One reason I started this blog once upon a time, was as a way of journaling. I hadn’t kept a diary since I was a teenager, and I thought it would be useful to have a journal I could reference from time to time. I note here, that back in March of 2007 I wrote a series of posts about upgrading Bagheera’s (my art room Mac) data drive from 200 gig to 500.
This was back when my Big Scan Project (wherein I am running all the film I’ve ever shot through the Uber nice Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED film scanner I bought back in December of 2006) was starting to really fill Bagheera’s data drive. The plan was that, hopefully, the price of disk storage would keep going down, so rather then buy several terribytes of hard disk space upfront I would just replace the data drive when it got full and hopefully the next step up would be affordable by then.
I further note in my blog archives that I bought Bagheera back in October of 2004, from the local Apple store in the Towson Town Mall. Bagheera as I recall didn’t have a second hard drive in it when I bought it. I added the 2 gig drive at a later date but I don’t see it noted in my blog posts when I installed it, just a first reference to it on November 2005. I started the Big Scan in December of 2006. By March of 2007 I needed to upgrade the 200 gig drive to 500. It’s January 2009, and the 500 gig drive is almost full. Time to buy more.
I was going to go for 2 terabytes but I couldn’t find 2 locally and my favorite online computer parts store, Directron, didn’t have any for sale, surprisingly, because I know I saw them selling 2 terabyte drives a couple months ago when I was noticing I was getting close to the line on the 500. But I am up against the line now and I have some projects I can’t do without more disk space so I went to Best Buy and bought a 1 terrabyte Western Digital SATA for Bagheera.
It’s down in the art room now. Some things have changed since the last time I did this. For one thing, I’m using SuperDuper as my backup software now, not Retrospect. Retrospect put everything into one great big backup file with a companion index file…similar to the way a lot of backup programs work. SuperDuper simply makes a straight file copy of everything onto whatever other drive you point it to, making the backup drive’s file system identical to the one you’re backing up. What I like about that is that if my data drive fails for whatever reason, I can just plug in the backup drive (after making a safety copy) and I can get right back to work. Or I can just pull off files directly from the backup drive if and when I need to revert back to a previous copy of something.
But Retrospect had one feature that SuperDuper does not and that’s it does a verification pass after it’s done backing up. So I’m currently doing a Unix diff command on the two drives to make sure everything on the backup drive is good before I pull the old data drive out.
I use two Western Digital USB/Firewire external drives for my backups and keep one in my desk at work and the other here and rotate them weekly. I do this with Bagheera’s system drive too. The nice thing about Apple computers is that you can make a bootable copy of your system drive onto a Firewire external drive and if your system drive ever fails you can boot directly off the backup drive. I love that…it gives you much peace of mind.
The other thing that’s changed is I’m running Aperture 2 now. In my previous post I wrote about how Aperature made upgrading the data drive difficult because it would not use the volume name to get the path back to its referenced image files. So after I copied over my image library back over to the new drive, Aperture complained that it couldn’t find its reference files and I had to manually "reattach" the masters. Hopefully Aperture 2 does all that a little more elegantly now. We’ll see.
So right now Bagheera is doing a ‘diff’ on the data drive and the backup drive. I expect that to take most of the rest of the night. When that’s done, if the diff found no problems, I’ll start doing the drive swap. After I get that taken care of, the plan is to upgrade Bagheera’s system drive and upgrade to Mac OSX 1.5 (Leopard). I’m still at Tiger, largely because I am not sure how well Leopard will run on the only single processor G5 Mac Pro Apple ever made.
It took two months shy of two years to use up the 300 gig of extra space I bought back in 2007, but I’ve been spotty about sticking to the Big Scan. If I’d run Bagheera and the scanner constantly it would have probably taken less time, but I have other things I want to use Bagheera for besides scanning in old (and new) film, so the Big Scan is an off and on project.
Sometime this coming year I may well purchase a more powerful Mac Pro for the art room. Four years is pretty old in computer years, and already I’m seeing Mac software out there that won’t run on Tiger. But upgrading Bagheera is budget and work status dependent. If I’m looking for another job by the end of this year, like a lot of other Americans already are, I may be worried about more then how slow my art room Mac is getting. If I do it though, I’ll make the old machine into a dedicated film scanner and then just keep running film through it.
I’ve been seeing the "news" headline pop up on my Google News page, that Stan Lee is working on a new gay superhero he’s planning to debut soon. Swell, thinks I, another mainstream gay stereotype, only this time in tights, is just what we need. Not. But no…as it turns out, there’s more to it. Lots more. Would you believe, that the actual creator of this new gay superhero, Perry Moore, is a gay Christian and the executive producer on the Chronicles of Narnia films?
