A Gay Guide to the Super Bow & Straight Guys

from Project Q Atlanta

A gay guide to the Super Bowl & straight guys
By Project Q Atlanta | Feb 7, 2010 | 4:17 PM

Ready or not, you are bound to come in contact with Super Bowl XLIV and straight guys today. While your gay world may not come to a halt, the rest of the country has and we’ve got tips to help you survive.

There are plenty of gay angles surrounding the game, what with the Tim Tebow ad, the rejection of the ManCrunch commercial and the slew of hot jocks, including Sam Giguere, gay-marriage loving Scott Fujita (photo) and a shirtless, milk-slurping Reggie Bush.



But let’s get to the game. Advertising exec Donny Deutsch may not think you watch the game, but we know better. So, courtesy of those gay jocks at Outsports, we’ve got a primer on the actual game.

WHAT: Super Bowl XLIV (44 for those Roman-numerically impaired) features the New Orleans Saints (15-3) from the National Football Conference and the Indianapolis Colts (16-2) from the American Football Conference. The Colts have been made a 5-point favorite by the Vegas oddsmakers. The Colts conference, the AFC, has won seven of the last nine Super Bowls. I need to state up front that I am a huge Colts fans and will be in the minority in rooting interest. The sentimental story are the Saints and their bond to New Orleans, especially in light of Hurricane Katrina.

KICKOFF/TV: The game is set to begin at 6:25 p.m. EST (or sometime thereafter), shortly after Carrie Underwood belts out the National Anthem. Carrie Underwood, preceded by Jennifer Hudson preceded by Jordan Sparks as anthem singers. Is there some Super Bowl-“American Idol” tie-in I don’t know about?

FASHION NOTE: The Colts are the designated home team and will wear their royal blue jerseys with white pants. The Colts have a classic white helmet, with a blue horseshoe as the logo. It’s one of the best logos in sports. The Saints are also styling, and will wear their white jerseys with gold pants. Their helmet is cool gold color with a black fleur de lis.

Of course, the Super Bowl comes with parties. Lots of them. (We’ve got the rundown of the gay gatherings here.) And with the parties often come the straight guys. So here’s a primer on how to deal with them.

THE GAY ANGLE: One player to root for is Saints linebacker Scott Fujita, a Caucasian adopted and raised by a Japanese-American dad and Caucasian mom. Fujita is unequivocal in his support of gay marriage.

Fujita, a political science major from Cal-Berkeley, is married with two kids, but still hasn’t stopped ignorant NFL players from trying to get under his skin. “They call me the Pinko Communist Fag from Berkeley,” he told Zirin. He added that, “I know for the most part, [players] are a lot more tolerant than they get credit for but they’re not comfortable yet speaking out about it. It’s going to come in time. By in large, it’s an opinion that’s shared by more people than are realized. I just wish it was shared by everybody.”

THE GAME: After all the hype and distractions, there will be a game and it should be a good one. The Saints led the league in scoring, while the Colts offense is equally strong. The quarterbacks, Brees and Manning, are both excellent. Manning has an edge in his ability to read a defense, but Brees is no slouch.

You may be catching the game at one of the several gay parties scheduled around it—we’ve got a list of those here. But watching the Super Bowl often means coming in close contact with straight guys. Gawker knows this and offers a contract for getting along with your straight male friends.

While not as fraught or as common as the friendship between gay guys and straight girls, sometimes the butch and the femme want to come together in a Platonic fashion. This is great for both parties. Many gay men experienced teasing and torment in their younger years by the big, butch jocks and other assorted heteros in their high schools and this is a great way to get over the PTSD of daily name calling and atomic wedgies in the boys’ room. For straight guys, having a homo friend is a fine way to get over homophobia as well as welcoming him into the modern world of diversity and acceptance for all.

But straight guys, there are a few things we need to work out first. Don’t expect that we’re going to be the guy you point to when you have to say, “I love gay people! I’m friends with a gay!” and we’re not just going to let you draft off all our straight lady friends so that you can run off and make the future generation of babygays (but thanks for that). This should be a relationship of equals based on strictly above-the-belt affection and shared interest. We may be on different teams, but as men we’re all playing the same sport.

