« October 2004 | Main | December 2004 »
Was here. Saw him, who appeared in such faves as The Perfect Weapon (mmmmm, Jeff Speakman) and Campus Man (ewww, lame-ass attempt to capitalize on the 'beefcake' fad).
Turns out, John Dye was also inTouched by an Angel, which I didn't know. I mean, why would I? I think I did see the porn, “Touched by an Uncle”, though.
There's always been gaydar. I think the straight folks who either can't learn it (Christian Extremism and voting Republican are in that same locus) or won't learn it (irony-impairment travels on the same gene) treat gaydar with the same kind of paranoia that makes people go to Epcot instead of going to the real countries.
It used to be that you could get around this ghastly lack by singing “Clang! Clang! Clang!” to a potential Matachine and if they respond with “Went the Trolley”, well, you have a bonafide (hehe, I said 'bone') homosexual on your hands (so to speak). But that's an old song that most people probably don't even know anymore.
There is a new hope, however: The KitchenAid Stand Mixer.
Got one? Then you're a Big Ol' 'Mo. Sorry, you just are.
We never made it to the second floor and still spent over $800. It would have been $900 if we didn't have a coupon.
Sam gasped at the checkout when the total appeared, but I leaned over to him and said, "These are heritage purchases." Which is supposed to mean something you keep for a thousand years, like a good old well-seasoned cast-iron skillet that you pass on to someone else. I just take it to mean, "how I make myself feel better about a $200 food processor".
Seriously, it feels good to buy stuff together that's meant to last a long time. Awwwwww.
I've never bought my own pots and pans—inherited those from Allen. Never bought my own flatware—gift from Mom and Dad one year. I'm a gadget geek in the kitchen, too, but Sam talked me out of one of those 500 HP KitchenAid standing mixers.
Next time, for sure.
The turkey is in an electric oven at 350° after brining overnight and after spending 30 minutes in the real oven at 500°. We're well ahead of the game (barring issues with the roasting), ready to make mashed potatoes and homemade stuffing (well, dressing, since the bird is filled only with herbs, apples and onions) and candied yams and some vegetables.
In the midst of all this, it's odd to trot out a single day out of the year for the sole purpose of giving thanks; I find myself generally grateful and generally willing to express such whenever I have cause to.
Which is quite often—because of the love of my life, Sam, my amazing family back in Pennsylvania and in Arizona, and a very large number of very good people who are my friends.
Except it's not just gratitude or thankfulness, two sentiments which are often aimed at a deity, but not always (obviously), it's also a reminder.
A reminder that I should also give some credit to myself for whatever part I've played in being surrounded by such astounding happiness. I know that I am one of the things that Sam, family and friends are grateful for, and I must remind myself to keep earning that place in their lives.
Holding in high value the qualities of decency, trust, mercy, compassion, vigilance and empathy got me here, to my place in the world, full of love and laughter and caring-for. And though the rest of the world may rail and rage contrarily at me, at my family, at my friends, even at my kind, that is but flotsam in the deluge of Good Things that is my life.
It starts with a choice. It starts with choosing to be entertained at the expense of being informed. It starts with appealing to the basest nature, because you're too lazy to create something, too frightened to act individually outside a crowd of the like-minded, too insecure to hold and defend an opinion that is your own.
It ends with lies.
Stolen identities; misrepresentation of others; shouting untruths long enough and loud enough to drown out other voices; hypocrisy; fraud; editorial abuse.
It all becomes a jumble, it seems. Honesty and truth—and, dare I offer, fact—are jokes, laughable anachronisms or elitist liberal heart-bleeding.
Gordon, one of the Dog's Knot Boys, won't address me directly, in email or otherwise, but he happily emails my boyfriend just to claim what a scum I am for 'stirring the pot' and making trouble for him. You'd think that lying was enough for Gordon, but no, he guns for hypocrisy and props to him for making that work. Where I was attempting to get this 'nunya' commenter to email me so that I was sure he wasn't just some random fuck posing as someone else—y'know, like Geoff and Gordon would do, where I was doing nothing but asking someone to own up to his own statements. Gordon tries like the dickens to make it appear like I was "bitchslapping" this person. Uhh, no Gordon.
