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I’ve just finished reading about David Reimer, the Canadian who was born a boy but got sexually reassigned and raised as a girl until he stopped identifying as female at the age of 14. It’s all very fascinating and disturbing at the same time. According to what I’ve read, David Reimer’s penis was accidentally burned off beyond surgical repair during an attempt at a newfangled method of circumcision when he was 8 months old. His parents were worried about what kind of future he was going to have, not having a penis, so they took him to see a psychologist who had some pretty interesting ideas about gender identity.

John Money, the psychologist the Reimer’s consulted, believed that gender identity is learned. In other words the things that make us male or female, with the exception of the differences in our physical structure, are all things we learn. He felt then that a girl could be raised to identify as and act like a boy and a girl could be raised to identify as and act like a girl. The Reimer’s allowed themselves to be convinced that it was in David’s best interest that they raise him as girl. They went forward with a surgery to remove his testes when he was 22 months.

David Reimer was born a twin. At birth he was named Bruce. His brother’s name was Brian. They were described as normal children; but apparently there was something strange in the way they urinated so their parents tried to fix that abnormality. That’s how the boys ended up receiving the circumcisions that left Bruce without a penis and lead the parents to consulting with Dr. John Money. No doubt the Reimer’s were doing what they thought was best for their son, but their decision would end up taking the ultimate psychological toll on both of their sons. Bruce who had lived as Brenda until age fourteen when he stopped identifying as female and named himself David, committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 38. His brother Brian had killed himself 2 years earlier.

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Visit the following resources for more about the David Reimer Story

• David Reimer - The boy who lived as a girl
• X + Y = Z -  An account of the John/Joan case, in which doctors tried to turn a baby boy into a girl
• A girl in theory, a boy inside

Immaculée Ilibagiza

Are you among those ignorant of what took place in Rwanda in 1994? I admit that I am among those. I’ve always heard there was a genocide that took place, but I was never really interested and I’m going to admit something that a lot of people probably would probably never admit even while knowing it’s true for them as well. The “something” I’m going to admit is that I’m less inclined to care about what goes on in Africa. I’m not sure why. I’m not even sure if it’s Africa specifically because I don’t really think too much about all the people who get killed in places like Iraq, Georgia, Kosovo and other war-torn regions.

For some reason Africa has always been in my mind a place where death from violence or disease is so commonplace that no report of people dying in Africa, even in the hundreds of thousands, ever stirs much of an emotion. Even pictures of starving African children have little if any impact any more. I’m more surprised these days to see a picture of healthy children in Africa than to see a picture of a naked child on the verge of death. The way Africa has been painted in all media, I’ve gotten to the point  where I figure millions of people have been dying in Africa every day for as long as I can remember that new reports, even of people dying as a result of genocide, don’t really get but a fleeting reaction.

I don’t say all this to explain my ignorance and disregard as if it’s justifiable. Last night I was viewing a video on CNN featuring a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide and it got me thinking. Why don’t I feel the same sense of outrage over the Rwandan genocide that I have always felt about the Holocaust? Why would my emotional  response at hearing a Jewish Holocaust survivor talk be so much more poignant than hearing Immaculee Ilibagiza talk about how her entire family, her mother and father, her grandfather and grandmother and two brothers  were killed in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda?

I’m inclined to believe that part of the reason is that I haven’t really ever followed any of the coverage of the Rwanda genocide. I’ve never seen movies about it, documentaries, interviews with survivors. We can hear about something and know it’s horrible in concept but it often takes seeing it documented in some visual form to really drive home the horror of it. Where I learned a great deal about the Holocaust in school, the Rwanda genocide took place while I was an adult and could only have learned about it through the media. Maybe the media covered the genocide but back in 1994 I was twenty-three and didn’t really care what was going on in the world. I would probably have been one of those to get upset if some tv show I was watching was interrupted for coverage of news related to a genocide in Rwanda.

Today I feel like it’s really not okay for me to continue not to care what’s going on in the world. It’s not okay to dismiss parts of the world as being irrelevant and hopeless and to be outraged by the mass killings of certain people but not care about the mass killings of others. I’ve read today that between 800,000 to 1,000,000 people were killed over the three month period within which the genocide in Rwanda took place. That’s a lot of people whose lives were savagely taken from them for no other reason than that they were of one tribe and not another. I feel that for as long as enough of us continue not to care, these atrocities will continue to happen all over the world. We figure it has nothing to do with us. We only need to be concerned about that part of the world where we live; but can we really afford to think that way? In life, somehow, some way these things always come back around to affect those of us who believe we’re protected and shielded by virtue of being far removed.

