Just wandering around…

Pawn Shop With Golden Lion- Memphis

Cash For Gold – Memphis

Shopping Cart Line – Memphis

Chism Trail – Memphis

Side Entrance, Raleigh Springs Mall – Memphis

(sigh)

For some years now I’ve had to wear glasses to read with.  It started out with the tiny print.  You know…the font the food companies print the ingredients lists on their product packaging with.  It got worse slowly…like a creeping fog cluttering up my vision.  One day I noticed I could not read the year mark on a dime.  Then it was the print in a newspaper.  Then it was the print in a book.  Then it was the print on maps.  Then it was the text in my computer display.  I gritted my teeth and just bought new half frames with stronger and stronger magnification factors.  I didn’t mind the half frames so much.  They were light in weight, and I could tuck them into my day pack and shirt pocket where they didn’t take up much room.  And I liked the look of them on me.  Even after a friend called me Granny Garrett when he saw me wearing a pair.  Half frames were invented by Ben Franklin, a man I greatly admire.  They’re so typical of his practical, common sense inventiveness.

I’d held out a hope that my distance vision wouldn’t be affected.  But some time ago I had to admit deep down inside that it was not to be.  I noticed myself having to work to get distant signage into focus.  Then I noticed I was doing the same thing to get the horizon into focus.  I could see it coming then.  So I did what any graphic artist would do when he notices his vision is getting worse.  I went into denial.

As long as I could reasonably make out what was there in the distance, I didn’t bother noticing that it was all getting fuzzier and fuzzier.  I just didn’t want it to be.  When the letter from the Maryland DMV to renew my driver’s license came in the mail the other day, I hoped that I could still pass the eye exam and for another couple of years at least not get the damn notice put on my license, that this driver needs to be wearing glasses to legally drive.  After all, I could still read the highway signs.  I just had to work my eyes a tad to do it.

Well…it was on the road to Memphis yesterday that I finally had to admit it.  My distance vision isn’t right anymore.  It’s not horrible by any means.  But it isn’t right.  Driving down highways that are unfamiliar, in traffic flows you are not used to, you really need to be watching the signs the moment they appear in the distance, so you can make your lane changes safely, well before the cutoff points.  When you can’t read the big green Interstate highway signs at a distance anymore, when you need them to be almost on you before the fuzziness goes away enough that you’re certain you know what they’re saying to you, you need glasses.  

Had I dealt with this more rationally I might have had some before I started heading out to Memphis.  As it was, I was able to get by using an old, old pair of spare reading glasses I’d stashed in the glove compartment.  They were so old they were useless for reading with, and I’d been meaning to toss them out.  As it turned out, luckily, that was just right for seeing the highway signs again.  But what really convinced me when I put them on and looked into the distance, wasn’t just the highway signs.

Oh…the horizon…it’s full of stuff now…

I could see it all…and yet I couldn’t.  I could see all the trees and houses in the distance, all the buildings in the far city skylines, all the elegant structures, human and natural, in the world around me.  But over the last couple years apparently, the detail in all that plenty had been fading away like the color in an old photograph.  And I didn’t know how much of it I’d already lost, until I put those old, weak, useless reading glasses on and looked out at the world beyond the highway signs.  I’d allowed my world to loose more of its richness and vitality then I’d realized, because I just didn’t want to know that my eyes were getting old, and that I was going to have to start wearing glasses all the time.

I hate it.  I used to have great eyes.  My left eye had better then normal vision in it: 20/14.  It’s still the better of the two.  But both of them need help now.

Since I was going to stay in Memphis for a while, I checked around to see if one of those quickie eye glass places could take me in, and make me a couple pair to tide me over until I got back to Baltimore.  I found a place that says they can do my exam first thing tomorrow morning, and probably have my glasses ready in an hour.  That’ll do until I can get back home.

My face is going to have a whole new look I reckon.  Oh.  And one other really irritating thing.  In the motel, I took a look at myself in the mirror with those old reading glasses I’d been using to drive down the highway with.  I’m 53 years old, and I hadn’t thought I was looking my age, until I looked at my face with a pair of glasses that allowed me to clearly see all the detail that I’d been missing, probably for the past couple years.  Damn.  Damn.  Damn.

It’ll be lite posting for a while here because as of…er…Right Now…I’m heading out to the big highways to visit some friends, attend the Open Source Developer’s Conference in Portland, and do some exploring along the way.  I’ll be on the road most of the day today, but I’m heading for Memphis and I’ll stay there for a while to see some friends, and…stand with Soul Force in front of Love In Action.  Via Peterson Toscano…

Ex-Gay Survivor Initiative Heads to Memphis

What: Gay men visit Love in Action to tell of the psychological and spiritual harm that they experienced there and in other "ex-gay" ministries. Three survivors of the controversial residential program will present Love in Action with personal artwork depicting the damage caused by the message that gays and lesbians can and should change their sexual orientation.

When: Tuesday, July 17, at 10:30 a.m.

Where: Love in Action, 4780 Yale Road, Memphis, Tennessee

Who: David Christie is a former Love in Action client who spent 13 years in ex-gay therapy before accepting himself as a gay man at the age of 28.
Brandon Tidwell completed Love in Action’s adult residential program in 2002, but ultimately rejected the organization’s theology and reconciled his sexual orientation with his Christian faith.

