Of all the moral positions the anti abortionists generally take, the easiest one to discern the honesty of is the argument from the sanctity of life.  Life, they aver, begins at conception, thereby making abortion murder.  Fine.  You can always tell the folks who argue this position in good faith, from the ones who don’t, because they’re the ones who also have a passionate concern for the welfare of children After they’re born.  When you see someone babbling about the killing of innocent babies on the one hand, while supporting public policies that take food out of the mouths of living children, and which put healthcare beyond the reach of their families, then you know you’re dealing with a fraud.  They don’t give a good goddamn about innocent children.  Their motives are elsewhere, and the dishonesty of their rhetoric is enough to give you a pretty good clue where that elsewhere probably is.

It’s the same with religious arguments over homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals.  Scanning Google News this morning, I came across this news article in The Age (Australia), concerning the current hostilities in the Anglican church over homosexuality.  Whenever someone starts pontificating about the tensions in various religious sects over homosexuality, you know they’re not really willing to look the beast in the eye when you see them starting from a premise of good faith on everyone’s part…

Not only is it divisive, it seems almost impossible to resolve because the opposing camps believe so strongly that they are right, that conscience demands they take the stand they do, and that they speak for God.

Er…no.  But it’s true that some folks expect you to accept their declarations of their faith and devotion to God at face value.  That needs to stop.

Those Christians who say homosexual acts are always wrong – and it is the act, not the orientation, they condemn, though gays don’t think this is a very meaningful distinction – do so because the Bible says so.

Here’s the problem with this: how often do you see these people who are standing pat on the bible’s anti-gay verses, living their own lives by the rest of it as well?  Just as you can tell who the frauds are in the abortion arguments by a passionate devotion to the right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth, you can tell who the frauds are in an argument over homosexuality, by an absolute devotion to the word of God that begins with all the biblical proscriptions against homosexuality, and comes to an abrupt halt wherever the bible starts telling heterosexuals what to do with Their genitals.

And then there is that ninth commandment.  You know…the one about not bearing false witness against your neighbors.  Who is the biggest consumer of junk science about homosexuality besides the religious right?  How often are religious right groups caught distorting the research of scientists and scholars about sexual orientation?  Over at Box Turtle Bulletin, Jim Burroway maintains a list of groups using Paul Cameron’s junk science.  Note the number of religious groups on it.  Back during the summer of 2005, when the Ex-Gay ministry Love In Action was being protested for forcing gay teens into their reparative therapy program, The Queer Action Coalition noticed that a number of negative claims about homosexuality on their website linked to a group calling itself the International Organization of Heterosexual Rights…an anti-gay hate group whose facts on homosexuality were utterly devoid of any scientific basis.  When challenged by QAC on their citing a hate group, LIA simply removed the links to the International Organization of Heterosexual Rights…but not their statistics.  What kind of piety is it, that holds Leviticus 18:22 is the absolute word of God, and the ninth commandment as optional?

It isn’t the people of faith who are the problem here.  The problem is the people of bad faith.  We can’t have honest discussions about homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals in this country, until we start demanding that the people of bad faith either come clean about what they really believe, or step aside and shut the fuck up.  Because all they’re doing…deliberately doing…is poisoning the well for the rest of us.  Shoving them aside until they’re ready to start speaking their mind instead of trying to incite and manipulate and short circuit the political conversation is the first order of business. 

You think the bible is crystal clear about homosexuality do you?  Fine.  But you think that divorce should be legal?  Had a divorce yourself have you?  Oh…two?  On your third wife now are you?  But the bible is clear about homosexuality you say?  No compromise with what God has condemned is it?  Well…okay…until you’re ready to have an honest discussion about this, just shut the fuck up while the grownups talk among themselves. 

[Edited a tad…] 

Painting.  Painting the iron rails out front.  Painting my deck out back.  Repairs.  Many little things I’d been putting off until I had time.  The dripping outdoor faucets.  The broken hose quick connectors.  Cleaning.  Both the deck and the front porch tiles.  So many things that still need doing that I just didn’t have time to get to.

Swear to god the quickest way to put an end to the entire concept of holidays is to buy a house…

So I’m reading the comments over at Fark.Com to that article about how dangerous getting back in touch with your first love is.  It’s comforting to see that I’m not the only one who looks back on it with feelings that are a tad mixed…

Mine is a pathological liar and has depression issues.

…………

Just saw mine last night, she said hi, i said hi, then stared like a dumb eye kid. I guess i’m still powerless.

