Music to my ears

Just got back from Sista Otis at El Mercado on South 1st St. Her playing can best be described as "rousing". I was quite taken with her right from the beginning, when all she was doing was strumming one chord really fast and talking to the crowd. Somehow she managed to make it feel urgent, like something really exciting was going on.

And that woman sang and played loud. For a sit down restaurant, they turned the amps way up. She sounded great and had a really sunny disposition. It was a pleasure to meet her after her set, thanks to Radio Mike. I never get over what a great town for live music this is.

Texas State Capitol. 

Discovering your own backyard

I spent another 4 hours today driving around East Austin taking photos of murals, and a few others I couldn't resist, like the one below of the city skyline. There's all kinds of stuff on the east side you never hear about. Last week, I came across the power plant and Town Lake access, today I saw the city bus facility, the Austin Police headquarters, the French Legation museum, the Texas State Cemetery, and Huston-Tillotson University. As you'll see in the pics, there are some serious hills over there, and some of the older houses I came across actually appeared to have slid off their foundations.

I took a turn and suddenly found myself on a gravel road leading to the scenic over look where I took the pictures above and below this post. There's nothing there but trees, grass, and sadly, broken beer bottles and garbage. It's at least a couple acres of undeveloped land, great for sitting in the sun, or as a man and woman I saw today were doing, napping in the shade on a blanket.

Austin Skyline. 

On the up and up

I got my car back from the shop today. It looks perfect, and they even detailed the inside. I've had two massages in the last two days, so my shoulder and neck aren't bothering me like they have been. The STAPLE! DVD release party is on for next Friday, July 1st, at Austin Books.

I'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

A job well done

The STAPLE! DVDs are done. They officially go on sale July 1st. Gary dropped off a few copies for me and the crew yesterday. They look good.

There will be a DVD release party in the very near future if anyone wants to come hang out, talk about/buy comics and pick up a cool DVD on making it in indie comics. Watch this space for details.

Big project

I got out in the heat today, probably mid- to high-90's, for about three hours. A couple of months ago, I came up with the idea of documenting Austin's many murals by driving around and photographing them. Then, I would post the photographs on a website, including their locations so other interested Austinites could find any they liked.

Well, I underestimated the size of this project. In that three-hour session today, I took about 40 pictures at eleven different sites, and only covered the area of East Austin from Town Lake to Cesar Chavez, i.e., 1st Street. This is likely to take all summer, if I want to come close to getting all of them.

Interestingly, many of the murals were on school grounds or city pool buildings. Also, the Twin Towers burning was a common theme, meaning they were painted in just the last few years. I'm sure some of them are painted over repeatedly every few years, and some of them had been defaced, but others likely have been around for a long time.

I'm also considering trying to get a grad student studying art to provide some perspective on them to put on the site. Maybe I could post for this on Craigslist.

Good vibes are flowing (with beer)

Okay, good news today. The woman's insurance is not only paying for the repairs, but also for the rental car while the work is being done, which means I don't need the Hertz coupons after all. They wouldn't let me use the one for a free upgrade, so I'm stuck in a Ford Focus. Bleh.

We met at Opal Divine's Freehouse Pub on 6th Street for a coworkers' happy hour this afternoon. Lots of good conversation and laughter, always fun. Name this lyric/quote: "Getting to know your associate employee contemporaries."

Premonitions and more bad driving

Don't you hate it when you get a feeling bad news is on the way, and you're proven right? I got a few coupons for Hertz car rentals a couple months ago, and for some reason I didn't throw them away like usual. I just had a feeling they might come in handy before their expiration date. The last time my car was in the shop, I paid full price for the rental I used, for about two weeks if I remember correctly.

Sure enough, I got sideswiped today coming home from work. No one was hurt, but my driver's side door won't open, and I may be looking at a $500 deductible because of this woman in a minivan. (I guess she'd never been in an accident before. She kept asking if we should call the police. I said, "Not unless you want to sue me." Her response: "No, you could probably sue me, it was my fault." She was right. She swerved into my lane to get around a stopped car turning left in front of her, but she didn't see me on her right.) At least I should be reimbursed if they do charge me, since she has insurance. Sigh.

This one may ruffle some feathers

We have now entered the age of "embryo politics". In the last week or two, the story of embryo adoption has spread in the media, and for those of us trying to get our heads around it, the possibilities and pitfalls in reproductive medicine today are dizzying indeed. A pair of articles in Slate (one linked above, the other here), reveal the complexities of the issue with several provocative quotes. It may help the discussion to break them into points.

