Teen Suicide in the News

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article yesterday about teen suicide. There was something notable about it.

See if you can spot it. Fill in the missing word from this key paragraph from the article:

After a teen suicide, family and friends often are left wondering if there were signs they missed, whether they should have seen it coming. Indeed, there are signs, but they can be subtle and difficult to spot -- especially for parents and friends who don't know what to look for, or who don't want to admit that a child is ____________.

(Answer below the fold)

No, the missing word is not "gay," "homosexual," or anything similar; the missing word is depressed.

Who would have thought that the Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, would run an article about teen suicide that that didn't include the datum that gay and lesbian teenagers are up to six times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual teenagers, or that doesn't mention the words "gay," "lesbian," "homosexual," "bisexual" or "heterosexual"? The article mentions in passing the suicide risk for ethnic minorites. Why was the suicide risk for sexual minorities swept under the rug?

Birth of a Card Shark

Yesterday I went down into the basement and dragged out the trunk where I keep a bunch of old papers, so I could bring to light the notebooks where I kept a diary from 1977 to 1980. I've been reading them from the beginning, finding them compelling despite their jejeune character. (I have what is perhaps an unhealthy appetite for my own writing, be it journal entries, old Usenet posts archived on Google Groups, or blog posts.)

Here is what I wrote about my first big win at poker. It takes place at SunCon, the World Science Fiction Convention held over Labor Day weekend in 1977 in Miami Beach, Florida. I was eighteen years old. It took place on Friday night and Saturday morning, September 2-3, 1977.

Later, I ran into Mike [Glicksohn] once more. He and a small entourage were going to their rooms to pick up money and cards for a poker game. I decided to join them, picked up a couple of bottles of Guinness from my room, and we all went up to one of the suites on the 14th floor [of the Fontainebleau Hotel]. Mike went off for a while to make a phone call, and when he got back the game began.

I had originally intended to spend not more than $5 in the game. This was the first all night poker game I had been to, and I fully expected to have bad luck. However, at one point there was no limit placed on the pot, so the betting was high. My cards were reasonably good, so I stayed in. I won the hand, to my relief (I was risking too much for my comfort). The game continued at the quarter or dime ante level for a while, then the stakes went up again, and I won again. This happened one more time, and I cleaned out Mike's money, leaving me with an IOU of $24.50 from him. We played at the dime level for the rest of the evening, and we quit at 5 AM. My total winnings were ~$150.

Mike Glicksohn was the only person named in my diary, but if memory serves, Ted Pauls was also in the game. And maybe Ron Bounds...?

That win was the high water mark of my poker career, until I began playing public cardroom poker twenty years later, in 1997.

The Devil Can Cite Scripture for His Purpose

I overlooked it when Avedon Carol linked to it, but Roz Kaveney noticed and remarked upon Avedon's link to an entry on Faithful Progressive about the degree to which the alleged fundamentalists in the Christian Right movement in the US cherry-pick the Bible to suit their preconceived agendas, rather than taking the Bible as a whole as their guide.

Faithful Progressive quotes in turn an essay by University of Chicago Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature, Margaret M. Mitchell, entitled How Biblical is the Christian Right? Mitchell examined biblical quotes on a number of prominent Web sites of well-known figures of the Christian Right. Mitchell's answer to the question "How Biblical is the Christian Right," it turns out, is "not very."

Here's Mitchell's money quote:

The Christian Right represents biblical interpretation in a conjunction of two selective circles: of what are the key issues in the political realm and what are the central passages in the biblical record. It represents an odd alignment of each. The canonical delineation is striking—a focus on the Old Testament, with special prominence given to Judges and 1 and 2 Chronicles, as well as to Genesis and Leviticus; and in the New Testament, to selected moralizing passages of the Pauline letters and Revelation. It is easy to see then what is missing: the prophets of Israel and the teachings of Jesus (the Gospels). Along with them go concern with social/political issues such as economic inequality, peace-making, love and forgiveness, and critique of religious hypocrisy (just to choose a few!).

In other words, the prominent advocates of the adoption of the Christian Bible as the foundation of American political and moral values willfully ignore the bulk of the teachings of that same Christian Bible.

If I were a Christian, I would take a mighty dim view indeed of the leaders of the Christian Right promoting and publicizing such a thoroughly distorted version of Christianity, built on a foundation of intolerance, hate, and cruelty. It's no wonder that so many decent people cringe when they hear the word "Christian." If these leaders actually wanted compassionate people to reject Christianity, they could hardly do a better job.

Malaise Speech

When he made his speech about sending more US troops to Iraq this evening, Bonnie Prince Georgie looked as if he's finally realized that, unlike every other failure in his long career of failure, this time there is no one waiting in the wings to bail him out.

That should give his poll standings a shot in the arm!

Bread Pr0n

Getting ready for our annual New Year's Day open house, I turned our kitchen into a sourdough bread production line. Here is the result:

I had to abort one batch before the final rising, leaving me with some extra starter. Does anyone want some? First come, first served.