You may have noticed a slight change in the way things look around here. That’s because I’m migrating the blog, finally, to a blog maintainance system… WordPress. When I moved the site to Winters Web Works (webmaster/host for Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World), Jonah, the admin here, coaxed me into it. For the past several months he’s been letting me experiment with a mirror WordPress blog and I’ve grown to like it, and in particular, the convenience of not having to manually do every little thing, like update the archive file and keep the permalinks and the comment links correct. It’s a very nice system, and one that should allow me to post from any computer with an Internet connection and a browser, so now I won’t have to carry my entire web site with me everywhere I go on a flash stick.

I’ve got a nice rich text editor I can compose my posts in (provided the browser I’m using follows the standard document model) and a spell checker (very necessary) and I can cut and paste links and text and format everything much more easily then editing the HTML by hand. I can also work on a post and save it without publishing, to work on it later, even from another location if need be.

There’s a new comment engine built right in to WordPress, which I’ll be using from now on. But Jonah has migrated the old comments over (which is why some of the old posts have duplicate comment links in them now). If you have any trouble with the new comment engine let me know. My blog should be RSS Feed enabled now, and better integrated with Technorati’s blog update notification system. Hopefully that will make things easier on the readers here who’ve asked me about it.

There may still be some dust to setting after the change over. If you notice anything amiss let me know. But I think the blog looks really nice now. Jonah made some suggestions about the banner image and the overall layout that I think work really well, and I’m very happy with how things look now. And since it’s a lot easier for me to just sit down and drop in a post I’ll probably be posting a tad more often now. I’m pretty sure this will end up being one of those "Why didn’t I do this before" kinda things…

Via Bill and Kent’s Place On The Web, something from Annapolis that I completely missed hearing about…

Last week in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, was requested to testify.

He did so. At the end of his testimony, a right-wing senator said: “Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man & a woman. What do you have to say about that?”

Raskin: “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

The room erupted into applause.

According to 365Gay.Com, the right wing state senator was Nancy Jacobs, republican (surprise, surprise) from Cecil and Harford Counties. So Dwyer isn’t the only nutcase in Annapolis.

Meanwhile, via Pam’s House Blend, you can read about two candidates for office, one in Ohio, and one in Texas, who are advocating the death penalty for homosexuals:

Merrill Keiser, Jr., is a trucker by trade, and he’s hoping his next journey takes him all the way to Washington. His goal is a seat in the US Senate, but first he has to make it through the primary that will determine which Ohio Democrat will be the November ballot.

The Fremont man is causing some controversy with one of his beliefs. He tells News 11 homosexuality should be a felony, punishable by death. “Just like we have laws against murder, we have laws against stealing, we have laws against taking drugs — we should have laws against immoral conduct,” Keiser says.

Then there is Larry Kilgore, running for Governor of Texas. According to Larry’s website, his platform consists of, among other things…

1-40 lashes for crime of maliciousness, like graffiti, porn, strip clubs.

Execution for crime of adultery. (Leviticus 20:10)

Execution for crime of homosexual acts. (Leviticus 20:13)

We have met the Taliban, and they are us. A decade ago I might have said these nutcases stand absolutely no chance of being elected. Now I’d have to say that they both have excellent chances of being elected. And that’s not because a majority, or even a significant number of Americans want to live in an old testament theocracy. It’s because there is no vigorous political defense of individual liberty in America anymore, and in particular, in defense of religious liberty. Religious liberty in America has come to mean that the most extreme fundamentalists can agitate for stoning to death people for old testiment sex crimes, and burning heretics at the stake, and anyone who speaks out against them is anti-Christian.

Believers in the American Dream, defenders of liberty and justice for all, had better start getting as angry, and as loud, and as in your face as the theocrats, or we’re headed for Shira law here in America.

You’ve all heard this one by now…right…?

The Associated Press reported today Dobson received a six-paragraph personal note from Alito. In the letter, Alito thanked Dobson for backing his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Read the note, “This is just a short note to express my heartfelt thanks to you and the entire staff of Focus on the Family for your help and support during the past few challenging months. I would also greatly appreciate it if you would convey my appreciation to the good people from all parts of the country who wrote to tell me that they were praying for me and for my family during this period.”

