The Annointed Fig

January 20th.  It was a quiet afternoon, as most afternoons in Louisville, KY are.  Of course, this one was special.

Because a few hundred miles away in a city that is never quiet — where the wheeling and the dealing are known to go long LONG into the night, and the paperwork keeps churning like butter — the noise pollution was such that day, it resonated in Louisville, and L.A., and Berlin, and even Kenya — whose native grandson has just put down his fork after his triumphant and very public first official luncheon.

Damn straight, sparky!

Before which came the equally triumphant Inaugural speech.

Now, I am sure there have been better speeches.  There might be better ones on all those January 20ths to come.

But for me, it was this speech that struck…something.  Something that gave me the nudge I needed to decide to reach for the stars.  Which we all needed to do, caught in the double helix of global recession and unrest.

I am a writer, but before that day…no, not that I was content to hold on to my day job.  It is more, I knew what I was doing, and, depending on whom you ask, the comfort of utter surety as to what tomorrow will bring is the prize all its own.

So, I kept polishing my book, and amassing suggestions, and reviews, and cautiously treading the water — and waiting.  In retrospect, I had been waiting for our new President’s Inauguration Day.

Apparently, I needed him to tell me to get off my ass and do something.  And if that something involved getting myself out there, well, hello world, The Annointed Fig: Metamorphoses is born!

But that wasn’t enough, not after that speech.  So, I decided to really take the bull by the horns — which, among other things, meant going and actually vying for a screenwriter-ship at one promising new venture, to which I had previously signed up, but had been too busy — and too chicken — to participate in.  And, so I used to tell myself, too realistic.

With zero screenwriting experience to my name, which I have since come to understand is an entirely different kettle of fish from prose, what in the world possessed me to think I was going to win a show-writer’s gig?  Why, President Obama, of course!

So, Mr. Antony van Zyl, the fearless leader and the mastermind behind Lombardi Street, that promising new venture that now has me haunting its site, has only his own former neighbor to blame for practically siccing me on him.

Because Lombardi Street, just like President Obama’s message, is addictive.  In our jaded day and age, the true promise of change, of revolution, is something as rare as the glimpse of an albino elephant.  And Lombardi Street, in a nutshell a full-length serialized college-based drama intended to run on both regular TV and the net (including video sites, blogs, and virtual worlds like Second Life), serves up said revolution in spades with its unique approach to scripted reality — a merging between fictional lives of those hailing from the all too real Happy Camp, CA; Lowell, MA; Midland, TX, San Francisco; Bemidji, MN and those of us actually living in, coming to, escaping these places.

Recently taken to welcoming the unwary with an offered selection of…you guessed it, the Beatles “Revolution” blaring off its front page — no, you don’t HAVE to listen — the L-Street actively practices what it has began to preach in early January.

It throws open the hallowed Hollywood doors to anyone smart and talented and determined enough to enter, and it does so through a series of contests or tasks the entrants are invited to participate in.  After all, shouldn’t there be tangible proof that you are not just wanting to reap the benefits, you YOURSELF are ready to be a part of the revolution?

In my particular case, it had been writing, as it has been for many.  Making a living AND showing off before the adoring public, we writers are not much different from artists, actors, graphic designers.  Of whom there are also hundreds on the site; we’re a multinational, multitalented, multidimensional Hydra.

Farm girls from Iowa set on becoming the next Meryl Streep; skit writers from Sweden inspired to create their answer to the SNL; dedicated community organizers staying up into the wee hours of the morning to help everyone from across the globe settle in, answer questions; talented grad students from India wanting a break; fantastic indie directors bringing their prize-winning expertise to bear teaching and writing; guerrilla advertising professionals promoting something they actually believe in instead of whoring themselves out to their highest bidder; hairstylists giving songwriting a chance; animal trainers giving assistant directorship a stab; even a billionaire tempted to try out for our ambitious marketing campaign.

"Never Follow the Straight and Narrow"

We’re all here, and we are building something great, something we see taking shape before our very eyes, something we can take pride in not for just an eventual payoff (which, let’s face it, who would say no to?), but because it is heck of a lot more ours than anything we join that is already so entrenched, that it has forgotten its roots.

