The walk home…
through the park, then up the hill
90 degrees…hot…
My daypack full of stuff
heavy
Noticing that my usual fast pace is making me tired
again.
Tired
Pausing for a while
to steady myself
I never had to before.
Blue Mountains high and valley low,
I don’t know which way I should go,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.
Warm summer breeze blows endlessly,
Touching the hearts of those who feel,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.
Bird on wing goes floating by,
But there’s a teardrop in his eye,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.
"Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that ‘some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they’ve heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.’ The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a ‘fact rich’ program to try to convince them to…
"Fact rich"? "Fact rich"? "Fact rich"? Well that certainly helps me make up My mind about running Vista. Hell will not only have to freeze over, it’ll have to turn into ice cream too.
I finished episode nine of A Coming Out Story last weekend, and I have a road trip coming up in another couple of weekends. I’ll be on the road for most of the month of July, first going to visit some friends in the mid-west, then out to the Four Corners area to explore a tad more, then to California and a visit with my brother, then to Portland Oregon and the O’Reilly Open Source Developer’s Conference. Given my past performance getting out new episodes it seemed a sure bet that I wouldn’t have anything more up until August at the earliest. But I have a head of steam up now, and I really really want to get episode ten up before I leave for the west. It’s one of several upcoming ones I’ve been chafing at the bit to do since I started scripting this series in 2005.
So I’ve been trying hard to push everything else in my life aside for a couple hours every night after work. Naturally several things suddenly popped up that needed my immediate attention and I thought I was once again letting precious drawing time pass on by. But somehow I’ve managed to finish half the pencils on episode ten already. I’m shooting to have all the pencils done by the end of this coming weekend. Then I can have the episode up for sure by the following weekend. Or even sooner.
I’ll probably take my portable drawing board (it has a parallel attached to it), my small scanner, the Wacom tablet and drawing supplies along with me on the trip. I might be able to get another episode out while I’m on the road. It really bothers me that I’ve been working on this thing since 2005 and it’s 2007 I only have nine episodes up.
(Albany, New York) The Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation Tuesday night, but the state’s highest ranking Republican vowed not to allow it to come to a vote in the Senate.
And what’s hilarious about all this is that a lot of these so-called gay conservatives think all the sexual hedonism of the liberal "gay lifestyle" is wicked and we should all be about settling down and getting married and moving to the suburbs and getting rich. The way they tell it, it’s the socialist-communist urban liberal left that’s anti same-sex marriage. So you’d think it would be democrats who are adamantly against it. But no…
Just remember folks, while you’re busy kissing up to the republican establishment, that Truman Capote once said a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.
Republicans have long tried to exploit masculinity images and depict Democrats and liberals as effeminate and therefore weak. That is not new. But what is new is how explicit and upfront and unabashed this all is now. And what is most striking about it is that — literally in almost every case — the most vocal crusaders for Hard-Core Traditional Masculinity, the Virtues of Machismo, are the ones who so plainly lack those qualities on every level.
There are few things more disorienting than listening to Rush Limbaugh declare himself the icon of machismo and masculinity and mock others as "wimps." And if you look at those who have this obsession — the Chris Matthews and Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldbergs and Victor Davis Hansons — what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one’s "traditional masculine virtues" — the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions — themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."
Not that I’m saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one’s duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one’s pain threshold.
The post Yglesias links to also has this little gem…
Is Instapundit A Homo? Well, I think I met him three times or something, and he never tried to pork me. Given the fact I’m 180 pounds of rompin’-stompin’ Clydesdale-clompin’ 180 proof sex, I’d say he successfully passed that test.
Or maybe Reynolds isn’t into drunken horse asses. Three times or something. Good thing he didn’t have to use two hands to count them on or he’d probably still be trying to write that post. There’s an old joke about how God gave men brains and dicks and not enough blood to operate them both at the same time. Somehow I don’t think this guy has that problem.
Have you ever wondered how men who feel such a profound contempt for anyone who would allow themselves to be fucked, treat their women during sex? The Ex-Gay barkers generally link male homosexuality to a broken sense of one’s own masculinity. But isn’t it staringly obvious that a broken sense of masculinity is what’s behind male homophobia, and misogyny?
Oh…and this…
Pam at Pam’s House Blend riffs on a column in the right wing World Net Daily from Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, who according to his Wikipedia entry is the founder of a group called The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, a group which is dedicated to promoting responsible fatherhood amongst African Americans. His column is a pathetic diatribe against the opposite sex…
Many women I counsel with and have interviewed on my radio and TV shows are quick to point out everything their man is doing wrong, but it’s rare to find one who will honestly admit that she’s screwed up the kids or that she’s driving her mate crazy.
It’s time that we look at the role women play in driving men out of the home and separating them from their children. That’s not to say that men don’t bear the brunt of the responsibility for their weakness. Men need to learn how to deal with women with strength and patience – this is love.
…
Most women themselves don’t understand why they provoke and agitate their spouse to lash out or run away. They don’t understand the subtle control they have over weak men.
Men typically marry for love and to raise children. The mistake they make is that they’re looking for love from the wrong source. Men shouldn’t look for love from women. Rather they should find God’s love and pass that love down to the wife and children.
