See the video below to understand the third part of that statement a little better…and I REALLY want one of those shirts.

As expected, Apple’s new wunderkind, the iPad, is taking the tech world by storm…however it is not without it’s detractors. In fact, the very power and savagery of apple’s hype machine is starting to put people off about the first of the coming wave of Tablet PCs.

In response to the endless amount of press about the iPad, Billy Kimball at The New Yorker decided to publish the following list of The Least Common Complaints About the iPad…and it was simply too rich not to repost here.

· Too salty.

· Time-travel app does not automatically adjust for Julian calendar.

· When used as tanning bed, battery life is limited.

· Not rhino-proof.

· Salesperson in Apple Store not wearing ironic “jazzman” hat.

· Not available in soothing Harvest Gold color.

· Strange odor coming from husband while using iPad.

· For $499, I was expecting a few more sequins.

· No USB port for whatever it is that they do.

· The iBookstore ichthyology section includes almost nothing on lampreys.

· When used as murder weapon, oleophobic coating does not completely eliminate incriminating fingerprints.

· Copying document files requires installation of forty-dollar iCarbonCopy app.

· Virtual cupholder does not actually hold cups.

· Unwilling to buy anything from Apple ever since Steve Jobs killed my parents.

· Insufficient media coverage.

· Original iPad was good enough for Grandpa and it’s good enough for me.

· Upscaling makes porn unexpectedly upsetting.

· After owning a Kindle for three weeks, I have become deeply loyal to the brand.

· The virtual keyboard is too %&@#! hard to use.

· New York Herald Tribune not available online anyway.

Spike

Plant a tree of glass and iron and burnt stone.

Drive it deep, a spike in the heart of the matter.

Make your stand, keep your counsel.

Drive it deep.

Let the world

and the heavens

and all the delights of creation

whirl around it.

Whirl around you.

Whirl away.

Wait a way.

Wait for the end of the world, a spike in the heart of the matter.

A spike in the end of the world.

Bell Jar

Bell jar on the shelf, blue cascading down to grey.

Watching light distort to fit the shape, smoothing and sagging.

Time in a bottle, blue down to grey.

Filled with the past.

Distorting.

To fit the shape.

I have often commented here on the amazing arrogance of modern society. We are taught a contempt for the past from an early age, or perhaps that is just human nature. I remember distinctly being certain as a child that color didn’t exist in the past, and that the world of history had been in black and white. Convincing me otherwise was something of a chore.

In the same way, we tend to think that the things which give our lives color, such as sex, either didn’t exist in the past or were a sad shadow of their modern glory. That is especially true when we think of the attitudes of our female ancestors to sex…they must have been repressed, cold, trapped in a web of superstition and repression and fear before modern birth control, Cosmo and Hello Kitty vibrators set them free. However, was that really true?

Some new scholarship is emerging that shows that perhaps our great grandmothers may not have been so different in bed than our wives and girlfriends…as disturbing as that image may be.

The following is reposted from Stanford Magazine.

The Sex Scholar

Decades before Kinsey, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher polled Victorian-era women on their bedroom behavior—then kept the startling results under wraps.

BY KARA PLATONI

IN 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford’s hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler nearly put it aside, figuring it was a manuscript for one of Mosher’s published works, mostly statistical treatises on women’s height, strength and menstruation. But instead, he recalls, “I opened it up and there were these questionnaires”— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.

In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s. The Mosher Survey recorded not only women’s sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren’t so Victorian after all.

Indeed, many of the surveyed women were decidedly unshrinking. One, born in 1844, called sex “a normal desire” and observed that “a rational use of it tends to keep people healthier.” Offered another, born in 1862, “The highest devotion is based upon it, a very beautiful thing, and I am glad nature gave it to us.”

The survey’s genesis—like its rediscovery—was a fortuitous accident. Mosher started it in 1892 as a 28-year-old biology undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin; she had been asked to address a local Mother’s Club on “the marital relation” and as a single, childless woman seems to have used data collection to fill gaps in her knowledge. Afterward, Mosher continued conducting surveys until 1920, using variations on the same form and amassing 45 profiles in all. Yet Mosher never published or drew more than cursory observations from her data. She died in 1940, and the survey was entirely forgotten when Degler unearthed it.

