Rant, Gollum, Abortion and Lorem Ipsum

Where have all my readers gone? I know, I know, it's my fault that I effectively stopped blogging for two months, and you could scour my posts with a microscope without finding so much as an interesting word, and those of you who were betting I'd give up on my Harry Potter mania are now several hundred dollars in debt and beginning to bet instead that I'll start stalking J. K. Rowling. It's all my fault, yes.

But I'll make it up to you, I promise. I will post (yes!) thought-provoking links and discuss them in a thought-provoking manner that invites more thought-provoking comments in that back-room labyrinth that is the Haloscan comments box attached to each of my posts. I will relocate all my HP fangirl enthusiasms to my other blog. I will even help you win back your money by giving serious consideration to my plan to stalk J. K. Rowling and evesdropping on her conversations to get hints of what's coming in her next books.

So come back and read a bit. Help me keep my Googlular distinction (see 'brag board', item 1).


PS: I mean those promises I made above, and here's proof:

1. This speaks for itself. The reason for my interest in it, aside from the obvious (Gullum, duh), is that I've just taken a couple of psychology courses, including one on abnormal psych. Fun.

2. So some nutcase in the Virginia House of Delegates, called John A. Cosgrove, proposes this bill during one of the sessions in the first week of January. This bill provides -

"... that when a fetal death occurs without medical attendance, it shall be the woman's responsibility to report the death to the proper law-enforcement agency within 12 hours of the delivery. Violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor."

Since a foetus in Virginia is defined as a product of conception at any point in the duration of a pregnancy, this bill means that women who suffer a miscarriage after, say, six weeks of pregnancy - and may not even know that it was a miscarriage - would go to jail for up to 12 months for not reporting it to the police. Even worse: a woman who has just been through this traumatic experience has to gather her wits and willingly violate her privacy within 12 hours after the miscarriage has occurred.

The question that readily springs to mind is why. Cosgrove claims that his intention is to reduce the number of 'trashcan babies', i.e. babies dumped or left abandoned in the streets. It took me a while to figure out his logic, which is probably that if you make women accountable for what happened to their babies, they can't simply say "I had a miscarriage and that's how my pregnancy has magically vanished." (Even this doesn't make sense to me, not much. But it's the best explanation I could come up with. Any other guesses?)

How is this whole measure supposed to help live babies if all it does is track dead foetuses? Why are they violating the privacy of an involuntarily traumatised person far more than that of a person who chooses to abort her baby? Though Virginia requires that abortions be reported, those reporting forms require only a “patient number” and information on the procedure. The “report of fetal death” asks for the woman’s full name, her history of prenatal care, her marital status, her education history, her previous deliveries (if any), and a number of other very intrusive - even traumatising - data items (e.g. : weight of foetus in grams, sex of the foetus, etc).

The saving grace for Virginia is that after female senators bombarded Delegate Cosgrove with mail and e-mails and other protests, he withdrew his bill.

3. On a much lighter note, ever heard of "Lorem Ipsum"? Think... think... it rings a bell, doesn't it? I'll put you out of your misery by telling you where you've seen it:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

It's survived to this day... wherever you see templated for blogs and websites, Lorem Ipsum is the filler text that people use in the templates. Not bad, huh. We're still using something five centuries old. But there's more:

Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance.

This link takes you to a site that generates any amount "Lorem Ipsum text" you want. Not a bad way to kill a couple of minutes.