It was a cold, damp April afternoon — the kind that settles slowly into your body, chilling you to the bone. The sky was a mottled gray, and I was standing in the muddy grass, face to face with the enemy. He leveled his eyes at me; I stared right back at him, as if to say, Carlos, you’re going down.

Yes, that would be the associate editor of this newspaper. No, it wasn’t a bizarre new kind of editing wherein the editor and writer mud-wrestle over grammar disagreements, although I could get behind that idea. It was intramural softball, and last Monday I found myself in the strange situation of playing against the Cornell Dairy Sluggers (an athletics official made a typo).

I was on the Kitsch Magazine team. Imagine the match-up: a small features magazine facing off against a newspaper that could draw its team from over 200 members, including a sports board. Plus, they had Per Ostman, and that guy’s like eight feet tall. My five-foot-two self was understandably intimidated.

But somehow we won. Somehow, despite the fact that our opponents were a hard-boiled conglomeration of athletes and Mexicans while we were a ragtag team of English majors and gay men, despite the fact that our team shirts were an oh-so-intimidating shade of baby blue, despite the fact that at one point we had two runners on third base at the same time, we won. It was like an after-school special.
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Hey, remember me? I’m not a new columnist; I just took a brief hiatus from my column so that I could finish my thesis. As of four hours ago, when I turned in my mammoth of a paper, I’m back and ready to continue writing for The Sun… for two more weeks. That would make this my second-to-last column, and since the last column is traditionally wasted on a bunch of goodbyes, thank-yous and other sentimental hooey, this is effectively my last column.

Which puts me in a bit of a tricky situation. I’ve got 950 — now, 850 — words left to say all of the things I haven’t gotten to say, so I need to choose carefully. In the past two and a half years I’ve written about 50 columns, and I probably could have written 10 or so more if I had never bagged. Some of the times I bagged it was because I didn’t have the time to write, but most of the time it was because I couldn’t think of anything to write about; I’d start with some raw idea and attempt to bake it into a column, but (to continue the metaphor) then I’d discover that I didn’t have any butter, so I’d replace it with half margarine and half shortening, and then I’d realize I was out of baking soda, so I’d double the baking powder, and… well, let’s just say the fire department wasn’t too pleased.

Damn, there go another 150.
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The month of March is host to many significant events: the mailing of graduate school decisions, Saint Patrick’s Day and, of course, madness. What many people don’t know, and what I just found out this afternoon, is that March is also National Women’s History Month (WHM). I knew my uterus felt funny when I woke up this morning.

I got pretty excited when I found out about WHM, partially because I’m interested in women’s history but mostly because it occurred to me that my column would be a perfect platform for proclaiming some other month, perhaps June, to be National Elise Kramer Appreciation Month. I began dreaming up the ways in which NEKAM would be commemorated: posters, dramatic public readings of my articles, Take Your Daughter to Elise Kramer Day. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be; apparently, in order for a month to be declared the National Month of Anything, a resolution needs to be passed by Congress.

So I’ll just have to be satisfied with WHM, which shows how far our country has come. Whereas women couldn’t even vote a century ago, now we get an entire twelfth of the year! Well, we don’t get the entire twelfth of the year — that would just be greedy. We share our month with many other important issues, such as: Play the Recorder Month, National Frozen Food Month and National Umbrella Month. For too long, Americans have wandered around in the rain, getting sopping wet and thinking, “If only there were some kind of portable dome made out of waterproof material that I could hold over my head when it rained! And why does it take so gosh-darned long to make mashed potatoes?”
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(My half of a Vs. in The Cornell Daily Sun. Josh Dugan’s opposing piece can be found at the Sun’s website.)

The term “hate crime” has always struck me as slightly bizarre. It implies that only a small subcategory of crimes stem from hate — that the remaining crimes are the result of, what, confusion? “Oh, dear, I seem to have bludgeoned you repeatedly with a blunt object. I do apologize.” Every violent crime is motivated by hate on some level, and to separate crimes based on type of hate is not only impossible but undesirable and counterproductive. Anyone who ties someone to a fence post, beats and pistol-whips him, and then leaves him for dead deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail with no parole — regardless of whether his victim, as Matthew Shepard was, is gay. I wish there were a magical balm that could cure society’s wounds, but hate crime legislation is no panacea.