On another website, when I stated to someone that since they weren't gay or weren't male (or either) they really didn't have solid ground on which to stand in judgment of my relationship, I get this:
Go ahead and call your lifetime fundamental relationship with another man anything you like. Martha wasn't JUDGING YOU, nor am I. She was merely INFORMING you that a "sexual" intimacy between two men (or two women) is immoral, and that it ISN'T really marriage. If the shoe fits…. That's not a personal judgment of you, merely an observation about a specific behavior. There IS a difference, whether you see it or not.
(The reason I put "sexual" in quote marks is that sex isn't just use (or abuse) of one's sexual organs. Sex, properly speaking, involves a man and a woman conjoining their respective and complementary sexual organs. But between two men…or two women…well, what can I say? Something just isn't quite…right. Something seems to be…missing. I expect you'll disagree vehemently. That's your right. Scream all you like. But it doesn't change anything.)
Whew! I'm glad I wasn't being judged or anything, Green Flash. Perhaps instead I should thank you (and Martha! Hi Martha!) for conveying a Sublime Truth to me that I failed to divine.
What comes of a world where self-responsibility is considered weakness and toeing the christian-company-line is 'strength'? What comes of a place where informing someone of fraud is called 'whining'?
I'm sure that Sam will end up getting email from Gordon, because he'll never contact me directly....no audience, no reason to speak, right? I'm sure that he'll photoshop some pictures again, call me any number of names. Hell, you might even end up seeing some of the obtuse apers of the Dog's Knot Mob clogging up the comments sections here, but hell, it was only a matter of time anyway.
Am I goading them? Yeah. Does it matter? No, because people like that find a way to stage a nutty in the presence or absence of reason.
Absence of Reason. Yeah, that has a ring to it.
These people are so close to the dangerous cliff, playing tug of war with the rest of us.
I swear to god[dess] I'm ready to just let go of the rope just to see if they scream as they fall.
I swear to God[dess] that if regular junior high school curriculum included...
...the world would be a far more relaxed, content place. There's be more good thinking going on, less pigeonholing of the Infinite, and no destructive clamoring over doing Heavenly work by way of making this life a living Hell.
Humans are special, we just don't need an old book and an ancient modality to tell us that.
I'm working my way through America (The Book). You've got to read this book. There hasn't been a single page so far (on page 183 now) that hasn't had at least one out-loud laugh on it.
This, from one of the Discussion Questions in the chapter on "The Future of Democracy":
4. What form of government would you like to see after our democracy finally eats itself, then shits itself out, and then re-eats its own self-shit in 2007? Express your answer in tears.
Like I said. Genius
It's amazing to me the lengths that Christians (well, Catholics, insofar as they are still Christians) go in order to tell you that science doesn't matter and that it doesn't come close to capturing the essence of human (and divine) existence.
I agree! But the point at which they make a statement like this is the point that they also start trotting out so-called science to back up their belief constructs. Unfortunate. This is what happens when the Little Church in the Dell comes to the Big City and tries an extreme makeover on society by attempting to harness political machinery.
What ever happened to the Substance of things Hoped For and the Evidence of Things Not Seen? I, for one, think that there's always room for a little (or a lot) of faith. It's dogma that wears me down. Think they're the same thing? Think again. Faith only becomes dogma when someone else tries to tell you the color and timbre and texture your faith is supposed to be. And where it's supposed to be aimed.
And how you're supposed to get out in the world and make more of the Faithful, either through procreation or through propagation of that Faith. Either way, they want missionary positions filled (groan, sorry, I know).
I have faith in my family. Faith that they are there for me when I need them. Faith that I will set aside whatever occupies the fore if my family needs me. Faith that my love for my partner is for life. Faith that he loves me in kind. Faith that I am capable of trust. Trust in things like love and life and Good Will.
I also have a certitude that there really is no such thing as Altruism, but that broad-enough and indirect-enough and long-term-enough self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism.
Frank Herbert once wrote: "'What do you despise?' By this are you truly known."
So what do I despise? I despise closed minds. I despise liars and those who take pleasure in the misfortune of others. I despise the self-imposed ignorance of those who short their own brainpower in favor of their religion. I despise xenophobia, especially the kind that masquerades as love.
Most of all, I despise hypocrisy and duplicity, and the ignorance that seems to generate both.
Well, that was fun, but I never fully agreed with Frank Herbert on that. It never allowed for creative acts, for things beyond just neutral.
I might suggest that for the lion's share of Christians (no pun intended), grasping at Jesus Christ is a desperate attempt to equalize all the individuals in a given society so that all the bonafide special and talented individuals are lost in that old "we're all special in God's eyes" bromide. We continue to increasingly celebrate the mediocre while becoming increasingly paranoid about those with wild talents.