Other participants: Jeffrey Harwood, Lance Carroll

Why: Love in Action (LIA) is a Christian residential program that claims to help clients "break out" of "homosexual attraction and behavior" at a cost of $7000 for 3 months. In 2005, the facility was under investigation by the state of Tennessee for operating a mental health facility without a license. LIA has since changed its operating procedures to avoid state regulation. Most recently, LIA closed its controversial Refuge program for teenagers and replaced it with "Family Freedom Intensives," a 4-day, $600 per person. The program is for parents of gay or questioning teenagers.

Love in Action is part of a larger "ex-gay" movement, which continues to thrive in spite of Americans’ growing conviction that sexual orientation is not subject to change and despite a growing willingness on the part of faith communities to accept gays and lesbians as whole and valuable members.

This event is part of the Survivor’s Initiative, a national campaign to share the stories of "Ex-gay Survivors"-men and women who feel that ex-gay messages and programs did them more harm than good.

If you are in or near Memphis, come and show your solidarity. Also, spread the word. It’s been two years since the summer protests sparked by Zach Stark’s blog entries. No matter how LIA words it, Refuge is no more. Even so, the voices of their former LIA clients need to be heard as a witness and a warning.

If you can be there to stand peacefully in witness and solidarity with the survivors, please come.  The ex-gay movement cynically pleads tolerance for religious diversity and freedom of choice but they have none to offer themselves for gay people.  They instill shame where there should be joy.  They teach fear where there should be love.  They build walls of shame and fear and mistrust between parents and their children.  All so that our hearts may bleed, so that they can feel righteous.  If there is such a thing as Sin in this world, Capital S, then to put a dagger of shame into a person’s heart and take away the possibility of finding that intimate other and building a life together, must surely be a big one.  For years the ex-gay ministries have claimed that thousands have changed.  Now another voice is making itself heard: that of the ones who tried, and who learned after great hardship and pain that to finally become whole persons, they first had to accept themselves, in the words of the old spiritual, "Just As I Am." 

Come, stand with us if you can, in witness and in solidarity.  Just as you are.  Just as we are.

Via Pam’s House Blend…  You could just about predict the reaction from the kook pews when several democratic candidates for president announced they’d participate in a debate on Logo about gay issues…

Democrats: Pandering to Perverts 101

After all who could argue with the intellectual, philosophical, economic, national security, and social conscience expertise of a network that prides itself on the number of different ways a human being can have engage in sexual behavior while at the same time avoiding good old fashioned marital sexual intercourse?

…

What will happen is that each of these candidates will have to also later face the same "faith-based" audiences that they have been attempting to woo in recent weeks. Heaven forbid, but Obama might even have to make a follow up appearance in Rick Warren’s pulpit to announce the results of his most recent AIDS test. And what will they have to say then?

See here is the unrelenting truth, put as plainly as humanly possible:

Homosexual behavior and Christianity do not mix. From the standpoint of theory, theology, doctrine, and practice the two are totally and completely incompatible; as are adultery, pornography, bestiality, pedophilia, pre-marital sex, incest, cross dressing, multiple partner orgies and the list goes on. So the candidates can not have it both ways.

The truth is Democrats are not now nor have they ever been interested in seriously committed faith based voters.

So says Kevin McCullough over at TownHall.Com.  Meanwhile…back on the side of all that is Godly and Righteous, the republicans are showing the rest of the nation just what it means to be morally upright…

Madam links Sen. Vitter to brothel

NEW ORLEANS — New allegations tie Sen. David Vitter to a high-priced brothel in his hometown, days after he publicly apologized for his connection to an alleged prostitution ring in Washington, D.C.

Vitter (R-La.) acknowledged being involved with a D.C. escort service that federal prosecutors say was a prostitution ring.

On Tuesday, former madam Jeanette Maier said Vitter was once a client of her Canal Street brothel. She pleaded guilty to running the operation in 2002. Vitter won his seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Maier described Vitter as a "decent guy" who appeared to be in need of company when he visited the brothel.

"As far as the girls coming out after seeing David, all they had was nice things to say. It wasn’t all about sex. In fact, he just wanted to have somebody listen to him, you know," Maier said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Oh…and dress him up in diapers.  Via Suburban Guerrilla…

Tonight I got confirmation from a solid inside source who has no ideological ax to grind. The source said [Sen.] Vitter was a client at Canal Street, and provided some additional details that shed light on Maier’s comment that there was “more to the business than sex”. [Update: Based on her comments about Vitter not having “unusual predilections”, I would interpret this comment to mean something like companionship and social interaction rather than fetishes… etc.] These details are not for the faint of heart, either.

We’re talking about, among other things, Diaper Fetishism. That’s right folks, according to a trusted inside source, Vitter was well known among other Canal Street Brothel patrons to like diapers as well as other bizarre “fetishes”. I don’t have much more info than that from my source, except that some of the other patrons at the brothel included a well known business-minded New Orleans Republican and a well known Democratic ex-governor. There are many other well known patrons who never held public office, too. You’ve probably heard various names floated about.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love that New Orleans has more than its share of sex fetishists and preeverts who can’t come missionary. This ain’t a vanilla town, kids.

But the thought of Vitter prancing around in a dipey is a bit jarring, especially since I’m changing those nasty things every day.