Alito went on to write, “As long as I serve on the Supreme Court I will keep in mind the trust that has been placed in me” and expressed his desire for a personal meeting with Dobson.

States have already begun passing anti-abortion laws so that Roberts and Alito can overturn Roe. And after they’ve accomplished that, expect them to start passing sodomy laws next so Lawrence can be overturned.

Theocracy. That’s what the democrats who wouldn’t filibuster Alito voted for. And that’s what everyone who voted for Bush last election voted for. Well, it looks like you’re going to get it.

If the following cartoon perplexes you a tad, you probably need to click here. And maybe here.

So I’m watching my local NBC affiliate do their nightly news thing, and I notice that the story about the West Virginia police chief who prevented a gay man who was dying of a heart attack from getting CPR had drawn the attention of the mainstream news media. I’ve been meaning to say something here about that, because the story really shines a cold hard light on the reality of what decades of relentless gay bashing by the religious right and the republicans does to gay people, but I’m still deep in this sleepless funk I’ve been in for weeks now and my outrage buffer is so maxed out now that I’m like that dog in those David lynch cartoons that just stands rigidly at the end of its leash completely immobilized by anger and I haven’t been able to type a word or skritch a line on paper for weeks now. But…I digress…

So…anyway…the news story deliberately obscures key facts of the story because the facts are so completely damning and journalists can’t take sides, and especially they can’t take sides when there are dead homosexuals involved. So when someone says that police chief Robert K. Bowman prevented Claude Green’s friend Billy Snead from giving him CPR, and tried to discourage the paramedics from doing the same because according to Bowman Green had HIV, never mind that they don’t bother pointing out that the reason the EMS workers ignored the drooling moron and kept on giving Green CPR was because you can’t fucking catch HIV from giving somebody CPR, they basically leave out of the story the part about how Green actually didn’t have HIV, and Bowman only assumed he did because he knew that Green was gay. Hey…he’s a 43 year old filthy homo, and didn’t Paul Cameron say that 43 is about as old as a homo gets? I’m surprised NBC News didn’t give Bowman credit for his remarkable restraint in not evacuating the entire town. But there’s still time for that I reckon.

Can I mention here how much I hate the news media? This is my blog…right? I can say what I want to here can’t I? Good. I fucking hate the news media.

I haven’t been posting much lately because I’m so damn tired all the time. Sorry. I’m still struggling with this sleep problem. It’s all I can do to drag myself to the drawing board to do my cartoons and I’m horribly behind on that too. Hopefully I’ll have this week’s up by the end of the day.

Living in a house I have all to myself is probably not helping my general health out any, a thing I’m finding both ironic and darkly amusing. They say the “Gay Lifestyle” is so bad for your health, yet I am about as far away from the scene as a person can be and my health these days isn’t all that great. I don’t drink much at all, and my casual drug use (remember, I’m a sixties kid) stopped pretty much back in the early 80s. I am not, and never have been, interested in casual hooking up. I’m a romantic. I want…no…I demand the emotional connection too. So I don’t just go trolling the bars like some people do when they feel themselves getting lonely. (No…when I feel myself getting lonely I put it into artwork that, trust me, you don’t want to see) So I’m at somewhat less at risk for HIV and other STD’s. But being constantly single is stressful on your health too, in ways science is only now beginning to appreciate. And when there is nobody in your life to nag you to take care of yourself, you tend not to.

I could be living the perfect ex-gay lifestyle right now, only not quite as miserable inside, because I’m not afraid of what the sight of a beautiful guy does to me. But that beauty seems so out of reach now, that I’m starting to wonder if maybe I shouldn’t just stop looking at guys anyway. It just makes me more miserable sometimes now, and it never used to do that. But then I might as well just crawl in a coffin instead of my bed, and I’m not ready for that. Celibacy is a healthy virtue only if you’re wired for it. Otherwise you’re just sleep walking through half a life like any party animal who isn’t paying attention to what they’re putting into, or doing with their body. It’s not sex that puts your health at risk, it’s alienation.

