Last night, some thieves stole the car parked Right Behind my new Mercedes. They apparently left behind another car they’d stolen previously. They took my neighbor Joe’s Dodge mini van. Joe is an elderly WWII vet and he has some trouble walking. The thieves left behind the walker he’d left in the back seat.
I woke up this morning, and looking out my front office window noticed Joe’s van was gone and assumed he’d gone to church early. Then I saw the walker laying in the grass and thought he’d accidentally left it behind. Later, I saw the police talking to my neighbor across the street and went out to ask what was going on and that’s when I found out Joe’s van had been stolen. It had happened right in front of my house. While I slept.
I’m assuming the Mercedes wasn’t disturbed because its built-in anti-theft devices still haven’t been cracked by the street, and the thieves didn’t want the alarm going off. Also, the evidence seems to indicate that these were joy riders, since they left behind another vehicle they’d previously stolen. I’m sure they’d have loved to have gotten their hands on my car. So on the one hand I’m a bit reassured that my car is deterring thieves, at least for now. But on the other hand our neighborhood seems to be a target lately.
It really burns me that Joe lost his car…and they had to know they were stealing it from someone who had trouble getting around since they took the time to take the walker out of the van. But I’m sure the thieves wouldn’t have even paused to know they were stealing from someone who put his life on the line for their freedom to be asswipes.
I’ve been considering putting up outdoor security cameras ever since we had that last bout of car thefts in the neighborhood a couple months ago. I’m going to do it now. Three hidden cameras out front…one looking directly in front of the house, one looking upstreet and one looking downstreet, and a DVR recording it all for posterity. Hopefully then when something’s stolen we’ll have their faces on record. I’ll start making inquiries this week. I’ll need someone to run a conduit for the cabling to the outside, and I suppose while I’m at that I should get an electrician to put in those outdoor outlets out front that I’ve been wanting ever since I bought the house.
The other thing I may do is go ahead and buy one of these, or one of these. If Joe gets another car to replace the one that was stolen, I’ll ask him if he wants one of those too.
[Update…] My brother in California says if I’m going to get a wheel boot, I should get one that covers the lug nuts. Apparently some thieves will just bring along a spare tire and just unbolt the one with the boot on it if the boot doesn’t cover the lug nuts. But then…I have locking bolts (on the Mercedes they’re bolts, not nuts) and maybe that’ll deter that.
Laying awake the other early morning, the twin images of Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton kept coming into my mind. Maybe it was the Ambien, but inevitably the choice between those two haunts the fevered brow in the dead of night.
Pay attention here…he’s been prescribed a CPAP machine (which he’s previously written flowery praises of) and he’s taking Ambien on top of that and he Still can’t get to sleep. I was on Ambien myself for a while and I’m here to tell you it knocked me flat.
Problem was, it also fucked with my head. Maybe some day I’ll go into more about the ugly episode in my life when I was dealing with insomnia and was taking sleep medication and eventually put onto a CPAP machine myself. It was an adventure in our modern health care system that taught me in spades how little the system actually cares about your health, as opposed to selling you treatments. There must still be some Baptist left in me because I’m feeling guilty right now as I type this at taking pleasure in the grim ironies in Sullivan’s predicament. He’s been bellyaching ever since Michael Moore’s Sicko came out about how superior the American profit motive health care system is over the socialized health care systems used by every other industrial nation in the world, and there he is, a perfect example of what it does to people. He’s on a CPAP machine, he’s downing Ambiens and he still can’t sleep. But you best believe his doctors have another pill he can take for all of that. And the best part is his sleepless nighttime is haunted by worries over the moral character of the person who will occupy the absolutist presidency left behind by George Bush, a man he once compared in a fit of giddy hero worship to Frodo, and then to Sam in Lord of The Rings.
You know…all that lefty field hippy stuff about eating more whole grains and fresh veggies and wholesome organically grown food and exercising more and keeping your weight down and not pigging out on junk food, really does go a long, long way toward getting you a good night’s sleep without drugs and machines pumping air into your lungs through a mask attached to an air hose. Ask me how I know. Ah…but that’s lefty stuff isn’t it Andrew…and that automatically makes it evil. So you’ll be popping those pills and hooked up to that machine and staring at the ceiling wide awake in the middle of the night for all of that anyway for the rest of your life won’t you?
