…can be really decadent if you add a little ground pork to the ground beef. Also, grilling is better then frying.
Obviously I’m not a vegan. But my beef intake these days is way, way down from what it was, simply because my body doesn’t do really heavy eating anymore. I used to hit the steak houses regularly. It think it’s been five years or more since I was last in one. But I still do the local rib joints here in Baltimore. This town has some fantastically good ones.
So I’m experimenting in the kitchen some today. Since I stopped going to the fast food joints (except for Subway and Quiznos), I’m missing the occasional hamburger out of my diet. I like a good burger. But I don’t trust the meat in fast food joints anymore, and if I want to keep somewhat trim I need to not eat fatty meats so often anyway. What I’m trying to do now is make my own burgers, from leaner, more wholesomely raised meats, and prepare it in smaller portions that more exactly fit my appetite. The burgers served at most restaurants are way too big for me.
But I’ve been reading that lean beef is actually not wonderful for making burgers. On a lark I bought some ground pork and made a burger out of about a quarter pork and three quarters lean beef. I kneaded it together with some ground pepper, garlic powder, a touch of Cayenne pepper, and a little fresh diced onion (again, from Whole Foods). Oh…and a pinch of finely ground beef bullion cube. I made a test patty, flat, because I want it cooked thoroughly in the middle, and about the size of the palm of my hand, which is about the right size for me. I eat small portions…always have. My diet problems come mostly from between meal junk snacking, which I won’t do anymore.
I’d bought a Delonghi electric grill some months back, and instead of firing up my trusty old Lodge cast iron griddle, I brought that out instead, because I hadn’t tried it with burgers yet. It’s an interesting design: the grill grate itself is the heating element, as opposed to a rack of iron sitting just over top the usual electric one. It does a great job of cooking and searing meat. The beef/pork burger I got off it was positively decadent.
The nice thing about meat is you can freeze it and it will keep for quite a long time. I’m going to make myself up as many burger pattys as I can out of the beef and pork I just bought, then put them in the freezer for later use. I’ll add the seasonings when I thaw them out for use. This is much better then the fast food burgers I’d been buying.
I’m out for a stroll with one of my cameras next. The weather is getting nice again here in Baltimore now. Then tonight I want to sit down in my art room, and try to get my drawing bug back.
Responding to legislation introduced in Congress last week seeking to discontinue the military’s "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy, Comedy Central’s fake pundit Stephen Colbert offered his own set of policy prescriptions to those who wish gays should be allowed to openly serve in the military.
"Folks, we are approaching a dangerous level of tolerance," Colbert mockingly proclaimed Wednesday night on his show. "That is why I am encouraging the Pentagon to adopt an even stricter policy, ‘Don’t Know, Don’t Think.’ Under the new policy, it will be against regulations for a soldier to even know what homosexuality is."
Makes a perfect fit with all their other domestic policies, doesn’t it?
The religious right is having another one of its puppet shows this weekend. This one is in San Francisco…which they insist was only chosen for the venue because of it’s abilty to host their event. Certainly not because they wanted to incite anti-gay passions in a city with a large gay population…
A two-day event called BattleCry starts Friday at AT&T Park, the downtown baseball stadium. Organizers say the gathering, which includes performances by Christian rock bands and inspirational speakers, is a way for young Christians to speak out against what they view as destructive cultural elements, including sex on television, obscene music and violent video games.
…
Tasha White, 18, attended the event last year and said it had opened her eyes to “a culture leading us into brokenness.”
“You look at Britney Spears, and what she did and that leads to divorce and rehab and drugs, and that’s a negative influence,” said Ms. White, who lives in nearby San Bruno and said she had had problems with under-age drinking herself. “And that’s not something I believe our generation should be looking forward to.”
Ms. White added that she did not think there was anything antigay about the event, though she believes gay people are “misguided.”
Mr. Luce echoed that sentiment, saying his group loves gay people, but does firmly believe their sexuality is sinful.
“We see homosexuality like a lot of other things that do harm to us, like lying, or cheating, or stealing,” he said, adding that he said he had seen studies suggesting that many gay people are depressed or unhappy. “And it’s not very loving to leave them in that state and not show them another way.”