What the hell do you care for the people of this planet?” a powerful savior-turned-villain bellows at Thom Creed, the eponymous teenage superhero in Perry Moore’s Lambda Award-winning novel, Hero. “They hate you, they call you names and they’re ashamed of you,” the bad guy says as he prepares to unleash a terrifying monster known as the Planet Eater. “You know I’m telling the truth. You’re all so stupid, and you’re killing this world anyway. I’m just giving you a little nudge, a gentle push.” Perhaps it’s not giving too much away to reveal that Thom, a young gay man whose sexuality is only one of several special gifts, manages to save the Earth and find true love by the novel’s last pages.
That dramatic arc may be unremarkable in a story where a boy-hero wins the heart of his ladylove, but as the scion of a literary genre—comic books—in which gay characters tend to meet a gruesome end, Hero is nothing short of revolutionary. And as Moore puts the finishing touches on the serialized small-screen adaptation of his novel for Showtime, it appears that the revolution will indeed be televised.
“Look at these tent-pole gay movies like Milk and Brokeback that straight people get behind,” Moore said in a telephone interview from his home in New York City. “The heroes die terrible deaths or endure terrible tragedies. And the characters like us that we see on TV are often the gay version of the Stepin Fetchit stereotype. Mine will be the first show where the gay character is a true hero and he isn’t doomed.”
Well Perry Moore has just won himself a fan. That Tragic Gay Ending is one of my biggest beefs with mainstream pop culture’s representation of us. Same sex love isn’t allowed to win. It has to die horribly. Either that, or the gay characters aren’t allowed to be whole people, just soulless, sexless, Stepin Fetchit stereotypes.
“God has a really big mission for me,” says Moore, who’s producing the Showtime series with Stan Lee, the former head of Marvel Comics who has supervised the development of successful crossover storylines like Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man and the Hulk. “A younger generation needs to supplant the older generation of bigots—that’s why Thom’s story is important.”
Ohhh… Take that James Dobson. I gotta go buy me this book…
I was perusing whitehouse.gov and, as a nerd lawyer who enjoys reading written law (meaning statutes, regulations and the like), found myself reading Mr. O’President’s first two Executive Orders. One involves procedures for release by the Archivist of documents possibly subject to a claim of executive privilege by the incumbent or a former President. Zzzzzzzzzzzz. The other is styled "Ethical Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel," setting forth rules about such things as acceptance of gifts and revolving door issues. What caught my eye, what would never have been ordered by W, is the following Ethical Commitment:
"6. Employment Qualification Commitment. I agree that any hiring or other employment decisions I make will be based on the candidate’s qualifications, competence, and experience."
This is huge. Understand that if an Executive Branch employee violates that rule, the Attorney General can go after the miscreant, including barring him or her from government service, barring him or her from lobbying the Federal government, enjoining him from the violation, and going after any cash or other things of value he or she got.
How different would today’s Justice Department, for example, look if such an Order had been in place in 2001? How many Federalist Society lawyers would have been hired ahead of Top Ten grads from major law schools?
Imagine! A requirement that public servants be selected based on their "qualifications, competence, and experience." We are entering a mysterious, brave, new world, one based on, um, common sense and the public interest.
One of my old and dear friends is a patent and copyright attorney. I’m going to forward him this. He might get a kick out of reading all the stuff on whitehouse.gov that’s going on in the public view now.
I just got my first Valentine’s Day spam from FTD. Maybe they finally figured out trying to sell me Mother’s Day flowers every year since mom died isn’t getting them much business. Problem is, reminding me I’ll be single for yet another Valentine’s Day isn’t helping adjust my attitude toward them any either…
Subject: Save 25% and Send a Big Hug to Someone You Love
Why…yes. I would absolutely love to send a great Big Hug to Someone I Love. Alas, the few Someones in my life who fit that category of Someone I Would Love To Send A Great Big Hug To are all happily coupled…er…to other people. So I really don’t think I should be sending flowers to any of them.
Save 25%. Send Someone You Love a Big Hug! The FTD ® Big Hug ® Bouquet. Now Only $29.99. Same day delivery available. Offer ends Saturday.
The Most Romantic Day is Near! Place Your Valentine’s Day Order Now and Save Up To 20%.
Yes, The Most Romantic Day Is Near. Thanks for reminding me. Bastards.
The Lonely Rose by Demonmiss27
…and I’ll get your idiot spam on Mother’s Day again this year too won’t I?
But I won’t mope around the house. No. I’m going to get right to work on This Years Valentine’s Day Poster Contest! It’ll be Fun!
The folks over at SLOG are making me wish I was in Seattle for Valentine’s Day this year…
Every year on Valentine’s Day the Stranger hosts a very special event for the heartbroken, the recently dumped, the bitterly divorced. Single people bring mementos of failed relationships to our Valentine’s Day Bash and we invite them up on to the stage, we listen to their sad stories, we boo their awful exes, and then we destroy their mementos live onstage in front of a cheering crowd. Over the last 12 years we’ve burned wedding photos, weve smashed engagement rings to smithereens, shattered sex toys after dipping them in liquid nitrogen, had gay boys beat off on the favorite t-shirts of homophobic ex-boyfriends, and taped pictures inside urinals and broadcast live, streaming video of live, streaming urine running down the faces of lying, cheating, scheming, heartless ex-girlfriends.