“I remember I was so surprised when I first opened it and saw what was there,” recalls Degler, 89, the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, emeritus. “I said to the librarian there, ‘Did anyone ever use these papers before?’ I was surethat they’d been used before. [The subject] was something that was so instantaneously interesting at this point. And they said no, no one ever had looked at any of the papers, and certainly not at that survey. That’s one of the great experiences of my life as a historian.”

Degler alerted the world to the survey’s existence in 1974 by analyzing it in theAmerican Historical Review, concluding that although in the Victorian era “there was an effort to deny women’s sexual feelings . . . the Mosher Survey should make us doubt that the ideology was actually put into practice.” The survey was a sensation. Degler recalls feminist historians coming to the archives to make copies, and in 1980 it was printed as a book that soon hit college classrooms.

Mosher’s survey, says Stanford historian Estelle Freedman, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, was “a goldmine” for scholars. In an era when “the public ideal was that women should be very discreet, if not ignorant, about sexuality,” says Freedman, Mosher was “asking very modern questions. She’s opening up an inquiry about what is the meaning of sexuality for women.” Mosher’s survey, like her life, gave poignant testimony to the complex desires of women who were caught between traditional feminine norms and 20th-century freedoms.

BORN IN 1863 in Albany, N.Y., young Clelia had a scientific bent encouraged by her father, Dr. Cornelius Mosher, whom she idolized. He took her on his medical rounds and taught her to love botany and literature. Yet he couldn’t bear to let his beloved—and somewhat sickly—daughter attend college, then considered a strain on young women’s health. He tried to distract Clelia by helping her set up a small florist shop, but she squirreled away tuition money and off she went.

Mosher’s college career was somewhat nomadic. In 1889, she entered Wellesley as a 25-year-old freshman but struggled academically and with ill health. She spent her junior year at the University of Wisconsin, where she conducted her first surveys, and in 1892 transferred to Stanford, enrolling in its second class of students. She received a physiology degree in 1893 and her master’s in physiology in 1894, while working as an assistant in the department of hygiene teaching health, physiology and exercise to female students.

Thanks to a steady supply of young female research subjects, Mosher’s scholarly aim soon became clear: to prove that women were not inferior to men, and that frailties chalked up to sex were really the effects of binding garments, insufficient exercise and mental conditioning. Her master’s thesis, for example, showed that women breathe from the diaphragm, as men do, rather than from the chest, as was believed at the time. She concluded that this so-called biological difference was really due to tight corsetry.

She also began tracking students’ menstrual periods, hoping to upend “functional periodicity,” the idea that menstruation debilitated women. It was a canny subject choice for an ambitious female investigator. “That was not research that men could do easily, so she definitely claimed an area that was not accessible to men for her own research,” says Elizabeth Griego, who wrote her 1983 dissertation on Mosher for an education doctorate at UC-Berkeley and spent most of the early 1980s in the Stanford archives sifting through Mosher’s papers. (Griego is now vice president for student life at the University of the Pacific.)

But it wasn’t until after 1896, when Mosher had moved on to Johns Hopkins to obtain her MD, that she analyzed her data. Again, she blamed nurture over nature: Painful menstruation, she concluded, was in most cases caused by inactivity, poor muscular development and the very idea of “inevitable illness.” Sending girls to bed to dwell upon their discomfort, Mosher wrote, “produce[s] a morbid attitude and favor[s] the development and exaggeration of whatever symptoms there may be.” Mosher was not subtle about her motivation for seeking to discredit functional periodicity. “Equal pay for women means equal work; unnecessary menstrual absences mean less than full work,” she wrote. Convinced that women should stay active throughout their periods, Mosher even invented abdominal exercises—dubbed “moshers”—to counteract menstrual pain.

‘The skirt, as modified by the vagaries of fashion, has a direct bearing on the health, development and efficiency of the woman. In 1893-96 I made a series of observations on the clothing of ninety-eight young women. The average width of skirt was then 13.5 feet. The weight of the skirt alone was often as much as the entire weight of the clothing worn by the modern girl.’

