Saturday, May 21, 2005
What do you call your loved ones?
Do you call your mother "Mother," "Mom," "Ma," "Mama," "Mommy," or something else? How did you come to use that particular name? I'm fairly sure that I called my mother "Mama" early on, which is what most little kids are taught, then "Mom" for most of my life, again because that was pretty standard with my peers, then started mingling it with a tongue-in-cheek reprise of "Mama" because that's what my father called her (more on that in a minute), and since I got married I've pretty much ceased to refer to her by any name at all, not from any conscious choice but, I think, in a subconscious desire to obliterate her. Of course, it's occasionally necessary to attach some label to her; I put "Mom" on her cards, and on the rare occasions when I need to single her out of a group, I'll call her "Mother," but in a way that makes it clear that it's a formal title rather than a name.
Fathers also have a range of names they can be called, and I think our adult choice for how to refer to our parents says alot about the relationship; looking back, I can see that I stopped referring to my father by any name by about my mid teens, at which point he'd non-coincidentally stopped calling ME by name, too... "that little bastard" and "that little son of a bitch" were his favorite terms for me (the former amused me as it denied his existence), but he'd use "that kid" as a contemptuous shorthand when his mood wasn't too vile. My mother and I referred to him amongst ourselves with an expletive, and do so to this day; when my husband first met the rest of my mother's family, he had to ask them who they were talking about, because they were using my father's actual name, and he'd never heard it, lol.
We have many different ways to refer to grandparents, too; the only one of mine that I ever knew well enough to have a name for is my mother's mother, and I created a nickname for her as a young child that I've used for her my entire life... somewhat to her embarrassment at times, when visitors to her home would want to know what the name I addressed her by in cards meant, and she couldn't explain how I'd invented it.
I think that one of the sure signs you've become an adult is when you stop referring to your aunt Mary as "Aunt Mary" and start calling her "Mary"; in some families, though, the aunt and uncle titles are never dropped, which is more traditional and respectful, but probably makes those so referred to feel older... if my husband (who's adopted) turns out to have half-siblings, and thus nieces and nephews, I think I'll try to dodge the aunt and uncle labels for just that reason.
What do your parents call each other? My father followed what used to be the standard pattern and called my mother "Mom" or "Mama," despite her periodic protests of, "Stop calling me that, I'm NOT your mother!!" I remember being stunned when the press made an issue of Ronald Reagan calling Nancy "Mom" or "Mommy" or whatever they said it was, because I'd always heard men calling their wives the same thing the kids called her; since wives ARE, in many ways, mothers to their husbands (sigh), this still seems perfectly reasonable to me.
My mother was quite sly in her choice of nickname for my father. I have virtually no memories of her calling him by his actual name; she always called him "Prince," which would cause periodic protests from HIM of, "Stop calling me 'Prince,' I'm not a dog," to which she'd of course reply with "Yes you are"... but dogs had nothing to do with this moniker. She'd occasionally refer to him as "Prince Knotso," which always vaguely puzzled me (since I didn't know what the connection was between him and knots), and which I eventually questioned her about; it turned out that she was actually saying "Prince Not-So," which was short for "Prince Not-So-Charming"... so when she called him "Prince," which would sound to anyone overhearing it like an affectionate and laudatory name, she was actually zinging him. :-)
What do you and your romantic partner call each other? I hadn't made the obvious connections before, but my husband's main nickname for me, although mostly flattering, carries on a deeper level a little bit of a zing, and my numerous nicknames for him, which are always multi-part, center around words that are at least semi-expletive in nature (usually connected with bodily functions-marriage is often weird and gross). I don't know what's eerier, now that I'm thinking about it; the way I adopted my mother's naming conventions for my father to invent nicknames for my husband, or how my husband, not even knowing what my mother called my father, came up with a similar nickname for me.
What's in a name?
Fathers also have a range of names they can be called, and I think our adult choice for how to refer to our parents says alot about the relationship; looking back, I can see that I stopped referring to my father by any name by about my mid teens, at which point he'd non-coincidentally stopped calling ME by name, too... "that little bastard" and "that little son of a bitch" were his favorite terms for me (the former amused me as it denied his existence), but he'd use "that kid" as a contemptuous shorthand when his mood wasn't too vile. My mother and I referred to him amongst ourselves with an expletive, and do so to this day; when my husband first met the rest of my mother's family, he had to ask them who they were talking about, because they were using my father's actual name, and he'd never heard it, lol.
We have many different ways to refer to grandparents, too; the only one of mine that I ever knew well enough to have a name for is my mother's mother, and I created a nickname for her as a young child that I've used for her my entire life... somewhat to her embarrassment at times, when visitors to her home would want to know what the name I addressed her by in cards meant, and she couldn't explain how I'd invented it.
I think that one of the sure signs you've become an adult is when you stop referring to your aunt Mary as "Aunt Mary" and start calling her "Mary"; in some families, though, the aunt and uncle titles are never dropped, which is more traditional and respectful, but probably makes those so referred to feel older... if my husband (who's adopted) turns out to have half-siblings, and thus nieces and nephews, I think I'll try to dodge the aunt and uncle labels for just that reason.
What do your parents call each other? My father followed what used to be the standard pattern and called my mother "Mom" or "Mama," despite her periodic protests of, "Stop calling me that, I'm NOT your mother!!" I remember being stunned when the press made an issue of Ronald Reagan calling Nancy "Mom" or "Mommy" or whatever they said it was, because I'd always heard men calling their wives the same thing the kids called her; since wives ARE, in many ways, mothers to their husbands (sigh), this still seems perfectly reasonable to me.
My mother was quite sly in her choice of nickname for my father. I have virtually no memories of her calling him by his actual name; she always called him "Prince," which would cause periodic protests from HIM of, "Stop calling me 'Prince,' I'm not a dog," to which she'd of course reply with "Yes you are"... but dogs had nothing to do with this moniker. She'd occasionally refer to him as "Prince Knotso," which always vaguely puzzled me (since I didn't know what the connection was between him and knots), and which I eventually questioned her about; it turned out that she was actually saying "Prince Not-So," which was short for "Prince Not-So-Charming"... so when she called him "Prince," which would sound to anyone overhearing it like an affectionate and laudatory name, she was actually zinging him. :-)
What do you and your romantic partner call each other? I hadn't made the obvious connections before, but my husband's main nickname for me, although mostly flattering, carries on a deeper level a little bit of a zing, and my numerous nicknames for him, which are always multi-part, center around words that are at least semi-expletive in nature (usually connected with bodily functions-marriage is often weird and gross). I don't know what's eerier, now that I'm thinking about it; the way I adopted my mother's naming conventions for my father to invent nicknames for my husband, or how my husband, not even knowing what my mother called my father, came up with a similar nickname for me.
What's in a name?
Friday, May 20, 2005
A freaky flaw in DNA testing
We're told that DNA testing is essentially infallible; scarily, in at least a small % of cases, it's NOT. I saw a program tonight on the Discovery Science channel called "I Am My Own Twin" that explained that some people have TWO different sets of DNA in their bodies; since DNA testing naturally doesn't include searching every part of the body for a 2nd set, if they test the "wrong set" they can get incorrect results for the primary uses of these tests, paternity and criminal identification.
