. . . the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.

1. Friendliness. I love Nick dearly, but it would be nice not to have to warn people about the dangers of over-petting him. Other cats may hide from strangers, or hiss, or display various other anti-social tendencies. I suspect there's a limit as to how precisely one can breed for personality, but I don't think there's been much effort put into it, either. And I wouldn't mind if he were a bit friendlier to me, as well. Would it kill him to sit next to me on the chair when I'm reading, instead of across the room?
   
2. Longevity. A normal human being is going to live approximately four times as long as a well-cared-for cat, assuming a cat lifetime of 20 years, which cats are certainly capable of doing. After all the emotional investment one sinks into the little furballs, the least they could do is stick around for a while. Dominic was born in the spring of 1992, so he's coming up on 16 years, by far the longest I've ever had a cat, and currently his only heath issues are vision-related. His veterinary ophthamologist says he's routinely seeing 20-year-old cats these days, which wasn't true even 10 years ago. The little cheater isn't even showing any (more) gray. In my observation, while dogs often go gray around the muzzle, cats go gray by growing in longer white guard hairs on their back and sides. Dominic has grown in the guard hairs, but they're invisible against his already-gray coat, so he doesn't look any different. He doesn't act any different, either; he hasn't slowed down appreciably. He still acts the same as he did as a six year old. Well, except now he doesn't leap down from high places like he used to, but that's almost certainly due to the fact that he's lost depth perception because his right eye is clouded by cataracts. Still, I'm almost certain to outlive him, and there's a lot of sadness in losing a pet. Having to go through that less often is definitely a good thing. Which leads to the next item on the list...
   
3. Health. There are a lot of health-related issues that won't cut a cat's life short. Still, if Dominic's going to live to at least twenty, as I expect he will, it would be better if (for example) he weren't blind for the last few years of his life. Also, a cat that's genetically inclined to be healthier will be less expensive to own. When Nick was around four, I spent about $1500 on him dealing with kidney-related issues; putting him on special low-urine-pH-inducing food as well as a couple trips to the vet. (A big chunk of that expense was due to him coming down with blockage just a few days before I was leaving on a trip to Belgium; I had to leave him with a vet who would board pets as well, so they could treat him, watch him, and then keep him until I got back. So the dollar amount's higher than it might normally have been.) A healthier cat is a happier cat, and the owner's bank account will be happier too.
   
4. Minimal shedding. If you own a cat, then cat fur's kind of unavoidable. I, for one, am quite unwilling to give up the experience of having a soft, cuddly, warm weight that's gently vibrating while curled up on my lap or blinking sleepily against my leg. But soft comes from fur, and fur has to be replaced, and that means shedding. But the rate of fur replacement is probably variable from cat to cat, and a cat who's follicles hold on to their hair longer before letting it go to grow a replacement would be less work for the owner.
   
5. Capacity for learning. I first called this one "intelligence," because a smart cat is hopefully less likely to try pouncing on the moving wheels of a car, to use an example I had to deal with once upon a time. But a smart cat could also find new ways to get in trouble. What's really needed is a cat that you can train easily. One that gets the whole litter-box thing right off the bat. One that quickly grasps that a cat door that lets it out will also let it in. One that takes to heart The Lesson Of The Tuna Sandwich And Mr. Squirt-Bottle. A smart, congenial, cooperative cat. Well, as much as any cat could be, at least.
   
6. Soft fur. While shooting for reduced shedding is more important, if possible I'd also angle for a cat who's hairs are smaller and of somewhat variable length. That will make it feel softer to the touch. Soft is nice. The combination of "healthy" and "soft fur" almost unavoidably drives my hypothetical cat to being a short-hair. Barfing up hairballs isn't as healthy as not doing so, and finer hairs will be more prone to matting and tangling, but shorter hairs are less prone to same. Also, not only does the cat have less hair to keep clean, but when it sheds, it's shedding a smaller volume of hair, contributing to "less shedding" as well.
   

1. Medium-small size. Specifically, a natural weight range of 6-8 pounds. Last time I went shopping for flea medication, it came in two different strengths: one for cats up to 8 lbs., one for cats over that. Dominic has weighted in around 7.5 to 8 pounds most of his life, so apparently he's a Medium-Sized Cat. He's never been overweight for his frame, which is nice as well. I've certainly met plenty of cats who were bigger, but I don't think I'd want a bigger cat, even if (especially if?) it was lean musle mass instead of fat. Nick's big enough now that I can tell when he jumps on the bed, but not so big that he's a chore to carry around. Smaller cats are going to cost a bit less to feed, make less poop to scoop, have less hair to shed, have more places to curl up and sleep, and just generally fit more easily into a human's life, I think. Not that I'm advocating weird miniature kitten-sized cats or anything! That's why I specified a range of 6-8 pounds. I think Nick's quite as big as any cat (of mine, at least) needs to be, and if he were even smaller, that wouldn't be a bad thing, either.
   
