It’s a relief to read some good news once in a while.

Here’s a story about a man who prevented a vehicle, whose driver had passed out, from heading into oncoming traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. The driver placed his truck in front of the driverless vehicle, using his truck as a buffer to guide the other car to safety. He deliberately allowed the driverless Jeep to crash into his own vehicle so that other people wouldn’t be put at risk. Had he not done this it’s almost certain that there would have been more fatalities — the woman who had collapsed died shortly afterwards.

Driver’s quick thinking prevents head-on crash on GG Bridge

I almost finished up by writing about some outrageously bad driving I saw at the scene of an accident in Massachusetts a few months back, but maybe I should just leave you with the memory of this courageous action.

The New York Times has been running an fascinating series of first-person accounts of adoption from the point of view of adoptive parents and adopted children (so far nothing from people who have put their children up for adoption). The series is called “Relative Choices.” This is of great interest to me because my one-year-old daughter, Maia, is adopted from Ethiopia.

Adam Wolfington writes about being a black child in a white family. He writes with a sense of vulnerability and describes the confused questions (”How come that white lady’s your mother?”) and taunting he has received from other children, and describes also his doubts about his own self-worth. He was given up for adoption by his (I assume) American mother before he has even born, and yet he still wonders if she rejected him because there was something wrong with him. His mother sounds wonderfully supportive and reassuring, however. I admit to nervousness about the possibility of my child encountering teasing and racism.

Hollee McGinnis was adopted from Korea and writes about how she came to accept that she was both Korean and American after many years of struggling to decide which was her “true” identity. How real a sense of being Ethiopian can we instill in Maia? She’s been adopted into a Scottish-Italian-American family but is Ethiopian by birth. That’s a lot of identities to play with! “Hi, I’m Scottish-Italian-African-American”?

Tama Janowitz writes about being questioned in the street (it’s really amazing how free people feel to ask personal questions when you’re with a child of a different race), but mainly about the resentment her daughter has for her. Tama, however, considers resentment to be a normal part of a parent-child relationship and not the product necessarily of the adoption. The adoption, in her view, is just the thing that the resentment fixes on to. I find myself wondering if Maia will resent having been taken from Ethiopia?

Sumeia (beautiful name!) Williams was lied to by her American father, who first claimed that he’d found her in an orphanage and decided to bring her home, then said he was her biological father (by way of a bigamous marriage in Vietnam), and then reverted once more to the orphanage story. He sounds like a real piece of work, and Sumeia still has no idea of what the truth is. At least we’re going to be completely honest with Maia about her story. We have as many photographs and as much information about her background as possible and hope to find out more. No one should have to face that kind of uncertainty.

Dr. Jane Aronson wrote a story that disturbed me. She was given a video of Ethiopian children who were offering themselves up for adoption. I found it rather disgusting that children should be put in that position and that a westerner would in effect do some “tele-shopping” for a child. The Ethiopian government doesn’t allow children in orphanages to have their photographs or video used in this way, and my own adoption agency was very clear about the need to keep images of children waiting to be adopted private. After reading that part of Aronson’s story I confess I couldn’t bring myself to read the rest. I hope it had a happy ending.

Huong Sutliff wrote at the age of 13 or being adopted at age 6, and conveys the anxiety, hope, and relief of a child of that age as she meets her adoptive parents for the first time.

Katy Robinson was adopted from Korea and grew up in a Salt Lake City family where there was a sense it was disloyal for her to have an interest in her Korean roots. She describes this attitude as being her own, but it’s obvious that the was but an internalized version of her adoptive family’s repression (Salt Lake City? Repression? Who knew?). After 20 years she decided she had to find out more about her roots and began to quiz her adopted mother. Then armed only with her Korean name and the date of her adoption she headed to Korea where she found her father, with whom she’s still in touch. She also seems very appreciative of her adoptive mother, despite the family’s attempts to efface her personal history. I admire that Katy hasn’t ended up resentful of her mother.

I came close to tears reading Jeff Gammage’s story of trying to trace the scant details of his Chinese daughter’s origins. While we know Maia’s birth-parents’ names and have met members of her family (even sat in the grass hut where she was born) Chinese baby girls are generally simply abandoned in public places. There’s therefore no family information, often not even a name. But Jeff discovered the name of the man who had found Zhao Gu in the street and made sure she was looked after, and managed, with the aid of a Chinese journalism student, to phone him. That’s not much in the way of background on your child — a conversation with the man who found her abandoned on the street — but if that’s all you have to go on then it’s incredibly important. That’s why I found my eyes welling with tears.

