Dogged Blog

May cause redness and irritation

I have rosacea. Not severe, and I don't get any form of acne or breakout, just a lot of flushing. My mom has it, and I'm of Irish and Scottish descent on my mom's side and rosacea has been called "the curse of the Celts." I am cursed.

I'm also getting older, and the products that worked for me either don't work anymore or aren't made anymore (oh, Aromaleigh skincare how I miss thee!). So, since I have raging PMS that seems to have demolished all forms of impulse control, I went to my happy place, the Chanel counter at Nordstrom, the other day, to see if maybe a new nail polish color would make me feel better.

They were slow, and Arlette was sure she could help my dry, irritated skin, so she gave me a mini-facial and a bag full of samples of products. My skin felt like silk. It didn't hurt, wasn't red, wasn't tight, and honestly, my skin looked five years younger.

But now, three days later? I have slight breakouts on my chin, lip, and nose, and one on my cheek, and I remember why I've always had so much trouble using even the most expensive department store products: Because they irritate my skin.

The problem is, the products that don't irritate my skin also don't seem to make my skin feel beautiful and soft. It's like I can have dehydrated, flaking skin that's prone to flushing, or I can have soft, supple skin with little red bumps on it.

I know many of you will swear by various supplements and the consumption of vast amounts of water. I already drink a lot of water -- I couldn't possibly drink more and not explode. I also eat a diet rich in healthy fats, and take a fish oil supplement.

I don't take evening primrose oil or anything like that, as I've been concerned about the pro-inflammatory effects of Omega-6 fatty acids, but I'm considering it, as I've had two or three bad menstrual cycles in the last year and given that I'm 48, I'm wondering if my hormones aren't starting to turn on me. Which I hear makes rosacea worse, so I'm just thrilled.

I just spent some time reading product reviews on the web, and it seems to me that many of the products made for rosacea are very much aimed at younger women with oily skin, rather than women like me whose skin is very dry. My mother also has very dry, dehydrated, sensitive skin, and her rosacea is a bit worse than mine (presumably because she is 23 years older than I am, and also because she doesn't take as good care of her skin as I do of mine because she actually has a life and isn't vain and self-absorbed like I am).

I have no idea what to try next. The Chanel people at Nordstrom are the nicest people on earth and asked me to come in and let them look at my skin, and see if there isn't one single product that might be causing this problem, rather than the whole line. I'm pessimistic, but Chanel has always been tried and true for me as far as makeup goes -- and I have a history of irritation with makeup, too, so that track record does mean something. Since I'm just using samples, this hasn't cost me anything yet (other than, you know, the $24 I spent on nail polish), so I'm willing to give it a try.

But in the meantime, I'm hoping that by throwing this out into the blogosphere, some kind person googling or tracking Neova R2, DermDoctor, or any of the many other products intended for rosacea without acne and in aging or dry skin will come by and say, "I had your exact problem, in fact, I'm your twin sister seperated from you at birth, and I know exactly what products you need."

Because I want it all, dear readers. I want my dewy soft baby butt skin and no redness or bumps. Is that too much to ask?

Yet more incomprehensible hodgepodge from Christie, Girl Reporter

Tuesday the second part of my article on the environmental impact of having pets ran... but don't read the comments section unless you're trying to have an aneurysm, because the pet haters are out in force over there.

I contributed to the Top 25 Gay TV Characters of All Time article over on AfterElton.com -- gold stars to anyone who can guess which profiles I wrote. ;)

Gina's and my article on the no-kill movement for our nationally syndicated pet feature ran this week... based on my interviews with Nathan Winograd ("Redemption") and Richard Avanzino (Maddie's Fund).

I reviewed some holiday music over on Club Kingsnake... old and new!

Mindless entertainment doubleheader

Okay, maybe not so much a mindless entertainment doubleheader; only one of these is "mindless," although they're both entertainment.

One of them is my recap the second episode of the fourth season of Project Runway over at AfterElton.com. That's the mindless one.

The other, though, is something I'm actually quite proud of -- an article about the groundbreaking 90s show "My So-Called Life," which was re-released on DVD a few weeks ago. Also from AfterElton.com:

If Thanksgiving put you in the mood for a heartwarming queer holiday movie, you won’t find much at your local DVD store. But don’t despair; one of the best shows ever made for television just got a stellar re-release on DVD, and if its gay-themed holiday episodes don’t make your season bright, you probably have a heart that’s three sizes too small.

The show is My So-Called Life, which ran for only one season on ABC in 1995, and then went into seemingly perpetual reruns on MTV. Far removed from the usual soapy teen-oriented dramas so familiar to viewers today, Entertainment Weekly called it "the greatest cancelled television series of all time," and it’s frequently found on critics’ “best TV shows” lists. My So-Called Life didn’t earn that acclaim by following the rules, so it’s no surprise its holiday episodes broke most of them.