As a friend I met through Lombardi Street has said, the entire concept is practically everyone’s unrealized dream.  Yes, it may sound too good to be true, but didn’t President Obama’s message do so when he started running?

He felt he needed to revolutionize the election, the country, the whole shebang.  Lombardi is fighting tooth and nail to accomplish the very same for the insular world of entertainment.

No need for studio heads, managers, underhanded distribution deals, that fabled Hollywood meritocracy that has been a pipe dream of many — who ended up settling into becoming teachers, scientists, programmers, housewives, bankers, firefighters, doctors.  Great things all to have done with a life, but for those of us wanting our chance at a place, in whatever capacity, in the light of the tungsten lamps?  Ultimately unfulfilling.

And it is powered by those of us who have chosen to take the reins into our own hands, those that Lombardi Street is rushing towards filming its pilot.  Slated to start airing September 23, 2009, the show is finally taking shape, and based on the cautious response, we are doing quite a few things right.

Lombardi will entertain, it will hopefully engross, it will employ dozens of people, it will introduce new directions in pull- and cause-based advertising to replace the invasive traditional means — and it will unequivocally demonstrate the validity of Mr. Obama’s message.

In a truly democratic society such as the one Mr. Van Zyl envisioned, spurred, no doubt, by example of the former Senator from his home state of Illinois, if you get off your ass, you CAN make something of yourself.  Even if that something happens to be in politics — or filmmaking, the mediums so often associated with the very worst excesses of cronyism and the dreaded casting couch.  Who knows, you might even change the world in the process!

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You know how you have a painful breakup and you really REALLY feel that the other person has hurt you?  You know how you wish you could just go Lorena Bobbitt on their ass?

There's nothing fishy about this.

Well, Lorena Bobbitt doesn’t ever have to wish that.  She HAD gone and done what most of us can only dream about in our most bloodthirsty moods.

But I wonder, does she wish she could undo it?  Certainly, she had enough provocation after supposedly having been driven to abortion by her then-husband, and just before the moment of truth, raped in a fit of drunken ardor.  And certainly, she has gotten off scot-free — just as Mr. Bobbitt.  They had both been tried for their respective wrongdoings and acquitted — before further clogging the court system and getting a much-needed divorce.

Sixteen years later, the unhappy couple has been reunited by Insider, and turns out, Mr. Bobbitt still has a thing for his ex-wife.  He’s been sending her notes, Valentine’s Day mementos — and on the show, generously offered to show her his scar.  Considering that after their legal separation, John Wayne has starred in two porno flicks, Ms. Gallo’s (as Lorena is calling herself these days) response of “Why would I see it now? I can just watch the adult movies,” does very much make sense.

What does not make sense is why she has agreed to the meeting — and why a rather stalkerish behavior is being sensationalized in mass media enough to actually be a reason to invite these people on the show.  Wouldn’t it send the wrong message?  Harass your wife and you will become a media darling again?

Sometimes, I have to really wonder at the mass media.  Are ratings all that separates men from…well, unprincipled men?

Yes, I may be accused to milking the same cash cow, but I don’t think it would occur to me to get these two on the same show — or even get them in the vicinity of one another.  I am not sure what Mr. Bobbitt is like away from his not-one-and-only, but Lorena’s life seemed to have taken a decided turn for the better.

I am not sure I believe the adage of “oh, they are just toxic for each other”, but I do know that sometimes people bring out the best in each other.  It is equally possible the other end of the spectrum, also, holds true.

And the worst part is, this can actually teach someone lusting over Natalie Portman, or, possibly, their next-door neighbor, or even their schoolteacher’s dog that it’s OK to walk over lines, and break boundaries, and skirt the edges of what is acceptable and what actually carries a prison term.  After all, if the Insider thinks it’s all right to “reunite” them, then maybe those icky unions in the stalker’s dreams are, also, a match made in the Nielsen’s boardroom.

