Britney: Live and Fully Dialated

I first heard this story a few days ago, but tragically have not been able to spread the word until now. I apologize for letting you all down. Fortunately, other keen-eyed reporters and bloggers have picked up the story, so you may have heard it by now. Even if you have, it bears repeating.

It seems that sculptor Daniel Edwards has created a nude statue (pictured below) of a pregnant Britney Spears, positioned on all fours on top of a bear rug, about to give birth. The statue was created to be a "Monument to Pro-Life" (and that is indeed part of its official title), and will include materials from the Manhattan Right-to-Life Committee as part of its dedication in April.

Wait...what?

Yes, that's what the press release says. It doesn't happen to say whether the dedication will specifically be on April 1st, but one could be forgiven for assuming so. However, the sculptor is a real guy -- and an extremely talented one, based on other examples of his work that I dug up on the Web. So I'm going to choose to believe this story. It's so weird, I need it to be real.

Next, I have to wonder how the largely conservative Pro-Life set would react to this honor. Sure, it's a lot of publicity for their cause, but on the other hand, umm, it's a realistic statue of a naked sex symbol in a classic erotic pose. (C'mon, all-fours on a bear rug?! And YES, guys, pregnant women can be erotic.) If there's anything we know about US conservatives, it's that they're not prudish in the least, AND they are always ready to support the freedom of artistic vision.



Regardless of any politics involved, I think that the art itself -- whether the creator's intent was serious or sardonic -- is really very good. No, really! If Pro-Life groups really get behind this and support it, then good for them. Oh, and in case you're wondering: Yes, the baby is crowning in the sculpture.

As for Brit-Brit (who, ironically, delivered her baby in a C-section), I just can't bring myself to bash her too badly; plenty of other people already do a fine job of that. As far as I'm concerned, she's only made one mistake, but it's not anything that can be cured by art or medicine -- unless doctors can perform emergency surgery to remove the 170 lb leech that's stuck to her.

Off Topic: Rogue Wave!

No, it's not a musical genre that fuses Punk and New Wave (although it is a band name). It IS, however, a natural phenomenon that has been witnessed by countless mariners over the centuries. Yet the very existence of this phenomenon had until very recently been disputed by scientists, because the laws of physics would seem to limit such an occurrence to once every 10,000 years.

It is the phenomenon known as the rogue wave, and its existence finally has been confirmed by science, in a big way. Not only was I surprised to learn this, I was surprised to find out that it's relatively old news.

As I said, rogue waves have been reported by countless mariners, and have also been suspected in sending countless more ships to the bottom, without trace. Even some famous ships, like the Queen Elizabeth 2, have encountered rogue waves and were lucky enough to survive.

So what, exactly, is a rogue wave? In my layman's definition, rogue waves (also known as "freak waves") are open-ocean waves that are substantially bigger than the surrounding sea state. For example, you could be sailing along cheerfully in five-foot swells, and the next thing you know, you get broadsided by a thirty-foot wave that came out of nowhere. This could very well result in the loss of your boat, and, by extension, your life. Likewise, you could be struggling through insane 50-foot seas, and suddenly get obliterated by a 100-foot rogue wave; it's the same principle at work.

(I'm obligated to add that the scientific definition of rogue wave -- now that science recognizes them -- is, "waves that are more than double the significant wave height (SWH), which is itself defined as the mean of the largest third of waves in a wave record". A tsunami is not a rogue wave, nor vice-versa.)

As if the sheer size weren't dangerous enough, what makes rogue waves particularly dangerous is their form: Rogue waves can be near-vertical (as opposed to a rolling swell), and they are usually preceded by a trough. Thus, instead of riding the crest of the wave, a ship will fall or roll into the trough, and then the wave will break on top of it. The other confounding factor is that rogue waves frequently travel at an angle to the swells, which means that they will hit many boats from the side -- and that is exactly where a boat does not want to get hit.


The ship in the above photo was lucky: She had been sailing in a steady 15-foot swell, when she encountered this approximately 60-foot rogue wave. According to the detailed caption, the ship was sliding down into the trough and towards the wave when this photo was snapped. There was significant damage to some of the deck fittings, but fortunately nobody was injured.

As an avid reader of true-life seafaring stories like "The Perfect Storm", I had always read about rogue waves, and so recently I did a web search on the subject, just to see if there had been any interesting developments (because that's just the kind of scintillating guy I am). It turns out there's been a lot -- and I may have been the last interested party to know. The first article I found was a 2004 report from the European Space Agency (ESA), which contained a staggering statistic:

"Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in many such cases."

In other words, two hundred of the world's largest ships have gone down in the past twenty years. Imagine if two hundred 747 jumbo jets had gone down in the same period: How would that make you feel about air travel? In fact, only 24 Boeing 747's have been involved in passenger fatalities in the entire 37-year history of the aircraft type. While it's true that those 24 incidents probably resulted in greater loss of life than the ship incidents (the ships lost were largely bulk cargo vessels), I think that even the loss of 200 empty 747's would make you sit up and take notice.

That same report goes on to say, "Two large ships sink every week on average, but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'."

The upshot, folks, is that even with today's cutting-edge technology, seafaring is still as dangerous as sailors and their insurance companies have always told us it is. In fact, as a result of the ESA study, we now know that rogue waves not only exist, but are common. Which brings forth the chilling realization that every ship currently afloat is basically vulnerable to death-by-rogue-wave, becase design standards call for ships to be able to withstand "normal"-sized big waves that are half the size of potential rogue waves.