…………

Mine became a Bible-thumping, street-corner preacher– no thank you!!.

…………

Mine got married to a BPD insane guy who tried to kill her and her entire family. She’s now with a recovering heroin addict.

…………

I ran into my first love at a grocery store near my mom’s while I was on a visit. He was working as a bagger. Took me about 3 minutes to recognise him, and about 3 seconds to be grateful that he didn’t recognise me!

…………

Mine’s a prostitute.

…………

A mutual friend who’s a cop now said he saw her about 15yrs after we graduated. (She was a freshman when I was a senior) He stopped her for a routine traffic stop and saw it was her, but she didn’t recognize him. She had a different last name, married of course…When he ran her license, he found out she had been married 3 times, had several convictions for shop lifting, forging checks, mail fraud and some minor drug convictions!

…………

Wow…doubt anyone will read this far down, but here’s my story, FWIW: My first love was a geek in high school, but we went to prom together. Then, we had a long-distance relationship when he went away to college at the Naval Academy. He dumped me. Twenty years later, he tracked me down before our high school reunion. He was living in Japan. I went to the reunion just to see him, sparks were incredible (and he enjoyed the BJ on the pool deck). I thought I was in love again. Apparently, he was not. He just got re-married, and still wanted to have me on the side. No thanks,

…………

I told mine I hope she dies. Does that make me a bad person?

…………

I haven’t seen mine since she moved during freshman year of high school. I still carry her school picture in my wallet.

I’ve found her listing on Classmates.com

I’ve found where her parents live.

Now she’s married to someone else, and so am I…

/depressed now
//where’s my hanging rope?

…………

Mine passed away at 18 from a rejected heart transplant. I think we would have married, though, he was the sweetest thing in the whole world. I still miss that boy. 

…………

I seriously hope there is a hell just so mine can rot in it… not that I’m bitter or anything.

And then there is this practical fellow… 

I hook up with random 18-year-olds in the hopes that I’ll be their "childhood sweetheart." Later in life I should have throngs of women ready to get it on with me at any chance encounters.

Consider that you may instead have throngs of women scattered here and there, ready to beat the living crap out of you when they lay eyes on you again.  Just a thought.

Ah…love.  I have been asked over and over again by heterosexual jackasses if I would take a pill that would cure me of my homosexuality if such a thing existed.  My standard retort is to ask them if they’d take a pill that would grow them a brain if such a pill existed.  My love life has been an excruciatingly difficult one, but I have never blamed my sexual orientation for that.  Note that Fark.Com is a mostly straight hangout and that most, if not all of the comments above came from heterosexuals.  Of all the people I knew in high school, only two managed to do the find your soulmate and spend your life together thing.  Ironically one of them was My first love.  Everyone else I know…Everyone…has had it rough.  Some of them very rough.  I’m far, far from the only broken heart in this poor world.  Which is why it pisses me off no end how fundamentalist and right wing jackasses do their level best to make it hard for people to find, and then keep that love of their lives in this poor lonely world!  If there’s a hell after all, then there needs to be a special place in it for people who made it more difficult for people to love.  And it needs to be really, really painful, to even come close to atoning for all the pain they left behind in this world.

So I have another retort now to the ones who keep asking me if I would ever take a pill to cure me of homosexuality.  If there was a pill You could take that would cure you of the ability to love…that would erase all knowledge of and even the memory of love from your mind…would you take it?  It wouldn’t kill your libido…just your romantic need.  You could still have all the random, carefree, hot sex you ever wanted, and even more guilt free then before, knowing that there would be no emotional attachment afterward.  Love’s a hard thing to deal with sometimes.  It can really, really fuck up your life, leave it a tattered mess.  Would you take that pill? 

I’m sorry to say, I think a lot of people would.  And if you would too, then I’m sorry for you.  Better an aching heart, then an empty one.

From our Department Of The Staringly Obvious…

Re-kindling your lost first love is playing with fire: experts
Memories of first love are more addictive than any drug and many adults find themselves powerless to resist when the sparks fly and they fall once again for childhood sweethearts.

First loves are indelibly etched into our minds, scientists say, but they warn that rekindling that old flame could have lasting, irreversible consequences, tearing apart marriages and leaving a trail of devastation.

"It’s not your average affair," said Nancy Kalish, a California State University-Sacramento psychologist, who has studied such relationships for 14 years. "It goes from the phone to the hotel. It’s that quick."

Not always…

Adolescent hormones carve those first loves into our brains, said Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of the book "Why We Love."

