happy Birthday

A radio station here just remarked that today is San Francisco's birthday, they've been playing music along that theme "San Francisco Days " by Isaak and Jack Johnson's "Where'd All the Good People Go?."

One of my favorite quotes about The City is by Herb Caen, the famous columnist, who'd write 1,000 words columns every day for the SF Chronicle.

"San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was."

This is the one place in the world that has it all; perfect weather for the most part, good industries, beautiful people, freaks and yuppies and gangstas and people who prefer to have their freak flag hanging over the couch in the living room.

What other city has a better Halloween or Pride weekend?

They say California is the land of fruits and nuts, and to a certain point agree. Let me ask this question though, which kind of salad would you prefer? Plain old iceberg lettuce or something with a few more ingredients. Fruit salad is a summertime treat, salad is just something to tide you over while they cook your meal at the restaurant. a tossed salad is more than just greens; it's apples and walnuts, and some cheese shredded, and a few slices of red onion, and some vinaigrette. Toss the ingredients in a bowl, put it on a plate, and some steak on top. you have yourself a feast before you.

Some of the technological leaps we've encountered came from right here in the Bay area and a few miles down the peninsula. World is running out of oil, odds are, a solution will be found. And it will most likely be discovered here

Stop me

If I've ranted this before. I wrote it the other day & I don't see it up here.

I don't mind too terribly much that Mr. Bush rigged not one, but two elections. That shows his capability to achieve. I don't care that he's a greedy crook, who rewards his cronies even when they do wrong. It happens all the time. I can live with the secrecy, the manipulation of facts and distortion of research to fit his political agenda. It happens in an totalitarian regime. I can even excuse his sending troops into an action that is intractable. Leaders do that all the time, and a soldier's lot in life is to suffer.

What bothers me is that he's a crook and a liar, and all of the above, but he doesn't work for the common good and the well-being of the American People.

And that is inexcusable.

You have let us down Mr. President. And I hope History will remember you as the ineffective inept intolerable dolt you are. I wish nothing but malice upon you and those who've aided and abetted you in the dismantling of our system of Checks and Balances.

If I had any avenue to redress my antipathy I would.

As it stands, I'm in a progressive enclave of like-minded people, and my representatives in the House and Senate are already aligned with my political leanings.

I only wish I could rally people elsewhere. Especially in Tennessee, Ohio, Pennslyvania and a few others.


If you live in any of these states, please, for the sake of all of us, vote your incumbents out. They do you more harm than all the married gays and satanic lyrics ever could.

While your at it, dash off a letter or two telling them what you think. Put them on notice that you won't tolerate any more of their intolerance. We need to remind these wonks that They work for YOU.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The dirklings have mastered this maxim recently. Being ten and eight, they are wont to still play pretend, and their chief sources of inspiration are the comics I buy them and of course cartoons.

I’ve bought several in anticipation of the seasonal migration. One, was a preview issue of Wildsiderz, something about a team of teens with hard light holograph exoskeletons



So, of course now they’re driving me nuts with their unrelenting pretend play, picking out which colors and what animals and how they use their powers.

I know, I brought it on myself. It could be worse, they could be ‘shrooms – sitting around inside playing video games with no imagination at all, or worse yet, jocks that are stat junkies, going on ad nauseum about Barry Bonds’ record, or how the Sonics are doing.

Or whatever it is normal kids are into.

They’ve also recently mastered the art of the half-truth. Telling just enough of an event to make it sound so much more dramatic, casting themselves as the tragic victims.

They’ll make good republicans.

Here's to you & her's to me, in hopes we never disagree.

It's Saturday night before Pride parade & I'm at home with the dirklings watching old episodes of The Avengers with the inimitable Mr. Steed and Mrs. Emma Peel.

I've got them doing shots. Of Odwalla protein shake. The Boy Child is dangerously underweight because he's such a picky eater. I'm not sure where I got the idea, but it's a skill that will serve him well in a decade. Next up, Godzilla versus Gigan.


fun fun fun.

Pride

This weekend is one of hte biggest parties in the Bay Area; the Gay Pride Parade is Sunday. A local columnist, Jon Carroll enthused about how things are progressing in today's column.

I have to say I agree with his sentiments. As I 've stated earlier, love is hard enough to find in this life, why place an aritrary restriction on it like gender choice?

The Greeks had several words for the different kinds of love

There was agape; or pure love aka brotherly love. This was what they claimed Jesus had for the world and its sinners. Too bad His followers hadn't chosen to follow His teachings.

There is Eros. This one gets the most attention. In Christian terms, it could be referred to as lust.

There's filial love, or love of family.

There's also a love for country, of duty and honor. I forget what that one's called.

I've tried to explain the concepts to my kids, and I think they get it.

Several years ago, I marched in the Pride parade as one of the naughty students from Vulva University. My then-girlfriend and I heard about it from some friends and it sounded like a good way to participate. There is definitely something joyful walking down the middle of Market street with a float carrying a Giant mockup of a Vulva nad the DJ spinning classic disco hits like "Lady Marmalade" and throngs of people cheering at you.

The only time things weirded me out was before the parade started. The Cheerleaders were rehearsing, and the BDSM scene was getting arranged, when a dad and his little girl came through to wish someone well. She was all smiles and waved to a man who was dressed as a Pony and harnessed to a small carriage to pull his Mistress. The ponyboy waved back and all was sweetness and light.