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India allows cows to roam free.  Ancient Egyptians buried dishes, crocodiles, and wives to ease the passing of a head of house.  And Jews and Muslims have tasty imaginative diets.  The problem for a dedicated pork cutlets aficionado like myself, these diets very much do NOT include anything originating in a pig pen.

And this isn't even the year of the pig!

Which, in a weird way, works out well for the Afghan pigs.  Or rather, an Afghan pig.  All of one, in the entire country — whiling away the days in the Kabul zoo, so, the good Afghan children have a snouted face to put to a dirty name.

Of course, the kids currently stopping by the zoo will not be in luck.  “For now the pig is under quarantine, we built it a room because of swine influenza,” Aziz Gul Saqib, director of Kabul Zoo, told Reuters. “We’ve done this because people are worried about getting the flu.”

Considering that in Egypt, all 300,000 of its pigs had been slaughtered — with no evidence of either of them being sick or a shred of danger to people from eating the diseased meat (which a lot of us might have, in fact, done, considering the swine flu has been circulating in the pig populations for quite a few years without doing much to the pigs that normal human flu doesn’t to us) — the Afghan pig has struck gold.

It is very easy to blame something — or someone, whom we inherently don’t trust for something they have no cause in bringing about.  Just as the Muslims are blaming the healthy pigs, the Russians are blaming Americans for the spread of the disease.  The Moscow talking heads are quoting local medical minds and unequivocally pointing to the use of pesticides in Vietnam war as the reason for the spread of the disease from animal to human host and, considering the recent Canadian case, back.

Based on the fact that Asia is the only continent so far largely spared the effects of the mysterious flu, which seems to actually land adult, generally healthy subjects in the hospital before the very young and infirm, this sort of assumption seems iffy — and quite on par with certain Mexican authorities pointing to US as the origin of the virus.

But, I suppose, blaming the neighbor — or the neighbor’s pig — is so much easier than looking for a solution.  Or, for that matter, learning to accept what you cannot change and moving on.

Which, I guess, is a very human condition.  Let’s see if the advent of the dread genetic engineering can cure us of that…  j/k

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If you are a true follower of the PETA dictums, right now, in addition to the more… ah traditional constraints like no meat, no poultry, no fish, no wool, no leather, no circuses, no zoos, no animal research, no pets, no seeing eye dogs, no goats mowing Google lawns (at least, without proper veterinary care and retirement bennies, which a company like Google will OBVIOUSLY be too cheap to provide), you would, also, be foregoing butter and honey.  Can’t violate something so inherently of the animal kingdom with your morning toast!

Hopping to join a good cause!

Vick-tim of bad press!

Forget, also, drinking milk and eating dairy.  Do you like Parmesan cheese over your lasagna?  Tough cookies — not that cookies are permitted, at least, not the cholesterol-inducing tasty kind.  Oh, and forget the eggs!  Why, there could have been a chick you are devouring with your omelet, no matter that by and large the eggs that are sold have never been fertilized.

Forget, too, that we are omnivores.  Evolution — or God, whichever theory you subscribe to — have conspired to put us on the very top of the food chain.  What we do with our power is our decision.

We could, for example, exterminate over 21,ooo pets in 10 years.  PETA itself is the organization to have done so, though the erm, pat explanation is, they were unadoptable because they were not in the best of help or simply too non-socialized.  Considering  it has expended precisely 0 man-hours a year of its hefty $30+ million annual budget to adopt out 7 homeless pets in their care and considering that football great Michael Vick’s dogs were exactly of that, highly dangerous, “unadoptable” kind, how is it that one amazing person, about whom I had already written more than once, a celebrated tattoo artist Brandon Bond and those he is working with, like Villa Lobos‘ and Animal Planet’s Tia Maria Torres, managed to home everyone of the pit bulls rescued from Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels (with the exception of one, who had terminal cancer, and another who ended up being struck by a car)?  To me, it’s not the majority of animals that are unsocializable, it is the people that are working — or NOT working with them — that are contributing to PETA’s dismal success rate.