It’s really touching how a movement that routinely lies through its teeth about homosexuals and what science reveals about sexual orientaion and family life teaches its puppets to say that homosexuality is as harmful as lying and cheating. And yes…these kids are being cynically used as puppets. Add to the long list of crimes against humanity perpetrated by the religious right, their willingness to take idealistic and passionate youth full of concern about the state of world and its people, cram their trusting heads full of tactical lies, and set them loose to destroy the very thing they’re so ardent to save. You could teach them to think for themselves, so they might find the answers this generation could not. But then they might question authority instead of "question homosexuality", and that would be a sin.
If you’ve followed the anti-gay agenda for very long, you’ve probably noticed a few dozen or so pat phrases that keep popping up, along with an assortment of words that don’t seem to mean the same thing in the twilight zone of the religious right that they do in the real world. As a public service, I thought I’d provide a few helpful definitions…
Homosexual: There is no such thing. Just people who keep having sex with persons of the same sex, no matter how much fear of God and acid disgust and self loathing we manage to cram into them.
Gay: A word that was full of cheerful carefree happiness until the homosexuals turned it into a code word for disgusting behavior.
Family: A word that was full of loving, nurturing, caring, security and warmth until we turned it into a code word for heterosexual supremacy.
Family Friendly: The civil way of saying "No Faggots Allowed".
Homophobe/Homophobia: Made up words, created by militant homosexual activists to stigmatize Christians who speak out against sin. Similar to how the word ‘xenophobe’ was invented by bleeding heart one-world liberals to stigmatize patriots who merely wish to keep their communities safe from foreigners and immigrants. Other invented words include Hydrophobic and Hydrophobia.
Ex-Gay: A person who is no longer one of those homosexuals that do not really exist.
Ex-Gay (II): A person who found freedom in the ten commandments of God, and the 1,287,094,873,922 1/2 commandments of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Ex-Gay (III): A person who did not question homophobia.
Ex-Gay (IV): A person graced by Christ after 50 years of prayer and repentance with blessed relief from the sexual temptations they had when they were a hot and bothered teenager.
SADD (Same Sex Attraction Disorder): Since there are no homosexuals, we needed a new word for people who keep having sex with persons of the same sex. And it had to be the opposite of ‘Gay’, since that’s how those people who aren’t homosexuals keep identifying themselves and we must disagree with everything they have to say about who and what they are.
Struggling with Homosexuality: A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder who keeps insisting that there isn’t anything wrong with them.
Struggling with Homosexuality (II): A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder who might be cured if only we can love them into hating themselves just a little more.
Struggling with Homosexuality (III): A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder whose life is careening downward in a reckless spiral of sexual addiction, prostitution, crime and drugs. If only they had listened to us when we told them that homosexuals only lead lives of sexual addiction, prostitution, crime and drugs.
Brokenness: What makes abusing homosexuals justified. ie: if they’re already broken to begin with, then this can’t really be hurting them.
Sexual Sin/Addiction: Having sex and liking it.
Sexual Sin/Addiction (II): Having sex and not being ashamed of it.
Sexual Sin/Addiction (III): Having sex with the one you love and feeling blessed.
Transformed by Christ: Still paying money to their ex-gay ministry.
Found Freedom From Homosexuality: Now employed by their ex-gay ministry.
False Image: What a yellow wall constructs to convince itself that it’s yellow.
Misguided: You’re ignoring me.
Gender Confusion: You don’t fit into any of my gender stereotypes, so you must be confused.
Gender Confusion (II): Your attractiveness is challenging my heterosexuality, so you must be confused.
Gender Confusion (III): Your gender non-conformity is confusing me so I must beat the living crap out of you.
Homosexual Lifestyle: All our most disgusting and perverted sexual fantasies and disorders bundled together and tied with a little ribbon of love, placed on the backs of homosexuals. The cross we nail homosexuals to so they can die for our sins.
Homosexual Agenda: A homosexual who thinks they should be treated just like anyone else.
Militant Homosexual Agenda: A homosexual who expects to be treated just like anyone else.
Militant Homosexual: A homosexual who thinks there isn’t anything wrong with being a homosexual.
Militant Homosexual Activist: A homosexual acting like they think there isn’t anything wrong with being a homosexual.
Love The Sinner: Remember how Lenny in Of Mice And Men loved his puppy? We love you just as much.
