I Never Donate… Wine

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Bela Lugosi's dead.A group of Democratic senators, led by John Kerry, are requesting the FDA overturn their lifetime ban on accepting blood donations from gay men. The ban was established in 1983 to prevent the spread of HIV infection through the blood supply. The FDA states the ban also prevents the spread of hepatitis as gay men have a higher rate of infection than the general population.

One website commented on the matter, “If you’re gay, you can’t donate blood. It’s illegal.”

Technically, no. The act of donating blood while gay is not illegal. What is illegal is for the donation center to knowingly accept blood from donors who meet certain criteria issued by the FDA. From the FDA website:

FDA requires blood centers to maintain lists of unsuitable donors to prevent the use of collections from them.

This may be splitting hairs, but if the act of donating or attempting donation was criminal, local jails would be bursting not only with gay men but with many other altruistic offenders as well.

I’m O negative, the universal donor, so my blood is a hot commodity — so valuable I have to give it away for free! — and I donate fairly regularly because that’s how my species reproduces. When you donate, you first have to answer a lengthy and tedious verbal questionnaire not only about sexual behavior, drug use, blood transfusions, tattoos, piercings, and hepatitis, but also about brain-membrane transplants, living and eating meat in the British Isles (worries about mad-cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases), travels in Africa, Lyme disease, and — most terrifying of all — Babesiosis, which one phlebotomist/Countess Bathory described to me as a “super Lyme disease” prevalent in southern New England. Answering yes to some of these questions may result in temporary deferrals from donating; others will ban you permanently. None will result in arrest. The worst that could happen is if you lied and then perjured yourself by signing the paperwork.

Also according to the FDA, the questionnaire filters out “approximately 90 percent of unsuitable donors,” though of course only a portion of them actually have dirty blood. The FDA is discriminating against whole swaths of people based on their experiences, not just gay men. This suggests to me the nation’s blood supply isn’t in dire straits as we are sometimes led to believe.

As a universal donor, you can see how my blood is doubly desirable because of my wholesome clean living. I’ve never gotten a tattoo, never banged another dude, never traveled in sub-Saharan Africa, never lived abroad…

Jeez, my life is really boring.

Averoigne on the Internets

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First The Cimmerian and then the Los Angeles Times picked up my tale of woe regarding my intent to put together an Averoigne collection. It’s an instructive case of the kicking and screaming that occurs when literature enters the public domain, yes, but it’s also a demonstration of the perils of the same agent representing both an author’s shade and the publisher who prints his work.

If I were an outsider reading these posts, not to mention the memorials uploaded back in January, I might be curious enough to give Clark Ashton Smith a try. Problem is, as a fan, it’s hard to tell newcomers where to go — which is my whole argument. But if you want to get started, try Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds. Together they offer 44 stories that were hand-selected by Smith for their original publication in the 1940s, and since they’re paperbacks, they won’t break the bank.

Also, Eldritch Dark has all of Smith’s writing online — though, if you’re like me, that’s no substitute for an old-fashioned book.

Incidentally, Ron Hilger, who edited the Averoigne collection that Donald M. Grant, Publisher has been promising to print for fifteen years, posted in December on the Eldritch Dark forums that the project may have legs again. On the other hand, Grant has been teasing this volume for fifteen years. From what I’ve read, if it does appear, it will be hardback with full-color plates within. So not cheap.

Illo by the inimitable Jim Roslof for the Averoigne-inspired D&D adventure, Castle Amber.

Into the Field

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Connecticut archaeologists are moving from archival research to excavation in an effort to delineate the boundaries of the battle of Pequot Hill and other sites:

McBride and his team of researchers are working with a grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program, which seeks to document and preserve battlefields from early American history. They are also using funding from the tribe, which is hoping to use the endeavor as an opportunity to learn about colonial and Native American life at the time of the Pequot War, which lasted from 1636 to 1638.

The Pequots’ use of their Foxwoods revenue to embrace archaeology is admirable — unlike certain tribes and certain governments who fight tooth and claw to obscure the story of mankind in America.

This Week in Dinosaurs

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A zoologist believes birds didn’t evolve from dinosaurs but rather both had a shared ancestor:

Almost 20 years of research at OSU on the morphology of birds and dinosaurs, along with other studies and the newest PNAS research, Ruben said, are actually much more consistent with a different premise – that birds may have had an ancient common ancestor with dinosaurs, but they evolved separately on their own path, and after millions of years of separate evolution birds also gave rise to the raptors. Small animals such as velociraptor that have generally been thought to be dinosaurs are more likely flightless birds, he said.

Granted, that’s from the Oregon State University press release, but I’m surprised this hasn’t received more widespread attention. Via Palaeoblog.

From Romania comes evidence that island dwarfism affected dinosaurs too:

Benton, who directs the Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research Group at the University of Bristol, and his colleagues conducted one of the most extensive studies yet on the Hateg Island dinosaur remains. They analyzed the dinosaurs’ limb proportions and bone growth patterns, comparing them with those of mainland dinos.

The analysis determined that at least four of the Hateg dinosaurs were dwarves.

The diminutive dinosaurs included the titanosaurian sauropod Magyarosaurus, which had a body length of about 16 to 19 feet. That’s impressive by human standards, but is miniature compared to a sauropod such as Argentinosaurus, which grew to be at least 82 feet long.

Finally, isotopic analysis suggests spinosaurus and its kin spent much of its time lurking and hunting in shallow water just like modern alligators and crocodiles. This allowed them to exist alongside other large Cretaceous theropods since spinosaurids weren’t in competition with terrestrial meat-eaters.

Photo of T-rex taken at the AMNH.

The War of Southern Aggression

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The following passage was written by a Confederate soldier who, on 6 April 1862, was captured at the Battle of Shiloh and eventually incarcerated at Camp Douglas. He describes the events immediately following his seizure by Union soldiers:

On the way, my guards and I had a discussion about our respective causes, and, though I could not admit it, there was much reason in what they said, and I marvelled that they could put their case so well. For, until now, I was under the impression that they were robbers who only sought to desolate the South, and steal the slaves; but, according to them, had we not been so impatient and flown to arms, the influence of Abe Lincoln and his fellow-abolitionists would not have affected the Southerns pecuniarily; for it might have been possible for Congress to compensate slave-owners, that is, by buying up all slaves, and afterwards setting them free. But when the Southerners, who were not averse to selling their slaves in the open market, refused to consider anything relating to them, and began to seize upon government property, forts, arsenals, and war-ships, and to set about establishing a separate system in the country, then the North resolved that this should not be, and that was the true reason for the war.

From The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909.