In November 2008, this so-called Jet-Set Hobo was in Buenos Aires when he filed his first story for True/Slant. It was called ‘From Argentina with Love’, and was in some way concerned with what was the new James Bond movie, ‘A Portion of Condolence’.  If there was any actual film reviewing going on, I think it would have betrayed some disappointment. But greater disappointments were to come.

There could still be ‘A Scintilla of Comfort’. But you’ll have to read/scroll until the end of the piece for that.

For one thing, troubles at MGM indicate that after ‘A Quantum of Solace’ the James Bond series of movies has been suspended …indefinitely! As assiduous followers of this blog can tell you, one of my great, unfulfilled ambitions was to play a villain in a James Bond movie. Any villain. Naturally I would have preferred to be the doomed evil mastermind, but anyone of his windswept and interesting henchman would have sufficed.

This has been true ever since I used to go to the cinema as a toddler back in the 1960s with my rather glamorous mother, who I somehow sensed – even back then – wouldn’t have minded a certain former Edinburgh milkman slipping his JB monogrammed velvet slippers under her bed one fateful night.

It must have been jealousy on my part, but I wanted to turn the tables on Bond, or more literally, feed him to a shark tank, or slice him in two with a laser beam, or pull the levers on him in a remote controlled helicopter on a collision course with a mashing machine – anything to get rid of that infernal Queen & Country prat.

With the combined ages of Messers Connery and Moore now at 163, more recently I’d set my heart on little Daniel Craig. But now even that seems to be in doubt.

Ah, but back in those far-off, heady days of 2008, and at the tender age of just 42, I had other, equally romantic ideas about blogging, and what it might do for what I sometimes laughingly refer to as my career. That is, when I’m absolutely determined to burst the seams of trousers.  These ideas were about the “vision of a contributor and community driven news and opinion websites that would forever change the face of journalism”. And I misquote. Because actually, these weren’t so much ideas as warm, mushy feelings engendered by reading online interviews with our CEO, COO, CTO and all the other chiefs. The guys in the backroom who stop the frurckendeiser from being mixmitized, as I like to put it. I like to put it that way because I can’t be arsed getting to grips with the jargonology. Anyhoo, it all sounded so gee whiz this is straight out of the lab, let’s see what it does, it might change everything.

Like Kim Jong Il, who may not understand precisely how all this nuclear technology works, but sure-as-hell knows he’d like to use it, well, that for me was the blogosphere. I wasn’t quite sure how blogging for True/Slant was going to finally catapult my diabolical alter ego ‘The Jet-Set Hobo’ to literary fame, but I felt it had some part to play.

So, for nearly two years, in fits and starts but fairly regular great bursts of activity, I’ve thrown a lot of stuff at the wall here to see if it would stick. Travel stories straight and twisted, from the high and low end of the social scale; from Florentine restaurant reviews and Budapest’s little Hollywood all the way to gangsters in Belgrade and an assassination in Beirut.

I have regularly cast a rueful eye over the English Channel to comment on the degrading spectacle that British public life seems to have become in the last 15 or 20 years. I’m not a Republican, out to eviscerate the Royal Family, neither am I a toadying colonial.

From time to time, I’ve held forth on what might be called modern manners; such as what to wear when you’re abroad or how to conduct a foreign affair.  Perhaps I should have done a bit more of this sort of material, after all, no offence intended, but take a look around at some of the baseball cap and sweatpants wearing, Cheeto eating contributors and I assume consumers of this site who could certainly use an overhaul, please -nobody-say-makeover.

There’s been my Fiction, which I started to publish late in the game here, just after we all knew the end was nigh. Some of which it must be owed, such as Krakow Nights, is fairly dark matter. They’re all stories that have been told to me, I swear! Your correspondent has always lived a life of blameless domesticity which is why he is also able to turn out work such as his as-if-Jean Cocteau-wrote-a-children’s-book over-a-couple-of-afternoons minor masterpiece, The Wild Cats of Piran.

You see, now we really are getting to the crux of the matter. The Jet-Set Hobo has both literally and figuratively been all over the map since this blog began. Not enough focus, and I suppose if I do return in some shape or form it will be with a tighter focus. But can you blame me, entirely? Since I began this blog in November 08 I’ve lived in and filed reports from Buenos Aires, Auckland, Beirut, London and Budapest.

But wait, there’s more.

From time to time, I’ve even posted some of my weird little movies online, which must really throw readers who come to True/Slant looking for either, broadly speaking, policy wonks discussing health care reform or otherwise smart people discussing articles with headlines like “Can sex with Dakota Fanning make Bela Lugosi hot again?” (Okay, I’m mixing it up a little there, but a headline like that would be more fun.)

Which brings us neatly to my final ‘beat’. When I’ve had enough of it, I’ve also vented against the mind-dumbing fatuity of celebrity culture. Yet some of my most popular posts have been about celebrities, so I can’t help but think I have failed in some way. I don’t just mean as a writer, but as a person. Because I can’t help watching and commenting on the tawdry parade of low life distraction that it is. For the record, I’m Team Oksana, all the way. So what if she is manipulative and a gold digger, (which I suppose she must be), you can see a train when it’s coming, can’t you? Besides, I never cared much for Mel Gibson and that was cemented for me by his revisionist historical movies. For example, painting the Brits of the War of Revolution as if they were the Gestapo. Plus I used to cringe whenever you’d see his co-stars talking with forced smiles about what a pranky prankster the Gibster was on set. But I digress as I am so wont to do. I’ve said that before too.

