For an excellent discussion of this week’s CSI episode, a man smothered to death by his fat date (when she passes out on top of him), see Cool Beans’ blog. I’d been thinking long and hard about writing on it, but she and her commentors have done such an excellent job, I don’t need to.

With cries of “Syria out! Syria out!”, tens of thousands of Lebanese citizens gathered today in Beirut’s Martyr’s Square, cheering the resignation of Pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami. And what an apt locale. Originally known as Burj Al-Kachaf, the square was renamed to honor Lebanese nationalists executed there by the Ottoman Empire in 1919. In it’s 4,000 year history, Lebanon has known many conquerors and many names, but the passion with which it was defended against Rome, Persia, Crusaders, Ottomans and Europeans still flows through the veins of the people. With one voice they’re making known their desire for self-determination against the forces of their neighbors that would occupy and use their land for purposes other than their own.

Beirut was once a brilliant jewel in the middle east, where ethnic and religious factions lived, traded and socialized without hatred or violence. It once boasted four universities that drew students and faculty from around the world, as well as salons, galleries, museums and monuments to three faiths. It’s hard for us to picture that now. We’re too used to images of a bombed out shell, the remains of twenty years of civil war. Lebanon has been the rag caught between the teeth of two pit bulls–Syria and Israel– as well has being ripped to shreds by its on partisan factions. Beirut has rebuilt slowly — first it’s infrastructure and now its will. This is week the culmination of that process.

The recent assassination of Rafik Hariri was the breaking point. As the masses gather in Martyr’s Square, I pray that the history of the place will not repeat itself.

I hope that President Bush takes the right lesson from this peaceful protest and does not assume that rejection of Syria means Lebanon will embrace the West in general, and the US in particular. I fear that the void left by the Karami government will encourage Washington in their endless urge to meddle in the affairs of middle-eastern states. To claim independence movement is a consequence of our war in Iraq would be a grave mistake.

Lebanon has thrown off foreign oppressors before, and will never cease to do so. Let’s not let the US become part of a long line of failed invaders. Let the people speak, and listen to what they say.

Read more about the history of Lebanon here.

I did something completely out of character today - I went shopping. For clothes. New clothes. Clothes that fit and are pretty colors. From a department store!

That may not sound very exciting, but you see, I don’t shop if I can possibly avoid it. And never in a department store. Almost everything I own, with the exception of things my mother or daughters give me for Christmas, come from Value Village, a second-hand shop in my neighborhood. I’ve never cared much about clothes, and since I work from home, if it covered me (preferably baggy) and cost less than $5, that was good enough for me. Who cares what it looks like? It drives my middle child, Meredith, nuts.

These days I’m fighting some serious self-esteem issues over my appearance, as you all know from my occasional whining, and I have almost nothing that fits. I’ve even avoided buying anything from the thrift store, feeling that it would be admitting defeat, that I might stay this shape. But today I had to have a new bra, and that’s something I don’t buy from Value Village. So Meredith and I went off to the mall.

Mere and I have never had the same taste in anything, let alone clothes. She’s got a great eye, though, from watching What Not To Wear. As hokey as I always thought that show was, she clearly learned something, because before I could find the lingerie she started pulling things off the racks, styles and colors I never would have noticed, and saying, just try it on, you’ll like it. And she was right. In less than an hour I had my bra plus 3 blouses, 2 skirts, a pair of dress pants and a jacket. Then she pulled out a coupon that knocked 30% off the whole works to bring it down to a price I could live with. I’m still in shock over how nice I look in the new things, and how good they make me feel. It’s done wonders for my confidence. At this rate, I might even let her take a picture of me for this page.

She says tomorrow we’re doing accessories at the dollar store.

In an age when Viagra is covered by Medicare, it’s still illegal in some states to sell a women a vibrator. Wired News yesterday ran an article (You Have an Rx for That Vibrator?) that reminds us that in 1998, the state of Alabama passed a law making it illegal to “produce, distribute or otherwise sell sexual devices that are marketed primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.” The law exempts sexual devices used “for a bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial or law enforcement purpose.”

