What I learned from Time magazine today

Ok, so I'm being incredibly unproductive at work today. That's why I'm posting twice in one day.

I just received the first installment of my Time magazine subscription (a Christmas gift) and read almost the whole thing through. I thought I would share some of my favorite parts with you all.

First of all, however, I came across this great link. It amused the heck out of me, anyway. http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=2007-01-19T145018Z_01_HKG364170_RTRUKOC_0_US-HONGKONG-LIFE-CONDOM-ODD.xml&src=rss

So now down to the serious stuff. Did you know that Apple is coming out with a new cell phone? It's called (suprise, suprise) the iPhone. http://www.apple.com/iphone/ It is amazingly beautiful, and blows everything else on the market out of the water. Of course, it's like $500, so it will be prohibitively expensive for most people. It holds music (which you can flip through your collection by ALBUM COVER!), a full touch-screen keyboard for texting, email, and the web. However, the amazing thing is that the websites actually look like they appear on computers, not as tiny, messed up versions of themselves. It is 4.5 inches tall, 2.4 inches wide, ad less than half an inch thick. It is beautiful, and I am in love :)

I'm flipping through the magazine to refresh myself on what I wanted to talk about. Oh ok, this was interesting. The Tower of London appointed a woman as one of the tower's guardians for the first time in the 522 year history of the job. Also interestingly, this is where the term "Beefeaters" comes from. I do love their gin!

Toyota is developing sweat sensors for their steering wheels that will be able to detect a driver's blood-alcohol level and then disable the car. Kinda strange.

Apparently there is a huge crop of opium (which provides 90% of the heroin consumed globally, how did I not know this??) hitting the streets this spring. At the same time, there is a hiring freeze for the DEA, so there will be even less drug enforcement going on.

The man that invented Scooby-Doo, and worked on shows like the Jetsons and the Flintstones died recently. His name was Iwao Takamoto. The interesting thing to me, however, was that he was interned with his family in California during World War II. He learned animation/illustration from his fellow detainees. Japanese internment is such a dark blot on our nation's history, and it really gets to me every time I hear about it. I'm amazed that this man was able to forgive this country, and still manage to make such a large impact on its media.

Finally, I was reading an article called "Pillow Angel Ethics". It was about a 6 year old girl named Ashley. She is severely brain-damaged. Her parents got doctors to agree to shorten and sterilize her to make it easier for her parents to take care of her. They gave her high doses of estrogen which closed her growth plates and ensured she would stay at 4 feet 5 inches for the rest of her life. Her parents justify this by saying "Ashley's smaller and lighter size makes it more possible to include her in the typical family life and activities that provide her with needed comfort, closeness, security and love: meal time, car trips, touch, snuggles, etc." Doctors removed Ashley's uterus and her breasts also. The reasoning behind this was that "Ashley has no need for developed breasts since she will not breast feed," and that they would cause discomfort when she was strapped into her chairs.

My response to this is - How much more difficult would it have been to feed, transport, and touch a girl that is 5'6 with an intact uterus and breasts? It seems to me that the choices the parents made to medically alter their 6 YEAR OLD (lets keep that in mind) was done for their convenience, not in regard to what was best for her. How far will we go with this? Is it ok to amputate a child's legs to make them more portable if they will never walk? This is a precedent that is very scary. There also have been proved cases of other children in Ashley's exact condition that eventually learn to sit up on their own, work an electric wheelchair, etc. Because of Ashley's stunted size, she most likely will not be able to reach that point of autonomy.

I have an idea of what it is like working with people with disabilities (I volunteered with Best Buddies for 4 years). I also know what its like when people loose their human rights just because of a disability. I don't think what Ashley's parents did was ethical, but that is just my opinion. I'm not in the situation myself, so I will never know for sure. What do you think?

So that's what I learned from Time today. Hope you enjoyed it too! :)

~Molly