I’ll not be posting much here over the weekend as I’ve got Thanksgiving dinner to go to with friends in D.C., and then my high school class reunion on Friday. Saturday I’ll be busy trying to get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted (you guys still remember that one?). So unless something comes up that I just Have to vent about here, I’ll be pretty quiet until next week.
Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow…(continued)
Via This Modern World… How our corporate news media covers the Writer’s Strike…
Atrios catches some anti-WGA strike bias on CNBC, a network that prides itself in catering to “business executives and financial professionals that have significant purchasing power”. The chyron reads :
WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?
4,434 Hollywood guild writers worked full-time last year.
Average salary: $204,000
Many earned $1 million or more
Well, to answer CNBC’s question, they aren’t fighting for “significant purchasing power”. They’re fighting for the financial security that would allow their members to remain in the middle class.
Middle class? Two hundred grand sounds like a good deal, but remember that’s the average salary. This number was chosen specifically because CNBC and the studios on whose behalf they’re arguing want you to believe that most writers are spoiled brats whining about their six-figure incomes. But in a case like this in which a deliberately-vague “many” WGA members earn over $1 million, the “average” income is misleading. A much more important measurement of writers income is the median.
For a good illustration of the difference between “average” and “median” incomes, let me refer you to this graph from the classic book “How to Lie With Statistics” (used without permission. go buy it now!) :
If you add up all of the salaries and divide it by the number of employees, you come up with an “average” that is a poor indicator of an ordinary worker’s income. After all, Mr. Moneybags at the top brings home more than twenty times what the dozen peons at the bottom of the graph make. And this “average” income is only earned by one person, who earns more than 20 of the 24 employees on the chart. While the “average” in this case is mathematically correct, it doesn’t represent the typical income. Or to use an oft-cited example, if Bill Gates walked into a homeless shelter, the “average” income would skyrocket, but it wouldn’t change the fact that everyone else is poor.
Now let’s go back to the WGA strike. Thanks to our friends at CNBC, we know that the “average” WGA member makes $200K, but what’s the median income? According to an LA Times op-ed written by a WGA board member :
“The median income of screen and television writers from their guild-covered employment is $5,000 a year, in part because almost half our members don’t work in any given year.”
Five. Thousand. Dollars. Now keep that figure in mind when you see these CEOs gush about how much money they’ll be making :
In summary…the big media moguls are waving the high dollar salaries of a few writers who’ve hit the big time in everyone’s faces, so they can suck dry the vast majority of other writers who are barely earning a living at their trade. And our corporate news media is happy to be of service.
Keith Mays, creator of the blog mocking men without that extra ‘Y’ chromosome Andrew Sullivan adores, is the creator of many other blogs besides Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians. One of them is titled, People I No Longer Speak To.
Via Atrios… In case you haven’t heard of it, Conservapedia is Wikipedia for culture warriors who want their reality filtered through the lens of their own bar stool prejudices. Or as Wikipedia puts it…
There are 45,009 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Conservapedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don’t qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 19,565 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.
5,901 files have been uploaded.
There have been a total of 36,693,438 page views, and 334,231 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 7.43 average edits per page, and 109.78 views per edit.
User statistics
There are 15,474 registered users, of which 27 (or 0.17%) are Administrators.
Well it ain’t economics. Geeze…I don’t think about homosexuality as much as these people and I’m a gay male.
Back when I was a teenager, this list would probably have been all about the International Communist Conspiracy. The top link would have been to an article on Communism, followed by a bunch of Communism and This, and Communism and Thats. Communism and Atheism…Communism and Jews…Communism and Liberalism…Communism and Democrats…Communism and Hollywood…Communism and Hippies…Communism and Feminism…Communism and Negroes… In my lifetime the American far right has gone from looking for communists under the bed to sniffing the underwear of gay men. That’s degeneracy for you.
Look at this graphic…is the dancer spinning clockwise, or counter-clockwise…?
Actually…she can be spinning in either direction. It depends on how your brain initially puts together the visual cues it finds. This from The NeuroLogica Blog, where Steven Novella debunks the notion that this optical illusion reveals left brain/right brain dominance…
Take a look at the spinning girl below. Do you see it spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? I see it spinning counter-clockwise, and I had a hard time getting it to switch direction. Give it a try.