1. Both sides see embryos as human life only when it suits their purposes. The pro-life camp considers human life to begin at conception, whether in the womb or in the lab, and the loss of an embryo to stem cell research or discarding due to failure to pay storage costs is a loss to humanity-except for all of the embryos that are lost on a daily basis without ever implanting for natural reasons and end up in the toilet. These are written off and forgotten, if ever thought about at all-even the adopted ones that don't take, say, if four are implanted and only one develops. IVF clinics and state governments, on the other hand, see embryos as property of the parents, tissue that is owned and under the control of those whose DNA they were created with. They can donate the tissue to research or throw it away, or give it to someone else-but they can't sell it. To quote the author of one of the articles, Liza Mundy,

   Though the fertility industry likes to promote the idea that they are multicelled clumps of tissue, it accepts that it would be morally unacceptable to pay money for an embryo, just as it's morally unacceptable to pay for a baby.

   This is to equate the buying and selling of human embryos with slavery, and nobody wants that.
2. A woman who heads an embryo adoption clinic and switched sides on abortion after finding herself infertile is described in Mundy's article as coming to believe every aborted baby is one she could have adopted. But there are plenty of babies in the world that need to be adopted already, so why not pick one of them? The answer, I think, is because it's more expensive than adopting an embryo, and there are bureaucratic hurdles to jump through that don't yet exist in the fertility industry. Science has made it more convenient, and that's what people like. Also, the article points out pregnancy is now considered by many women to be a right that one can be "cheated out of", as opposed to a potentially life-threatening burden to be carried.
3. By mixing up embryos from different donors, it's possible to give birth to twins (or more) with unrelated genetic lines. This mixing is apparently common practice, although it's not clear from the article how many such multiple pregnancies are carried to term. I wonder what the future holds for them when, say, one is white and one is black, each facing discrimination the other will never know.
4. In the other article, William Saletan lays out the battleground the pro-life movement faces regarding in vitro fertilization. He quotes a pro-lifer referring to an embryo as a "child", and others talking about restricting the number of embryos that can be created at one time for IVF procedures. There have already been bills in several states introduced to that effect, and requiring counseling like that for abortion is apparently on the agenda as well. Since there's currently almost no regulation of the industry, this is likely to see major resistance.
5. As articulated by Saletan, the pro-life position appears to be moving farther and farther away from its conservative roots. Instead of limiting government, they now want the government to determine the fate of your embryos if they disagree with your choice. "Pro-lifers don't think anyone, including a parent, has the right to doom an embryo to death," he writes, later quoting a Republican Congressman from New Jersey saying

   Parents of human embryos are custodians of those young ones. They are not owners of human property, and the public policy we craft should ensure that the best interests of newly created human life is protected … The cryogenically frozen male and female embryos that the genetic parents may feel are no longer needed for implanting in the genetic mother are of infinite value to an adoptive mother who may be sterile or otherwise unable to have a baby.

Infinite value? The problem I have with these kinds of statements, and the attitudes of pro-lifers in general, are that they reject the idea of cost/benefit analysis when it comes to pre-birth human life, something not even the Bible does. Even if you accept the idea that human life begins at conception, to promote the idea that a clump of 4-8 cells that may or may not develop into a baby after thousands of dollars, 9 months, and the risks and effects of pregnancy on a woman's body is inherently equally as valuable as a cure for cancer or any other disease is foreign to my way of thinking. To believe that an embryo deserves the same rights and protections under the Constitution as a living, breathing, tax-paying citizen, is preposterous. An embryo is potential, unrealized.

What's going to happen when it becomes medically possible for a fetus to be transferred to another woman's womb, or an artificial womb? Will the pro-life movement be clamoring to adopt the fetuses that are scheduled to be aborted? Will the government pass laws requiring it? What kind of nightmare would that be? The cost to society and to humanity of going down this path seems to me to outweigh the benefits by many times.

On the subject of abortion, I believe that any woman who decides to have an abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or risk to her health has made the wrong choice - but it should be her choice to make. Neither I nor the hundreds of men running the government will ever know what it's like to be faced with that decision. I think the phrase "safe, legal, and rare" does a good job of conveying my attitude, the more rare the better. That means I support the morning after pill, which prevents embryos from attaching to the uterus and prevents abortion from becoming a possibility in the first place.

I'll conclude this long post with one last thought: I don't believe stem cell technology will solve all our problems, or that genetic engineering should be used to tailor babies, or a number of other things that have been suggested by technophiles and futurists. But I do believe it has the potential for great advances in making sick people better, and that makes it valuable and worthy of pursuit. I'm clearly not alone, and the progress being made in other parts of the world is progress the U.S. will be missing out on the longer our current government leaders resist the idea that science is a tool, not an enemy.