We’re talking about the man here, who won his office after its previous occupant, another Louisiana republican, had to bail out after his own sex scandal…

During the Clinton impeachment scandal, Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt placed an article in his magazine offering up to $1,000,000 for information on sexual indiscretions by Republican officials. Flynt received evidence that Livingston had strayed outside of his marriage and he was preparing to publish this information. Livingston got word that the article was pending. During debate over the impeachment resolution on December 19, 1998, Livingston surprised everyone by stepping down as Speaker-elect and announced he would resign from the House in May 1999. He was succeeded by David Vitter…

Vitter had this to say about impeaching Bill Clinton prior to his arrival in Washington…

The writings of the Founding Fathers are very instructive on this issue. They are not cast in terms of political effectiveness at all but in terms of right and wrong — moral fitness. Hamilton writes in the Federalists Papers (No. 65) that impeachable offenses are those that "proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust."

In considering impeachment, Vitter asserted, Congress had to judge Clinton on moral terms. Decrying the law professors’ failure to see this, Vitter observed, "Is that the level of moral relatively [sic] and vacuousness we have come to?" If no "meaningful action" were to be taken against Clinton, Vitter wrote, "his leadership will only further drain any sense of values left to our political culture."

You don’t say, David.  Gosh…three cheers for moral leadership.  And…prostitutes who are worth every penny they charge.  Especially the ones who know how to dress a man in diapers.

Andrew Sullivan caught this one the other day…

Today, looking back, Jeanette is not the least bit ashamed of the business she built.  "There is a need for prostitutes," she says.  "We balance everything out.  We let a guy live out his fantasies."

Some of the fantasies at the Canal Street Brothel got a little rough.  For those who liked that kind of stuff, there were whips, chains and a lot of leather.  Jeanette says that most of the clients who wanted to be dominated were Republicans.  She cracks a smile, then adds, "They wanted to be spanked and tortured and wear stockings–Republicans have impeccable taste in silk stockings–and these are the people who run our country."

Silk stockings.  Silk stockings.  And…family values.

Meanwhile, Larry Flint says there is more family values righteousness yet to come…

"We’ve got 20-some investigations that all look good," Flynt said during a news conference at his Beverly Hills office.

"We have got some high-ranking Republican and Democratic members of the Senate and the House," he told reporters. "If I get just a couple of those phonies out of there, maybe it will be a step forward."

I’m laughing in your face Kevin McCullough, and all the rest of you pusillanimous sexual perverts over at Town Hall.  Sex is a beautiful, thrilling, wonderful part of being alive and being human, and it isn’t Godlessness that’s writing all these sordid headlines now, and it isn’t moral relativism and wasn’t the dirty hippies and all their free love.  This is what you get when you drag this vital part of the human identity into the gutter like it was dirty laundry, not one of this life’s pure and perfect joys.  When you teach people that sex is a sordid, squalid, dirty thing, don’t be surprised when they act it out in sordid, squalid, dirty ways.

The author Mary Renault once said that politics, like sex, is an expression of the person within.  If you’re mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you’re not the sort of person who will behave like that.  So what have we here?  The party of Greed Is Good, and Sex is 90 Percent Evil, Except When It’s Between A Married Man And Women For Making Babies.  And the brothel owners are saying they like to be dominated and spanked and tortured.  And…wear silk stockings.  And…diapers.  And I’ll not endure lectures on how unnatural my sex life is from the likes of your kind Kevin.

I see Pope Ratzinger is still trying to drag the world back to the middle ages…

Christian denominations outside Roman Catholicism are either defective or are not full churches of Jesus Christ, the Vatican has reaffirmed.

A 16-page document released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Pope Benedict XVI once headed, described Orthodox churches as true churches, but said they are suffering from a "wound" since they do not recognise the primacy of the Pope.

The document, approved by Pope Benedict, went on to say the "wound is still more profound" in Protestant denominations.

Just so all you American fundamentalists who’ve been getting all gushy about yours, and Ratzinger’s, mutual hostility toward gay people know where you fit in.  But hey…look at it this way…you both agree that everyone else but you isn’t a true Christian.  Common Ground.

In the wake of three Surgeon Generals testifying on Capital Hill about Bush administration political interference in medical science, raising once again the issue of how the Bush administration has been relentlessly attacking any science that doesn’t agree with their agenda, Andrew Sullivan thinks Virginia Postrel is making sense…

"Scientists have gotten way too fond of invoking their authority to claim that "science" dictates their preferred policy solutions and claiming that any disagreement constitutes an attack on science. But, even assuming that scientists agree on the facts, science can only tell us something about the state of the world. It cannot tell us what policy is the best to adopt. Scientists’ preferences are not "science." You cannot go from an "is" (science) to an "ought" (policy). Social science, particularly economics, can tell you something about the likely tradeoffs (hence some of my frustrations at Aspen). But it can’t tell you which tradeoffs to make,"
– Virginia Postrel, making sense as usual.

Postrel is referring to an op-ed defending Governor Girly Man’s sacking of Robert Sawyer, chair of California’s chair Air Resources Board.  Schwarzenegger had appointed him in December of 2005, calling him "an exceptionally accomplished scientist, teacher and environmental policy expert who has devoted his career to using science and technology to improve air quality not only in California, but across our country and the world." 