I abide the ideal of freedom of religion, so long as the set of religions also includes the empty set (i.e., freedom to practice no religion or faith). It's a natural tendency for the dogmatic to frame and label the world according to their own carefully constructed belief systems. Their identities, individual and collective, are tied up in requiring boundaries around things, including their own god.
Well, my identity is tied up in other things. You won't find a satisfactory theism-relative label for me.
Forgive the crass dipping into boolean logic, but here's where I stand:
Kinda boring, I know. But this is where good old Occam comes in with his Famous Razor: the world around us—if you avoid the overweening assumption that the universe is just God's Terrarium—becomes a magical place.
With Theism, you get "god did it". Without assuming Theism, you get a wonderment that's good for the soul.
Have you ever wondered how Germany came to despise the Jews so much in the first third of the 1900s? That's one of a whole quiver of questions that never got answered to my own satisfaction in my own education.
Was it just out of fear? Fear that a militant government would ascribe anything short of hating them to be treasonous?
Was it pent up rage on an individual level, where one could find an outlet in his own private anger against how the world treated him unfairly...by hating the Jews?
Was it simply the loss of one's own sense of joy, where despair had won and peopled settled for being not-as-bad-as instead of outright happy?
Was it nationalism that allowed acceptance of the elimination of Jews from the Fatherland on the basis of Germans Rightfully Possess Germany?
Were the Germans in need of a 'cure' from the multicultural urban reality?
Did the Germans need an Opposing Evil in order to accept the mantle of Good?
Was it really a drive to bring the entire populace into line with what was thought to be the purely-normal?
I know it didn't happen overnight, but I also know it happened fairly quickly. But how?
Where was the self-doubt? Was it first an attack on Germans themselves, instilling fear and subsequently punishing those who doubted themselves, doubted the rightness of the German Cause?
Was the tyranny of the German government simply the tyranny of the majority?
How does a country start the process of treating those who don't buy the party line as less than human? And does that process always end in 'cleansing'?
And weren't a lot of the Jews Germans themselves?
Spending most of this afternoon trying to restore our TiVo to working order (an attempted re-upgrade to a bigger hard disk and a database cachecard and a network card) after having somehow made it ill after the last time—the TiVo has been dying a slow death for a month—I'm doing it all over again.
Remembering to change jumpers on a hard drive back and forth, connecting and disconnecting and reconnecting hard disks to the insides of a PC (I know, right???) and burning linux boot CDs from ISO images found on the net...it's going to kill me.
Oh, how I long for software-only solutions. Or Apple coming out with a box that does it all for me already and is integrated with iTunes, iMovie and iDVD...
I feel dirty. And dusty.
The US debt ceiling has been raised another $800 BILLION.
See, if the Republicans were in power, they'd never let those crazy Democrats spend like—oh, wait...
Anyhoo, the new borrowing cap will be $8.18 TRILLION.
Let's do some math here. $8.18T - $800B = $7.38T. We as a country are approaching a $7.4 TRILLION dollar deficit.
And President Bush wants to give tax cuts to the very rich. Sorry...tax relief.
Let's do some more math. This time it's a word problem:
Mr. & Mrs. Podunk Poorfolk pay taxes. Mr. & Mrs. GeorgeDick BushCheneyRichmotherfucker pay taxes. Mr. & Mr. Adam N. Steve live next door to Podunk and his Poorfolk brood. Our President and Congress are spending us all into a debt from which we will not recover from in a time considered short by mammals. If the BushCheneyRichmotherfucker's are paying less taxes, and the debt must still be spent down...
Dear Mr. & Mrs. Poorfolk and the last stragglers of what's left of the American Middle Class who voted Republican this time around: when a Democrat or other Progressive President finally comes to the Whitehouse to clean up this unconscionable mess that the current batch of folks you voted into office have made, remember that it was your own fault.
Flaming faggot and liberal that I have been called, I won't even point at you and laugh at your destitution when that day arrives, even though your bankrupt finances will finally match your bankrupt ethics. I'll probably try to find ways to help you, to save our society, even from your own short-sighted, dogmatic insanity.
Here it is, y'all.
Republicans, FoxNews or Blogging Nematodes? You decide.
So today the Republicans in congress decided to preemptively shield Tom DeLay's job, you know, just in case he gets indicted.
So that's the motivation for changing the rules, which until today would have put DeLay's position in jeopardy if he were indicted.