I’m shy, but I’m not this shy. I’m just too tired anymore to live a life and I wish I could fix that. So I’ve gained about ten pounds this winter, as my sleeping problems keep me sedentary. My work as a software engineer only complicates the matter: I am seated at a desk in front of a computer monitor most of my day. Then there is the drafting table. But at least I’m sometimes standing up while I’m working there. I don’t move about much any more. Except to drag myself to bed…often…during the day. And there’s nobody here to get me the hell off the bed and out the door to do something…anything…

Trying to fit in to a MySpace world…

Gay Swing Dancing. Dang. Just…dang. If I could have gone to this kind of thing when I was in high school, I might have danced a little when I was a teenager.

Canadians have all the fun…

There are think tanks, and there are propaganda mills, and it really isn’t all that hard to tell between them. Via Brad DeLong, Mark Kleiman has a simple, straightforward bullshit test anyone can apply:

Is there any hope of getting the press to distinguish between (1) the original “think tank” — the RAND Corporation — and comparably respectable universities-without-students (Brookings, the Urban Institute) where real social scientists (and real natural scientists, engineers, mathematicians, historians, and policy analysts) do real research and analysis looking for real answers to real questions and (2) faux “think tanks” (Heritage, Cato, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse) set up for the purpose of providing “studies” in support of pre-determined ideological points?

The distinction isn’t hard to make. If you have to read the report to know the conclusion, it’s a real think tank. If you know the conclusion as soon as you know the topic and where it was written, you’re dealing with a phony.

He goes on to say this trick works for faux news outlets to like…uhm…Fox… This is such a simple, Obvious thing, that in a way it’s a damning indictment of the U.S. news media that it even needs to be pointed out. How much of what you hear on the news comes from these propaganda mills, funded by right wing billionaires, and how much of what you hear amounts to actual fact-finding? Let’s face it, very little. And it’s not the fault of the propaganda mills, they’re just doing their jobs. Its the fault of our news media, that just doesn’t give a good goddamn about facts anymore. Sometime in the past few decades, facts stopped being important. And that was also the day America stopped being important to them.

I’ve been saying for years now that citing Paul Cameron or any of his bogus statistics in a discussion about homosexuality automatically makes that person either a liar or a cheat: someone either way who doesn’t care about what is and is not true. You can make the same case about a reporter who cites any of the big propaganda mills for a story. In an opinion piece it’s one thing…that’s a different playing field. But reportage that contains so much as a single piece of punctuation from one anyplace like Cato or Heritage or the Institute For Policy Studies isn’t journalism, it’s second hand propaganda, and that reporter is selling out not only their trade, not only the country that wrote freedom of the press into its constitution, but their human identity and yours and mine.

That’s what’s going on here. When you see fundamentalist zealots attacking science and science education, when you see them insisting that schools teach not the facts but the controversy, when you see them demanding that science place their vein throbbing religious babbling on equal footing with Newton and Gauss and Heisenberg and Einstein and Darwin and Watson and Crick, think of all the major daily newspapers and network news broadcasts nowadays that do that very thing. So newspapers give us words that mean nothing. So schools teach children lessons that mean nothing. And so America becomes nothing. And so we become nothing. As Jacob Bronowski once said, when you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard in it also what a human is.