These kinds of optical illusions are always fun. What they reveal is how our brain processes visual information in order to create a visual model of the world. The visual system evolved to make certain assumptions that are almost always right (like, if something is smaller is it likely farther away). But these assumptions can be exploited to created a false visual construction, or an optical illusion.
The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.
By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction.
The trick, once you’ve settled on a direction for the dancer’s movement, is changing your mind about it at will. It’s not easy at first…at least it wasn’t for me. Initially I saw her spinning counter-clockwise. It took effort, but after a while I found that if I view the image in my peripheral vision, I can train my eye, while not looking directly at the image, to see her spinning in the opposite direction until it "takes". Then when I look directly at her she’s now spinning in that direction. At first it took a while and a lot of effort, but after some practice I could make her switch pretty quickly.
It used to be when I got real sick I’d experience a bounce effect at the end of it. One morning after a long bout of sickness I’d wake up and it would be gone, and I’d be all bright-eyed and bushy tailed and it would seem like the whole world was brighter and livelier then ever. My head would be crystal clear and my body full of energy and I would feel more alive and alert then ever. As a compensation for days and days of misery it wasn’t bad. Then as I got older, that bounce seemed to go away. The past few years it’s been more like I drag myself back to health, then suddenly bounce back into it.
But I’m having myself a really nice bounce this morning, and I’m wondering now if this No-Junk diet of mine I’ve been doing this past year is part, or all of it. The fever and misery is gone. I’m a bit drained, but gosh I feel so…alive…right now. Almost like it always was. Only I’m still not a twenty-something anymore, so the energy and perkiness I’m feeling isn’t quite the same. But it’s close. It’s helping too, that the sky is bright and blue this morning. The leafs on my Japanese Maple tree have turned bright red, and I can look through them and see the golden leafs of the trees across the street. The effect is stunning…deep blue sky, vibrant reds and golds…one of the nice spiffs of owning this house is how great the view is out my front windows when the leafs around here change.
That oh-so-clear sky is because we had a cold front pass through Maryland last night and it’s damn cold out there now. So best to stay indoors today too, as much as possible. I want to make sure this damn flu is gone, gone, gone because next week is Thanksgiving week and I have friends to visit and a class reunion to go to.
It’s saying something for how deep in new car love I still am, that the thing I’ve been missing most being sick is being able to drive my car. Traveler has been sitting patiently out front waiting for me to get in and take him somewhere. At least my gas bill this week won’t be so much.
Oh Gosh…I haven’t even Seen gas prices for the past week or so. Something tells me I should be very afraid…
I hate it. Which is why I get the shot every year. But it takes up to two weeks to confer immunity and I started coming down with the one I have now about two days later.
Right now I’m pretty miserable. This was not a good time at work for me to be taking off sick. And I’m sitting here at Casa del Garrett with an absolutely skull splitting headache due to spending too much time in bed. So I can’t go lie down like my body wants to right now, and I can’t stay active because I’m too weak and feverish.
This is the other reason why I stock up on supplies for the winter in November. Being single means there’s no one else around here to go get things at the store while I stay home sick. So if I come down with something I’d better have everything I need here at home. Even so, every time I come down with something like this now, it reminds me how vulnerable I am because I’m single. I was stepping weakly down the stairs this morning to go to the kitchen and get a glass of OJ, and maybe make myself a quick sandwich, and it felt like my legs were barely able to hold me up. That’s the first time a flu has ever done that to me. It put me to wondering what would happen if some illness simply made me too weak to even get out of bed.
Next year, I’m getting the shot earlier. I waited this year for the usual freebie shot we get at work every year and it came (obviously) a tad too late.
So I see Rex Wockner, and Andrew Sullivan are in agreement with John Aravosis that transgendered people have basically hijacked the gay rights movement. Dan Savage is at least on board with the transgender free Barney Frank/HRC bill that just passed the house. Somehow, it’s…unsurprising…to see the "No Fems" contingent bellyaching that they just don’t get the transgendered. Here’s Wockner giving it his best attempt…
I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?