But who put that rule in place in the first place? Oh yeah, the Republicans, back in 1993, when they wanted to specifically remove key Democrats (the GOP was in a minority then).
Hypocrites. Cowards. Fuckwits.
I learned a new thing today. I learned about the most successful Third Political Party in the USA ever—except, of course, for Lincoln's Republican Party (arguably, the Party of Lincoln no longer exists, just the name does): the Know-Nothings. It was a party established to champion the rights and values of White Protestant [male] voters who were feeling threatened in the face of immigrants who might overturn their comfortable applecart. Sound familiar?
Ok, and I learned a new thing yesterday: the word fideism. Dictionary.com's definition is tame enough, at first blush: "Reliance on faith alone rather than scientific reasoning or philosophy in questions of religion". Neat, tidy, and most importantly, well-applied solely to religion. Good so far.
You'll see around the web all this claptrap about the so-called Party of Lincoln. Back then it was about bringing freedom to those who didn't have it. It was about course-correcting the country in favor of the spirit of the United States Constitution so that later this revised, more splendid spirit could be codified into the letters of the document itself. The Republicans of that day were responsible for the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which abolish slavery, guarantee civil rights and also suffrage, respectively. Nice job, guys.
And especially nice job, Mr. Lincoln. Which brings me back to the Know-Nothings. Of them, he wrote:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
This was written before the Civil War, mind you. This was President Lincoln's worldview—regardless of the law. There's an irony here, in that a certain Martin Luther said the exact same thing, only far more tersely: "Sin Bravely."
For you literalist, right-wing moonbats out there, of course the father of Protestantism wasn't advocating sinning. At the least, he was cautioning against claiming self-righteousness. At best, I like to think he was insisting that one not compound a sin by also refusing to take responsibility for the sin in the first place.
The Know-Nothings were not brave in their sinning. They hid behind a curtain of public fear; they undermined good will and individual security just to accomplish their fevered, self-involved goals.
Today's version of the Know-Nothings are, sadly, the Republicans. This is what has become of the Party of Lincoln.
The general populace who support the Republicans these days not only volunteer victimhood to the Republicans in power, they have become their footsoldiers. Look at the arguments those people have made for choosing ineptitude for four more years: "moral values", "I just know he's a good guy" and "he's one of us". All considerations that have nothing to do with, well, consideration. Or with thinking or with reasoning or even with philosophy. They are today's fideists.
They argue that their faith alone is valid to any argument. They don't argue, come to think of it, they merely state. And there is no disagreement, because there is nothing to agree with. You are simply wrong and they're right because Jesus told them so. Jesus also apparently has told President Bush he's doing good work. Hard work.
I cannot underestimate the damage that fideism can do once it has taken root in bureaucratic bodies. Even the Catholics understood this, still understand this:
Fideism owes its origin to distrust in human reason, and the logical sequence of such an attitude is scepticism. It is to escape from this conclusion that some philosophers, accepting as a principle the impotency of reason, have emphasized the need of belief on the part of human nature, either asserting the primacy of belief over reason or else affirming a radical separation between reason and belief, that is, between science and philosophy on the one hand and religion on the other.
Example: witness Andrew Sullivan, a practicing Catholic, prattling about faith and Jesus being valid rhetorical method. He's basically saying that a person's faith is not to be discounted when having an argument (and here I take argument to mean 'a discourse intended to change the nature of a truth') about worldly things. Even the Catholics disagree with this kind of thing.
But if the Know-Nothings have their way this time around, the Catholics won't matter, either.
It turns out that Dan Gurley, National RNC Field Director is gay.
Not only gay, but in an open relationship, and prefers to have sex with strangers without using condoms.
His own business, of course, but he helped elect people who want to teach abstinence as sex-education, who denounce sex outside of the marriage bed, and have told Middle America that homos are the biggest threat to their straight, narrow lifestyles.
What's a President to do?
I, for one, think we should all write letters to Reverend Dobson asking him to remind President Bush of his campaign promises. Why? Because I'm tired of the liberals working so hard to keep pulling the Republicans back from the brink. They're out on that dangerous ledge. They chose to be there. They want to be there. Let them be there! No, scratch that. Let's just push them off the ledge.
Either force the current adminstration to finally go off that deep-end and alienate the rational people in their party, or force the Christian Fundies to start making grand apologias for being stiffed (so to speak) by W., lied to just to get votes.
Let's all tangle the web they have woven. Fuck them all.
