Yesterday, the radio opera was “Die Fledermaus” by Johann Strauss Jr (“The Waltz King”). This and “The Merry Widow” bY Lehar are the only two operettas I can think of which are sometimes done by regular opera companies. Both can be described as “zany.” Of course so can Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas – and, really, most operettas of the period. People have always enjoyed far-fetched humor. “Fledermaus” means “Bat,” and the premise is that, a year before the operetta, the lead tenor and the baritone went to a an event together, something between a party, a costume ball, and an orgy, and both got drunk. The baritone, who dressed as a bat, passed out, and the tenor (dressed as a butterfly) left him in a public park to sober up, and he woke to crowds pointing and laughing. This year, he wants revenge – and he gets it. And everyone except the tenor gets amusement and laughs at the tenors expense. When I was working as a volunteer costumer for my local college’s music department (before I got hired and paid by the theatre department), this was one of the shows I dressed. That was even longer ago than when the recording was made which they used yesterday to celebrate the operetta’s 150th anniversary (it premiered in April, 1876.) Also, I heard from Pat, who said her doctor’s apointment went well, and she is greatly relieved.
This is neither political, medical, financial, or helpful in any other way. It’s just interesting in that it reveals issues in the way we think about time (and probably other things as well.)
Many sources are discussing the decision by the Arizona Supreme Court that an abortion law from 1864 can stand. Much of the coverage includes lurid detail about the life and actions of the author of the law, which may be interesting, but really isn’t germane to the merits (and demerits, which outnumber the merits) of the law itself. This (gift-linked) article from the Washington Post doesn’t go there, instead concentrating on the effect of the ruling on the 2024 general election, both statewide and nationwide, and the reactions of Arizonans both in and out of politics.
Yesterday, I finally took a few duck eggs out of the freezer ((I’m allergic to chicken eggs, n=but not to duck eggs or goose eggs) to use as toppers to corned beef hash (yes, I’m old – that used to be a popular meal, particularly for breakfast). I froze some when my source retired. Freezing eggs is an awkward business – you have to take them out of the shell, because if you don’t, they will break in the freezer, and you also have to at least pierce the yolk. And if you don’t want to use them all together, you need to put each one into a separate plastic bag. So hardboiled eggs are not an option. Traditionally, with hash, they were poached, but that’s not an option either, since the yolk is pierced. I just made a “valley” in the “mountain” of hash and put an egg (out of the plastic bag) into it, then microwaved it. It wasn’t as good as the meals I remember, but it wasn’t bad either. However, the best use of frozen (and then thawed) eggs is in baking. Maybe I’ll feel up to that eventually.
I always enjoy reading Amanda Marcotte. She sees things that otber people, including me, don’t. I don’t claim she’s always right, but what she has to say always bears consideration. I should point out that Salon, where she is a senior writer, is also now on substack (as is I presume her personal newsletter which they mention.)
As Nameless often says, good news is always welcome. And I find this news particularly good coming from Texas. I suppose the whiny Texas GOP will be taking it to the Supremes, but at least there are injunctions for the interim. And the Supremes might turn it down. If they’re smart enough (I know some are.)
Yesterday, I found it refreshing for an earthquake to be newsworthy in some place other than California. (And, since there were no injries, the humor is a nice touch. “The Empire State Building”sent some messages via Xitter: “I am fine.” “I am still fine.” and then another “I am fine.”) Also I got my lost made of people whom I haven’t yet paid. There are seven of them, one of them whom I guess I saw twice, so there are eight charges. When new bills come in they should be easy to find. Also – the “Phone Call” Robert Hubbell prodived a summary for yesterday – Beau did a video on it It’s over 10 minutes, so I sdon’t wast to embed it. But it’s detailed enough i do wany to make it available. So, here’s the link.
This really is madness. Sadly it’s predictable (and in-character) madness. Russia is not going to be destroyed by migrants. But it very wwell may be destroyed by its own government.