Any deeper then this and Wockner is in danger of getting his own reality TV series. Wille. Wille. You know, not all transgendered persons go the sex reassignment surgery route, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the "No Fems" crowd to have picked up on that. Geeze…and I used to think I had a problem with things female, my libido and my emotions being so relentlessly polarized toward the male sex. But the worst I ever was, was indifferent. I didn’t dislike girls and I don’t now, they just don’t register on my radar like guys do. I like guys. I like being a guy. I like being around guys. I like being made sweet sweet love to by guys. But there really are males, heterosexual ones too amazingly enough, who just get deeply anxious when confronted with anything even vaguely suggestive of femininity, and never more so then when it’s within another guy. I guess they’re afraid of their own dicks falling off or something if they get too close. Notice Wockner’s problem is with "a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts" and "become a woman". Notice further that he’s saying this right after talking up Shannon Minter, born female, now living as a man.
I do, in fact, count myself among those Americans who still don’t fully understand and "get" the whole concept of being born in completely the wrong body. I’ve asked Shannon for a personal, one-on-one crash-course the very next time we’re within range of each other on the national map.
Probably because Shannon is butching it up and Wockner can deal with that better then with a person born male but who considers themselves female. Well let me say I don’t "get" what the goddamned problem is here. Has Wockner, after all this time, never pondered what makes some people gay and others straight? There is a mountain of evidence building now, that sexual orientation is innate, something in our biology, that draws us to mate to our own sex. It’s not in our willies, but in our heads. Is it really that hard to look at this, and consider then that gender expression may also work in some similar way? And for Christ’s sake it’s not like issues of gender haven’t been animating American politics ever since…oh…the feminist movement. I know that serious questioning of whether gender expression is more nature or nurture, biological or sociological, have been tracking alongside the same questions regarding sexual orientation since at least my own teen years and I’m older then any of these three deep thinkers (Aravosis doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of this at all so much as machine gun jerking his knee…)
I think my eureka moment came some decades ago while reading an article on boys who had been born with deformed or missing genitals and were, shortly after birth, surgically assigned a female gender and raised as girls. Tragically, horribly, it didn’t work. There was one boy in particular, who said he’d kept on reflexively trying to pee standing up all through his childhood. That opened my eyes. As it turns out, it’s not what we have between our legs that makes us masculine or feminine, it’s what we have between our ears.
What T’s have in common with LGB’s is that primary opposition to all of you comes from your subversion of proper, binary, complementary gender roles. You may be quite different from the inside, but from the outside you look similar. I heard my southern baptist grandfather give a sermon in which one of the ills of the modern world was "men not wanting to be men." I’m pretty sure he had gays in mind.
Surely you know this.
To which Sullivan reliably babbles…
If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don’t conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?
Not to worry Andrew, a lot of gay folk don’t regard you as being part of our community either. Not after you swooned over the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy laws because he thought they were a valid expression of the morality of the majority of Texans. But, no you drooling moron, the entire point of anti-discrimination laws Is how other people view us, not how we view ourselves.
Yes, yes…we’re all different from one another in so many little ways. Men and women from other men and women. Whites and blacks and Asians from other whites and blacks and Asians. Gays from other gays. How many different sub groups within that vast rainbow of humanity that are homosexual? Bigotry on the other hand, ignorantly lumps people together. Since when did prejudice ever make sense? No, the color of your skin doesn’t say anything about the content of your character. Neither does your sexual orientation. Neither does your gender. Neither does your gender expression. And as for why ‘T’s are part of this movement too, well let’s let Jack Chick explain something you need very much to understand:
Now, look at that. No…Really Look At It. Anti-discrimination laws aren’t about how minorities see themselves. What they address is how popular prejudices view and treat minorities. Look At That Image. This is what the bigots see, when they look at us. They don’t see difference one between the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s you idiot. They don’t even admit there is such a thing as sexual orientation. let alone something called transgender. To them, it’s all sex perversion. You’re a man and you’re having sex with other men and that means as far as they’re concerned, that you’re acting like a woman. Never mind you don’t think you are. It’s not about what you think. Butch it up until you’re growing hair on your palms and it still won’t matter to them. They see a man making himself into a woman. They see gender non-conformity. In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1969, I was taught that as a literal truth: that homosexual men think they’re really women. You’ll always be a fairy to the bigots Sullivan.