The grim irony in Postrel’s blog post is that what the Schwarzenegger camp would have you believe is that Sawyer was fired for doing exactly what Postrel said needs to be done: weighing the science against the public interest.  Against the wishes of environmentalists, the state air board led by Sawyer voted by a 7-1 margin to let San Joaquin Valley polluters have until 2024 to come into compliance with the Federal Clean Air Act.  The San Joaquin Valley is California’s, and by extension much of this nation’s, food basket.  But it wasn’t this decision, so much as Sawyer’s insistence that the State Air Board remain politically independent, that got Sawyer his pink slip.  That is what Postrel is defending here; not the idea that public policy often has to be a compromise between various necessities, but that science must serve politics.

Postrel’s post is dishonest claptrap of the sort that homophobes use when they bellyache that they’re being called bigots merely for "disagreeing with the gay agenda".  It isn’t disagreement the scientists are calling attacks, it’s when politicians censor them, and then rewrite their science outright to fit a specific political agenda, that’s the attack on science.  It’s one thing for politicians to say that they have to weigh the science against what they see as the public interest, and another for them to force science to tell the public things that are not true.  But this has been Bush administration policy from day one, and republican party policy now for decades.  Intelligent Design anyone?

I keep turning to Jacob Bronowski on this, but he said it absolutely right…

Picture the state of German thought when Wener Heisenberg was criticized by the S.S., and had to ask Himmler to support his scientific standing.   Heisenberg had won the Nobel prize at the age of thirty; his principle of uncertainty is one of the two or three deep concepts which science has found in this century; and he was trying to warn Germans that they must not dismiss such discoveries as Relativity because they disliked the author.  Yet Himmler, who had been a schoolmaster, took months of petty inquiery (someone in his family knew Heisenberg) before he authorized of all people, Heydrich to protect Heisenberg.  His letter to Heydrich is a paper monument to what happens to the creative mind in a society without truth.  For Himmler writes that he has heard that Heisenberg is good enough to be earmarked later for his own Academy for Welteislehre.  This was an Academy which Himmler proposed to devote to the conviction which he either shared with or imposed on his scientific yes-men, that the stars are made of ice.

-Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values.

For years after reading that I wondered why the hell anyone would want to force scientists to say that stars are made of ice.  Then I came across this web site run by a group of people who still believe in the Ptolemaic earth centric model of the universe and then it made sense.  There are still some nutty fundamentalists out there who insist that the earth must be the center of the universe, because they bible says so.  But in that case the stars simply cannot be suns like our own, and light years away from us, because then the outer edges of the universe would be whipping around the earth once each day at speeds even a fundamentalist could not accept.  So the stars must be a lot closer to the earth and the universe must be a lot smaller.  But if the stars are a lot closer to the earth then they can’t be objects like our sun.  So they must be made of ice instead, and are merely reflecting the light from our own sun back at us.

It’s crazy.  But that’s apparently what Himmler believed, because his screwball religion told him it had to be so.  And never mind what the evidence says.  Contrary opinions are not merely wrong, they’re heresy, and even worse, they’re rebellion against authority.  This is why theocrats and totalitarians hate the practice of science.  The only authority science accepts is the evidence.  At the end of the day nature speaks for itself.  This is why science is always going to have a tense relationship with politics.  But it’s not a hopeless one, so long as everyone is willing to tell the truth. 

It’s one thing to say that we have to weigh the costs and benefits, and make hard decisions sometimes that maybe nobody really likes, and another to try to make scientists say things that aren’t so.  No, science can’t tell us what policy is the best to adopt.  But it can sure as hell narrow it down.  You can’t even begin to guess what the best policy is, if you don’t know what the goddamned facts are.

The cartoonist Doug Marlette died today in an automobile accident.  In the spirit of not speaking ill of the dead, I’ll let Doug speak for himself…

Via Ex-Gay Watch…  PFOX is getting a tad pissed off at all those militant ex-ex-gays.  On their MySpace page (!) they’ve posted "A letter from an "Ex-Gay" to "Ex-Ex Gay" Organizations!", which starts off thusly…

While you all claim in websites, protests, in organizations, or coalitions, to want to help people who are “trapped in homosexuality,” you seem to be more concerned with sticking your nose in my business, and telling me the way you think I should live, along with who I am.

Whoops!  Sorry.  What this guy actually wrote was…

While you all claim in websites, protests, in organizations, or coalitions, to want to help people who are “trapped in the ex-gay movement,” you seem to be more concerned with sticking your nose in my business, and telling me the way you think I should live, along with who I am.

Sorry about that.  Really.  Meanwhile (again via Ex-Gay Watch…), PFOX is still battling the Montgomery County Maryland Board Of Education to insure that the only things taught in sex education classes about homosexuals and homosexuality are what the ex-gay movement wants taught.  Not that they want to be telling anyone how they think they should live mind you…

Fred Clark’s Slacktivist blog got an R rating from the same nutty blog rating thing that gave me my NC-17.   Fred is a liberal Baptist and one of the most decent people I’ve ever met.  He regularly tackles spiritual and theological issues on his blog, and he’s been doing a really killer ongoing review of the first book in the Left Behind series.  His blog got the R for excessive use of the words Missionary, Hell, and Death.  Oh…and Dick…but that Fred says, was in a post about the Vice President. 