Of course, if you want to dispense with the game and straight guys, head to see Mary Edith Pitts and her show at Burkhart’s beginning at 9 p.m. Or there’s the Armorettes show at Blake’s. Start time is 8 p.m. Just don’t venture upstairs, as that’s where a bunch of gay athletes will be watching the game. Yes, that game.

A Third Revolution

As found on PC World.com

The IPad Isn't a Third Device, but a Third Revolution

By Dan Moren, Macworld.com

A few years ago I brought my MacBook into an Apple Store to get it serviced--this was a first-generation model, which had the rather unenviable habit of spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason.

The two Geniuses had looked over my computer with the same critical eye that an enthusiast might give a hot rod. "Look," said one, "he's replaced the battery monitor in the menu bar. And he's got the Dock down in the bottom right of the screen."

Like hot rodders, techies wear their tweaks and optimizations as badges of honor. To me, that's the chief distinction between power users and your average user: power users adapt computers to the way they work, instead of adapting the way they work to computers.

But something strange happened last week when I sat down at my MacBook after watching Steve Jobs unveil the iPad. I looked at all those little inscrutable icons in my menubar and saw them for what they were: hacks and shortcuts to "fix" the way the computer worked. Surely there must be a better way.

I was but a wee lad of four years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984 and first brought a graphical user interface to the masses. "Look," Apple said, "computers are powerful, useful tools, but they're clumsy and inelegant. Let us show you a better way." There was no shortage of resistance, especially from those who had gotten comfortable with typing their instructions at the blinking cursor.

Of course, the Mac was derided as a toy and not a tool for serious work, its mouse-driven approach deemed silly. While the Mac's market share remained small in the following years, the impact of its revolutionary interface was felt throughout the world--because every subsequent personal computer operating system followed the Mac's example.

And now, 26 years later, we're still interacting with our computers in fundamentally the same way: a cursor-driven interface in which we point, click, drag, arrange windows, use drop-down menus, and so on. Sure, the trappings have changed, but compare your Mac running Snow Leopard today with an original Macintosh running the first version of the Mac OS and the similarities largely outweigh the differences.

But as good as the Mac is, Apple realized that it wasn't good enough. Take the mouse, for example. There's a reason that Apple has insisted upon a single-button mouse for the last quarter century, even as its competitors have added extra buttons, scroll wheels, variable tracking, and more: Have you ever watched a complete novice try to learn to use a mouse? Before you even get to clicking--or right-clicking or scrolling--you have to learn how your movements translate into the movements of an arrow that flies around the screen. It makes a sort of sense, but I'd argue that much of that sense comes only because we're now used to it.

While PC makers tried to push computing forward by adding extra buttons and controls to try and provide more options for telling a computer what to do, Apple went in entirely the other direction, asking itself: how do we remove a layer of abstraction between the user and the computer?

That question eventually yielded the iPhone and the culmination of Steve Jobs's war on buttons. And it couldn't have come at a better time for Apple. As others have suggested, I suspect that the iPad was the device Apple had long wanted to release: a touchscreen replacement for the computer interface to which we've all become accustomed. But launching directly into such a product, even given the resurgence of the Mac and popularity of the iPod, would have been an uphill slog."

The mobile phone market provided a perfect opportunity to test the waters. In 2007, when Apple announced the iPhone, cell phones had long been ubiquitous, but smartphones were still just catching on; most were still too complex for the average user. The device itself presented a smaller, more compact canvas on which Apple could put its vision to the test. "Look," Apple said, "smartphones are powerful, useful tools, but they're clumsy and inelegant. Let us show you a better way."

Seventy-five million devices later, it's clear that this idea has resonated with users. And, like the Mac, the iPhone has encouraged other device makers to follow suit and introduce touchscreen smartphones of their own. But for Apple, the mobile phone market was never the ultimate goal: the iPhone and iPod touch were a virus of an idea, infecting all those users with a new way of doing things. The touchscreen interface was part of that idea, but it wasn't the whole idea any more than the whole idea of the original iMac was that it was blue. All those competitors just slapping touchscreens on their phones were digging in the wrong place.

Even introducing it into a market that's been primed to accept such an idea, the iPad is a bold, ambitious product. The smartphone, as a category, was still fairly young when the iPhone was introduced; the vast majority of users didn't yet have habits to change. But the way people interact with their computers has remained largely static for 25 years--it has a lot of inertia, and it's harder to move something with a lot of inertia.