–Clelia Mosher, Strength of Women (c. 1920)

By the time Mosher received her MD in 1900, there were approximately 7,000 female doctors and surgeons in the United States (almost 6 percent of the total), but they still faced discrimination. Mosher turned down a job as an assistant to a gynecological surgeon when told that men would refuse to work under her. She returned to Palo Alto and opened a private practice, but struggled to get patient referrals from male colleagues or win grants to fund her menstruation studies. In 1910, Stanford offered her an assistant professorship in personal hygiene as the medical adviser for women, and Mosher eagerly returned to academic life. “I think she started out thinking she would like to be a doctor and perhaps a surgeon, but she found the doors closed to her very quickly,” muses Griego.

Instead, Griego says, Mosher found what mattered to her: a living wage, intellectual freedom and access to research subjects. Mosher restarted her menstruation research and completed a study showing that the average height of Stanford’s entering female students had increased 1.5 inches in 20 years, a change she attributed to better exercise and comfortable clothing. Mosher became a full professor in 1928, one year before she retired.

Despite the increasing prevalence of professional women, Griego says Mosher was an “intellectual loner.” She didn’t join women’s professional groups or bond with many female academics. (Her Stanford research collaborators were male.) “She was really not very interested in the kinds of things that even faculty women—certainly faculty wives—were interested in,” says Griego. “She wasn’t interested in teas, she wasn’t particularly interested in nurturing or mentoring women. She was really a researcher and she wanted to be accepted for her scientific approach to subjects.”

She cut an odd figure on campus, Griego says, in her habitual “mannish suit.” In her writings, Mosher railed against fashion: Sewing dainty clothing wasted women’s study time; a young girl “making tatting to decorate her clothes or knitting or embroidering while her brother is playing ball” would grow feeble and sedentary.

Mosher never married and had few close relationships, although her mother lived with her on campus. Mosher felt this anomie deeply. A diary entry from 1919 laments: “I am finding out gradually why I am so lonely. The only things I care about are things which use my brain. The women I meet are not so much interested and I do not meet many men, so there is an intellectual solitude which is like the solitude of the desert—dangerous to one’s sanity.”

Some archival scraps hint at her longing for connection: an unfinished novel whose heroine chooses career over the man she loves, musings on the mother-daughter bond and, the most poignant, a series of letters to an imaginary friend. “I get the sense of companionship and you are spared the boredom of reading them,” Mosher wrote impishly in 1921. But in 1926, her tone was more despairing. “Dear ‘Friend who never was,’” she wrote, “I have given up ever finding you. I have tried out all my friends and they have not measured up to my dreams.”

MOSHER’S BIGGEST scientific splash also eluded her during her lifetime.

Because it was hidden so long, her sex survey had little influence on her contemporaries, but today it’s a valuable historic document that gainsays the stereotype that Victorian women knew little of sex and desired it even less. Granted, it is small and nonrepresentative, favoring well-educated, middle-class white women, and only those willing to disclose intimate matters. Mosher took care to obscure their identities—names and residences were not recorded—but it’s likely the group included Stanford faculty and wives, the Mother’s Club members from Mosher’s Wisconsin days and other women she knew. Of those surveyed, 34 had attended a university or teachers’ college. Nine were Stanford alumnae, six from Cornell; other alma maters included Wellesley, Vassar and the University of California. Thirty respondents had worked before marriage, mostly as teachers.

Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they’d gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like “watching farm animals.” Yet no matter how sheltered they’d initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.

Unlike Mosher’s other work, the survey is more qualitative than quantitative, featuring open-ended questions probing feelings and experiences. “She’s actually asking these questions not about physiology or mechanics—she’s really asking about sexual subjectivity and the meaning of sex to women,” Freedman says. Their responses were often mixed. Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn’t. One slept apart from her husband “to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse.” Some didn’t enjoy sex but faulted their partner. Mosher writes: [She] “Thinks men have not been properly trained.”

