Our very own Shamash is featured in an upcoming book, “So Far and Yet So Near: Stories of Americans Abroad.” It’s a collection of stories written by Americans living overseas and is available from American Citizens Abroad (ACA).

You can order it directly from the publisher via the link, order it from Amazon or request it from your favorite independent bookseller.

This is, I believe, her first publication of what I hope will be many more. She hints about it on her site, so I hope you’ll all stop by and offer her your congratulations.

Way to go, Shamash! I’m so happy for you.

Washington State has once again declined a chance to take a stand for sexual literacy by not acting on the half dozen bills in the legislature to require sex education. What is required, if sex ed is taught at all, is a push for abstinence. Anything else is up to the individual school districts.

That means that districts which teach anything at all must preach that those disgusting naughty bits must be saved as a blessed gift for your spouse, but are not required to give information on birth control, either inside of or outside of marriage. And if they teach birth control at all, it’s not required to be medically accurate. While health classes will educate on hand washing to avoid colds, they don’t have to give kids information that could save their lives.

Instead, the state is sponsoring an tv and billboard advertising campaign called No Sex, No Problems, run by Department of Health Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program Coordinator Paj Nandi, which touts abstinence as the method to prevent STDs and pregnancy.

From the No Sex No Problems website:

DOH funding for this program is provided by the Administration for Children and Families under the US Department of Health and Human Services. Funding for this program does not endorse information beyond the scope of the federal Abstinence Education definition.

How’s that for a use of tax dollars.

The website also announces in scary large type that 590 high school students in Washington contracted gonorrhea in 2004, 5,957 teens reported contracting Chlamydia and that 11,404 Washington girls between the ages of 10-19 got pregnant. That’s out of approximately 500,000 students in grades 6-12. That’s after abstinence only education. That doesn’t sound to me as if the campaign is working.

The information available to adults isn’t any better. From the WA Department of Health website, the plan to reduce STD rates states: “Risk Reduction: Behavioral risk reduction is carried out through general educational materials distributed throughout the state. Annually over 300,000 language and education level appropriate materials are distributed. These focus on abstinence, delay of sexual activity and monogamy as well as individual diseases and conditions. STD Program helps people make healthy choices by explaining the kinds of behavior that increase risk of STD infection.

So how are adults supposed to education their kids, when the information available to them is limited to abstinence and monogamy?

Yet our legislators continue to stick their heads in the sand.

When you stick your head in the sand, your ass is up in the air. That must be what they’re thinking with.

“But I heard it on the news - it must be true!”

When I was 14, we got a television and cable tv for the first time. Previously, my only contact with movies had been Saturday afternoon matinees of Tarzan, for 25 cents a show sponsored by the downtown merchants during the Christmas season to give parents time to shop, and once, when I was 12, a trip with my cousins to see “The Wizard Of Oz.”

But with a tv in the house, I discovered WGN and TBS, the first major cable offerings. On hot summer afternoons in the gap between waking and going to work, I watched old musicals. “Singing In The Rain,” “On The Town,” “Brigadoon” and “American In Paris” became my favorite movies. They had one thing in common: Gene Kelly. That man could dance, loose jointed and flowing like honey, up the walls, over chairs and swinging from lamp posts. It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.

Instant love.

I was horrified when I found out he was older than my father.

So I pretended he wasn’t. In 1980 I even went to see the disasterous Xanadu, just because he was in it. Now 25 years later, I’ve still got a crush on the star of the 50s.

Last week I indulged in “American In Paris” again, and even though the movie is a sexist nightmare, and even though he’s dead, Kelly’s still got it. I’m reminded of the other great dancer I admired, Gregory Hines. I could watch either of them move for hours.

I think we’ve lost the awareness of the sexual allure of men who can dance, and I miss it. Men that comfortable in their bodies were incredibly magnetic, in a way that muscle-bound, gun-toting action heros are not. The old soft shoe and tap still turn me on. I love the finesse and control of it.

Guess I’m older than I thought.

Charles Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil. You are
one of the most loved and hated poetic works.
Death and decadence are important themes for
you, but none should overlook your impressive
aesthetics, either. Deep down youre not evil
at all, you just like to play the tough guy
on the block.

Which literature classic are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmm… I’ll have to read this book.

Via Romancing Paradise

Timed to coincide with International Women’s Day, 8 March 2006 is Blog Against Sexism Day. Be part of the awareness campaign. I’m sure all of us have experiences to share, so I urge everyone, men and women of all ages, to take part. More details can be found at VeganKid. When you write a post, be sure to trackback to the link or leave your url in comments to the linked post to be including in the participation list. Be sure to let me know, too, so I can link to you.

