Road kill reported by a driver in the German state of Lower Saxony turned out to be a drunk badger taking a nap, police in Goslar reported on Wednesday morning.
Late on Monday night, a driver reported what he thought was a dead animal on county road 32 near Groß Döhren to police.
But when officers arrived on the scene to remove the traffic obstruction, they were stunned to find that the animal was not dead or injured.
“Right in the middle of the street there was a badger sitting and staring at the officers incredulously,” a police statement said.
The officers quickly discovered that the animal – which was not frightened by their presence – had been snacking on the overripe cherries on a nearby tree.
“The animal’s belly digested the fruit to alcohol and the badger was, as the saying goes, ‘drunk as a blackbird’,” the statement said, adding that the little mammal was also suffering from “diarrhoea containing cherry pits.”
Officers directed the badger off of the road, where he could “sleep off his intoxication in a meadow.”
–The Local, Germany
Well of course they let it go on its way. Who wants to arrest a badger for public drunkenness? You’d get your hands chewed off.
Good thing it was the happy peaceful kind of drunk and not the loud belligerent kind. Just imagine walking home from a night out at the bars and suddenly encountering a drunken pissed off badger…
Really? Staffers that would otherwise have contributed to police work, road repair, education, and sea research were pulled in to help the governor’s office deal with the legal ins and outs of ethics complaints? That’s the official explanation for Palin’s claim now?
Well, it will be for the next five minutes. Then another lie will come along. Note in particular that ABC News’ Kate Moss did not even question her bizarre claim that she was resigning to save the state "millions" in frivolous lawsuits, a claim that was suspicious on its face, debunked on the blogs and now a proven lie. But on ABC News, stenographers to the powerful, Kate Snow just sat there and let Palin state…
This would be the same ABC News that claimed that Matthew Shepard knew his killers, that he was a druggie, and that his murder was a meth fueled robbery gone bad, not a sickeningly typical-in-its-brutality gay bashing? That ABC News?
If You Understand Nothing Else Understand This: Those Days Are Over
Dan Savage puts his finger on what’s so utterly dumbfounding about the Rainbow Lounge raid…
…The police burst into that bar as if it were still 1968, the year before the NYPD’s raid on the Stonewall Inn, as if the old rules were still in force. They assumed that the other men at Rainbow Lounge that night—the men who witnessed four officers assaulting Chad Gibson—would disappear into the night, grateful that they got out of the Rainbow Lounge without getting assaulted and arrested too. The police didn’t expect the other gay men men at the Rainbow Lounge to talk to the media—or to organize a protest outside Fort Worth’s city hall. The police didn’t even seem to realize that there were men taking pictures with their cell phones during the raid. It’s as if the police in Fort Worth didn’t know what decade this is.
In June 2008, Washington D.C. Council member and former mayor Marion Barry declared his support for same-sex marriage in the District. Three weeks ago Barry co-sponsored the District law that recognizes legal same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The former mayor now breaks his promise and appears at an anti-gay rally organized by the publicity-hungry gay-bashing Bishop Harry Jackson of the Hope Christian Church in nearby Beltsville. Barry and Jackson call marriage equality "immoral."
D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), the only council member to vote against the bill today to legalize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, predicted today there could be a "civil war" in the District if the Council decides to take up a broader gay marriage bill later this year.
"All hell is going to break lose," Barry said while speaking to reporters. "We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this."
Barry made his remarks a few hours after a group of same-sex marriage opponents, led by black ministers, caused uproar in the Wilson Building after the Council voted 12 to 1 to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. They caused such a ruckus that security guards and police had to clear the hallway. The protesters shouted that council members who voted for the bill will face retribution at the polls.
U.S. Park Service Police arrested Barry (D-Ward 8) about 8:45 p.m. in Anacostia Park after a woman flagged down an officer to report that a man in a nearby vehicle was "bothering her," police said.
After interviewing Barry and Watts-Brighthaupt, Barry, 73, was charged with one count of "misdemeanor stalking," said Sgt. David Schlosser, a Park Police spokesman. Barry, on probation for failing to pay his federal taxes, was released hours later and ordered to appear in court Thursday.
It’s a girlfriend who broke up with him and says he won’t leave her alone. Except they had lunch together that same day and she’s saying now she didn’t ask for him to be arrested. This is the same girlfriend he bought a eight-hundred dollar coat for at auction while he was struggling to repay the back taxes he’s on probation now for not paying. Moral Leadership.
Tune in again next week when our topic will be: Moral Leaders And Their Soulmates…featuring Marion Barry and Mark Sanford.
I saw the other day that Sirius/XM has an iPhone app. Neat, I thought. Until naturally I saw the details. It’s extra, on top of a subscription fee that I have been wondering for months now why I keep paying.
Oh I know…mostly. It’s for OutQ…the only gay radio station on the planet. Well…there’s a German one I found using Wunder Radio. But it only plays dance music. At least it doesn’t have the inane chit-chat programs that OutQ does. The only thing I ever listen do on OutQ these days is Signorile. And he’s the only reason I’d want Sirius on my iPhone. I have tons of other music and talk options on the iPhone. I don’t need Sirius for either one.
So to ask me to pay extra above and beyond the normal subscription price is more then too much to ask. When I first signed up Sirius had a lot of content I liked. They’ve systematically removed or destroyed most of it. Swing Street is gone. It became…somehow…the All Frank Sinatra All The Time station. When they bought XM they brought over its 40s station…but that seems to always play the very worst most saccharine stuff my parent’s generation ever listened to. I don’t think they’d even bother with it were they still alive. The Trance channel is only trance part-time these days. The "New Age" channel became the International Music channel and it really eats toxic waste. The classical stations never play anything worth listening to. The sixties channel seems to just play the same set of songs over and over. I scan the dial and I hear nothing, Nothing, that is worth my time. In the car these days, I mostly listen to my iPod/iPhone, or the CD player.