But DO NOT fuck Dan Gurley. Make that irresponsible barebacking fuckwit go without his anonymous sex until he recants and stops trying to elevate himself at our expense. Call it a Lysissystrata.
And DO say hello to Dan and thank him for his efforts on our behalf, helping to make us all good christian conservatives. He can be reached at: AOL and at gay.com. Apparently he's quite efficient, multitasking and whatnot, all to be a power bottom to whoever wants to seed or be seeded.
Tell him the god of biscuits blessed his efforts.
There was only one time when Allen had to go to the hospital. It was a day in May. It was in 1995. I remember such mundane details now only because it was in the middle of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference that year.
Allen had become increasingly annoyed with my increasing mother-henning, as he'd put it. Which of course was, not insignificantly, an outlet for my increasing worry over his health.
It was two mornings after the first night that there was ever a problem with his overnight IV of TPN, no coincidence. A night of no nutrition and more importantly, of no hydration, had taken its toll. Only I didn't know that before I left that morning to drive 50 miles to San Jose to the conference. I just knew that he was annoyed with me still, and that I, in turn, was pissed at him and then appalled at my 'selfishness' at being pissed off at such a sick man.
I snapped at him and he stood there, silent, glaring.
So, I thought, that is his answer: silence.
For the first time in our entire relationship—and, as bitter destiny would have it, also the last time—that I ever turned away from him. I grabbed my backpack and headed out the door.
I sat in the morning's first WWDC session, a vast, dark room filled with Mac-nerd-filled straight-backed chairs, all of us facing forward to watch a fascinating, in-depth talk on who-the-fuck-cares-about-this-stuff-when-the-man-I-love-is-dying—
I left after ten minutes and drove back to the City, back to him. Where else could I be, really?
At the end of the longest drive ever, I walk in the back door of the house and he was standing there. Just standing there. I'd already gotten used to his gaunt face—if it's at all possible to get used to the face of the one you love so much changing so rapidly—but this was different. So different, so stressed was I, so immediately lacking wherewithal, I snapped and started crying. I dropped my bag and walked out to the front rooms of the house. I sat down on the sofa and Randee, our little black schnauzer, hopped up there with me and leaned against me.
However long had passed then, I don't know: I was still crying. I looked up and Allen was standing in the wide doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, still staring that different stare.
It wasn't until he turned without speaking and walked away that I realized something awful was at play.
I couldn't get back to the bedroom quickly enough, yelling the question, "What the fuck is wrong?"
I practically landed in the bedroom, he was sitting on his side of the bed, not moving, not even to light a cigarette. I asked him again what was wrong and he turned to me and spoke.
Except it wasn't speech, so much as a series of words that made absolutely no sense.
There is panic that you feel when something bad is about to happen. There's despair when you know something has happened. Then there's that in-between time, when panic foments a despair that is, in turn, short-lived because fresh panic tells you there's going to be even more bad stuff happening.
At first I thought it was a stroke he'd suffered, my first line of defense being an attempt to isolate and label what was wrong.
He spoke again and it was no better than the first attempt. I told him I couldn't understand him, my voice already taking on soothing tones as tears dried up: another of my defense mechanisms. He grabbed the pad next to the bed and wrote down what he was trying to say. "Good," I thought, "it's just something affecting his speech and not his wits." He handed the pad to me and the words were clearly written in his not-so-clear chicken-scratch, but were still out of order and nonsensical.
I got him to lay back down. I walked out of the room and called Laura, his—I almost said 'our'—nurse and she calmly urged me to take him to the ER.
I got him to get dressed—he didn't have much difficulty understanding me—and got him over to Davies Medical Center.
After 9 hours there in the ER—some of which was morbidly comical—and after doing a CT scan, they officially admitted him.
He would be there for two nights.
That first night there, though, after he had gone to sleep, Dr. Lisa Capaldini came by to talk to me. She took me into a narrow, overly-lit service corridor just down the hall from Allen's room and told me the bad news: that the MAI had caused atrophy in brain mass and that such atrophy is a strong indicator of advanced HIV disease and that he likely 'would no longer be with us' in two months' time.
That was the first time in my life I'd heard AIDS referred to as "HIV Disease", but Lisa, knowing me so well and being so beautifully compassionate and empathetic anyway, had aimed her words with frightening precision. My brain switched over into clinical mode and I absorbed the information into that framework instead of being emotionally overwhelmed by it there.