The Bash is coming up fast—did you know that Valentine’s Day is on February 14 this year?—and you could consider this your save-the-date notice if you weren’t, you know, GOING TO BE ALONE ON VALENTINE’S DAY, seeing as you don’t have a date to save the date for BECAUSE YOU JUST GOT DUMPED. So instead consider this your personal invitation to start looking around for a memento to bring to the Bash. We don’t want to get all woo-woo about this, but we’ve heard from past Bash participants that they were truly moved by the experience and it did, on some level, help ’em heal. And, hey, if you’re single on Valentine’s Day, what better place to be than a room full of drunk, single people on the serious rebound?
Wonder if I can get something like this going here in Baltimore. Somehow Baltimore seems like a more perfect place for it then Seattle. But maybe all that rain they get in the Pacific Northwest makes them all gloomy up there. I could show them gloomy here in Baltimore. Maybe instead of random stuff I find out on the web, this year’s poster contest will be my own Baltimore photos.
43 years ago today, this is what the nation was being told about its gay citizens, by one of the big national news magazines…
It used to be "the abominable crime not to be mentioned." Today it is not only mentioned; it is freely discussed and widely analyzed. Yet the general attitude toward homosexuality is, if anything, more uncertain than before. Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity—but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him.
A vast majority of people retain a deep loathing toward him, but there is a growing mixture of tolerance, empathy or apathy. Society is torn between condemnation and compassion, fear and curiosity, between attempts to turn the problem into a joke and the knowledge that it is anything but funny, between the deviate’s plea to be treated just like everybody else and the knowledge that he simply is not like everybody else.
…In 1948, Sexologist Alfred Kinsey published figures that homosexuals found cheering. He estimated that 4% of American white males are exclusively homosexual and that about two in five had "at least some" homosexual experience after puberty. Given Kinsey’s naive sampling methods, the figures were almost certainly wrong. But chances are that growing permissiveness about homosexuality and a hedonistic attitude toward all sex have helped "convert" many people who might have repressed their inclinations in another time or place.
Homosexuals are present in every walk of life, on any social level, often anxiously camouflaged; the camouflage will sometimes even include a wife and children, and psychoanalysts are busy treating wives who have suddenly discovered a husband’s homosexuality. But increasingly, deviates are out in the open, particularly in fashion and the arts. Women and homosexual men work together designing, marketing, retailing, and wrapping it all up in the fashion magazines. The interior decorator and the stockbroker’s wife conspire over curtains. And the symbiosis is not limited to working hours. For many a woman with a busy or absent husband, the presentable homosexual is in demand as an escort —witty, pretty, catty, and no problem to keep at arm’s length. Rich dowagers often have a permanent traveling court of charming international types who exert influence over what pictures and houses their patronesses buy, what decorators they use, and where they spend which season.
…
There is no denying the considerable talent of a great many homosexuals, and ideally, talent alone is what should count. But the great artists so often cited as evidence of the homosexual’s creativity—the Leonardos and Michelangelos —are probably the exceptions of genius. For the most part, thinks Los Angeles Psychiatrist Edward Stainbrook, homosexuals are failed artists, and their special creative gift a myth. No less an authority than Somerset Maugham felt that the homosexual, "however subtly he sees life, cannot see it whole," and lacks "the deep seriousness over certain things that normal men take seriously … He has small power of invention, but a wonderful gift for delightful embroidery.
Homosexual ethics and esthetics are staging a vengeful, derisive counterattack on what deviates call the "straight" world. This is evident in "pop," which insists on reducing art to the trivial, and in the "camp" movement, which pretends that the ugly and banal are fun. It is evident among writers, who used to disguise homosexual stories in heterosexual dress but now delight in explicit descriptions of male intercourse and orgiastic nightmares. It is evident in the theater, with many a play dedicated to the degradation of women and the derision of normal sex. The most sophisticated theatrical joke is now built around a homosexual situation; shock comes not from sex but from perversion. Attacks on women or society in general are neither new in U.S. writing nor necessarily homosexual, but they do offer a special opportunity for a consciously or unconsciously homosexual outlook.
They represent a kind of inverted romance, since homosexual situations as such can never be made romantic for normal audiences.
…
Even in ordinary conversation, most homosexuals will sooner or later attack the "things that normal men take seriously." This does not mean that homosexuals do not and cannot talk seriously; but there is often a subtle sea change in the conversation: sex (unspoken) pervades the atmosphere. Among other matters, this raises the question of whether there is such a thing as a discernible homosexual type. Some authorities, notably Research Psychologist Evelyn Hooker of U.C.L.A., deny it—against what seems to be the opinion of most psychiatrists. The late Dr. Edmund Bergler found certain traits present in all homosexuals, including inner depression and guilt, irrational jealousy and a megalomaniac conviction that homosexual trends are universal. Though Bergler conceded that homosexuals are not responsible for their inner conflicts, he found that these conflicts "sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted by a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person."