The two-part story, “So-Called Angels” and its New Year’s Eve sequel, “Resolutions,” opens a few days before Christmas, with a beaten and homeless gay teenager, series regular Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz) on his knees in the snow. It cuts to the home of his friend Angela (Claire Danes), where her kid sister gets off one of the funniest lines in a holiday TV show ever: “Do we have to talk about religion? It’s Christmas!”

Like all the best holiday stories, the episodes go straight for the heart. But while there are snowy streets, Christmas carols, and even an angel, the snow is stained with Rickie’s blood, and the angel is definitely not It’s a Wonderful Life’s Clarence.

Read the rest, including an interview I did with Wilson Cruz, here.

Just another head-exploding Sunday

Pet Connection has published the complete transcripts of my interviews with shelter reform pioneers Richard Avanzino of Maddie's Fund and Nathan Winograd, author of "Redemption." I was on my way over here to link to them, and I will, but first... allow me to spatter gray matter all over your monitor.

In today's Houston Chronicle, a story about the Austin, Texas' failed effort to move its animal control department out of the dark ages and into not the future, dear readers, but even a decade ago in terms of its save rates:

A decade after city leaders adopted an ambitious program to end the euthanasia of healthy, adoptable animals, 14,000 dogs and cats at the Town Lake Animal Center are still being killed annually.

But some progress has been made. Benefiting from two private low-cost spay and neuter clinics, and aided by a well-established network of 85 approved rescue groups and 400 volunteers, the city pound has seen the number of incoming animals drop by 4.6 percent over the past decade, from 27,000 to 26,000 last year. It's cut its euthanasia rate by 17 percent.

Now, nearly half of all animals that enter the shelter leave alive.

That puts Austin well ahead of just about anywhere else in Texas, including Houston, but not far enough in front to appease local activists like Ryan Clinton. He faults his city for failing to adopt the policies enacted more than a decade ago in San Francisco, which became the nation's first city to end the killing of healthy non-aggressive animals in its shelter.

"The definition of insanity is not changing your ways and believing that the results will be different," said Clinton, who heads Fix Austin, an animal advocacy group. "We only get by by saying we are better than the worst."

Cities that look to Austin for guidance in reducing their animal euthanasia rates will learn that the politics of saving cats and dogs is as contentious as a roomful of cats and dogs.

Many in Austin's rescue community note that the city's euthanasia rate has been creeping upward since 2001. The reductions in euthanasia, they argue, occurred in the early years after city leaders vowed — but ultimately failed — to become "no kill" by 2002. Today, more than a third of all cats and dogs deemed fit for adoption by shelter staff is euthanized.

Nathan Winograd says that usually, such failures are due to decisions made by shelter management: "The buck stops at the shelter director's desk," he's said. So let's hear from Austin's shelter director:

Dorinda Pulliam, director of the Town Lake Animal Center, said: " 'No-kill' is dramatic, and communities can get behind it, but it can be disappointing because you don't get the outcome people expect." Many animals, she said, have to be euthanized because they're too sick, injured or aggressive to be rehabilitated.

But critics say Austin could save as many as 90 percent of the animals that enter its shelter if it embraced the policies and programs that led to significant euthanasia reductions in places like San Francisco, and more recently, in Reno, Nev., and Philadelphia.

They fault Austin for failing to implement off-site adoptions and allowing only employees and volunteers, not the public, to foster kittens and puppies too young to survive shelter conditions.

Nathan J. Winograd, a former criminal prosecutor who founded the No Kill Advocacy Center and who offers seminars to municipal shelter employees around the country on how to achieve "no kill," status said: "When you make a claim that you're going to be no kill in the millennium and basically a decade later you're killing half the animals, you have to classify that as failure. ... I think it's great Austin is saving 48 percent of its animals but it would be saving 85 or 90 percent if its leadership rigorously or comprehensively implemented all the services and programs."

Pulliam was quick to defend her agency. She said Austin failed to achieve its "no kill" goal because "there was no strategic plan" — just a list of good ideas.

Ultimately, she said, the problem of homeless animals is a community problem.

"The city shelter can't be held singularly accountable because people in the community are the ones creating it."

The "people in the community are the ones creating it," she says, in the same breath as admitting there was "no strategic plan," just a list of good ideas. Hello, cognitive dissonance. But there's more:

She believes the majority of animals that get put down are simply not fit for adoption. "The easy pickings are getting adopted. The animals that are left are the hard-core problems."

I would guess that's why you're a highly trained professional, hired specifically to come up with strategies to deal with problems, rather than just process the low-lying fruit? What about Nathan Winograd's "No Kill Equation," foster problems, off-site adoptions, and all the other programs that have been successful over and over in other communities?

She said it would be irresponsible to open a public foster program for kittens and puppies, since not everyone knows about caring for kittens and puppies.