The improvements to personal computing over the last quarter century have been, to use an oft-quoted expression, more evolutionary than revolutionary. Changes have been gradual: the ability to run multiple programs, for example, or full color. But with every additional level of complexity comes an additional way of simplifying that complexity. Mac OS X's Exposé is a great example: it's a fantastically helpful feature, but it's indicative of what is wrong with the computer experience. It's a shortcut, a hack to deal with something that's inherently inelegant: the fact that we all have a huge mass of stacking, overlapping windows as a result of a three-dimensional interface shoehorned into a two-dimensional screen.

But Apple's been experimenting for some time on the simplifications that the iPhone embodies. Take the introduction of iTunes (née SoundJam MP). Before iTunes, playing music on your computer involved programs more like Apple's QuickTime Player: you interacted with a music file in the same way that you interacted with a text document in your word processor. You went to the File menu, chose "Open File," and then navigated through your folders until you found the music file you wanted to play. If you were willing to spend the time, you could organize your music into folders to make them easier to find. Later on came the ability to create playlist files, if you wanted to listen to a particular set of music.

iTunes abstracted that process: you no longer dealt with files, you dealt with music. The program handled organizing files on the disk; you worried about organizing your music into the way you wanted to listen to it. You could still use iTunes to pull out a file if you wanted to give a copy to someone else (where legal, of course), but most of the time, you just want to listen to music, and iTunes simplified that. Apple then repeated the approach with iPhoto (although interestingly, it's never been quite able to decide if videos should live in iPhoto or iTunes).

The key here, as with the iPhone, is to abstract the nitty-gritty details of the underpinnings and remove obstructions in the way you do things. Much of the negative response to the iPad seems filled with anger--which, as Yoda adroitly pointed out, stems from fear--and it mostly comes from the kind of power users who like dealing with the underpinnings.

But I don't think the iPad heralds the death of the personal computer or, as many people seem somewhat strangely concerned about, the end of tinkering. It's not as though the iPad is going to murder curiosity. Some complain that Apple keeps locking out the jailbreakers with every revision of the iPhone OS, but the key point there is that the jailbreakers keep finding a way in. Cars are harder to tinker with today, but that hasn't stopped people from becoming mechanics. It's just that the vast majority of people don't care how it works under the hood, as long as it gets them from point A to point B.

For Apple, it's not about killing off tinkerers, but ensuring that not everybody who wants to use a computer has to be a tinkerer.

Few people mourned the damage the personal computer dealt to the typewriter, and most of those who did were either a) fueled by nostalgia or b) people who made typewriters. Few people mourned the damage that e-mail and the Internet dealt to the fax machine--in fact, we're mostly just pretty ticked off that the fax machine is still persistently clinging to life at all. In both cases, people embraced the new technology because it was, well, better.

This is the next phase of computing. Apple's not the only one to realize it, either. The approach of Google's Chrome OS is pretty different from what Apple is doing with the iPad, but it's not hard to see that it's aiming at the same target: making computing easier for the average user. I wager that we'll see a touchscreen tablet running Chrome OS within a year of the software's release, though I am skeptical of how effective that combination will be.

The iPad won't kill the computer any more than the graphical user interface did away with the command line (it's still there, remember?), but it is Apple saying once again that there's a better way. Regardless of how many people buy an iPad, it's not hard to look forward a few years and imagine a world where more and more people are interacting with technology in this new way. Remember: even if it often seems to do just the opposite, the ultimate goal of technology has always been to make life easier.

Rejected by CBS

Beware Calorie Counts

Beware restaurant, frozen meal calorie counts, US study says

(AFP) – 4 hours ago

WASHINGTON — Weight-watchers who swear by the calorie counts that many restaurants in the United States display on their menus, take heed: the numbers don't always tell the truth.

Researchers at Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy found that around half the dishes served in popular US restaurants delivered more calories than stated on the menu, with some packing double the stated energy value.

And the researchers found discrepancies in the portion sizes the restaurants said they were serving and the actual size of the meal that showed up on the diner's plate, the study published in the January edition of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association said.

The researchers analyzed the calorie content of 18 side dishes and main courses from five popular sit-down restaurant chains -- Applebee's, Denny's, Olive Garden, P F Chang's and Ruby Tuesday -- and 11 sides and main courses from fast food restaurants Domino's, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Taco Bell and Wendy's.