Perhaps it’s time for the Rogue Bond movie. Remember the Australian Bond, George Lazenby? Well, imagine him enjoying his sunset years at Strangways health farm, puttering about in a wheelchair, trying to get it on with the nurses. Along I come at the wheel of lawn tractor and crash straight into bank of rhododendrons. Later while recuperating, my character strikes up an unlikely friendship with the octogenarian secret agent, finally getting close enough to strangle him with a stethoscope, or his tie-your-0wn bow-tie. That’d truly be a happy end, for this fantasist at least. But I jest, I’m just jealous.

So anyway, a happy ending for my real future in the virtual sphere? I don’t know. I’ve migrated most of the stuff filed here over to another site, and I’ll be sure to post there when I have the energy and stamina for it. Like about once every five years.

I’m thinking of cancelling my facebook account too incidentally. All these people, putting all their junk out in public, affairs going toxic, surrendering all their personal data to a 26 year old fratboy. Hmm. When did we ever think that was a good idea? Privacy. It’s the new luxury. Besides, it’s occured to me many times how much like high school Facebook is, and I never particularly cared for that either.

So, we’re going to wrap this up, because it’s already 1200 words or so, and I think a good blog post is seldom no more than a thousand, just like eight hours is as long as you ever really can enjoy sitting in a plane, no matter how good the service. This isn’t quite goodbye however. It’s my understanding some of the True/Slant team are going to be asked to stay on in some new, transmogrified version of this site, and I’d quite like to be one of them …so you never know. Hmmm.

Besides, it’s not midnight EST on July 31st just yet, so we’ve time for a few more laughs and some goodbyes.

Stay tuned.

A new study by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Cambridge University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has found that even light or moderate intensity physical activity, such as walking or cycling, can substantially reduced the risk of early death.

The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, combined the results from the largest studies around the world on the health impact of light and moderate intensity physical activity. It showed that the largest health benefits from light or moderate activity (such as walking and cycling) were in people who do hardly any physical activity at all. Although more activity is better — the benefits of even a small amount of physical activity are very large in the least physically active.

The good news from this study is that you don’t have to be an exercise freak to benefit from physical activity. Just achieving the recommended levels of physical activity (equivalent to 30 minutes daily of moderate intensity activity on 5 days a week) reduces the risk of death by 19% [95%confidence interval 15% to 24%], while 7 hours per week of moderate activity (compared with no activity) reduces the risk of death by 24% (95% CI 19% to 29%).

(Of course, if you get off the raft and jog around the lake, the benefits rise. Who knows, there could be a further reduction in the risk of death, as long as you aren’t jogging in traffic. Over on his Coloradoan blog, senior runner Jon Sinclair points out that runners of a certain age — Sinclair introduced this writer to the “pre-boomer” designation — have been at it long enough to have proved this point: “Everyone stand up. All of you that began running after 1976 can sit down. Those that still are standing can smirk proudly at those sitting. I’m sure there aren’t many of you standing. For us ‘pre-boomers,’ or pbers, the current state of running is amazing and we should all feel happy about it.”)

But the best news of all, especially for those drawn to summertime laziness, is just in from the SportsGeezer. It is the suggestion that if you invite a bunch of friends to join you on the raft, possibly planning for cocktails and dinner later, you might do just as well skipping the walk/jog altogether:

More powerful than exercise, better than giving up smoking, extensive social networks have been shown to increase longevity by 50 percent. The Scientific American reports on research conducted at Brigham Young University that reviewed the results from 148 studies—which included a total of 308,849 participants—going back to the early 20th century. Most studies assessed survival in contrast to mortality from all causes. Sciam reports that the analysis also assessed what kind of studies best predict a person’s survival. Questionnaires that had asked participants at least a few in-depth questions about various social connections (such as, “To what extent are you participating or involved in your social network?” or “To what extent can you count on other people?”) were more effective at pinpointing a person’s overall risk of mortality from all causes than those that simply determined if a person was single or married or lived with at least one other person. The researchers found that when the questions delved deeper, complex social networks increased survival rates by 91 percent.

Prospects for a pleasant summer and a long life just went up.

Image by peasap via Flickr

This is the story in France right now, with the BBC reporting there are already 40 journalists in the tiny rural town of Villers-au-Tertre, near the Belgian border.

The woman, a nurse in her 40s who has two daughters and grand-children, confessed to killing eight of her own babies between 1989 and 1996, but only two corpses have been found at their current home. Police suspect she might have brought the other corpses with her when they moved in.

The woman, mordbidly obese, managed to keep every pregnancy secret from her husband.

Not sure if this story is more a cautionary tale against morbid obesity or abortion versus infanticide.

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I live in an apartment building that is, frankly, something of an old age home — filled with people in their 70s, 80s and 90s. There are days I weary of gray hair and halting gaits, but I have also learned to appreciate the deep value of role models, especially of older women living, well, alone.