She hugged me, and held me when I tried to escape the embrace. I melted into her a little, and that, too, took its intended effect. Perhaps she had wicked off that first wave of dread.
She wrote me a script right there for Restoril. Told me to stop at the Walgrens at Castro & 18th as they were already staying open 24 hrs a day and it was on my way home. She told me to take one pill as soon as I got home.
When Lisa speaks in a certain tone, I follow without question. I trust her that much.
I got home, popped a pill and took the dog for a walk. When we got back, I unhooked the leash from Randee, locked the back door and dropped onto the bed, face down, head to the side.
I remember blinking and not breathing. I remember the Universe stopping. I remember not remembering anything other than the news about Allen.
I drew in a deep breath, turned my face into the pillow and screamed.
It terrified me that I could not stop. Literally could not. The terrified part of me sat in the back of my brain just observing, just listening, wondering if it would ever stop.
I woke up seven hours later. When I saw the little orange bottle of pills sitting next to the clock radio, I started to cry all over again.
As it turned out, Allen had beat Lisa's prediction by about three days. On July 15, 1995, just after midnight, Allen died.
So no, today is not an anniversary, no calendar will mark today as something historically significant.
Just a little orange pill bottle I had in my hand this morning as I called in a refill.
[ sturtle.com ]
Anyone who uses 'corsetry' in a sentence is more than ok by me. I hear he's hot, too.
Like a lot of things that the stolid, staid, "moral values" sheep voters find "icky", the concept of outing (as gay) has been taken from its original concept and perverted into something that serves both their xenophobia and their "compassionate" conservatism.
Michelangelo Signorile is largely—and rightly—credited with bringing the concept of outing into the mainstream. Since then, of course, the perception of what it is, what it was meant to be, has become something else. Something that has caused divisions even among gay people.
I think it's time again to remind people what outing is all about. In a world where we know too much about Britney's corroborative efforts towards straight marriage and see far too much of Tara Reid's plastic surgery scars and hear far too much of John Ashcroft's chanteusing, people still screed "respect their privacy!" when it comes to homosex.
And by 'people', I don't mean "also journalists", I mean especially journalists! This is exactly the beef that Mike Signorile had with the supposed objectivity of journalism and other news reporting: the double-standard when it came to homosexuality.
Anyone remember Malcolm Forbes? Anyone remember his place in the History of Outing? I'm not going to launch into an entire history here, because you can check that out in the bio at Mike's site. And while I have every confidence that Mike's take is accurate, go google it and read more. Here's a relevant quote:
Signorile contended throughout that time that the homosexuality of public figures -- and only public figures - should be reported on when relevant to a larger story (and only when relevant).
That's it, folks. That's what outing is all about. It's a call for journalistic integrity. It's about ethics. Many might consider integrity and ethics dead concepts, especially in the media and even moreso in the proliferation of Bread and Circuses blogs, but I don't. Even though ethics rarely wins over making a buck and even though integrity never makes the headlines, what do we have if we don't have those?
So in any case where a public person's sexuality is relevant to a story, that person's sexuality, priorly openly stated or not, should be reported. And if I have anything to say about it (and I do, from this modest-sized podium, at least), it will.
So when you hear of Congress members talking about abridging my rights, implying that I am less and that people like me are less because we're gay, well, how much more relevant can you get?
I welcome the return of outing. Thank you, Mike, for drawing that line in the sand 14 years ago.
Appeasement.
Besides being British, that's what both men have in common.The other night on Real Time with Bill Maher, Andrew Sullivan suggested—almost insisted!—that the "Hollywood left" are to blame for handing the election to the Right:
ANDREW SULLIVAN: Well, Bill, Bill, congratulations to you because you did your bit to help George Bush win the election. And so did the entire Hollywood left, who galvanized people in the middle of the country who are tired of being patronized, condescended to and demeaned. I mean, if you want—
As Sterling said in Jeffrey, "Ooooh! Get her!"
Naturally, it's not the fault of the Bush-approved messages that rained on Ohio, Pennsylvania and all those Crazy Swingers about the gore of a partial-birth abortion and of gay people bringing the hell-rains down on hopeful and decent society.
Nor is it the fault of the Republican machine that starts with a message-of-the-day and ends with the myriad voices of the rageful right aping the message without thought, without consideration and certainly without regard for decency, veracity or even plausibility.