2. Multi-colored. I'm not going for "pretty," exactly, although I think that would tend to be an indirect consequence. But a cat with spots, stripes, swirls, tipped ears or dipped toes, is not only inherently more interesting to look at, but also more easily identified. More individual. More fun.
   

"Once upon a time in a land not so far, far away a new musical began its journey to Broadway. SHREK THE MUSICAL will play an exclusive World Premiere engagement at The 5th Avenue Theatre August 14 - September 21, prior to opening on Broadway Fall of 2008."

Sci-Fi’s (re)running their two-part miniseries The Legend of Earthsea this weekend. `Hm,’ I thought to myself. `Have I seen that? I don’t think I have. I certainly want to. But it’s opposite The Chronicles of Riddick, which I think I also want to see. I wonder if Earthsea is any good? I seem to recall hearing something about Ursula not liking it . . .’

Well, that latter is an understatement, to be sure. But I’m not moved to post because Hollywood failed to do a good job adapting a great literary work. That’s not news. No, I’m writing because I found an essay by Pam Noles by following a link from Ursula’s site, an essay entitled Shame, which says, among other things, “This I believe: If Hollywood has taken a groundbreaking, universally acclaimed, multicultural novel that has been in print for over thirty years and turned it into a white-boy romp, that is a news story. . . . If the genre news outlets exist to serve their subculture in a way more than pimping for the publishers and the production companies, the deliberate omission of characters of pigment in the Hollywood adaptation of Le Guin’s Earthsea is the sort of news story a genre news outlet should notice and write about. . . . The mainstream media broke this story, while our media played catch up by linking to Slate. What this says to me is My People Still Don’t Get It.”

She’s right. I read this and realized that I Still Don’t Get It.

I read Ursula’s original protest to the Sci-Fi production and was surprised to find that, of all the things they’d done to the story, chopping it up and rearranging the bits to all-but-obliterate the original story was not the thing that had upset her the most. It was the fact that they’d cast people with different skin color than the book’s characters had had.

I haven’t actually finished reading Noles’ essay yet, actually. I had to stop and write this right away, because her essay made it much clearer to me the distinction, and particularly the importance, between Getting It (Ursula) and Not Getting It (me).

What really molds my cheese about this is that I’ve been putting extra effort into Getting It for a bit over five years now, since falling in love with somebody of the same gender as I. Until then, I’d been sitting at the top of pretty much every list one would care to make of characteristics that can be ranked in terms of privilege and opportunity, through no fault of my own. White. Male. Anglo-Saxon/European descent. Protestant. American. Not overweight. Tall.

Oh!

Wow, look at those dust bunnies in the corner. If I didn’t have this 500-watt light bulb over my head at the moment, I’d never have seen them.

OK, I have to digress for a moment. I was about to digress anyway, to do a little mini-essay on how strange it is that, all other things being equal, tall people will be paid more for doing exactly the same job as short people. It seems so absurd on the face of it; absurd enought that you might think it a joke, but it’s well documented that salaries increase by 1–2% per inch of height. Why this would be the case has always been quite mysterious to me.

Another mystery was why I look so good in my Matrix coat. Those of you who’ve seen my coat can vouch for the ‘looking good’ part; I constantly get compliments when I wear it around. But it occured to me to wonder “why?” Partly it’s the flowing billowy effect when I move, but why do we think that a coat (or a cape) that’s billowing is cool? We obviously do, or Batman wouldn’t have one. However, just being billowy doesn’t explain the reaction to my coat, or rather, me when I’m wearing my coat.

I now understand that the primary factor is simply that it makes me look even taller than I am. Eric overheard somebody at the Toronto WorldCon say (as I passed them in the hall), “He can wear that because he’s tall.” On the face of that, it’s ridiculous. A male friend of mine who’s shorter than average has a very similar coat that, like mine, was custom-tailored to his frame, and it looks very good on him. He can wear “that” without being tall, but it simply isn’t as striking or dramatic when he does it as when I do; because the coat’s style emphasizes height, and I have more height to emphasize.

Being thin makes me look taller too, of course. Last time we checked, I was the same height as my brother to within a quarter inch, but unless we’re standing right next to each other, people assume I’m taller because he’s proportional, and I’m not. That is to say, he’s right around the “normal” weight for somebody our height, and I’m around fifty pounds below that. Without the width, all that’s left is the height.