My strong recommendation if you’re clueless about the Rwandan genocide like I am, Buy Led By Faith: Rising from the Ashes of the Rwandan Genocide. Get a firsthand account of the Rwanda genocide from a woman who lost her entire family, with the exception of 1 brother who happened to be out of the country. I’ll be buying my copy at Borders today.

In a previous post I asked the question why do husbands kill their wives. I acknowledged in the post that wives also kill their husbands; but I said it doesn’t appear to happen quite as often; however I stumbled across what appears to be an excerpt from a book titled “The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-outs, Sob Stories and Evasions of Responsibility” written by Alan M. Dershowitz. The excerpt references a study of murder in families that was conducted by the Department of Justice some time around the OJ Simpson murder trial.

The finding of the study, according to the text of the excerpt, was that in the context of family murders, wives kill their husbands almost as often as husbands kill their wives. Dershowitz hints that the reason it appears that significantly more husbands kill their wives than wives kill their husbands is because of how differently these matters are handled/reported in the media.

Dershowitz also suggests that, based on the findings in the study, wives who kill their husbands receive lighter sentences over all and get acquitted more frequently.

I’ve searched Google news for recent cases of wives killing husbands. The most recent I was able to find was back on the 25th of November when 83 year old Irene Updegrove shot and killed her husband Louis Updegrove then shot and killed herself. Presumably this was not your typical case of a wife killing a husband out of vengeance. In fact, police have suggested this was an elderly couple who were faced with deteriorating health and other medical issues, and the wife chose to terminate their lives to solve their problems.

Another recent case is that of Miriam Helmick  who has just been arrested in Jacksonville Florida for allegedly murdering her 62-year-old Alan Helmick back in June in Mesa County Colorado. It is being suggested that she might also have murdered her first husband, Jack Giles, six years ago.

Wives Also Kill Husbands–Quite Often by Alan M. Dershowitz

Cholera patient being treated 1992

There is a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean Health Minister, David Parirenyatwa, has, in fact, declared Zimbabwe’s present cholera epidemic a national emergency. It is reported that more than 500 lives have already been lost to the illness; but exactly what is cholera?

According to the CDC, Cholera is an illness characterized by acute diarrhea. It is caused by an intestinal infection which develops from invasion of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The infection itself is said to be often mild or even asymptomatic; but it can sometimes be severe. An individual with a severe case of cholera suffers with “profuse watery diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps”. Such a person loses body fluids rapidly, becomes dehydrated and goes into shock. If not treated immediately the individual can die within hours of going into shock.

How do you catch the disease?

You can get cholera if you drink water or eat food that is contaminated with the cholera bacterium.

More from the cdc

If you and your significant other are planning a trip to Dubai in the near future, remember that having sex on the beach in Dubai comes with risk of spending time in jail in Dubai. Unless frolicking in the sand is worth spending time in jail, do your dirty business behind closed doors.

Michelle Palmer and Vince Acors, the two Brits who were caught having sex on the beach in Dubai back in July have been through an ordeal they are unlikely to ever forget. Recently a judge dropped their prison sentence and ruled that they must pay a fine and be deported. This comes after they were previously convicted and sentenced to three months in prison charged with having sex outside of marriage, public indecency and drunkenness.

The pair have no doubt learned a valuable lesson about cultural differences and the importance of abiding by the rules of the nation you’re visiting. When you travel to another country you’d better know what’s against the law there.

In Dubai public displays of affection are unlawful, so if you go there on a romantic trip remember that overtly sexual behavior of any kind is considered offensive and could get you into trouble.

Zhang Weiyuan, a 4-year old boy who lives in China, was born with a condition called “Pentalogy of Cantrell”. Pentalogy of Cantrell is rare. It has to do with various internal organ defects. In the case of Zhang Weiyuan, his particular “Pentalogy of Cantrell” defect is known as ectopia cordis.

Ectopia Cordis is a birth defect characterized by the heart growing in an abnormal location. In most known cases of Ectopia Cordis the heart protrudes outside the chest; but it can also be situated in the stomach or neck.