Would that the world could be so easy.

I know some of the influences on my predilections. Mrs. Emma Peel, and Big Barda, were the coolest when I was little; Speed Racer's Trixie was a hysterical wuss. Later Grace Jones, Stevie Nicks and no list of beauties would be complete without Chaka Khan.

Coming out to my family was one of the hardest things I could do. It was after my second divorce, and I was living with a man who helped me get my life together, just by sharing his place, and generally being him. It was living with him that I came to understand, that it's ok to be different, and not have to apologize, or feel guilt, or shame. I don’t need your sympathy or any special treatment. I am who I am, and I don't have to explain myself to anybody.

I'm bipolar. With a side of ADD.

My emotional cycle is too long to be classic bipolar disorder, and my distractibility isn't as severe as the "typical" person with it. I get the blues, get on a roll when ideas just flow, and instead of a manic euphoria, I get irritable and frustrated.

This is the time of year I feel pride. In my chose lifestyle and those of my friends, no matter what that lifestyle happens to be. It's also the time of year I think of a roommate I had years ago, and wonder how he's doing. Unlike some people, I don't stalk my past. I tend to let it slip away. The good and the bad.

Thank you Raif. You and Malcolm save my life back in Seattle. I just hope all is well in your world and I hope you have a fine Pride weekend wherever you are.

Article

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Pretty simple-enough sounding. We the People have the right to speak our minds, to dissent, to praise, to say anything we feel. We the People have under this Amendment, the first one listed to our Constitution, the right to meet others in peaceable assembly for any reason. We also should have a free press, who has the right to know and research, and to report to We the People what hey find. Under this Amendment We the People have no State-Sanctioned religion.

Originally, this was intended to help protect the churches from the Government. Bluff King Hal made himself the Head of the Church of England, seized its assets, broke with Rome, and annulled his marriage so he could marry Anne Boleyn. Henry VIII was looking for a son, and instead, he got one of the greatest monarchs to ever rule England.

But that's not important right now.

What is important is that churches and places of worship are for the governing of men's souls, not their worldly affairs. As we are seeing, that is not the case any longer.

This article in the Times describes how.

An Air Force panel sent to investigate the religious climate at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs found evidence that officers and faculty members periodically used their positions to promote their Christian beliefs and failed to accommodate the religious needs of non-Christian cadets, its leader said Wednesday.

And as usual, when a body investigates itself

But the panel said it had found no "overt religious discrimination" - only "insensitivity" - and praised the academy leadership for working aggressively to confront religious problems in the last two years.

That's like saying the Japanese were "insensitive" to its POWs during World War Two. But I digress.

Most authentic religious people I can tolerate, even respect. To have faith is a difficult thing, and can be a source of great comfort. I despised the trainees who got religious during Basic Training or deployments. I know I wasn't the only Atheist. Just the most vocal. My dog tags even said so. "godless" was what I requested. I got "Atheist". Close enough.

I had a fighter jock try to mathematically prove it was in an airman's bet interest to believe in god. Called it a "Zero - Sum" equation, and proceeded to draw a grid with a plus in one corner, and 0s in the remaining three.
Like this:

+|0
----
0|0

He then labeled the quadrants

God No God

+ | 0 God
--------
0 | 0 No God


He then explained the diagram:

If you believe in God, and there is a God, then that's a "+", 'cause you're going to go to heaven

If you don't believe in God, and there is a God, that's a "0",'cause you're not going to go to heaven

If you believe in God, and there is no God, then that's a "0", 'cause you're not going to go to heaven

If you don't believe in God, and there is no God, that's a "0",'cause you're not going to go to heaven

I was too hungover to deal with this, I had to chime in.

"You forgot one axis of the equation."

The Captain asked me to explain.

"If you believe in the WRONG god, there's a potential "-" in the equation, because most of them are of the jealous variety."

He then tried to say that there was only one true god, and I then asked him (respectfully) to prove which one it was. With using more than just the bible.

" "

I went to get more coffee. And then on to work.

The point is, we mere mortals will never know one way or the other. Faith is hard to have when times are good. Easy when times are hard and we feel powerless. That more than anything is why the Conservatives and Religious nuts are so embattled. They thrive on persecution.

And the Liberals on college campuses ply right into that game. Stop attacking. Listen, and then calmly and peacefully counter the argument. Always focus on your point, but acknowledge the opponent, but stay focused on winning. And quit doing protest marches. They are ineffective on most occasions. Get in on the local politics, and make no noise until you know you have a majority. Then crush them without a moment’s hesitation. It's worked for them.

When and how did a religion based upon a man of peace sacrificing himself so his followers could be saved from eternal damnation ever turn into an aggressive blend of Amway and Starbucks in its approach to gaining members?


And why are we letting them get away with what they're doing?

Migration

Tomorrow night, the dirklings fly down from their mother's home. In addition to the usual scramble, we're adjusting things for daytime care for them. In the past, I stayed home and we maintained the house, er, mostly.

This time I have a permanent employer, not just a temp gig that I can walk away from, and tell the agency I need the summer off. I'm working during daylight hours, so I need to have them spend a big chunk of the day in someone else's care.

oboy.


This is also the first year there hasn't been major drama involved in getting them. almost like clockwork, or a menstrual cyacle, their mother would freak out and worry about them coming down. Like I don't know what I'm doing.This year is different. She seemed almost eager for them to come down. I know she's taking some coursework, so that might be it.