So the San Diego Padres, in a gesture of good will to the gay community, hosted a pride night at yesterday’s game.  Given that many gay couples go to the games are families with kids, the Padres cheerfully offered to give their kids 14 and younger free Padres floppy hats.  Of course you just know this made the kook pews go nuclear…

What began as a few angry parents in San Diego, has now turned into a major blunder on the part of the political powerbrokers within the Padres administrative offices. However, the Padres are not backing down. They are choosing the side of homosexuality over the protection of kids, as well as the rights of parents to choose when they teach their kids about sexuality. Parents at the July 8th game will be forced to explain homosexuality, lesbianism and transsexuality to their little boys and little girls because of the celebration of gay pride during the Braves-Padres game.

Rally organizer James Hartline hopes that educational flyers being distributed to families coming to the ballpark will discourage parents from bringing their children inside of the stadium where they will be exposed to radical elements of the homosexual movement. Rally sponsor Scott Lively, President of Defend the Family International, hopes that the Christian response to the gay pride celebration at Petco Park will serve as a catalyst for awakening parental responsibility in a very sexualized culture.

…"We will not abandon these kids to the destruction of homosexuality," says Dennis Martinez, a former national skateboard champion. A committed Christian and well-respected minister among America’s troubled youth, Martinez decided that he could not allow his ministry or its employees to compromise their commitment to Christ.

And…fat lot of good it did too…

Boycott of gay pride event at Padres game fizzles

As boycotts go, yesterday’s protest at Petco Park flopped – like the hats.

Objecting to the confluence of two promotions at last night’s Padres game – “Pride Night,” a group event for local gays and lesbians, and a team giveaway of floppy hats to children 14 and younger – several Christian and conservative groups called for a public protest and boycott of the game.

Roughly 75 protesters showed up outside Petco Park’s front gate dressed in red T-shirts emblazoned with the message “Save Our Kids.” They handed out fliers. A few attempted to talk with Padre fans as they arrived for the 5:05 p.m. game that was nationally televised on ESPN.

“We’re here to inform parents, to warn them about what’s happening inside (the ballpark),” said James Hartline, a self-described Christian activist who directed the protest. “Bringing together homosexuals with baseball and kids is beyond bounds. We’re trying to get people to turn around, not go to the game, and we’re succeeding.”

If so, it wasn’t readily apparent. Official attendance for the game was 41,026, just short of a capacity crowd for the 42,685-seat ballpark.

And…oh look James…it wasn’t just the gay fans who were ignoring you… 

“Values start and are taught in the home. Just because you see a bum on the street doesn’t turn you into a bum,” said Robert Davila of El Cajon before walking through the gates with his wife and two young children.

Not that gay people are bums…but you get the idea.  Gay isn’t something you catch like a cold.  But the subtext here, as always, isn’t that simply seeing gay people would turn the kids gay, but that gay people are predators that children should be taught to be afraid of.  The better to make them fear and loath their gay classmates as they get older.  The better to make them fear and loath themselves if they are gay. That’s what the Save Our Children slogan has always been about, ever since Antia Bryant used it back in 1977.

You can see why the bigots were bursting a vein over this.  If gay and straight can sit down together with their families and enjoy a baseball game together, what next?

Via Fark.Com.  As if you needed one more reason to hate the music industry.  They’re going after coffee shops who have live music…

Six months after raising the curtain on their gourmet coffee shop in the beachside Indian Harbour Place shopping center, Laurie and Jim Hall decided to offer live music on Friday and Saturday nights.

The performers, normally duos, mainly covered songs written and made famous by other musicians. There was no cover charge, no pay for the musicians, no limit to how long patrons could sit on a couch with their coffee, playing chess and enjoying the music.

No problem.

Then a few months later, music industry giant ASCAP started calling and sending letters saying East Coast Coffee & Tea was in violation of copyright laws. The fee to continue the music was $400 a year.

"At the time, the shop was losing money, so we had to break it up into payments," said Laurie Hall. But the Halls paid, and the music continued.

Six months later, other music copyright companies began calling the Halls and demanding money. Most days there would be three or four phone calls from each company, Hall said. Finally, unable to afford the fees, she had to call most of her musicians — those who did not play original music — and tell them they would not be allowed to continue performing.

This aggressive — but legal — posture being taken by music licensing companies has the potential to unplug live music in many restaurants, bars and coffee shops in Brevard County.

Doesn’t this sound vaguely familiar?  First they agree to payoff the one guy…and then another guy shows up demanding money…and then another…and then another…

Andrus, the owner of Lou’s Blues, said he has had many run-ins with the copyright companies over the years.

"It started 15 years ago when I had a guy come out to our other place, Cantina dos Amigos, and play Mexican music on his guitar on the patio," Andrus said. "They came after me for money. Are they really sending royalty checks to the songwriter in Mexico?"

Andrus said he pays BMI and ASCAP about $3,000 a year but is ignoring the smaller companies that seek royalties from him.

"There are so many damned companies you don’t know who to pay," he said. "One guy called and said I had to pay him if I played any gospel music at all. It’s really a mess."

…

And in no way do the songs have to be performed live, or even on the radio, to elicit calls for royalties.

Andrus said a friend of his who owned a restaurant that did not feature music was contacted by a company looking to charge him because it owned the rights to a Hank Williams Jr. song, "Are You Ready for Some Football?" The song preceded every "Monday Night Football" telecast, which the restaurant carried on its televisions.

What next?  A shakedown of street performers who play for tips?  If the music companies had their way you wouldn’t be able to whistle a tune in public without paying them royalties.