Another homosexual trait noted by Bergler and others is chronic dissatisfaction, a constant tendency to prowl or "cruise" in search of new partners. This is one reason why the "gay" bars flourishing all over the U.S. attract even the more respectable deviates.
…
The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual’s parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him. If at the same time the father is weakly submissive to his wife or aloof and unconsciously competitive with his son, he reinforces the process. To attain normal sexual development, according to current psychoanalytic theory, a boy should be able to identify with his father’s masculine role.
Fear of the opposite sex is also believed to be the cause of Lesbianism, which is far less visible but, according to many experts, no less widespread than male homosexuality—and far more readily tolerated. Both forms are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles—wearing wedding rings, calling themselves "he" and "she."
Is homosexuality curable? Freud thought not. In the main, he felt that analysis could only bring the deviant patient relief from his neurotic conflicts by giving him "harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed." Many of Freud’s successors are more optimistic. Philadelphia’s Dr. Samuel Hadden reported last year that he had achieved twelve conversions out of 32 male homosexuals in group therapy. Paris Psychiatrist Sacha Nacht reports that about a third of his patients turn heterosexual, a third adjust to what they are, and a third get no help at all. But he feels that only about one in ten is moved to seek help in the first place.
That is the crux: most homosexuals apparently do not desire a cure…
Focus on the Family? The Mormon Times? No…Time Magazine, issue of January 21, 1966 – The Homosexual In America
I was 12 years old. By the end of the year I would turn 13, and enter my teen years in an America where the common view of gay people were that we were sick tortured twisted sexual deviants who ought to be locked up for the safety of the community. When I was 14 I would sit with my grade school peers in a sex ed class, taught by our gym teachers, who told us that homosexuals typically killed the people they had sex with, and preferred to kidnap and rape children and seduce young heterosexuals, rather then seek out other homosexuals for sexual trysts, precisely because we knew how dangerous we were. They taught us that homosexuals would become so excited during sex that we often mutilated the genitals of the people we were having sex with. They taught us that we were confused about which gender we were, and hated ourselves, and would take out that hate on other people by killing them horribly. Most unsolved murders we were told, were committed by homosexuals. That was the world I came to know myself in.
How I managed to come out of my teen years into adulthood not completely loathing myself as others of my generation did is a story I’m (very slowly I’m afraid…) telling in cartoon form in A Coming Out Story. I was so lucky…especially in that my first high school crush was so completely decent to me. Those of us who made it out of there in one piece emotionally and mentally, pretty much swore to make sure other gay kids didn’t have to go through what we did, and to fight for the honor and the dignity of our lives, and our loves, so that future generations wouldn’t have to know what it was like to have your teachers look you in the face and try to make you and all your friends believe that you were a sexual monster…a deviant…a pervert…
It’ll be interesting and, more often than not, frustrating to watch as the new reality takes hold in Washington. The Village conventional wisdom has been stuck in 1984 for 25 years now, and obviously things have changed. The media have been taking their cues from Republicans for so long it’s difficult to see how that will change quickly. But things have changed.
I was watching some of the TV news coverage of the inauguration last night…I haven’t watched TV news in ages its been so pathetically worthless…and I was struck by how many of the gas bags on my screen were actually older then me. Then I remembered that I am not young either. So why did they look so damn old?
If the Village Conventional Wisdom has been stuck in 1984, I’ve been stuck in 1976 for 32 years now. That is…I keep thinking of myself as young when logically and rationally I know I’m not and haven’t been for quite a while. I look in the bathroom mirror every morning and dang if I don’t see a 55 year old man staring back at me. But I know I’m that and when I see myself in a mirror, or in a photograph, it doesn’t bother me. But sitting on the couch watching tv (or for that matter banging on a keyboard as I am right now) somehow I just snap back into that mental self image I had back when I was a kid.
So I have no gut level apprehensions at the passing of the generational torch that I’m seeing now in some of the talking heads. As far as the inner me is concerned, this is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life: when what Howard Cruse once called Kennedy Time picks back up where it left off. I’ve been waiting out Nixon Time now for so long I’d almost forgotten how it felt to be living in an America that had a bright and promising future in front of it. I’ve no idea if Obama is going to be the kind of president Kennedy was…in point of fact I was too young during Kennedy’s all too brief administration to really grasp what was going on in the world politically. All I knew was after being a kid in a world where the communists were lurking in all the shadows, suddenly there was nothing to be afraid of anymore. There was a future ahead of us, and it was going to be a great adventure after all, and not something to fear. If Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, I wonder if the counter-culture that came later in the decade would have pushed back as hard at that era’s Wise Old Men. Johnson was no Kennedy. We all felt betrayed.