My theme song is this, a rockabilly anthem to feisty female old age, from a 1988 album by Michelle Shocked.

I’m thinking of this because one of our building’s two cool 96-year-olds, one of whom lives on my floor, was taken to the hospital by ambulance yesterday. She’s got brilliant blue eyes, thick white hair, and a spirit so lively and outgoing we all love her. I’m praying for her.

The other, on my floor, is wealthy, a bit of a grande dame. She lives in a three-bedroom apartment with a live-in helper. (Money is a wonderful, necessary adjunct to a decent, solitary [even shared] old age.) She wears fab clothes, keeps a fresh manicure, comes down to the pool, even with a walker.

Most women, statistically, will outlive their husbands or male partners. We have to be ready, in every way, to survive — and thrive — on our own.

But I also treasure Marie, 80, on my floor. She’s still married. She wears an immaculate bouffant pompadour hairdo, dresses with style and had a male stripper for her 80th. I asked her in the elevator one day — she’s OK with this sort of directeness — “How old are you, anyway?” I thought, maybe, late 60s.

I feel too fragile these days because of my aching, injured hip. When I watch these women soldiering along, finding new beaux, slapping on the mascara and nail polish and a smile, heading out for dinner with their girlfriends, I’m glad I don’t live surrounded by 20 or 30-somethings, slick and invulnerable.

These ladies are survivors. I hope to be one, too.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Not too sure about her consort, pictured here, from the forehead up. The headware was part of his laughable bid for Governorship of California. How laughable? Read on.

Los Angeles, California (CNN) — How well Zsa Zsa Gabor is recovering from hip replacement surgery a week ago depends on whom you ask: her husband or her daughter. Prince Frederic Von Anhalt said his wife of 24 years is in “critical” condition, but daughter Francesca Hilton said her condition is “guarded.” Gabor, 93, suffered a broken hip in a fall at her Bel Air, California, home nine days ago. “It’s up and down,” Von Anhalt said Monday afternoon. “It worries me very much.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor is from good, hearty Hungarian stock. She may well survive this trial and then the so-called Prince will have to wait a bit longer to inherit all those wedding rings from past marriages. After all, she herself said “I never hated a husband enough to give him his diamonds back.”

The so-called prince’s royal credentials certainly bear closer scrutiny. According to Wikipedia, he became the adopted son of Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt at the age of 37 in a business transaction put together by Hans Hermann Weyer, a former consul of Bolivia.

Not that I’m knocking this, not entirely. I mean, I’d simply adore to have a title, even if did come out of a packet of breakfast cereal. What is also… interesting is that since marrying, the couple have adopted several grown men:  Marcus Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Marcus Eberhardt), who now calls himself as “Prince Germany”; Oliver Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Oliver Bendig); and Michael Prinz von Anhalt (formerly Michael Killer.) Following their adoption, all these chaps are entitled to use the last name of “Prinz von Anhalt”. In return for what, we can only surmise. In any case, back to the ailing screen siren of yore…

“The publicist for Hilton, however, gave a more optimistic report. Edward Lozzi said the glamour icon was able to sit up in bed and talk, an improvement that followed a blood transfusion and the removal of her morphine drip over the weekend.”

Again, this is a Hungarian woman we’re talking about. You could probably shoot her full of enough morphine to keep Pete Doherty and the Libertines out of recording studios for the next decade, and she’d still be babbling away.

Gabor has “rallied” and is “more talkative,” Lozzi said.

More talkative than whom?

She is still in the intensive care unit at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, but the prince’s publicist, John Blanchette, said she could go home as soon as Thursday.

I see, so the prince’s publicist differs from the great lady’s publicist? My what a strange little band of 21st century Californian courtiers they must be when all assembled.

Von Anhalt is either Gabor’s eighth or ninth husband; depending on whether you count one marriage that was quickly annulled. The glamorous Hungarian-born actress, the second of the three celebrated Gabor sisters, is most famous for her many marriages. Among her other husbands was Oscar-winning actor George Sanders.

via Prince: Zsa Zsa Gabor’s recovery is ‘up and down’ – CNN.com.

Her older sister Magda got married to Sanders some time after he was divorced from Zsa Zsa, which would seem to indicate that he had a thing for chatty and batty Hungarian beauties. And who can blame him? Certainly not this Budapest resident. George Sanders must have felt that, after two Gabor sisters, life held little more in store for him by way of excitement, for he committed suicide, leaving behind the most urbane suicide note imaginable. It read: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”

How simply wonderful. The prince I feel, is somewhat less so. You may remember he was one of the men who came forward to claim possible paternity of poor Anna Nicole Smith’s baby girl in 2006. If that wasn’t fantastical enough, less than a year later, he had a great story for the police. Found naked inside his Rolls-Royce, he claimed to have been taken in by three nubile, young beauties who at first asked him to pose for pictures with them. At this point, von Anhalt said they stripped him bare, took his car keys, wallet and money, jewellery, driver’s license and clothes, before handcuffing him to the steering wheel. Which was remarkable, given that he was able to call the cops to the scene of the crime, using his cellular phone. The culprits, he said, had driven away in a Chrysler convertible.  How common, you’d think they’d have at least had the good taste to dig up a Bentley from somewhere.