The lost love’s voice or touch triggers wanting, needing, craving in the same spots in the brain as those affected by cocaine.

Sound like addiction?

"It is more powerful than addiction," said Fisher.

 …

"The lost-love people seem to have a tremendous sense of entitlement to do what they want and screw everyone else."

The poet Richard Lovelace wrote, "…I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not honor more."  That’s the hard part of love, but it’s what separates the gold from the fools gold.  Lost-lovers aren’t acting from a sense of entitlement.  They’re acting on something that was theirs once, and never really went away…a thing as common and obvious as the warm summer sun.  But fucking up a marriage isn’t the nicest thing in the world to do to someone you were once madly in love with.  And do you really want to die remembering that first love of your life as a cheat?

Like Rick Blaine said, "We’ll always have Paris…"  

It’s the holiday weekend, and I don’t feel like posting any heavy stuff here now.  I’m busy with a bunch of home repair and improvement chores this weekend, and I just want to take a break from the world for now.  I’ve got the deck to reseal, my iron handrails by the front steps and porch to clean and paint, and a bunch of pots to put flowers in.  I don’t want to even look at the news for now.  So I’m going to share a little family trick with the rest of you kids.  How to make a jug of perfectly smooth and tasty sweet ice tea.  I’ve no idea why so many people get it wrong, but most of the stuff I taste, particularly around here in Maryland, is too rough on the pallet.  They like to make this "sun tea" for some reason, and it never tastes right to me. 

Making ice tea right is really very simple. They seem to have the knack for it in the South, but I didn’t know that until I visited down there recently.  Apparently sweet ice tea is a southern thing.  I’ve no idea how my mom, a Pennsylvania Yankee, got the method figured out.  I think it was just trial and error.  But by the time I was 12 she had it down pat and when I was a kid I just loved summertime because it was ice tea time.  Now I make it all the time.  I generally have a tall glass of it somewhere nearby all day long.

I start by boiling a kettle of water.  Filtered usually.  There are two tricks to it.  The first is to figure out how much sweetener you need for a given amount of boiling water beforehand.  It isn’t sweetened to taste afterward, but before.  I make about a kettle full, which works out to, I reckon, about a quart and a half, or about 48 ounces of water.  So I know from experience that it takes about a quarter cup of sweetener.  Your mileage may vary.  I used to use pure sugar, which I bought by the 25 pound bag at Costco.  But since I started watching my weight I’ve been using Splenda.  It works just fine for me as a sugar substitute.

I put the sweetener in the empty jug first.  When the water comes to a boil I pour it in over the sweetener, and it goes instantly into solution.  Then I put in the tea bags.  I just use plain old Lipton orange pekoe and pekoe tea bags.  Three standard size bags work for me for this amount of water.  Again, your mileage may vary.  I’ll place the top on the jug loosely and walk away from it.

See, the second trick, and probably the most important, is to let the tea cool down at its own speed.  Never, Never put it into the fridge before it’s at room temperature.  It’ll go bitter when you do that, even if it’s just a little bit warm to the touch.  Just let the jug cool off on its own to room temperature with the bags in it.   It may take hours.  That’s fine.  I usually do a jug before bed and just leave it overnight.  Once it’s at room temperature, then take the bags out, put the jug in the fridge and let it cool down.

That’s it.  Nothing really special about it.  But do it that way and you’ll get a nice, smooth sweet ice tea every time.  You can add lemon, and maybe a touch of lime after you pour it into the glass.

Long Island Ice Tea is another story, for another time. 

Also from the Slashdot thread on the new Creation Museum…

"If the museum flops, it can always be turned into a minature golf course."

"I always wondered why God had to rest…"

-From the comments on Slashdot, in a thread about the new Creation Museum.

Mary Cheney has given birth to a boy, Samuel David, 8-pound, 6-ounces, at 9:46 a.m. at Sibley Hospital in Washington, Wednesday.

The Official White House photograph shows only his grandparents. 

Yes, I’ve made this complaint before, so just bear with me because I need to make it again.  I am fucking tired of movies about gay romances that end tragically! Can we please see stories about same sex love that succeeds, that triumphs over adversity? My thanks in advance.

I am so starved for romance that I can relate to, that the other night I find myself trolling YouTube for film clips from Japanese "boy’s love" anime that I don’t have yet.  If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, which sometimes goes by the name "Yaoi" in both manga and anime, it’s mostly torrid soap opera style love stories of the sort you might find in any paperback romance novel, save for the cultural differences in style, and the fact that they’re about gay male couples.  I’m told the audience for these stories in Japan are mostly teenage Japanese girls. 