There is something in the air today, very much like the feeling I had back in "Kennedy Time". Yes, there are dangers ahead, yes there are hard times facing us, but we will meet them and rise above. We can do it. Liberty and Justice for All can win over totalitarianism and greed and hate. America can walk with the rest of the world into a brighter tomorrow. We can do it. I’m writing here about the sense of mind and spirit you feel now, not necessarily the reality on the ground. The next few years are not going to be a cakewalk obviously. For one thing all the apparatus of the Nixon/Reagan right are still there. Rush Limbaugh and all the other hate jockeys will still be pumping venom into hearts and minds, although hopefully to smaller and smaller audiences. Right wing billionaires like Howard Ahmanson will still be destabilizing our democracy with their wealth like heroin and meth pushers destroy neighborhoods. The enemies of democracy around the world will hate us all the more for living up to our ideals then they did while Bush and Cheney were busy pissing on them and laughing. But America is dreaming a better dream now, then the tired and fearful conceits of the Wise Old Men.
So there I am on the sofa, watching the talking heads on TV trying to wrap their minds around this new president and this new reality and suddenly they all just look old and tired and I have to remind myself that they’re not that much older then me some of them. And I am struck by this fact. The entire time Bush sat like a turd in the White House and I was hating, absolutely loathing the Washington news media, The Villagers, for kissing up to him, I never really noticed how old The Villagers were. I saw it in their faces today. But mostly, in their smiling bewilderment. And I remembered how Kennedy had begun, by declaring that the torch had been passed.
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans-born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage-and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
–John F. Kennedy – inaugural address, Friday, January 20, 1961
There’s going to be a lot of ink written about how Obama represents the passing of the tired old boomer generation. But many of us boomers didn’t get old and tired and never let go of our dream of a better world, a just and peaceful world. We were outflanked by the Nixonites, who simply dug in their heels and kept on fighting after Nixon resigned. We thought the struggle was over then and it wasn’t, it was only just beginning. Cheney and Rumfeld, who were both in the Nixon administration, and much of their gang were born either before or during the second world war. Villagers like David S. Broder were born well before it. If my generation is guilty of anything, it’s living too much in our dreams and not enough in the world to make them real. I’m told that there is a saying among Jews, that when you pray you should pray as though everything depends on God, but when you act you should act as though everything depends on you. We should treat our dreams like that. Dream as though dreams come true. Act as though dreams are not enough. And never underestimate how much the darkness hates the dreamer.
One thing that struck me about Obama early in the primaries, was how good he was at taking the measure of his opposition, how decent he remained in the heat of the fight and how relentlessly focused he was on the process and the outcome. He took the Clinton camp completely by surprise, and walked right on by them, so certain were they that their candidate was inevitable. There’s the difference between the generations. There’s why Obama was the better person for the job…the necessary person for the job. Nothing is inevitable. If the torch has now been passed to a new generation who revere the dream of liberty and justice for all, but are wise to its enemies, starry-eyed and street-smart, then we will get to the promise land.
Steve…I Really Wish You Were Here To See All This…
Steve Gilliard that is. I was just thinking now how sad it is he didn’t get to see this day. Jim Capozzola too. Jim I think would have loved that someone with a brain who likes to read was finally in the White House. But Steve especially. Steve should have lived to see this.
I watched him take the oath of office, and heard him speak to America and the world after, with my co-workers here in the Institute auditorium. I was too young to appreciate Kennedy, really. But I remember not only the excitement of the adults around me, but also the sense of promise everyone saw in him. The nation was young again, and the future was full of promise. I never really appreciated what so many decades of Kultar Kampf had done to take that away from me. So much Ronald Reagan. So much Moral Majority. So much George Bush. So much Karl Rove. So much James Dobson.
And then I watched Obama take the oath, and I heard him speak to America, and to the world, and I felt it again, just as I had when I was a kid, doing my duck and cover exercises, listening to the civil defense tests on the radio and TV, and nobody knew who was going to win the cold war, or the space race. And I wasn’t the only baby boomer in that audience. We all felt it. I could tell. America is young again. The future is full of promise. We can do it. We can do anything…
So…the insulate the exterior wall of the bedroom proof of concept test: The results are pretty much what I’d hoped for. Sunday I cut and stuck foam insulating panels on the back bedroom wall with double sided mounting tape. For the rest of that day the temperature in the room seemed to maintain pretty steadily. But the real test I knew, would be how it felt in the morning after a good overnight chill outside.
I’ve actually been running an oil filled space heater in the bedroom lately because it gets so cold overnight. When I first moved into Casa del Garrett, I used to run an electric blanket. But the blanket died on me last year and I bought the oil filled space heater to replaced it, thinking that a space heater was a more versatile spot heating solution then an electric blanket. Since I was testing the difference insulating that back exterior wall would make, I kept the heater off.
Monday morning the bedroom was refrigerator cold when I got up. But none of the foam panels I’d put up were radiating coldness at all. So it was coming from somewhere else then the sections of wall I’d insulated. As I paced around the room trying to see where the cold was coming from I realized I’d forgotten about the wall length closet on one side of the room.