None of us, the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s behave according to the gender expectations of the majority. That’s why we’re discriminated against. That’s the stinking rotten core of it, along with a healthy dose of misogyny. Men rule, women serve men, wives gracefully submit to their husbands who are the head of the household and all is right with the world. Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered people all throw that nice neat little "natural order" into question and they can’t deal with it. But you need to understand that the problem from their perspective isn’t that you’re homosexual. Many of them insist there is no such thing as a homosexual to begin with, merely damaged heterosexuality. Their problem is that you’re a man who, by having sex with other men, makes himself into a woman. That’s the thinking going on here. They see no distinction, zero, zilch, nada, between a transgendered individual and a homosexual. None.
And this is why any anti-discrimination law that does not include gender expression in it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Incrementalism is fine I suppose, when it actually gets you somewhere. Civil Unions before marriage. Okay…I can dig that. I don’t like it but I can dig it. At least Civil Unions are a step forward; at least they’re something. The EDNA passed last week is nothing but hot air and a bunch of preening politicans and HRC lobbyists patting themselves on the back for appearing to be doing something when all along they were too goddamned timid to actually fight for something honestly worthwhile because that might be risky. You know…behaving like democrats always do these days. Any bigot with half a brain can simply say they fired you because you weren’t conforming to their company gender norms, not because of your homosexuality. And Barney Frank has given them the green light to do that, by insisting that the law Specifically omits gender expression as a protected catagory. Lambda Legal has been all over this big honking loophole, and Frank and HRC (say…I thought you didn’t like them Andrew) went ahead and did it anyway.
But then…why someone who doesn’t believe in anti-discrimination laws in the first place is bellyaching about including ‘T’s, when he thinks ‘G’s and ‘L’s and ‘B’s shouldn’t be protected classes either is beyond me. I guess you just have to jerk your knee at every fucking thing that liberals are for, or that you imagine they’re for. The guy who once said that liberals might mount a fifth column against the war on terror is certainly no stranger to how bigots think is he? And I see that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton has you back to nearly full time snarling at the Clintons again hasn’t it? Jesus Christ you are one big fucking bundle of surly knee jerk reflexes aren’t you?
Instead of writing the transgendered out of EDNA, maybe Barney should have just written "No Fems…" into it. That would have made you guys happy, wouldn’t it?
No fems please…we’re all manly cocksuckers here. Hey…don’t get me wrong…I’m a big fan of Y chromosomes myself. Just not the big stupid ones.
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Ben Franklin
54 doesn’t feel like a whole hell of a long time to have been walking this good earth. I have to keep reminding myself that to a lot of people whose paths I cross nowadays, 54 years is just a tad short of forever…
What is Guillermo del Toro smoking?: Pan’s Labyrinth director will adapt an ancient British TV show about secret agents who acquire psychic powers after crashing in the Communist Himalayas.
Ancient?! I glanced at that photo and instantly remembered the show without even needing to follow the link. It was called The Champions. I would have been 15 when it started airing in the fall of 1968. I recalled it running for just one season and that the stories were fairly unexciting and unimaginative considering the premise. It was certainly no Avengers, but then nothing else was either. I wouldn’t go out of my way to own the DVD set, assuming anyone would make one.
Ancient. Ancient. It’s not helping that I can remember when telephones all looked like that too. And…window blinds.
A southwest Idaho woman accused of setting fire to a mounted bison head at her ex-husband’s home faces arson charges. Police arrested Ryann Jean Stafford, 26, Thursday on a charge of third-degree arson, a felony.
Investigators said Stafford and her former spouse got into an argument at his home. But after he left the house, police said Stafford began throwing objects and then used a lighter to ignite the mounted head.
I’m sitting here wondering if the Bison head was there when she married him. Did he put it there to spite her? To drive her crazy? Hey honey…you ever notice how the bison’s eyes seem to follow you around the room…? Did he give it to her as a gift and she filed for divorce immediately thereafter? Was it a prized memento from their honeymoon? Were they fighting over who gets it in the settlement? Did he name it after her? After her mother?
Note to self: Marital bliss is probably not enhanced by tacking large dead animal heads to the wall. On the other hand, I used to know a gay couple who had a buffalo hide rug and they said it was absolutely their favorite thing to have sex on.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