But I suppose, NOW it just might improve.  Because PETA is currently deep in negotiations to hire a new hot spokesperson to truly bring their message to the fore.  What with this person’s experience in handling animal-rights related issues and their deep and abiding need to do good by those we mercilessly eat, use for clothing, lawn mowing — or entertainment, as may be the case in racing or illegal cockfighting and dogfighting rings, I can see how the PETA marketing department has truly come up with a gem.

Wouldn’t YOU want to stop abusing our animal breathren?  Wouldn’t YOU want to go and destory every egg-filled case in your local WalMart if you heard that person coming to you with their message?

AWWW, who doesn't love a good wedding?

Because after all, Michael Vick would be a CELEBRITY spokesperson, and when one of those speaks, we, hoi-polloi, sit up and take their heartfelt words to our own heart!  What does it matter that a man is a criminal who isn’t even allowed to return to professional football?  What do we care that he has cold-heartedly put to death several dogs that were too weak to keep around?

PETA, it may be said, is doing its own herd-culling.  So, taken from that perspective, yes, I have to agree, this IS an inspired choice.

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My son’s birthday was yesterday and now, he is all of 16 — months, that is.  Yay!  Still can’t believe it.

And that in about 8 months, also, makes him eligible to start reading the new book Where Did I Really Come From by Narelle Wickham just rereleased in Australia.  First penned in the 1990′s, it has received a new millennium face lift and is now really pushing the envelope on sex ed.  For two-year old toddlers.

The Age of Enlightenment

Apparently, they have a right to have that existential question answered, too, in nice painstaking detail.

There are drawings, detailed descriptions — and a gay angle that is having people up in arms rather than the contents of the book themselves.

To me, the gay angle — including a picture of two gay men holding an infant in the chapter devoted to surrogacy and a description of how two moms may want to forgo intercourse with a man and instead opt out for assisted insemination — is a lot less offensive that the very fact that the sexual intercourse itself is being referenced BEFORE it ever reaches the assisted conception chapter.

Added to the fact that the book in its inside cover claims it has been drafted for use by the New South Wales Attorney General’s office in its Learn to Include program, while the NSW AG, John Hatzistergos, denies having anything whatsoever to do with the publication, and the book seems to me a desperate and tasteless bid for attention.

Obviously, everyone has a right to have their natural curiosity satisfied, and the pat “stork brought you to us” answer wouldn’t…erm, fly, not for any length of time in our enlightened culture.  And really, I would be the last person who would want my son wallowing in ignorance or being one of those kids in the old joke, where a 13 year old boy tells his girlfriend upon not being permitted to the showing of an R-rated movie, that since they are not allowed to watch that, they should just go and while away the afternoon having sex.

Current school of thought suggests an age between 3 and 4 as a good time for a child to develop curiosity about sex.  That is usually when kids need to memorize the names for all the body parts and start thinking about procreation — but in the way that is appropriate for the age, with answers slowly graduating from simple to somewhat more involved to altogether frank once they are of school age and better able to grasp the dynamics.

There are many versions of the early sex ed books, but one of those most widely recommended by experts is Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle, a squirmingly honest yet naive look at everything from orgasm to fetal development. And the pudgy nudes featured in illustrations are supposedly the furthest thing from erotic.  I can’t say whether that is the case, I am yet to read it myself, but, at least, it is being geared to kids 4 to 8.

I don’t think I am a prude.  I want my son to know about evolution, and the particulars of intercourse between two consenting adults, and the choices gays of either gender have to make to achieve that age-old drive for parenthood.  And by the time junior or high school rolls up, the furthest thing I want is for him to start being ashamed of his sexuality.  I am with President Obama on that, who, still as Illinois Senator gave speech at a Planned Parenthood event in which he emphasized the importance of sex education for children. As he said, “It’s the right thing to do…to provide age-appropriate, science-based sex education in schools.”

But at 2 years old…no, thanks.  I would rather my son still believed that when people (of whatever sexual orientation) want someone as wonderful as he is, they find a vaguely organic / vaguely spiritual way to get their heart’s desire.  That — and in Santa.