1. Where did you graduate from and what year?
   Charles W. Woodward, Bethesda Maryland, class of 1972. Maybe someday MySpace will let me add it to my schools list. I’ve only asked them about a hundred times or so…
2. did u have school pride?
   Yes, but the rest of the kids called it Apathy Day. I was among the pesky prideful minority. Not ‘Up With People’ delirious, but I liked my school.
3. Was your prom a night to remember?
   Gay kids didn’t have prom nights worth remembering in 1972.
4. Do you own all 4 Yearbooks?
   Oh yes. Still treasured.
5. What was the worst trouble you ever got into?
   I mostly stayed out of trouble in High School. High School was fun. Jr. High was another story.
6. What kind of people did you hang out with?
   I hung out with the stage crew geeks, the VCR crew geeks and the art class geeks.
7. What was your number 1 choice of College in HS?
   Didn’t have money for college, so I never thought much about it. I did eventually go to Montgomery Jr. College.
8. what radio station did u rock out too?
   WHFS. You have to love a radio station with a DJ named Weasel.
9. Were you involved in any organizations or clubs?
   Art Club. Photography club. Film club. Student Newspaper (ironically enough it was named ‘The Advocate’.) And though I wasn’t officially part of the Yearbook team I did a lot of photography for them.
10. What were your favorite classes in high school?
    Art. Science. Photography seminar. Social Studies. Newspaper. I did both cartoons and photography for the student newspaper.
11. Who was your big crush in High school?
    His nickname was Tico… I remember his face and his smile and the way he walked more vividly then I remember most of my classmates.
12. Would you say you’ve changed a lot since highschool?
    I’ve changed a lot. I’ve changed hardly at all.
13. What do you miss the most about it?
    The scene with my friends. Discovering the world when everything you saw was still mostly something you’d never seen or known about before.
14. Your worst memory of HS?
    Getting ridiculed by some teachers in front of the rest of the class for not doing my homework. That happened a lot.
15. Did you have a car?
    No. Rode the bus…rode my bike… Hitched rides with friends.
16. What were your school colors?
    Purple and White.
17. Who were your fav. teachers?
    Mr. Moran (my art teacher). Mr. Ochse (sociology). Mr. Bunday (science).
18. Did you own a cell phone in high school?
    Class of 1972. Class of 1972. Class of 1972. Cell phones? Ha! My home had a dial phone…okay? A party line dial phone…
19. Did you leave campus for lunch?
    No. Not allowed. Some of my friends would but I was a bit of a wuss.
20. If so, where was your fav. place to go eat?
    They usually went to Gino’s. And if you remember Gino’s you probably graduated sometime in the 1970s too.
21. Were you always late to class?
    Never. Well, sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time. Okay, just about always. Occasionally I was on time to class…
22. Did you ever have to stay for Saturday School?
    Not had to…but there there were things the clubs sometimes did on Saturdays.
23. Did you ever ditch?
    Not in High School. I liked High School. I ditched Jr. High sometimes.
24. What kind of Job did u have?
    Burger Chef. And if you remember Burger Chef you probably graduated etc…etc…
25. When it comes time for the reunion will you be there?
    I went to the twenty year one. Seems like they didn’t have a thirty. If they have another I will. But like I said before…we had an Apathy Day…
26. Do you wish you were still in high school?
    No. It’s good to be grown up. It’s good to live in the present. I have a cell phone now. I have satellite TV and radio. I work on the Hubble Space Telescope project and the Next Generation Space Telescope project. I have a house of my own. I can put my cartoons on the web where people all over the world can see them. Cameras are digital and I can develop my images in a computer. I have the Internet, and gay people don’t have to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes anymore. Advertisers and magazines market to gay people. Gay high school kids can take their true love to the prom now. Gay people are seriously fighting for the right to marry. 2006 is a good time to be alive. But some days I wish I could go back to 1972 for a visit.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m a little quiet here lately. That’s in large measure because my sleep disorder is taking a big toll on me since I left the sleep clinic. I had a follow-up last Tuesday with a doctor there who went over the results of my sleep over with me. To make it short it seems as though there may be some sleep apnea after all, but it is not severe. I don’t stop breathing, I just have these repeated little moments of difficulty that being me, not to complete wakefulness most of the time, but seem to pop me right out of a sound sleep nonetheless. So I spend a lot of time at the threshold of wakefulness when I should be sound asleep, not fully awake, but not fully asleep either.

Where it got bad was when he perscribed a new sleep medication for me, Rozerem, which he said was supposed to act on the melatonin receptors in my brain. The problem is it is working as poorly as all the other sleep medications that have ever been prescribed for me, with the exception of Ambian, which proved to be too addictive. It’s the typical pattern: one good night’s sleep on the new medication, followed by nothing but misery. My third night on Rozerem, I wne to bed around 11pm, drowsy, and popped wide awake at one in the morning.