First, there is the difficulty in establishing what, precisely, constitutes a hate crime. This difficulty exists on two levels: obviously it’s extremely hard to determine motive beyond reasonable doubt (without the aid of a foolproof lie detector), but more significantly, it’s extremely unclear which kinds of “hate” fall under the purview of “hate crimes” and how direct the connection between the hate and the crime needs to be.
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Like many college students, most of my knowledge of current events is gleaned from the headlines on the New York Times website, the first ten minutes of the Daily Show and, of course, NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics (newsflash: despite the fact that the women wear next to nothing and are often thrown bodily onto the ice by their bumbling partners, ice dancing is really boring!). For those of you who are as behind on the news as I am, a recap of some recent stories: the Vice President of the United States has gunned down an elderly man in an apparent effort to compensate for his lack of military service, the Danish butter cookie industry has been dealt a crippling blow by a Muslim boycott (their loss — who doesn’t love Danish butter cookies?), and everyone’s favorite no-nonsense talk show host, Oprah Winfrey, has been leading a campaign against James Frey for publishing a largely fabricated memoir.

I can understand peppering 78-year-old men in the face with birdshot and burning down consulates to protest accusations of being violent, but, frankly, Oprah’s one-blowhard crusade has left me scratching my head. Memoirs aren’t exactly a genre known for their accuracy, nor should they be; who wants to read about a person’s actual, mundane life, replete with poor comedic timing, esprit d’escalier, small dreams and big disappointments? The “true” anecdotes we share with others would, without a bit of poetic license, be boring beyond belief. In the retelling, the situation becomes just a little more dramatic; we become just a little wittier; ensuing hijinks become just a little zanier. As David Sedaris, the queen of the entertaining memoir, once said, “When people ask me if these stories are true, I prefer to say that they are true enough.”
So I don’t really care that Frey lied about the veracity of his novel — in fact, I wish more authors would follow suit. I don’t have a problem with people making things up and claiming they happened; I have a problem with people making things up and claiming they didn’t happen.
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I have connections. I don’t mean connections of the ligament-and-tendon variety, although I do have those as well (if I didn’t, that headshot up there would be assuredly different) — I refer of course to the connections that us Ivy League students are privy to, the kind that coalesce out of glances and furtive handshakes in the smoky back-rooms of bars.

More specifically, I have connections to the Ithaca Bureau of Investigations, a little-known but powerful organization located in the secret passageways below the clock museum. The IBI is primarily concerned with the monitoring of alien life, which, as you may have surmised, is particularly active in Ithaca. Through a series of improbable events that I won’t bother to recount (it involves three bowling balls, a two-dollar bottle of wine and a rather embarrassed emu), I became the official IBI-Daily Sun liaison, serving to control The Sun’s alien-related content (“What alien-related content?” you wonder — my point exactly) in exchange for privileged information.

Recently, I came across one such privileged document so shocking and so important that I felt I must share it with you. It seems that Cornell has been infiltrated by alien anthropologists, funded by a generous grant from the Intergalactic Science Foundation, who have posed as undergraduates in order to write an ethnography of the human race, no doubt to insidious ends. I have a copy of the translated notes for the ethnography, and I will reprint them in full in the following space so that you can be prepared for whatever may come of them. Although I realize that making this document public puts my reputation, my position at The Sun, and indeed my life itself at risk, I am willing to make that sacrifice to become the Daniel Ellsberg of our generation. A noble act? Certainly, but I would expect no less of a journalist such as myself.
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In the past decade, Google has become an indispensable part of American culture. And, much like American culture, Google is slowly but surely taking over the world — albeit while engendering far less resentment from its conquered. This is not surprising, as Google has revolutionized the way that people get information; its centralizing approach elegantly and efficiently fills needs we didn’t even know we had. Just in the past year or so, Google has introduced: Google Maps, which trounces Mapquest if only because of its lack of intrusive ads; Google Print, which allows you to search the full text of an ever-increasing number of books; and Google Scholar, which enables you to easily find research articles and, if you’re on a university network, locate them on campus (a windfall for those of us who have struggled with the Cornell Library Gateway’s cumbersome “Find Articles” feature). Google now also offers service through text messaging. I’ve never been prouder to be an American.