He will be disabused of the quaint notions of childhood soon enough.  For now, though, well, I want him to stay a CHILD.

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What is it about the Catholic Church that turns perfectly normal men into pedophiles?  Sexual deprivation?  That’s it?  Doesn’t speak highly of our species if not getting any is all it takes to have us start raping young boys or girls supposedly in both our spiritual and physical care.

We are all special on the net.

And what is it, for that matter, about the Internet that turns us into raving loonies drawn to ask about people’s bra sizes, get into pointless flame wars, put our jobs and families in jeopardy while we painstakingly append wings onto penises and make them swoop onto Second Life newbies like Red Barons onto unsuspecting enemy planes?

Or, worse yet, begin and proliferate the sites featuring Nikki Casouras crime scene photos, live (or, rather, very much dead) and in vivid Technicolor?  What could possibly be fascinating about something as horrific as that?  Then again…

The link I am providing does not feature these photos, but though curiosity hasn’t yet killed me like that proverbial cat, this latest bout of it (and of a decidedly morbid kind) will likely leave me with nightmares, because under the guise of doing thorough research, I did search for them, and let me tell you two things.  One, they are disturbingly easy to find, and another, they are…disturbing.  That’s it.  Saw and Final Destination franchises have nothing on these.

And when you take into account the fact that these are real photos taken by officers on the scene of the young woman’s high-impact car crash, the “God forbid!” factor rises like a Geiger counter reading after an atomic bomb goes off a few miles upwind.

For those not in the know about what SHOULD be world wide web’s best kept secret, Nikki, then 18, had an argument with her parents over trying cocaine for what had been the second time in her life.  According to mom Lesli, the first, due to an inoperable brain tumor discovered 10 years prior to the fatal accident, a few weeks before had landed her daughter in the hospital for 3 days.  The altered brain chemistry combined with cocaine has caused a type of a psychotic break.

On Halloween of 2006, having been suspected of for the second time dipping into the poison, Nikki had her own car keys confiscated and her father order her to get ready for another hospital stay.  Ms. Catsouras, already at that moment under the influence, responded by grabbing the keys to her father’s Porshe and taking off down the highway at over 100 mph.

The resulting crash had landed a driver of another car, a law-abiding Honda Civic, in ER with minor injuries (a three-year old case against Nikki’s parents is still pending) and Nikki dead.  The coroner, who had chosen not to release the photos to the family so as not to cause unnecessary trauma, had ruled the death had been instantaneous, and if there is one silver lining to the whole sorry mess, it is that.

Unfortunately, the two policeman on the site of the crash the very next day leaked these images on the net, and the witch hunt on the relatives of a “rich girl” who had gotten what was coming to her was on.  The pictures were being passed around.  The girl’s MySpace page has been hacked and made into a repository of all the gore.  The sickos wrote the distraught family gruesome, Halloween-themed letters — attaching the photos, lest their thought processes go misunderstood.  And little by little, the younger members, those that by a lucky twist of fate, didn’t end up being exposed to the horror, came to actually fear being on line or Googling for their name.

Having had enough, the California family sued the State Highway Patrol for $20 million, and though the department offered its apologies for its role in the fiasco, and one officer responsible had been canned (“for unrelated reasons”) and another suspended for 25 days, by March 21, 2008, Judge Steven L. Perk dismissed the case stating the Highway Patrol was under no obligation to spare the privacy of the Catsouras clan.  Considering as of last year, completely without the family’s permission, a local college was using these photos in one of its criminal-law classes, the judge seems to be in the right — or, at least, within the letter of our precedent-based law.

Required reading before Internet use?

That said, the family is continuing the crusade.  I am not sure other than bringing awareness to the issue of Internet exploitation and all-permissiveness it is accomplishing much these days, but bringing continued exposure to these photos.  All publicity, even of the negative sort, is a good publicity to the sites of the ilk I found on the front page of Nikki Catsouras (aka Porshe Girl) Google search.  Even Christos and Lesli themselves admit that the continued press exposure may drive some, like yours truly, to seek out the photos they might not have been aware of before reading about them in more reputable news outlets.

