They say money can’t buy happiness. The same also goes for celebrity, and even the status that accompanies being among the best in the world at your profession. We’ve had ample demonstration of this in recent days.

Robert Enke, the goaltender for Hannover 96 (who currently hover in the middle of the German Bundesliga standings) and a potential member of next year’s German World Cup team, died the other day. His death was apparently a suicide.

“At 1825 (1725GMT) he was run over by a regional express train running between Hamburg and Bremen,” said police spokesman Stefan Wittke. “The train was travelling at the speed of 160-kph.”The player’s friend and consultant Joerg Neblung told reporters: “I can confirm this is a case of suicide. He took his own life just before six (pm).

Enke lost a child in 2006 and has left behind a wife and eight month-old daughter. Full Story »

Every sperm and every egg, fertilized or not, is a living, breathing person, endowed by its Creator with certain inalienable rights. At least, that’s what the proposed 2010 personhood amendment to the Colorado state constitution implies. No, it doesn’t say that literally, but thanks to the vague wording of the amendment, that’s one possible interpretation.

It’s also clear from an article in The Colorado Independent that this is only half of what the amendment’s authors intended.

“It’s intended to account for human beings who may be created through asexual reproduction in laboratories and used as raw material for research, organs, or stem cells. Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning,” [Gualberto Garcia] Jones explained. (Jones heads the organization that initiated this year’s amendment)

That this law could be interpreted to include sperm is an ironic example of the law of unintended consequences. Full Story »

You’re honey child to a swarm of bees
Gonna blow right through you like a breeze
Give me one last dance
Well slide down the surface of things

You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing

- U2

Fantasy stories, myths, legends, tall tales, fairy tales, horror, all these have been with us for a very long time. Science fiction, as well, has been with us since Mary Shelley found herself in a bet with Lord Byron about the possibility of writing a new kind of horror, one not grounded in the gothic.* So the presence in our popular culture of stories based in unreality of one form or another is certainly nothing new.

It seems to me that there’s been a lot more of it lately, though. Full Story »

If you’ve been off-planet for the last few months you may have missed the news: Jon & Kate have split, and in the process migrated from the relative banality of the TV listings over to the hyper-banality of the tabloids. I’m still not sure what the future holds for the popular “reality” show, but whatever it is, Gosselin family 2.0 equals Jon minus Kate.

It occurs to me that these events represent something significant in our culture. Since about 1980 or so we’ve been in one of our periodic “childrens is the most preciousest things in the whole wide world” phases. (For more on the generational cycles that produce this dynamic, see Generations, 13th Gen and Millennials Rising by William Howe and Neil Strauss, two men whose work I have referenced a number of times in the past.) In the previous generation (Gen X), children were an afterthought for most parents, who had been socialized in far more self-centric times. Full Story »

Well, I didn’t expect my return to Scroguedom after six months would be in the form of a personal screed, and on domestic topics no less (as in “household”). However, as the feminist mantra of the 1970s claimed, “the personal is political,” a statement as salient today as it was then.

I’d like to be writing about clean energy or debating health care policy. I wish I could add something astute to the discussion about the future of democracy in Iran. But to do so would mean investing the time to follow these issues closely enough to have something worthwhile to add. And then there’s the time needed to actually write something. I’ve already got four or five unfinished posts languishing on my laptop.

Yet, in the words of my 14-year-old son this morning, who is angry at my asking him to pitch in around the house prior to the arrival of weekend guests, and who can’t understand why I won’t just drop everything to pick him up from the lake with his friends later today, I don’t have a “real job” — so why can’t I be like a good stay-at-home mom and craft my life exclusively around his? Full Story »

Marshall County, Tennessee has four inches of top soil that rests upon 4000 cubic miles of limestone. It’s not exactly God’s Country if you own a plow. The Dad grows tomatoes. That’s all he grows, and when his tomato plants go out, he declares immediate and total war on all critters, toddlers, birds and insects that dare intrude upon Tomato Land. He plants according to the Farmer’s Almanac signs, waters his tomato plants twice a day, prays over the tender shoots, covers them if the temperature drops below 45, and patiently waits for a harvest. Last year was The Dad’s best crop ever. He picked 27 tomatoes from the vine. Because The Dad doesn’t like tomatoes, he gave them all away.