WTF?? As a gay man, this contempt for the opposite sex you regularly see from the ersatz "manly man" crowd is really striking. The shibboleth is that they’re thumping their manly chests to prove they’re not homosexuals. I think they’re thumping their chests because it’s the only way they know how to prove they’re somebody. Because they’ve lost the person within. There is no there inside them anymore. That’s probably why they don’t know how to love anyone outside of themselves. Sex is a reflex, and they still understand it when it tugs at them. But love is utterly beyond this kind of guy. You need a heart for that, and all he’s got is his…masculinity.
There’s an order to life: God in Christ, Christ in man, man over woman, and woman over children. When this order is broken or violated you have "hell" on earth.
…
There’s been a deliberate plan to wipe out masculinity in society. When you wipe out the man you wipe out God, because the man represents God on earth. Then there’s no truth – no light – and no hope for the family.
The man represents God on earth… Well there’s a little Christian modesty for you. None of this meek shall inherit the earth claptrap for this guy. No, no. All you need to do to be the very embodiment of God on earth in his good book, is to be born with that there ‘Y’ chromosome and you’re set. And…to attack masculinity is to attack on God.
And I could almost buy that, in the sense that to demean and degrade anything that is a part of this wonderful universe is an attack on its creator, on existence. To attack femininity is to attack God. To attack sexuality is to attack God. To attack any part of our shared humanity is an attack on God. But I don’t think that’s what this creep has in mind. He thinks his ‘Y’ makes him something. But all it makes him is male. Now to this gay boy, and I’m sure most heterosexual women will agree, that is no trivial thing. But you need to be more then simply male to be attractive. You need to be decent. And the ‘Y’ won’t make you that. You have to make yourself that. That’s the part people like Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson miss.
I would ask the Reverend what the difference is, between holding yourself above women simply because you’re a man, and holding yourself above others simply because of the color of your skin. You can make a case for the proposition that the genders view the world around them in their own way, but that’s not to say that one gender is better then another, let alone that being male makes you God on earth. This is the cop out people take, when the struggle for character becomes too much. Instead of reaching beyond themselves, for that better person they could become, they buy the cheap seat to self esteem. Why bother making yourself a better person, when you’re already the embodiment of God on earth?
And the problem with that is that it leaves an empty spot, a barren patch deep down inside, where a conscience is supposed to develop. The Reverend may think he’s preaching a message of strength to his male flock, but he’s just making them weak. "…what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one’s "traditional masculine virtues" — the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions — themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."
As Frank Lloyd Wright said, "No stream rises higher then its source" The cult of masculinity, is more of a dildo. A grandiose substitute for something that’s all well and good just for what it is, but that shouldn’t be made into any more then what it is. A masculinity that feels itself threatened by gay men, let alone the opposite sex, is one that’s probably broken to start with. Your own maleness is a good thing to understand if you’re a guy. But it isn’t what matters. It’s what you make of yourself that matters. The higher ground, the exalted status, is possible to all of us, regardless of our gender, or our sexuality. But so is this:
You need a really good set of brakes to avoid finding yourself in this place. The ancient passions of our tribal past, of the long march of life on earth from the sea to our human existence, can sweep us off our feet in an instant, and deliver us into unmitigated evil before we even know where we’re going. The flesh of our existence is an amazing, wonderful, glorious thing. But to see your personal salvation in it is to walk away from everything fine and noble a human being can be, and bellyflop into the jungle of our past. Real men, like real women, have brains, and hearts, and a conscience that knows where the lines are you cannot cross, without renouncing your humanity.
My little iPod died yesterday. Suddenly. Very suddenly. Just so all you other iPod kids know, they can go without warning.
I’d just got home from work. My place of work is within walking distance of my home and unless the weather is looking really ugly I’ll almost always walk it, with iPod on my hip. Actually, that iPod has become almost a constant companion now on my walks. Also, when I’m busy puttering around the house doing chores. So when I get home I check the iPod’s battery meter and it’s looking about half way drained and so I decide to pop it onto its charging stand so it’ll be fully charged for my evening walk. The moment I sat it down on its charging pad the screen went blank and nothing, Nothing I could do, no pressing or prodding or stroking of any of its controls, could bring it back.
I’m more addicted to that thing then I ever was to my first Sony Walkman. The first generation Walkmans used cassette tapes and were a blessing for those of us who liked to take long walks or hikes in the countryside, and always wanted our favorite music as a companion. Before the Walkmans the best you could do was a small transistor radio and a single earplug with the high fidelity of a tin can. Your only choices were whatever the radio stations you could pick up were playing at that moment, along with all the ads. With the Walkmans you had great sound quality, no static, and you could play whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, wherever you wanted. But you were limited to what a single cassette could hold. That often meant stuffing your pockets with cassettes, and still not having just the right music you wanted to listen to if you changed your mind in the middle of a walk.
When the first CD Walkmans came out they were an improvement, in that you had even better sound quality and the CDs held more music at a time. But CDs didn’t really fit into a pocket very well, and the first clip-on-your-belt CD players often skipped when jarred, like when you were darting across a road or going up and down stairs.