So, what is the point behind opening old wounds and digging for maggots?  The past is dead and gone, and though I wish the redoubtable officers of the Cali Highway Patrol received worse than a slap on the wrist for their grotesque violation of, at least, a moral if not a legal code, there is nothing to be achieved keeping the war going.  Even if the family received this money, what would it do with it?  Get rich on their little girl’s death?

Or would they give it to charity?  Even that wouldn’t fill that gaping emptiness they might still be feeling — while sapping the funds from the State of California already so badly pressed by the global economic downturn.

Who would win even if the higher court overruled Judge Perk — other than lawyers?  And I don’t know about you, but to me, despite the best efforts of Reputation Defender, a tech company hired by the victim’s parents to disseminate the futile cease and desist notes, this doesn’t sound like a sort of resolution designed to cleanse the net of similarly grotesque imagery — or let Nikki get on with whatever has welcomed her on the other side in peace.

• When you say, fiery rage... When I was a teen, I used to -- LITERALLY -- beat the stuffing out of my debonair pink flamingo in a black top hat whenever I was feeling pissy.  Those hormones raging like Cali wildfires stoked by Santa Ana winds, let me tell you, that flamingo suffered. [/caption] But......
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• David Carradine's Death Photo I see dead people. No, really. With Google and a little spare time, anyone can track down photographs of dead celebrities. WARNING: the teeny tiny thumbnails you see in this blog are actual photos of the dead celebrities in question, but hopefully in a resolution that would not offend. (Far......

Our police is there to really weed out…er, weed users.  And if it happens to waste a year of man-hours out of the bleeding pockets of Chicago municipal coffers (that these days is making up for a burgeoning shortfall by upkeeping the prohibitive employee tax and raising Downtown parking prices to a whooping $20 or more for a suburban couple making it into the city for a bite of a famous Chicagoland pizza), well, at least, said redoubtable organ managed to save its precinct from 180 grams of marijuana, trace of cocaine, and a flat-screen TV.

Shouldn't we citizens BE on patrol?

It, also, arrested 21 University of Illinois students and 4 non-students, resulting in yet more public funds being wasted on arraignments, public defendants, back and forth PR.

Sentencing for crimes as minor as this will be negligeable in any.  But ask the precinct and it will have been a job well done!

I don’t know about you, but I personally would welcome some kind of public funds misappopriation hearings.  Certainly, everyone has a right to their mistakes, but if these mistakes end up costing us, taxpayers, quite a bit of money while accomplishing no purpose to justify the expense, there should be a way to limit such investigations in the future.

It could be argued that such practice may prevent more than a few fruitful investigations from materializing, bt that is not at all what I am calling for here.  Instead, after the fact, I would like for it to become common practice in cases as ultimately ridiculous as this for police officials to show just causes for initiating — and in fact, continuing the investigations, and if those end up holding water, well, that’s it, no harm done.

If, however, there has been a demonstrated and persistent lack of common sense, then, of course, there should be reparation — from the payback of public funds down to those on top of the decision making process losing their jobs.

After all, I understand they would if they DIDN’T take appropriate action.  Shouldn’t it also hold true for the other extreme?

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What do you do if you discover you have HIV?

a) Cry

b) Take a retest

c) Have unprotected sex with partners you do not make aware of your condition

d) None of the above

e) All of the above

How did those wily French get Nadja starring in their anti-AIDS commercials? Her tail in particular is in VERY fine form!

If are are Nadja Benaissa, a German singer, songwriter, sometime actress, and a participant in the prestigious Eurovision tournament 2 years ago as a part of a pop group “No Angels”, can’t vouch for the option “e”, but the “c” applies likes there’s no tomorrow.

And the way, at least, one of her victims…sorry, lovers probably feels, there really isn’t.