These double-DNA people are called "chimeras," after the mythical creatures with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail
http://www.sp.unipi.it/index.php?page=/settling/prova2004
http://webhome.idirect.com/~donlong/monsters/Html/Chimera.htm
and, while there are only about 30 known cases, they have no idea how common this actually is, as very few people receive DNA tests, and there's hardly ever a reason to suspect there's a problem, or to take test samples from different parts of the body that might give different results, so a chimeric person could be tested and still not know that they have a 2nd set of DNA.
How does a person end up with 2 sets of DNA coexisting in their bodies? Wikipedia says:
"In zoology, a chimera is an animal which has (at least) two different populations of cells, which are genetically distinct and which originated in different zygotes (fertilized eggs). Chimeras are named after the mythological creature Chimera.
Chimerism may occur naturally during pregnancy, when two non-identical twins combine in the womb, at a very early stage of development, to form a single organism. Such an organism is called a tetragametic chimera as it is formed from four gametes-two eggs and two sperm. As the organism develops, the resulting chimera can come to possess organs that have different sets of chromosomes. For example, the chimera may have a liver composed of cells with one set of chromosomes and have a kidney composed of cells with a second set of chromosomes. This has occurred in humans, though it is considered extremely rare, but since it can only be detected through DNA testing, which in itself is rare, it may be more common than currently believed. As of 2003, there were about 30 human cases in the literature, according to New Scientist."
Sadly, New Scientist only makes full articles available to subscribers, but this site
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_838312.html?menu=news.scienceanddiscovery.genetics
gives the story, which is about one of the women who was covered on the TV show:
"A mother-of-three has discovered she is not the biological parent of two of her naturally conceived sons and is in fact made up of two women.
Scientists came to the extraordinary conclusion that the 52-year-old was formed from two non-identical twin girl embryos which fused into a single person in her mother's womb.
Tests carried out on the woman - known as Jane - showed she had two distinct types of DNA in her body.
Her blood is made up of her own cells, but when doctors took samples from her thyroid gland, mouth and hair, they found they came from two different people.
Jane is a tetragametic chimera - someone whose body is made up of two genetically different lines of cells.
Her story, told in the New Scientist, is extremely rare and only 30 cases have been reported.
The discovery came when Jane needed to find a suitable donor for her kidney transplant. When her sons underwent blood tests to see if they could help their mother, the results showed that two of her boys could not be hers because they had different DNA.
Jane's doctor, Margot Kruskall, from the US Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, was perplexed and asked her colleagues for advice. "I did get the most amazing set of explanations," she said. "Nobody could quite figure it out."
The children were definitely conceived naturally and Jane's husband was proved to be the father. Some doctors thought she had secretly undergone fertility treatment using donated eggs while others thought she had used her sister as a surrogate mother.
Finally, a familial link was established with the boys when doctors tested Jane's brother and found he had similar genes to her sons. When Jane's ovaries were studied, it was found that the two different sets of genes in her body were living amicably alongside each other.
One of her sons came from her set of cells, while the other two were derived from her non-identical twin's set of cells. Dr Kruskall said the number of chimeras may increase due to the use of modern fertility drugs."
YIKES!! Can you imagine how that family must have felt? They had another, similar case on the show, where they thought the woman was trying to commit welfare fraud by passing someone else's kids off as hers, because they didn't have her DNA; they showed that the boys shared DNA with her mother, and then they had someone there when she gave birth to her 3rd child to witness the birth and take blood samples which proved that THAT child didn't share her DNA either. I think in her case they eventually found the other set of DNA in cells taken from a scraping of her cervix; she and her family are continuing to participate in studies being done at Harvard on chimerism.
A more detailed description of what can lead to chimerism comes from this site
http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=23
which tells us:
"First, it is possible to become a chimera if developing fraternal twin embryos fuse together to become one embryo. (Think of this is as the reverse of identical twins where a single embryo splits into two.) This happens very early on when the embryos are just unspecialized cells, so a healthy baby can still be made. Fraternal twins do not have the same DNA, so a mixture of two embryos will give a chimera.
Second, chimeras can arise when developing fraternal twins share a blood supply. This happens when the twins (who have different DNA) share a placenta and cells from their blood mix. The twins will be chimeras only in terms of their blood since other cells in the body are not affected by the blood supply.
Third, sometimes chimeras can happen through an error in the way cells divide in the developing embryo. (These people are technically called mosaics but the concept is similar.) Cells split into two to make more of themselves - something embryos need to do a lot of to grow into a baby. For this, cells need to double their DNA and divide it between the two new halves. Sometimes this goes wrong and some new cells end up with different DNA. If this happens early on, the tissues that come from these cells end up with a different genotype. "
The term "mosaics" came up in the TV show, too, and was used to describe chimeras with unusual skin pigmentations; I don't know if the patterns that they sometimes get on their skin are why they're called mosaics, but it's a good way to remember the term. As shown on the show, some chimeras have what looks like a sharp line of demarcation down the middle of their abdomens with different colors of skin on each side of the line, like in that old Star Trek episode, some have all sorts of streaks, splotches and mottlings, and some actually have what can only be described as a checkerboard pattern of pigmentation; you've got to see it to believe it, it looks surreal. This unusual pigmentation is a big clue to medical types that the person might be chimeric; other possible clues are the eyes being different colors (heterochromia iridium), and the presence of a combination of male and female genitals (intersexuality). The 2 women in the show lacked any of these characteristics, which gives us the creepy realization that ANY of us might actually be chimeras and not know it.
Because they can't do DNA testing on every bodily part of anyone, much less a big enough sample of people to know how common this is, we have no way of knowing if it's rare or not... and thus no way of knowing how often paternity tests that come up "not the father" are wrong, how often DNA test done to identify criminals that come up "not the criminal" are wrong, and of course how often the other sorts of answers sought from DNA tests are wrong.
Scary, isn't it?
These double-DNA people are called "chimeras," after the mythical creatures with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail
http://www.sp.unipi.it/index.php?page=/settling/prova2004
http://webhome.idirect.com/~donlong/monsters/Html/Chimera.htm
and, while there are only about 30 known cases, they have no idea how common this actually is, as very few people receive DNA tests, and there's hardly ever a reason to suspect there's a problem, or to take test samples from different parts of the body that might give different results, so a chimeric person could be tested and still not know that they have a 2nd set of DNA.
How does a person end up with 2 sets of DNA coexisting in their bodies? Wikipedia says:
"In zoology, a chimera is an animal which has (at least) two different populations of cells, which are genetically distinct and which originated in different zygotes (fertilized eggs). Chimeras are named after the mythological creature Chimera.
Chimerism may occur naturally during pregnancy, when two non-identical twins combine in the womb, at a very early stage of development, to form a single organism. Such an organism is called a tetragametic chimera as it is formed from four gametes-two eggs and two sperm. As the organism develops, the resulting chimera can come to possess organs that have different sets of chromosomes. For example, the chimera may have a liver composed of cells with one set of chromosomes and have a kidney composed of cells with a second set of chromosomes. This has occurred in humans, though it is considered extremely rare, but since it can only be detected through DNA testing, which in itself is rare, it may be more common than currently believed. As of 2003, there were about 30 human cases in the literature, according to New Scientist."
Sadly, New Scientist only makes full articles available to subscribers, but this site
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_838312.html?menu=news.scienceanddiscovery.genetics
gives the story, which is about one of the women who was covered on the TV show:
"A mother-of-three has discovered she is not the biological parent of two of her naturally conceived sons and is in fact made up of two women.
Scientists came to the extraordinary conclusion that the 52-year-old was formed from two non-identical twin girl embryos which fused into a single person in her mother's womb.