I wouldn’t have figured out that the coat’s magic is all about making me look taller if I hadn’t figured out why being taller’s such a big deal in the first place. That happened when I tried to find links to support the height salary bonus, and instead ran across a Seattle Times article that reminded me of the correlation between height and nutrition. Bam! Light bulb.

There’s also a salary bonus (and many other benefits) to being beautiful/handsome. And what makes people think somebody’s beautiful? Symmetry and proportion. What adversely affects a human’s symmetry and proportion? Genes, yes, but also nutrition. If you see somebody ugly (read: “asymmetric”), your brain whispers “poor nutrition” and “childhood disease” in your ear. Poor nutrition does more than make somebody less beautiful, though. It also makes them dumber, weaker . . . and shorter.

So everybody’s got a little voice in their head that says that if somebody’s tall and handsome, they’re also probably strong and smart. As it happens, recent research says that the voice is even telling the truth. The Case and Paxson paper reveals:

As early as age 3—before schooling has had a chance to play a role—and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests. The correlation between height in childhood and adulthood is approximately 0.7 for both men and women, so that tall children are much more likely to become tall adults. As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence, for which they earn handsome returns....we find that the height premium in adult earnings can be explained by childhood scores on cognitive tests. Furthermore, we show that taller adults select into occupations that have higher cognitive skill requirements and lower physical skill demands.

The authors strongly imply that taller people earn more because they get higher paying jobs because they’re smarter and thus more qualified. I must say that I doubt that this adequately explains why taller people doing the same job get paid more; I think we still must look to a species-wide bias to make up the difference.

My, look at the time! So let’s get back to the original topic. No, no need to look back, I’ll remind you of where we were: “I’d been sitting at the top of pretty much every list one would care to make of characteristics that can be ranked in terms of privilege and opportunity, through no fault of my own. White. Male. Anglo-Saxon/European descent. Protestant. American. Not overweight. Tall.” And straight, until one startling day, when the love of my life walked through my door and suddenly I became a member of one of the most overtly persecuted groups in America: gay.

Now, understand I didn’t suddenly become gay. I had been, and still am, bisexual; more specifically, if I were going to make a list of the sexiest people I know, it would include both men and women, and I’ve known for much of my adult life that, if I ever found That Special Someone, that person could be either male or female. Since there are a lot more straight women than gay men, the odds seemed to strongly favor women, so that was what I was expecting, and when I would put effort into actually dating, I was dating women. So the rest of the world mostly just assumed I was a straight guy.

Meeting Eric didn’t change my personal sexual identity, but it sure changed my social one. “Bi” still isn’t a significant category (the LGBT acronym notwithstanding), and admittedly a monogamous bisexual is basically splitting hairs to draw that distinction, so to an awful lot of the people who knew me (including my poor mom), I basically turned gay overnight.

Unlike somebody who’d been born into a category that’s discriminated against or persecuted, I hadn’t grown up with the idea that random strangers might want to beat me up, or that I might be arbitrarily refused service, or fired, or insulted. That took a bit of getting used to. Not that I mean to whine; I still had all my other categories, and it’s much easier to pretend to not be gay than it is to pretend to not be black, for example.

On the other hand, when I proposed to Eric, Canada hadn’t set off the massive landslide of change with their explosive legalization of gay marriage, and I was looking at being gay in a world that had (and still has) hundreds of laws, rules, regulations, and protections to mitigate discrimination on the basis of gender and race, but almost none on the basis of sexual identity. My brother was quite incredulous when he learned that it was perfectly legal here in Washington, as well as most of the rest of the country, to fire somebody for being gay, or be denied an apartment for the same reason. (Of course, that changed about a year ago.)

So when prominent black leaders started insisting that the fight against discrimination against homosexuals wasn’t remotely comparable to their ongoing efforts against racial discrimination, I was astonished and insulted. I’d been supporting their efforts to not be treated as second-class citizens all my life; but they seemed to think it perfectly fine for me to be a third-class citizen. Discriminating against them is unjust, but discriminating against me is totally reasonable, because . . . what? Their ancestors were treated worse than mine? Because they have to be black 24/7, but “all” I have to do to avoid discrimination is lie to people? What could possibly be so much worse about their discrimination that it would be OK to discriminate against gays but not against blacks?

The short answer is, of coures, “nothing.” That attitude is as big a pile of unsupportable bullshit as the attitude that if two people declare intent to spend the rest of their lives as a couple, they are entitled to thousands of special privileges only if they’re of different genders.