You may also recall that Zsa Zsa has had some trouble with the Old Bill herself. In 1989, while still a spritely 72 year old, she was jailed for as many hours after slapping a Beverly Hills cop who had the temerity to slap her with a traffic fine.

Be that as it may, we wish her Royal ZsaZsaness a speedy recovery. Her eventual passing will and probably should be mourned in Hungary, not only as a famous daughter of Hungarian soil, but as the last of her kind. She was born in Budapest. In 1917.

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s an idea — bigger women rock. From the Daily Mail:

All women should aspire to be a size 14 with buxom, hourglass figures, the new equalities minister claims.

They must not be made to feel inadequate by stick-thin models staring out of advertising billboards and magazines.

Instead, they should regard curvaceous women such as Christina Hendricks, star of the TV series Mad Men, as their ultimate role models, Lynne Featherstone said.

The Liberal Democrat minister described the actress, who plays Joan Holloway in the popular American drama set in the 1960s, as ‘absolutely fabulous’.

She said that too often, women were made to feel wretched about their size as they were constantly comparing themselves with ‘unattainable’ figures of celebrities and models…

‘Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous. We need more of these role models,’ she added.

I agree. I’m sick to death of skinny 16 year olds held up as my “role model” when I am neither their age nor aspire to their body size or proportions.

I weary of the Olsen twins, billionaires who look like homeless people wearing too much eyeshadow. Or actresses whose shoulder blades protruding from their designer ballgowns on the red carpet simply look scary.

I recently saw an older woman at a local restaurant whose legs resembled twigs. She looked terribly unhealthy but had clearly starved herself to this size.

Or…is this just one more excuse to be a little piggy and eat too much?

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It has been a year and a half since Chris Brown was arrested for assaulting Rihanna, his girlfriend at the time, the night before the 2009 Grammy Awards. Both of them have released albums since then, acknowledging the incident in their own ways – Brown with songs like the over-the-top “Changed Man,” and Rihanna more subtly on tracks like “Stupid in Love” and “Cold Case Love.”

Though she shouldn’t have to forever wear her victimhood on her sleeve, Rihanna did express in interviews following the incident that she felt to compelled to speak out about her ordeal out of concern for her young fans who might be dealing with similar problems. It’s pretty bizarre, therefore, that her newest hit has her singing the hook on a domestic violence-fueled Eminem track, the single “Love the Way You Lie,” currently No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Rihanna’s portion of the song is rather tongue-in-cheek. She moans the refrain throughout: “Just gonna stand there and watch me burn, well that’s all right because I like the way it hurts/Just gonna stand there and hear me cry, well that’s all right because I love the way you lie.” In between her bouts of singing, though, Eminem hurls angry words that paint a scary picture of a relationship gone wrong, a theme typical of his raps. “I feel so ashamed, I snap … I laid hands on her/I’ll never stoop so low again/I guess I don’t even know my own strength,” he spits, before closing the song with this terrifying revelation: “I’m tired of the games, I just want her back I know I’m a liar/If she ever tries to fucking leave again, I’ma tie her to the bed and set this fucking house on fire.”

Subtle, Eminem is not. Which makes Rihanna’s participation in such an explicitly violent song all the more hard to understand. She has lent her vocals to countless rap tracks by other artists, giving a strong feminine touch to songs like “Run This Town” with Jay-Z and Kanye West, and “Live Your Life” with T.I. And while some of those songs contained vaguely violent elements, they were rooted in metaphor (“Get your fatigues on”), and had Rihanna as an active participant – she dons the same all-black outfit and badass swagger as the men she’s next to. But in “Love the Way You Lie,” the girl at the center of the story is clearly and unequivocally a victim, even if Eminem describes being hurt by her too.

Rihanna certainly isn’t obligated to forever use her music as a platform from which to speak out against abuse. There has to be a happy medium, however, between advocating for women and participating in a song in which one is getting beaten to death.

Nice booty! Image by vmiramontes via Flickr

In case your butt isn’t sufficiently curvaceous.

From The Wall Street Journal:

When Tara Rachel Benson went out on a recent night to an album release party in Los Angeles, she put on her makeup, a tight-fitting Herve Leger dress, stiletto heels—and a pair of padded panties.

“It’s part of the whole outfit,” says Ms. Benson, a 25-year-old assistant to a music manager. Wearing the Booty Pop brand of underwear, which contain egg-shaped foam pads to plump up the posterior, “I look better, I feel better, and as a result, I act better,” she says.

Upstart company Booty Pop thinks it has the answer for women who want curves like Beyonce and JLo: padded underwear.

For centuries, women have wriggled into girdles and other slimmers to minimize their rear ends. Now, a fascination with the hind-quarters of celebrities like Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian is fueling a booming market for undergarments that amplify the derrière..

Booty Pop projects it will sell close to 1 million pairs of padded underwear this year.

Make this go away.

Here’s my thoughtful, serious analytical take on the matter. Transplants!

Why mess around with a fake ass that, should you actually undress in front of someone you hope to seduce, will suddenly be…not there? Just buy yourself a permanent butt. Take all that nasty fat from somewhere else on your body, or maybe someone else’s. No biggie.