Thus far, the singer had been accused of sleeping with three men knowing she had HIV, but not letting them know ahead of time or using any sort of protection.  And out of these, one has fallen ill, though the singer’s lawyer — trying to get her acquitted of a crime carrying with it a possible 10 year sentence — argues that there is no evidence she is the one responsible for the man’s infection.

It is for that reason, exotic Nadja is now on bail after having spent 10 days behind bars — and free to resume the same destructive course that has her waiting to face the court in the first place.

But if it were up to me, the argument wouldn’t have held water.  Even if the man has caught his infection elsewhere, even if it could be argued that her lovers were equally at fault for practicing unsafe sex, there is still an unequivocal fact that the woman knew what she was carrying and had willfully foregone any and all accepted measures of disease prevention.

What exactly motivates people like Nadja?  Revenge?  On whom?  The innocent bystanders?  Indifference?  Makes a little more sense.  Bitterness at the world at large?  Stupidity at its finest?

Her behavior has a potential to be more destructive than Jeffrey Dahmer’s when you think about that.  How many folks could her lovers have unwittingly infected?  How many — her lovers’ lovers?

There really is a potential for geometric progression, depending in particular on basic promiscuity and carelessness of everyone involved.  Considering she has not been arraigned for rape, there is a fair chance to some extent, both are being practiced by Nadja’s sexual partners.

That said, I cannot see her how a mere decade is an acceptable term in case of a conviction.  She might have — or may be in the process — of torturing countless victims.  Victims of their own stupidity, too, true enough, but that does not exonerate her particular brand of viciousness whatsoever.

Key. See Key? Throw Away Key. Bye, Nadja!

A public prosecutor’s office in the western town of Darmstadt responsible for initiating the criminal proceedings against Nadja hadn’t solicited my opinion, but if it did, I would actually have bumped the charges to domestic terrorism and the multiple counts of murder in the first degree.  Despite a mounting outcry from AIDS equal rights groups regarding what could be perceived as “the criminalization of HIV transmission”, I think what Ms. Benaissa has done was wrong.  It was a conscious violation of other people’s right to choose — their lives, their friends’ lives — and while the transmission of AIDS through not taking necessary procedures is undoubtedly wrong and should be educated against, walking around consciously spreading the virus is a kettle of reeking week-old fish.  And if glamorous Ms. Benaissa had nothing better to do than monger that spoiled fish, she should be prepared to pay the hefty fines.

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So, you thought your parents were too strict?

Were you grounded when you had brought home an “F”?  Did you have to go to bed without dessert if you didn’t clean your hamster cage?  Were you not allowed to watch a late-night showing of a Freddy Krueger flick on a school night?

What goes around...

Don’t know about you, but I certainly felt supremely used when either of the above chanced to happen.

But after reading a recent report published on life.ru about parents so concerned with their 12-year old’s GPA, they kept him from using a bathroom and stuck hot peppers in his mouth and anus if he brought home a Russian equivalent of an “F”, well, lemme tell you, my inner child is feeling chastised.

Abuse by those you trust the most is to me so much worse than the comparable wrong done to you by a stranger.

You are not expecting those nearest and dearest to do you wrong, and when they do…I think the hurt goes deep.  So deep, many never completely recover.  And those that do not, yet make it through childhood alive — if scarred, in more ways than one — all too often grow up doomed to repeat the same cycle of behavior.  In fact, even infants subsequently adopted out into loving household are now considered at risk for abusive behavioral patterns.  No, it is not a classic argument in favor of nature winning over nurture.

Quite the opposite, in fact.  The theory is, infant abuse in early stages of life may lead to the lowered production of seratonin, a chemical responsible for transmitting brain impulses, the depressed levels of which have long been known to cause anxiety, depression, and impulsive aggression.  The study extending this disturbing school of thought to our youngest members is based on the effects of maternal neglect and abuse on baby rhesus monkeys, whose metabolism and reaction to stress has often proved very similar to that of humans.

Even now not altogether understood, the infant failure to thrive has been a medical staple for many decades.  The failure to develop into an emotionally healthy adult based solely on upbringing in the first few months of life is something that is, also, beginning to make rounds in the professional cycles.