Let’s spread the word.

Via Sour Duck’s Link Blog, who got it from GenderGeek.

You don’t have to attend MIT to get an MIT education. The MIT World Distributed Intelligence education center now makes available streaming video of hundreds of lectures given on campus, including Human Genetics, Our Past and Our Future, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, and Patriotism and Reconstruction: Washington, DC after Conquest and Arson during the War of 1812.

My only complaint about the service is that the videos aren’t captioned, but they do offer faced-focused shots so that visual assistance to hearing is possible. This is a wonderful opportunity - I hope you’ll take advantage of it.

Via Digg.

I’ve thought long and hard whether or not to take on the issue of the abortion ban passed this week in South Dakota. It’s an area and people I know well, having grown up less than 60 miles away over the border in Iowa. In my youth it was a fiercy independent state with a deep respect for the individual. The Dakotas have traditionally been a “live and let live” area, with the population dispersed enough that there is no illusion that your neighbor’s activities are any of your business. You take care of yours and I’ll take care of mine.

Geography encourages it. If you’ve never visited the South Dakota Badlands, it’s a land of deep contrasts. To some it’s desolute and a vision of hell; to me, it’s starkly beautiful with no extraneous flourishes to obscure the nature of truth. I love to climb to the top of an outcropping and gaze down at the ancient land spread before me. To the Lakota Sioux it’s holy ground, and I feel that reverence embedded in the carved canyons. It’s easy there to feel you’re the only soul on earth.

But that sense of isolation impacts the state in other ways. It took Dennis Banks and Russell Means and the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation of Wounded Knee to wake the state and the nation to the abuse going on at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and to shake up the instituionalized racism that went unnoticed. I see the same thing happening to women now that afflicted Native Americans then.

It’s very easy to pretend that what doesn’t affect one personally doesn’t exist when one lives in an intensely private place. Suffering, like poverty, is silently at a distance. The struggle for bodily self-determination is the same thing. It’s some unseen Other’s problem. That, I believe, is the core of the abortion debacle in South Dakota, and why a traditionally independent area sees fit to legislate away a woman’s right to control her own body.

What’s it going to take to wake the state up now? Another Wounded Knee? Where are women’s Banks and Means?

At Wounded Knee it took the harsh light of national attention to do what individuals could not accomplish. We need to focus the glare of spotlights on the discrimination against women’s health care and demand that it be addressed. Yes, it will make the locals dig in their heels, just like they did with AIM, but in the end it was the only thing that brought about justice. The public trials of Banks and Means forced the state to hear what it would have prefered to ignore. Perhaps a challenge in the federal courts will bring uncomfortable attention to a hidden problem, the plight of women.

Change happened then. I hang onto hope that it can happen again.

I’m feeling cranky today.

While Volkswagen is under fire–rightly–for it’s misogynist “my fast” commercials, there’s another little thing they do that doesn’t draw much attention. They add a commercial tag line to the captions on every show they sponsor or partially sponsor.

I need captions, for both television and movies. Without them, I can’t pick up enough of the dialogue to enjoy the program, which locks me out of most British tv and many older documentaries on the Discovery and Learning channels. I feel that the hearing impared have a right to publically broadcasted material in a manner which they may enjoy them. But Volkswagen takes the concept a step too far with an extra commercial snuck in that only the hearing impared are aware of. Butterfinger candy bars do the same thing with The Simpsons.

Not that I think that the hearing impared have a right to commercial-free television. In fact, I refuse to buy products from companies whose commericals aren’t captioned, since they obviously don’t care about my business. But sneaking in extra ones targeted solely at those of us who depend on captions really annoys me. It is in effect a user fee for needing captions, different from the standard credit line “closed captioning brought to you by …” the agency or captioning company line. This feels exploitive.

We’re paying twice for what those with normal hearing pay once in advertising, and that’s not right. Captioned should not mean captive audience.

When they were babies, I didn’t know many traditional songs so I sang my kids to sleep with spirituals and current classics by The Eagles, John Mellencamp and Dan Fogelberg. Now you can find out what your parents might have sung to you.

From the NST Lounge comes this Billboard listing of the #1 hit for the day you were born. Mine, for 10 April 1960, was “Theme from ‘A Summer Place’” by Percy Faith. Perhaps not coincidentally, my dad used to sing it to me.

From the first page chose your birth month, from the next your specific day. Scroll down the list to find the exact year.

Leave your results in comments!

Via Digg.