I’ve considered donating my ass, on occasion, but the sweetie has forbidden it, bless him.

It would only be for scientific purposes, research, the advancement of knowledge. All that.

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Well, it’s true. Women are shoe-obsessed, according to a British study of 3,000 women:

In analyzing the spending of some 3,000 women, a British pollster finds the average female buys seven new pairs of shoes a year, and for a 67-year period. At close to $400 annually — which may even be lowballing when it comes to North American women — the grand lifetime total tops $26,000.

It’s an astounding figure, to be sure. But with no male comparison, critics say it’s yet another example of shoe purchases having become shorthand for female frivolity.

“It really is a very feminist issue,” says Elizabeth Semmelhack, senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. “Men’s excesses are often seen as somehow positive — ‘He works hard, so of course he should have that Rolex’ — whereas women are constantly belittled for them.”

The new survey, conducted by OnePoll for Gocompare.com, doesn’t address male shoe budgets.

Pollsters do, however, report that a quarter of women rarely divulge their shoe purchases to their partner “as he doesn’t understand their obsession,” and that “predictably, 29 per cent of ladies say shoes are the one thing they can’t resist buying, regardless of whether they can afford them.”

This year, I’ve beat the average — nine (so far.) Two pair of athletic shoes; three pairs of flats; a pair of dressy pumps and three pairs of sandals. That’s not typical for me and seven of those (she whimpered) were on sale. None cost more than $100. It adds up, but the number, for me anyway, is less the issue than their longevity.

I blogged here about the recent loss of our local shoe repairman, Mike, who closed his shop a month ago. I keep my shoes (and clothing) for many years, sometimes decades; a pair of monk-straps and loafers date to 1996 and still — thanks to Mike — look new.

Every women knows that new shoes are are easy place to indulge quickly and painlessly. No calories! You can gain — or lose — 5, 10 or 50 pounds — and still wear gorgeous shoes.

Unlike much of life, new shoes are forgiving. If you’re anything over a size 12, looking for beautiful, well-made clothing, good luck with that. Buying shoes doesn’t demand squeezing into a dressing room, or waiting for one. And, if decently made and cared for, they last, unlike much clothing that stains, tears or can’t be altered.

Men, too, have their sprees.

For my Dad, it was safari jackets and Irish tweed hats (and pipes.) The sweetie has an enormous collection of caps that I know will only expand further — and all those golf games add up to serious coin.

They just don’t fit into a closet.

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“The worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Alaina Podmorow heard those words — from Canadian journalist Sally Armstrong — during a speech on the treatment of Afghan girls and women. She was nine.

Now, Podmorow heads a non-profit, Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan:

Poised and confident, Podmorow, 13, now gives inspirational speeches herself as the founder of the nonprofit Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan, a fundraising organization that channels money for teachers’ salaries and training through Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan.

“I found that it doesn’t matter how little or young you are, you can make this difference,” she said in an interview during a conference on Afghanistan hosted by the Canadian Federation of University Women.

Her first fundraising effort in her hometown of Kelowna was aimed at raising $750, the amount she was told would pay an average salary to a teacher for a year in Afghanistan.

“We raised enough for four teachers’ salaries for one year and I was so amazed because that was more than I could have ever imagined raising at nine years old,” she said.

Chapters of Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan have sprung up around the country and fundraisers have been held in many cities. The groups have raised about $160,000 from the public and almost the same amount again in matching funds from the federal Canadian International Development Agency, the foreign-aid wing of the federal government.

Canadian kids helping other kids overseas in so organized and sophisticated a fashion isn’t new. In 2002, Craig Kielburger — then 19 — was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his aid work, which he began at the age of 12. Kids Can Free The Children has built 316 primary schools around the world, allowing 20,000 children to attend school. It has 100,000 members in 35 countries.

I’m proud of kids like these. I wish their names and actions were widely-known — not morons like Lindsay Lohan.

You're not athletes! (Image via Wikipedia)

That’s not me saying cheerleading isn’t a sport, even if I did type that headline my ownself.

That’s a Connecticut judge, ruling whether Quinnipiac University could count competitive cheerleading as a sport in order to meet requirements under Title IX, the federal law that prevents gender discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal funding. U.S. District Judge Steven Underhill, sitting in Bridgeport, ruled in favor of the school’s former women’s volleyball team, which sued after the school announced it would chop (as well as men’s golf and men’s outdoor track) in favor of competitive cheerleading for 2009-10, a lawsuit that Underhill later expanded to a class-action case.

Actually, the lawsuit looked at all sorts of questions about roster-size manipulation Quinnipiac, in the judge’s mind, made to comply with Title IX, but the headlines are uniformly about how cheerleading is not a sport. And why not, after Underhill made this statement, reported in the Hartford Courant:

“Competitive cheer may, sometime in the future, qualify as a sport under Title IX; today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students.”

The immediate result of this case is that the Fighting Pollsters have 60 days from the July 21 ruling date to get in compliance with Title IX, and specifically must bring back the women’s volleyball team.

However, while Underhill unequivocally declared that cheerleading is not a sport, no matter how much paralysis it has caused, like the current U.S. Supreme Court he made his ruling narrow enough so that everything isn’t 100 percent settled.