I like them for the beauty of the males in the storylines, and the torrid romance of the storylines.  I used to smirk at some heterosexual friends, female, who had racks and racks of those Harlequin Romance paperbacks at home.  Well, I sure couldn’t smirk at them now.  I guess it was just a matter of not seeing any of it that I could relate to.  I tell myself these days that I’m finally having the teeny-bopper experience I couldn’t back in 1969-1970.  Well…apart from all those Tiger Beat magazines I used to buy, take home, devour, and hide under my bed, all the while telling myself that I was a perfectly normal heterosexual guy.

So…anyway…I’m busy trolling YouTube for some same sex romance, and I come across a set of 10 posts comprising an entire live action Japanese film titled, appropriately enough, Boy’s Love.  Ohmygod, thinks I, the leads are go goddamned Cute!  So I start watching the first one.  And I notice that it’s in Japanese with no sub-titles.  Oh well.  I keep watching, while trying to deduce the plot from the visuals.  Later on I find this about the film on Wiki…

Just doing his job, magazine editor Taishin Mamiya (Yoshikazu Kotani) interviews high school model Noeru Kisaragi (Takumi Saito). Despite Noeru’s bad attitude, an enchanting picture of the ocean he draws leads Mamiya to invite him out for dinner afterwards. They connect at the restaurant, but while in the bathroom there Noeru solicits Mamiya sexually. The next morning, Noeru’s office calls the magazine office where Mamiya works. "Your editor was rude. Have him come and apologize." When Mamiya goes to Noeru’s house to deliver the apology, he sees Noeru with a dirty-looking man. Mamiya is shocked to discover at that moment that his interest in Noeru goes beyond article research–he truly wants to know more about him.

Heh.  Yeah.  Sort-of.  There’s more to it, including a jealous classmate who the commenters on YouTube took to calling "Harry Potter" because of his glasses and bookish look I suppose.  But it’s pretty much your standard gay soap opera plot.

Warning…Major Spoilage after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Message In A Bottle:  To a certain someone living near the land of Walt…who I used to talk to way back when…in another time…

So,  bear with me here a little…  Jacob Bronowski tells of how Dimitri Mendeleeve used to play a little card game with himself that his friends used to call Patience.  He played it with cards that he’d written the known elements of his day on, along with their atomic numbers.  He put hydrogen aside, since it was kind of an odd one, and instead began his first column with lithium.  Next came beryllium, then boron, then the familiar elements, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and then fluorine at the seventh column.  Then next known element was sodium, and since it had a likeness to lithium, Mendeleeve decided it should go under that element, starting a new row.  He continued putting known elements into the second row, and as he did so, noticed that they all lined up perfectly with the elements that had similar likenesses above them. 

He continued doing this, and starting a new row as necessary, until he came to a…difficulty.  And that was the element titanium.   It didn’t fit exactly with the elements above it, boron and aluminum.  However it did seem to line up with carbon and silicon. Mendeleeve interpreted this difficulty as a missing element.  Aha, thinks he, there is an element we don’t know about yet, but when we find it, that element will have properties that put it under boron and aluminum.  He called the missing element, eka-silicon.

When they found it, they named it germanium, since it was discovered in Germany.  But it was Mendeleeve who first realized it was there.  He had in fact, predicted just what properties germanium had, even before it was discovered.  He knew the element was there, because the elements he had told him it was there, and where to look for it, and what it would look like when they found it.

So…here’s the point.  There is something that we folks who work in Information Technologies understand about data, that most people miss.  Data is not important, really.  Data does not matter.   What matters, are the connections between the data.

So…anyway…I have these keys.  Some of which I found for myself, and some of which you gave me.  But there was one I wanted that you would not give to me.  And..well…you know how I am.   So I knew it was out there somewhere, but none of the keys I had would give it to me.  But I knew that if I used the keys I did have, they would probably give me another key, and that key would give me another, and so on.  Which I did.  Until I came to a…difficulty.  And there most people might have figured it for another dead end, but that difficulty told me where the missing key was, and pretty much what it would look like when I found it.   And so I went looking there, and I fit one of the keys I had into that place and turned, and the key I needed just sort of popped out.

And you told me why I couldn’t use it, and you were right.  I can’t.  I can see that for myself now.  So I won’t.  I reckon I’ll just keep tossing these messages in a bottle out to you until the day comes, maybe, when you give me one I can use.

