November 2009
8 posts
4 tags
Show us less than half of what you got, ladies!
Woman #1: “…And then Ronald said, ‘You aren’t going out in that. I believe I see at least forty-eight percent of your skin in that dress! They’ll think you’re some kind of trollop! Change at once!’”
Woman #2: “So you put on that instead?”
Woman #1: “It still shows off a good 30 percent of me.”
Woman #2: “Tell it to...
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The Coming of Neurodiversity (Part II in a series)
This whole project, and maybe even the motivation behind my coming to Petri Town in the first place, was in service of a question: If there is a cure for Fragile X, who would it turn The Boy into?
Questions of identity and the “I” are pretty salty ones, and whereas it was once the province of men in togas and the French, now the self can be subjected to neurological study — and...
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Fragile X marks the spot. (Part I in a series)
It occurs to me that I’ve never actually told The Boy’s story, and therefore a story of my family, from the molecular level.
That story begins at the far end of the human genome, at the 23rd pair of chromosomes, where X, as always, marks the spot.
Fragile X — it’s the most common heritable form of mental retardation and the most common known cause of autism. If...
A short rant before a week-long series.
I think this thing, this whole Fragile X/autism/society/vaccines/conspiracy thing, is now getting out of control. Maybe the debate has long since escalated to outright conflict, but I fear there will come a time when someone will shoot someone on the other ideological side, and then this debate — about vaccines, about autism, about what causes this thing that affects so many people —...
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Et tu, Islam?
The Garden of Eden is getting pretty crowded. With creationism on the rise in Islamic countries, evolution better quick produce its own ancient texts to get people believing in science’s story of the rise of life on Earth.
And science better get a good editor, too. Because look at how the big difference between Christian creationism and Islamic creationism reveals the power of word choice....
I don't test well.
I kind of like tests. Especially ones that ask weird questions. Like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a standard personality test for the sane and slightly-less-so. Amongst its True/False gems are statements such as these:
I have diarrhea once a month or more.
My hands and feet are usually warm enough.
I would like to be a singer.
Evil spirits possess me at times.
At times I...
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“As soon as one begins to divide things up,
there are names;
Once there are...”
– Tao Te Ching, Chapter 76
October 2009
27 posts
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The curse of the endless carnival
The giddiness and abandon of the mask-wearing holidays — Halloween, Mardi Gras, Carnival, etc. — has everything to do with the changing of identities. A man dons a mask and behaves as he normally would not, because after all it’s not really him that had a dalliance in that alley, or rode a large dog down the street, or started a minor revolution. It was his other, the self let...
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Pimp my cosmology.
This was a good week for your friend me. I had five good ideas. One was for a bar, one was for a movie, two were for stories and one was for a TV show. I still consider this kind of thing important. Sadly I cannot share the nature of these ideas with you, patent pending and all that, but I will say that the bar would be very cool here in Petri Town and involves conveyor belts.
As for the TV show,...
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Zen and the Art of Retardation
It’s not so bad. I think about all the ways The Boy is how he is, and how he seems pretty happy. Sure, there is anxiety and learning difficulties and some hygiene things, but it’s hard to argue with The Boy’s outlook when he’s doing something so simple as throwing rocks.
And I’ve come to realize that we “neurotypicals” aren’t so different. Every...
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Criminal Minds
Growing up in Texas seriously curbed The Boy’s tendencies toward becoming a master criminal. Our fair state, after all, had a habit of executing the mentally retarded. At least until the Supreme Court intervened.
But can nothing stop the criminals with Asperger’s rampaging among us? Slate.com’s Erica Westly considers in a very good story the neurological framework of the...
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Proper greetings in desolate places.
In reporting on the effects of the largest wildfire in LA County history over the last week for a documentary project, I’ve been driving way out into some newborn wastelands. The scenes in the hills outside the city are eerie and beautiful— naked slopes, black trees curled like claws, charred metal that once was a car or a road sign or a swingset. But in the midst of all this,...
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Celebritarded III: Politickin'
The ugliness of the vaccine debate is something you need to see to believe. Character attacks, death threats, the much-hyped research of the scions of famous American families — this story’s got it all. And it continues to grow.
Because it’s flu season, and with the changing colors comes the annual flush of influenza strains, including the It Girl of communicable disease this...
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Evolution likes big butts (and it cannot, under...
I got a memo a couple of days ago from Steve at the Office of Evolutionary Affairs (I signed up for like a t-shirt and ended up on their mailing list). Anyway I thought it was interesting.
“10/19/09
Attn: Organisms
Re: Human Female Evolution
It has been decided that in light of current trends in biological development human females will begin evolving to emphasize these traits:...
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Clap your hands.
One of the very special joys of living here in Petri Town is that I wake up most weekdays to the sound of children playing in the fenced yard at the end of the street. Sunday there are no children; but, as special, the sound of church bells echo in through the window, playing a more involved and sprightly tune than the weekly on-the-hour gongs.
Children and church bells are alike in a certain...
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Celebritarded II: Telling funny jokes.