My friend Jon was explaining to me the other day that he’d had a hard time directing people to A Coming Out Story, in conversations where he couldn’t actually give someone a link, because it was buried a tad deep in the structure of my web site.  He’d tell them to go to my main page at brucegarrett.com, but from there it wasn’t obvious how to get to A Coming Out Story.  he suggested a link right off the main home page, which I did a little while ago (and I added one to the left column here).  But that brought me back to mind about how I’d been wanting to restructure the cartoon page generally. 

I’ve been needing to give some of my other cartoon formats their own pages here for a while now.  I’ve been tossing out these little cartoons onto the blog that never fit on the political cartoon page, or anywhere else.  Some multi-panel stuff with Mark and Josh, and just some random fun stuff like Sergeant Stoneface – Love Detective.  They all needed their own pages. 

So now they have them, and the cartoon page, instead of being only for the political cartoons (which you may have noticed I’m not doing that much of these days…) is now a central jumping off point to get to all the others.  The political cartoon page has it’s own link off the cartoon page now, as does A Coming Out Story and Mark and Josh’s cartoons and a miscellaneous Fun page where all the random fun stuff will go.  All the existing links to individual cartoon pages should still work and not be broken.  But if you come across a broken link please let me know about it and I’ll fix it as soon as I can get to it.

So the morning after our Forth of July party, Jon and I are out getting a bite to eat at Panera Bread, a nearby sandwich shop.   Jon is still playing with his new iPhone, and he wants to see how well it works with the free wireless hotspot at Panera Bread.

We sit down to a light breakfast (really light for me because I’m still feeling a tad hungover from the previous night…), and Jon calls up a few items on the Safari browser built into the iPhone.  Then for kicks and grins he tries to call up my web site.  But the wireless at Panera Bread blocks it, with a message that my site is being blocked because its content is pornographic.

WTF???  The most risqué this site gets is on the cartoon prologue to my cartoon series A Coming Out Story, where I talk about the time my straight high school pals dragged me to see my first X-rated movie.  I’d give the content of that one an R rating at best.  I just don’t do X.  X is obvious.  I don’t do obvious, I don’t feel comfortable treating sex that way.  It isn’t me.  (There’s a reason why the character of my Libido in A Coming Out Story is always wearing a fig leaf…)  I figure some blue nosed jackass took a look at my site and saw that it was full of unashamedly gay content and complained to the filtering software company.

The blocking message provides a link to where you can complain if you think you’re being blocked unfairly, and I give it some thought.  I’m not entirely happy about being accused of being a pornographer.  But on the other hand, I’m certain this isn’t about any suggestive content in my cartoons, so much as the political content of the blog, and perhaps the political cartoons.  I’m gay, and I’m fine with that, and as far as some people are concerned, that makes me X-rated.  Which makes this blocking notice I’m looking at a political statement.

Jon helpfully tells me that there are rating services I can subscribe to which will rate my website and help keep it unblocked, and I instantly have images of something like the old Comics Code Authority plastered on the top of my cartoons and I hate it.  No.  No.  That is not going to happen.  The only rating my cartoons, or anything else on my web site that I publish will ever have stamped on them, is the only one that matters:  My name.

I may still request a little clarification from the filtering company that Panera Bread is using.  In the meantime, if you have trouble accessing my website from some public place send me an email and I’ll tell you a few ways to get past it.  Jon and I eventually brought my website up at Panera Bread’s anyway.  And in the context of Kultar Kampf, being censored is more like a badge of honor then a stain on your reputation.

Yesterday, on the way to our weekly happy hour gathering, I tell Joe about having my web site censored for pornographic content.  He congratulates me.

"The Internet treats censorship as damage, and it routes around it."
-John Gilmore

[Edited a Tad…]  In the comments Jon tells me it was Panera Bread not Cosi as I’d originally said…

[Geek Alert…]

I bought my iPhone yesterday morning, after hemming and hawing over it for…oh…about 38 hours.  38 hours being the timespan between the moment one of my friends showed me his iPhone, and getting my hands on one of my own.  For some time now I’ve been waiting for that all-purpose cell phone/music/email/entertainment widget to appear on the market and I figured the iPhone would be it.  But I wanted to wait a generation to let them work out the bugs.  Then I had a chance to get my hands on one and I realized then that I’d been thinking about this sort of device all wrong.

Last Wednesday I’d been invited over to a friend’s condo in Washington D.C. for the annual fireworks show.  From John’s condo you can see the Mall fireworks nicely.  I stopped by my friend Jon Larimore’s place beforehand, where he and his boyfriend Joe were waiting to spring the trap on me.  "Look at what Joe bought me," says Jon happily as I walk in the door.  He’s holding out his iPhone.  Joe had walked into an Apple store the day before and bought two, one for himself and one for his other half.  A few hours later we drove over to John’s condo for the fireworks.  Our usual Friday happy hour gang showed up along with some of his other friends.  The crowd was mostly gay computer geeks, a subset of gay you won’t generally find in the movies they show on Logo.  Everyone swarmed around John and Joe’s iPhones like bees to honey.  I couldn’t blame them.  The moment I got my hands on one, my fingers just didn’t want to let go.