Off-site adoptions work in communities that have shelters in remote locations and not centrally located ones, like Town Lake in central Austin.

"We have more people here selecting animals than I have staff to process."

She has more people in the community who want to adopt than she can process with her staff, but it's the community that is to blame? Can she even hear herself? But don't worry about her overworked staff, trying to handle the deluge of people who want to adopt from them but can't because they're too busy killing cats and dogs in the back room:

That may change. The city recently approved plans to move the Town Lake shelter to a more out-of-the-way area east of Interstate 35.

Winograd says the plan will be a death sentence for thousands of animals.

"I can't think of a business in the country, across any industry, that says it's better to be where the people aren't. In terms of a retail business, and sheltering is like a retail business, it doesn't make sense. It just shows you how desperate they are to do what they've always done."

The writer of the article concludes, "Today, death remains a part of life at Austin's city shelter."

Now, to take that bitter taste out of your mouth and possibly even glue my poor shattered skull back together, head on over to Pet Connection and see what Nathan Winograd and Richard Avaninzo are doing to stop the use of killing as a form of population control in America's shelters.

Project Runway is totally gay

Since Season Four of Project Runway is the gayest TV show ever -- 7 out gay male contestants, one out gay judge (Michael Kors) and one out gay host (Tim Gunn), and you know, it's about the fashion industry -- those nice boys at AfterElton.com asked me to do weekly recaps on each episode this season.

And since it's about clothes and shoes and everything I love, I said yes. The first one went up this week:

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Project Runway.

Love because, hello…. I love clothes, I love fashion, I love those shoes models wear that make them walk in that long, lean, painfully swaybacked way.

Hate because when I say I love clothes, what I mean is I love clothing made from fabric, and not something you can throw together using materials obtained strictly from the local produce market and items left in the bus station lost and found. Which there’s been a little too much of on Project Runway in the past.

The rest is here. I actually find a way to mention my dogs. Twice.

Best. Horseshit. Review. Ever.

John Scalzi is the smartest funniest man alive. I want to be him when I grow up. Via email from Gina:

Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas.

[....]

And you say, “Well, that’s all very nice. But it’s still just an enormous load of horseshit.”

And this is, in sum, the Creation Museum.

He goes on:

The Museum is casually trying to establish an equivalence between science and creationism by accrediting them both as legitimate “starting points” for any discussion of biology, geology and cosmology. This would cause any scientist worth his or her salt to have a positively cinematic spit take, because it’s horseshit, but if you don’t know any better (say, if you’ve been fed a line of crap your whole life along the lines of “science is just another religion”) it sounds perfectly reasonable. And so if you buy that, then the next room, filled with large posters that offer on equal footing the creationist and scientific takes on the creation of the universe and evolution, seems perfectly reasonable, too: Heck, we can both have our theories! They’re both okay.

The problem with this is that creationism isn’t a theory, it’s an assertion, to wit: The entire universe was created in six days, the days are 24-hour days, the layout for the creation and for the early history of the planet and humanity is in the first chapter of Genesis and it is exactly right. Everything has to be made to conform to these assertions, which is why creationist attempts at science are generally so damn comical and refutable. This is also why the “different starting points, same facts” mantra is laughably false on its face — creationism has to have different facts to explain the world. It’s a little idiotic to establish as a “fact” that both science and creationism acknowledge, say, that apes exist, but to paper over the difference in the set of “facts” that explain how the apes got here, or to imply that a creationist assertion (apes created on the fifth day) is logically or systematically equivalent to decades of rigorous scientific process in the exploration of evolution.

But none of this is immediately obvious stuff and certainly the Creation Museum isn’t going to go out of its way to point it out; quite the opposite, in fact, since everything relies on the audience swallowing that whopping load of horseshit right up front. Thus the avuncular fake paleontologist at the start of the tour, looking all squinty and trustworthy and setting forth his load of utter horseshit in a tone of calm sincerity. Why wouldn’t you believe him? He’s a scientist, after all. Once you buy the initial premise, the rest comes easy, or, well, easier, anyway.

Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts. It’s all there in the book, son, all you have to do is look.

Read it until the tears roll down your face.

Did I read that right?

Someone bought ONE HUNDRED copies of Nathan Winograd's book "Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America" from my Amazon.com bookstore.

I'm guessing a whole lotta legislators are going to be getting it in their stockings this holiday season. Thanks to whoever bought it through my Amazon link, but more importantly, thanks for spreading the word!

Nathan Winograd in San Francisco

On Thursday night, I braved some of the worst parking in San Francisco to hear Nathan Winograd speak to a packed house.

It was the latest stop on his nationwide book tour for “Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America.” He only has two dates left, and you’d think that by now he’d be running out of steam. You’d be wrong.