So I’ve been busy this week at work, making sure that all the test center Linux workstations are ready for the switch to a new Daylight Savings Time schedule. I got home real late last night and pretty much just crawled into bed. And I wake up this morning at the usual time, and as I get out of bed I note that new high tech energy efficient furnace I bought two Decembers ago has kicked in…
I have a variety of ways I can schedule that thing to heat or cool the house. The controller on my wall, where the old Honeywell round thermostat used to hang, looks like an oversized iPod; white with a big LCD display and a set of controls tastefully arranged below it. No more just turn the dial to the temperature you want. I have it programmed to kick the heat back at night, and during the weekdays when I’m at work, and then start to bring the heat back up again just before I come home, and just before I wake up. I can tell it to heat the house as normal on weekends, and Friday, which is my telecommute day. I can program four time periods during the day, can set a different schedule for each day of the week, or for the whole week, weekdays or weekends. I can create a completely different "vacation" schedule, which kicks everything into low usage mode.
The thing monitors the temperature outside as well as in, and builds an internal model of how the house maintains temperature, to use only the least amount of gas it needs. It’s burners can run at high heat or low, and the fan is variable speed. How much all of that is actually saving me is a good question, since right after I bought it, the price of natural gas heating here in Baltimore went through the roof (so to speak). But its good not to waste energy.
…and so here I am getting up for my day, and I note the furnace has kicked on. As I walk into the bathroom I can feel warm air gently flowing out of the vent. And a thought occurs to me. Does my furnace software need a Daylight Savings Time patch too? Because I’ve never had to set that clock once I got it installed. How the hell does this thing keep time? I guess I’ll find out…
I wonder if my car’s software needs patching too. Or that new digital camera I bought last year. This future I’m living in is not anything like the Jetsons told me it was going to be, back when I was nine…
(actually…his music for the film Koyaanisqatsi is a favorite. Buy the recent CD release, which includes the cue Organic, which the first release of the soundtrack unforgivably left out.)
On the March 6 edition of Fox News Live, while discussing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-NY) March 4 speech and her participation in a commemorative civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, host E.D. Hill accused Clinton of affecting a "Southern drawl" during her speech and asked pollster Scott Rasmussen: "[W]ould it happen elsewhere, if she was attending, say, a GLAAD [Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation] convention, would she speak with a lisp?"
You just know they all think gays have limp wrists and walk with a swish too. Why the hell did Harry Reid agree to have a democratic presidential candidates debate hosted by Fox News? He going to ask Focus On The Family to host the one after that?
John Ashcroft. You remember him…right? The man who scared the steaming crap out of everyone when President Junior made him Attorney General, because of his bedrock fundamentalist contempt for all that civil liberties and religious pluralism stuff? The man whose father, a traveling Pentecostal minister, anointed him with oil in the kitchen the day he took office? The religious zealot who asked nominees for judgeships if they were faithful to their spouses, and whether they drank? Who vetoed a bill while governor of Missouri to allow liquor sales on Sunday? The sanctimonious jackass who said, "I don’t particularly care if I do what’s right in the sight of men. The important thing is for me to do right in God’s sight. The verdict of history is inconsequential; the verdict of eternity is what counts." The self righteous prig who ordered a cover for the statue of the "Spirit of Justice" in the lobby of the Justice Department because one of her breasts was exposed?
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who sent a letter this week to his successor Alberto Gonzales blasting the proposed merger of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., approached XM in the days after the merger was announced offering the firm his consulting services, a spokesman for XM said Saturday.
The spokesman said XM declined Mr. Ashcroft’s offer to work as a lobbyist for the company.
Mr. Ashcroft was subsequently hired by the National Association of Broadcasters, which is fiercely opposed to the merger. On its behalf he conducted a review of the effects on competition if the two satellite radio companies were allowed to merge.
See…all this time you thought what made Ashcroft dangerous was his moral fanaticism. But people become fanatics precisely because they have no personal sense of the moral and decent. Their inner lives are a vast unexamined wasteland where no personal sense of right and wrong ever had a chance of taking root. So as they walk through their lives, they come to embrace a kind of idolatry that’s all performance and ritual and ostentatious humility, dress themselves up as the idol’s champion and commissar, wage righteous war on behalf of it, so they can appear to themselves, to each other, and to the world, as all they are not within. Moral. Honorable. Decent. They wear their religiosity on their sleeve like that because not having a conscience, it’s the only place they have to put it.