Tests carried out on the woman - known as Jane - showed she had two distinct types of DNA in her body.
Her blood is made up of her own cells, but when doctors took samples from her thyroid gland, mouth and hair, they found they came from two different people.
Jane is a tetragametic chimera - someone whose body is made up of two genetically different lines of cells.
Her story, told in the New Scientist, is extremely rare and only 30 cases have been reported.
The discovery came when Jane needed to find a suitable donor for her kidney transplant. When her sons underwent blood tests to see if they could help their mother, the results showed that two of her boys could not be hers because they had different DNA.
Jane's doctor, Margot Kruskall, from the US Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, was perplexed and asked her colleagues for advice. "I did get the most amazing set of explanations," she said. "Nobody could quite figure it out."
The children were definitely conceived naturally and Jane's husband was proved to be the father. Some doctors thought she had secretly undergone fertility treatment using donated eggs while others thought she had used her sister as a surrogate mother.
Finally, a familial link was established with the boys when doctors tested Jane's brother and found he had similar genes to her sons. When Jane's ovaries were studied, it was found that the two different sets of genes in her body were living amicably alongside each other.
One of her sons came from her set of cells, while the other two were derived from her non-identical twin's set of cells. Dr Kruskall said the number of chimeras may increase due to the use of modern fertility drugs."
YIKES!! Can you imagine how that family must have felt? They had another, similar case on the show, where they thought the woman was trying to commit welfare fraud by passing someone else's kids off as hers, because they didn't have her DNA; they showed that the boys shared DNA with her mother, and then they had someone there when she gave birth to her 3rd child to witness the birth and take blood samples which proved that THAT child didn't share her DNA either. I think in her case they eventually found the other set of DNA in cells taken from a scraping of her cervix; she and her family are continuing to participate in studies being done at Harvard on chimerism.
A more detailed description of what can lead to chimerism comes from this site
http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=23
which tells us:
"First, it is possible to become a chimera if developing fraternal twin embryos fuse together to become one embryo. (Think of this is as the reverse of identical twins where a single embryo splits into two.) This happens very early on when the embryos are just unspecialized cells, so a healthy baby can still be made. Fraternal twins do not have the same DNA, so a mixture of two embryos will give a chimera.
Second, chimeras can arise when developing fraternal twins share a blood supply. This happens when the twins (who have different DNA) share a placenta and cells from their blood mix. The twins will be chimeras only in terms of their blood since other cells in the body are not affected by the blood supply.
Third, sometimes chimeras can happen through an error in the way cells divide in the developing embryo. (These people are technically called mosaics but the concept is similar.) Cells split into two to make more of themselves - something embryos need to do a lot of to grow into a baby. For this, cells need to double their DNA and divide it between the two new halves. Sometimes this goes wrong and some new cells end up with different DNA. If this happens early on, the tissues that come from these cells end up with a different genotype. "
The term "mosaics" came up in the TV show, too, and was used to describe chimeras with unusual skin pigmentations; I don't know if the patterns that they sometimes get on their skin are why they're called mosaics, but it's a good way to remember the term. As shown on the show, some chimeras have what looks like a sharp line of demarcation down the middle of their abdomens with different colors of skin on each side of the line, like in that old Star Trek episode, some have all sorts of streaks, splotches and mottlings, and some actually have what can only be described as a checkerboard pattern of pigmentation; you've got to see it to believe it, it looks surreal. This unusual pigmentation is a big clue to medical types that the person might be chimeric; other possible clues are the eyes being different colors (heterochromia iridium), and the presence of a combination of male and female genitals (intersexuality). The 2 women in the show lacked any of these characteristics, which gives us the creepy realization that ANY of us might actually be chimeras and not know it.
Because they can't do DNA testing on every bodily part of anyone, much less a big enough sample of people to know how common this is, we have no way of knowing if it's rare or not... and thus no way of knowing how often paternity tests that come up "not the father" are wrong, how often DNA test done to identify criminals that come up "not the criminal" are wrong, and of course how often the other sorts of answers sought from DNA tests are wrong.
Scary, isn't it?
Thursday, May 19, 2005
The best interest of the child
You hear this phrase all the time, and it's a non-stop refrain during custody cases, but do we have any idea what it MEANS... and do we actually strive to achieve it?
One of the basic principles that we adhere to in this area is that a child's biological parents are "best" for them... but what do we base this idea on? There's nothing about sharing DNA with a child that makes people more loving, more special, or better parents, is there? There are countless adoptive parents who are wonderful, and countless biological parents that, like mine, are only slightly "better" for a child than being raised by wolves; you either love a child or you don't, and there's no magical extra effect added in if there's shared DNA.
But wait a minute, don't a mother's hormones fill her with love for the child? Sure, as long as she's not hit with postpartum depression, or indifferent contempt like MY mother was, but non-biological parents who are eager for a child are overcome with love, too; any time you hear an adoptive parent talk about the moment when they were given their child, and you'll hear rapture equal to anything that biological parents ever came out with. Any adult that wants a child can feel that love, and they can feel it for any child they see as theirs; that parents can take home the wrong baby from the hospital and never notice anything's amiss shows how strong the biological drive is to bond with a baby, whether or not one has given birth to or sired it.
One of the biggest strides humanity made in the last century was to realize that some parents are abusive or neglectful, and that this is NOT ok; the laws that allow kids to be taken away from parents that don't treat them right (to an extreme degree, as we still consider a certain amount of abuse to be ok) have saved countless kids from permanent physical and psychological damage, and even death... in this situation, at least, we've seen that the biological parents can be the WORST thing for the child, rather than the best. But what about situations where no egregious abuse is involved?
It's not hard to see that you can't just take a child away from its parents on a whim-the child would be devastated and traumatized, which is clearly NOT in their best interest. Then again, even in abusive households, if a child is taken out for their protection, it's standard for them to scream and cry and beg to be take back to their parents... so how do you know which is the greater harm to the child, their suffering with their parents or their suffering withOUT them? I don't know how you determine a child's best interest in that sort of situation; since there's no way to objectively measure or predict suffering, I'm betting they don't have much better of a record of judgment in cases where the abuse isn't monstrous than random chance would give them, which is pretty sad.
Then, there are the cases where a long-missing biological parent appears on the scene, and the judge decides that the terrified child should be dragged off struggling and screaming to spend time with, or even LIVE with, what to them is a total stranger; on what planet would it be in a child's best interest to be taken from a loving and familiar family to be with someone who just happens to have contributed half of their DNA? What benefit do they get from the proximity to the DNA donor that makes up for their misery?
What about when the parents are desperately poor and live in a horrible neighborhood, or are homeless; would it be better for the child to be adopted by wealthy parents who could give it a safe and comfortable life? The child would be upset at first, but would the countless advantages they'd receive make it better for them in the long run?
And now for the $64K question; what if the child is an infant, not yet bonded to the parents as an older child would be, and the biological parents were poor, uneducated types who could never provide it with any of the good things in life, and there was a wealthy couple who were desperate for a child, would love a child with all their hearts and give it every advantage... which set of parents would be to the child's best interest, the biological ones or the ones who could love it AND give it everything a child could ever need or want? Isn't it better for the child to have love AND financial benefits than just love? If not, why not? If so, shouldn't we be taking babies away from poor parents and giving them to rich parents with the justification that it's in the best interest of the child?
