P.S. You can also look for me on Facebook!

That's quite a claim for a hunk of metal on wheels. This kind of idea seems to be a salient one for many, however, as my students' papers illustrate. Quite a few are proposing programs to keep kids engaged in leisure and other "pro-social" activities within and outside of school as a means to prevent and/or remedy delinquency. For the most part, though, these types of programs haven't shown statistically significant results in doing either.

But there is one indisputable fact: the Bots kick butt, as the video below illustrates. Anybody else remember this show?

Until now, I had been pursuing my PhD in social work. However, various circumstances and stars have aligned such that I've decided the Sociology Department here at the U would be the best place for me to continue and finish my degree. The principal factor is that the faculty, research, and teaching resources here best match my long-term scholarly interests. Other "bonus" features include three years of guaranteed funding (no more hawking my wares all over the U!) and my husband joining me in the Social Sciences Tower as a geography PhD student in the fall. Also, I've been working in Soc for the past two years, so I'm already well-integrated here.

That said, nothing essential has changed. I'm still interested in the same stuff and still want to do research that matters and can have an impact (for the better, I hope) on society.

For some reason, when I registered 10 minutes ago for the classes I need to take in Soc this fall (the main "cost" in this decision is that I have to take a few more classes) this all began to feel more real. In a good way.

This is the name of the cancer that my mom has been surviving for the past 4+ years. It's become a regular part of our family vocabulary. Since her initial diagnosis in 2003, she (and the rest of us) have weathered a few recurrences. This time, the stakes are a bit higher with potentially major surgery to remove a significant portion of her liver on the horizon. We'll know more after next Tuesday when she meets again with her oncologist. In the mean time, we're hoping and praying for the best!

To learn more about Leiomyosarcoma, click here. To sign a petition asking the President to make April 26th "National Leiomyosarcoma Awareness Day," click here.

Finally, here's a recent news story of a women's daring surgery to address her own Leiomyosarcoma. Rare coverage for a rare disease...

Breakthrough Cancer Surgery Saves Terminal Patient

By JEFFERY KOFMAN and ROGER FORTUNA
March 25, 2008

Doctors are releasing Zepp from the hospital in Miami today and believe she is now free of cancer.

I highly recommend catching a taping if you're ever in Chicago on a Thursday. Tix are a mere $20.

Eddie Oroyan
Brown Rocket

Dancers: Eddie Oroyan and Laura Selle-Virtucio
Music: Joshua Wetjen

After paying a ridiculous $15 for 45 minutes worth of parking downtown, I whisked myself back to the U for my Friday afternoon seminar on the life course and found myself siting across a very different table from nine other highly educated people surrounded by a great view of the city through large windows. Funny enough, the topic was intra-societal variation in the life course featuring readings about the very social structures and circumstances from whence my research participant hails. Though I'm always at least somewhat aware of the distance between myself and those I "study," the chasm felt especially wide this afternoon. Perhaps the two tables made it all the more clear.

If nothing else, the experience renewed my resolve to always remember the humanity of those I study. They aren't abstract concepts to be operationalized and fitted into regression models. They live and breathe and suffer and rejoice all the while I read and write and do this academic thing and tell myself that maybe what I do might be of some benefit to them...somehow.

The authors put on no airs regarding their lack of authority on the subject, except that they have spun a good tale for TV that takes on real issues of race, crime, law enforcement, education, and general urban decay in perhaps one of the most accurate attempts to date. But they do evoke their characters as muses for average folks who might want to make a difference in the sad state of U.S. carceral affairs. I can't help but wonder if the same viewers the authors hope to inspire spent one hour per week on some of the corners in my neck of the 'hood would find similar sympathy for my less-than-fictional drug dealing neighbors? I don't have to turn my TV on to see "the other America."

At the same time, I resonate with the authors' assertion that politicians are not likely the best targets for citizens who want to effect change when it comes to penal policy. Even our beloved Bill is culpable for a great deal of "get tough on crime" policy in the 90s that has contributed to this trend. Neither Dems nor Republicans are likely to "get soft" anytime soon. In this respect, I'm intrigued by the idea of jury nullification as civil disobedience. It seems like it might have little impact, unless it were to become a widespread practice. How many non-violent drug offenses actually go to trial vs. plea bargaining? Within that number, how many will have juries with willing objectors? For instance, I have yet to serve on a jury for anything, ever, much less a drug trial.

I have no real expertise to speak to the law enforcement side of things, but anecdotally, having lived for 2 years on a block where open-air drug dealing was an unrelenting daily reality, the police didn't seem to be able to do much about it by continually arresting the lil' homies on the corner. Our neighborhood association regularly sends us opportunities to give "community impact" statements on offenders, many of them drug-related, and the sheer number of arrests and/or convictions for many of these individuals is staggering - yet the problem persists.

It's an interesting proposition - if I do get called for jury duty in such a case, I guess I'll have to consult my conscience...