Oddly, I'm ambivalent about the whole thing. They and my wife are my whole reason for being. When the blues come upon me, it's the fact that I'm needed that keeps me going, gets me out of bed, and prevents me from giving up. "Blues" is a but of a misnomer - it's more of a dark slate grey. Like Ohio skies in Late winter, no snow, but no sun. Colors aren't as bright, food is less satisfying. Most things are joyless.

I'm very tired. I have been for a few days. I'm not depressed. Not yet, anyway.

I've stopped calling them. They always seem to be watching television, or in the middle of doing something more demanding of their attention. I've told them time and again that they can call me whenever the mood takes them. When I first moved away, I called almost daily. Time went on, the frequency tapered. I've lived in the Bay area for five and a half years now.

I don't know.

Poor, Poor, Fatima

Cursed with a beautiful mother, she has her father's looks.

Friendly Hostility, a webcomic my wife reads regularly, is about a family of Indians who have an interesting dynamic.









The boy in the car is her brother, Fox.

The artist originally had a strip called "Boy Meets Boy" that was in a similar vein, only focusing more on Fox and his boyfriend/roomate

oy.

I prefer comics the old-fashioned way. On paper.

Who, pray who, will help the children?

I tried like hell to post this last night, but couldn't uplod to blogger. -- d

They say Democracy is a full contact event. Over the past five years, we Americans and the world have been numbed by historical events. We've endured a great loss; the loss of our perceived invulnerability, and our security. When afraid, humans are at their most bestial.

With us in the grip of this great Fear, our leaders have manipulated events, facts, and anything else necessary to attain their ends. The Downing Street memo is hardly spoken of here in the US, yet it doesn't allege anything, it out and out states that the Bush Administration was intent on invading Iraq long before they had "exhausted" any peaceful efforts.

In the Military, one must be prepared, for any number of contingencies. Having forces stationed in the Persian Gulf for a decade, of course there have been plans to invade Iraq, There have probably been plans for repulsing another invasion of Kuwait. Any number of things regarding a hostile nation need to be thought of and planned for. It's the way things are done. It's good to have a plan.

The difference between a contingency plan and manipulating data, facts public opinion, is like comparing practicing martial arts, and carrying a gun looking for trouble.

We have ample evidence that reports and scientific studies are being edited to fit policy are appalling. The Bush Administration isn't even bothering to try to cover it up. We The People have been led astray. We The People have been cowed, we're numb. We feel Helpless with a capital H. What can we do?


I'm glad you asked.

We vote.

We write letters, and email to our elected officials. We remind them that they work for We the People, no matter who gives them campaign donations, We The People cast the ballots.


The PBS fiasco got me started. Aside from public libraries, I can think of no greater service the government provides to our society. I did very little research to find the following links to places where you can make your voice heard.

Remember, in a civil society, we use civil language to be taken seriously. Writing a Representative or a Senator is different than a flame war.

But you knew that. Just thought I'd remind you.

MoveOn.Org, the group that tried to get Bush & Co out of office has an online petition you can sign to express your displeasure at the mauling of our Public Broadcasting Systems. These services include Air America, and the Voice of America, I think.

http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/

In addition to MoveOn.org Here are some other links of interest.

These are the official government sites:

The White House
http://www.whitehouse.gov/

The Senate
http://www.senate.gov/

The House of Representatives
http://www.house.gov/

In California our Senators our Barbara Boxer & Diane Feinstein. Barbara Lee, if you recall, was one of the few dissenting votes on invading Iraq . So far it's 1700 dead and counting.

Diane Feinstein's homepage
http://feinstein.senate.gov/

To contact her
http://feinstein.senate.gov/contact.html


Barbara Boxer's homepage
http://boxer.senate.gov/

To contact her
http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm



To get the contact info on your Representative go here, and type in your ZIP code.
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Finally, the Democratic Party - They're not much of alternative, but at least they are one.

http://www.democrats.org/

The #1 problem with the Dems and Liberals in general is how uppity the come across, and how intolerant of red-staters. You come across as pussies; and bitchy ones at that. We are Americans, we're rough around the edges.


It's not enough that we Californians do something. The rest of the country, if not the whole world knows how progressive we are here in the worlds fifth largest economy.

We need to get our friends and family in the rest of the country motivated. Your aunt in Michigan, that kid in Ohio you knew. Old Military friends, lost lovers you stalk from time to time, ANYBODY not in California needs to get involved as well. Even if it's the online petition at MoveOn.org

And if you know any one -- ANYONE -- who can vote in Tennessee, to get all their friends to vote against Bill Frist in the next election. It's 18 month away, but this man is particularly dangerous, he's got to go.

And if you live in Kansas, you have my sympathies. Your's is an uphill fight against the flat-earthers. If there's anything I could do to help, let me know.


I leave you with a quote from the venerable Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson.

"All politics is local politics"

I need your help

Got an email today that alarmed me. Can't say it's much of a surprise, but alarming nonetheless.

Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS: http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/

A House panel has voted to eliminate all public funding for NPR and PBS, starting with "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," and other commercial-free children's shows. If approved, this would be the most severe cut in the history of public broadcasting, threatening to pull the plug on Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Oscar the Grouch..