After all, Underhill, by saying “sometime in the future” it could qualify as a sport, ruled that cheerleading isn’t a sport not because it’s doesn’t have a ball or stick. It’s because it’s not organized enough.

So I’m thinking the takeaway for those in the cheerleading community — or the public school community — that want sis-boom-bahing declared as a sport would be: Get organized. Start leagues. Have conference championships. Get to the point where people are playing football on the sidelines to fire up the crowd into rooting harder for the cheerleaders.

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A Salt Lake City mom is pregnant with two babies, only they’re not twins. They don’t even have the same due date. The expectant mom, Angie Cromar has two uteruses, a rare condition known as uterus didelphys. She got pregnant with one and then a couple of weeks later with another.

It’s happy news for the 34-year-old and baffling news for her doctors. The chance of her getting pregnant in both uteruses was one in five million. Only 100 such cases of a double pregnancy like Cromar’s are known.

Cromar and her husband already have three children under 8 years old so she was aware of her rare condition. She also knows that this pregnancy isn’t without its risks. The babies could be born at a low birth weight or prematurely. But so far, so good. The fetuses are around 20-weeks along (give or take a week, right?) and they are developing normally.

The Cromars found out about this extremely unusual pregnancy when she went in for an ultrasound. The techs saw one fetus that was five weeks and one day along and then noticed the second, which was more like six weeks and a day.

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In Israel, lying in order to get your way into bed may be punishable with a jail sentence. A Palestinian who pretended to be Jewish in order to have casual sex with a woman was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Deliveryman Sabbar Kashur, 30, met an unnamed woman by chance in predominantly Jewish Western Jerusalem sometime in 2008. He told the woman that his name was “Daniel” and that he was “single and looking for a long-term relationship.”

Less than two hours later, the couple was sneaking into a nearby building for casual sex. According to media reports, Kashur left the building without waiting for the woman to get dressed.

Sometime afterwards, the woman found out that “Daniel” was really Sabbar. She went to the police shortly afterwards, falsely claiming that Kashur had violently raped her. Court proceedings went forward.

Eventually, even after the truth (so as it may) of the event transpired, Kashur accepted a plea bargain of 18 months in prison for “rape by deception” rather than risking a longer sentence:

Prosecutors acknowledged that the sex was consensual, but accused him of misrepresenting himself.

The court agreed, sentencing Kashur despite acknowledging that his case was not “a classical rape by force”.

“If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated,” the judges said in their ruling.

“The court must protect the public interest against sophisticated criminals with a smooth tongue and sweet talking, who can lead astray innocent victims.”

Thoughts:

1. It’s nice to know that “serious romantic relationships” can include having sex in an office building two hours after you meet. Just like in America!
2. If lying in order to get laid was a crime, half the men in America (and Israel) would be in prison right now.
3. Maybe the solution to the whole Palestinian-Israeli conflict is for the two sides to get together and have lots of Isratinian babies.

As for Kashur, his case is provoking a legal furor and will likely be taken to the Supreme Court.

As it turns out, diagnosing the earliest stage of breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and case-by-case disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant, according to an examination of breast cancer cases by The New York Times.

Advances in mammography and other imaging technology over the past 30 years have meant that pathologists must render opinions on ever smaller breast lesions, some the size of a few grains of salt. Discerning the difference between some benign lesions and early stage breast cancer is a particularly challenging area of pathology, according to medical records and interviews with doctors and patients.

Diagnosing D.C.I.S. “is a 30-year history of confusion, differences of opinion and under- and overtreatment,” said Dr. Shahla Masood, the head of pathology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville. “There are studies that show that diagnosing these borderline breast lesions occasionally comes down to the flip of a coin.”

Much of the current finger-pointing is toward pathologists, where their money comes from, whether they are ‘certified’ or not and in general, how good a job they do.

In 2006, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, an influential breast cancer survivors’ organization, released a startling study. It estimated that in 90,000 cases, women who receive a diagnosis of D.C.I.S. or invasive breast cancer either did not have the disease or their pathologist made another error that resulted in incorrect treatment.

After the Komen report, the College of American Pathologists announced several steps to improve breast cancer diagnosis, including the certification program for pathologists.

For the medical community, the Komen findings were not surprising, since the risk of misdiagnosis had been widely written about in medical literature. One study in 2002, by doctors at Northwestern University Medical Center, reviewed the pathology in 340 breast cancer cases and found that 7.8 percent of them had errors serious enough to change plans for surgery.

This space has argued occasionally for reconsideration of yearly mammograms and for longer, stronger consideration of other options before a mastectomy is performed. Especially in the case of older women.

Would I insist on further studies or opt for less radical treatment if I were diagnosed with breast cancer today? Probably. Can I undo the mastectomy I had at 72? Not exactly. Second-guessing is beside the point for someone who is healthy and fit, but asking questions won’t ever hurt.

Earliest Steps to Find Breast Cancer Are Prone to Error – NYTimes.com.

Norma Lopez went missing on her way home from summer school. Photo via KTLA News.

When 7-year-old Kyron Horman went missing from his Portland, Ore. school early last month, news outlets ranging from blogs to newspapers to TV stations raced to cover the story. His name quickly climbed up most-searched term lists and People magazine has been relentless in its documentation of each break in the case. Meanwhile, the case of another young boy who went missing at nearly the exact same time as Horman, Anthony Thomas, generated only a fraction of the coverage.