No, Andrew, it's none of that. It is we; we who demean the christians and their unnatural lifestyle unprovokedly? We must agree to respect those who take comfort in irrefutable delusion; who imagine an Absentee Father in Heaven who's waiting for them after they've spent a lifetime in a lifestyle dedicated to bringing pain and disadvantage to those who don't accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour (that spelling was for you, Andrew)?
SULLIVAN: --as people in Hollywood who demean people of religious faith. We’re getting into this cycle in which one side is continually polarizing the other until we have no discourse left at all.
Being the Thatcher-lover and Reagan-buttboy that he is, Mr. Sullivan seems to forget that it was the Reagan Right in the late 1980s who latched onto the word 'liberal' and turned it into 'Liberal', who convinced followers that a media that was increasingly being governed by large-corporate interests was actually a bunch of hippies, who convinced everyone that unchecked corporate and government aggression was the key to clean air and clean water, a full belly and a full wallet.
And Mr. Sullivan wonders why we associate being dogmatically and rabidly christian with being learning-impaired.
No, Mr. Sullivan, our salvation doesn't come from making sure they don't think we're hate them. They've already convinced themselves of that. Our salvation comes from making them grow up. Our salvation comes from making them aware of how much they have benefited and will continue to benefit from our efforts. Oh, we already know the good works they've done for all of us; their christian humility insists they let us know at every turn how full of grace and full of decency they are.
And they'll tell us when we aren't paying enough attention. Whether we are or not.
Those who can fabricate a Hand of God can fabricate just about anything.
Hi all...and welcome to the new digs.
What a pain in the ass (and not in a good way) getting things moved over here. Most of the archives are not here yet; all of the comments are gone (post some more!) and won't be moved.
The chapters of A Strong Sense of Place are not here yet, either.
On the plus side, I'm now on movable type and can start to do all kinds of cool nerdy stuff 'round here.
Stay tuned.
So, I hate authoring any lengthy content in a webpage. Way back when, that was one of the big reasons not to use MT.
I'm a big fan of "rich client" applications instead. Think iTunes Music Store. Think Ofoto Express for Mac. :)
In comes ecto. This the follow-on to kung-log, and it basically gives you your beautiful, handy Macintosh UI while composing entries that get posted to your MT site. No fussing with webpages and editing fields that are too small to use. No big chance of losing your posting just cuz you hit the back button or accidentally closed the wrong Safari window.
So go check it out if you're a Mac person and you use MT.
Oh, and it's got a "now playing in iTunes" button in the UI:
Piggy from the album "The Downward Spiral" by Nine Inch Nails
So today I discovered, quite accidentally, that dreamhost has turned on AppleShare. No more FTP clients just to move files from here to there. Just mount my home directory in the Finder and drag 'em to where they belong.
God, I'm such a nerd.
The move to the new site is complete (enough) that I'm ready to call it permanent, if unfinished.
Even though I'm redirecting traffic from the old site and from the old URL, for those of you linking to me, I'd prefer not to have to rely on redirects at all. So,y'all please change your links to: http://www.godofbiscuits.com/blog
Thanky.
Yay! Jennie!
This blog has always been composed and published from the iBlog app for Mac OS X.
I originally chose it 17 (seventeen!!!) months ago because it was a rich-client application, because i absolutely hate creating content in a webpage. Now that ecto is at least as easy to use as iBlog, with all the added benefits of a) movable type's maturity and b) being usable from any Mac, not from just the original installation of iBlog.app, I'm sold.
Thanks to Pete for helping me decide on a new web host, dreamhost.com. I'm very happy with them so far! They have emacs and more from their shell. Woo-nerdy-hoo!
So sometime in the next few weeks I'm going to attempt to migrate the whole shebang to MT. Also look for a new website from yours truly (and, hopefully, a bunch of really really smart people I know). Sam's blog will be migrating to dreamhost, too. It's going to be a busy couple of weeks, with BBEdit, Transmit, CSSEdit and HyperEdit windows open across Jack-Jack's 20" Cinema Display.
Palpable nerd-groove here.
So Sam wanted me to come up with a name for the new Dual-2.5GHz PowerMac G5. He wanted an old-man name but I couldn't think of one that I liked. Then I thought maybe since it's a dual-processor machine, something twinny, or two-headed, or something. (Dumb, I know, riiiiight?) Then I thought maybe I'd get a cool name from The Incredibles, which we saw Friday night. Typical me, I forgot all about it by the time the movie was over. It was an amazing movie. Everything was genius, even the silliest details (in typical Pixar fashion).