The cuts would slash 25% of the federal funding this year—$100million—and end funding altogether within two years. The loss could kill beloved children's shows like "Clifford the Big Red Dog," "Arthur," and "Postcards from Buster." Rural stations and those serving low-income communities might not survive. Other stations would have to increase corporate sponsorships. Already, 300,000 people have signed the petition. Can you help us reach 400,000 signatures today?

Check out this link
http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/


And another link to look up- the Washington Post.
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=745--



I checked it with Snopes.com & this one's true.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/arts/nea.asp

Before there was cable, there was PBS. Without it, we probably wouldn't have phrases ingrained in our memory, like;

"No one expects the Spanish inquisition"
"As we go into the silent world aboard the Calypso"
"Hey Froggy Baby"
"Hello neighbor"
"This parrot's dead"
"Hey you guys!"
"Exterminate! Exterminate!"
"There are billions and billions of stars..."

PBS has provided a valuable service to society at large and to geeks in particular. Without whom, many of us would not have been introduced to Monty Python, Oscar the Grouch, Rowan Atkinson, Miranda Richardson, John Cleese, Benny Hill, Stephen Jay Gould, The Teletubbies, Bert & Ernie. I could go on, but you get the point.

Our childhood friends and our children's friends are under siege, something needs to be done.

Whatever your political beliefs, I ask you to participate in this call to action. Sign the petition; get more involved if you wish, just remember that this is the one station that is for we the people.

Their mission is to inform, entertain, and educate. But most importantly they do this non-commercially.

For the kid & geek in all of us.

Rub her feet

Lazarus Long is the main character in the Roboert Heinlein book, "Time Enough For Love." More of a manifesto for polyamory than just about anything else, the book is about Lazarus, who was born in the early part of the 20th Century and had lived for thousands of years, thanks to a selective breeding project and some kind of cloning-like technology.

The book has several ministories, where he relates various experiences, but the thin that stands out are the maxims he lists. hte tile of today's entry being one of them.

Below are a few of my favorite.

"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny."

"The greatest productive force is human selfishness."

"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."

"Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that does this to himself"

"Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse"

"Natural laws have no pity."

"It is impossible for a man to love his wife wholeheartedly without loving all women somewhat. I suppose that the converse must be true of women."

- Having falling in love on a BART thousands of times myself, I can vouch for this one.

"Never appeal to a man's "better nature". He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage"

"Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate - and quickly."

And this one has been told to me by others in differing varieties -

"Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you."

Finally, I give you this nugget to gnaw on, for I believe in it wholeheartedly.

"If you are in a society that votes then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.

If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask him his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such a thing is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires"

So, do your part, and vote the bastards out. Especially nutjobs like Frist, and his ilk.

Urban is just another word for

Scary, huh? When words have a definition that is totally different from the euphemism that they’ve become, what happens to the original definition?

It’s another case of current use does not equal original intent. Urban means city from the latin word urb. Now it’s pretty much the nice way of saying "ghetto". Which in America means “black” which in white America means “scary”.

I live in Oakland. Not too long ago I lived right off Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd here is a satellite picture of the block I lived on. Just north of the “roarin’ twenties” in the “ghost town” neighborhood. I knew all my neighbors by sight, and most of them by name. The worst problem we had wasn’t the entrepreneurs who hung out on the corner by the lliquor store. It was the church next to us.

The clockers were just making a living of sorts, and didn’t bother anyone who wasn’t a customer. The Church, a little Baptist affair was alright in and of itself. But there was one thing wrong. They sublet their spaced to a small Pentecostal group who met there about four nights a week. They felt they could make up in volume what they lacked in membership. The nine members would turn the volume way up, and they would chant their halleluja’s usually untill 9 - 10 o’clock in the evenings. It’s struck me as odd that people who speak spanish speak in tongues differently than people who speak english and speak in tongues.

I’m not religious. I blame the need to have a higher power on our big toe. More on that later. I do believe, however, that as an American, you have the right to delude yourself with whatever spiritual crutch you feel you need. I call it the “Right to be Wrong” and as much as I criuticize the Christians especially and to a lesser extent the muslim communities, I respect their right to have those beliefs and will fight to the death for that right.

But

As my neighbor, you have the responsibility to get along with the rest of the community. The Pentecostals would have the occasional revival, going until 4-5 o’clock in the morning. Without warning and on no particular day. If it was Easter, or St. Swithin’s day or Walpurgisnacht, I could understand, and adjust my plans accordingly. If they would post some knid of announcement that this was going to happen, I could also adjust my plans and be out of town that weekend.

But no, they hadn’t the decency.

The last encounter I had with them, I called the Oakland police, to complain about the noise. Yes, I was serious, I’d tell them, after I’d say my address. By 4:30. I’d snapped. I told the dispatcher if they didn’t send a car over in the next five minutes, just send the county coroner’s, and to bring plenty of bags.

A patrol car was there by the time I left the house. My wife talked to the pastor, I talked to the police, and in an hour or so, nothing was accomplished. The five times I called my landlord that night got more done, because he was going to lose the tenants in all four of his units in that house because of that group. He called the Baptist pastor, the owner of the church building, and they talked to the Pentecostals, quieting them down for a little while. They’re still there, I moved on.

I’m still in Oakland, just farther away from a church. In most urban areas, you will see tons of little churches, seemingly on every corner, right next to the liquor stores.

There’s an evangelical megachurch in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by the Air Force Academy that is attracting people from all over. this article and this one from Harper’s sums them up as:

They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain towns. What Colorado Springs offers, ultimately, is a story.

