk by a pharmacist that addresses this exact underutilization issue:
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Pretty good, although dry to watch if you’re not also a provider.
Pharmacists are important because doctors make mistakes. Doctors make prescribing mistakes at alarmingly high rates. If patients asked more questions and pharmacists spent more time on each individual, it would probably save a lot of lives.
One of the aspects of the profession I noted that the lecturer didn’t address is that the way corporations run retail pharmacies makes the kind of access he idealizes impossible. With immunizations and peripheral paperwork, pharmacists simply don’t have the man-hours to counsel every new patient. Any intern who has done a rotation at a high-volume chain knows this already. But I guess the Talk was already too long to go into a tangent about how for-profit-healthcare is fucking awful.
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Footnote on my ventures in my fake freelance writing career: I was interviewed a few months ago by a health care education group for their company’s blog. They wanted my “expert” opinion on formal education and training for pharmacy technicians.
My answer was, “Don’t go to school because you will be automatically less hireable than precocious college kids willing to work for near-minimum wage.”
They thanked me and then totally did not publish the interview.
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We Giggle Behind Small Hands and No Speak Engrish
“Cho and Chang are both last names. They are both Korean last names. I am supposed to be Chinese. Me being named “Cho Chang” is like a Frenchman being named “Garcia Sanchez.”
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Apparently some Asian people got pissed because Cho Chang could “technically” be a Chinese first and last name. Rostad later stated in a comprehensive response that she knew, but sacrificed the details for a punchline.
Whatever criticism of racial stereotypes aside, Cho Chang is still a pretty shitty character and a pretty stupid name.
(As far as I know, no Chinese person romanizes Qiu as “Cho.” A more extreme analogy would be like spelling Hussein “Hoosayne.”)
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The Psychiatric Ward and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Or: An Oddly Personal Reaction to the News.
I was once in a psychiatric hospital against my will. And yes, they can get just as terrible as mainstream media can make them seem. I don’t keep my mental health problems a secret. Or my involuntary commitment a secret; it’s not an experience I care to repress or forget. At the same time, I’ve never publicly blogged about it before it now.
It happened 16 months ago, and although it’s left an indelible mark on my psyche, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get the experience out in a single entry. “The Psych Ward Story” is a complicated story and when asked why it happened I usually sigh and say, “an unfortunate series of events.”
There were lots of traumatic aspects of the ordeal in addition to the obvious confinement: Being denied birth control by the Catholic hospital. Being transferred to another hospital in a poorer area with an under-trained and under-educated staff. Being prescribed psychotropic drugs that I knew from extensive experience were not going to help or agree with me. Being misdiagnosed.* Being falsely accused of being danger to myself.
But the incident that I would ping in my head as “the most wrong” in the week-long experience was when my doctor refused to give me access to my court paperwork and refused to give me the identity or phone number of the public defender. (There were also a nurse and a counselor present at my first and only meeting with the psychiatrist. They were silent.)
It was as simple and as curt as a “No.” My basic rights, probably as citizen and most definitely as a patient, were flagrantly violated.
I never did pursue a civil lawsuit. Besides legal fees and the desire to not re-live the experience, it was disheartening but unsurprising to learn that my requests to pursue my legal options to formally contest the confinement were never documented. My hopeless crying at the psychiatrist’s dismissal of me was ironically* recorded by the doctor in the progress notes as, “Patient thinks [referring to self in third person] does not care.”
These days I get emotional when reading about anything remotely related to civil rights violations, specifically unjust treatment during confinement. Some days I’m afraid I’m becoming a libertarian. I don’t know enough about trauma to talk about it on a medical level, but I do know that I never used to start crying when reading about the disgrace that is Guantanamo. And I have no doubt that had the psych ward incident not have happened, I would not avoid listening to the Bradley Manning tapes out of fear of having a panic attack.
So today when I read that the Boston Marathon bombing suspect was not Mirandized, my immediate thoughts were, “That’s terrible!” and then “I bet Glenn Greenwald is going to go off about this.”
Needless to say, Tsarnaev is probably the single most hated figure in America now. As a result, as Bazelon noted, not many people will care what is done to him, just like few people care what happens to the accused terrorists at Guantanamo, or Bagram, or in Yemen and Pakistan. But that’s always how rights are abridged: by targeting the most marginalized group or most hated individual in the first instance, based on the expectation that nobody will object because of how marginalized or hated they are. Once those rights violations are acquiesced to in the first instance, then they become institutionalized forever, and there is no basis for objecting once they are applied to others.