The iPod is one of those little gizmos that shows how a lot of incremental improvements on a theme can suddenly add up to a revolution given just one more logical step. Capacity. I’d never pictured how things might be when I could take damn my whole music library with me everywhere. Well I can now. Almost. I don’t think even 80 gigs is enough to hold all of mine, and half my library is on LPs so converting that is still going to be a bit of work. But now I can go for a walk, or for a road trip, or on a business trip, and I don’t have to think about what music I should take along. I just take the iPod with me and I have it all. It also means I can back it all up so I need never loose any music I’ve bought due to breakage or theft. No more heartbreak over a broken or lost record. I can take all my music with me to work. I can take it with me grocery shopping. I can take it with me anywhere. Of course, I still need somewhere to plug in and recharge the little dickens.
I use my iPod now more then I use my big vacuum tube/solid state stereo system, and that thing used to be on constantly when I was home. But now when I’m busy with household chores I’ll almost always have the iPod clipped to my belt. I never did get around to wiring up the whole house for sound, and now I don’t need to. I can wash dishes, do a laundry, iron my shirts, work in the back yard, paint my porch railings, refill the bird feeders, cook dinner, with the iPod clipped to my belt, feeding my ears any music from my library I want to hear.
So when I saw that screen go utterly blank my heart sank. Nooooo…! I can wait for a repairman to come fix my washing machine, but I need my iPod, Now. Luckily there is an Apple Store not far away from my house. But all they could do was confirm that the thing was dead, and to fix it would take weeks possibly, and cost a tad more then half of what a new one would cost anyway. Since the fix was just to replace the old iPod with a reconditioned one, I was a bit nonplussed that it would take over a week. Erm…why don’t I just hand you my old one and a hundred and fifty bucks and you just hand me a reconditioned one…?
So I have a new iPod now. It’s the fifth generation video player one (I really don’t see the use of playing video on an iPod, but maybe that’s because I’m not really watching much TV anymore as it is…). For the same price as the old one cost me two years ago, the new one holds about 10 gig more, and has a bit more battery life between charges. And it’s thinner and lighter, so it was a bit too loose in the old one’s hip case. The new Incase case I bought is a bright electric blue (I’m thinking now I should have bought the pink one…) and protects the iPod inside a bit better then the old ones. I asked the lady at the Apple support counter to look at the charger for the old one, to make sure it wasn’t the culprit. She said it was okay, which was a good thing because as it turns out they don’t supply separate chargers with the new iPods. You’re expected to charge from the computer’s USB port, but I turn Bagheera, the art room Mac which also holds my iTunes library, off when I’m not using it. So I need the charger.
It’s a bit frustrating that the only fix for these little gizmos is to just completely replace them. You can’t just open the back, diagnose which part failed and replace it and close it all back up again and hand it back to the customer. It’s all one little board inside those things, and even the damn battery in an iPod is hard wired into place. Apple will give you a small discount on a new one if you let them recycle the old one, which eased my mind a bit from an environmental standpoint. But I still didn’t like it. At least it’s not all just going into a landfill, but two years isn’t all that great of a lifespan. My iPod was a forth generation, and I was hoping to at least leap frog over a generation before I bought another one.
Massachusetts lawmakers on Thursday took less than a half hour to kill bid to amend constitution to ban gay marriage.
Because the marriage amendment was citizen-based it required only 50 votes. The final vote was 151 – 45. That means the issue cannot be put to voters in 2008, and will force supporters of the measure to begin collecting signatures all over again.
If proponents of the amendment do gain the signatures needed the measure would again have to go to two consecutive sessions of the legislature.
The earliest it could be put to voters would be 2012. With public opinion polls showing Massachusetts voters becoming increasingly comfortable with same-sex marriage it is considered unlikely any amendment would be approved.
Going into today’s joint session of the legislature it was anyone’s guess how the vote would go…
I was so deathly worried about this. They only needed 50 votes to get it out there. And I could easily see it passing with a simple majority vote, even if a majority of voters weren’t in favor of turning back the clock. The haters are enthusiastic in their hate. Support for our rights is often in word only. It could have happened. Massachusetts could have cut off our ring fingers, even if a majority of its people weren’t really all that interested in cutting off our ring fingers. All they needed was fifty votes out of two-hundred. But in the end, they could not manage even that.
It was because they’d had a chance to see people, to see loving, devoted couples, apart from the scarecrows that the haters have been waving at them for decades now, that this happened. Because of that, I think many of them simply could not in good conscience remove the rings from our fingers after all, despite what the haters were screaming at them. Thank the courts for that. Somewhere, whether it was in Massachusetts or another state, same sex marriage had to be ushered in by the courts. Because until people could see for themselves the substance of our lives and our hearts, and our devotion to our mates, all they would know about us, was what the haters keep on screaming at them. The wall of prejudice had to be broken by the courts somewhere, because the statehouses simply do not stray very far from the prejudices of their voters.
But now that it’s been broken, and especially now that same sex marriage has been defended by such a significant majority in one American statehouse, I would expect to see other statehouses follow. Perhaps not this year or the next. But soon. We are finally on the threshold of our dream of equality. In one birthplace of the American revolution, the revolution still lives after all.