The story they found in Colorado is about newness: new houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were before the culture wars, after the World Wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.

Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of it—the burglary rate in and around Colorado Springs exceeds that in New York City and Los Angeles—but the idea of crime: a faith in the absence of it. And of politics, too: Colorado Springs’ evangelicals believe they live without it, in a carved-out space for civility and for like-minded dedication to common-sense principles. Even pollution plays a part: Christian conservatives there believe that they breathe cleaner air, live on ground untainted by the satanic fires of nineteenth-century industry—despite the smog that collects against the foothills of the Rockies and the cyanide, from a century of mining, that is leaching into the aquifers and mountain streams.

But those are facts, and Colorado Springs is a city of faith. A shining city at the foot of a hill. No one there believes it is perfect. And no one is so self-centered as to claim the perfection of Colorado Springs as his or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and more grandiose. It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream “Christian,” but in its particulars it is “American.” Not literally but as in a story, one populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

It’s a frightening feature. The church itself is huge, Wal MArt huge. Walt Disney coldn’t have imagined anything like this, but Heinlein did. In a series of his stories he describes the “American Ayatollahs”, religious nuts who run our country until a counter-revolution depsoses them.
this megachurch, called New Life Church, is close enough to the Air Force Academy that it has influence there, recently, a chaplain who reported the abuses the evangelical chaplains and cadets was reassigned. There’s articles from the Washington Post, CNN online, truthout.org and, for fairness, The bitches over at the Free Republic.

And yes, they are bitches, of the punk-assed variety.


The Harper’s piece describes further the demographic of these megachurches.

Part of their antipathy is literally biblical: the Hebrew Bible is the scripture of a provincial desert people, suspicious of the cosmopolitan powers that threatened to destroy them, and fundamentalists read the New Testament as a catalogue of urban ills—sophistication, cynicism, lust—so deadly that one would be better off putting out one’s own eye than partaking in their alleged pleasures. But the anti-urban sentiments of modern fundamentalists are also more specific to the moment in which they find themselves.

Three years ago, in the 2002 elections, Christian conservatives swept Georgia, the last Democratic bastion in the South. They toppled an incumbent Democratic governor, a war-hero Democratic senator, the state House speaker, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, and his son, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a majority black district that state Democrats had drawn up especially for him. The new Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss, and the new governor, Sonny Perdue, both conservatives and Christian, won not on “moral values” but on an exurban platform. The mastermind behind the coup was Ralph Reed, once of the Christian Coalition, who had been reborn as Georgia’s Republican chairman. Reed remains a fundamentalist, the same man who once tested employees’ commitment to “Christian values” by asking them if they supported the death penalty for adultery, but he was too canny to talk like that in public. The term “Christian,” he’d learned, is a “divider,” not a “unifier,” so he had left overt faith behind. He backed candidates who ran under the mantra of the exurbs: “Shorter commutes. More time with family. Lower mortgages.”

This troika of exurban ambition worked on multiple levels. Just as Nixon used marijuana and heroin in the 1960s as code for hippies and blacks, Reed devised a platform that conflated ordinary personal goals with fundamentalist values. “Shorter commutes” is a ploy that any old-time ward heeler would recognize. It means: let’s move the good jobs out of the city. Atlanta, like Colorado Springs, has an urban core that Christian conservatives would just as soon see wither. “More time with family,” of course, extends that promise of exurban jobs but also speaks in code to the fundamentalist preoccupation with “family”—that is, with defining it, with excluding not just gay couples but any combination not organized around “biblical” principles of “male headship.”

As for “lower mortgages,” they are lower in exurbs because cities subsidize them. The city pays the taxes that build the sewers and the roads for the exurbs. The city provides the organization that makes it possible. Exurbs are parasites. And what else does “lower mortgages” mean? More land. More space between you and your neighbors. And this, too, is necessary for Christian conservatism, which depends on the absence of conflict as one of its main selling points. For all its talk of community, it is wary of community’s main asset: the conflict, and the resulting cultural innovation, born of proximity. But such cultural innovation is death to today’s Christian conservatism, which tosses a gauzy veil of tradition over the big-box consumerism of its megachurches.

As contemporary fundamentalism has become an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of theodicy—if God is good, then why does He allow suffering?—as a matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than others. Cities equal more fallen souls equal more demons equal more temptation, which, of course, leads to more fallen souls. The threats that suffuse urban centers have forced Christian conservatives to flee—to Cobb County, Georgia, to Colorado Springs. Hounded by the sins they see as rampant in the cities (homosexuality, atheistic schoolteaching, ungodly imagery), they imagine themselves to be outcasts in their own land. They are the “persecuted church”—just as Jesus promised, and just as their cell-group leaders teach them.

This exurban exile is not an escape to easy living, to barbecue and lawn care. “We [Christians] have lost every major city in North America,” Pastor Ted writes in his 1995 book Primary Purpose, but he believes they can be reclaimed through prayer—“violent, confrontive prayer.”[4] He encourages believers to obtain maps of cities and to identify “power points” that “strengthen the demonic activities.” He suggests especially popular bars, as well as “cult-type” churches. “Sometimes,” he writes, “particular government buildings . . . are power points.” The exurban position is one of strategic retreat, where believers are to “plant” their churches as strategic outposts encircling the enemy.

Theirs is an embattled religion, always persecuted and with enemies everywhere. First it was Satanic subliminal messages in music, now it’s gays, and the urban nightmare.