This is an interesting story — Birder Admits Killing Cat, but Was It Animal Cruelty? — which brings up once again (see “They Eat Horses Don’t They“) the confusing ways in which we relate to animals. A man shoots a feral cat in order to protect rare birds in a protected area, and is accused of animal cruelty. At the same time thousands of people are out shooting bambi with crossbows and guns.

From my perspective as a vegetarian I don’t see much difference. A cat has no more or less capacity for pain and suffering than a deer has (not to mention the sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens that are slaughtered each day for food). Arguably, the cat was in fact far more destructive than any deer — a deer may pillage your garden but it’s unlikely to drive strawberries or cabbages to extinction.

The DA told the jury in court that the defendant, Mr. Stevenson, “shot that animal in cold blood” and that the cat died a slow and painful death “gurgling on its own blood.” Isn’t that how deer die? What’s the difference?

One issue is whether the cat was feral. Although the cat lived under a toll bridge, she was fed and cared for by a toll collector. I guess that means that if I go into my local forest and feed the deer, I can then argue that they can’t be shot? I somehow doubt that that would go over wel.

It’s almost inconceivable to imagine a headline in the US that reads “Hunter Admits Killing Deer, but Was It Animal Cruelty?”

I’d have preferred if the cat had been trapped and moved, and it’s a shame the cat was killed, but I find myself almost defensive of the birder simply because of the contorted views that underlie his prosecution.

With the help of iJailbreak, a hack put together by a 13-year-old (naturally) and advice from a number of websites I managed to hack my iPod Touch and make it into a much more interesting and useful machine: more like, in fact, the device I think that Apple should have released.

One modification fixed the fact that it wasn’t possible to add or edit calendar appointments on the Touch. I’d actually resorted to pasting post-it notes on the back of my Touch when I’d needed to make a note of a new appointment while out and about.

I was also able to add the functions that Apple had stripped from the Touch, but which are found on its sister product, the iPhone. So I now have the very cool little Mail program that allows me to check and replay to my email using any wireless network.

I also have the Weather program which is handy for seeing what the heavens have in store for me in the coming week.

The Notes program is pretty useless because it doesn’t sync with anything, but I installed it anyway. The new version of Mail.app on Leopard has a notes function, and hopefully Apple will alter iTunes so that it can sync the Touch with Mail.app or someone else will come up with a modification that does the same thing.

I’ve added a third-party dictionary (I’m a dictionary freak).

That’s pretty much it for the modifications.

The Touch now replicates (and improves on, in most respects) all the functions of my old LifeDrive. Once the notes are fixed it’ll be a near-perfect PDA and video iPod. I love it!

I’m a little regretful I went for the 8GB version rather than the 16BG one. The extra space would have been handy for the video. I also sometimes think I should have gone for the iPhone after all, and hacked it to work with my T-Mobile pay-as-you-go SIM card. I use around $60 worth of cell-phone calls a year (yes, a year) and that’s at 10c a minute! I really don’t like using the phone much and only make cell-phone calls when I really have to and for short messages rather than long conversations. So why the lingering desire for an iPhone? Simply because it would reduce the number of gadgets in my pockets from two to one. (I’m down to two from three — iPod, cellphone, and PDA — since getting the Touch).

Anyway, I try to let go of these lusts for technological devices, and I think I do pretty well at it. The iPod touch is only my second iPod in four years and my third PDA in six years, since I got my HandSpring Visor. I’m not exactly dominated by the desire to own material possessions (I don’t even have a TV) and I’m generally able to exercise patience and restraint when I do want to buy a new toy. When I do buy new gadgets it’s not usually an impulse buy.

To be honest, I could keep milking my Ethiopia photographs for several years’ worth of Wordless Wednesday posts. This one is of some kids who were fishing off a pier in Awassa, not far from from the motel (more like a hostel) where we were staying. Our driver was very wary about us going for unescorted walks, but we always felt completely safe in Ethiopia. The people there are very friendly and respectful and very few people beg, with the exception of the children. The kids, to their credit, usually start by asking for pens, which they need for school. Next time I go back to Ethiopia I’m going to buy a big box of pens locally so that I can hand them out. Many of the children know a little English — enough to ask for a pen, and maybe to explain that they are very poor and need money. But they were no trouble — we just explained that we’d left our money at the hotel and they didn’t hassle us.

These kids were fishing in the rather unsavory-looking waters of Lake Awassa, but they were very happy to take a break and pose. Considering that most of them have never seen their own picture before, they’re remarkably good models!