No one would agree to such a plan, of course, because, above and beyond the idea of the best interest of the child is a more primitive one; that a child is the property of the parents. We don't take a child from poor parents any more than we'd take anything else of theirs; we see that child as belonging to them, and, as long as they keep their abuse below a certain level, they can treat the child any way they want, make them live any kind of life they want, make their life a living hell of joylessness and rules if they want... and we see that as their right.
Is THAT in the best interest of the child?
One of the basic principles that we adhere to in this area is that a child's biological parents are "best" for them... but what do we base this idea on? There's nothing about sharing DNA with a child that makes people more loving, more special, or better parents, is there? There are countless adoptive parents who are wonderful, and countless biological parents that, like mine, are only slightly "better" for a child than being raised by wolves; you either love a child or you don't, and there's no magical extra effect added in if there's shared DNA.
But wait a minute, don't a mother's hormones fill her with love for the child? Sure, as long as she's not hit with postpartum depression, or indifferent contempt like MY mother was, but non-biological parents who are eager for a child are overcome with love, too; any time you hear an adoptive parent talk about the moment when they were given their child, and you'll hear rapture equal to anything that biological parents ever came out with. Any adult that wants a child can feel that love, and they can feel it for any child they see as theirs; that parents can take home the wrong baby from the hospital and never notice anything's amiss shows how strong the biological drive is to bond with a baby, whether or not one has given birth to or sired it.
One of the biggest strides humanity made in the last century was to realize that some parents are abusive or neglectful, and that this is NOT ok; the laws that allow kids to be taken away from parents that don't treat them right (to an extreme degree, as we still consider a certain amount of abuse to be ok) have saved countless kids from permanent physical and psychological damage, and even death... in this situation, at least, we've seen that the biological parents can be the WORST thing for the child, rather than the best. But what about situations where no egregious abuse is involved?
It's not hard to see that you can't just take a child away from its parents on a whim-the child would be devastated and traumatized, which is clearly NOT in their best interest. Then again, even in abusive households, if a child is taken out for their protection, it's standard for them to scream and cry and beg to be take back to their parents... so how do you know which is the greater harm to the child, their suffering with their parents or their suffering withOUT them? I don't know how you determine a child's best interest in that sort of situation; since there's no way to objectively measure or predict suffering, I'm betting they don't have much better of a record of judgment in cases where the abuse isn't monstrous than random chance would give them, which is pretty sad.
Then, there are the cases where a long-missing biological parent appears on the scene, and the judge decides that the terrified child should be dragged off struggling and screaming to spend time with, or even LIVE with, what to them is a total stranger; on what planet would it be in a child's best interest to be taken from a loving and familiar family to be with someone who just happens to have contributed half of their DNA? What benefit do they get from the proximity to the DNA donor that makes up for their misery?
What about when the parents are desperately poor and live in a horrible neighborhood, or are homeless; would it be better for the child to be adopted by wealthy parents who could give it a safe and comfortable life? The child would be upset at first, but would the countless advantages they'd receive make it better for them in the long run?
And now for the $64K question; what if the child is an infant, not yet bonded to the parents as an older child would be, and the biological parents were poor, uneducated types who could never provide it with any of the good things in life, and there was a wealthy couple who were desperate for a child, would love a child with all their hearts and give it every advantage... which set of parents would be to the child's best interest, the biological ones or the ones who could love it AND give it everything a child could ever need or want? Isn't it better for the child to have love AND financial benefits than just love? If not, why not? If so, shouldn't we be taking babies away from poor parents and giving them to rich parents with the justification that it's in the best interest of the child?
No one would agree to such a plan, of course, because, above and beyond the idea of the best interest of the child is a more primitive one; that a child is the property of the parents. We don't take a child from poor parents any more than we'd take anything else of theirs; we see that child as belonging to them, and, as long as they keep their abuse below a certain level, they can treat the child any way they want, make them live any kind of life they want, make their life a living hell of joylessness and rules if they want... and we see that as their right.
Is THAT in the best interest of the child?
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP)
They say you learn something new every day, and today this one was my thing; I saw part of an ad for the DVD release of the movie "White Noise," which I'd never heard of, and when I looked it up
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=141298&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Full
it turned out to an interesting-sounding horror movie circling around the idea of EVP, which I'd never heard of either. I did a search, and here
http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa020303a.htm
I discovered that
"Electronic voice phenomena - or EVP - is a mysterious event in which human-sounding voices from an unknown source are heard on recording tape, in radio station noise and other electronic media. Most often, EVPs have been captured on audiotape. The mysterious voices are not heard at the time of recording; it is only when the tape is played back that the voices are heard. Sometimes amplification and noise filtering is required to hear the voices.
Some EVP is more easily heard and understood than others. And they vary in gender (men and women), age (women and children), tone and emotion. They usually speak in single-words, phrases and short sentences. Sometimes they are just grunts, groans, growling and other vocal noises. EVP has been recorded speaking in various languages.
The quality of EVP also varies. Some are difficult to distinguish and are open to interpretation as to what they are saying. Some EVP, however, are quite clear and easy to understand. EVP often has an electronic or mechanical character to it; sometimes it is natural sounding. The quality of EVP is categorized by researchers:
Class A: Easily understood by almost anyone with little or no dispute. These are also usually the loudest EVPs.
Class B: Usually characterized by warping of the voice in certain syllables. Lower in volume or more distant sounding than Class A. Class B is the most common type of EVP.
Class C: Characterized by excessive warping. They are the lowest in volume (often whispering) and are the hardest to understand.
The most fascinating aspect of EVP is that the voices sometimes respond directly to the persons making the recording. The researchers will ask a question, for example, and the voice will answer or comment. Again, this response is not heard until later when the tape is played back."
At 1st glance, this looks like a clear case of wishful thinking applied to little bits of noise that went unnoticed when the taping was being done, but people apply similar "logic" to the existence of ghosts to dismiss them, and I know THEY exist, so... maybe there's something to this. There are all sorts of energy around us, and it's not impossible to imagine that some of it could imprint on a tape; it'd sure be interesting if they did a study to see if anything other than sound waves could do something to a tape that would be translated into sound when the tape was played, wouldn't it?
Where do people think the "voices" come from? Some of the explanations are:
"They are voices of people who have died. This is why many researchers go to cemeteries seeking EVPs (and often with great success). In this context, the phenomenon is sometimes called instrumental transcommunication or ITC.
They are from another dimension. It is theorized that there may be many dimensions of existence, and somehow beings from some other dimension are able to speak and communicate with ours through this method. A good question is, however: How do they know English and other languages of our dimension?
They come from the researchers' own subconscious. It's been suggested that somehow the researchers' thoughts are projected onto the tape.
Some people believe that these voices are angelic or demonic in origin.
Skeptics assert that there is nothing to EVP at all - that the "voices" are either hoaxed, random noise interpreted as voices, real voices already on the tape, or voices picked up from radio, cell phones and other such sources."
They left one out; since energy can never be destroyed, every thought we have exists forever in some form... so words from ANY person's thoughts might in theory be recorded, not just from the researchers.
This blew my mind:
"It is not generally known that in the 1920s Thomas Edison tried to invent a machine that would communicate with the dead. Thinking this was possible, he wrote: 'If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical or scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, other faculties, and knowledge that we acquire on this Earth. Therefore... if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.'"
Would any scientist dare to openly admit to doing that sort of research today? Nope... and that's why we never get anywhere with discoveries in the area of the unknown, sigh.