Ten frozen meals bought at supermarkets were also analyzed.

On average, restaurant foods were found to contain 18 percent more calories than what was stated on the menu, and frozen meals averaged eight percent more calories than stated on their packaging.

But some of the restaurant items contained more than twice the calories listed on the menu.

Frozen dinners fared somewhat better, but even there, three meals -- including one each from Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine -- delivered around a quarter more calories than stated on the packet.

"If people use published calorie contents for weight control, discrepancies of this magnitude could result in weight gain of many pounds a year," the study's lead author Susan Roberts said in a statement.

To illustrate the gravity of the problem, imagine ordering a portion of dry toast at Denny's.

The seemingly innocuous side dish is listed on the menu as weighing 28 grams and containing 97 calories.

But the Denny's dry toast analyzed by the Tufts team weighed in at 72 grams and packed 283 calories.

Copyright © 2010 AFP.

Green Apple

Greenpeace ranks Apple as greenest electronics maker

Thursday, January 7, 2010 @ 05:00 PM

After falling prey to harsh criticism from Greenpeace over its use of toxic chemicals in products for years on end, Apple was honored this week with the environmental advocacy group's top ranking as the greenest electronics maker.

"It's time for a little less conversation and a lot more action on removing toxic chemicals," said Casey Harrell, Greenpeace International Electronics campaigner. "Apple is leading and HP is playing catch up, but the lack of action from other companies is ensuring that customers and the environment are still losing out."

The Cupertino-based Mac and iPhone maker received gold stars in all four categories identified in Greenpeace's latest electronics guide: desktops, notebooks, cellphones and displays. In each case, the firm said Apple's products were free of the worst hazardous substances plaguing modern-day electronics.

"Companies need to support legislative bans to ensure a consistent phase out of PVC and BFRs across all electronic products," Harrell added. "Sony Ericsson and Apple are already calling on EU institutions to support such a ban. Other big players, such as HP and Dell – who have so far been silent - and Acer, need to ensure the ban is passed in the European Union parliament."

Saying Greenpeace and Apple have a storied and muddied past would be an understatement. This week's announcement follows years of pressure on the part of Greenpeace, in which the advocacy group made Apple its primary target in the wake of the iPod boom and the Mac's return to stardom. 

In August of 2006, Greenpeace issued a reportwhich gave Apple a 2.7 out of 10 environmental-friendly rating, condemning the electronics maker with low scores in almost all of its criteria, including the use of toxic chemicals, recycling, and the quality of its take-back programs. 

"For a company that claims to lead on product design, Apple scores badly on almost all criteria," the group wrote in the report. "The company fails to embrace the precautionary principle, withholds its full list of regulated substances and provides no timelines for eliminating toxic [chemicals]."

Greenpeace then kicked off a "Green my Apple" campaign that saw it set up shop at that year's MacExpo in London, in which members began distributing organic green apples to attendees in an effort to raise awareness about the use of toxic chemicals in Apple's products. The effort was short-lived, however, as Greenpeace was abruptly asked to leave the show and forced to shut down its operation.

In the month's that would follow, the group would pull similar publicity stunts such as "greening" Apple's flagship store on Fifth Avenue New York City by shining green spotlights into the location's 32-foot glass cube. A similar protest was made at Apple's San Francisco-based flagship shop during the January 2007 Macworld Expo, albeit to less success due to technical difficulties. 

Nevertheless, the negative publicity generated by Greenpeace would force Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs to issue an open letter to customers and shareholders in May of 2007, in which he admitted that the company had not been forthright on its environmental policy. As part of the letter, Jobs outline a timetable for the removal of toxic chemicals from the company's products, including arsenic, mercury, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and brominated flame retardants (BDRs).

In an interview this past September, Jobs, along with Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, would expand on his company's newfoundenvironmentally conscious ways while acknowledging that Greenpeace's targeting of his company played a significant role in promoting its green focus in public.



After Greenpeace criticized Apple for the use of toxic chemicals in its products, Jobs said he turned to former vice president Al Gore, a member of his company's board of directors and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change. Gore reportedly told Jobs to do what he does, and not get into a "mud-slinging war" with the environmental organization.

In response, Apple began mentioning its products' environmental impact with a scorecard at each keynote. Jobs argued that his company had always been green, but in the past it didn't make it a point to mention it in public. He said the company's tight-lipped approach, particularly on public policy issues, hurt its image with environmental organizations.