I feel so good right now. Better then I thought I’d ever feel about my country again after six years of George Bush. Man…I am gonna have me some fireworks for This 4th…
There’s a kind of primitive variable that probably everyone who writes computer code knows and understands these days…the Boolean. Unlike other variables which can hold a range of values, be they numbers, or strings of ascii characters, the Boolean is a relentlessly either-or variable. And for that reason, it maps pretty well to the fundamental logic by which all digital computers operate, and to their smallest unit of data, the bit. But humans have been considering their world in Boolean logic ever since our minds first emerged from out of the biological background noise.
Yes-No. True-False. Right-Wrong. Good-Bad. Even as we admit to ourselves that there are often only shades of gray, we persist in reducing our experiences to these terms. It’s as basic an evaluation as can be. The second postulate of Aristotelian logic is that of ‘either-or’. A thing cannot both be, and at the same time not be. Either yes, or no. Either true, or false. Either right, or wrong. Either it is, or it is not. It must be one or the other.
Well…tell it to Schrodinger’s cat. It’s probably no coincidence that our machines are made in our image, that they resemble the way our minds like to think. The canvas always speaks of the artist. But as it turns out, that’s not actually the way our brains operate. It may not even be the way nature, at its most elemental level, works. There’s this intriguing tri-position logic in the natural world that I keep seeing raise its hand and wave at us from time to time. But it seems to go unexamined most of the time, and I think that’s because like the extra space-time dimensions physicists keep telling us are there, it’s hard for our minds to wrap themselves around it. And that’s really interesting, because one place you really see this tri-position logic is in how our brains actually physically work.
Consider the humble synapse. It is the gap between brain cells, across which two different kinds of chemical "messages" can cross. One kind of chemical causes the cell on the other side of the gap to fire. The other chemical inhibits the cell on the other side of the gap from firing. So far, so good. We’re still comfortably in the basic Boolean logic of things. Fire-Don’t fire. Yes-No. Off-On. Either-Or. But there’s a third thing that synapse can do: Nothing.
So synapse logic has three states, not two. Fire, don’t fire, and…what? Here’s where it gets interesting for me. What is the word here. We don’t really have one. And that I think, is because the concept is difficult for us. The state itself seems foreign enough to the way our minds naturally work, that as far as I know, humans don’t really have a good enough word for that third position. Neutral doesn’t quite do it. It isn’t that it isn’t engaged, like a gear shift you put into neutral, say. It’s connected, to the rest of the brain. ‘Off’ isn’t quite it either. Each half of the synaptic gap has a current state that influences the state of the cells on either side of the synaptic gap depending on the direction of the message, or the absence of one. So there are really three states possible here: Fire, don’t fire, and a third, that is neither fire or don’t fire. Depending on the state of the synapses it’s connected to, a brain cell may or may not fire. So the cell itself may have just two states. But the synapses have three.
Our minds just don’t seem to grasp that third logical state very well, and we fumble to describe it. It’s a between state. No…it’s a middle state. Wait…a transitional state… Uhm… No…it’s…it’s… (shrug) I dunno…
Maybe ‘zero’ is the right way to think about it. But I can only say that because I write software code and I understand how zero is actually something distinct from a positive value, is distinct from a negative value. But that seems to be a non-intuitive concept for us humans. Consider that the Arabic invention of the zero as a form of notation actually came well after a lot of other very basic mathematical concepts. Well of course everyone knew that you can have a zero quantity. But expressing it abstractly seemed to be a difficulty. And in many programming languages, 0 evaluates to false anyway, and any other value is true (except in Basic, where –1 is (was) true, which I think is right from a bitwise NOT sense…but don’t get me started…). And…this third position isn’t really a ‘nothing’. It’s more of a ‘neither’.
Another place you see this tri-position logic is natural selection. In the grand scheme of things, the winners are those organisms that are best adapted to their environment. Variation then, that gives an organism an advantage tends to be passed on, and variation that puts an organism at a disadvantage tends not to be passed on. Over time the advantages accumulate, and the disadvantages get culled out. Either-Or. But there is a third thing that can happen. Nothing. A variation can simply be neither an advantage nor a disadvantage. Those variations it seems, get placed in the genetic portfolio right along with the advantages too…
The most detailed probe yet into the workings of the human genome has led scientists to conclude that a cornerstone concept about the chemical code for life is badly flawed.
The ground-breaking study, published in more than two dozen papers in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, takes a small percentage of the genome to pieces to draw up a "parts list," identifying the biological role of every component.
For the international team of investigators, the four-year project was the computer-equivalent of passing a fine-toothed comb through a mountain of raw data.
Reporting in the British journal Nature and the US journal Genome Research on Thursday, they suggest that an established theory about the genome should be consigned to history.
Under this view, the genome is rather like a ribbon studded with some 22,000 "nuggets" in the form of genes, which make proteins, the essential stuff of life.
Genes — deemed so valuable that some discoverers of them have been prompted to file patents over them for commercial gain — amount to only around a twentieth, or even less, of the genetic code.
In between the genes and the sequences known to regulate their activity are long, tedious stretches that appear to do nothing. The term for them is "junk" DNA, reflecting the presumption that they are merely driftwood from our evolutionary past and have no biological function.
But the work by the ENCODE (ENCyclopaedia of DNA Elements) consortium implies that this nuggets-and-dross concept of DNA should be, well, junked.