If they want war, fine. Let them see a war. A cold war. Like the one America just won. We beat the Communist systems because of our system's checks and balances, our openness to newness and change. The Founding Fathers instituted these because they didn’t trust human nature and it’s proclivity towards tyranny.

Go to the Hinterlands and set up your homogenous grids and Mega everythings. I want my city, next to The City, and I want all the weirdoes, even the one’s that I don’t like, because htye are still part of the environment that fosters creativity, and chaos, and from those elements come opportunity. The Urban Village model needs to be explored further, and wacky things like sustainability and diversity and equal opportunity and quality secular education. The only way the Darkness of these Forces of Ignorance can be turned back is with the light of reason.

And turn down that damn amplifier.

You know how it goes.

It’s midnight

Time is Fleeting.
Madness, takes it’s toll. But listen closely, (not for very much longer) I’ve got to keep control.


You know how it goes.

Just got back from seeing the Luc Besson movie “Unleashed”, strarring Jet Li, Bob Hoskins and Morgan Freeman.

Wow.

the acting was great. I’ve always admired Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins. I’ve loved Mr. Freeman since he was Easy Reader in the Electric Company on PBS. He is the only reason I didn’t start a riot at the screening of the Kevin Costner debacle that was Robin Hood.

Mr. Hoskins was in Several gritty dramas before “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” I am still amazed he did that one. He's such a typical Brit actor, accomplished and beleivable. Actors who trained to act. Who knew?

I once had a multimedia project in school where I created a design document to make a presentation on the letters unearthed at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall. The remakrable thing about these letters were the content. They were messages from Officer’s wives to one another, letters form home outlining care packages and the like. In this document, I wanted Mr. Hoskins & Mr. Gordon Sumner to narrate.

The story is thus; a man, Danny (Li) has been raised to be an attack dog by a local Glaswegian thug (Hoskins), after a Mcaguffin, Danny comes to live with a blind piano tuner and his step-daughter. There he becomes human. He encounters his old boss again, and of course he ends up confronting his former master, and learns of his past.

Standard stuff, really, but the themes are nicely handled; the scenes deftly shot & edited. Mr. Besson doesn’t revel too much in the violence to show what a beast Danny is; except to establish he’s a badass. Anyone familiar with Jet Li knows this, but still, it’s refreshing to have the story told, rather than rely on the actor’s reputation. to move it along.

There are several scenes that are superb. Where Hoskins and Li show, by turns, what animals we really are. Both good and bad. Hoskins talks to him in tones like one would a dog, first chiding, then conciliatory then stern. Li, in response adopt the shuffling gait, the downcast eyes, the beseeching eyebrows that dogs pull on you.

I believe domestication is a two-way street. humans are definitely a domesticate-able species. To quote the poet Perry Farell, “We’d make great pets.”
There are several traits an animal must have to be domesticated, if it’s missing just one, it can’t be domesticated. Take the llama and the vicuna for example, or the horse and zebra. In both instances, they are very similar cousins, genetically, but there’s one trait, that is the difference between the wild and the tamed. The llama doesn’t panic when penned, and the zebra will not accept a human as the alpha of the group.

The Book “Guns, germs and Steel” (ISBN 0-393-31755-2) describes this in depth. It’s a bit deterministic, but overall a good. book.

The premise reminded me of a recent development in DC Comics. It the Batman constellation of comics, the original Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, is crippled, and becomes ORacle, kind of major domo for an ersatz batcave the graduates from the Batman School of Crime-fighting. In a series several years ago, a young girl is raised to be a perfect fighter, where she never learned to speak, so her first language was combat. According to the comic, the language centers were used for her fighting skills, rather than speech.

But I usually don’t read Batman, or DC Comics. After all, a writer I don’t know says that there’s an editor who works there who discriminates against women writers.

Great movie. I highly recommend it.

Yep, another

Saturday night and we’re going out to see a movie, Unleashed over at my favorite movie theater in the Bay Area, the Parkway Theater. It’s one of those places which has couches and you can drink beer and eat food there, just like theaters in Europe. Well, except for the couches part.

I like this place because it’s local owned and operated, they have a designated day for mothers with small children to go see a movie with their kids. I Seattle, there were several baby-friendly theaters that had special rooms where the sound wasn’t as loud and had some sound proof glass or something so the other patrons didn’t have to hear a baby if it got fussy. What a concept. It’s a perfect example of a market –driven solution to an age-old problem. Why more places don’t do this I don’t know, there’s always going to be mothers with small children who would like to go out without having to ditch their newborn.

Of course, in San Francisco, there are more dogs than kids. Sad but true.

A sort of Homecoming

The wife is on her way home from Truckee, where she was in a one-day mini renaissance faire for the local middle school. Last night, she got to enjoy the fellowship of friends not seen and to teach kids. THe only things that would make it perfect would be if she were to fly a small plane, and maybe me there as well. In the past twenty four hours, I have enjoyed things that my wife doesn’t enjoy, so I forgo them.

I wished she would have stayed another night and gotten some rest, and some more fun with her friends. I would miss her, but I would rather her miss her than mourn her. The roads from the Bay to Truckee are twist and turn with on the sides of mountains, so there’s little room for error. Fortunately, she’s not driving alone, so it won’t be too bad.