"We tend to report rather than predict," Jobs said. "You won't see us out there saying what the PC is going to look like in 2016. We quietly go try to invent the PC for 2016." 

Another report highlighted the company's reporting of hardware carbon emissions, a new disclosure that was revealed by the company that same week. It noted the use of Apple products by consumers accounts for more than half of Apple's annual 10.2 million tons of carbon emissions. Apple's environmental Web site states that less than 5 percent of the company's emissions come from manufacturing facilities, while more than 95 percent of its greenhouse gases are from the products it sells.

Cook said that companies often focus on the wrong issues. He gave the example of installing motion detectors in a conference room, to automatically turn off the lights in a room when no one is there. But the real carbon footprint, he said, comes from the products themselves.

"Making products cleaner involves real engineering," Cook said. "It's about innovating, and it's hard work."

Can Cell Phones Help Fight Alzheimer's?

Can Cell Phones Help Fight Alzheimer's?
Study Shows Exposure to Electromagnetic Waves May Prevent Alzheimer's Disease
By Bill Hendrick
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Jan. 6, 2010 -- Cell phone exposure may be helpful in the fight against Alzheimer's disease, a new study shows.

The study, involving mice, provides evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer's disease.
The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

"It surprised us to find that cell phone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer's symptoms," study researcher Gary Arendash, PhD, of the University of South Florida, says in a news release. "It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer's mice."

The researchers say they found that exposing old mice with Alzheimer's disease to electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones reduced brain deposits of beta-amyloid. Brain plaques formed by the abnormal accumulation of beta-amyloid are hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, which is why most treatments try to target the protein.

The study allowed scientists to isolate the effects of cell phone exposure on memory from other lifestyle factors, such as exercise and diet, the researchers say.

The study involved 96 mice, including mice genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer's disease and normal mice. Both the Alzheimer's mice and the normal rodents were exposed to the electromagnetic field generated by standard cell use for two one-hour periods daily for seven to nine months.

The mice didn't wear headsets, and no one held tiny phones to their ears. Their cages, rather, were arranged around a centrally located antenna generating the cell phone signal.
Each rodent was housed the same distance from the antenna and exposed to electromagnetic waves, at a level typically emitted by a cell phone pressed against a human head.
The researchers say that if cell phone exposure was begun when the Alzheimer's mice were young adults, and before signs of memory loss became apparent, their cognitive ability was protected. And if older mice with Alzheimer's were exposed, their memory impairment improved. What's more, months of cell phone exposure even boosted the memories of normal mice, the researchers write.

The researchers say the memory benefits in normal mice of cell phone exposure took months to show up, suggesting a similar effect in humans might take years. However, they also caution that "care should be taken in extrapolating our results to cell phone use and [electromagnetic wave] exposure in humans."

New Ways to Fight Alzheimer's and Brain Injuries

The researchers conclude that the findings could mean electromagnetic field exposure might be an effective, noninvasive, and drug-free way to prevent and treat Alzheimer's disease in humans.
"If we can determine the best set of electromagnetic parameters to effectively prevent beta-amyloid aggregation and remove pre-existing beta-amyloid deposits from the brain, this technology could be quickly translated to human benefit against AD [Alzheimer's disease]," says study researcher Chuanhai Cao, PhD, also of the University of South Florida. "Since production and aggregation of beta-amyloid occurs in traumatic brain injury, particularly soldiers during war, the therapeutic impact of our findings may extend beyond Alzheimer's disease."
Cao says the study "provides evidence that long-term cell phone use is not harmful to [the] brain," Cao says. "To the contrary, the electromagnetic waves emitted by cell phones could actually improve normal memory and be an effective therapy against memory impairment."
They note that previous human studies of electromagnetic waves from cell phones involved only brief exposures.

Although some people have claimed that cell phones may cause brain tumors, the South Florida researchers say that "despite numerous studies, there is no definitive evidence that high-frequency electromagnetic field exposure is a risk to human health" and their study suggests the waves may be beneficial.

A study published in December 2009 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found no substantial change in the incidence trend of brain tumors among a study group of 60,000 people five to 10 years after cell phone usage rose sharply in the countries where they lived.

2010 Cotton Bowl

2010 Cotton Bowl

Congratulations Ole Miss Rebels!