Very often I can’t find a particular story on “Law and Crime,” appaently because there’s so much crime that stories get pushed to the back. This time I found the one I was looking for. A value of $40.000.00 sounds like grand theft to me.
Yesterday, another uneventful day for me. But not for a number of public figures, one in particular.
Mary Trump would like us non-lawyers all to calm down and take a deep breath. (I’d like that too. Things are bad enough without us interpreting anything we don’t like as a catastrophe. Whych is why I don’t report more on the Trump** trials.)
Now that i’m getting the Borowitz report again, I can share him. And this is a good one. There is only one female character in the Revelation of Saint John. And I can definitely see why he’d think of her.
I was concerned about this – we probably all were – I even included a Beau video (yesterday) discussing the possibility of a veto. Well, we didn’t.
Yesterday, I did listen to Turandot after all. Of course it was lovely – but I was also fascinated to observe that the Met’s announcer as well as the steeped-in-opera expert who seerves as her sidekick (you know that opera which the listeners voted on a few weeks ago? Well, he was at that performance when it happened. And was an adult at the time) both pronounced the name of the opera “Turandot” but the singers pronounced it “Turandough.” I believe “Turandough is more technically correct, based on a letter Puccini wrote suggesting that pronunciation, but I do like the sound of “Turandot” better myself. Not that it really matters. Oh, the conductor was the first Ukrainian, and therefore also the first Ukrainian woman, to conduct at the Met. Aside from that, I basically just laid out (in tiny bottles) my meds for the next two weeks. Boring, but it has to be done.
I am not deliberately seeking for Women’s History month stories which are also Black History – I just keep running into them, and they’re good ones.
Heaven knows I cannot generally recommend the New York Times for journalism, but this appears to have some valuable information. Hopefully you won’t be negatively affected by all the eye-blinking in the caricatures.
Today, it looks as though we in the United States need some help from the goddess Cybele, the goddess of childbirth
It seems ironic that today, just as almost every other country in the world, including notoriously Roman Catholic countries like France and Ireland, has made abortion legal, and women may make their own medical choices and have bodiy autonomy, the United States is going backwards in time (though not as long as you might think. Abortion was never a political issue until sometime in the latter half of the 19th century the Pope at the time wrote an Encyclical condemning it.) It’s true that abortions were hard to get before that. But that probably was because so lttle was known about the female anatomy that there were no techniques for it – certainly no safe ones. Some doctors may have been influenced by the full version of the Hippocratic Oath, of course.
And it’s even more ironic that the way they chose to justify this draconian action (or actions) puts a huge risk not only women, but also the practice of IVF, in vitro fertilization. You may or may not know anyone personally who has used this technique, often when all else failed, to produce a child (I believe Tammy Duckworth had to use it due to her combat injuries.) If not, this highly personal story should give you at least an idea of how complicated it is at every point – and how hypocritical the Republican Party is (as if you didn’t know).
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I’m a political scientist, and the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling turned me into a reproductive-rights refugee
Spencer and Gabby Goidel hadn’t planned to become activists. Spencer and Gabby Goidel, CC BY-ND
That Friday evening, Feb. 16, 2024, unaware of the ruling, Gabby started taking her stimulation medications, worth roughly US$4,000 in total. We didn’t hear about the decision until Sunday morning, Feb. 18. By then, she had taken four injections – or two doses – of each of the stimulation medications.
For those who don’t know, the IVF process is a winding journey full of tests, bloodwork and bills. An IVF patient takes hormones for eight to 14 days to stimulate their ovaries to produce many mature eggs. The mature eggs are then retrieved via a minor surgical procedure and fertilized with sperm in a lab. The newly created embryos are monitored, sometimes biopsied and frozen for genetic testing, and then implanted, usually one at a time, in the uterus. From injection to implantation, one round of IVF takes four to eight weeks.
IVF can be as stressful as it is exciting. However, the potential of having a successful pregnancy and our own child at the end of the process, we hoped, would make it all worth it. The decision by the Alabama Supreme Court threw our dreams up in the air.