I've long had an interest in ocean travel, but in light of this new research, I think I'll just remain a passive observer, as I've always been. Not that it would've mattered anyway; as it turns out, I'm prone to violent seasickness.



Even the venerable "QE2" has encountered a
rogue wave.

Note: Due to the popularity of this topic (and my own continued interest), I posted a follow-up on April 26. And don't even get me started on the movie "Poseidon"...

Off Topic: It Was Bound to Happen

Up until now, I have largely kept this blog "on topic" -- the topic being the outstanding female artists that can be heard on ESTROGENIUS Internet Radio. Although I have always had the temptation to do what many personal bloggers do, which is to write about their own lives and interests, I have seldom done so. (There have been some exceptions; it goes without saying that the world needs to be informed of the goings-on of The Poubelle Twins.)

While it's true that this policy was partly motivated by conscience (woe is they who are subjected to me talking about my personal interests), in reality it was more of a pragmatic necessity. When I write about a fantastic new artist, I want that artist to be able to link back to that post; what I don't want is for that artist to have to share webspace with my ruminations on things like "Whatever Happened to the Sequential Turn Signal?" (Answer: A Federal regulation eventually prohibited them.)

However, I have realized that I can no longer contain my need to share random trivia with the masses. I must blog about Stuff, much like those bloggers whom I admire most. In order not to conflict with my primary mission of cheerleading for female artists, I have come up with a simple solution: Rather than start a separate blog for the pointless blathering, I will simply post such things as standalone entries in this blog; any such post will have the heading "Off Topic" in the title. Yeah, I know...I'm a real rocket surgeon.

I've already got my first Off Topic subject lined up -- but it'll have to wait until next time. I've already spent way too much space explaining something that you all figured out in the first two seconds.



If you know the Mercury Cougar, then you know about
sequential turn signals.

I Loves Me Some BUST

I got a very pleasant surprise when I checked my email last week: The BUSTline -- the e-newsletter sent by BUST Magazine to thousands of subscribers -- had a plug for ESTROGENIUS and this blog! Like I needed any more reason to love those crazy kids!

A bit of background for you:

BUST is a bi-monthly magazine about women, pop-culture and everything that happens when the twain meet. It is intelligent, snarky (yet not too full of itself) and it doesn't hate men, except when some of us deserve to be hated on.

One useful resource provided on the BUST website is the Girl Wide Web, a repository of girl-oriented sites from all over the internet. If you know of a site that belongs on the GWW, then submit it; I did, and shortly thereafter I got the aforementioned plug in The BUSTline! Sometimes, the Universe IS cool.

Thus, I have no problem plugging them right back, and forming a sort of Moebius strip of mutual admiration. Below is a pic of the cover of the latest issue of BUST, featuring cover girl Gretchen Mol as cover girl Bettie Page! Please do everyone a favor, and buy a couple of subscriptions.


© 2005 BUST, Inc.


PS: In the interest of full disclosure, I might as well mention that it really was the content of BUST that caught my eye, not the expectation of it being a magazine about major-league yabos. In fact, I prefer a smaller bust on a woman (although I would never discriminate). Even Mrs Arhythmius wishes that her shapely C's were a little smaller. A reverse trend, perhaps?

Lady of Tomorrow: Amy Obenski

If you're a nascent musician, you may feel as though the likelihood of releasing an album and having it gain nationwide attention must be a struggle bordering on the impossible, even in this era of Myspace superstars.

Well, it's not impossible, and I've got the CD to prove it: Kite, by Amy Obenski.

Photo: Jamie Ibey
Amy Obenski is a Santa Cruz resident (go Slugs!) who had always wanted to be a musician and songwriter, but never got beyond the university choir. After graduation, she got a job in local government in San Jose, but soon realized that what she really wanted to do was become a famous singer. So, one day, she actually did something about it.

After taking a weekend "realize your potential" course, Ms Obenski was inspired to write her first song. Two years later, in 2003, she released her first album, What We Tell. And not long after that, she received a call from an MTV executive; they had heard one of the tracks from What We Tell on somebody's iPod, and wanted to license the music for the MTV show "Made". Eventually, MTV would license all of Amy Obenski's songs, for use on two of their shows.

This incredible story can be found at Amy Obenski's website, linked above, and in this article from the Santa Cruz paper Good Times Weekly.

But back to Kite, Amy Obenski's latest CD. Wait a minute, you're probably saying. It's Folk, and you don't like Folk. Well, let me first clarify that I don't dislike all Folk music; just all Folk music that I've heard. But I like Kite, which means that either A) It's very good Folk; or B) It's very good Amy Obenski music, and we should not be so quick to pigeonhole music into neat little categories. But if you want me to drill-down to proper radio semantics, I would say that Kite is more AAA than Folk, and would be welcome on any station that plays Beth Orton.

What I like about the album is that it does start off very light (musically, if not lyrically), with a raft of coffeehouse-friendly tracks that allow Ms Obenski's comforting voice to, er, comfort us. But then, she surprises us with a mood change that starts with the excellent "Lady of Tomorrow", continues with "Bomb the World" (a cover of a Spearhead song), and plays through much of what would've been called Side B, in the bad-old-days of vinyl.

Don't get me wrong, she doesn't turn into Rage Against the Machine or anything, but there is still a subtle edge to this album, which I heard and appreciated.

But more importantly, Amy Obenski's success as a new artist is impressive, and I hope that it gives other new artists the inspiration to continue trying to make their dreams a reality.

Even if they don't go to the university that has the world's best mascot.



"You guys look like..."
"Dorks. They look like dorks."
The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slug makes its star turn.
( Photo by Linda R. Chen, courtesy of Miramax films)