Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Thanks to a conversation on a mailing list that started as a tangent from my "blade on a stick" reference, I now know a) what a "sling blade" is, having never heard the phrase before that movie (which I haven't seen yet) came out, and b) what the particular kind of blade-on-a-stick that I've wanted for quite some time and have been unable to find is called. (Turns out it's called a "grass whip" as well as a "sling blade".) For much of my yard, it would work somewhat better than the particular type of blade-on-a-stick that I did wind up with when I went looking for something to mow with. (Yes, my back yard is that small. There isn't room enough to use a push-mower effectively. I could use a weed-whacker, but anything motorized seems like overkill. A sling-blade seems better suited to the open area in the middle than a weed-whacker anyhow. The weed-cutter I've got isn't well-suited to the corners, nor for dealing with the clingy, tangly vines I need to get under control.)

It's a neat feeling to finally get that connection between tool and word, and between "cool sounding noun from movie" and its meaning. It's also retroactively annoying to contemplate how much simpler various interactions with hardware-store employees might have been if I'd known the right name for what I was looking for. (I'd seen one before, so I knew what I wanted. I'd used my father's when I was a kid. I just had no idea what it was called.)

I wonder whether it has any other names ... 'cause I'm not sure how I managed to avoid hearing either "sling blade" or "grass whip" for all this time.

Still catching up on that large stack of URLs and even larger stack of open browser windows (taking up valuable RAM).

• Amputee kangaroo fitted with prosthetic leg (MSNBC). "Everybody we asked said, 'you're going to have to kill it,' we were unwilling to accept that answer." The manufacturer of the spring device used by Para Olympian Thomas Bourgeois donated their rather expensive technology to the kangaroo project.
• "Politicians and police officers in the Philippines are calling for a ban on sexy billboard adverts because they cause traffic jams." (Ananova, 16 May)
• Doctors Advise Caution in Ambiguous Genitalia Surgery (WebMD, April 2003). "An estimated one in 2000 babies is born with ambiguous genitalia [I thought it was more common than that] [...] The custom in western countries is to raise the child female, and to surgically remove 'excess tissue' -- whether it's a small penis or clitoral tissue." But, "Most women born with ambiguous genitalia are masculine in behavior." The new thinking: "We've learned in recent years that gender identity is much more complex than once thought," and "We believe in doing the least intervention, because the minute you touch those tissues, you can create problems [...] We can always go back and correct it at puberty, when the child can make the decision.... The feeling now is that you should raise the child as their genetic sex as much as possible [...]" How does this match up with what intersexed-activists have been pushing for for years?
• This one's interesting on several fronts, and to several overlapping subsets of my readers: Biologists Rethink Darwin's Theories on Sex Roles "[W]hile sexual-selection theory justifies some mating behaviors it by no means explains all of them, says Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biological science at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. The evidence for diversity of sex, gender expression and sexuality in nature are extensive, she says." Obviously, this is significant to anyone interested in evolutionary biology. The article will also be interesting to folks concerned with gender expression: "The biggest mistake in biology today,' said Roughgarden, 'is extending the idea of the gametic binary to both behavior and life history.'" and "Gender is surprisingly labile and is not solely determined by the gametes a creature happens to produce,". If anyone still cares, the article also discusses same-sex sexual behaviour in animals. And for folks looking at non-reproductive aspects of sex in general: "Roughgarden says that sexual intercourse has social roles--managing power, negotiating for resources--as well as a reproductive one." (Sex for the purpose of sexual pleasure is also mentioned.) One last sound-bite: "Although challenges to sexual selection theory are widely documented, the flaws are rarely included in biology classes, nature programming or zoos."
• Related to the previous item, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation (The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex), by Olivia Judson, is a book about sex in the animal kingdom, presented in the form of letters from various critters to a sex expert. (wordweaverlynn posted this link in a comment to the article in the previous item.) I'm going to have to add this to my wishlist the next time I do a round of web site updates.
• "The World's Strangest Museum", Niagara Falls, Ontario, presents five thousand years of beautification practices, focussing on the body-modification aspects. "Every continent, culture, race and religion has some sort of history of body modification, be it tattooing, piercing, scarification, or one of the many other varied methods of setting ones self apart from the rest." (The site unfortunately uses JavaScript for important parts of its navigation, but you can get to the first page of the "tour" here, and the rest of the tour uses normal HTML links. And some other pages can be reached via the updates page. If you've got JavaScript turned on, you can ignore this note about navigation.) Tatooing, scarification, corsetry, foot binding, piercing, cranial deformation, and other things humans do and/or did to ourselves to alter our appearance.
• "I'm a girl - just call me 'he'" (The Guardian, 2 May). The teaser below the headline is: "Hip New York lesbians are calling themselves boys." The author strikes an odd tone, confusingly wandering between, "Gee, aren't they silly?", "Huh, why not?", and explaining why she thinks it makes sense, almost at random. And she seems to conflate lesbians, FTM transsexuals, genderqueer, and drag kings; they're mentioned separately, but it's not always clear which she's talking about and whether she actually gets the difference. (The term "boy poseur" gives me pause in that regard.) Despite those flaws, it's an interesting article (otherwise I wouldn't have inflicted it on y'all), she manages to ask some interesting questions, and she provides us with some lovely quotes. (I'm going to use the bagel line as a quote-of-the-day later.) "And certainly, being forced to refer to a woman as 'he' as you are being served by 'her' in a restaurant makes you reassess your whole approach to the concept of gender." More thought provoking: "If people today invest so much energy in class 'passing' and age 'passing' (just about every older woman who has cosmetic surgery), then what's the big deal about girls passing themselves off as boys?" And quoting Jami Weinstein: "There are a million miles between a woman like me and say, Ivana Trump, who performs her gender so differently. Then there's Oprah Winfrey, Angela Basset, Donatella Versace - she's more like a drag queen anyway. You can see that 'woman' is a pretty arbitrary category."
• I still say Peeps are eeevil, but it might be wise to keep an eye on them so I know what they're up to. Thus: "Peep Research: A study of small fluffy creatures and library usage". "Although scientific and health research has been conducted on Peeps, [...] we have noted an absence of research focusing on the ability of Peeps themselves to actually do research. To address this lack, we invited a small group of Peeps to visit Staley Library at Millikin University during the week of March 17-21, 2003 so that we could more closely observe their research practices."
• "Business Booms for Real-Life Fawlty Towers" (Reuters/Yahoo). "A cafe in northern England has turned itself into a copy of TV's disaster-prone Fawlty Towers and the customers love it, the owner said on Tuesday."
• Pilots approaching an airport in England heard somebody's baby monitor instead (Reuters, Yahoo). Very short story.

ukelele came up with a Dr. Suess version of the naturalization oath for soon-to-be US citizens, after elwe pointed out that there are some potentially tricky words for less than perfectly fluent speakers of English:

"I will not serve a foreign king
I will not owe him anything.
I will not let him break the laws
I do not like that kind of cause.
I will fight for the US
And I'll help out, and I confess
That no one's put me in a jam --
I really like this, Uncle Sam!"