Why am I paying money for this? Well…because it’s still handy to have when I travel cross-country. But only barely. I can plug my iPhone into the car stereo and hit "shuffle" and hear more songs I like then I can on Sirius. For hours at a time now I am listening to the iPod while driving.
Hey Sirius…bring back Sunset Cruise and I might reconsider. I’d take that to mean you are taking your gay listeners seriously again. Sunset Cruise was this sweet little call-in show where gay folk would call and dedicate a song to the one they love. They ran it Sunday evenings and it was a perfect way to end the week. I used to listen to it while I was drawing the weekly political cartoon for my web site. It was just the thing I needed to remember why the struggle was worthwhile, and life was good after all. It’s DJ, Pat Marino, has set up his own Internet broadcast Here, called The Heartbeat Cafe’. If he was still doing Sunset Cruise on Sirius I wouldn’t hesitate to add that iPhone app to my subscription. But you seem to think the kind of raunchy talk you hear constantly on Derek and Romaine is all gay people want to listen to.
If there were no OutQ I wouldn’t even bother subscribing. But its programming is way too narrowly focused on an urban gay stereotype that isn’t most gay people. It had more bandwidth a few years ago. But then, your entire channel line-up had more variety then it does now. You are not competing with broadcast radio anymore. You are competing with the iPhone and iTunes and the Internet. And just like the newspapers, you are loosing because you are stuck in an old business model and you keep thinking you can drag your customers back into it somehow and you can’t.
I’m cleaning house here at Casa del Garrett, going through tons of old stuff, and I got into a storage bin I have of posters that go back to my teen years. I found one titled Peter’s Laws. I’m not going to keep it…it really isn’t my style. But I know why it found its way into my collection: it’s hilarious. Well…I think it is. Here’s a few of them…
If anything can go wrong…fix it. To hell with Murphy.
When given a choice, take both.
Multiple Projects lead to multiple successes.
When forced to compromise, ask for more.
If you can’t beat them, join them. Then beat them.
If you can’t win, change the rules.
If you can’t change the rules, ignore them.
Perfection is not optional.
When faced without a challenge, make one.
"No", simply means begin again at one higher level.
The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live
This poster was subtitled, The Creed Of The Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive. I can’t imagine why. Like I said, I’m not going to keep it, it’s not my style. But there are times when I get like this. I can’t imagine being like that all the time though. You don’t always need to be relentless. It’s good to step back from time to time and just watch the chaos happen. You see things you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Life takes you places you would never have guessed would be interesting.
NEW YORK – Federal marshals seized disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s $7 million Manhattan penthouse on Thursday and forced his wife to move out and leave her possessions behind, including a fur coat she had asked to take with her, an official told The Associated Press.
…U.S. Marshal Joseph Guccione said the marshals arrived at the property at noon with a court order permitting them to take custody of the apartment and to make anyone living there move out. Guccione said Madoff’s wife Ruth had been advised in advance of the marshals’ plans and was leaving the residence and surrendering all personal property.
"She will be leaving," he said at midday. "Restitution for the victims is the government’s top priority."
There are the people he took money from. But I wonder if he ever thought about what he was doing to his wife too…
From No Macs In My Life To A 100 Percent Apple Household In Just Five Years…
[Geek Alert…]
My life with computers started with a Coleco Adam, and was not auspicious. It was 1983, back when consumer home computers had just started to appear on the store shelves, not just the back page advertisements of the hobbyist magazines. Apple, Atari, Commodore, Texas Instruments, Radio Shack and Heathkit all had one you could buy, most still horribly expensive. They had only text based user interfaces, and if they had graphics capabilities at all, they were very crude and slow.
Initially I saw little use for them, but I had a ColecoVision game console I played constantly and one day Coleco announced it was coming out with a home computer that would do it all, and play the same ColecoVision cartridges. A Commodore C64 could be had for around the same price, but I already had a big investment in ColecoVision game cartridges. Plus, the Adam came bundled with its own printer: a really nice (in theory) daisy wheel printer which would make good letter quality output, as opposed to most of the consumer dot matrix printers of the day. My typewriter skills were tragic. Worse, though I had a huge vocabulary for my age (due to being such a bookworm), I reliably failed to correctly spell a lot of it. When I saw a word processor demo…I think it was on an Atari…and discovered I could compose words on a computer screen…backspace, erase, correct, rearrange all of it before printing out a single page of paper…I was floored. Then I saw it spell check. That did it. I had to have one.
But like thousands of others I had to return my Adam the day after I bought it because it was defective. Not a good beginning to my entry into the world of computers. But because of all the hype from Coleco about what the Adam could do, I turned around and with the refund bought a Commodore C64. And my love of computers took wing almost immediately. In retrospect, it was probably a given that I’d get my hands on a computer eventually. I was always a little techno nerd, and had built my first Heathkit radio when I was a fifth grader (my teacher at the time refused to believe I’d built that radio myself when I brought it to show and tell and insisted I’d had help, which made me furious…). Computers and I were going to get a thing going eventually. We just were.
So now I had my first…well…second one. There was a kit you could buy for the Commodore that let you decode teletype traffic. It included a software cartridge and a box that converted the signals from the radio to something that could be fed into the Commodore’s serial port. I’d been hooked on shortwave radio since I discovered at eight or nine that I could listen to broadcasts from around the world on mom’s old one. So that kit was high on my list of things I wanted to try out. As soon as I got the Commodore home I ordered up one and when it came I connected it the really nice ICOM shortwave receiver I’d bought a few years previously with some inheritance money. Finally I could listen in on some of those mysterious beeping-clicking-chirping sounds I kept hearing on certain frequencies.