Their responses reflected the cultural shifts of the late 19th century, as marriage became viewed as a romantic union, not just an economic one, and as people began to dissociate sex from procreation, says Freedman. One woman, born in 1867, wrote that before marriage she believed sex to be only for reproduction, but later changed her mind: “In my experience the habitual bodily expression of love has a deep psychological effect in making possible complete mental sympathy & perfecting the spiritual union that must be the lasting ‘marriage’ after the passion of love has passed away with the years.” Wrote another, born in 1863, “It seems to me to be a natural and physical sign of a spiritual union, a renewal of the marriage vows.”

‘A great responsibility rests upon us as physicians and teachers of physical training to lead women to ideas of health, to hold out to each one an attainable physical ideal, to teach the mechanism of our wonderful bodies so that she obeys the laws of her body, laws learned so perfectly that they are obeyed automatically.’

–Clelia Mosher, The Relation of Health to the Woman Movement, 1915

Anxieties about unwanted pregnancies are also clear. This was a hot topic during the 19th century, when the marital fertility rate fell by half despite the criminalization of abortion and contraception, Freedman says. At least 30 respondents reported attempting birth control anyway. Many mentioned using douching, withdrawal or the rhythm method; a few had tried a “womb veil” or male condoms.

“My husband and I . . . believe in intercourse for its own sake—we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness,” wrote one woman, born in 1860. “On the other hand there are sometimes long periods when we are not willing to incur even a slight risk of pregnancy, and then we deny ourselves the intercourse, feeling all the time that we are losing that which keeps us closest to each other.” A woman born in 1862, who felt that without “a strong desire for children” marriage was no more than “legalized prostitution,” nevertheless wrote: “I most heartily wish there were no accidental conceptions. I believe the world would take a most gigantic stride toward high ethical conditions, if every child brought into the world were the product of pure love and conscious choice.”

So if not all Victorian women scorned sex, why do we think of them as prudish? First, says Freedman, the notion of passionlessness wasn’t universal, it was a class privilege, a way for wealthier women to claim respectability that more sexually vulnerable slave, immigrant and working-class women couldn’t. “To some extent it’s a protection of women from the sense of availability, and in other ways it’s a limitation on them and denying their sexuality,” Freedman says. Virtue was also a way for women to demonstrate good citizenship—men expressed this in the public sphere, and women in the home.

Also, some historical sources are misleading. As Degler pointed out in his 1974 article, until the Mosher Survey, much information about Victorian sex lives came from health advice books, like those of Dr. William Acton, who wrote in 1865: “The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally.” But these books, wrote Degler, designed to urge temperance to young women, were prescriptive rather than de-scriptive: “The so-called Victorian conception of women’s sexuality was more that of an ideology seeking to be established than the prevalent view or practice of even middle-class women.”

More accurate portrayals of women’s lives likely were confined to diaries and letters. Similarly, Griego says, women probably unburdened themselves to Mosher as a well-credentialed female physician. “They wouldn’t have responded to just anyone with that confidential information, but her own self-image as a researcher and scientist encouraged them to be honest and factual.” Although the survey’s size means we can’t draw broad conclusions about Victorian life from it, Freedman says, it’s still a remarkably telling document, “a lens on a moment of transition.”

We may never know what Mosher made of her own survey. Her brief introduction merely notes that it provided “a priceless knowledge for a practicing physician and teacher; a background sufficiently broad to avoid prejudice in her work with women.” A comment on the era’s falling birthrate contains her only analysis: “The maladjustments in marriage occasionally occur at the first consummation of the marital relation. The woman comes to this new experience of life often with no knowledge. The woman while she may give mental consent often shrinks physically. Her slower time reaction deprives her of all physical response, or (2) too often her training has instilled the idea that any physical response is coarse, common and immodest which inhibits proper part in this relation.”

Ultimately, Mosher’s story is deeply ironic: She was a staunch feminist who remained aloof from sisterhood, a woman who rigorously researched sexuality and marriage yet probably experienced neither, a pioneering scholar who longed for recognition but did not live to enjoy it. Today there is an often well-rewarded place in our society for awkward overachievers, but Mosher struggled her entire life with her ungainly intellect and with being a woman in a man’s research world.

“We need people to go before us, and she was certainly a way-shower for a generation that followed her,” Griego says. “Even though she was not the kind of person that women of her time wanted to emulate, still she held out the possibility that women could be intellectuals, they could be scientists.”