Is Rudolph gay?

from EW.com

Is Rudolph gay?

by Sean Smith

The 1964 Rankin-Bass animated classic Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer has been my favorite Christmas special ever since I was a boy, sitting on our yellow shag carpet in my PJs, watching it on an old black-and-white TV. Seeing it again recently, though, I noticed something I hadn’t before: The whole special is kind of like a gay coming-out story.

Rudolph has this problem: He has a very shiny nose (you could even say it glows.) All of the other reindeer laugh and call him names, and Rudolph’s father, Donner, is horrified. (No son of his … etc.) Donner insists that Rudolph cover his nose with mud. Rudolph hates the mud, and feels like he’s living a lie, but at least he fits in. Problem is, he can’t seem to keep that nose out of sight, especially when he’s getting physical with his friend Fireball.

Meanwhile, Hermey, the perfectly coiffed elf, wants to be a dentist, but he can’t be because elves aren’t allowed to be dentists. They have to make toys. The two boys meet and discover they have a connection, and, realizing that they can’t be their true selves in this oppressive, small-town North Pole, the flamboyant reindeer and the elf with the oral fixation set off in search of a place where they belong. They find it in the Island of Misfit Toys, an ice floe ruled by a winged lion where other fabulous toys (e.g a Charlie-in-the-Box, and a doll with abandonment issues) who don’t quite behave or look like they’re “supposed to” can live together in peace and harmony. (Think West Hollywood).

But then, lo and behold, it turns out that all those haters at the North Pole need a little help from a flaming nose when the Xmas eve fog gets so thick that Santa can’t see well enough to take off. Suddenly, everyone realizes that being different can be kind of cool, and Rudolph’s kind of fun to have around, really. There’s even a hint that he’ll be allowed to marry another reindeer.

So what do you think, Christmas Popwatchers? Am I stretching the metaphor too far, or was this show eerily progressive for 1964?

Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

from the New York Times

Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: December 21, 2009

I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence.

In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants “forage” for resources like light and soil nutrients and “anticipate” rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground “rhizosphere” and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Plants can’t run away from a threat but they can stand their ground. “They are very good at avoiding getting eaten,” said Linda Walling of the University of California, Riverside. “It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome those defenses.” At the smallest nip to its leaves, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky goo to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response. We need terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics — let’s move.

“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

Enemies of the plant’s enemies are not the only ones to tune into the emergency broadcast. “Some of these cues, some of these volatiles that are released when a focal plant is damaged,” said Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis, “cause other plants of the same species, or even of another species, to likewise become more resistant to herbivores.”

Yes, it’s best to nip trouble in the bud.

Dr. Hilker and her colleagues, as well as other research teams, have found that certain plants can sense when insect eggs have been deposited on their leaves and will act immediately to rid themselves of the incubating menace. They may sprout carpets of tumorlike neoplasms to knock the eggs off, or secrete ovicides to kill them, or sound the S O S. Reporting in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Hilker and her coworkers determined that when a female cabbage butterfly lays her eggs on a brussels sprout plant and attaches her treasures to the leaves with tiny dabs of glue, the vigilant vegetable detects the presence of a simple additive in the glue, benzyl cyanide. Cued by the additive, the plant swiftly alters the chemistry of its leaf surface to beckon female parasitic wasps. Spying the anchored bounty, the female wasps in turn inject their eggs inside, the gestating wasps feed on the gestating butterflies, and the plant’s problem is solved.

Here’s the lurid Edgar Allan Poetry of it: that benzyl cyanide tip-off had been donated to the female butterfly by the male during mating. “It’s an anti-aphrodisiac pheromone, so that the female wouldn’t mate anymore,” Dr. Hilker said. “The male is trying to ensure his paternity, but he ends up endangering his own offspring.”

Plants eavesdrop on one another benignly and malignly. As they described in Science and other journals, Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues have discovered that seedlings of the dodder plant, a parasitic weed related to morning glory, can detect volatile chemicals released by potential host plants like the tomato. The young dodder then grows inexorably toward the host, until it can encircle the victim’s stem and begin sucking the life phloem right out of it. The parasite can even distinguish between the scents of healthier and weaker tomato plants and then head for the hale one.

“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

Thank You

Thank you, Idle Eyes, for being my best partner.

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away."
- George Eliot