That closet goes the entire length of the bedroom on the wall I share with my neighbor. One end shares a wall with the bathroom and the other end of it is the exterior wall. That little slice of exterior wall in the closet was cold as ice when I put my hand to it and it was chilling all the air in the closet, which then seeped out into the bedroom. So Monday I put up some more sheet foam against that wall. I also added some more foam panels to a portion of the exterior wall that had been built out to accommodate one of the heating ducts as it was very chilly too.
Once more I slept without the space heater on. This morning when I got up it was 16 degrees outside and the bedroom was pretty warm. So this pretty much settles it. My project starting next spring is to insulate the exterior walls here at Casa del Garrett.
The Presidential Inauguration Committee just issued a statement saying, "We had always intended and planned for Rt. Rev. Robinson’s invocation to be included in the televised portion of yesterday’s program. We regret the error in executing this plan – but are gratified that hundreds of thousands of people who gathered on the mall heard his eloquent prayer for our nation that was a fitting start to our event.” — PIC communications director Josh Earnest.
Okay…from all the books on German culture I’ve been reading lately, is this is something like saying Pope Still Catholic, or Bears Found To Prefer Woods To Port-A-Johns. Germans and angst are like southerners and barbecue.
Did HBO cave in the face of conservative outcries over Rev. Robinson’s selection for this event? Did the Inaugural committee rush Rev. Robinson onstage and off before the broadcast was slated to begin? Whatever the case may be, this is a cold slap. HBO has some serious explaining to do, as does the Inaugural committee.
Harvey Milk is screaming in his metaphorical grave right now.
It’s a good question, and this scenario fits nicely with the alleged technical difficulties I keep hearing about, that prevented Robinson’s words from even being clearly heard by the crowd that was there: I have friends who work as sound engineers, I’ve been with them as they did their work in various settings, and I’m here to tell you that they work hard at choreographing each and every microphone and pickup’s settings for each and every element of an event. I have no idea how the video side of it works but I’d be surprised if it was any less intricate. If Robinson was rushed out before the stage crew and the technical engineers were ready for him that would explain the fumbling around, and possibly even the video black-out. The only problem with this scenerio of course, is it still doesn’t explain why the Gay Men’s Chorus was closeted.
One fuckup I can accept. It’s still unacceptable, amateurish, unprofessional behavior that gay Americans have every right to be pissed off about and demand an apology for, but I can be convinced that one was a fuckup. Two of them that Just Happen to target the gay presence at this event and only the gay presence at this event and it’s staringly obvious that it was deliberate. The only question now is who engineered it?
I’m reading elsewhere that Dianne Feinstein heads the inagural committee. Well, there’s a good place to start. People just assume that since she was Mayor of San Francisco after Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assasinated that she’s a friend of the gay community. Nothing could be further from the truth…
After the 1978 death of Harvey Milk in San Francisco, gay rights activist Tom Brougham came up with a definition of domestic partnership that is now universally used, and was designed to include everything about marriage except sexual orientation. According to Brougham, the definition was that the couple must be more than 18 years old and mentally competent to make a contract. Furthermore, his position was that domestic partners must publicly declare the partnership and pledge to be responsible for each other.
In 1982, Brougham’s definition was modified by Supervisor Harry Britt (a gay man appointed to replace Harvey Milk). Britt’s version was adopted and passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but Dianne Feinstein, mayor of San Francisco at the time, came under intense pressure from the Catholic Church and subsequently vetoed the bill. Not until 1989 was a domestic partnership law adopted in the city of San Francisco…
Note that we have been fighting for marriage rights since the 1970s. Next time some ignorant jackass asks you why same-sex marriage has suddenly become such a big deal with teh gays, slap them upside the head with the biggest, thickest history book you can find.
A recall attempt was made after Feinstein vetoed Britt’s bill, to get her booted out of office. The gay community was massively pissed off. But Feinstein calculated that there weren’t enough gay people in San Francisco who cared enough about domestic partnership in the disco 70s to sign enough recall petitions to get it to the point of their actually being a vote. But another group of pissed off San Franciscans, gun owners, were already circulating a recall petition on her after she signed some new gun control measure or another. Many gay folk simply started adding their names to that one. That gave it enough signatures that a vote was actually held, much to her shock.
She survived it. Ever since when asked about it she has not only never apologized, she has insisted vetoing the bill was the right thing to do. Feinstein is that sort of democrat that blocks progress on equality far more then outright bigots manage, because they keep conning people into believing they’ll do the right thing once in office and then when it actually comes time to do the right thing, they don’t.
I wonder if another Catholic Bishop whispered into Feinstein’s ear again, that she’d better not be seen giving anything to the gays…
Contacted Sunday night by AfterElton.com concerning the exclusion of Robinson’s prayer, HBO said via email, "The producer of the concert has said that the Presidential Inaugural Committee made the decision to keep the invocation as part of the pre-show."