In her own writings, Mosher was acutely aware of her foresight, and of the possibilities that lay ahead for women once sex became less of a secret and gender less of a burden. “Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman’s real capacities are,” Mosher wrote in 1923. “She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?”

Springtime tends to be a season of dark memories and bittersweet moments for me, but that was made all the more visceral this week after reading the story of Mike Penner/Christine Daniels.

Life is seldom easy, and the hardest thing is always finding our proper place and role in it…where we feel safe, comfortable, loved. Seeking it against all odds is an act of courage, often a source of tragedy…and I for one bitterly mourn the death of Mike/Christine, and hope that the life they lived will help other people find the peace they never found.

Read on, to understand.

The following is reposted from the LA Times.

Public triumph, private torment

By Christopher Goffard

In late April 2007, Mike Penner published an article unlike any of the thousands he had written for the Los Angeles Times. It was brief, just 823 words, and placed without fanfare on the second page of the Sports section that had been his home for 23 years.

Under the headline "Old Mike, new Christine," Penner explained that he would soon assume a female identity and byline, a decision that followed "a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy."

It was "heartache and unbearable discomfort" to remain a man, he explained. Being a woman promised "joy and fulfillment." The article ended on a hopeful note: "This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship."

Gone was quiet, circumspect Mike Penner, replaced by ebullient, outgoing — and instantly famous — Christine Daniels. Celebrity meant a megaphone, and Daniels vowed to use it as an advocate. She told her story at transsexual conferences across the country, becoming a symbol of courage to a transgender community inspired by the most visible coming-out in decades.

A year after the essay, the Daniels byline vanished from the newspaper, and within months Penner was back at work, living as a man and writing under his male name. Once so voluble about the reasons for becoming Christine, Penner was silent about the reasons for abandoning the identity.

This time, there was no essay, no explanation. But friends saw a person in torment. Last November, in the parking garage of the apartment complex where he lived alone, Penner killed himself. He was 52.

The duality that defined the sportswriter’s life divided the grieving. Mourners were split between two memorial services, one for Mike and one for Christine.

Penner was an Inglewood native who spent nine years in what he called a "very strict Catholic school." He was an avid weekend soccer player and a lover of the punk band the Clash. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a receding hairline and a penchant for untucked shirts.

In 1983, he jumped from the Anaheim Bulletin to The Times. Over the years, he covered high-school sports, tennis, the Angels and the NFL and developed a reputation as a wry essayist who relished global spectacles such as the Olympics and World Cup soccer.

Penner and his wife, Lisa Dillman, also a Times sportswriter, relied intensely on one another in their 20-year marriage. "It seemed to a lot of us that they were just this great love story," said Randy Harvey, formerly the Sports editor, now an associate editor at The Times. "They just seemed to be in sync — not necessarily with the world around them, but with each other." The couple had no children.

It is not clear when Dillman learned about her husband’s persistent feeling that he was imprisoned in a male body, a condition known as "gender dysphoria." In a recent column, ESPN personality Rick Reilly, who worked with Penner at The Times in the early 1980s, said his friend confided to him that he kept a dress, wig and pearls hidden in a tool box behind his bed.

By his mid-40s, Penner was regularly dressing as a woman in private and soon was venturing to transgender hangouts and attending Metropolitan Community Church, known as a gay/transgender haven. He sought counseling at the Los Angeles Gender Center.

The many friendships he built at these places were close yet compartmentalized. He could confide what he called his "most important truth," but not his real name or where he worked. He used the name Christine, a nod to personal hero Christine Jorgensen, the transsexual who helped bring the phenomenon out of the shadows of early-1950s America.

"Christine kept telling me that she was afraid to go out in the ‘real world’ for fear of being laughed at and worse," said Susan Horn, a transsexual who counseled Penner through the coming-out process. Horn, a Los Angeles paralegal, was in the final stages of her own transition, and the price had already been high. The attendant depression had cost her a 30-year career as a lawyer, and her teenage daughter had said, "You’re dead — I’ll never talk to you again."