I don’t garden. I don’t even know if that’s a verb. Scooting on my knees in the mud, covered by a huge floppy hat, armed with a rusty pair of pruning shears and hanging out in the elements with the snakes and bees and wasps and spiders for company reminds me of boot camp. Full Story »

By Jennifer Angliss

When I was a kid, I listened to the “Free to Be… You and Me” album incessantly. We had it on vinyl (not 8-track!) and I probably came close to wearing it out. At the time, I didn’t really care for the track “William’s Doll”. The chorus of “A doll! A doll! William wants a doll!” grated on my nerves–actually, it still does. But the song tells a story that I think is really important. William is a 5 year old boy who wants a doll. Unfortunately, everyone seems to think that this is a terrible thing for a little boy to want. His dad gets him all sorts of sports equipment instead, which he also enjoys, but he still craves that doll. Finally, Grandma hears about this and gives him a doll. Full Story »

I need to admit this up front. I have a condition. My great aunt Doreen called it Brain Fag and said it ran deep in all the Hargrove men, but I don’t think there’s an official name for it, and certainly no effective treatment. It’s sort of hard for me to talk about, but the best way I can put it is that I suffer from occasional moments of high stupidity. Oh, what the hell. I have Brain Fag, and it isn’t getting any better.

How do I know? Let’s look at the facts. When I was a kid, I dressed up as a matador and went to school actually thinking I looked cool. I bought a book titled “How to Hypnotize Bees.“ And tried it. Twice. I believed my friends when they said emu tipping was possible. I still have that scar. Just last year, I was “It” in a game of tag with 22 middle school students. I still have that scar, too. I bought Lehman Brothers stock because Jim Cramer said it was a good idea. Full Story »

In Colorado, you are allowed to enroll your children in school without them having had all their supposedly required vaccines. Instead, Colorado parents are allowed to sign a waiver and then enroll their children. According to a KCFR/Colorado Public Radio interview with a medical researcher working for Kaiser Permanente, this fact partly explains why Colorado has about 800 cases of pertussis (aka whooping cough) a year, one of the highest rates in the country.

Kaiser Permanente (KP) is a large HMO that maintains its patient records in electronic form, a fact that makes the records very useful for researching disease. A new study performed by researcher Jason Glanz of KP finds that children who have never received a pertussis vaccine are 23x more likely to catch the disease than children who have been vaccinated. Of the approximately 800 cases of pertussis per year, that works out to 767 children who might not have caught pertussis if they’d been vaccinated, while only 33 children would have caught pertussis even after receiving the vaccine. Full Story »

Part six in a series

Wu Tao stands at the front of the bus, microphone in hand, radiating charm.

Wu “Harry” Tao (right) talks with St. Bonaventure
professors Carl Case (left) and Darwin King at the
Winter Palace in Xi’an.

As our group rides around Xi’an, Wu Tao serves as our tourguide. He stands in the bus’s center aisle and regales us with stories about the city’s past. He wears a dark t-shirt with a big numeral “8” on it—which has made him easy to find in a crowd—jeans, a pair of open-toed sandals, and a million-yuan smile.

When he points something out to us and tells us its name, he carefully repeats it and even spells it out for us to ensure we can follow him.

Tao is his given name while Wu is his family name, but Chinese custom puts the family name first, then the given name: Wu Toa.

Like many Chinese, Wu Tao has an American name, too: Harry. “Like Harry Potter,” he says with good-natured amusement. A lot of things appear to amuse him. He smiles freely and chuckles often.

The students are wild about him. Full Story »

A parent is a special kind of magician: one who turns a clean slate into a glass table.

by Terry Hargrove

We recently had the Cruel Weekend here in Connecticut. The Cruel Weekend is a meteorological phenomenon that occurs every March, when the temperature flirts with 60 and everybody gets out and walks or jogs or washes the car. The forecast for tomorrow is rain and snow, but the Cruel Weekend has put spring in my mind, and once the idea of spring gets inside, there is no getting rid of it. Lord, how I want spring! Green grass, leaves, flowers, a pond I can wade into rather than walk over. And I want it all to be really slow.

The worst thing about this year’s Cruel Weekend is how I squandered it. I went to the movies! I know I should have been outside, but I’ve waited a whole year to see Watchmen fail to live up to my expectations, so I had to go on opening weekend to get the disappointment over with quickly. The extended Director’s Cut comes out in June, so I‘ll get to be disappointed all over again. When I came home, there sat Joey on the couch, looking sad.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” I asked. Full Story »