As I look back, this was oddly enough the real beginning for me. From my studies of radio I was already familiar with the concept of bandwidth…a thing the expensive ICOM receiver was able to adjust to better capture a signal. But with the RTTY converter kit I started becoming familiar with the basic concepts of electronic communication systems…how to work the serial port…bits, words, baud rate, and eventually also packets and protocols, concepts that would later be useful in understanding computer networking.
But the Commodore had one other thing that intrigued me. When you started it up without a software cartridge in it, the initial screen you got was its Basic interpreter. I began playing with that and right away the discovery that I could make the computer do stuff by feeding it instructions in Basic became an absorbing curiosity.
I could make it display words and shapes and colors on the screen…move them around and…ohmygosh, calculate the answers to complex math problems! Sweet! Algebra was my downfall in grade school, so this last really got my attention. With one of these things I could solve problems I simply could not cope with. Or so I thought. How I wish back then that someone had told me that algebra was just another kind of symbolic logic, because I actually did have a head for solving logic problems. I was doing it right there on the Commodore, every time I wrote a simple Basic program, although I didn’t realize it then.
I still needed a word processor. I checked around and found a program called PaperClip that ran on the Commodore. It did it all on that little machine. But it required one of the Commodore disk drives to run it. Which made sense. Even if they’d sold it on a cartridge, which a lot of software for the Commodore came on in those days, you still needed a place to store your written text while you were working on it. So I got the money together somehow and bought one. I quickly discovered I could store my Basic programs on that drive too. Good. Now I didn’t have to key my programs in every time I wanted to run them. Now I could write big ones, that did more things. This was when I really started learning how to compose software code, and test and debug it.
As time went on I began to bump into the limits of my Commodore’s horsepower. IBM came out with its PC and some friends of mine had one in their household. The thing awed me whenever I came to visit. Then I learned that some enterprising folks were selling parts you could put together to make one of your own. I’d been building Heathkit electronic gizmos for years, so the notion I could build my own IBM-PC from parts immediately took wing in me and I ran with it. When the next county HAM Fest came along I went with a list of parts and came home with the makings of the computer that would change my life.
And I knew after I had it together and working that something big had happened. I can still remember vividly sitting on the edge of my bed, just staring at it, amazed. It had a 16 bit microprocessor. It had 1 megabyte of ram, 648k available for user program space. I’d installed two double sided 5 1/4 inch Teac floppy drives, the best most reliable drives made, that could each hold a whopping 360k of data. I’d bought a Hercules Graphics card, one of the most powerful and sharpest monochrome cards made. And I’d installed a 2 megabyte expanded memory card, from which I could create a 2 megabyte ram disk. This was serious business. And so it was. That computer, and what I learned to do with it, eventually got me my first job as a programmer. Which led me, eventually to my first apartment of my own, then to a new car, and then to my first house, and to working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Wish I’d held onto it now, but you only see these things clearly in retrospect.
Had IBM not started to immediately lock down the PC platform I’d have been more grateful to them. But my love turned mostly toward Microsoft. They’d developed the operating system the PC ran on. But more importantly to me and my new career, they’d developed and extended the Microsoft dialect of the Basic programming language I’d begun to earn a really nice living with. And their professional developer’s tools were easily affordable, compared to the stuff the big computer companies sold. Even after IBM entered the microcomputer market they still didn’t get what it was about. One story I heard was that while IBM was hawking it’s new OS/2 operating system at tech conferences, they’d sell you the driver development kit for about ten grand if you asked. That was pretty typical pricing for software from the big iron crowd. Microsoft on the other hand, working its competing NT operating system, would sell you their driver development kit for fifty bucks…but if you gave them a nice song and dance at the conference about the really cool thing you were working on, they’d just give it to you for free.
That was then. In those days I viewed Microsoft with something like revolutionary ardor. They had taken on the big establishment corporate behemoth IBM and won. They had brought the power of the computer out of the big corporate data centers and into the hands of the people. They had made tools available to everyone, at prices most of us could afford, to create software that ran rings around anything the big iron mainframes could do, other then by raw horsepower. I can still remember demonstrating my DOS Basic IDE to several Baltimore Gas and Electric mainframe programmers, how their jaws simply dropped when I showed them that I could run and debug my program right there in the editor, and how the editor would even check my syntax for me as I typed. This was back in 1993 and these were simple DOS programs, but they danced rings around what anyone was doing on the mainframe.
Microsoft practically gave me my career as a software developer, and all the perks that came with it: a good income, a place of my own to live in, and a new car. Just a few years before I’d been living in a room in a friend’s basement, mowing lawns and doing Manpower jobs to make ends meet. I’d had to scrounge up a junker car from a friend to travel to Baltimore for my first job as a programmer. Now I had a new car, and my first apartment that was all my own, and enough money at the end of the week to think of buying things like…well…like a better computer. I soon graduated from that first IBM PC compatible I’d built to other more powerful ones. But I always kept building my own. That way, I could get exactly the hardware I wanted in it.
Which was so unlike the other kid on the block back then…Apple. Apple computers were there right from the beginning of the personal computer revolution. The Apple II was the first consumer PC that came complete in the case with a keyboard. It was the Visicalc spreadsheet, mated to that early Apple II computer, that brought the PC into the workplace, and made IBM finally take notice of the market for those little "toy" computers. But the Apple was hugely expensive and even then, was its own world. Especially after struggling with all the non-standard ports and software quirks of the Commodore (even it’s character set wasn’t standard ACSII…) I wanted nothing more to do with closed systems. At the time I thought Microsoft didn’t either. At the time I thought Microsoft was all about the freedom the personal computer brought down from the corporate heights to everyone. Go ahead…laugh at me. I can laugh too. Now.