Later in the article, they describe how you can try recording these "voices" for yourself; I'm not copying that info here, because the idea of focusing on any entities that might currently be hanging around unnoticed, and thus risking being given special notice by THEM, gives me a cold chill... although I don't think most spirits would mean us any harm, poltergeists are no joy to deal with, and it's anyone's guess as to what else is there, just beyond our ability to perceive them, so why take chances?
With no experience, and no intention of getting any, and no facts at my disposal, I can't make any sort of judgment on this one; my instinct is that it's possible, but that most of the time all there is are fragments of sound that coincidentally sound vaguely like words. I found a guy who describes himself as "a programmer and musician making music from Chaos Theory - using a system I've written myself I convert mathematic fractal data into musical tones and durations, and then compile these to make compositions," who got more than he bargained for from one of his projects:
"... when playing these sequences through vocal-based patches on my synthesisers, for example, a "choir" sound, I found that the sequences produced sounds that mimic real vocal phrases - in the case of "Season" in two places there are vocal sounds that listeners have mistaken for real vocal phrases, and, most strange of all, one seems to be saying "Rimbaud.""
He doesn't seem entirely sure if these are coincidences or something else, but to my mind it's proof that at least some of these EVP's are cause and effect with technology. You can read his whole story, and his explanation of how to generate the sort of stuff he does, here
http://users1.ee.net/pmason/music3.html
The ever-helpful Wikipedia site suggests that EVP might be attributable to pareidolia, which is "a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse." This probably accounts for 99% of the alleged EVP's.
But what about that last 1%?
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=141298&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Full
it turned out to an interesting-sounding horror movie circling around the idea of EVP, which I'd never heard of either. I did a search, and here
http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa020303a.htm
I discovered that
"Electronic voice phenomena - or EVP - is a mysterious event in which human-sounding voices from an unknown source are heard on recording tape, in radio station noise and other electronic media. Most often, EVPs have been captured on audiotape. The mysterious voices are not heard at the time of recording; it is only when the tape is played back that the voices are heard. Sometimes amplification and noise filtering is required to hear the voices.
Some EVP is more easily heard and understood than others. And they vary in gender (men and women), age (women and children), tone and emotion. They usually speak in single-words, phrases and short sentences. Sometimes they are just grunts, groans, growling and other vocal noises. EVP has been recorded speaking in various languages.
The quality of EVP also varies. Some are difficult to distinguish and are open to interpretation as to what they are saying. Some EVP, however, are quite clear and easy to understand. EVP often has an electronic or mechanical character to it; sometimes it is natural sounding. The quality of EVP is categorized by researchers:
Class A: Easily understood by almost anyone with little or no dispute. These are also usually the loudest EVPs.
Class B: Usually characterized by warping of the voice in certain syllables. Lower in volume or more distant sounding than Class A. Class B is the most common type of EVP.
Class C: Characterized by excessive warping. They are the lowest in volume (often whispering) and are the hardest to understand.
The most fascinating aspect of EVP is that the voices sometimes respond directly to the persons making the recording. The researchers will ask a question, for example, and the voice will answer or comment. Again, this response is not heard until later when the tape is played back."
At 1st glance, this looks like a clear case of wishful thinking applied to little bits of noise that went unnoticed when the taping was being done, but people apply similar "logic" to the existence of ghosts to dismiss them, and I know THEY exist, so... maybe there's something to this. There are all sorts of energy around us, and it's not impossible to imagine that some of it could imprint on a tape; it'd sure be interesting if they did a study to see if anything other than sound waves could do something to a tape that would be translated into sound when the tape was played, wouldn't it?
Where do people think the "voices" come from? Some of the explanations are:
"They are voices of people who have died. This is why many researchers go to cemeteries seeking EVPs (and often with great success). In this context, the phenomenon is sometimes called instrumental transcommunication or ITC.
They are from another dimension. It is theorized that there may be many dimensions of existence, and somehow beings from some other dimension are able to speak and communicate with ours through this method. A good question is, however: How do they know English and other languages of our dimension?
They come from the researchers' own subconscious. It's been suggested that somehow the researchers' thoughts are projected onto the tape.
Some people believe that these voices are angelic or demonic in origin.
Skeptics assert that there is nothing to EVP at all - that the "voices" are either hoaxed, random noise interpreted as voices, real voices already on the tape, or voices picked up from radio, cell phones and other such sources."
They left one out; since energy can never be destroyed, every thought we have exists forever in some form... so words from ANY person's thoughts might in theory be recorded, not just from the researchers.
This blew my mind:
"It is not generally known that in the 1920s Thomas Edison tried to invent a machine that would communicate with the dead. Thinking this was possible, he wrote: 'If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical or scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, other faculties, and knowledge that we acquire on this Earth. Therefore... if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.'"
Would any scientist dare to openly admit to doing that sort of research today? Nope... and that's why we never get anywhere with discoveries in the area of the unknown, sigh.
Later in the article, they describe how you can try recording these "voices" for yourself; I'm not copying that info here, because the idea of focusing on any entities that might currently be hanging around unnoticed, and thus risking being given special notice by THEM, gives me a cold chill... although I don't think most spirits would mean us any harm, poltergeists are no joy to deal with, and it's anyone's guess as to what else is there, just beyond our ability to perceive them, so why take chances?
With no experience, and no intention of getting any, and no facts at my disposal, I can't make any sort of judgment on this one; my instinct is that it's possible, but that most of the time all there is are fragments of sound that coincidentally sound vaguely like words. I found a guy who describes himself as "a programmer and musician making music from Chaos Theory - using a system I've written myself I convert mathematic fractal data into musical tones and durations, and then compile these to make compositions," who got more than he bargained for from one of his projects:
"... when playing these sequences through vocal-based patches on my synthesisers, for example, a "choir" sound, I found that the sequences produced sounds that mimic real vocal phrases - in the case of "Season" in two places there are vocal sounds that listeners have mistaken for real vocal phrases, and, most strange of all, one seems to be saying "Rimbaud.""
He doesn't seem entirely sure if these are coincidences or something else, but to my mind it's proof that at least some of these EVP's are cause and effect with technology. You can read his whole story, and his explanation of how to generate the sort of stuff he does, here
http://users1.ee.net/pmason/music3.html
The ever-helpful Wikipedia site suggests that EVP might be attributable to pareidolia, which is "a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse." This probably accounts for 99% of the alleged EVP's.
But what about that last 1%?
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
The future of blogging
This keeps coming up on other people's blogs, so I figured it was time to address it here; in a nutshell, the golden age of blogging has come and gone. I say this because:
It used to be cool to have a blog; now, almost everyone you encounter has one, and of course nothing that everyone has, and that everyone can easily do or get, is ever cool.
The novelty of blogs has long since worn off, and we're driven by the desire to find new things, and tend to lose interest in the old ones.
Blogging is a great deal of work, and people stop being willing to do that work in the same way that most people can't maintain a paper diary or journal indefinitely.
Those who blog about whatever's on their minds often find that they don't have an infinite # of interesting lines of thought to rant about, leaving them having to try too hard to find something to say; it stops being fun and starts being work.
There are so many blogs around now that people who want to have a certain level of traffic and/or commenting can't compete with older blogs, and the countless blogs similar to theirs, and thus end up posting to themselves; again, that stops being fun after awhile.
Alot of people got burned out on blogs after the post-election frenzy, and stopped reading, commenting and posting.