I study politics – I don’t practice it. I’m not involved in state or local government. I’m a scholar, not an activist or an advocate. But now one of the most intimate, personal events of our lives had been turned into a political event by the state’s highest court. As a result, I became something else, too, which I had not been before: an activist.
Making sense of the ruling
Throughout the process of creating, growing and testing embryos in a lab, as many as 50% to 70% of embryos can be lost. Similarly, in the preimplantation stage of natural pregnancies, many embryos don’t survive.
If embryos are children, as the court ruled, then fertility clinics and patients would be exposed to an immense amount of potential legal liability. Under this new framework, patients would be able to bring wrongful death suits against doctors for the normal failures of embryos in the testing or implantation phase. Doctors would either have to charge more for an already expensive procedure to cover massive legal-insurance costs or avoid IVF altogether.
Lab staff at an in vitro fertilization lab extract cells from embryos that are then checked for viability. AP Photo/Michael Wyke
The decision and its implication – that IVF could not continue in the state of Alabama – felt like a personal affront to us. We were infuriated to have this uncertainty injected into the process three days into injecting IVF medication.
While the decision clearly imperiled the future of IVF in Alabama, it was not clear to us whether we would be allowed to continue the process we had begun. We were left completely in the dark for the next four days. Gabby and I had no choice but to continue daily life and IVF as though nothing was happening.
I’ll never forget walking into class on Monday, Feb. 19, and telling the students about the court’s ruling and how it – maybe? – was going to jeopardize Gabby’s and my IVF process.
Before starting IVF, Gabby and I had gone through three miscarriages together.
IVF doesn’t always work. Approximately 55% of IVF patients under the age of 35 – Gabby is 26 – have a successful pregnancy after one egg retrieval. We couldn’t imagine the pain of telling friends and family that our attempt at having a child had once again failed. So we had agreed we were going to tell as few people as possible about starting IVF.
Yet, here I was now, telling my entire class what we were going through and how the Alabama Supreme Court ruling could affect us.
I wasn’t alone in sharing our story. The night before my Monday morning class, Gabby published an opinion column on our local news site about the ruling and our resulting fears and anxieties, which really resonated with people.
I was, that day and throughout the next few weeks, fixated on the conceptual gulf between the court’s ruling and public opinion. I wondered aloud, “Who’s against IVF? Surely, only 5% to 10% of the public agrees with this ruling.”
The actual numbers aren’t far off my in-class guess. Only 8% of Americans say that IVF is immoral or should be illegal. But the story is more nuanced than that. Approximately 31% of Americans and 49% of Republicans support “considering frozen embryos as people and holding those who destroy them legally responsible.”
In an attempt to tie our personal political experience into the class topic, I remarked that this court decision was a surefire way to get people involved in politics. I had no clue at the time how prophetic my comment would be.
We didn’t know what we were going to do, but we knew we were likely leaving the state to continue IVF. I needed to tell my department chair what was going on.
I was walking out of my department chair’s office when my phone rang. Gabby told me, “We got in, we’re going to Temple.” I ran back into my department chair’s office, told her we were going to Temple, Texas, and then rushed home.
A reporter from CNN beat me there. It was one of severalinterviews with majormediaoutlets Gabby did in the wake of her opinion column. After the interview, we threw clothes in a suitcase, dropped our dogs off at the vet and drove to the Atlanta airport. We flew to Texas that night.
One of the Goidels’ many media interviews in the wake of the Alabama ruling.
The thought of not completing the egg retrieval never seriously entered our minds. We were confident that we could get in with another IVF clinic somewhere, anywhere. But we’re affluent. We’re privileged. What if we weren’t so well off? We wouldn’t have wanted to give up, but we wouldn’t have been able to afford the fight.
We spent exactly one week at my parents’ house in Texas. Thankfully, my parents live an hour and a half away from the Temple clinic. We met our new doctor, Dr. Gordon Wright Bates, and were immediately reassured. His cool expertise and confidence were calming to a stressed-out couple. The Alabama Supreme Court may have upended our lives, but we felt weirdly lucky to be in such a comfortable place.