Time passes…the universe expands… I got the job of my dreams at Space Telescope, largely for the skills I’d developed writing business applications in Microsoft Visual Basic. But by then I’d become massively disillusioned by Microsoft’s highly predatory nature. Bill it turned out, wasn’t a revolutionary after all. He was just another robber baron, willing to betray every ideal of the personal computer revolution for power and money. Software was just a means to an end. He’d realized that the future world would be driven by software, and he wanted to be the John D. Rockefeller of software. By comparison, Steve Job’s little Cult of Macintosh didn’t seem so egregious, although I still didn’t want any part of it.
I gravitated to Linux and the Open Source movement. At work, most of the systems were Unix based, so learning to run and maintain Linux at home helped me greatly with my working skill set. I eventually took on the task of maintaining the Linux test center for our engineering branch. I tested and ran various Linux distributions at home too, in the hope that I could wean myself off of Microsoft systems. By that time, two things had permanently soured my relationship to Microsoft. First, they’d trashed their Basic development platform, replacing it with a pathetic .NET bastardization. Second, they’d implemented software branding in the OS, which made it nearly impossible for me to experiment with building new hardware at Casa del Garrett. But as time went on, and my responsibilities at work grew, I needed more and more to have computers around me that didn’t have to spend a lot of time fixing and tweaking and fiddling with and Linux is a lot of things but not that. And in my personal private world the story was much the same.
The computer had entered parts of my life I’d never dreamed of. My photography hobby was now thoroughly tied to the computer, as were the cartoons I was now putting up on my web site. I was starting to get really, really tired of how often my Microsoft workstation at home, or the Linux ones, were blowing up on me because some software update had broken everything right as I was trying to get some work done. And now the hardware for them seemed to also be going down in quality. I was always having to rebuild a machine because some part of it had failed. My closet was full of computer parts now, that I was relying on more and more to be able to swap around until I got something fixed.
At work, the Macintosh was gaining more and more ground, largely because the Mac OS then was based on a Unix kernel. In 2004 I bought my first one, a 12" PowerBook G4 laptop, to take with me on a trip to a software developer’s conference. I bought it mostly to explore the Mac OS for the first time, and to familiarize myself with it enough that I could be useful to the Mac users at work, and to the Mac users in our external user community.
Macs had by then evolved greatly since that first Macintosh came out in 1984. The operating system as I said, was now based on a Unix kernel and was now truly preemptively multi-tasking and powerful. There was an actual terminal window in the Mac now…a thing that had once been considered heresy…so now a developer or a power user could get inside of the file system and the OS and dig around a bit. This was something that previous Macs had been determined to keep you out of. And Macs lived in much better harmony with third party hardware now. They even worked with two-button mice! And though the Mac was still a highly closed ecology, let it be said that Microsoft, by way of stabbing so many of its software and hardware partners in the back, was working mightily it seemed to shrink its own ecology. How many viable commercial non-Microsoft word processors are still in production for Windows? How many alternative compilers and software development platforms? At least Apple’s ecology worked.
And that was the thing. That little Mac laptop I bought was a pure pleasure to use on that first trip, and on every trip thereafter, business or vacation. It took a little while to get use to the Macintosh way of doing some things, particularly and annoyingly regarding the keyboard mapping inside of text editors. But it got to the point where I simply took for granted that the Mac would work when I started it up, and that the software updates wouldn’t break it. That was a new experience for me.
So much so that a year later I bought a second one, and dedicated it to the art room. Macs had always held on to their reputation in the arts and publishing businesses and I felt the Power Mac G5 I’d bought would fit perfectly into my art room workflow. And so it did, becoming both a darkroom and a virtual drawing board. I still develop my own black and white film, still do most of my artwork with the traditional tools on my drafting table. But I don’t bother with silver prints anymore, I just scan in the negatives and go to work in the computer. The results are so much better, and there is no mess to clean up afterward. And now I also do a lot of post production work on my cartoons in the Mac after scanning them into Photoshop. It’s mostly just touching up things here and there, and the lettering, which my hand was never good at. And once they’re in the computer, I can publish them on my web site, for the world to see. Having a worldwide audience for my cartoons was something I could only dream about once upon a time. Now, thanks to the computer, it is a reality.
Those two household Macs, Akela (the laptop) and Bagheera (the G5 tower) have become staples of the household network. So rock solidly reliable that over the years I have come to take them for granted. They just work. I don’t sweat the software updates. I don’t sweat the hardware upgrades on the G5. There is something to be said after all, for control-freaking the hardware and the software ecology. Users chaff at Apple’s tight control…I still do…often. Yet, it all just works. Time and again when Mowgli, my Intel Windows/Linux box would break down for some reason, either a hardware or software failure, I would have to attach its data drive to one of the Macs so I could keep working. The Macs have never given me any problems. I can rely on them.
So now I had two Macs that I came to utterly rely on. Then came the iPod. Years previously I’d bought a second generation Sony Walkman and then later a Walkman CD player. When I saw that I could put almost my whole CD collection on an iPod, and carry hours and hours of music with me wherever I went, I had to have one. Naturally when I got it home I mated it to one of the Macs instead of the Windows box. It all just seamlessly worked together.