Uncertain as to whether or not that meant that HBO was contractually prevented from airing the pre-show, we followed up, but none of the spokespeople available Sunday night could answer that question with absolute certainty.
However, it does seem that the network’s position is that they had nothing to do with the decision.
So who made the decision to closet the Gay Men’s Chorus? Dan Savage sums it up nicely here …
When you’re throwing folks a bone it’s a good idea to make sure they can, you know, see the bone.
It’s five in the morning here in Baltimore, and already my mailbox is chock full of outrage over this. From the Gay Democrats mail list to the local Baltimore lists its everywhere. Everywhere but Google news which seems to think that Robinson’s prayer was seen by the whole nation. Over at Science Blogs they’re calling it an Historic inaugural slap in the face to LGBT community. One commenter there posted this…
We’d like to have you speak at our inaugural event…
We’d like to put your face up on the screen
Look around you; all you see are Democratic eyes.
Stroll around the Mall until it’s time to speak
And here’s to you, Bishop Robinson,
CNN—your speech they wouldn’t show
Wo wo wo
Bless us with tears, Bishop Robinson,
Heaven knows it can’t be cos you’re gay
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey….
Use another camera while the Bishop says his prayer.
Put it on a crowd scene for the broadcast
Keep him in the closet, Bishop Robinson’s not there
Most of all, we’ve got to hide him from the kids
Shoo, shoo, to you, Bishop Robinson,
CNN—your speech they wouldn’t show
Wo wo wo
Bless us with tears, Bishop Robinson,
Heaven knows it can’t be cos you’re gay
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey….
Standing on the marble steps, with Lincoln looking down
Going through the motions for TV
Laugh about it, Shout about it, Try to spread the word
Anyway, the Bishop wasn’t heard
Where have you gone, Marian Anderson?
The GMC is singing just like you
Ooo ooo ooo
What’s that you say, Bishop Robinson?
CNN sure kept you locked away
Hey hey hey… hey hey hey…
Several people over at Daily KOS, are covering this. DrFood mentions, via Pam’s House Blend, that you couldn’t even hear Robinson on NPR…
Bishop Gene Robinson gave a beautiful invocation at the inaugural concert today. I know because I read it here. (Full text below the fold.) I didn’t see it on HBO. Apparently you couldn’t see it on CNN or PBS. (*see update below) An angry commenter on Pam’s House Blend says you couldn’t even hear it on NPR.
Craigkg is reporting that even those in the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial might not have been able to hear Robinson’s Prayer…
In fact, it is being reported by some who were in attendance that when Rev Robinson delivered his invocation, the speakers were either turned down or off all together.
The situation with Rev. Robinson and Rev. Warren has become so incredibly similar to the fiasco involving Donnie McClurkin and Rev. Andy Sidden its not even funny. Before the South Carolina primary, Obama held a concert for black evangelicals and invited gospel singer and "ex-gay" homophobe Donnie McClurkin to sing and emcee the event. GLBT activists reacted by denouncing McClurkin’s claims that gays can change their sexual orientation (aka be saved) and Obama for having such a divisive anti-gay figure associated with his campaign. The GLBT community is rightly very sensitive to the legitimization of the ex-gay movement and the severe psychological damage reparative therapy can have of those subjected to this (being kind here) torture. After some hemming and hawing Obama announced he did not agree with McClurkin’s views on gays, tried to reinterate his own support of the GLBT community and announced that an invocation at the concert would be delivered by openly gay minister, the Rev. Andy Sidden. It was highly questioned at the time having a white gay minister deliver the prayer when several black gay ministers were available and willing to give it. At the concert, Rev. Sidden delivered his prayer in front of a largely unoccupied venue as most people were outside still filing in. Reports put the crowd at one quarter to one third of the eventual attendance at best. McClurkin went on to emcee and perform in front of the full crowd and delivered his own god saved me from my gayness statement…
At Talking Points Memo…there is the Top Ten Reasons Why HBO Censored Gene Robinson…
1. HBO sound system cannot broadcast gay voices.
2. Program ran over schedule, so HBO went back in their time machine and cut the beginning of the live broadcast.
3. Appearance of a gay men’s chorus went way over HBO’s ‘gay quota’ for the event.
4. HBO is a family-friendly network that does not carry offensive material like frontal nudity, profanity, or bishops.
5. Ellen DeGeneres was jealous.
6. Dumbledore was jealous.
7. HBO was warned that terrorists were watching for a signal that America was gay weak.
8. Rick Warren was jealous.
9. Everyone knows all gays are atheists.
10. Sarah Palin used her special anti-Russian spyware to block the signal.
A search of Getty Images, NYTimes.com and WaPo slide shows turned up nothing. In short, I found no visual evidence that an invocation was ever said.