They are sweet little gizmos.  The touch screen user interface is the candy that attracts the eye, but what attracts the imagination is how it brings together several different threads of information technology into one device, and right away you can see ways in which they relate that you didn’t before.  The one thing a little gizmo can do to win my heart is show me something I wasn’t expecting from the technology, but which in retrospect I should have seen coming.  In the case of the iPhone, believe it or not, what it was, was the integration of the wireless networks, the address book, and Google Maps.  Suddenly I had a map of the whole goddamned world in the palm of my hand and it could tell me exactly where everything in my address book was located, from where I was standing right then, right that moment, if I wanted it to.

The iPhone doesn’t have a GPS unit built-in yet, but I can see that coming down the road.  Still, if I need to see where I am on a map in most urban zones I can just walk up to the nearest door, read the street address off it and plug that into the iPhone and get my location on a map back.  Then if I want to know where a certain place is from where I am I can plug that address in, perhaps from my address book, and I get back a map with path lines and a set of directions.  Or if I just want to see what’s in my general vicinity I can scroll around the map with the touch of a finger or two.  If I’m planning on driving somewhere, a few touches here and there and I can get a traffic map of the area.  Two fingers can zoom out or zoom in on just about any iPhone display with simple, obvious, pinching or expanding motions.  The user interface is sweet.  The screen is made of glass, not plastic, and the entire unit feels solid to the touch. 

James Burke once said that data isn’t important.  What’s important are the connections between the data.  My old Kyocera Smart Phone linked my Palm address book and the cell phone in a way I thought was useful.  So when I decided to get the iPhone I migrated my Palm data into the address book and calendar applications on Akela, my Mac Powerbook.  Then I bought a .Mac account so the address book  and calendars on both my Macs could sync up with each other, and then the iPhone, even when I’m away from home.  (The only major gripe I have so far with the iPhone is that the note taking applet doesn’t let you sync your notes too.  I really need that.  But I can wait for it.)   So now I had the links between my address book and the iPhone established.  To that I added links to my two household Macs, and the web too, since a .Mac account allows me to view my personal data from anywhere, and share selected bits of it with others.  Then yesterday while I was at Jon’s house, Jon showed me how you can tap on an address and the iPhone will bring it up on Google Maps.  Seeing how that worked I realized that there wasn’t any reason now, why all my personal data can’t be linked in some way to the general storehouse of information on the net, and that those links could tell me things about my personal world that I hadn’t seen before.  

We had our usual happy hour last night, and I and another friend, Tom, brought our brand new iPhones along.  You have to picture this little clutch of gay geeks walking into a gay bar brandishing iPhones as we chat with each other.  Later that evening several of us were driving together out of D.C., chatting about this and that.  The conversation strayed to books we all wished we’d had the time to read and Tom, asked me if I’d ever read a certain mystery writer.  I said I hadn’t and tried to tell him about another one whose books I’ve just loved over the years and I had a brain block and for the life of me I could not recall that writers name at just that moment.  So while we’re all riding down the highway I start tapping away on my iPhone.  I bring up Google and do a quick search on the names of two of this writer’s characters I remember, and I instantly get a page of search results back that tell me the name of the writer.  That took me maybe thirty seconds.  Then a few more miles down the road the conversation stayed into singers and sentimental songs and Vera Lynn and how you never hear those deeply felt sentimental ballads on the radio anymore.  I mentioned a favorite of mine from my teen years that I hadn’t realized until recently was about the Vietnam war and Jon asked me who had composed it and once again I got a brain block and just couldn’t remember the name of the composer.  A few taps on the iPhone later and I had it.

There’s a story I’ve heard the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke tell.  He was trying to make a point about space exploration, but I think it makes the same point about any emerging technologies.  Suppose, he asks, you could go back about 500 million years and ask a reasonably intelligent fish why fish should bother trying to colonize the land masses.  Fish breath and live in water.  Air is a dangerous place for fish to be.  Colonizing the land would be costly and difficult.  But this particular fish, being a reasonably intelligent and progressive member of his species, might be able to give you many, logical, sound, progressive reasons why, despite all the hazards and cost and difficulties, fish should try to colonize the land.  It might tell you that in learning to colonize the land, fishkind would learn more about how to take care of the seas.  It might tell you that all sorts of new technologies would be invented along the way that would benefit the lives of fish.  It would never have thought of fire.

So…last night I rode down the highway with some friends, looked at the iPhone in the palm of my hand, and I beheld fire.  There are other devices recently that have tried to put all these technologies together into one hand held device, but they’ve been really awkward to use, or at least I’ve found them so and I’m someone who never had trouble programming a VCR.  In the iPhone Apple has brought everything together into a seamless whole and now suddenly you can see a horizon before you that you never expected:  what life is like when the answer to anything you want to know is literally in your pocket.  As time goes on other companies will probably take the hint and start designing these devices to be more then simply cell phones with some extra widgets tacked on.  The phone part of the iPhone may end up being the part of it I use the least. 

[Edited a tad…] 

Theory and experiment alike become meaningless unless the scientist brings to them, and his fellows can assume in him, the respect of a lucid honesty with himself. The mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford said this forcibly at the end of his short life, nearly a hundred years ago.

If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done by the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may even prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should loose it’s property, but that it should become a den of thieves; for then it must cease to be a society. This is why we ought not to do evil that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby.

This is the scientist’s moral: that there is no distinction between ends and means. Clifford goes on to put this in terms of the scientist’s practice:

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous.