The genome turns out to a highly complex, interwoven machine with very few inactive stretches, the researchers report.
Genes, it transpires, are just one of many types of DNA sequences that have a functional role.
And "junk" DNA turns out to have an essential role in regulating the protein-making business.
Previously written off as silent, it emerges as a singer with its own discreet voice, part of a vast, interacting molecular choir.
"The majority of the genome is copied, or transcribed, into RNA, which is the active molecule in our cells, relaying information from the archival DNA to the cellular machinery," said Tim Hubbard of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a British research group that was part of the team.
"This is a remarkable finding, since most prior research suggested only a fraction of the genome was transcribed."
Francis Collins, director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which coralled 35 scientific groups from around the world into the ENCODE project, said the scientific community "will need to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do."
"This could have significant implications for efforts to identify the DNA sequences involved in many human diseases," he said.
Another rethink is in offing about how the genome has evolved, said Collins.
Until now, researchers had thought that the pressure to survive would relentlessly sculpt the human genome, leaving it with a slim, efficient core of genes that are essential for biological function.
But the ENCODE consortium were surprised to find that the genome appears to be stuffed with functional elements that offer no identifiable benefits in terms of survival or reproduction.
The researchers speculate that there is a point behind this survival of the evolutionary cull. Humans could share with other animals a large pool of functional elements — a "warehouse" stuffed with a variety of tools on which each species can draw, enabling it to adapt according to its environmental niche.
IMO, there’s that third logical position at work again. The variation is neither good, nor bad, it’s just there. At some future point, say a rapid change in the organism’s environment, and that gene might be a handy thing to have all of a sudden. Or, conversely, it might turn into a complete disaster for the organism. But for the moment, it’s just there, evaluated to position three. Zero, let’s say. Neither positive nor negative. It has the potential to be either one, given a chance to express itself.
From somewhere deep in the physical fabric of the universe, Schrodinger’s cat licks its chops and smiles. Or doesn’t. Or both. Just don’t open the box.
The science fiction writer Larry Niven once averred that giving gay people what we want would be the quickest way of breeding us out of the population. But then, he didn’t get the fact that his Ringworld needed attitude jets until some real engineers pointed that fact out to him. I happen to think that having a gay minority does in fact provide a survival advantage to the human line. But as it turns out, homosexuality can fit comfortably into our gene pool just fine, along with a bazillion other random variations on a theme that simply are, and do no harm.
I don’t need to pass on my gay genes. My heterosexual brethren probably have them too…they just aren’t expressing them. For some reason, I expressed mine. But I’m fine with that, and so is nature. I happen to think it’s a plus. But the point is that a variation only gets culled out if it’s a minus. A really big minus. And this one isn’t.
LOS ANGELES — Don Herbert, who as television’s "Mr. Wizard" introduced generations of young viewers to the joys of science, died Tuesday. He was 89. Herbert, who had bone cancer, died at his suburban Bell Canyon home, said his son-in-law, Tom Nikosey.
"He really taught kids how to use the thinking skills of a scientist," said former colleague Steve Jacobs. He worked with Herbert on a 1980s show that echoed the original 1950s "Watch Mr. Wizard" series, which became a fond baby boomer memory.
In "Watch Mr. Wizard," which was produced from 1951 to 1964 and received a Peabody Award in 1954, Herbert turned TV into an entertaining classroom. On a simple, workshop-like set, he demonstrated experiments using household items.
"He modeled how to predict and measure and analyze. … The show today might seem slow but it was in-depth and forced you to think along," Jacobs said. "You were learning about the forces of nature."
Herbert encouraged children to duplicate experiments at home, said Jacobs, who recounted serving as a behind-the-scenes "science sidekick" to Herbert on the ’80s "Mr. Wizard’s World" that aired on the Nickelodeon channel.
When Jacobs would reach for beakers and flasks, Herbert would remind him that science didn’t require special tools.
"’You could use a mayonnaise jar for that,’" Jacobs recalled being chided by Herbert. "He tried to bust the image of scientists and that science wasn’t just for special people and places."
He modeled how to predict and measure and analyze… Yes. Just so. He also modeled for adults, how to behave toward kids. He never talked down to the kid by his side at the experiment table. The assumption that they could understand the concepts he was teaching them was always a cheerful given. Whatever he was showing the kid at any given time, the first thing was always that they could do it too.
If the kids on that 1950s through early 60s TV show seem a tad too squeaky clean for this day and age, consider how different the man looks compared to most adults you encounter now. He was decent. He treated kids with respect, not condescension. And he understood that a kid’s instinctive curiosity is something an adult cultivates and trains and sharpens, not something you snuff out the moment it starts asking questions. If we had more adults like that in the world now, we’d have more kids like those in the world now.
Thank you Mr. Wizard, from a kid who used to watch you back in the day, and who later became a software engineer working on the Hubble Space Telescope project.
When television is good, nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you – and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
-Newton Minnow, FCC Chairman, 1961.