Then along came the iPhone. Once I carried around a Palm Pilot to help me manage my calendar and other personal information. Then when the Kyocera smart phone came out I could combine phone and PIM and then I had my contact information with my cell phone where it made some sense for it to be. I began to hope the someone would intergrate an mp3 player with a cell phone/PIM. But the first few tries I saw were less then wonderful. The Kyocera could play music, but it didn’t do it well, didn’t hold much, and the interface was cumbersome. The I saw my first iPhone. Cell phone… PIM… iPod… eMail… Web Browser… Road Atlas… Video player… Application Platform… Computer… In the blink of an eye that little touch pad device swept away everything I ever thought about what a smart phone could be.
You see where this is going, right? The computer had become an integral part of my life. Probably yours too, and probably you take that for granted. But for nearly half my life computers were something only big corporations had the money, let alone the room for. So I have witnessed some amazing changes in how computers are used, and I am still taken aback sometimes at how ubiquitous they’ve become, and how radically they’ve changed the way we live. Listen to music…on a telephone…? Why the hell would I want to do that? Now most of my time is spent using computers in one form or another. And at home, whether it’s working on some photographs on Bagheera, or listening to the iPod while doing household chores…most of the time I’m running something made by Apple.
It was insidious. I had no plans whatsoever to join the cult of Steve Jobs. I wanted nothing to do with it actually. He got me anyway. By making a better computer. And then by doing what was never in Bill Gates to do: make them liberating.
People smirk at Job’s relentless focus on making his products "cool". But it forces him to think outside the box. Bill just wants to put the world into his box. The difference really shows not on the desktop, but all the places nobody in their wildest dreams would have thought back in the 1970s to put a computer in. That IBM executive who once wondered why the hell anyone would want to use a computer to write a memo…I wonder what he would have thought to hear someone say that one day they’d be putting computers into telephones.
Bill had Windows on cell phones long before Steve got MacOS on them. But when Bill brought out Windows Mobile he was about putting Windows into cellphones and adding cellular technology to his items of world conquest. See…you can even open a Word document in one and read it…You can read Outlook Mail…share your calendar with other Microsoft Exchange users… It was Windows on a cellphone. When Steve brought out the iPhone he was about reinventing the telephone. There’s the difference between Bill and Steve. Yes, MacOS is at the heart of the iPhone. But the iPhone is not about MacOS. The iPhone is about what you can do with the technology now, that you couldn’t before. Not an incremental step from familiar territory into well explored territory, but a grand glorious crazy leap into the future.
That kind of thing still has appeal to those of us who got into the personal computer revolution at the beginning. So I have this little cell phone now…a thing I can hold in the palm of one hand…and I’m feeling like a kid again, beholding the world of tomorrow. I love that feeling. This little gizmo would make that first IBM PC compatible I built tremble in awe if it had feelings. If I could have foreseen my iPhone 3Gs back when I was sitting alone in my bedroom, staring amazed at the PC I’d just successfully built, I’d have known that the future really was going to be everything I’d ever dreamed it would be. Had I seen a Zune…not so much.
So I’m writing all this because a few days ago Mowgli died…again. This makes the fourth major hardware failure I’ve had with Mowgli since I bought the Mac Laptop back in 2004. And I can’t count the software glitches that kept him down for days at a time until I could work my way through it. And with Microsoft’s new Windows license enforcement code, I can’t just simply fire up my copy of XP once I put a new motherboard in Mowgli. This will be that XP install’s third motherboard and so I’ll have to phone Redmond and convince them I am not stealing their software so they will kindly unlock my copy remotely. Fuck that. I have had too many problems with Windows and Windows updates and Windows applications and Windows drivers and Windows this and Windows that to be begging them allow me to run software I have bought and paid for. If my Windows platform was as reliable and as pleasant to use as my Macs I’d grit my teeth and bear it. But it isn’t. It never was.
So I’m replacing it. With a Mac. I’ll still be able to fiddle around with Linux since the Macs will boot off of external drives and most Linux distributions have always produced a version that ran on Macs too, whether they be PowerPC Macs or the new Intel based ones. I could even run Windows on a Mac now, via one of the enabling VMs such as Boot Camp or Parallels, although Redmond restricts which versions of Vista and presumably Windows 7 you can do that with. Which is the other thing I hate now about Windows…all the idiotic flavors of it.
The office is running on Akela for the moment. I put Mowgli’s data drive in a IDE to USB converter box and hooked it up to Akela, then copied its contents over to an external Firewire drive I’d partitioned and formatted in the MacOS file system. My plan is to eventually move that data to a network drive, probably off a new router like the Apple Airport, that all the household computers can access. I connected Akela to Mowgli’s ViewSonic monitor, the Altec sound system and the router and turned off it’s wireless for now. I bought an Apple keyboard since I wanted a standard layout, not the laptop layout, to work on and all my spares are IBM PS2s and I don’t have any PS2 to USB connectors. With the external keyboard I can run Akela with its lid closed and it’s almost like I’m working with a Mac desktop computer instead of a laptop. I’m tempted to just run the office on a laptop forever now, since Akela has plenty of horsepower for it. But it’s good to keep a laptop that is separate from your day to day home office so that when you take it anywhere it has no sensitive data on it.
I haven’t decided yet, but I’m leaning towards buying a Mac Mini for now, since it’s just straight pluggable into the peripherals I already have gathered about Mowgli, and now Akela. I don’t really have the money now to replace Bagheera with a newer Mac Pro or Mowgli with an iMac. My plan ideally would have been to replace Bagheera possibly next year and then move the older PowerPC machine upstairs to the office. I need the more powerful Mac to be in the art room, where the graphics intensive work is. But for now I need a new Office machine and it will not be another Windows box. I am done with Windows. I’m just not fucking with it any more. Five years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be an all Mac household. Now I am.