Be nice if we didn’t have to keep waving flags at a distance to each other.  Be nice if we could just…you know…talk.  Like we used to.

Well this was a first I could have lived contentedly without ever knowing about…

No escape as mobile phone reaches Everest’s summit

A British man has set a world record by making the first mobile telephone call from the summit of Mount Everest, taking the blessing — or curse — of the cell phone to new heights.

"It’s cold, it’s fantastic, the Himalayas are everywhere," Rod Baber said in the phone call from the top of the 8,848-metre (29,198-foot) peak…

No Shit?  The Himalayas, did you say?  And…like…is there snow everywhere up there too?  Is it really high up there? 

See?  He’s on the fucking summit of Mount Everest, and you have to think that the thoughts in his head at that moment were actually some pretty profound ones.  That is a rare and dangerous adventure.  And he goes on that adventure…and he reaches the top.  He did it.  And the reward is a view of planet earth that few humans have ever seen with their own eyes.  But then he puts the goddamned cell phone to his face and all the comes out is shopping mall babble.  Cell phones just bring out the chattering little monkeys in all of us.  I’m not busting on them…I’d hate to live in a world without them.  But there will never be famous memorable words spoken into a cell phone.

Oh, just what I need to make me worry more about my reliable forgetfulness…

Men’s Minds Decline More with Age

Everyone becomes a little more forgetful as they get older, but men’s minds decline more than women’s, according to the results of a worldwide survey.

…

Some studies found more age-related decline in men than in women, while others saw the reverse or even no relationship at all between sex and mental decline. Those results could be biased because the studies involved older people, and women live longer than men: The men tested are the survivors, "so they’re the ones that may not have shown such cognitive decline," said study team leader Elizabeth Maylor of the University of Warwick in England.

The new study used data from the BBC Sex ID Internet Survey, conducted between February and May 2005. The survey had more than 250,000 respondents worldwide.

Survey participants completed four tasks that tested sex-related cognitive skills: matching an object to its rotated form, matching lines shown from the same angle, typing as many words in a particular category as possible in the given time (e.g. "object usually colored grey") and recalling the location of objects in a line drawing. The first two were tasks at which men usually excel; the latter are typically dominated by women.

Within each age group studied, men and women performed better in their respective categories on average. And though performance declined with age for both genders, women showed significantly less decline than men overall. Women slowed down more in terms of their decline, but when comparing men and women of the same age, men showed a greater amount of decline.

On the other hand, maybe I’ll forget that I’m forgetting.  So this could be good news. 

Peterson Toscano writes It’s About Heterosexism, Silly on the International Day Against Homophobia, and Alan Chambers’ post on the Exodus blog about how he is all in agreement that violence against gay people shouldn’t be tolerated.  Chambers writes…

Today is the International Day Against Homophobia. And, you might be surprised to learn that I support this effort. Homophobia does exist. Irrational fear of those who are gay or lesbian is a real problem in our culture. While I believe we have come a long way, I still see true homophobia at work each and every day.

What a swell guy, eh?  Almost makes you wonder why they’re all so uptight about hate crime laws over at Exodus.  Peterson responds that the lives of gay people are less impacted directly from violence, so much as the premise of heterosexual superiority…

While homophobic attacks happen daily, heterosexism happens by the nano second. A young child gets the message over and over again in books, TV ads, teacher’s examples and even heterosexually paired salt & pepper shakers, that anything other than heterosexual pairing is just not right. Growing up in such a world, with virtually no positive examples of same-sex couples, queer and questioning young people begin to develope a negative sense of self and can even grow quite isolated and suicidal within a society where they do not see themselves reflected or accepted.

Just so.  I’ve often wondered of late, how different my own life might have been had I the chance to grow up in a culture as accepting of same sex pairings as opposite sex ones.  Maybe I’d have found my soul mate by now.  Maybe I did find him long ago, once upon a time, only to loose him due to that relentless hostility toward same sex pairings. 

Once while I was working as a stock clerk at a catalog retailer, I met this really nice guy from one of the branch stores who’d come to the warehouse on an errand.  I think my jaw dropped a little when I caught sight of him, he was so drop dead beautiful.  He saw me looking and flashed a wonderful smile at me.  Some weeks later I had a chance to go to the store he worked at on an errand of my own and the look he gave me when he saw it was me was thrilling.  We didn’t have any time to talk that day, we were both so busy with work related chores.  But I vowed to get his name and phone number the next time we met.  Which should have been the following week.  But his supervisor caught us sharing a smile and I guess she didn’t like the look of it because the next day we were both fired, me ostensibly because my hair was too long.  I never learned why exactly they’d canned him.  I only found out when I tried visiting his store afterwords and was coldly told he wasn’t working there anymore. 