This past week was a bad one for the media. First the whole Fourth Estate gets shanghaied by a reality-television aspirant who pretended to send his child aloft in a homemade balloon. (There’s already a video game, t-shirt and lots of Halloween potential, apparently.) Then there was the little story about the autistic boy who saved his teacher from choking, a story apparently only I have to...
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What is it, Aspie? Is it trouble? Good work,...
Holy jumping Christ, did you hear the news? An autistic boy saved his teacher! From choking! The news media is breaking its jaw grinning so much over this feel-good story. I imagine the newsroom just a-hoppin:
“Carl, hold off on that health care package! We got ourselves some kinda magic retard what kin save a lady’s goldamned life! Didjoo even know them autisticles had werkin...
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Lord loves a working man.
Here’s a genetic link between The Boy and me: we aren’t made for working. We’re more built for lookin’ at. Leisure class, strictly. Cloud-white linen suits, silk cravats like Salome’s veils, the pair of us winding along a Riviera two-lane in a topless Ferrari, down to a dock and a shining ketch bobbing in the glittering wash. I teach him to say “Ciao”...
“When I was 10, I would pray to God and ask for my challenge. ‘Give me my...”
– Joe Blair, “For the Boy Who Makes Waves,” The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2009
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Celebritarded: Our Ladies of Scientific Opinion
Okay. So.
Jenny McCarthy here is the voice for Generation Rescue, a nonprofit that researches the “causes and treatments for autism, ADHD, neurological disorders and chronic illness, while parent-volunteers mentor thousands of families in recovering their children.” And by “recovering” they mean exactly that — the organization believes that autism is not so much a...
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Dear Retardation,
I hope this letter finds you well. I am living on the West Coast now, but rest assured I haven’t forgotten about you. In fact I have, of late, been thinking about you quite a bit. The last 36 hours, especially, have been pretty intense, which is why I thought it might be a good time to reach out. I have gotten myself involved in an upcoming study in the north of this state, a new clinical...
"A couple of years," she said.
So I’ve spoken this evening with the previously mentioned Dr. Randi Hagerman of the University of California at Davis’ M.I.N.D. Institute. I’d forgotten what a kind and interesting and enthusiastic person she is. Hers is a kind of energy rarely encountered — the drive of someone who spends a life pursuing a thing, who enjoys this pursuit, who can be consumed by something...
Diplomatic plates for the differently-abled.
Surely we all reach a point — in the day, in the year, in the life — when the rules we’ve always been taught to live by stop applying. From the basic decorum of restaurant etiquette to agreeing that dollar bills have meaning in society, somewhere, at some point, I think for all of us it necessarily breaks down. You use bad words around an important stranger, you slip restaurant...
“The sage
acts but does not possess,
completes his work but does not dwell on...”
– Tao Te Ching
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The Boy at sea.
The Boy loves to be driven places. The paradox of a constant scene always changing is soothing, I think. But it’s only recently that he’s been able to get on a sea-going vessel without panicking.
A few summers ago, my father, The Boy, our stepmother and her kids went to the beach. They chartered a boat to take out on the gulf for a day of fishing. The Boy quite enjoyed it —...
Famous person Jim Carrey has a moral dilemma that...
So the bigtime quote below comes from a study which says that most autism cases are genetic, which stands in serious contrast to the bigtime movement that blames vaccines for causing autism. If autism is genetic, heritable, rather than environmental, that changes the nature of Who’s to Blame. It’s God, then, the creator of mutation, rather than Man, the creator of pharmaceuticals.
...
“Compared to other complex diseases, which are caused by a complicated mix of...”
– from the Broad Institute’s latest genome-wide study of autism
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Fragile XXX and Autism Porn
We’d always guessed The Boy came from another planet. It isn’t that he’s different so much as unheard-of. He knows songs (mainly your less-savory country music, unfortunately) after the first few notes; he has an instinctive directional sense, an incredible memory and despite no known history of yoga, is as flexible as a giantish squid. When we were kids he’d play the...
Autism hates freedom.
Hidden deep in Kathleen Sebelius’ op-ed below is a mention of the 2006 Combating Autism Act, which allocated $36 million to research, treatment and “surveillance.” Now this makes me feel special inside for a number of reasons — not least of which is that since it was signed into existence by Bush, who must at that time have been feeling particularly hawkish, the...
“Last Wednesday, President Obama visited the National Institutes of Health (NIH)...”
– Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Yahoo.com op-ed
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"Retard."
The very surprising thing about Petri Town is that, for all its gigantism, it’s really a bunch of small towns, swipes of a cultural swab onto agar that have grown into interesting strains of people — the inbound outcasts, the affectedly homegrown, the very tall women and the camera-ready families and the drug-addled and the drivers of food trucks and the men who are very tall women....
“The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation...”
– Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Stephen Jay Gould
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A portrait of the artist as a gene pool.
I’m going to tell a story I’ve told before, which is something I try never to do. In the interests of novelty, originality. As though I’m somehow better than previously told tales. But I am retelling this story in the hopes that it proves to me that it is an important one, that in its retelling it becomes truer or better, or, better still, that it makes me better, or truer....