It happened that fast, after the first one came into the house. I am amazed. But happily so.
Life happens. My cartoon pages have been terribly neglected recently and I apologize to those of you who enjoy that part of the site more then this one.
When I included the political cartoon page, my goal was to do one a week. I was frustrated then, and still am, by the disinterest of mainstream political cartoonists in the gay rights struggle. They were not nearly so reticent about racial equality in America, although now that I think of it, the women’s rights struggle also got pretty short shrift from them too…at least among the male cartoonists. Most of them are pretty terrible at dealing with issues of gender. Witness Pat Oliphant, who I mostly admire for his style and willingness to let a cartoon deal with a subject (like racism) passionately. That’s a rare quality in a political cartoon these days, and getting rarer. But he once portrayed the equal rights amendment as a Wagnarian fat lady, decked out in a ridiculous Brunhilde costume.
It’s gotten better in recent years, as the gay rights movement seems to have finally found acceptance as a legitimate issue in mainstream news. But it’s still not great. Some prominent and well respected cartoonists still can’t seem to get beyond treating the whole subject as a joke.
Now I’m hardly the only gay cartoonist out there. There are many others, most of them a lot better at the drawing board then I am. But I still don’t see anyone else out there taking on this subject in the traditional political cartoon format. What I see are many excellent multi-panel cartoons…often done in a slice-of-life style…documenting our lives and our struggle. The best of them is Howard Cruise, whose artwork is a level of draftsmanship I will never be able to touch. He is an amazing story telling, as are cartoonists Robert Kirby, David Kelly and Robert Triptow who all contribute these absolutely wonderful gay slice-of-live comics. Cartoonist Willie Hewes, who I came to know through the Love Won Out protests, did an absolutely stunning zine style comic on the topic of forced conversion therapy, and she continues to produce first rate comics on gay issues.
These are not a trivial things. The more the stories of our lives can get out there where they be seen, the more our heterosexual neighbors can see us as human beings, and not the monsters we’re made to be by the religious right. But none of them do political cartoons in the traditional form. Single panel, black and white, whose impact comes largely from the imagery it uses to convey a point of view. You take one glance at it, and it hits you squarely with its message.
As I am a gay man myself, and in love with the political cartoon as an art form ever since I was a teenager, I consider this topic my particular beat. But the cartoons have been absent for quite a while now. That’s partly because my personal life has been relentlessly crowding out my time at the drafting table. But also because I just got tired of being angry all the time. Another reason I started the political cartoon page, was to have a way of venting a little of the anger I always seem to be carrying around with me. You live a life that is constantly under attack by massively financed right wing anti-gay machines and it’s hard not to be angry all the time. What I discovered was that simply researching the material for each week’s cartoon just made me angrier. After a while, I got tired of being angry all the time.
I’d wanted to see if I could sustain a weekly output. I found that I could…the material was, unfortunately, abundant…but it became less and less rewarding. But I never quite stopped altogether. I have dozens of cartoons that never made it to the scanner. Things I drew intending to post here, and then never finished because I lost steam in the middle of it.
Well that’s about to change.
Several weeks ago, during a Baltimore Guerrilla Gay Bar event, I met Steve Charing, editor of Baltimore OUTLoud. He’s invited me to contribute a political cartoon to his bi-weekly newspaper. I just turned in my first one and hopefully it gets published in this week’s edition. Now I have a steady gig, and I’ve got the drafting table all fired up again and I’m hot to go. I’m going to finish off some of the cartoons that never made it to the scanner and post them here over the next few weeks. And I’ll be posting the cartoons I send to OUTLoud, a week after they appear in the paper.
The bi-weekly time frame of OUTLoud gives me some breathing room, but at the same time I want to see if I can get back to doing these on a weekly basis. Again, regrettably, there is no dearth of material for me out there. But don’t expect one every week for now. The bi-weekly OUTLoud cartoon however, will continue for as long as Steve wants me in his paper. I really appreciate his giving me this opportunity.
Hopefully, this will also kick-start A Coming Out Story. If I don’t knuckle down on that one I’ll still be working on it when I’m 100.
Message From A Stonewall Adult, To A Post-Stonewall Kid…
The day after the homos rioted in Greenwich Village, the New York newspapers barely mentioned it. But that was par for the course back in the 60s. I was a fifteen year old kid when it happened, growing up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C., and didn’t hear about the riots until I was well into my own coming out to myself process in 1971. By then, the scruffy, angry, younger gay liberation front was rudely elbowing aside an older generation of more genteel suit and tie activists, who had tried with painfully little to show for it, to work within the system for change.
You’d have thought the gay civil rights movement had begun on the street in front of the Stonewall Inn. It didn’t. In the lightning flash of the Stonewall riots we lost sight for a while of how much courage it would have taken to picket for gay rights in front of the White House, as activist Frank Kameny and members of the Mattachine Society of Washington did on April 17, 1965. Kameny was rightfully honored recently at a White House ceremony, and received an official apology for being fired in 1957 from his position as an astronomer for the Army map service. People think the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s were all about ferreting out communists in government and industy. But homosexuals were just as much, if not more of a target then. We need to remember the staggering courage it took for those early pioneers in the struggle to come forward, and push back against the hate. But we also need to remember this…
A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.
I was there on the Saturday and Sunday nights when the Village’s established gay community, having heard about the incidents of Friday night, rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island and elsewhere. Although several older activists participated in the riots, most stood on the edges and watched.
