The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 7 - 12/09

My four favourites from this past week, in no particular order.

The Chemist's Kitchen is unique, at least of all the many food blogs I have seen. Readers can ask questions about the chemical properties and handling of food. Ingredients are explained - like the effects of too much essence of bergamot oil in Earl Grey tea or just how many rum balls one would actually have to eat to become impaired (6.6 lbs!). Interesting, informative, humourous with really nice photos.

(The image is of the bergamot orange plant.)

Got Medieval is about all things medieval - marginalia, saints, books of hours and culinary history. The treatment is lighthearted but detailed and informative. In his post about forgetting St. Cecilia in the November saints roundup, the blogger began with a riff on Simon and Garfunkel's song Cecilia: "Oh St. Cecilia, I'm down on my knees, I'm begging you please to forgive me for leaving you out of my November saints roundup." Very nice touch in this blog.

Figleaf's Real Adult Sex is NOT a porn site. It is a thoughtful, very frank, and searching discussion about sex and gender by a thoughtful, frank, interesting, respectful man. I love this site because it is written by a man and deals fairly with gender issues, is informative, not shy, and often funny. It is fairly explicit, though, so be forewarned.

The Wisdom of Whores is also NOT a porn site; rather it is the blog of Elizabeth Pisani, epidemiologist, author, and journalist. Pisani writes about HIV and its prevention in the blog (among other things) and has published a book The Wisdom of Whores. The information in Pisani's blog is eye-opening, informative, often sad, but necessary. I wrote about Pisani in an earlier post - A Wise Woman.

THE Quilt - Personalizing AIDS

After reading many of the Bloggers Unite posts for World AIDS Day yesterday, I realized that the personal ones were the most moving. And I was also reminded of the feminist saying of the seventies - "The personal is political."

Although staggering, the statistic of millions of people infected with HIV or having active AIDS is too big and too much to hold in one's mind. I try sometimes to picture millions of people; I can't. The closest I can come is about 500,000 - 1,000,000 in various protests televised from the National Mall in Washington DC. (And some of the largest were for LGBT and women's rights.)

The Quilt, as it is informally known, came about because of activist Cleve Jones in San Francisco:

Since the 1978 assassinations of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Jones had helped organize the annual candlelight march honoring these men. While planning the 1985 march, he learned that over 1,000 San Franciscans had been lost to AIDS. He asked each of his fellow marchers to write on placards the names of friends and loved ones who had died of AIDS. At the end of the march, Jones and others stood on ladders taping these placards to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of names looked like a patchwork quilt.

The visual cue was enough to start the NAMES Project Foundation which collected the panels for and constructed the the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The project took off, first around the United States, then around the world.

The Quilt now has 44,000 panels (as of November 2008 and growing monthly), each one 3'x 6', each one a tribute to one individual who has died from AIDS, each one lovingly made by those left to mourn.

The panel I have pictured above for Lewis Anton Smith, whom I do not know, is displayed on the homepage of  aidsquilt.org.  It seemed almost too personal to post the image of the panel - would I be offending the maker of the panel, disrespecting the image?

But the personal, painful, intimate nature of the individual blocks is exactly the point. The statistic of 44,000 people who are commemorated on the Quilt, is another statistic - hard to imagine, really. But to see even one panel invades one's space, says that Lewis Anton Smith, this age, this face, this family, died of AIDS. Now imagine 44,000 of those faces all in one place.

The Quilt is, for me, the most striking, astounding reminder, wake-up call, and dedicated testament anyone has ever made about the tragedy of AIDS.



The Quilt was shown on the National Mall in Washington DC on both the first (1987) and last (1996) time it was shown in its entirety - interesting how that place is so significant, visually, politically, and symbolically.

The Quilt and the NAMES Project Foundation live, now, in Atlanta, Georgia. Parts of the quilt are on display around the United States constantly and may be requested for community and academic events. The Quilt is also searchable online - a good thing, but a sad commentary on the slow progress of eliminating HIV and AIDS.

A Wise Woman

Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist specializing in infectious disease. She writes about, cares about, and advises about HIV around the globe. Her blog covers things sexual and scientific.

Her book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of Aids (released today) outlines the ways we fail to do what it takes to end the Aids epidemic.

She says that political correctness about sexual practices is killing people.

Agencies and governments don't want to label common sexual practices, especially in Africa - like multiple partners - as bad for fear of offending!

Pisani also concludes that we have to begin thinking of this epidemic as being about sex, and not predominantly about poverty and gender.

Pisani discusses her book in the Times Online. And Alex Renton reviews it in the Times Online. She makes sense, plus she knows several languages and has a degree in Classical Chinese from Oxford and was for a time a correspondent for Reuters. Wise and interesting.

I would like to invite Pisani to my soiree.