I really don’t much care for gangster movies and TV shows, but if I’m reading the howls of anger from the couch potato crowd right then I am truly sorry now that I missed watching The Sopranos after all. It looks to me like its creator, David Chase, has worked one of TVs rare moments of absolutely pure gold, taking the medium that Newton Minnow once called a "vast wasteland" and proving him right when he said that when it is good, nothing is better. I’m sorry to say that the howling anger also proves that the audience mostly wants the nothing-is-worse bad. But it’s not because Chase didn’t give them the satisfying final shoot-out they were hungry for. What he gave them, unforgivably, was a head on collision with their own ticking clock, their own little patient shadow of death just waiting to tap them on the shoulder when they least expect it. And they didn’t much like it.
On this Slashdot thread, one commenter puts the pieces together for the slower ones…
The ending left a lot open to speculation, but one thing that it didn’t leave open (IMO) is Tony’s fate.
Tony is dead – if you watch episode #78 "Soprano Home Movies," while Tony and Bobby are on the lake they are talking about what happens to people like them, and specifically about what it’s like to get killed. Tony says something along the lines of "you don’t hear the one that gets you," and Bobby asks "what do you tin happens when you die," to which Tony replies "nothing, everything just goes black."
Then, in last week’s episode, "#85 The Blue Comet," Tony flashes back to this scene while he is lying in bed "everything just goes black."
Even David Chase said in an interview that the key to how it ends is in that first episode (Soprano Home Movies), and to make sure people would remember this he put Tony flashing back to that moment at the end of "#85 The Blue Comet."
It’s something we all wonder about. What happens when you die? In a nation that claims to be overwhelmingly Christian (at least, in theory), you have to think that most folks are counting on seeing the pearly gates, or some acceptable substitute when the moment comes. That final curtain really isn’t final after all. Perhaps, a merging of one’s soul with that airy Cosmic All. Perhaps a rebirth into an entirely new life. But what if this is it. What if death is simply and finally the end of consciousness?
For most folks, myself included, that is a deeply horrifying thing to consider. Who among us doesn’t want consciousness to endure, in some form, even in some completely disembodied existence, even at last, to spend an eternity in Hell. Better that even, then simply…nothing. Emotionally it’s the great despair. And even intellectually and dispassionately it’s difficult to grasp. How do you visualize nothing? David Chase tells us how, and in the ultimate irony, puts the words into the mouth of a cold blooded killer.
"Nothing. Everything just goes black."
So there’s Tony Soprano, mobster, murderer, king of his own little corner of the gutter, family man, sitting down to a plate of onion rings. We nervously glance here and there, perhaps just as Tony does…to the man walking into the bathroom…to the guys over at the jukebox…to Meadow just walking in the door. And Tony’s eyes rise to look at Meadow. And then…nothing. Just…nothing.
Nothing. A fitting end perhaps, to the nothing he’d made of his own life, except that it’s the end we all get. Maybe.
Digby of course got it, and quotes "one of the 100 most dangerous academics in the country"…
Now, the fact that Chase didn’t even give us a gunshot to go on, no clue that Tony really dies — well, so what? Are there really ghosts in The Turn of the Screw, or is the governess mad? (That debate has been going on for more than a century now.) We’re left to wonder whether we’ve been duped into thinking that Tony dies because all the staging in that final scene — the brief shots of each of the restaurant patrons, the focus on the guy going to the men’s room, the closeups of Meadow having trouble parking the car — feels like the generic suspense-creatin’ mechanisms that precede a catastrophe. We stop and ask ourselves how much of our reaction depends on those narrative mechanisms. And so the ending becomes, in a meta- way, not Chase’s "final fuck you" to the viewers (as so many pissed-off viewers have said) but, rather, a form of what did you expect? — except that it’s a real question, not a rhetorical one.
What did you expect? Good question. Maybe we shouldn’t expect anything. Maybe we should pay a little more attention to the life we know we have, right now. Maybe we should get off the goddamned sofa. Maybe, the next time we get a chance to do something we always wanted to do, or to make our little corner of the world a little brighter, or bring a little more happiness into it, we shouldn’t let it slide on by thinking that we can always get to it later. Because later may not even be there. And when it’s over, when that cut to black happens, what you made of your life, your mark on the world, and the reputation you left behind, is all there will ever be of you. What did you expect?
I’m going to date myself here, and also place myself firmly in the context of my generation. I read raptly the books of Carlos Castaneda back in those days, and still find some of it very worthwhile. Knowledge of The Four Foes being one, and how your death is actually an ally, keeping you on the Path With Heart. And what came to mind while I was reading the howls of viewer outrage about how The Sopranos finally ended, were these words of Don Juan’s…
"Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us. Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has. Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he’s about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so. His death will tell him that he is wrong, that nothing really matters outside its touch. His death will tell him, ‘I haven’t touched you yet.’"
Okay…it’s a metaphor. But a good one. Every now and then you need to turn around quickly to your left, and look your death right square in the eye and not flinch away…and wonder. Why? Because if you don’t, you’ll fritter the life you know you have, and everything you could have become, away. Tony Soprano was a gangster, and in the end his life didn’t amount to anything. But on the other hand, what have you made of yours? At least Tony knew enough to look over his shoulder from time to time. It’s the most subversive thing your TV can say to you, and the absolute horror of its corporate masters: Put the remote control down and get off the goddamned sofa. Because someday, in an instant, maybe in the next instant, while you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing at that moment, everything will just go black. And that will be that. You won’t even get to see the credits rolling.