The sportswriter accompanied Horn to Sisley, an Italian restaurant in Sherman Oaks, for dinner in August 2005, dressed as a woman. It was the first time Christine had stepped outside the sanctuary of the transgender community.

"Christine was very nervous and looking in every direction to see if anyone was looking or staring," recalled Horn, now 61. "The waiter treated us just like he would treat any two women, and Christine was in heaven."

After dinner, they shopped for shoes and saw "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

Later, Christine would recall the night with delight in an e-mail to a friend: "I know I laughed longer and harder during that movie than I would have in boy mode. To be in a favorite environment (next to music, movies are my No. 1 love) and to be yourself — Wow!"

That evening, however, the sportswriter wept "about the prospect of having to become Mike again when she got home. It was devastating to her," Horn said. "It became more and more difficult for her to change back."

Still, Penner kept his dual identities secret, his selves boxed up as carefully as the wig and pearls.

Because many people afflicted with gender dysphoria don’t seek medical attention, there are no solid statistics regarding their numbers. Nor is there scientific consensus on the cause of the condition, though studies in the Netherlands point to the influence of brain anatomy.

In the past, patients with the condition felt the need to pick a male or female gender, but today younger people increasingly eschew hormones and surgery to find "an identity that’s kind of in the middle," said Chris Kraft, a psychologist at the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit at Johns Hopkins medical center in Baltimore.

The path is harder for the middle-aged, because many have a rigid sense of how men and women are supposed to look. Penner told Horn and another transsexual friend, Amy LaCoe, that he wanted sex-change surgery. Before American doctors will perform the operation, they require patients to live openly for a year in their new gender to confront the difficulties and sacrifices involved without illusion or false hope.

It’s called the "real-life test," and as he prepared for it, Penner gathered longtime friends and handed them packets about transsexualism.

He took pains, a friend recalled, to remove from the Web every picture he could find of himself as a man, consigning what he considered a counterfeit self to the past. He debated how to come out at work and worried how the publicity would affect Dillman. People who had been through the process advised a low-key approach.

At a meeting with then-Sports editor Harvey in late February 2007, Penner revealed that he would soon become Christine Daniels (his middle name was Daniel) and suggested that perhaps he should move to The Times’ Calendar section.

"I thought he felt maybe we wouldn’t accept him in Sports," Harvey said. "I told him it was a bad idea to leave Sports. We were family to him."

Penner wanted to become Daniels quietly, without explanation to readers. But Harvey pointed out that the name change was bound to become news. "I said, ‘I think you need to write it. Don’t let anybody else write it first,’ " he recalled.

Penner agreed but was consumed with dread as publication day approached. He enlisted friends to monitor the e-mail feedback and sports-radio chatter.

The article, published April 26, 2007, became the paper’s most-viewed story of the year online, and the response — from colleagues and the public — was overwhelmingly positive. "One of the best days I’ve ever had," the sportswriter told National Public Radio.

Two weeks later, Dillman signed papers petitioning for divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences."

Transsexual friends — many of whom had lost families during their transition — recall warning Penner that maintaining the marriage was an unrealistic hope. Through a lawyer, he made overtures: Could the marriage be saved? The answer was no.

Daniels underwent electrolysis to have facial hair burned out at the root, took hormones, amassed a shoe collection and experimented with a variety of wigs: short, long, blond, brunet. She spoke in a soft, high voice, cried frequently, happy or sad. Daniels was "exuberant, dynamic, touchy, hugging, a vibrant, vivacious person," Harvey said.

She championed transsexual rights in print and was praised at gay and transgender conferences. She chronicled her transition in a Times blog, Woman in Progress.

"Everybody wanted some of her," said Donna Rose, a transsexual friend. "People are looking for hope."

Autumn Sandeen, another transsexual friend, said: "A lot of people who came out around 2007 said, ‘Her courage is what made me courageous enough to come out.’ "

A celebratory profile in the Advocate, a prominent gay publication, declared, "a heroine is born."

Daniels said that becoming a woman had been a matter of survival. "At some point, the gender dysphoria reaches a pitch so excruciating, the transsexual will barter anything and risk everything, just to have a chance at a future, any kind of future," she wrote in a Times review of transgender-themed films.