Many told me they were put off by the way the younger gays were taunting the police — forming chorus lines and singing, “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!” Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression…
And thus the phrase "militant homosexuals" entered the vernacular. But all it takes to become a Militant Homosexual is to simply believe there is nothing wrong with you and behave accordingly. There is nothing unusual about people getting angry when they are mistreated. There is nothing remarkable about people fighting back when their basic human rights are denied them. There is nothing less surprising then to witness lovers protecting and defending the sacred ground between them. Especially young lovers. When someone utters the phrase "militant homosexuals", what you should be hearing is: I Can’t See The People For The Homosexuals.
The older generation had grown up in a time when homosexuality was almost universally regarded as a dirty secret, a filthy perversion, the less spoken of the better. As new studies began to show that we were a natural part of the human family after all, that generation began, very courageously, to take that message to the public. See…we’re just like you after all… And so we are, the ordinary among us and the exotic both. But you can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.
As long as the rest of society could look the other way while our lives were drowned in a sea of prejudice and hate, we would never make any progress. As long as the rest of society could ignore the toll prejudice was taking on our lives, that prejudice would keep doing its work on us. That night in June of 1969, the frustration of the young and outcast simply boiled over. And the rest of us saw something we had never seen before: gay people, angry gay people, fighting back. And it lit a fire in us. And we would never be the same. Because a few street kids and drag queens simply had enough, that one night, that one time.
There are times when it’s wise to listen to what the older generation has to say. We’ve been there…we took the hits…we saw it all with our own eyes. But never…Never…let someone old enough to have achieved some measure of success, and made a good and comfortable life for themselves, tell You what you have to put up with.
Heroes Of The Culture War #721…Collect The Entire Series!
As Jim Burroway remarked last night on Facebook, I had no idea "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" meant that…
Mark Sanford. Republican. Conservative. Sexual moralist. Fierce defender of Traditional Marriage. Protecting innocent children from the homosexual agenda. Upholding his state’s reputation as a place decent normal families can come visit…
When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford learned that his state was being advertised as a gay tourism destination, he ordered a Cabinet-level department head “to do the right thing personnel-wise or process-wise to ensure this does not happen again,” Sanford’s spokesman Joel Sawyer told Q-Notes.
Sanford was reacting to U.S. media reports that a subway poster mounted in London, England, during Gay Pride week was announcing, “South Carolina is so gay.”
A state employee who approved the ads was called to a meeting with management and resigned, according to Marion Edmonds, spokesman for the state’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism (PRT).
If the employee broke any rule in the conduct of her job, it was apparently an unwritten one.
…
Governor Sanford mandated that PRT director Chad Prosser will from now on have to personally sign off on all advertising campaigns, Sawyer said.
S.C. Governor Mark Sanford has admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, and stated in his press conference at 2:30 p.m. that this was the reason he was in Argentina for Father’s Day instead of at home with his family.
I don’t want to hear one more word about how horrible it is that teh gays hold their parades every year on Father’s Day. Oh…and his mistress is also married…
Seemingly fighting tears at times, he said the situation holds a certain irony. He said his mistress is also married and has two children.
Good thing we have people like you keeping children safe from all those same-sex households, so they won’t grow up with a twisted set of values.
Another day…another anti-gay culture warrior pops out of the philanderer closet. So…"I believe in traditional marriage" is a euphemism for "I’m cheating on my spouse" is it?
Calling it "absolutely the worst thing that I’ve ever done in my life," U.S. Sen. John Ensign admitted Tuesday that he had an affair with a campaign staffer last year.
It was with a staffer who worked on his senate campaign. Oh…and her husband worked in his senate office. Oh… And He’s A Promise Keeper.
"If there was ever anything that I could take back in my life, this would be it," Ensign, 51, said Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas, reading from a prepared statement in a brief news conference at which he took no questions.
During the height of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the Nevada Republican denounced the president’s conduct as "an embarrassing moment for the country."
‘I think we have to feel very sad for the American people and Hillary and Chelsea,’ he said.
Weeks later, Ensign would call on Clinton to resign. "I came to that conclusion recently, and frankly it’s because of what he put his whole Cabinet through and what he has put the country through," he was quoted saying at the time. "He has no credibility left," he added.
At the time, Ensign was in a tight Senate race with incumbent Harry Reid, an election he would ultimately end up losing. And he didn’t shy away from trying to exploit the moral trip-ups in Clinton’s personal life to benefit himself and the GOP.
"It could have a dramatic effect on Democrats like (President Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal) had on Republicans in 1974," he said, according to a local AP article from September 14, 1998.
In fact, not only did Ensign envision the Lewinksy affair as a political boon for Republicans, he actively made it an issue in his campaign against Reid. At one point during the campaign, Ensign accused his opponent of having a double standard when it came to politicians and sexual dalliances. Reid, he argued, had been much tougher on former Sen. Robert Packwood — who resigned from the Senate under allegations of sexual harassment — than he was with Clinton.
Ensign would support amendment banning gay marriage
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said he would support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Ensign cautioned that changing the Constitution should not be done lightly.
After evaluating the idea of President Bush’s recommendation of such an amendment Tuesday, Ensign said he believes it is necessary "to protect the institution of marriage in America."
"In order to defend the institution of marriage, uphold the rights of individual states and maintain the will of the people, I believe we are compelled to amend our country’s Constitution," Ensign said.
So many righteous defenders of marriage. So many marriages needing defending from their defenders. It wasn’t gay people who broke your marriage vows jackass. It was you. Stop blaming other people for your own pathetic failures of moral character. We are your neighbors, not your scapegoats. Leave us the fuck out of your problems. If you had minded your own goddamned business instead of dumping your cheapshit bar stool moralizing on other people you might still have a reputation to defend, let alone a marriage.