The egg retrieval was Wednesday morning, Feb. 28. By all indications, it went well. IVF, however, is full of uncertainties. Now we are waiting on the results from preimplantation genetic testing. After that, there’s implantation and hoping the embryo continues to grow. We’re not in the clear: IVF is a stressful process even without a state court getting in the way. But today we are in a situation more like an average couple going through IVF than we have been in the past few weeks.
Late Wednesday night, March 6, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law a bill providing legal protection to IVF clinics in the state. Gabby and I rejoiced at the news. Hopefully, we’re the last Alabamian couple to flee the state for IVF.
A mobilizing moment
When state politics directly interferes with your life, it feels like a gut punch, as if the community that you love is saying you’re not loved back. It’s easy to see how such an experience could either discourage or motivate you. Research shows that traumatic events, for the most part, depress voter turnout in the following presidential election. By contrast, families and friends of 9/11 victims became and remained more politically engaged than their peers.
In this case, the Alabama Supreme Court ruling mobilized Gabby and otherwomen going through the IVF process. For better or worse, the women, couples and families mobilized by this decision will likely always be more engaged because of it.
“Oh, God,” I remarked to my dad, “we’re going to be activists now, aren’t we?”
“So?” he asked.
“No one likes activists,” I responded in jest. But if we’re going to have and raise the family we want, this is just the first of many decisions we’re going to make that someone’s not going to like.
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Cybele, I’ll bet you wish you have had a tool like IVF to help out couples in despair. But abortion too can oddly increase fertility in the long run. Mt mother, for instance, had surgery for an ectopic pregnancy (they called it a “burst tubal pregnancy” at the time, which essentially means it wasn’t caught in time and she was bleeding like crazy all over the docter’s office when it was caught.) Had she not been allowed to have her life saved with that surgery, I would not have existed. I came along about seven years later. And it just makes sense – if a woman is not able to get an abortion for a pregnancy which will kill her if not terminated, she will not bear any more children. Ever.
I don’t expect you to get through to any Republican lawmakers … but you may be able to give some hints on how to grapple with this issue to Democratic lawmakers. We have several who are good at turning factual information into damning narratives. To name a few Jamie Raskin, Jerry Nadler, Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, Ted Lieu … and that’s just in the House. There are some in the Senate also. Any assistance will be more a[[reciayed than I can possibly express.
Yesterday, I got another grocery order. I loaded up on fresh fruit and also got some fresh vegetables, one of which is intended to be in ingredient in a new crockpot recipe – so I’ll cut this short and go back to working on it. But P.S. – this is the T-shirt.)
As usual, Mary Trump has a lot to say. This time it’s about the cognitive issues of her uncle. She starts by quoting one of his former White House advisers on what she (the adviser) has seen since 2016. But then, Mary also goes back many years ago – as far back as when Donald got chosen and Fred disinherited. This makes his current state appear even more disastrous.
Axios sent out a news flash that Nikki Haley won the Republican primary in Vermont. Only that one, but it means Trump** cannot clain a sweep. Betcha Biden can. (And I find it hard to believe Bernie’s Vermont preferring Trump** over just about anyone, so it makes sense.)
Heather Cox Richardson picked March 2, the anniversary of US Steel (founded 1901), to write about that and about the policy changes made by Teddy Roosevelt. She writes late, so I did not get it until the 3rd, and today is the 4th, so it’s 2 days late. But it really should never be forgotten.
Tennessee Brando made a video for Meidas Touch about what it’s like to be an addict, active and recovering. He made it in connection with Hunter Biden’s testimony. But I wish everyone could see it. I’m sharing the link to the DU article because you can always get from there to YouTube comments if you like, but you can’t go the other way.
some fresh vegetables, one of which is intended to be in ingredient in a new crockpot recipe – so I’ll cut this short and go back to working on it. But P.S. – this is the T-shirt.)