In the spotlight, Daniels seemed acutely self-conscious but also driven by a sense of purpose. She told people that God had given her a high profile in order to bring transsexualism into the mainstream.

"I think the prospect of what she could achieve was too attractive to turn down," said Christina Kahrl, a transsexual who works as a sportswriter for BaseballProspectus.com. "She was daring to do more than anyone had ever tried since Christine Jorgensen."

When British soccer superstar David Beckham arrived to play for the Los Angeles Galaxy in July 2007, Daniels joined the media fleet at Home Depot Center to greet him. It was Daniels’ first public appearance at a sports event, after 25 years of "dreaming about how it might play out if it ever came to be," she wrote on her blog.

Journalists who had known Penner for years got their first glimpse of Daniels, who recorded the event in a droll, triumphant tone. Beckham "arrived wearing a silver-gray Burberry suit, surrounded by a phalanx of assistants and yes-people," she wrote on her blog. "I arrived wearing a golden-hued top from Ross and a multicolored paisley skirt from Ames and a pair of open-toed tan heels from Aerosoles, surrounded by nobody. . . . "

Paul Oberjuerge, then a sports columnist for the San Bernardino Sun, was in the crowd. "I hate to be judgmental about these things, but Christine is not an attractive woman," he wrote on his blog, noting that Daniels had a prominent Adam’s apple and stood more than 6 feet tall in wobbly heels. "It seemed almost as if we’re all going along with someone’s dress-up role playing. . . . "

Daniels was wounded by such criticism — and by comments from other transsexuals who faulted her for an excessive interest in dresses, jewelry and other outward trappings of femininity.

As the year wore on, Daniels grew estranged from the Los Angeles transsexual community, complaining that she had become a fundraising tool. At one gathering, she spoke of how supportive the Los Angeles Times had been, only to be confronted by someone who insisted that this didn’t reflect the experience of most transsexuals.

"She didn’t know who to trust in the community," Sandeen said, "because all these people were willing to use her."

In October 2007, Daniels showed up at a Los Angeles studio to pose for photographs to accompany a profile in Vanity Fair magazine. The photographer, Robert Maxwell, said Daniels wore simple, elegant dresses in what was intended as a "conservative, classy-type look."

Maxwell said he sensed Daniels’ brittleness and tried to deal with her sensitively. On seeing the photos, she dissolved into tears, saying: "I’m ugly."

"I told her, ‘No, you’re beautiful,’ " Maxwell said. "I was trying to say all the right things. How do you tell someone who looks like a man, ‘You’re a beautiful woman’? I don’t know." As he tried to console her, Maxwell recalled, she pushed him away. The photo shoot was "a total debacle, probably the worst experience of my transition," Daniels wrote in an e-mail to a friend.

The photographer "apparently wanted to portray me as a man in a dress — my worst fear," Daniels wrote. "I felt betrayed, totally abused, and very very vulnerable and exposed and alone in the world."

The profile writer, Evan Wright, said that to write an honest article, he would have to observe that the sportswriter did not pass as a woman. "I thought, ‘Bottom line, she has a fantasy conception. She doesn’t accept who she is.’ "

Wright said that after the photo shoot, he was so afraid Daniels would commit suicide that he asked his editor to cancel the story. It was never written.

The episode seemed to mark a turning point, a retreat. By year’s end, Daniels had cut off many of her transsexual friends.

She let weeks pass without updating Woman in Progress. In February 2008, Tony Pierce, The Times’ blogs editor, asked Daniels whether she wanted to stop the blog.

"She said she didn’t want to be the spokesperson for anything, but unfortunately that’s what she had become," Pierce said. Posts remained infrequent, and Daniels eventually asked to have the blog discontinued.

One transgender friend, Sara Hayward, heard an eerie shifting in Daniels’ speech during a conversation in early March. Now and then, Daniels’ soft, steady voice would give way abruptly to Penner’s voice, deep and cracking. "It was two voices coming out of the same person," Hayward said.

Daniels, who had been writing a sports-media column called Sound and Vision, had her last byline in The Times on April 4, 2008, then went on extended disability leave. She was despondent — close friends knew she was manic depressive — failing to eat and stricken with esophageal pain.