When it comes to the social sciences, however, Google serves an entirely different sort of purpose. While it is excellent for tracking down facts, figures, and research articles — all of which involve its capacity as a referrer to other sources of information — it also serves as a source of original information in its own right. It’s an index of nearly everything written in the public domain of the Internet, and as such it can provide information about the information that’s available — “meta-information,” if you will. Anybody who has begun a paper by citing Google statistics (“The phrase ‘I love tomatoes’ returns 9,370 search results in Google. Clearly, the tomato has become a beloved institution in the English-speaking world”) has taken advantage of this function.
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New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd took a brief sojourn from the Op-Ed pages this past Sunday, writing a feature article for the magazine section entitled “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” In the article, Dowd ponders the question of whether feminism is dead; in support of this thesis she cites an apparent increase in adherence to traditional gender roles and seeming apathy in response to social inequality.

What surprised me most about the article — aside from the fact that, when not making up cutesy nicknames for politicians, Dowd can write eloquently and thoughtfully and almost completely non-irritatingly — was a statistic she provided in a section on “power dynamics.” Dowd writes: “A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman’s chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.”

Holy crap. That’s quite the staggering figure, and it certainly bolsters Dowd’s assertion that “the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men.” But statistics are funny things sometimes. They carry with them an air of factuality, of incontrovertibility — if the numbers say it, it must be the case. And to an extent that’s true; statistics are descriptions of observations, and as such they don’t lie (assuming the numbers aren’t fudged).

The problem is that statistics can easily be abused and misinterpreted, and they all-too-frequently are. Researchers are usually pretty good about discussing the limitations and caveats of their own findings, but journalists — propelled by the goal of making information newsworthy — are notoriously bad at letting numbers speak for themselves. Since most of us rarely read the actual research articles, most of us never question the secondhand assertions framing the data.
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About a year and a half ago, I used this space (”Annelidanger,” 4/21/2004) to raise awareness about an insidious problem on the Cornell campus - namely the way that worms slither onto the sidewalk in the rain and are, for lack of a better term, totally gross. Though an Ad Hoc Committee on Worm Welfare has yet to be assembled, I have been satisfied with the public response and, for 19 months, I have laid down my arms against a sea of squashed yucky things.

But now I must take them up again.

If you’ve been on the Arts Quad, you’ve probably noticed them. They blanket the sidewalk that runs north-south in front of Stone Row (Morrill, McGraw and White Halls) in numbers never seen before, quantities too staggering to believe. Thousands of caterpillars darken the cement, flattened by the treads of unsuspecting undergrads and gallivanting grad students. And at night — oh, the scene! — the sidewalk lives with the teeming, wriggling bodies of thousands more. It’s positively fulsome.
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Let’s begin today with a pop quiz. Take out your number two pencils, everybody.

1. A man and a woman conceive and give birth to a child the “old-fashioned” way. Who are the child’s parents?
2. A man and a woman adopt a 10-month-old infant. Who are the child’s parents?
3. A woman has in vitro fertilization with another woman’s egg and her male partner’s sperm. The egg is implanted in her uterus and she gives birth to the child. Who are the child’s parents?
4. A man and a woman employ a surrogate mother to be implanted with a donor ovum that has been fertilized with donor sperm. The surrogate mother gives birth to the child, and the original man and woman take custody of it. Who are the child’s parents?

The answer to the first question is likely obvious, but the other questions seem to beg for a more nuanced use of terms: the distinction between genetic parents and what I’ll call familial parents (those who actually raise the child) is useful for answering the second and third questions. The fourth question adds a third term to the mix, one that we don’t usually use but that perhaps we should: a biological parent — currently, it can only be a biological mother — is one who carries the child prenatally and gives birth to it. (This relationship is not insignificant, as the number of surrogate mothers reluctant to give up the children they birth can attest.)
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