Bored with your life? Save your boredom for the Big Nothing. Instead of living vicariously though the lives of TV characters, why not live your own life for a change. It might get a little less boring then after all. Your life stinks? If can know it, then you can do something about it. Don’t like what you are? Then be something else, something better, something you really want to be. Come the fade to black, the world will never know what you kept inside all to yourself. Is that what you want?
Live. Now. Make something better of yourself. While you still Are.
I’m almost done with episode nine of A Coming Out Story, and I expect to have it up sometime this weekend. Yes…it’s been over six months since the last one and I’m really sorry about that. I started writing the script for it back in the summer of 2005, and by 2006 I had it pretty well fleshed out. But then sometimes the past suddenly reaches out and taps you on the shoulder and that kinda makes it a bit harder to think about the way you did before.
Still following the script though. There’ll be about fifty or so episodes when it’s all done. Hopefully sometime before I’m eighty…
The whole point of Holsinger’s paper is to draw a sharp contrast between gay relationships and heterosexual relationships. But to do so, he he culls his evidence largely from papers which describe injuries from nonconsensual intercourse to denigrate consensual relationships, he describes odd sexual practices that are enjoyed by heterosexual couples to denigrate the minority of gay couples who indulge in those same practices, and he misleads his readers by padding his bibliography with more references to papers explicitly describing injuries experienced by heterosexual men and women to imply that they describe gay men instead.
In other words, to describe gay sexual acts, more often than not he turned to papers which describe injuries sustained through heterosexual activity. And then he used this evidence from heterosexual activity to say that “when the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above.” But what does this evidence suggest about “complementarity” in heterosexual relationships? Holsinger doesn’t answer.
Burroway, as he has done previously with other religious right bigots, most notibly Paul Cameron, illuminates again and again the casual and deliberate deception in Holsinger’s anti-gay tract. For example, how Holsinger used a study of 365 male patients of a single urban STD clinic in Copenhagan so prove that homosexual sex is more likely to result in disease. As Burroway dryly notes…
This of course means that if you study people with STDs, whether they are gay or straight, you will find people with STDs. Holsinger uses the behavior of one particular sample of men who expose themselves to the risk of STDs to denigrate all gay men (and lesbians!). This study says nothing of those whose “lifestyle” choices do not lead to contracting STDs. And of course, Holsinger’s arguments don’t address whatever responsibility heterosexuals overall have for the 64% of this particular Copenhagen sample who were exclusively straight and were treated for STDs.
This was what Evelyn Hooker understood back in the 1950s when she did her landmark study of the psychological adjustment of gay men. If all you study are sick homosexuals, then all you’re going to see in homosexuality is sickness. But that’s all that some people want to see. Holsinger uses data on injuries to the rectum gleaned from emergency room treatment of people who had been raped, to smear the sex loving same sex couples have as physically damaging. Perhaps in his own mind, Holsinger really cannot see the difference between love and rape when it involves homosexuals. Or perhaps he’s just trying to make sure that nobody else can. Either way, it speaks volumes about that open sewer he calls a conscience.
And here, Burroway nails it:
But worse, Holsinger made the fatal error of ignoring the bonds of affection and devotion that arise in gay and lesbian couples. He reduced the rich complexity of their relationships to pipe fittings and how they interlock with each other. But the interlocking parts that fit together in relationships are those parts that fit sublimely. They have absolutely nothing to do with pipes or connectors or any other analogies drawn from the local Ace Hardware store.
But the interlocking parts that fit together in relationships are those parts that fit sublimely. Yes. Just so. But that is the part of an intimate romantic relationship, that the right reliably fails to grok. I think the reason why is obvious.
We have needed a Jim Burroway in this movement for a long, long time. Someone to actually take the time and effort to rigorously dig below the surface of these religious right anti-gay tracts and show, point by point, how they are looking you in the face and lying through their teeth, confidant that their ostentatious religiosity will keep you from questioning their facts. Surely men of God wouldn’t deliberately lie to us. They may be uptight moral prudes and cranks, but at least they believe in and live by their own moral values and we can trust in that. They are merely zealots, blinded by their prejudices, not conniving con artists. No. There is no mistaking this kind of thing for what it is. You cannot pick and choose your data to suit your purposes, without knowing that you are picking and choosing your data to suit your purposes. It is calculated, it is deliberate, and it is to virtue and morality as Al Capone was to law and order.
Some years ago, long before I’d ever ventured out into the Internet, I wrote an essay on my own coming out to myself experience, to post on a gay FidoNet echomail board. It’s been through many iterations since…mostly to edit unclear or awkward passages and add a bit of clarifying text here and there. I’ve taken it down from my web site here for the moment, while I give it an update. But I’ve posted it in response to many arguments I’ve had over the years with online bigots.
I saw early on that the personal computer enabled us as a people, for the first time in human history, to tell our own stories to the world, in our own words, completely bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of culture. Ever since I’ve been taking every opportunity to tell these little slice of life stories out of my own life, and encouraged other gay people to do the same. If we don’t tell our stories, the only people who will are the ones who hate us…the ones who cannot see the people for the homosexuals. For generation upon generation, the haters were the only ones who were allowed to speak on the subject of homosexuality. Our voices were silenced, often brutally, so their lies could be told without any fear of being contradicted by the truth of our lives. No more. For all the same reasons the totalitarians in China couldn’t massacre thousands of their own people in Tiananmen Square on a Sunday evening, and then tell the rest of the world Monday morning that it never happened, the homophobes can no longer insist that Homosexuals Don’t Love, They Just Have Sex and expect everyone to just nod their heads and accept it as a given.