Which is why fanatics are so dangerous. It’s not their moralizing. Fanaticism is the opposite of moralizing. They are incapable of moralizing. They have no brakes. They’ll do whatever that stone idol sitting silently in the middle of that vast inner wasteland tells them to.
The silence here. Yeah. For those of you wondering. I’m still feeling pretty much like the guy in White Room and I’m not up for talking about it because I know that, really, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s misery. Also, I just don’t want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world now, because I’m fucking tired of hearing about how republican’s can throw a party and invite every gutter crawling fag baiter in the world to it and their presidential hopefuls will come to that party and beg the gutter for support. So I’m not much provoked into saying something right now.
I’m mostly just occupying myself with a couple of photo projects down in the art room lately, including a photo album of shots from the Woodward days. An old friend of mine complained the other day that he couldn’t get to the albums I’d posted on Classmates.Com without paying their fee and I thought, well hell, I’ll post them here then…and of course then I got to thinking about how I might like to do it a little differently then I could there…and so on.
So I’m editing a photo layout in Apple’s Aperture, which still has it’s flaws, but they’re more of an irritant now with version 1.5.2 then a hindrance…except when it comes to the medium format stuff anyway. Otherwise Aperture is a fantastic photographer’s tool and I love it. But prowling over all those images from back then is leaving me more then a tad bummed out.
I bought the big film scanner, the Coolscan 9000, so I could start on a project I’d been planning for a while now, to scan in everything I ever took, and get it all cataloged and searchable and workable in the computer. I actually have a system I’ve been using since the Woodward days, but it makes use of numbered contact sheets and I haven’t had a darkroom where I could process contact sheets in years, so it’s been getting badly out of date. So I’ve been working the Big Scan project from both ends, that is, from the beginning of the old system forward, and from today, and all the rolls I haven’t made contact sheets for, backwards. It’ll take years to complete the scan (and Terabytes).
So I’ve been at it now for a couple months and I already have a bunch of stuff scanned in from the Woodward days and I keep pouring over it like I’d just like to go back and do it all over again and I know I can’t and I know it wouldn’t be good even if I could, but there it is. And I think the reason is that I was happy back then, in a way I don’t think I’ll ever be again. Which is probably a bizzare thing to say about being a gay teenager in 1971, when you really think about it. For all that 60s Peace, Love and Understanding stuff going on back then, the environment for gay people was not wonderful. Not at all.
I have a stack of underground comix from the period, and never mind the drugs, there’s a ton of free love and sex going on in them. But without exception, whenever they touched on homosexuality, and the breathtakingly liberating thing about those comics back then, after years under the thumb of the Comics Code Authority, was that there were no taboo subjects, gay people were portrayed in all the typically crude and demeaning stereotypes of the times. Well…except for Howard Cruse’ Barefootz stuff, which was like an oasis in the middle of a landscape of crude, jackass ignorance. Not a lot of free thinking there when it came to gays. As a gay teenager, I mostly just glossed over that when I read it. Below the surface it was making me angry, but I thought eventually people would wise up. Some did. Most have not. No…the Free Love 60s/70s were not a great time to be Gay in America. Not at all.
And yet, I had this completely naive faith, after I came out to myself one December evening, that I could find my soulmate, that I Would find my soulmate, and we would have our life together. And it kept not happening. And it kept not happening. And it kept not happening. And now I’m 53 and it still hasn’t happened, and I suppose I’m prowling over all those photographs from back then, as a way of holding on to that faith, or at least trying to keep it alive. Because if I loose that faith that it Will happen, I really don’t have anything left.
I have the best job in the world now. I have a nice little house. I can buy the cameras I couldn’t afford when I was a kid. I have an art room now. A little back yard. Everything I once assumed, assumed mind you, that would be out of my reach all my life. I grew up in a fairly low budget family environment, and I’m living a pretty good life now. And it all seems like props on a stage, and the story has no point. It just rambles on and on, but it’s going nowhere. There is no meaning. Not without that love of my life.