I never saw him again.  I don’t even know his name.  It is one of many junctions in my life that I’ve always wondered about since, wondered about what might have been had they left us alone.  He was real nice.  And that is not the only time something like that has happened to me.

Not one to let a suggestion that gay people be given a measure of human dignity go by without spitting on it, Mike Ensley commented on Chamber’s blog thusly:

The fact is, heterosexuality is innately superior. Only heterosexual partners enjoy the complimentary aspect of their physiology, and only they can produce children.

Ensley is a jackass.  Dr. John Corvino in this lecture on the morality of homosexuality , hilariously addresses that The Parts Don’t Fit argument, with the simple retort that, yes the parts Do fit, and that ought to be obvious since if they didn’t, people wouldn’t do that.  This isn’t rocket science.  It shouldn’t take a micro-watt of brain power to figure that if sex wasn’t gratifying and fulfilling for same sex couples then they wouldn’t do it, let alone take all the risks that same sex couples often have to take, even in this day and age, let alone back when sodomy could still land you in prison, in order to do it.  The trick is…well…you have to be gay in order to find it fulfilling.  If you’re heterosexual, then you won’t.

Because heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex, it’s easy for them to mistake the complementary nature of their relationship for gender.  But the complement isn’t the gender, it’s the person.  What people like Ensley are doing in reality, is denying gay people that intimate, body and soul complementary relationship with another person.  Then they point to how miserable gay people often are as proof of the innate superiority of heterosexuality.  It’s called, building yourself up, by putting other people down.  Ensley is doing a little dance there, over corpses of gay people’s dreams and hopes, as a way of demonstrating the superiority of heterosexuality.  And he has no idea how ugly it looks to anyone with a conscience.

And thus prejudice, eventually, destroys the destroyer. 

Leonard Pitts writes about the one moment in Jerry Falwell’s life when it seemed like he had a conscience after all…

It happened in 1999 when Falwell and other Christian conservatives met with a group of gay, lesbian and transgendered people of faith. As gay observers condemned the gay delegation for its involvement and his fellow Christians excoriated Falwell for his, the two groups worshipped together and talked.

Falwell and the Rev. Mel White, leader of Soulforce, a group of gay Christian activists, said they organized the meeting out of a sense that the language between them and the groups they represented had become harsh, acrid, unChristian. If they could not change one another’s minds, they reasoned, perhaps they could at least change one another’s words. In the spirit of the moment, each apologized for hateful language directed at the other. It was a brave and moral moment.

In a column I wrote at the time, I warned both sides that, while it’s easy to stigmatize anonymous others, it would become a lot more difficult after they had spent time in one another’s company, gotten to know each other a little. "How," I asked, "do you go back to being who you were and hating as blindly as you did?"

It’s easy when you just can’t see the people for the homosexuals.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions…

Wow.  Just…wow.  This place is Really Nice!

Great old lodge style place that’s been added on to and added on to, such that it has all kinds of nice neat little nooks and comfy lounge areas hidden away here and there throughout the lodge and the grounds around it.  There’s a lot of space here, and yet so many little places in this corner and that full of very nice comfortable furniture where groups or couples or individuals can have some privacy too.  Yet you can just take a few steps and be out in one of the public areas again at your leisure.  Very nice. It’s got a first-rate dinning room and a little community breakfast room (they actually ring a triangle bell in the morning to call the guests to breakfast).  There’s a nice bar, an exercise room, two hot tubs and a steam room. 

Wireless broadband works too (obviously since I’m posting)  But the cell phones are completely dead.  It’s a long windy gravel road to get here.  You’re tucked into a nice stretch of West Virginia scenery.  The lodge and the little guest houses have a very, very nice comfy feel.  Lots of oversized leather sofas and chairs all over the place.  I’m in a little room in the top floor of their "carriage house".  it almost has a treehouse quality to it on the inside.  Bed was one of the most comfortable I’ve ever slept on and I’ve lost count of all the hotel beds I’ve slept on.  I’ll definitely be coming back here regularly.

I’ll post some photos as soon as I get them processed.  I have my film cameras with me this trip so, sorry, no instant digital images for now…