The reason I got to thinking about why blogging is declining is because in recent months a FLOOD of blogs that I've been a long-time reader of have been deleted, or abandoned, or put on indefinite hold, or reduced to blank pages that don't have anything put on them even weeks later, or have a seriously reduced frequency of posts; also, when I look for blogs in the various directories, I consistently find that a scary % of the links now lead to dead or deleted blogs. These things, combined with a great deal of "next-blogging" that's verified that many excellent blogs are being largely ignored, made the truth impossible to mistake... the "Age of the Blog" is, if far from over, clearly past its peak.
What I see happening over the next year or so is a continuing gradual die-out of blogs, after which we'll be left with a far smaller (but still non-trivial) # of hard-core bloggers, who'll collectively be seen as a subspecies of geek, interesting perhaps but not worthy of the attentions of CNN and the rest of the mainstream media... 5 years from now, people will read old articles that refer to what's being said in the blogosphere and laugh in disbelief that we were once so watched and paid attention to. Blogs will end up being like Geocities sites; a few years ago, everyone had to have that Geocities URL, leading to a conglomeration of personal photos and info or a "fan site," and now you almost never see that sort of personal page anymore... and sooner than we think, the daily-entry text arrangement will seem just as quaint, although I'm guessing more people will hold onto it and keep doing it than they did with "personal pages"-time will tell.
What's replacing blogs as the cool thing to do? Podcasting. Seemingly overnight, it went from something I'd never heard of to being EVERYWHERE, which is a sure sign of something catching on; it's much easier to talk than to write for most folks, plenty of people would rather listen than read, it's far more personal to hear a voice than to look at text, and it's still NEW, so I expect an ever-increasing amount of enthusiasm to be shown for it... and I'll be amazed if I haven't seen/heard mentions of it in the media by, say, the end of the summer (which will allow time for the young people to turn this into a major thing over their vacation).
If you're not familiar with podcasting, or are getting into it and would like to experience something new, you'll find terrific ones being produced by my friends Robert Keeme
http://www.keeme.com/
and Gary Bibb (with Yaz Larino)
http://www.bibbsrevenge.com/
I won't be joining the podcast revolution, as it'd eliminate my deniability if anyone I know ever found my blog... and my long, elaborate posts wouldn't translate attractively into spoken monologues in any case (just ask my husband, lol). Although I empathize with those who say that their blogs were taking up too much of their time, energy and thoughts, I won't be joining THEM any time soon either; unless and until a day arrives when no one comes here anymore, I'll still be slaving over a hot laptop to give you a daily look into my mind for the foreseeable future.
It used to be cool to have a blog; now, almost everyone you encounter has one, and of course nothing that everyone has, and that everyone can easily do or get, is ever cool.
The novelty of blogs has long since worn off, and we're driven by the desire to find new things, and tend to lose interest in the old ones.
Blogging is a great deal of work, and people stop being willing to do that work in the same way that most people can't maintain a paper diary or journal indefinitely.
Those who blog about whatever's on their minds often find that they don't have an infinite # of interesting lines of thought to rant about, leaving them having to try too hard to find something to say; it stops being fun and starts being work.
There are so many blogs around now that people who want to have a certain level of traffic and/or commenting can't compete with older blogs, and the countless blogs similar to theirs, and thus end up posting to themselves; again, that stops being fun after awhile.
Alot of people got burned out on blogs after the post-election frenzy, and stopped reading, commenting and posting.
The reason I got to thinking about why blogging is declining is because in recent months a FLOOD of blogs that I've been a long-time reader of have been deleted, or abandoned, or put on indefinite hold, or reduced to blank pages that don't have anything put on them even weeks later, or have a seriously reduced frequency of posts; also, when I look for blogs in the various directories, I consistently find that a scary % of the links now lead to dead or deleted blogs. These things, combined with a great deal of "next-blogging" that's verified that many excellent blogs are being largely ignored, made the truth impossible to mistake... the "Age of the Blog" is, if far from over, clearly past its peak.
What I see happening over the next year or so is a continuing gradual die-out of blogs, after which we'll be left with a far smaller (but still non-trivial) # of hard-core bloggers, who'll collectively be seen as a subspecies of geek, interesting perhaps but not worthy of the attentions of CNN and the rest of the mainstream media... 5 years from now, people will read old articles that refer to what's being said in the blogosphere and laugh in disbelief that we were once so watched and paid attention to. Blogs will end up being like Geocities sites; a few years ago, everyone had to have that Geocities URL, leading to a conglomeration of personal photos and info or a "fan site," and now you almost never see that sort of personal page anymore... and sooner than we think, the daily-entry text arrangement will seem just as quaint, although I'm guessing more people will hold onto it and keep doing it than they did with "personal pages"-time will tell.
What's replacing blogs as the cool thing to do? Podcasting. Seemingly overnight, it went from something I'd never heard of to being EVERYWHERE, which is a sure sign of something catching on; it's much easier to talk than to write for most folks, plenty of people would rather listen than read, it's far more personal to hear a voice than to look at text, and it's still NEW, so I expect an ever-increasing amount of enthusiasm to be shown for it... and I'll be amazed if I haven't seen/heard mentions of it in the media by, say, the end of the summer (which will allow time for the young people to turn this into a major thing over their vacation).
If you're not familiar with podcasting, or are getting into it and would like to experience something new, you'll find terrific ones being produced by my friends Robert Keeme
http://www.keeme.com/
and Gary Bibb (with Yaz Larino)
http://www.bibbsrevenge.com/
I won't be joining the podcast revolution, as it'd eliminate my deniability if anyone I know ever found my blog... and my long, elaborate posts wouldn't translate attractively into spoken monologues in any case (just ask my husband, lol). Although I empathize with those who say that their blogs were taking up too much of their time, energy and thoughts, I won't be joining THEM any time soon either; unless and until a day arrives when no one comes here anymore, I'll still be slaving over a hot laptop to give you a daily look into my mind for the foreseeable future.
Monday, May 16, 2005
The TOS
That stands for "Terms of Service," and virtually any site you sign up with will have one; it might have literally pages of gobbledygook, and no one ever reads it, but it's there. Most times, they have a box to check that says that you've read and accepted the TOS, which is accessible via a link that no one clicks, so you don't even have to SEE it... but it's there.
Under normal circumstances, as long as you're not trying to do something criminal to or with that service or the company that provides it, you never have to worry about the TOS, but there's one big exception that hardly anyone knows about; email providers. Since the early days of cyberspace, most providers of both free and paid email accounts have, for reasons that I can't imagine, taken it upon themselves to decide what sort of language you can use in your emails; if you check the TOS of your provider, you'll almost certainly see something that'll be vaguely described as vulgar or abusive or objectionable language that you're not allowed to include in any correspondence... and what they mean by that is curse words, racial and religious (etc) slurs, and various other offensive words and terms. They never give you a list, so you can't tell exactly what they have a problem with, but you can make pretty solid guesses... as long as your guesses include everything that 2nd grader would get busted for saying in class.
AOHell in particular was really ridiculous about policing everyone's language on their site in the early days when they had close to a monopoly; my husband actually got a warning from them for using "s***" or something similar as a substitute for the familiar 4-letter word... that's right, he didn't even use the word, and he STILL got warned. I'm guessing that they have too many users, and too many competitors, to be so anal today, but you never know.