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I cried a lot at that editorial. Not that I want to hyperbolize my experience by comparing it to individuals of national interest or make a plea on behalf of all those that have undergone civil or criminal commitment. I just wanted to make note of the highly personal ways individuals can react to current events based on their own experiences.
Today, in a weird way, I find myself having empathy for a terrorist. Or, to be fully politically correct, an alleged terrorist. I too have made had my fundamental rights abrogated in the name of “safety.” And as an American and an idealist, it makes me very sad.
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*My only long-standing diagnosis is Major Depressive Disorder. The same inpatient psychiatrist who shit on my Due Process later carelessly listed the “Final Diagnosis” on my discharge report as “Schizophrenia.”
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Fallon Fox Has Already Lost
If you’ve been following LGBT issues at all, then you’ve probably heard about Fallon Fox.
She’s a professional mixed martial artist who caused a great deal of controversy when questions came up last March about her medical history–specifically that she’s a transgender woman fighting other women. The controversy garnered even more mainstream media coverage after Joe Rogan went on a rant calling her “a man without a dick” and then again when a UFC fighter got cut for telling a reporter that Fox was a “sociopathic, disgusting freak.”
Birth name unreleased, Fox had gotten sexual reassignment surgery in 2006 and has been on hormone replacement therapy for years before she started fighting.
Fallon Fox was later cleared by the Florida State Boxing Commission to fight women. And she is now scheduled to fight Allanna Jones in CFA 11 on AXS TV, May 24.
[Cat Zingano’s interview tact here was laudable.]
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It was my interest in sex and gender roles that led me to what has become the only sport I enjoy regularly watching. (Who is this Ronda Rousey that made it for women in the UFC when the president said it would “never” happen? I found last year’s Tate v. Rousey and was immediately intrigued by the fast-paced grappling.)
But I struggled with this piece, not only because I don’t participate in WMMA, but because the nature of the sport can make it harder to argue what constitutes “fairness” in competition than in say, a non-contact sport like running. Example: If you’re wrestling and have a leg lock around an opponent’s waist, even adjusted for weight, I imagine that something like hip shape could matter, and it could matter a lot. I had a lot of problems trying to think of how to write an article that defends which characteristics are “important” in determining sex in a way that doesn’t open up a slippery slope into scrapping sex segregation in sports all together.
All the major MMA news sites I’ve read have had an outstanding professional and nonjudgemental style when reporting the controversy. But the more critical opinions of the fans can be found in the comments sections of sites like CagePotato, MMAjunkie, YouTube videos, MMA forums, and r/mma.
Many comments are dismissible purely on their ignorance (dur, XX and XY, the end) and hate levels, but there is some civil discussion going on:
Click to enlarge
Most of the arguments about Fox still having the “natural advantages” of men can easily be rebutted with existing scientific literature. The hormone replacement therapy makes the muscle mass and bone density arguments moot. Testosterone levels are going to be well within “female” range. I haven’t found any “muscle fiber type” literature that says women can’t condition train to “manlier” types. And any differences in neurology (reaction time, spatial awareness, etc.), are usually too small to make blanket statement about the sexes.
Not every sexual dimorphism can be neatly plotted on a bell curve, and even when they can, elite athletes are going to be the outliers.
That said, the amount of sexism and transphobia within the fighting community is overwhelming. Cris Cyborg has been getting unparalleled amounts of shit for her masculine physiognomy for years, so it was no surprise to see her name alongside Fox’s in comments like, “let the trannies fight each other.” I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to characterize most MMA fighters, commentators, and fans as giant douchebags. The amount of vitriol, prejudice, and misinformation that has surrounded Fox is what is truly disgusting about the entire ordeal.
Upvoted 162 times. Downvoted 3.
Upvoted 130 times. Downvoted 3.
Upvoted 93 times. Downvoted 3.
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If Fallon Fox loses to Allanna Jones on Friday, she loses. If she wins, it’ll be toted as proof that male-to-female transgender means superior. Either way, she’s still going to have to face a bunch of judgment and questions about her legitimacy as a a woman and a fighter. She may have problems finding consistent sponsors. Major promotion agencies, which have pretty much all been bought by Zuffa (UFC), are going to want to avoid this controversy until the fans will it to happen. Fox is now 37, late for a budding MMA career, and transgender folk still have a long way to go before society matches them at current tolerance and understanding levels of homosexuals. By those metrics, Fox has already lost.
The silver lining in all this is that the Florida State Boxing Commission made the right call. At the end of all the quibbling about bone proportion and safety, there should be a segregation of men and women in MMA and Fox should be allowed in one of the two.
The doctors and the overseeing commission say that Fallon Fox is a woman. So fight on, Fallon “Queen of Swords” Fox, fight on.