Daniels told Amy LaCoe, her transsexual friend, that she had ruined her marriage and made a mess of her life. LaCoe insisted that Daniels stay with her for a couple months. "She stared at my bedroom ceiling for a long time," LaCoe said. "She had stopped caring about herself."

Daniels stopped taking hormones and began getting rid of the physical trappings of Christine, LaCoe said, giving the jewelry and shoe collection to friends, donating the wigs, carting the clothes to Goodwill. In a matter of months, the whole identity had been banished.

Just as Penner had once hunted down and removed his male pictures from the Web, he now sought to erase evidence that Christine Daniels had ever existed. He asked editors to have archives of the Woman in Progress blog erased. They refused, citing the paper’s policy of preserving its records.

Nevertheless, at some point the archives vanished. Pierce said he has been unable to retrieve the posts or determine who deleted them.

When the sportswriter returned to work as Mike Penner in late October 2008, co-workers noticed that his manner was remote, his handshake unsteady. His face was changed, the jaw line permanently smooth from electrolysis. He did not want to talk about his experience, much less write about it.

When a transsexual friend asked what had happened, Penner responded, "Well, that’s why there’s a real-life test." Friends said he held out hopes of saving his marriage, but by year’s end, his divorce was finalized.

In the summer of 2009, Horn and LaCoe said, he was hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation.Horn said that a delusional Penner called her from the hospital, accusing The Times of having broken into his apartment to steal compromising pictures.

On Nov. 25, over dinner with LaCoe at Marie Callender’s, Penner was deeply depressed and indifferent to advice. "He didn’t want to hear my mouth," she said. "Maybe he felt something was settled."

Penner had been renting a one-bedroom apartment at the Westwood Villa Apartments on Sepulveda Boulevard, a big, bedraggled, anonymous complex.

About 5:45 p.m. on Nov. 27, Penner entered the apartment office to deposit two envelopes in the outbox — payments to Verizon and a credit card company. Three hours later, neighbors found him slumped in the front seat of his 1997 Toyota Camry in the underground parking garage. The windows were fogged, and a vacuum hose stretched from the exhaust into the passenger window.

The silence that enveloped Penner’s last months now extends among almost all the journalists who knew him best at The Times, including his ex-wife, who covers the Clippers, and his brother John, who works on the copy desk. Neither responded to requests to be interviewed for this article.

At the family memorial service at Forest Lawn in Cypress, mourners were screened to keep out reporters who might write about it.

A second memorial service, open to anyone, was held weeks later at Metropolitan Community Church Los Angeles. The pastor made it clear, as did the picture on the program, that they were saying goodbye not to Mike Penner but to Christine Daniels.

Horn stepped onstage and told a personal story. When she came out as a transsexual, her teenage daughter had shunned her. After "Old Mike, new Christine" was published, her daughter called. She had read the article. She understood now.

"Christine did that for me," Horn said. "She did that for all of us."

Of course, in ten years it will be Daniel Radcliff appearing with the Royal Shakespeare, Emma Watson doing something shockingly intelligent and artistic in academia and Rupert “Harry Potter’s Ron” Grint in the corner seat on Hollywood Squares.

Still, I love all three of ‘em…

Looking for land in Second Life? In the mood to build a screamingly chic gothic castle, chain a few virgins in the dungeon and invite the neighbors over for coffee and Ghoul Scout cookies? Need that perfect estate on a remote promontory to brood in dashing, mysterious peace as you attempt to solve the riddle of instilling life in lifeless matter and/or how to mix the ideal Banana Daiquiri?

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No one boring, mundane or namby-pamby need apply. Void where prohibited.

In a few days a new Winterfell sim named Winterfell Ravens Reach will

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Illyria.

Raven’s Reach will host a wonderful event of inauguration, welcoming

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http://slurl.com/secondlife/Winterfell%20Ravens%20Reach/14/156/24

Winterfell reaches new heights of its spectacular amenity and style,

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read on for land opportunities, historical information and much more!

__________________________________

W I N T E R F E L L   R A V E N S   R E A C H

__________________________________

Ravens Reach will be the first sim to experience the renaissance of

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