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.

Look sharp. 

This is the end...

Wow, it's been a while. I'm putting the finishing touches on the STAPLE! project this weekend to hand off Monday for pressing. It's been quite an involved process, but valuable experience in the industry. Look for the DVD to go on sale by the end of June, if not sooner.

This coming week being my first real free time without commitments in months, I hope to do some writing and get back to watching movies on a daily basis. More to come.

End of an Era

Well, the Star Wars saga is finally complete, and it went out with a bang. Lucas did indeed wrap up most everything, and I can't wait to see them all in order and get the whole emotional arc of the Anakin Skywalker character. I really felt (and I know I'm not alone) that I didn't want Anakin to fall, even though it was inevitable and necessary to give us Darth Vader, one of the greatest villains in sci-fi. This movie had a feel that was instantly recognizable as different from Episodes 1 and 2, more deliberate and implacable in its progression. I'm still digesting it, and I plan to see it again this weekend. What a great birthday present these movies have been for me.

By the way, if you want a very tiring 36 hours, get up for work at 7am, work until 5pm, drive three hours to Dallas to see the movie at midnight, get out of the movie and drive three hours home, get an hour and a half of sleep, then get up and work another nine hours. Around 2pm the next day, I was having real trouble keeping my eyes open, despite several cups of coffee and multiple Dr. Peppers. Then I got a second wind and went to bed at my normal time. Go figure.

Personal

I recently posted a personal ad on Craigslist to try to meet some new women around Austin (try to guess which one's mine!). I haven't been out on many dates lately, and I'm about to have a lot more free time on my hands when I wrap up my first feature-length project in a week or so.

I'm not sure why, but I was pleased to get quite a few responses in less than a day. I've posted a couple times before, and gotten 3 responses and 0 responses, respectively. Phil suggested it might be like callers for his radio show. Sometimes he gets nobody calling in, sometimes several-it just depends on who's paying attention. I guess there's probably always new readership, so even repeat posters will get responses over time. I'd like to think it's not only the same people looking every day, since that would mean it doesn't work and we're all wasting our time.

Anyway, I wrote back to everyone who wrote me (do unto others), and sent them a link to this blog if they wanted to know more about me...and I haven't heard back from any of them since. I can only assume they read my last post about "no job, no insurance" and wrote me off. Otherwise, it might mean I need a new profile picture, but since I think that's a good picture of me (taken by Phil at Austin City Limits Music Festival 2004), I'd at least like to think I'm not that unattractive-although it might be the facial hair and cigarrillo, since I hear women run from both of those.

Let me assure you, ladies, I once again have a good job, and insurance, and I still have my own side business as well, so I'm doing all right. But I'm keeping the facial hair. Still interested? Write me here.

Proms and problems

Tonight I went to the KVRX prom, thrown by UT's student radio station. I've met quite a few people there through Phil, so I recognized half a dozen or so faces. This wasn't a real prom obviously, but it had all the trappings: dancing, spiked punch, photos, dresses. It also had free beer, a live band, and a few kids tripping on acid, which made it a bit different from either of the proms I attended.

It started raining about halfway through, but not too hard, so the band finished their set before Phil and I packed up the video equipment we were using to project Pump Up the Volume on the wall of Irongate Studios, in whose parking lot the prom was held.

Did I mentioned it rained a little bit? Less than a mile from home, Phil tried to make a turn too fast on the wet road and hit the curb hard (he wasn't drinking-he's a teetotaler). It didn't blow out the tire, but when we stopped at a tire place right around the corner, I thought I could hear a hissing sound and the hubcap was broken, so it's definitely shot. We left the car there to see what the damage is Monday, when they open. I just hope the axle isn't bent, or else he's out some money, since his insurance won't cover it.

While he was waiting for me to walk back to the apartment, get my car, and come back for the equipment in his trunk, there was a wreck at the stoplight closest to our place. As I drove by, the cops hadn't yet arrived, but the two cars had spun into position to block both directions on that side of the intersection. Rough night.

I told Phil I knew exactly how he felt, having cut my finger a few months back, when I was still looking for work. No job, no insurance, and it's going to cost you a bunch of money you don't want to spend. That's life for you. Always throwing curve balls.

Spring is here again.