And the passion in Clifford’s tone shows that to him the word credulous had the same emotional force as ‘a den of thieves’

The fulcrum of Clifford’s ethic here, and mine, is the phrase ‘it may be true after all.’ Others may allow this to justify their conduct; the practice of science wholly rejects it. It does not admit the word ‘true’ can have this meaning. The test of truth is the known factual evidence, and no glib expediency nor reason of state can justify the smallest self-deception in that. Our work is of a piece, in the large and in the detail; so that if we silence one scruple about our means, we infect ourselves and our ends together.

-Jacob Bronowski “Science and Human Values” 1956

Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin and Mike Airhart over at Ex-Gay Watch react positively to a blog post by Exodus affiliated minister   Karen Keen, about her experience attending some of the events at the Ex-Gay Survivor’s Conference.   Jim calls it “…a very lovely and grace-filled post.”   Mike says of it that it is an “…accurate, balanced and thoughtful account.”   Allow me to be the grouch here.   Accurate it may well have been.   Balanced, perhaps.   Graceful…well it depends.   It was certainly polite.   But I wouldn’t go so far even as to say it was respectful.   What it was, was patronizing.   There is a spiritual sense of the word ‘grace’ that speaks to unconditional loving and caring and unless you think that looking for better ways to put innocent people through unmitigated hell out of a thoughtless devotion to dogma amounts to grace I’d have to say grace filled, along with thoughtful it was not.   When people say things like this you need to take it seriously for what it is…

As we munch on bok choy and shrimp, Scott, Sonia and I listen to stories and concerns regarding ex-gay ministry. Our goal is not to criticize or argue, but to take the concerns seriously and learn how ex-gay groups can improve their ministries.

Emphasis mine.   She was there to observe the broken ones, and try to figure out some better ways of fixing them.   To take the concerns of the people she sat down to dinner with seriously is a mutually exclusive proposition to learning how ex-gay groups can improve their ministries, because if going into it the assumption was that the people she was sitting down to eat with were broken and needed fixing, then the degree to which their concerns needed to be listened to was limited from the get-go.   Clearly, the only thought she was willing to entertain throughout the course of her interaction with the people at the Survivor’s Conference was how to fix the fixing process.   But that the fixing process could not not itself be fixed because it was based on a flawed and disastrous premise was never, Could Never be considered…er…Seriously.   Which meant that she wasn’t so much listening to her dinner companions, as filtering what they were saying to her through the main preconception she brought to that dinner with her.   This isn’t somebody who came to listen.   But then she couldn’t.

When she says that the raw expressions she witnessed during the survivor’s chalk talk moved her more then she expected, I’m sure that was genuine.   But that’s not to say it moved her very much, because what it should have made her was ashamed.   Deeply, gravely, severely ashamed.   There, right before her eyes, were the raw, anguished torn from the gut expressions of the suffering those people needlessly endured at the hands of the likes of her, simply for being homosexual.   And even that was not enough to make her question change.   But it couldn’t have.   In the end, she writes…

I realize I was drawn to the Survivor Conference because I love these people. In some impossible way, I long for camaraderie and unity with ex-ex-gays with whom I have shared so many of the same life struggles and pain. Yet, at the end of the day our roads lead us apart, and I wish it wasn’t so. I leave the Survivor Conference knowing it will be my last ex-ex-gay conference. I feel an ache in my heart—the kind of sadness that comes when breaking up with a lover. Even when irreconcilable differences are clear, and parting is the most honest thing to do, the loss is still felt. I want to take my friend by the hand and walk her down the same life path I am traveling, but I know I can’t.

And in the comments at Ex-Gay Watch she elaborates…

Another clarification–when I talk about how the two groups (ex gay and ex-ex gay) are on separate roads that lead apart, I did not mean to infer that I will not engage in dialogue anymore. I am always open to hearing people’s thoughts and stories. I comment on this a bit in response to someone’s comment on my blog. What I was describing is that the two movements have different goals that cannot be reconciled. I am all for church unity, but there are some things that cannot be unified without comprising our own personal integrity.

Integrity.     I happen to believe that the so called “clobber passages” of the bible don’t actually say what a lot of homophobes think they say.   But let’s assume for the sake of argument that they do.   So what.   In addition to calling on the faithful to put homosexuals to death, the bible also insists that the faithful not suffer witches to live.   Innocent people died once upon a time in Salem Massachusetts because of those passages, and you best believe that the people who put them to death did so in good conscience, and prayed afterwards for God to have mercy on the immortal souls of those poor devil possessed witches.   But it is not integrity to put theology above the observable and knowable humanity of the old woman whose head your are putting into a noose.   The word for that is fanaticism.

It is not at the end of the day that Karen Keen’s road diverged from that of the survivors.   It was at the beginning, at that point along the way where we all decide whether we will walk down the path before us with our eyes wide open or not.   That the survivors eventually came to the conclusion that their treatment at the hands of the ex-gay ministries was not only not working, but could not be made to work, and then that it was unnecessary to begin with, doesn’t mean that they had fallen back into “the lifestyle” but that at least after some horrific measure of pain and suffering they were willing, finally, to let the evidence speak for itself.   When you embrace a religious faith that insists its written dogmas have to count for more then the observable facts, more even, then your own first hand experience, more then the witnessing of pain and suffering, your personal integrity is the first thing you give up.

As Jacob Bronowski wrote in Science and Human Values…

The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece.   When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.

Likewise, when we discard the test of fact in what a homosexual is, we also discard in it the human being that they, and you, are.   Integrity.