Wednesday, Mar. 05, 2008
The Wire's War on the Drug War
By Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

The authors are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which concludes its five-year run on March 9

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What strikes me as funny is that each week I am informed that my baby now resembles some form of produce in size. It started out with fruits in the early weeks, like "your baby is now the size of a grape" or "a plum" or a "large orange." But now that we're in the third trimester, we seem to have graduated to vegetables. Last week, my baby was approximately as big as a head of cauliflower and as of yesterday he is, apparently, "like a Chinese cabbage." Mmmmmm...

So, next time you're in the produce aisle, pause for a moment and think of my fetus. Any guesses as to what veggie he might be next week?

For more on my pregnancy, visit my birth blog: Off My Rocker

Well, there go the rumors that with each album, Lenny Kravitz was going to jump ahead three years stylistically, catching up with the present some time around 2008. From its title on down, It Is Time For A Love Revolution is spiritually interchangeable with his debut, 1989's Let Love Rule. Think about that: Lenny Kravitz has had a longer stint as an oldies act than most actual oldies acts. And in spite of a couple of bright riffs (the chunky "Love Revolution," the space-soul of "This Moment Is All There Is"), Love Revolution contains some of his hackiest work yet (which is really saying something), from the ponderous refrain of "I Love The Rain" back to "Love Revolution" itself, on which Kravitz overdubs himself in breathy "soulful" mode over his rockin' chorus, just to cover the bases. He's also got zip to say, most gratuitously on "Back In Vietnam," the most nuanced Iraq commentary since 10th-grade lunch hour. Kravitz used to catch hell for sounding like other people. Now people can make fun of him for sounding like himself.

A.V. Club Rating: C-

Advocacy Group Unveils New Web site
Site features easy navigation, community resources

REDONDO BEACH, CA, February 7, 2008 – The International Cesarean Awareness Network launches a new, user-friendly Web site today in an effort to further the group’s outreach efforts.

“The new Web site will make an impact in the battle against the growing cesarean statistics by providing information to moms, challenging them to take responsibility for their births and providing a safe community for moms to heal” ICAN President Pam Udy said. “This will give women the tools they need to make educated decisions about their births – because this isn’t about statistics. It’s about every mom and every baby getting the safest birth possible.”

Easy navigation is a key feature of this Web site, which has been in the works since July when ICAN Board Members recognized the need for a more user-friendly Web site. (The Web site can be found at www.ican-online.org) Site viewers will find information separated into five categories: Pregnancy, Recovery, VBAC, Advocacy and Community.

“In our daily advocacy work, we saw a clear mandate for a site that was simple to navigate, simple to understand and full of easy-to-access information for the woman avoiding a cesarean, recovering from a cesarean or on her journey to VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean),” Laureen Hudson, ICAN Publications Director said. “ICAN interacts with women on very different journeys -- the messages a pregnant woman needs to hear to avoid a cesarean are not the same messages a woman on the journey to VBAC needs to hear. We like to think that this site addresses those two complimentary, yet divergent, needs.”

The Web site lets women research the VBAC policies of hospitals near them; learn how to correct problems (such as malposition or pre-eclampsia) that commonly lead to cesareans; get quick physical recovery tips to help after a cesarean; and stay up-to-date on medical research on pregnancy and birth. New community features include user birth blogs, videos and images; and the capability for users to create their own homepage on the ICAN site to share with friends and family. ICAN leadership also can connect more easily via the Web site with the women ICAN serves. Further, the Web site features a new logo – the logo, and all of the Web work, were completed entirely by volunteers.

“We wanted our site to be easy for the average woman recovering from surgery and caring for a newborn to find the info they needed quickly and easily,” Webmaster Melissa Collins said. “One of my favorite features is the online social community that is safe for moms planning a VBAC or just wanting to avoid. I’m really excited to watch this new community grow.”

This new Web site comes after research in 2007 by the National Center for Health Statistics showed the cesarean rate reaching a record high of 31.1 percent. Further, a CDC report indicated the maternal death rate rose for the first time in decades and Consumer Reports includes a cesarean in its list of “10 overused tests and treatments.” Other research from 2007 cites a VBAC continues to be a reasonably safe birthing choice for mothers. And while studies indicate a VBAC is a viable option, women often have difficulty finding a health care provider who encourages a VBAC – which is where one of the site’s new features comes into play.

“The most useful tool for women is probably the Hospital VBAC Ban information,” Collins said. “Women can look up the hospitals near them and find out their VBAC policy and if any doctors are actually available to attend them. It is getting difficult for so many women to find a VBAC supportive provider and this is one way to make that a little easier for them.”

Mission statement: ICAN is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve maternal-child health by preventing unnecessary cesareans through education, providing support for cesarean recovery and promoting vaginal birth after cesarean. There are more than 94 ICAN Chapters across North America, which hold educational and support meetings for people interested in cesarean prevention and recovery.

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