It was only a yet another example of the media’s crush to report on abductions and foul play involving white women and children, while giving little coverage to minorities who disappear: The latest example is 17-year-old Norma Lopez, who appears to have been kidnapped on her way home from summer school in Moreno Valley, Calif. Most of the coverage of Lopez’s disappearance has come from local news outlets, while the national attention to the case by places like the Los Angeles Times and CNN has been restricted to short blog posts — rising nowhere near the level that dominated the disappearances of girls like Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway.

Media coverage is crucial to the cases of people who go missing because it is often vigilant members of the public who can play a role in helping law enforcement find the victim. Certainly a young, beautiful girl like Lopez and the eery circumstances surrounding her going missing — some of her belongings and “evidence of a struggle” were found in a field Lopez would walk through as a shortcut — are just as deserving of coverage as any other person — white, female or otherwise.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

This week marked the launch of DateMySingleKid.com, whose site offers a photo of its creator, Geri Brin, and her 31-year-old single son, Colby. He looks like a nice guy, cute.

Does he really need his Mom’s help?

From the National Post:

As the New York entrepreneur behind FabOverFifty. com, she decided to add a dating component to the website–not for her women readers, but for their sons and daughters. Unlike sites such as Lavalife or eHarmony, Date My Single Kid asks moms to upload photos of their adult children along with a brief profile; then, if another mom thinks she’s found a good match, she’ll send a message. “The goal is mom-to-mom communication,” Geri says. Date My Single Kid, which the Brins insist wasn’t created for the sole purpose of finding Colby’s future wife, went live on Tuesday. Within 48 hours, it had 200 profiles uploaded. Although many a thirtysomething guy would find it embarrassing to be set up on a date by his mother, the Brins think this system has its advantages. “Say you’re into gardening,” Colby says. “You might not think that’s cool or manly, so you leave that out; but your mom might mention it and it shows your sensitive side, and a girl might find that attractive.” Then again, mothers don’t always know best. “She casts a wider net than I maybe would,” Colby says about his mother’s broad search criteria. “Her main requirements are just age and gender.”

My family was always pretty laissez-faire when it came to my dating life. My parents, long divorced, were often far away, traveling or living many times zones distant. It wasn’t the sort of family that spent a lot of time vetting my beaux. (Might have helped.)

Only once did my Mom introduce me to a guy she’d met, an IBM salesman (yes) named Bob, from a small town in Saskatchewan. Bob had a closet filled with (yes) white shirts and dark suits and a BMW that (help me) he called his Beemer. (What can I say? It was a summer fling.) He was good-looking, smart, had a decent job. But, once we got past this approved exterior, there wasn’t a great fit. He did manage to piss off all my friends at a dinner party by calling them (accurately, but still) limousine liberals.

Has your Mom ever found you someone to date? How did it work out?

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File this one under weird.

Montreal, a city hardly known for its prudishness, has shut down an event featuring a poster featuring Pamela Anderson in a bikini, her curves marked like a side of beef — cuisse (thigh), epaule (shoulder), pied (foot) — with the slogan: “All animals have the same parts — go vegetarian.”

Reports the National Post:

”I have to inform you that we, as public officials representing a municipal government, cannot endorse this image of Ms. Anderson,” an official for the Montreal Film and TV Commission wrote to PETA. “It is not so much controversial as it goes against all principles public organizations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women.”

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I’ve heard Savage argue against strict monogamy a million times, and it’s always been compelling, but Ryan’s explanation of how it all started absolutely floored me.  He explains that before the advent of agriculture, monogamy simply wasn’t in the best interest of the individual or the community.  In pre-scientific hunter-gatherer society, children were seen as much more communal– the connection between sex and birth had not yet been made.  Once agriculture was in the picture, domesticated animals began to illustrate the link between sex and birth– and with that came the significance of propety and ownership.   Only then did humans both know where babies were coming from, and have the incentive to know whose babies belonged to who.  In order for each individual to know which children he should leave his land to, he must know which children were his– and thus, he must control who the women were sleeping with.  And so, with the possession of land came the possession of female sexuality.  As Ryan puts it:

That’s when this hunger to control female sexuality really entered human behavior.  Before, when property is shared, and property wasn’t really even an important concept in pre-agricultural society, why would you care who a woman’s having sex with?

HOLY SHIT!

Both Savage and Ryan agree that it’s difficult to know how to apply this knowledge to modern human behavior– the “now what?” part.  But simply understanding where these ideas of possessing and controlling female sexuality came from is incredibly interesting.  It’s also important for us to be reminded that even our longest-held values are not innate and inevitable- -they come from somewhere.  They were born out of specific circumstance.  And, from an economic, social, and historical perspective, it’s pretty fascinating that it can all be drawn back to land ownership.  Long before the idea of capitalism even existed, the developing distinctions between private and public were informing human behavior in a very powerful way.