Anyhoo, Sam leans over to me after the movie and says, "We should call the G5 'Jack Jack'." Genius! It fits with the movie, fits with the twinny thing (sorta), and it's an old man name, too. (Hi, dad!)
So, folks, meet Jack-Jack.
Belly of the Beast
Radiator. (Seriously, it's liquid-cooled!)
Sleek backside
There has been a lot of talk about people wanting to leave the country now that George Bush finished the clean-out he started four years ago.
The talk is wrong. Fundamentally wrong. No one I know is talking about wanting to leave the country so much as fleeing the country. There's a huge difference there. No one wants to leave their home. But many of us have seriously considered the notion that we might have to leave before things get so bad for us that we won't be allowed to leave, that we won't be allowed to do very much at all without getting a permission slip from a government official first.
It sounds like a lot, doesn't it? It sounds like an over-reaction.
But pay attention to what the state-religious are saying these days. Pay close attention.
Now, it is said that you can tell a lot about a people by the way they treat their dead. I might add a corollary to that: you can tell a lot about the victorious by how they view the defeated.
The Dog's Knot (you know who they are) are balls-deep in self-aggrandizement, ready to eject 48% of the entire populace of this country just so their own internal emotional freakshows can be reflected in society. Joining them are a band of little Calvinist boys masquerading as little Catholic "pro-life" (except for the lives of "whining" liberals, women who kill their innocent unborn "babies", Iraqi civilian women and children, and those sentenced to death by the penal system) boys. Now, imagine a few thirteen-year-old males who take it upon themselves to understand the pressures of adult life, not only of male adults, but females of breeding age as well.
I've done some soul-searching (so to speak, you Theists) on what my reaction would be if Kerry had won. I wonder what the reactions of most of my friends would be if Kerry had won. The one thing that keeps coming back to mind is simply this: RELIEF. Relief that the isolationist, theocratic, narrow, regressive trends of a massive country with a staggering capability for destruction would begin to restore the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And what's the reaction from the Dog's Knot and the young Calvinists? Ugly gloating and decidedly non-Christian imprecation. "Fellow" Americans are only the 51% of the voting populace who finally gave Bush a Presidential win. More guns, less charity. Enforced Normalcy and desultory cultural cleansing. "America. Love it or Leave it. And You Don't Get to Decide What Forms Love Takes."
I wrote a while back about 'brinkmanship'. It's here, folks. And maybe, sadly, the only way to get away from the brink is to go over it.
We progressives may be "moonbats", but we're not lemmings.
I think I'm coming to understand the Republicans' love of guns: it's about to be Hunting Season.
Out of concern for reprisal, oblique or otherwise, we must greet the Leader of the "Free" World with laurels and not accusations.
But a grand apologia to the rest of the world? I can manage that before any smoking gun is found.
Were I a Republican, I should set out to find someone to blame, for in the absence of Good Will (buddy, can ya spare some?), democratic forms require a scapegoat. And there's no good will anymore; it's all been sucked up by the evangelical christians who insist on installing their own craziness where there's access to a big red button.
So who can the Republicans scapegoat? Well, my money's on Europe. You guys kicked out the Evangelicals of their day back in the 1600s and now they're back, angry, gloating. Ascendancy achieved.
Yes, it's Revenge of the Pilgrims.
From those of us feeling trapped inside our own vast country—too big for its britches, too wealthy to still possess shame—we're sorry for what suffering the American Empire is about to bring to the rest of those who share this planet of ours.
We're sorry. I am sorry.
Floridian Nader voters. One Question: WHY?
Call us when the shuttle lands, Pauline.
In the Declaration of Independence, which admirably (and with political expediency) caters both to the notion of a god and to nature (and this was before any solid theories of evolution!), there's a declaration of "inalienable rights", followed by a list of grievances against King George.
To my way of thinking, out of the 18 grievances against that George, our George already meets 7 of them:
Did you also know, Americans, that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence both allow for total self-abolishment?
I know! Nothing is sacred, right?
23% of gays and lesbians who voted, voted for Bush/Cheney.
I'm sorry you hate yourselves so much; I'm sorry you're so ashamed of who you are.
But in case you didn't notice, they don't put therapists' couches in voting booths. Go get some help before you vote again.
Warmest regards for a speedy recovery,
The Other 77% of Us
Go vote. It's important.
If you vote for Bush...hmm...how do I put this....oh yeah: you're a FUCKING IDIOT.