Not to say we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our not so stellar family members.  There are people referred to among behavioral researchers as “resilient” and they are carefully studied – with their consent – for the purpose for of developing programs for “at risk” populace and implementing them as means of preventing the spread of this trend to new generations.

Meanwhile, though, are children are left to rely on civic authorities to protect them from those who have given them life and yet are prepared to make it a living hell for any and all perceived infraction.  But all too often, the authorities fail — either because of frank societal indifference or a gross negligence on the part of the people in charge.

In the case with the disciplinarian couple referenced higher, well, it has to be the former, because action has been taken, just in a mindbogglingly insufficient way.  Having been reported to the police by the boy’s teachers, this particular set of role models was found to have severely whipped their son for every conceivable misdemeanor in addition to their creative means of assuring his study ethics — and convicted by Voronezh court system of cruelty to a minor, sentenced to…8, I repeat, 8 months in a state penitentiary.  With, because it is not separately stated, I assume a possibility of an early parole.

I really and truly do not understand the logic.  Nor, for that matter, do I understand the utter lack of any sort of outrage on the part of the local journalists bringing us that blurb.

Do we have to be cruel to be kind?

There was such a matter-of-factedness in that description, that not even the parents’ contemptible behavior has shocked me the deepest in this sorry mess.  What does it say about the society where this is practically the norm?  And what does it say about our own country, where prohibitive sentencing is practiced and yet, we have equally if not the more disturbing cases coming to light every day?

Is such violence actually bred into us by this point that no amount of prosecution can, at least, scare it out of those prone to it through our genetic and / or learned blueprint?

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What do you do when all the problems of the world are solved?

There is no Chrysler bankruptcy setting a pall over the sputtering global markets.  No swine flu among other things, bringing restaurant business in Mexico City to a grinding halt.  No neo-Nazis burning synagogues and painting crude messages on the Jewish grave markers.  No planned May 5th, 2009 country-wide pogroms to commemorate the 40 days since an ostensible suicide in the famous Petrovka solitary cell of a leader of a militant national-socialist movement “Russkaya Volya”, accused of 8 murders spanning Russia, a dedicated teetotaler and “revolutionary”, Maxim Basilyev, 28.

Those historians are dogged. Dogged, I tell you!

And yet, one of the biggest stories of the week is a 65-year old message in a bottle found by workers demolishing a wall at the State Higher Vocational School in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim, the site of the infamous World War II Auschwitz Nazi German death camp.

The bottle with a note signed by 7 concentration camp prisoners inside was literally unearthed in the crumbling mortar of a structure built to house the guards stationed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“We know two of the Auschwitz prisoners who signed the message survived the camp, but their later fate isn’t known,” the Auschwitz museum historian Jerzy Mensfelt said in a telephone interview, leaving it open whether the ensuing publicity would be used to search for more information on the survivors.

And now, time for yours truly to be crucified.  But, SERIOUSLY, why?  Why should we bother these two very old men?  And why is there a growing media frenzy?  Why.  Does.  Anyone.  Care?

No, about the archaeological find, not the horror of the Holocaust.  Jew by descent, this topic has infallibly left me scared, depressed, maddened beyond measure.  It is a colossal crime — against Gypsies, Jews, Poles, gays — the likes of which is practically impossible to truly internalize unless one has lived through it, I imagine.  Or rather, don’t want to imagine.

But why precisely is it imperative to know what happened to people who had been lucky enough to have made it out of that slice of hell alive?

Certainly, they couldn’t but have come out with some sort of PTSD.  Just as certainly, their acclimation to a world still convulsing after the devastating effect of the second global war within less than three full decades couldn’t have been easy.  But that is nothing that we can change now — or could have even changed then.  They have made it out, and while hardly their oyster, the universe was at that point just as much theirs as it had been any man’s.

Here’s hoping they have made some sort of peace with their ordeal and carved out the kind of life for themselves that gave them love, prosperity, happiness — and hurt as few of their neighbors in our global village as possible in the process.  As far as I am concerned, that is the most any one of us can ask for.

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