Law enforcement?! Whoa, that adds a whole new component to good cop/bad cop fantasies. I’ll keep any speculation on legislative purposes to myself, but feel free to write your own scenario.

Way back in February 1999 I wrote a journal entry on that topic. Since then the case of Williams vs. Alabama, which challenges the law, has been working its way through the courts. The US Supreme Court recently rejected an appeal of the case, so it seems to be a done deal.

It’s not just Alabama, folks. I was shocked to learn that Georgia and Texas also outlaw assistive sexual devices, and that Louisiana, Mississippi, Kansas and Virginia restrict them. Regina Lynn at Wired makes a compelling case that this is not just a privacy issue; it is also a disability issue.

I can’t think of a more blantant example of conservatives wanting a camera in every woman’s bedroom. It’s not enough to want her barefoot and pregnant — now they want to make sure she didn’t enjoy getting that way. Or to guarantee that if she is enjoying something, it can result in conception.

On a more positive note, the article points out that it is not illegal to possess a vibrator in Alabama; only to manufacture or sell one. So far, at least, no one has been charged with violating the law by stepping across the state line to acquire one. Perhaps in the honor of universal human rights and brotherly love, we should organize an air lift to Birmingham with several cases of battery-powered buddies and hand ‘em out on street corners.

As Charlie Brown would say, “Good grief.”

Every once in a great while I stumble across a band so incredibly special that I want the whole world to listen. That’s the case with Darvish, a jazz trio of piano, cello and percussion that fuses progressive jazz and middle-eastern melodies and rhythms. I found them first on Amazon Free Music Downloads a couple of years ago, and when “3 Point Landing” came up on my random play list this morning, I knew I had to share.

These guys–Peter Maund, Moses Sedler and Victor Spiegel–are incredible. They play with a sensitivity to texture and color that blows me away. Even if you’re unfamiliar with either jazz or middle-eastern music, you’ll find their stuff approachable and exciting.

While all of the cd Darvish is available for free download, I urge you to listen, then buy a copy anyway.

News coverage has been intense this week about the disappearance and murder of Texan Lisa Underwood and her 7 year old son by her former boyfriend, who apparently feared she would expose their affair to his wife. Sadly, it’s not a unique case. Yesterday Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report listing murder as a leading cause of death of pregnant women.

From Reuters:

“Homicide is a leading cause of pregnancy-associated injury deaths,” Jeani Chang and colleagues wrote in the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

They investigated the deaths of women who died while pregnant or within a year of being pregnant between 1991 and 1999 and found 1,993 that were caused by injury, compared with 4,200 that were directly related to pregnancy complications.

Of the injury-related deaths, 617 or 31 percent were ruled homicide, making murder the second most common cause of injury-related death for pregnant women (emphasis mine) after car accidents.

The homicide rate for pregnant black women was more than triple that for white women, the researchers said.

Theories vary about the causes, but certain patterns emerged in the study. Black women between the ages of 25 and 29 were murdered at a rate 11 times greater than white women. Unmarried women are more likely to be victims, as are women of color and women under the age of 20. Overall, the CDC calculated a ratio of 1.7 homicides per 100,000 live births, but acknowledged that the ratio is understated because homicide is poorly tracked.

This is sad commentary on the status of women in the United States. At a time in their lives when they are the most physically vulnerable, they are also most likely to have it used against them. Despite two recent cases of female murderers intent on stealing infants, pregnant women are overwhelmingly murdered by the men in their lives.

From CBS News:

Clinical psychologist Robert Butterworth tells The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler the Underwood murders represent “one of those cases where pregnancy indicates a crisis point. We’re seeing research around the country that actually shows that, if you’re pregnant, the leading cause of death, sadly, is homicide.