Zhang Weiyuan’s heart protrudes outside his chest.
Photo of Zhang Weiyuan showing his heart growing outside his chest

I’ve done a little digging to see if I can learn more about those bicycles I saw people getting into the back of while viewing the times square cam on earthcam.com (more about this); and I’ve come up with the name “pedicab” thanks to an article written by Ned Crabb for The Wall Street Journal back in 2005 (article here). So I have the Times Square Cam and Ned Crabb to thank for my discovery of pedicabs.

I almost feel like an alien from another planet because it would seem that pedicabs weren’t invented yesterday. They’ve been around a while. They are more commonly known as richshaws, specifically ‘cycle rickshaws’, and you can find them throughout Europe, Asia and in some of the USA’s most populous cities.

Pedicab related articles

• The Leisurely Pleasures of a Pedicab
• Chariots for Hire
• When to take a pedicab

Out of curiosity I did look up pedicab related deaths because it seems to be a pretty high risk mode of travel based on what I saw viewing the Times Square Cam. I found a story about a Connecticut man named Peter Dzioba who died when the pedicab he and his wife were traveling in crashed into a van and scooter. The couple were celebrating their 25th anniversary. Interestingly there don’t appear to be very many news stories of deaths resulting from pedicab accidents.

Image: Cycles Maximus

I’m reading Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama. I started it last week and was really getting into it, but then it started getting a little bit uninteresting where he starts to detail his arrival in Chicago and the process of starting out doing his work as a community organizer. I find that there’s too much in the way of unnecessary detailing of insignificant conversations and encounters; but that’s not what this post is about. I’ve decided to use the book to help improve my comprehension skills.

Today I’m looking at a phrase from the preface (page xi). The phrase is “untrammeled fury”. Interestingly, the word “untrammeled” is not in my tenth edition of the Miriam Webster dictionary. I guess I need to upgrade. The word “trammel” is in the dictionary though and it means “restrain” among other things; so I’m going to guess that, as used in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama, untrammeled means “unrestrained”. Obama writes about the narrow path between humiliation and “untrammeled fury” in the lives of the children on Chicago’s South Side.

Word phrase of the day: untrammeled fury.

Image by Sammis Co

Pardon me while I explore my newly discovered word: churl. I know, you can’t believe I’d never heard the word before. I must not be very smart etcetera etcetera…but anyway, when I discover a new word I like to try to make myself more familiar with it by looking up it’s usage.

Let’s start with instances of the word churl I’ve found around the Internet. BTW: It was actually churls I discovered, but churls is just the plural form of the word.

Web uses of the word churl:

1. There’s someone on Flickr who calls himself/herself churl. I think that’s him in this photo below:

Image credit: churl

I think churl likes to cook because he has a lot of pictures of food. They all look very delicious. You should check them out. He also looks like a very nice guy.

Note: Churl used as a name would have nothing to do with the meaning of the word churl. I’ve seen that there are people with the first name and last name of Churl

2. People.com has a post from September 1993 titled “Lovable Churl” which is about the actor Brian O’Connor

3. There’s apparently a French proverb that states; “A churl never liked a gentleman”

4. There’s a New York Times article from 1905 titled “BAR THE ELEVATED CHURL.; A Chance to Weed Out the Insolent Guards”. It was a letter sent to the editor of the New York Times referencing guards who were rude to “patrons of the road” calling the guards churls and describing the manner in which they abused the power of their uniforms, slamming gates in the faces of passengers among other things.

Do you know anyone who could be classified a churl?

Have you ever heard the word “churls” before? Today is the first I’ve encountered the word myself. I was playing Word Womp on pogo and spelled out “churls” expecting it to be wrong but it turned out it was right. There’s such a word as “churls”; so I went for my tenth edition Miriam Webster collegiate dictionary and looked up the word and this is what I found out:

A churl can be a rude or ill-bred person; or a churl can be a stingy or morose person; therefore churls are rude or ill-bred people or stingy, morose people.

Churl is also used to refer to a medieval peasant, or a person from country.

The word churlish refers to a person who behaves like a churl. To behave churlishly is to behave vulgarly. A churlish person is boorish and difficult to work with or to deal with.

Since a churl is a person, churls would be a noun.

I’m using a stock photo of an obnoxious customer service rep because I’ve surely dealt with my fair share of churlish customer service representatives.