I found out a way to turn this to my advantage when I got into an email battle with some twit from one of my online clubs who thought that not being agreed with about everything was an excuse for her to act like a lunatic, figuring that she could get away with it because she was effectively anonymous; when I didn't obey her abuse-filled missive instructing me to not write her back (on what planet did she think she had the right to send a final slew of attacks and not be replied to?), she responded by informing me that she was going to report me to my email provider... not to be outdone, I reported HER to HER provider, Hotmail... and within about an hour received an email from them telling me that they'd DELETED her account because she'd violated their TOS by using improper language.
DELETED. All her saved emails, GONE. All of the email addresses she had stored there, GONE. All the personal info she had stored in the address book, GONE. Anyone who had only that addy for her would no longer be able to reach her. Anyplace where she'd signed up with that addy would need to be updated with a new one. Her MSN ID associated with that addy vanished, and there went any MSN clubs she was in, the MSN IM with all THOSE records... the whole bit. All because she used ONE ill-advised word; I was so stunned when my husband read her final email to me and explained what they'd taken issue with that I almost fell off my chair.
And yes, I was angry enough at her to be DELIGHTED that her ugly behavior, and her making an issue of reporting ME, had backfired on her, and caused her some real grief; I'd have given ANYTHING to have seen the look on her face when she realized that her account was gone, and then realized WHY it was gone.
Since that happened, any time I get sucked into an email war with anyone I'm just WAITING for them to violate the TOS so I can report them and get their account deleted; I still get the same thrill at seeing that I've taught yet another person that you need to think twice before launching an attack on someone online, because unless you have your own server you're NOT immune to getting in trouble if you get nasty.
If you're curious as to how touchy providers like Hotmail are when it comes to the TOS, here's the best example from my experience; one pushy young man who became infuriated when I declined to arrange a meeting with him called me a whore (which is a pretty silly choice of epithet to use on a conservative married woman), and that got him deleted... plain old name-calling, with a word that most folks wouldn't even consider vulgar.
An odd thing that I found that encourages people to use profanity, etc, is to tell them that their addy has been blocked from my inbox; everyone knows about email blocking, so no one should keep writing after they've been told they're blocked, but, because I'm hoping to catch them out, I don't actually block them, and then I wait... and here will come a final email from them in which they're certain to include an abusive word. Why would ANYONE write an email to an account they think they've been blocked from? It's happened multiple times, so there's gotta be some psychological thing going on... maybe it's therapeutic to send an ugly email even if the intended victim doesn't get it? Be that as it may, the apparent requirement for online attackers to say something that violates the TOS of their email providers in that final email has proven to be their undoing.
As an aside; if you're feeling any sympathy for these folks, DON'T. When an individual takes time out of their day to attack someone, they're an @sshole, and when they do it online they're a coward as well; people that use the unreachability of being in cyberspace to try to hurt and upset others are COCKROACHES, and deserve as little mercy as their insectile counterparts do.
If you ever have someone sending you abusive emails, wait for that inevitable dirty word, or tell them they've been blocked to flush it out, then go to the homepage for their email provider, check their TOS for the bad-language clause so that you can quote it, and then send their customer service or similar department a copy of the offending email with full headers, and ask them to take action against this violation of the TOS... you might not succeed in getting action taken (although *I* always have), but chances are good that you'll get an email telling you that that account has been closed, and thus you'll have struck a blow for every person that was ever harassed and mistreated online but didn't think they could do anything about it.
Long live the TOS!! :-)
Under normal circumstances, as long as you're not trying to do something criminal to or with that service or the company that provides it, you never have to worry about the TOS, but there's one big exception that hardly anyone knows about; email providers. Since the early days of cyberspace, most providers of both free and paid email accounts have, for reasons that I can't imagine, taken it upon themselves to decide what sort of language you can use in your emails; if you check the TOS of your provider, you'll almost certainly see something that'll be vaguely described as vulgar or abusive or objectionable language that you're not allowed to include in any correspondence... and what they mean by that is curse words, racial and religious (etc) slurs, and various other offensive words and terms. They never give you a list, so you can't tell exactly what they have a problem with, but you can make pretty solid guesses... as long as your guesses include everything that 2nd grader would get busted for saying in class.
AOHell in particular was really ridiculous about policing everyone's language on their site in the early days when they had close to a monopoly; my husband actually got a warning from them for using "s***" or something similar as a substitute for the familiar 4-letter word... that's right, he didn't even use the word, and he STILL got warned. I'm guessing that they have too many users, and too many competitors, to be so anal today, but you never know.
I found out a way to turn this to my advantage when I got into an email battle with some twit from one of my online clubs who thought that not being agreed with about everything was an excuse for her to act like a lunatic, figuring that she could get away with it because she was effectively anonymous; when I didn't obey her abuse-filled missive instructing me to not write her back (on what planet did she think she had the right to send a final slew of attacks and not be replied to?), she responded by informing me that she was going to report me to my email provider... not to be outdone, I reported HER to HER provider, Hotmail... and within about an hour received an email from them telling me that they'd DELETED her account because she'd violated their TOS by using improper language.
DELETED. All her saved emails, GONE. All of the email addresses she had stored there, GONE. All the personal info she had stored in the address book, GONE. Anyone who had only that addy for her would no longer be able to reach her. Anyplace where she'd signed up with that addy would need to be updated with a new one. Her MSN ID associated with that addy vanished, and there went any MSN clubs she was in, the MSN IM with all THOSE records... the whole bit. All because she used ONE ill-advised word; I was so stunned when my husband read her final email to me and explained what they'd taken issue with that I almost fell off my chair.
And yes, I was angry enough at her to be DELIGHTED that her ugly behavior, and her making an issue of reporting ME, had backfired on her, and caused her some real grief; I'd have given ANYTHING to have seen the look on her face when she realized that her account was gone, and then realized WHY it was gone.
Since that happened, any time I get sucked into an email war with anyone I'm just WAITING for them to violate the TOS so I can report them and get their account deleted; I still get the same thrill at seeing that I've taught yet another person that you need to think twice before launching an attack on someone online, because unless you have your own server you're NOT immune to getting in trouble if you get nasty.
If you're curious as to how touchy providers like Hotmail are when it comes to the TOS, here's the best example from my experience; one pushy young man who became infuriated when I declined to arrange a meeting with him called me a whore (which is a pretty silly choice of epithet to use on a conservative married woman), and that got him deleted... plain old name-calling, with a word that most folks wouldn't even consider vulgar.
An odd thing that I found that encourages people to use profanity, etc, is to tell them that their addy has been blocked from my inbox; everyone knows about email blocking, so no one should keep writing after they've been told they're blocked, but, because I'm hoping to catch them out, I don't actually block them, and then I wait... and here will come a final email from them in which they're certain to include an abusive word. Why would ANYONE write an email to an account they think they've been blocked from? It's happened multiple times, so there's gotta be some psychological thing going on... maybe it's therapeutic to send an ugly email even if the intended victim doesn't get it? Be that as it may, the apparent requirement for online attackers to say something that violates the TOS of their email providers in that final email has proven to be their undoing.
As an aside; if you're feeling any sympathy for these folks, DON'T. When an individual takes time out of their day to attack someone, they're an @sshole, and when they do it online they're a coward as well; people that use the unreachability of being in cyberspace to try to hurt and upset others are COCKROACHES, and deserve as little mercy as their insectile counterparts do.
If you ever have someone sending you abusive emails, wait for that inevitable dirty word, or tell them they've been blocked to flush it out, then go to the homepage for their email provider, check their TOS for the bad-language clause so that you can quote it, and then send their customer service or similar department a copy of the offending email with full headers, and ask them to take action against this violation of the TOS... you might not succeed in getting action taken (although *I* always have), but chances are good that you'll get an email telling you that that account has been closed, and thus you'll have struck a blow for every person that was ever harassed and mistreated online but didn't think they could do anything about it.