While reading the extract below, keep in mind that the author is talking about a time in this country, the 1950s, when every state in the union outlawed same sex relations among consenting adults. No prostitution or public sexual conduct was necessary to be convicted of "the crime against nature". Gay men and women, caught up in police witch hunts, often had to denounce others. And in addition to being locked up in jail, people’s names, and sometimes photographs were published, and homes and jobs would be lost…
Across the country there was an alarming vagueness in legal definitions as to who might be classified as a sexual psychopath. State laws defined a sexual psychopath as someone who had a "propensity" to commit sex offenses (Michigan and Missouri) or who "lacked the power to control his sexual impulses" (Massachusetts and Nebraska). In most states, however, authorities couldn’t just pluck such a person off the street and label him a sexual psychopath. In Alabama, for instance, the suspect had to be convicted of a sex crime first. Under the proposed Iowa legislation, such a person had to be charged with – but not necessarily convicted of – a "public offense." In Nebraska, on the other hand, a suspect didn’t have to be charged; all that was needed were certain facts showing "good cause" and the process of classification as a sexual psychopath could begin. And in Minnesota, the only requirements were a petition by a county attorney and an examination by "two duly licensed doctors of medicine."
Whatever their individual wordings, such laws were intended to bring about the indefinite of dangerous or socially undesirable people. In all these states, a sexual psychopath could not be released from detention until psychiatrists rule that he was "cured" or at the very least no longer posed a threat to society.
Despite their good intentions, sexual psychopath laws invariably took a catch-all approach to sexual offenses. The intended targets may have been rapists and murderers, but in almost every state with a sexual psychopath law, little or no distinction was made between violent and non-violent offenses, between consensual and nonconsensual behavior, or between harmless "sexual deviates" and dangerous sex criminals. An adult homosexual man who had sex with his lover in the privacy of his bedroom was as deviant as a child murderer. A person who had a pornographic book or photograph hidden in a night table faced the same punishment as a rapist. All these people were lumped into one category – that of the sexual psychopath – and could be incarcerated in a state hospital indefinitely.
New York lawyer and judge Morris Ploscowe, one of the most prominent critics of sexual psychopath laws at the time, found that these were most often used to punish and isolate minor offenders rather then dangerous predators. In Minnesota, which enacted its sexual psychopath law in the ’30s, some 200 people were committed to state hospitals in the first ten years of the law’s existence, according to Ploscowe. Most were detained for homosexual activity, not for being hard-core sex criminals.
–Neal Miller: Sex-Crime Panic
This may be difficult for some of my heterosexual readers to grasp here…but back in those days, mere possession of pornography was enough to get you lumped in with rapists, murderers…and homosexuals. What may be difficult for some of my younger gay readers to grasp, is that a heterosexual charged with possession of pornography back then would likely be more appalled to to find themselves being compared to homosexuals then to rapists and murderers. The stigma of being homosexual really was that profound. You were more despicable then even rapists and murderers. More despicable even, then a communist.
When the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the sodomy laws in 2003, fourteen states still had some form of sodomy law on the books…four of them applying only to conduct between members of the same sex. In Idaho and Michigan you could get life for it. That was only six years ago.
If you’re curious, Miller’s book, Sex Crime Panic is a good place to begin developing an understanding of what Stonewall means to your gay and lesbian neighbors. Miller details events that took place in Iowa in 1955, following the rape and murder of two children. To address a growing public anti-gay hysteria, authorities arrested 20 gay men who they never even claimed had anything to do with the murders, had them declared "sexual psychopaths" and locked them up in a state mental hospital indefinitely. The only thing unique about Miller’s story, is that someone actually went to the trouble to document it all, finally.
Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig…Goooood Evening J.R….
So…I’ve been on the road for a few weeks. And I’ve not been updating my blog very much. And there’s a reason for that and it isn’t that I’m not talkative anymore. I’ve actually been very active on my Facebook account while on the road. And the reason for that is there is a handy little Facebook application for the iPhone that works…sorta kinda. There’s a lot it’s missing, but for basically updating your status, sending Facebook email and posting photos off your iPhone it works okay.
There is a WordPress app for the iPhone too, but I need to upgrade my WordPress software to enable it and as I have some customization in amongst my php files that isn’t a simple chore. I need to set aside some time for it. I could also enable email posting too I suppose…but again I need to set aside some time to experiment with it.
Anyway…I’m back at Casa del Garrett again, and I have lots to talk about in the coming days. But for now I need a rest. Here’s some quick stats from Traveler’s trip computer…
6753 Miles
29.6 Miles Per Gallon Average
61 Miles Per Hour Average
111:04 Hours Driving
30.7 Miles Per Gallon Averaged Today (6-10-2009)
That last figure is from the time I started the car this morning in Vandalia Illinois to shutting it down just now in front of Casa del Garrett in Baltimore. That’s almost entirely highway driving with the cruise control on, which I did more to keep me safe from speed traps then for gas milage.
I’ll total up the money this weekend. I didn’t buy as much turquoise this trip as I usually do when driving through the southwest. But I got a couple of really nice pieces, and one very nice amber bracelet in Chinatown. Brother-Mine has promised me a custom jewelry box to finally give all this turquoise a nice home.
I’ve got tons of photos, which I’ll work on over the weekend too.
I love my native state, California. I often dream of living out there. That was the plan, once upon a time. But then I got the job of my dreams, and a nice little Baltimore rowhouse to go with it, and so Maryland is probably where I’ll spend the rest of my life too. But…it’s good to be home. I love to travel…I love the open road. But…it felt so nice to walk into my house a few hours ago. So very, very nice…
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