Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Time	Event
3:29a	Alternative medicine unfunny business Over a decade ago Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) helped to create the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). He's recently expressed his displeasure that NCCAM has failed to find proof for the effectives of too many alternative medicine modalities, and said (emphasis added) "One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches". Not impartially investigate, but investigate and validate alternative medicine. More here. (22 Comments | Comment on this)
6:03p	Fugly Wank of the Day This is a couple of days old, but the drama is still going strong and getting crazier by the comment. So, the blog Fugly Horse of the Day's Sunday post features a picture of a toddler in a slightly drooping diaper standing barefoot in a pen brushing an unrestrained foal by a somewhat dubious fence, while two pens over his mother is grooming an older horse, also barefoot and possibly also in nothing but underwear. The caption of the photo seems to be from the mother herself, and reads: "I was out side grooming my 3 girls today and Joseph wanted to help.And he loves playing with the baby so I gave him a brush and a way he went.This will be Josephs first horse he breaks on his own." Cathy, the blog's owner, is less than impressed. Pictures like this make me want to beat the parent in the head with a Pony Club manual. Again, it's not a stuffed toy. It's a 300 lb. unpredictable baby prey animal with sharp little hoofies. It is inches away from turning your child's foot into bloody hamburger, if not knocking him down and doing the same to his face. This isn't cute. This is negligence. If you're a loving parent - and I'm sure you think you are - get him some boots, some jeans, a helmet and a 25 year old pony! The comments are a mixed bag of horrified reactions, support for the mother, calls for contacting the local Social Services, bashing of Social Services, people who claim the kid is obese, others who think he's at a healthy weight, redneck bashing, redneck defensiveness, people who have a grudge against Cathy, people who have a grudge against people who have a grudge against Cathy, people randomly talking about this one driving accident at a show, something about NASCAR and pit bulls and some stuff about whether Cathy is a hypocrite for not gelding her stallion, and finally it seems that the mother has come in and flipped her shit, although it's hard to tell what she's saying. *gasp-wheeze* Basically, it's just one giant unfunny clusterfuck. So far it spans 413 comments and still seems to be going strong. ETA: Here are the mother's responses in all of their illegible glory. Thanks to emiweebee for picking up my slack and digging up the first three for me! ETA2: The woman's phone number has been removed from the main write-up. Damn my short attention span. ( I'm not entirely sure what exactly is going on here. ) (56 Comments | Comment on this)
6:13p	Endangering somebody is okay when you do it under your real name Picked from wank_report. In the beginning of the year, Seeking-Avalon posted an open letter to Elizabeth Bear aka matociquala about the representations of people of color in fiction. After Bear's initially reasonable response, a wank broke up among her supporters and friends and lead to Writing The Other/Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM '09. One of the participants in the debate was coffeeandink, who also posted a public warning about Will Shetterly, who is a general fail person. Now, Shetterly and Kathryn Cramer have been actively trying to out coffeeandink's real life identity, with Cramer making accusations about coffeeandink hiding behind anonymity and Shetterly making speculations about coffeeandink's personal life and background. coffeeandink has posted about this in her journal. Apparently, Shetterly and Cramer both backed off when warned. But now they expect apologies for that. ETA: Appeared to back off, actually. As told by vito_excalibur, Shetterly is now banned from Feminist SF Wiki for his efforts to reveal coffeeandink's name. Update: Kathryn Cramer has now password-protected her entire blog. There are screenshots of her post about coffeeandink here and here, with coffeeandink's name removed. Earlier she redirected those who tried to access her blog to a site with possible malware. Update 2: greyorm is now intentionally outing coffeeandink. Update 3: Shetterly has opened his ignorant trap again. Update 4: Cramer is back to demanding an apology. Update 5: A new general summary by rydra_wong. arionhunter has made a post about Elizabeth Bear's reaction. Relevant posts General summary of what's been going on. rydra_wong has a link masterlist here and more posts in her race fail-tag. coffeeandink has her own race fail-tag here. Seeking-Avalon has a timeline about the original racefail here. And if you want some comic relief, mtgat has Meta in Song. (164 Comments | Comment on this)
6:20p	More Bad News from the Keystone State First there were corrupt judges sending kids off to boot camps, and then came an eleven-year-old charged as an adult for murdering his dad's pregnant girlfriend. Now it's a middle-aged man hosting beer bashes in his basement for high-schoolers and supplying stripper poles as well. Steven Russo, 36, accused of hosting teen drinking parties, encouraging pole dancing Dear state of mine, WHAT THE HELL?! ETA: Link fixed, sorry about that. ETA2: I'm sorry about the 'middle-aged', folks. Didn't mean any offense. Current Mood: *Snarl* (30 Comments | Comment on this)

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