Long live the TOS!! :-)
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Could you marry someone VERY different?
By an odd coincidence, 2 different movies that I've seen in the past few days have featured couples where one was a dwarf... and before you say, "oh no, it's 'little people,'" these movies, and some documentaries I've seen recently, have used the term "dwarf," so I'm assuming that's the preferred one currently. Anyways, this 2nd movie coming hard on the heels of the 1st got me to thinking; how "different" of a person could YOU marry... and I say "marry" because I'm talking about making a serious and permanent emotional commitment, NOT about what you might accept out of curiosity for a fling. So, could you marry someone who was:
Deaf?
Blind?
An amputee?
In a wheelchair?
Facially disfigured?
Otherwise physically deformed?
Paralyzed?
Otherwise handicapped?
Terminally ill?
Obese?
A giant/giantess?
A dwarf?
Intersexed?
A conjoined twin?
4 or more decades apart from you in age?
Anything I've forgotten that would make people double-take when they saw that person, or saw them with YOU, or would make people say, "But, why would you want to be with her/him, (s)he's..."?
There are "normal" individuals who HAVE chosen people of all of these types as their life partners, so it CAN happen; if you're like most folks, though, there are few, if any, of the above categories of people that you'd even be willing to be set up on a blind date with, or to date if you got to know them, say, at work, much less marry. Do you think that's an ok way to feel about it? If not, will you do some soul searching and work on your inner self to become more accepting, or will you just shrug it off?
And what about ME, you ask? Fair question; the fast answer is that dating demand for me was always so low, as in non-existent, that I honestly think it would never have occurred to me to reject a man for ANY reason other than being a violent lunatic... and even then, I dated a man who thought he was a ninja for about 6 months, so...
The "slower" answer is; I've never been unable to interact comfortably with any kind of person, so I could see it happening that I could get to know someone in one of the above categories and have it progress to something serious... why not? They'd have to be willing to accept ME, and deal with all MY unusual characteristics, would they not, so why shouldn't I reciprocate?
There was a man I knew in college whose body was twisted to the point that he could barely walk, and was legally blind too (he attributed these things to being given oxygen right after he was born); despite these afflictions, he was totally without negativity or self-pity, and was in fact very funny as well as highly intelligent. If he saw me approaching him on campus, he'd "run away," which meant that I could "catch" him without speeding up my walking pace much, and we'd both laugh about it when I reached him; I found his ability to make his handicap into a recurring joke very impressive. I would absolutely have dated him if he'd asked me, as I liked him a great deal, and in fact tried not too subtly to get us off campus together, but he never went along with it; I hope, looking back, that it was just that he found me entertaining but not datable, like the other guys did, rather than that he felt unable to handle a dating situation.
In my early 20's, I dated a man who weighed perhaps 400 lbs; my mother's comment when she 1st saw him was "cross him off the list," and the way people stared and double-took when they saw us made it clear that people in general thought we didn't belong together... I even had guys try to chat me up with this man hanging onto my hand, as if they thought he must be an over-affectionate brother or something, and not possibly a boyfriend. Even the man's PARENTS, both of whom were obese, seemed to look askance at he and I being together; in the closest thing to a laudatory statement I recall her EVER making about my appearance, my mother actually said after I met his parents, "They just can't believe that someone with your looks and brains is interested in their son." Despite all of this, I WOULD have married him, and we had talked about marriage; if he hadn't just vanished one day, never to call again, it might well have happened.
At this point in my life, I've long since ceased to care what anyone other than the people I know and respect think of me or what I do, and none of those folks would have any objection to my being with someone because they were different, or VERY different, perhaps because we're geeks, and have been to enough scifi conventions, which always attract people with disabilities because of the culture of acceptance there, to have hung out with all sorts of people and learned through experience that they're not different in any way that matters... so, if something were to happen to my husband, and I was acquitted (lol), I'd be willing to become involved with, and marry, ANY sort of man who possessed the only qualities that matter... the INNER kind.
Deaf?
Blind?
An amputee?
In a wheelchair?
Facially disfigured?
Otherwise physically deformed?
Paralyzed?
Otherwise handicapped?
Terminally ill?
Obese?
A giant/giantess?
A dwarf?
Intersexed?
A conjoined twin?
4 or more decades apart from you in age?
Anything I've forgotten that would make people double-take when they saw that person, or saw them with YOU, or would make people say, "But, why would you want to be with her/him, (s)he's..."?
There are "normal" individuals who HAVE chosen people of all of these types as their life partners, so it CAN happen; if you're like most folks, though, there are few, if any, of the above categories of people that you'd even be willing to be set up on a blind date with, or to date if you got to know them, say, at work, much less marry. Do you think that's an ok way to feel about it? If not, will you do some soul searching and work on your inner self to become more accepting, or will you just shrug it off?
And what about ME, you ask? Fair question; the fast answer is that dating demand for me was always so low, as in non-existent, that I honestly think it would never have occurred to me to reject a man for ANY reason other than being a violent lunatic... and even then, I dated a man who thought he was a ninja for about 6 months, so...
The "slower" answer is; I've never been unable to interact comfortably with any kind of person, so I could see it happening that I could get to know someone in one of the above categories and have it progress to something serious... why not? They'd have to be willing to accept ME, and deal with all MY unusual characteristics, would they not, so why shouldn't I reciprocate?
There was a man I knew in college whose body was twisted to the point that he could barely walk, and was legally blind too (he attributed these things to being given oxygen right after he was born); despite these afflictions, he was totally without negativity or self-pity, and was in fact very funny as well as highly intelligent. If he saw me approaching him on campus, he'd "run away," which meant that I could "catch" him without speeding up my walking pace much, and we'd both laugh about it when I reached him; I found his ability to make his handicap into a recurring joke very impressive. I would absolutely have dated him if he'd asked me, as I liked him a great deal, and in fact tried not too subtly to get us off campus together, but he never went along with it; I hope, looking back, that it was just that he found me entertaining but not datable, like the other guys did, rather than that he felt unable to handle a dating situation.
In my early 20's, I dated a man who weighed perhaps 400 lbs; my mother's comment when she 1st saw him was "cross him off the list," and the way people stared and double-took when they saw us made it clear that people in general thought we didn't belong together... I even had guys try to chat me up with this man hanging onto my hand, as if they thought he must be an over-affectionate brother or something, and not possibly a boyfriend. Even the man's PARENTS, both of whom were obese, seemed to look askance at he and I being together; in the closest thing to a laudatory statement I recall her EVER making about my appearance, my mother actually said after I met his parents, "They just can't believe that someone with your looks and brains is interested in their son." Despite all of this, I WOULD have married him, and we had talked about marriage; if he hadn't just vanished one day, never to call again, it might well have happened.
At this point in my life, I've long since ceased to care what anyone other than the people I know and respect think of me or what I do, and none of those folks would have any objection to my being with someone because they were different, or VERY different, perhaps because we're geeks, and have been to enough scifi conventions, which always attract people with disabilities because of the culture of acceptance there, to have hung out with all sorts of people and learned through experience that they're not different in any way that matters... so, if something were to happen to my husband, and I was acquitted (lol), I'd be willing to become involved with, and marry, ANY sort of man who possessed the only qualities that matter... the INNER kind.