In a couple weeks, the dirklings come down for the Summer. I miss them as well; it’s a dull ache, a sense of loss similar to the death in the family.
Watching X-Men again. I think one of it’s biggest appeal is seeing childhood friends in the real world. As a kid, I loved the Hulk, he was big and strong and child-like. Didn’t uunderstand why he was so mad at a world that hated him. Wolverine was cool to the young teenager, all rage and the struggle to contain it. John Byrne drew the X-Mane at the time, he helped steer Wolverine fromjust being a reckless hothead to being more of a Clint Eastwood kind of character, the Man With a Past and the Demons to show for it.

Over the years, Wolverine and the X-Men have faded in and out of my consciousness. The ebb and flow of my life making comics a kind of love/hate relationship. Nowadays, comics, or Sequential Art as some would have it, are finally being afforded some well-deserved respect. Now, I’ve introduced them to the kids, as a way to foster reading and more importantly, as friends of mine.

Hot time tonight.

I got a job finally. It's at one of the most progressive companies I've ever encountered. This is how companies should be run. The gig I do I'm so over-qualified for, but I see room for growth. As a copywriter, I could grow into the Marketing/PR department or elsewhere. I'm afraid to like it too much.

But enough about me.

My wife is up in Truckee right now. She is helping out a friend put on a mini Renaissance faire.

So, I have a flat to myself, and what do I do? Make a toddy/hot chocolate and organize my computer files.

I can see why Ian Mc Kellan been considered a "babe magnet" in the gay community. If I had that kind of command of language, of delivery.

Just showing cage match. scene. love the blade design of his claws. It's the first time I've noticed the barmaid counting money looks like Hedwig. Not that it's a bad thing, mind you, but I didn't know Bilgewater's had cage matches.

I'm a fan boy. Bite me.

Wolverine's thirtieth anniversary was this year. I remember the comic he first appeared in. The Hulk was fighting some beast called the Wendigo. I didn't know who the bad guy was, & quite frankly, I didn't care. It was the Age Of Big Guys Who Looked Like Tanks.

Toddy's kicking in. Can't write coherently.

Koo Koo Ka Choo Mrs. Robinson

Anne Bancroft is dead. I heard about it from my wife and read about it here. She is survived by her husband Mel Brooks and their son. She was born 17 September, 1931, which is just a few days after my father. She married Mel in 1964.

I pulled up her biography here and here.


I’m not sure what else to say. I’ve only seen The Graduate once, and I feel for Mr. Brooks. I’ve lost two wives so far, and the fact that they are still alive only mitigates the feeling of loss. When you mourn someone, it’s the things you didn’t do, the things you never got around to, the things that you had planned to .

it just goes to prove that there is nothing in this world that can’t be taken away from you in an instant.

When NPR doesn't Suck

I had just followed a link to an NPR piece, “The Benefits of Restlessness and Jagged Edges” which, of course had related articles, which is where I found this one titled “Me and My Depression”. A student, named Belia Mayeno describes her onset of it and how she came to terms with the medications she’s now taking. the part that resonates most was how she misses the highs, and to a lesser extent the lows, but her metaphor of choice was that there was a “war” going on inside her head. I never saw it that way. I still don’t.

Another piece by a staffer at NPR describes how he deals with the depression, and how, even though it seems everyone has some kind of mood altering prescriptions, Bipolar Disorder has a bit of a stigma about it.


This topic is close to me, because my son has been diagnosed with Childhood Onset of Bipolar Disorder. He gets it from his father. I’m haywired. I’ve never been officially diagnosed as having either ADD/ADHD or Bipolar Disorder. but I take the medications that can be used for both.

When I get a high, they’re not extreme. I can still sleep normally, I just scribble a lot of notes and sketches and let them run wild in my head and flow unrestricted onto paper as well as I can and save the notes and sketches and ideas for the times when the well runs dry, so to speak. the hypersexuality is fun, but a bit frustrating, it’s more akin to being hungry than horny. Every woman is especially attractive in one way or another on days like that.

When I get the blues, I just try to sleep it off. I can and will endure. I know it will pass, but I just get all the more irritable when my wife or someone close tries to “help”. It would be akin to me trying to help with PMS or childbirth. I can offer aid, and support, but it’s a reactive role, not an active one.

I try to help my son find ways to deal with the fact that the world isn’t made for people like us. I tell him how the world is made up of different kinds of people.

Some of us are built to be farmers, we get up at the same time, do the same routine day in and day out, and things change slowly. Others of us are hunter gatherers; we are restless, always looking out for something and when we come across something we really want, we’re able to focus in on it. We’re also good at taking risks. In a world of farmers, daring and inventiveness is a rarity, so we hunters stand out a bit. He seems to understand what I mean.

I originally read aobut hte Hunter/Gatherer theory a few years ago. Apparently a man named Thom Hartmann developed the theory about 5 years ago. I got this quote Here

I spent the first year after my son’s diagnosis (and the sermon by his psychologist that he “isn’t normal”) trying to find a deeper understanding of what this thing called ADD was. I read everything I could find, and talked with friends and former associates in the child-care industry. I learned that the three cardinal indicators of ADD are distractibility, impulsiveness, and a love of high stimulation or risk. (If you toss in the inability to sit still — hyperactivity — you have ADD-H or ADHD.) While I’d never seen it written anywhere, I also intuitively knew that people with ADD had a different sense of time from those without ADD.