The TVBarn blogger lists three options for team Obama to handle this: 1) Claim it was a technical glitch, 2) Admit they never intended for Robinson to be seen on national TV, 3) Admit they screwed up. My money is on 1, and they’ll stick stubbornly with it no matter how many people point out that the event began without any problems precisely on time, and that the "glitch" only happened during Robinson’s prayer, and that it still doesn’t explain why the Gay Men’s Chorus was closeted.
Could it be that the American media has finally decided these public events should be 100% secular? Don’t count on it, friends, because you know as well as I do that pop-pastor Rick Warren will be front and center and at full volume to kick off President-Elect Obama’s formal Inauguration on Tuesday.
Today’s event at the Lincoln Memorial was entitled We Are One, but apparently We Are Minus One is closer to the truth.
When Barack Obama chose anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-porn Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, gays and lesbians—still smarting from Prop 8—were understandably upset. Well, I thought our dismay was understandable. But a lot of folks in the comments threads here, there, and everywhere disagreed. Barack was just trying to bring the country together, to find common ground, and Rick Warren invited him to his church, and how dare you get upset, trust the man, let him get into office before you start grousing at him about this, why are you worrying about symbolism when it’s policy that matters, and blah blah blah.
…
Then when Barack Obama chose Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopal bishop, to give the invocation at tonight’s pre-inaugural festivities—the concert tonight at the Lincoln Memorial—the folks defending Obama were all like, "SEE? Obama is bringing the country together! Anti-gay preachers, gay preachers—everyone is equal and equally welcome!" And Gene Robinson did give the invocation at tonight’s concert…and his words were very moving. You can read the full text of Robinson’s prayer here.
But if you were watching HBO’s broadcast of tonight’s concert you didn’t see Robinson, or hear his remarks… because Robinson’s invocation wasn’t included in the broadcast. Skipped over during the live broadcast, edited out of the rebroadcast.
Dig it. Not just skipped over, but edited out. And Bishop Robinson wasn’t the only thing edited out…
How about the fact that tonight’s other big gay moment—the D.C. gay men’s chorus singing with Josh Groban—passed without the chorus, unlike every other performer, being identified?
Nice. Welcome to morning in America. No matter what little token we may think we’ve managed to win, never doubt the ability or the willingness of the corporate media to make sure we remain invisible. And it’s not just that they’d rather have republicans in power then democrats. It’s not just that allowing people to see their gay and lesbian neighbors for the human beings we are, makes it hard for us to be the monsters we have to become every election year so that republicans can gay bash their way into winning elections. Homophobia is as much a fact of life in the high testosterone boardrooms of corporate America as it is in the megachurch stadium seating big screen TV cathedrals of the heartland. They hate us. First of all you have to understand that they hate us.
The democrats are sill late in coming to this fight. Obama and his people probably genuinely thought they were being actively inclusive in bringing in Gene Robinson. They were probably totally blind-sided by all this. Like a lot of decent rational people, they just don’t get the depth of contempt toward gay people. They never believe it until they actually see it for themselves. You can’t just take a rhetorical stand in favor of gay equality. You can’t just make a few gestures of sympathy and expect any progress to be made. This is a knife fight. They hate us. They hate us with a venom that is as bottomless as it is bitter. Every inch of progress in this fight, every inch, every painful, bloody inch of progress we make toward equality, toward the day when we are free to love and hope and dream and make decent lives for ourselves to the best of our ability, is its own poisonous scorched earth total war. Every inch. It will be like that right up to the bitter end and for generations after. They hate us. They will never stop hating us. Of course HBO censored Gene Robinson. Of course they shoved the Gay Men’s chorus into the closet. The corporate media will keep on making us invisable, will keep on shoving us back into the closet, will enable the demonization of gay people, and look the other way at the toll of death and destruction until someone makes them stop. Asking politely will not change one single solitary thing. They hate us.
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We’d like to have you speak at our inaugural event…
We’d like to put your face up on the screen
Look around you; all you see are Democratic eyes.
Stroll around the Mall until it’s time to speak
And here’s to you, Bishop Robinson,
CNN—your speech they wouldn’t show
Wo wo wo
Bless us with tears, Bishop Robinson,
Heaven knows it can’t be cos you’re gay
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey….
Use another camera while the Bishop says his prayer.
Put it on a crowd scene for the broadcast
Keep him in the closet, Bishop Robinson’s not there
Most of all, we’ve got to hide him from the kids
Shoo, shoo, to you, Bishop Robinson,
CNN—your speech they wouldn’t show
Wo wo wo
Bless us with tears, Bishop Robinson,
Heaven knows it can’t be cos you’re gay
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey….
Standing on the marble steps, with Lincoln looking down
Going through the motions for TV
Laugh about it, Shout about it, Try to spread the word
Anyway, the Bishop wasn’t heard
Where have you gone, Marian Anderson?
The GMC is singing just like you
Ooo ooo ooo
What’s that you say, Bishop Robinson?
CNN sure kept you locked away
Hey hey hey… hey hey hey…
Posted by: Cuttlefish | January 18, 2009 10:38 PM