But insist they will, because that’s all their cheapshit hatreds allow them to see. My own personal favorite example of that, happened when I once again posted my coming out to self story on a Usenet message board, in response to a bigots assertion that every homosexual that ever lived got that way because they were molested as a child. I said I wasn’t…I said that the first sex I’d ever had was with another guy about my own age, and that I was in love, and I reposted my essay, which reads in part…
Slowly and deliberately we drew ourselves closer together. One summer afternoon we arranged to go hiking. There was a place we’d both never been to that we wanted to explore.
At a shop where I once worked one of the guys there described, a little too graphically for my taste, the loss of his virginity. A guy never forgets his first woman, he said. Actually he didn’t say woman he made a reference to a woman’s organ. What I’ll never forget that day when I was 17: the moment he put his hands on me. That gentle tentative touch was electric.
I woke up that instant from the dream of childhood. We laid down and took each other all that green warm golden afternoon across the threshold, into the land of adults. My gym teacher’s ravings and everything else I’d ever been told about what homosexuals were and what it meant to be one disappeared in my first passionate embrace of another male. And after, breathless and exalted, we looked into each others eyes for, I don’t know, minutes, hours… To this day I can still remember quite vividly things like the sounds of birds calling each other in the trees above us, the scent of his skin, the feel of his hands on me, the sunlight drifting over his hair in the warm breeze…
I had been an instrument sitting idly on the maker’s shelf, watching curiously the work around me, hearing the first tentative notes of the others along side of me, and not knowing that I too had been created to make this music until that moment when the maker took hold of me, and I felt myself lifted up, and I sang.
Sure as the sun rises in the east, the very next day that gutter crawling bigot posted back, accusing me of putting pornography on the message board. I’d written a story he said, about "two pervs feeling each other up."
I was gratified to see that I wasn’t the only one reading that message board, who thought the man in question was nuts. But you need to pay attention to this: All I’d said was that he touched me, and Instantly this man read that as we were feeling each other up. I never actually described the sex we had, because that detail wasn’t important. I was writing about my state of mind, about how it felt to be in love for the very first time, and to find yourself one lovely summer afternoon in the arms of the one you love. And this prize pervert took what I wrote about being in love, and his twisted little mind turned that into some graphic and satisfyingly disgusting homosexual sex scene that he could not take his eyes off of. And he had to make sure no one else could either.
The very idea of “Gay Conjugal Visits” for prisoners sounds like a bad joke, but officials of the California penal system are to worried to laugh. Because of the state’s new “civil unions” law, the gay convicts who linked themselves to partners before incarceration are now entitled to scheduled sessions of intimacy, just like their married counterparts. This means that prison staffers who spend their time in desperate efforts to prevent behind-bars gay conduct, including rape, must now assist selected prisoners with trysts involving their “domestic partners.” This absurd innovation exposes the true nature of the so-called gay rights agenda: it’s not about equality, it’s about governmental promotion of behavior that many Americans still consider disgusting and immoral. Gay conjugal visits should cause the public to look past platitudes about love to focus on the raw actuality of male-male eroticism. Is this practice – with all its hygienic, physiological harm—really deserving of governmental (and prison system) support?
Now…read this part again: Gay conjugal visits should cause the public to look past platitudes about love to focus on the raw actuality of male-male eroticism. Sure Michael. Sure. Just like the sight of a gay male couple walking down the street holding hands makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship. Just like the sight of a gay male couple sitting together at a restaurant peacefully eating lunch, content simply in each other’s company, makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship. Just like the sight of a gay male couple standing bored out of their minds in a grocery store checkout line makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship. And that’s because you don’t see human beings when you look at homosexuals Michael. You see monsters. The monsters your cheapshit bar stool prejudices have always told you they are. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
They have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…!!!!!
Anyone whose mind functions normally might otherwise be able to see the sense in this new prison policy. First of all, if opposite sex couples can have them, then it’s just a simple matter of human decency to allow it to same sex couples as well. It may actually serve to Reduce the incidence of prison rape, by lowering the sexual tensions inside prison. It can serve as an incentive toward good behavior. And helping to keep couples together while one is in prison, means that when they are eventually released, they still have something to go home to. Or would you rather dump them back out on the streets with nothing at all left in their lives Michael? Oh never mind…of course you would. The emotion of love registers inside your dark little heart about as much as a candle in a blizzard, doesn’t it Michael? That gray, sterile, brutal toxic human wasteland where love never was, and can never be, and where no inhumanity is impossible, is your beloved homeland, isn’t it Michael? That’s why all you can see, when your eyes behold a couple, is the sex they’re probably having, isn’t it Michael? Because that’s the only thing about how couples feel about each other that you Can understand, deep down inside that dark little heart of yours, isn’t it Michael? And it isn’t just the feelings same sex couples have for each other that completely mystify you…is it Michael?
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