And the more I looked at it, the more it seemed that this “illness” could also be an asset under some circumstances.

After six months of hyperfocused research, I was reading myself to sleep one night with Scientific American. The article was about how the end of the ice age, 12,000 years ago, brought about a mutation of grasses leading to the first appearance on earth of what we today call wheat and rice. These early cereal grains led to the development of agriculture among humans, and that point in history is referred to as the Agricultural Revolution.

As the article went into greater detail about how the agricultural revolution transformed human society, I got a “Eureka!” that was such a jolt I sat straight up in bed. “People with ADD are the descendants of hunters!” I said to my wife Louise, who gave me a baffled look. “They’d have to be constantly scanning their environment, looking for food and for threats to them: that’s distractibility. They’d have to make instant decisions and act on them without a second’s thought when they’re chasing or being chased through the forest or jungle, which is impulsivity. And they’d have to love the high-stimulation and risk-filled environment of the hunting field.”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“ADD!” I said, waving my hands. “It’s only a flaw if you’re in a society of farmers!”

From that concept came what was originally a metaphor, a less-disempowering story that I could tell my son (for whom I originally wrote this book) and others about their “difference.” Since that time, we’ve discovered that this original “story” may, in fact, be factually accurate: science is rapidly corroborating many of my original observations and theories.

So where we go from here is forward, into a future where people with ADD are not embarrassed or ashamed to say they are Hunters, where children are helped in schools with appropriate interventions and educational environments, and where teenagers and adults recognize in advance that some jobs or careers or mates are well-suited to their temperament and others are not — and from that self-knowledge can gain a greater measure of success in life.

We go forward with proud steps, ignoring those “helpers” who would cling to our legs and scream (or say softly) “you’re sick!” while offering us quick fixes, radiation, or expensive “cures.”

We go forward as Hunters.

Another time, at a renaissance faire, we saw a corgi puppy heard a bunch of animals in the petting zoo section. The pup would separate the two goats, and then the ducks, and move them to different parts of the fenced in area.

for those who don’t know what a corgi is, it’s a dog from the UK . You can adopt this kind of dog, and all sorts of critters, via petfinder.com. It's a site that is an aggregate of animal shelter databases across America. You just type in your ZIP code, or city, and other criteria, and they list what's available.

I explained to the Boy Child that he and I are more like the corgi, always running around, chasing down things and that most people are like the goats. As fate would have it, the goat got tired of the pup, and kicked him across the pen. Fortunately, the little dog got right back up and went back at what he was doing.

My daughter, the Girl Cub, is blessedly normal. Well, as normal as a dirkling could be.

I hate meetings.

Went to the Burning Man Artery's meeting tonight. The discussion was mostly on the procedures on how to register art on the playa during the week of the Burning Man Festival. It's a fairly simple process, and the majority of time was spent discussing the exceptional stuff. Stuff that's not going to happen most of the time.

It's during these kinds of meetings, my inner Mad Scientist breaks out and does all sorts of Wile E Coyote - type technical sketches. I'm tempted to scan them and post them just to illustrate what I'm talking about.

Tonight were some pretty usual themes. I want to build some wind-powered vehicles for the desert. I remember seeing a special once when I was younger about some people who made skiffs of some sort that used sails to power them across the Sahara. I think it was a National Geographic event.

I would make a lateen rig, and have four wheels, on front, one back, and two on the sides for stability. I'd probably use plastic tubing, because of cost, but a bicycle type frame has advantages as well.

I want to launch things, using old mechanical power, like what was used in siege engines. The ballista, the trebuchet, etc., they all produced a fair amount of power, and the plans are readily available. It would take a little research, but not much. I have friends in the Renaissance reenactment community.

I also want to build a catapult that launches gliders. The Navy uses steam powered ones to launch planes from the decks of their aircraft carriers. I would propose to use a counterweight and leverage.

The planes and gliders that were made from before the Wright brother's plane and up to World War One are beautiful and elegant in their own sort of way. I'm sure I could find plans for something to build that could house one or two people, that could safely launch and land.

The airfoil design currently for most parachutes would be a good starting point. for that sort of joyride. I'd have to make it something that takes minimal steering

In the movie, Revenge of the Sith, for the 35 seconds the wookiees are on screen, they have some wonderful aircraft(here and here), as do the aliens that Obi Wan visits to have his showdown with General Grievous. I've looked them up too.

These are the sorts of things that ferment in the back of your mind; like Belgian beer or kimchi, the longer it sits, the better it gets.

Someday.

Maybe.


But probably not.

Now This is cool.

I found this site tonight while cruising the web for wookiee weapons, art by Clayton Henry, prehistoric mammals and generally just free-associating. The site outlines a conversion of an old Smith-Corona typewriter into a keyboard for a computer.

I have wanted one of these since the Animatrix story that was a hardboiled detective story where the private eye was hired to find Trinity.

Here's a picture of what I'm talking about.









Pretty neat huh?

I love my laptop. It's well designed, and the keys are responsive and light and the only drawback to the touchpad is that my index finger gets tired if I work too much on graphics stuff. But, I take that as a hint to take a break more than anything else. It's light, holds a charge for several hours and fits nicely into my bag.

I would love to make several retro-styled desktop machines. Like a brass and woodgrain styled "computing engine" from a steampunk era, or an Art Deco machine, all zinc and clean lines. An Art Deco tower and screen with organic schapes and curves.

I just might have to start sketching these things out.