So I’m editing these various photo layouts of that time in my life when I could easily believe that love would happen to me somehow, someway. That I’d find that love of my life and we’d build our life together. And if I can see anything at all I can see how much time has really passed since then. And it hasn’t happened. And I’m working with these photo layouts in Aperture, and there he is, here and there among the images, the guy who opened my eyes to what it was all about. And elsewhere in that vast library of negatives and slides I have, mostly still unscanned for now, are the others…I could name them all but I won’t…that I circled around, and tried to start a fire with, and a few of them I dated for a while, and a few of them I could only circle around, but they all told me in one way or another ‘no’, and I grieved, and I moved on. I’ll see them all again as I work my way though this project. And here I am prowling over all this visual history of my life, and I’m still as solitary now as I was when I first came out to myself, when, unlike a lot of my peers, I was swept up not in a chaos of self loathing and fear and disgust but of awe and joy and amazement that there was such a thing as love in this world, and that it could possibly be so sweet. And I just knew that I’d find the love of my life someday. I just knew it. And I haven’t.
And I know, reading back over what I’ve just written, that there are people in this world who would be just delighted to know this. The haters want us to be lonely and miserable in this life because…well…they hate us. And we need to hate ourselves as much as they hate us. We need to hurt, simply for existing. Our wounds are the butter on their daily bread. I can not begin to describe the anger and outrage I feel toward these monsters in words, though I’ve tried over the past few years to do it with a few political cartoons. But anger is a brittle bedrock to build a life on. And it can easily turn into hate. You need love.
What I need right now, is to believe that it will happen to me. No…I need it to actually happen. But if I stop believing that it will, then for sure it won’t. So I can’t loose that faith. I can’t. But I think I am.
Speaking today at the Conservative Political Action Conference, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” Audience members said “ohhh” and then cheered.
A 21-year-old man from Bayonne, New Jersey was followed off the PATH train in Hoboken and attacked by two men who had been harassing him on the train for, among other things, wearing pink pants.
Hobokenpath Police are calling the attack an anti-gay hate crime, according to the Jersey Journal:
"When the train pulled into the Hoboken station, the two men followed the Bayonne man off the train and up the stairs, then attacked him near a newsstand on the concourse in Hoboken Terminal, police said. The man required 12 stitches to close facial wounds, police said, adding that he also had a black eye and was temporarily blinded in one eye. Using video shot from security cameras, police were able to identify Hoboken High School student Andy Rivera, 19, of Marshall Drive. He was brought to the police station for questioning and arrested Tuesday at 2 p.m. on charges of bias intimidation and aggravated assault."
The other assailant is still at large, but a warrant has been issued for his arrest.
I’ll bet Couter’s audience would have cheered that beating too. Coulter, you’ll recall, is the well respected conservative pundit who said her only problem with Timothy McVeigh is he didn’t go to the New York Times building.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), prior to Coulter’s appearance: “I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!”
Police in Detroit released a sketch Thursday of the man suspected of killing Andrew Anthos, a 72-year-old disabled gay man whose dream was to light the Michigan State Capitol dome red, white and blue for Independence Day.
Anthos died Feb. 23, 10 days after a fellow bus rider, spouting anti-gay slurs, paralyzed him with a blow from behind with a metal pipe. Police have since questioned several people aboard the bus, including the wheelchair-bound friend Anthos was helping through the snow when he was struck.
Coming up…another lecture from David Broder and the other Wise Old Men of Washington, about how liberals are so hateful, and just too damn angry…
In the white room, with black curtains, near the station,
Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings,
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes.
Dawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentment.
I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines;
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves.
You said no strings could secure you at the station.
Platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows.
I walked into such a sad time at the station.
As I walked out, felt my own need just beginning.
I’ll wait in the queue when the trains come back;
Lie with you where the shadows run from themselves.
Another bit of 60s psychedelia that seems completely random and meaningless at first glance, and yet it isn’t. The song seems formless, winding, aimless, like the smoke off a joint. There is no rhyme to the verse, no obvious sense of narrative in the words. Time seems to shift randomly back and forth. Yet there is structure here, and a rigorous one. Each verse is comprised of three phrases of four syllables each. It is played, except for the chorus, with the beat on the last syllable of each phrase. And there is a story. A very painful one. But not, alas, a very uncommon one.
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes.
Dawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentment.
I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines;
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves.
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