So when a CBC article subtitled “The Rise of Alternative Fashion Models” landed in my in box, I couldn’t help wondering: Is this for real? And it is — there is a new breed of diverse body-typed, tattooed and even transsexual models walking the runway. The problem is that they aren’t doing it in New York or Milan, Italy, but in the explicitly antiestablishment event Toronto Alternative Arts and Fashion Week (known by the mixed-up acronym FAT), which began April 9.

AS CBC sums it up: “The event prides itself on celebrating men and women of all shapes and sizes but also embraces ethnic variety and body art. [FAT] models stand anywhere from five-foot-one to six-foot-one; tattoos are flaunted, not concealed; belly flab is accentuated, not spurned.”

What’s not to love? If it came to my city, I’d bare my belly flab and go.

What’s interesting is that the producers claim their inclusive aesthetic isn’t simply healthier for the models but potentially more profitable for the designers. One organizer says designers who continue to hire the same old scrawny white chicks fail to realize “unleashed potential, newfound profit, newfound economic and financial potential that they haven’t yet achieved.” (We’re talkin’ mega newfound potential.)

Does that mean that your average middle-aged, slightly overweight mother of three can finally break into modeling? Not quite. But the article focuses on one particularly promising model — a Kenyan transsexual male-to-female — whose tall, narrow frame looks like a lot of female models everywhere. And after looking at dozens of photos from past years, where you’d be hard-pressed to pinch an inch, it’s obvious to me that the fashion world will sooner embrace transsexual models before pudgy ones.

As one of the organizers admits: “The images still have to be aspirational. You still want that glamour. You don’t want the photograph to look like a driver’s license picture.”

Despite a couple of near misses when the Colombian government and the rebels appeared near to an agreement to exchange captives for prisoners, and when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez negotiated the release of a handful of captives last year, Betancourt’s prospects have seemed bleak. In November the government found videotapes of Betancourt and other hostages that suggested that the captives were still alive, but in the soundless video footage she appeared extremely gaunt and did not look at the camera.

Recent news (via the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times, among others): After six years in captivity in the jungle the 46-year-old Betancourt is rumored to be on the verge of death. A priest from a village near FARC-occupied land claimed that she had been taken to the local clinic for medical care, though the doctor and the nurse there have denied they treated Betancourt. A medical mission sent by French President Nicolas Sarkozy landed in Colombia on Thursday, hoping to offer Betancourt medical care. But the most recent report from Reuters claims that the mission remains grounded in Bogota. “Are we pessimistic about a result from this French mission? Yes,” Astrid Betancourt, Ingrid’s sister, told the local media.

At this point it’s impossible to know what will become of Betancourt, but as a progressive politician who has risked her life for her ideals, she merits more column inches than all the bad girls in Hollywood combined. For a great glimpse of her fierce resolve, check out this Salon interview, just a couple of weeks before her abduction, and for a documentary film shot during the years before and after her kidnapping, go here.

Thursday Air America Radio announced that Rhodes had been suspended because of the comments, so good for it. Yet such suspensions won’t offer but a drop in the bucket against our wasteland of media vitriol. Forget sex and violence; I think playground cruelty is the source of the most obscenity. Have you seen the outdoor ad campaign for the new romantic comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”? The black-and-white billboards proclaim: “I’m So Over You, Sarah Marshall,” “You Suck Sarah Marshall,” “My Mother Always Hated You, Sarah Marshall,” and “You Do Look Fat in Those Jeans, Sarah Marshall.” It’s the first time I’ve wanted to shield my daughter’s eyes from a spectacle in the city.

Ironically, the person who has been most articulate about the current mean streak in American culture is Barack Obama, Rhodes’ apparent favorite. But as someone who also favors the senator from Illinois, I’ve become increasingly queasy about the tone some of his supporters are willing to take. At a recent brunch, I heard a sweet elderly woman wearing an Obama button talk about “just hating” Hillary Clinton. She had no idea who her fellow partygoers were voting for.

As ad hominem insult has become normative political speech, professional bloviators like Rhodes seem to have to go farther each day to retain their “edge.” Still, why does Rhodes need to be so misogynist when she’s carving up her victims with her tongue?

Very well. Since there is apparently some folklore that advises pregnant women against wearing seat belts (strikes me as patently absurd), there’s no harm in a scientific study proving the obvious: Seat belts save lives. Not just “regular people” but pregnant women with big vulnerable bellies.

But the angle of the article — the saving of 200 fetuses a year, a rather small number given the approximate 43,000 automobile deaths in the United States every year — seems kinda insidious. (In case you missed it, Oklahoma passed legislation this week that allows healthcare workers to refuse to perform abortions and requires abortion providers to do ultrasounds of all pregnant women seeking abortions, along with another bill that makes it a felony to assault a pregnant woman and cause a miscarriage.)

Would I be devastated to lose a pregnancy in an automobile accident? Of course. But with headlines focused on saving fetuses (not their mothers) combined with new laws and Horton hearing every creature however small, it seems there’s a not-so-silent march toward endowing fetuses with personhood.

Neuroscientist Christina Barr of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Md., told the New Scientist that the bodies of infant monkeys are like human infants in that they release pleasure-inducing substances called opioids when they spend time with their mothers — chemicals that act via the same brain receptors as morphine. But some monkeys (again, like humans) have a gene mutation that seems to intensify this pleasure and make withdrawal from it more painful. For those 25-30 percent of the monkeys with the genetic variation, maternal separation produces unremitting distress with repeated separations; those monkeys seem resistant to weaning and developing peer relationships. In contrast, monkeys without this extra attachment gene exhibit decreasing levels of distress with repeated maternal separation and spend more time exploring the world.

While this study may be good news for mothers and fathers who blame their own parenting style for their children’s insatiable neediness, it delivers its dose of bad news as well. The genetic variation that creates intense maternal attachment is also associated with an increased vulnerability to alcohol and drugs. Another study found that macaques with the genetic mutation drink more alcohol than normal monkeys when given the chance, leading Barr to compare a genetic proclivity to maternal attachment with a sort of proto-addiction. “In a sense it’s very similar to effects that you would see during periods of intoxication and withdrawal,” Barr told Science Central.

This may not completely staunch the theories that anxious attachment derives from negligent or obsessive parenting (another chapter of the endless tome “It’s all Mom’s fault!”). But it does offer one alternative explanation for how parents can raise one child who easily adjusts to the inevitable separations from caregivers and another who just won’t let go.