On the other hand, I try to avoid short answers that aren’t created from long ones, which is why, as I said many paragraphs ago, I’ve been putting extra effort into Getting It for a bit over five years now, since falling in love with somebody of the same gender as I.

I thought I’d been doing fairly well. I’ve been paying a lot more attention to the history of races in America, current issues of race, and other related material. My brother is a professor of cultural anthropology at a very respected liberal-arts college in the midwest, and I took advantage of that last Christmas to learn even more about how the experience of discrimination varies between different groups.

Maybe I am doing well. False modesty aside, I wouldn’t be surprised if I understood a lot more about what an average American citizen with very dark skin experiences than they do about an average gay American. Still, Ursula’s biggest complaint about the Earthsea miniseries is that they made almost everybody white, and I’m not only surprised by that, but don’t even realize that I shouldn’t be surprised until I read Pam’s essay. That’s pretty sad, and pretty embarrassing.

Overt persecution is so much easier to defy. If somebody says “we don’t allow your kind here,” then I can tell myself that they’re just a sad, pathetic person who is as much to be pitied as hated. “My kind” could be gay, or black, or asian, or female; the point is, I can defy it, even if (especially if!) just to myself, if I recognize it. The same is true if a movie’s Evil Villian is a shifty-eye Asian or a lesbian.

But “copper-red”-skinned Ged fell in love with Tenar, and Tenar’s a woman. Nothing wrong with that; some of my best friends are heterosexual. And, there is one black character (Ogion) on the “good guys” team in the televised “Earthsea.” But the “bad guys” (more accurately, the “outsiders” or “others”) in LeGuin’s story are the Karg, and they’re white. Tenar is of the Karg. In the miniseries, she’s played by somebody with a distinctly non-white (Asian) appearance.

Tenar’s a main character, so is Ogion; so there are representatives of these disadvantaged racial groups present. But the melanin-deprived hide is not the most common one on our planet, nor was it the most common in LeGuin’s stories. White folk are the most common type in Hollywood; I certainly expect most works coming from there to be predominantly white, just as I’d expect a movie from Bollywood to be cast primarily with Indians, even if the movie was about some space colony, or a remake of “1984.” But if Bollywood remade “Gone With The Wind” and everyone was Indian except the slaves (maybe they’re Chinese?), I don’t think I’d be the only one upset.

I’d sure like Hollywood to do a better job of casting multi-ethnically, just like I’d like to see a few more characters who just happened to be gay without it actually being some kind of plot point or intentional story element. But I don’t expect any particular production to make the extra effort to cast against the ratio of skin types showing up to casting calls.

“Earthsea” is different; the story specified racial types. Now somebody is intentionally ignoring the original work. Shame on them for being so lazy and/or for caring about the source material so little, that they couldn’t be bothered to cast it according to spec (and for butchering the work, of course).

Shame on me for not recognizing why that really was the worst part of what they did to it.

A major impetus to the passage of the U.S. Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938 was the murderous action of a particular “excipient” used for the laudable purpose of solubilizing a particular drug. Elixir of sulfanilamide contained diethylene glycol, a highly toxic component of some modern antifreezes, in combination with the active sulfa drug. More than 100 children died.

In 1995, Haiti experienced a terrible echo of this tragedy when 80 children died from diethylene glycol-contaminated glycerine used in the manufacture of a children’s cough medicine. The convoluted trail of where the glycerine came from points out the need for international standards. According to a report by David R. Schoneker, vice chair for Science and Regulatory Policy at IPEC-Americas, the glycerine was obtained from a European distributor that represented itself as a manufacturer but was really only a repackager that had obtained the material through a series of intermediaries. The original glycerine had been produced in China, at whose border the trail turned cold because of the investigators’ inability to gain access to the communist country. The material was ultimately sold to the Haitian pharmaceutical company as USP-grade glycerine complete “with a certificate of analysis indicating that it had been tested to meet USP specifications.” The user trusted the analysis rather than perform “appropriate identification testing upon receipt of the glycerine as would be required by cGMPs.”

1. Health Care
   
   
   
   • Visitation of a patient in a health-care facility.
     
   • Ability to give informed consent for health care for a patient who is not competent.
     
   • Disclosure by a health-care facility of health-care information about a patient without the patient’s authorization.
     
   
   
2. Death
   
   
   
   • Funeral arrangements.
     
   • Ability to consent to autopsies.
     
   • Authorization of organ and tissue donation.
     
   • Inheritance rights when there is no will.
     
   • Administration of an estate if the decedent died intestate or if the representative named in the will is unable to serve.
     
   
   
3. Provisions dealing with non-probate assets and power of attorney