I wasn't able to actually liveblog the appearance as there was no wireless at the venue, but I did the next best thing and wrote it up (hey! no typos!) at Pet Connection:

In 1974, animal welfare groups including HSUS, the American Humane Association (AHA), the ASPCA, and the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) met in Chicago to investigate the cause of surplus cats and dogs in American shelters. Who, they asked, is to blame?

First, Winograd said, were the animals themselves. They were “to blame” for not being adoptable enough, with shelters estimating that only around 40 percent of the animals entering their doors were adoptable. They had a moral obligation to kill the other 60 percent.

The next group to get blamed were, of course, pet owners, and the answer to pet owner irresponsibility was more laws. Leash laws, limit laws, mandatory spay/neuter proposals, prohibitions against feeding strays, animal seizures allowed by animal control officers, and increased licensing fees exploded across the country after 7000 copies of the conference proceedings were distributed to shelters nationwide. “Shelters became adversaries of the public, often the most compassionate members of the public.”

As a consequence, shelters that were complaining they didn’t have the money to implement lifesaving programs like low-cost spay/neuter clinics or care for the animals inside their walls were diverting more resources to bringing in more animals, thus driving their kill rates even higher.

Read the whole very long thing here... and then, if you haven't already, READ THE BOOK!

Gina Spadafori on HSUS and No-Kill

Last night, I was at the talk "Redemption" author Nathan Winograd gave in San Francisco. I'll be blogging about it later over at Pet Connection. But while I was there, Gina Spadafori was doing some thinking about yesterday's post on No Kill from the Humane Society of the United States' Wayne Pacelle, and her commentary is brilliant:

Now, now, Mr. Pacelle, let’s give credit where credit is due. You wouldn’t even be posting this were it not for “Redemption.” And the no-kill movement — this semantic distinction of yours is more face-saving BS — hasn’t “divided our strengths” but rather energized and focused a new army of animal-lovers who are tired, tired, tired of the intitutional status quo of shelters run by people who cannot see any way out except to empty the cages by killing, fill them again and blame “bad people” for the problem. I’m really sorry if your feelings are hurt by the charges in “Redemption,” but it was apparently the only way to get your attention.

However, I’m absolutely delighted that you’re on the target and on the team now. I’m sure you’ll now be wanting to change your zeal for misguided mandatory spay-neuter legislation like California’s AB 1634 that targets reputable breeders and gives puppy-mills a free pass. I’m also sure you’ll be wanting to look more at the Maddie’s Fund model, of community engagement towards no-kill goals.

And I’m sure, more than anything else, you’ll be wanting to put your money where your mouth is, and loosen the HSUS purse strings for a massive program supporting the building of no-kill regional efforts and promoting cooperative strategies that bring all animal-lovers into the fight.

Am I right? Words are cheap, Mr. Pacelle. Let’s see some action.

Read more here.

Back from the frozen Northwest

I just got home from my trip to Washington. I spent the first few days visiting my friend Terri in the Hood Canal area, getting to know her Silken Windhounds Teddy and Phoenix, and falling in love all over again with her deerhounds Tor and Lilibet, who I knew since, well... before they were born, actually.

Tor is the world's biggest lover, a 100 pound lap dog.

Terri's place is absolutely gorgeous, a fairy tale woodland setting full of mists and sparkling with FROST because it was freezing. Terri and I don't have the same internal thermostat setting, so my desire for the house to be somewhat warmer than the outdoors conflicted with her desire to sleep on a block of ice, and I spent most of my visit with my teeth chattering.

She also took me bird watching, a first for me. Which leads me to the following comment: I'm very concerned about all the birds who seem to think they are fish. I have heard the song, and it says "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly." In Washington, apparently many birds think they are fish.

Seriously, we saw a bald eagle, and although I pretended not to care, I actually thought it was pretty cool.

Also we saw a seal and Terri didn't know what it was. So she should probably check out the "mammal" section of her wildlife books once or twice. ;)

The Seattle portion of my trip was very different, and not just because the hotel had central heat and I could control the room's thermostat. It was also because, of course, Seattle is the spiritual home of Nordstrom, and I spent several hours wandering its aisles and meeting my new best friend, the guy at the Chanel makeup counter. More on that later in a post-vacation edition of "Stuff I Like."

I also had lunch with my editor from AfterElton.com, Michael Jensen, and his partner, Brent Hartinger. I already knew I adored Michael but meeting him just made it even more so, and Brent and I bonded over the Xena love. When he started analyzing the impact of the Season Three "rift" arc on their relationship, I bounced up and down in my seat and did my best fangirl squee.

Kyrie is completely punishing me for abandoning her (let's forget the twice-daily dogwalker, the two friends who stayed at the house for no other reason than to feed and love them, and my mom, who like the best grandmothers, spoils them rotten when I'm gone), but Rebel is following me from room to room.

It's good to be home.