In a slightly unrelated video, Savage applies this idea to one of the most modern human behaviors around right now– sexting.  He argues that the backlash against it has to do with our overwhelming desire to control female sexuality:

We fear and long to control female sexuality.  With all the talk about sexting, you don’t really hear about pictures of dicks.  You hear about pictures of tits.  Because?  Because?  we don’t think women– particularly young women– own their own tits.

Any regular readers of Blogging Molly already know that I think Dan Savage one of the most important voices for sex and gender equality/liberation out there.  I’d love to hear any thoughts from people who’ve read Sex at Dawn. The more we are aware that our understanding of sexuality is constructed and not innate, the more we have the ability to develop it into something far more healthy, nuanced, and tolerant.

Rather than burden their children with the daunting task of caring for them as they age, some baby boomers may be considering an extreme form of “relief.” Suicide.

Psychiatrist Mark Goulston says he’s been approached by some middle-aged patients who say they’d rather “take a bottle of pills” than inconvenience their children.

Dr. Goulston blames the problem on the impatient nature of “millennials” – the offspring of baby boomers – a trait he says was passed down from the boomers themselves.

Adding to their angst is their own experience of taking care of elderly parents, which sometimes leads to feelings of resentment. Baby boomers don’t want their own children to grow to resent and begrudge them when they get old and feeble.

There’s a video exchange between Goulston and CNN’s Don Lemon that’s worth watching, but won’t lift your spirits much.

Add to this don’t-be-a-burden dilemma — and it IS a dilemma that crosses the mind of everyone over 60 and most folks who have a parent over 60 — the bizarre situation of estate taxes right now and the whole business of dying gets seriously complicated. It was okay last year, when you knew estate taxes were magically going to disappear on January 1, 2010, so the focus was on staying alive until then.

Work-life balance as it has traditionally been understood, where there is a discrete separation between work and leisure, and between the professional and the personal sphere, appears to be a thing of the past. To most Gen Y-Fi:ers, work will be an all-consuming thing not because it is forced upon them, but because they choose it. As members of an educated, global elite, Gen Y-Fi:ers are among the privileged workers who can view work as a means to self-fulfillment, not merely survival. They’re part of a small but by some accounts growing segment of the population, which Richard Florida terms “the Creative Class.” Florida, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, defines the Creative Class as a group of workers whose economic function is to think up new ideas, create new technology, and produce creative content based on today’s most important currency—knowledge. Members of the creative class are engineers, designers, artists, writers, planners, analysts, managers, and other “creative professionals.” He estimates that approximately 30 percent of the American workforce is part of the Creative Class (up from 10 percent in 1900 and just 20 percent as recently as 1990).

Florida wrote a series of influential books (The Rise of the Creative Class; Cities and the Creative Class; and Flight of the Creative Class) documenting the make-up and impact of the creative workforce. His and other studies show that cities that attract and retain members of the Creative Class prosper and grow, while those that do not stagnate.  Florida’s theory, which is not without critics, is that the presence of certain types of individuals—rather than businesses—is the key to economic growth. Moreover, the Creative Class—the future of the American economy, if you buy his argument—envisions their work and lives in a different way than other groups. In a 2003 Washington Monthly article titled “The New American Dream,” Florida wrote that:

The rise of the creative sector has also changed the way people work, as well as their expectations. The American Dream is no longer just about money. Better pay, a nice house, and a rising standard of living will always be attractive. But my research and others’ show another factor emerging: The new American Dream is to maintain a reasonable living standard while doing work that we enjoy doing.

Theoretically, Florida’s analysis and conclusions about the importance of the Creative Class should give its members quite a bit of agency and power. And there is anecdotal evidence that some businesses are increasingly striving to meet the needs of a creative workforce. Urban planners have been the most visible group to embrace Florida’s message: city’s across America are trying to improve their ranking on Florida’s “creativity index,” which includes tolerance (presence and acceptance of diverse communities), talent (basically a crude measure of individuals with at least college degrees), and technology (tech infrastructure and firms), in order to attract the Creative Class.

Still, despite all the attention given to the Creative Class in recent years, so far the ability of this group of workers to command the kind of workplace, policy, and cultural changes that they would need to really flourish has been limited. This is because those workers that find themselves part of Florida’s Creative Class on paper, have no sense of group identity in real life. Creative Classers don’t organize; they don’t agitate or lobby as a collective whole for increased workplace flexibility, for example. Workplace realities seem to happen to them, rather than by them; and when potentially negative changes occur, they have almost no recourse individually.

In the CNN article , “Welcome to the Weisure lifestyle,” Thom Patterson attributes the new term weisure to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, who claims that: “Activities and social spaces are becoming work-play ambiguous.” In his book, “Elsewhere USA,” Conley claims that Americans are working more and more, which necessitates the mixing of work and leisure. But, in addition, people are “more willing to let work invade their leisure time because, for a lot of Americans, working has become more fun,” Patterson writes.It isn’t as though everyone’s job is suddenly more enjoyable. There are still plenty of tedious jobs out there. The people who are having more fun, according to Conley, are the professionals defined by Florida as the Creative Class.

Creative Classers have embraced weisure, upping the ante once again on their commitment to work. But what has been the response from employers and society? Are workers getting anything back, in the form of an easier time with the “life” part of the equation, in exchange for their renewed commitment?

What are your experiences?

- Astri and Liz