“(It’s) because pregnancy for relationships can be life-altering and by that I mean, financial responsibility. It can also mean, if the person’s having an affair with the individual, that this can actually cause shame. So in a sense, somebody becomes pregnant, the woman has control over having the child or not, but the man has no control, and sometimes the man is kind of almost psychologically backed into the corner and as a result, sometimes homicide occurs.”

Butterworth notes that, “Pregnancy used to be a deterrent. It doesn’t seem to be a deterrent now. I think the fact is that, when you ask people what role will children have in their lives, a lot of people are not happy about pregnancy. And a lot of men become stressed when the individual becomes pregnant, either because of shame or because of not wanting the child or because the whole relationship changes and, sadly, murder and homicide become alternatives. We need to find some other way rather than taking this — doing something as horrific as this act.

“We know men are becoming more violent. It’s almost the profile of a white man in his ’30s focused on guns and women that are in relationships where men are threatening and there’s domestic violence and these things kind of add up.

“When a relationship is somewhat on the edge and a pregnancy occurs, that could kind of overwhelm the relationship to the point where the husband or the lover or the boyfriend cannot tolerate it and in (the Underwood) case, things just go to a head and things erupt and become out of control.”

What does this say about our society? Something is terribly, horribly wrong.

Kalilily Time had a wonderful piece yesterday about the full moon. Check it out.

Confession: I’m a lousy speller. I’ve been frustrated over the lack of a good spell checker for WordPress, since I’d gotten spoiled using Blog on my old site. Using webmail and typing comments on other sites is challenging, too, unless I keep a dictionary at my elbow. Often as not, I ended up rewording things using only words I’m sure of to avoid looking publically illiterate.

But a couple of weeks ago I found a great little plug-in called IESpell. It installs easily in Internet Explorer (sadly, doesn’t work for Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox) and appears on my right-click menu. Best of all, it’s free. Check it out.

Advisers to the FDA this week voted by a narrow margin to recommend keeping Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra on the market, stating that while the drugs do increase the risk of adverse cardiovascular events, those risks may be outweighed by the benefits for some individuals. As someone who has taken the drugs in question, I hope the FDA will go along with the recommendation. Maybe that will put an end to the stupid OTC pain reliever commercials where a woman walks in the door and says that her doctors says all she needs to do it a take a couple of tylenol/aleve/excederin/etc to manage her arthritis pain. Trust me — if OTC remedies handled the pain, that woman wouldn’t have gone to her doctor.

For too long, pain management policy in this country has been at the mercy of the “War On Drugs.” Risk of physical or mental addiction trumps quality of life issues in the treatment of those with chronic pain; though drugs capable of controlling severe pain exist, they are under-prescribed because of phobic fear of “scheduled” drugs. It is ridiculous that we have people in this country supporting assisted suicide to deal with pain issues when drugs exist to ease that pain and return to the suffers some measure of pleasure in life.

Even setting aside the pain associated with terminal illness, chronic pain affects people in ways those not suffering it cannot imagine. Dealing with chronic pain sucks up a big part of brain capacity; energy that could be going to other things is diverted into tamping down the pain and forcing it out of the conscience mind. Something as simple as reading a map or writing checks to pay bills becomes difficult with the background noise buzzing in your head.

My instincts say this is a bigger problem for women than it is for men. As a gender we are under-treated for such major conditions as heart disease, hypertension, stroke and depression. One recent study published in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (referenced by the Canadian Women’s Health Network) found that women were “more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychogenic’ and, therefore, ‘not real’.” I am concerned that an over-reaction to newly released risk tables for Cox-2 drugs will make that situation even worse.

For me, Cox-2 drugs mean the difference between being able to walk the length of the mall shopping with my children and spending the damp and cold months dry-mouthed with pain at home on the couch. Whether that gain is worth an increase in my minimual risk of heart attack and stroke should be a decision left to me and my doctor.

A truly unique and brilliant man gone. Please check out HCWW’s beautiful eulogy.