I’m going to stay on it for another week and if there is no improvement I’ll try to call this sleep clinic doctor and tell him it isn’t working. In the meantime they’ve scheduled me for another sleep over so they can caibrate a CPAP machine for me. I have not a clue how well I’ll be able to sleep with one of those damn things strapped to my face, but at this point I’ll try anything.

So for the past week or so I’ve been a very groggy guy. I’m getting some long overdue household chores done, but I’m not much leaving the house or doing anthing I’d planned to do for the week I was on vacation. That’s not to say the vacation has been a waste. I needed the break from work. But I didn’t go anywhere like I’d wanted, or get nearly as much done around the house as I’d planned. I hate being this tired all the time.

I love watching the Olympic men’s figure skating events. It’s just about the only thing I care to watch during the winter Olympics. But I have to get myself out of the habit of picking favorites, because mine never seem to get any medals, and I’m starting to feel like I’m cursing them just for wanting them to win.

The other night I watched Johnny Weir skate an achingly beautiful program, and even I could tell he wasn’t at full steam. There was a reason for it – as it turned out he missed the bus to the arena and was almost late for his performance. But what he did give to the audience was just stunning. It wasn’t enough to put him on the platform though.

The other stunning performance I saw came from Japanese skater Takahashi Daisuke, who fell once, but got back into it right away, and was poetry in motion for the rest of it. Between the two of them I just could not take my eyes off the tube, and I hate television anymore. But neither one of them won anything, and I was not greatly impressed by the winners. Oh, I understand why they won…they had all the really difficult manuvers down pat…but in my opinion their moves were not nearly as beautiful. You can dance the dance perfectly, and still not be beautiful. On the other hand you can be so beautiful in your moves that little imperfections in timing and difficulty just go right past. A slight gesture of the hands here, a tilt of the head just so, a lovely arc and motion of the body there… Still photography just doesn’t do figure skating justice, and I’ve seen some first rate photography of the events. You have to see them in motion. Weir is just amazing, I’ve never seen him give a so-so performance, and even when he is off his game like he was last night he is so goddamned beautiful to watch. And Daisuke, never mind the fall he took, just kept my eyes riveted to the tube. But sheer beauty alone does not win medals.

In fact, in men it invites contempt. I was reading a mocking review of Weir’s performance on the web this morning and then noticed that it came from Fox News. Now you just know the bar stool grunts at Fox News only bother with the Figure Skating event to mock the pretty boys, and oogle the teenaged girls in their skimpy costumes. But the homophobia in sports coverage of men’s figure skating is always there, like a background hum. There’s open speculation about Weir’s sexual orientation and I have very little doubt that’s hurting him not just with the sports writers, but also with some people in the Olympic community. Why wasn’t somebody there to make sure he got to the event on time? Why didn’t someone make sure he knew the bus schedules had been suddenly changed? And there’s Fox News the day after, mocking his costume and his ego, as if athletes didn’t have egos, and the homophobic contempt is barely concealed. They did the same thing to Rudi Galindo once upon a time. Weir isn’t talking about his sexuality and it’s hard to blame him. I doubt the sports community bigotry Patricia Nell Warren described in her book The Front Runner has changed very much since she wrote it. You can be openly gay, and you can win the gold, but you can’t do both.

Howard Cruse has a new cartoon up on Pop Image that you should check out. It’ll be in five parts, the first of which was posted yesterday. It’s the finale to the Young Bottoms In Love series, which you should also check out, because there are a lot of good stories there. I wish I’d had comics like that to read when I was a teenager.

Howard also has a new blog up and running here. I hope he has fun with it. Looks like Howard’s using Movable Type (I’m a computer geek, I look at the source code). At some point hopefully I’ll have my own blog moved to WordPress. But I need a few changes still in the template to make that happen and neither I nor my new web host seem to have the time to spare for it right now. So for the moment I’m still a hand rolled operation.

God help me I realized last night that I can buy all my old favorite 45rpm singles from my teen years, the ones I can barely listen to anymore because they’re too worn out, on iTunes, and I downloaded a bunch of them and then realized as I was playing them today what a love lorn teen I must have been back then, because my favorites were almost all these soulful love songs. Yet I didn’t have the slightest interest in the dating and mating game back when I heard these songs for the first time. Something in them, in the music, in the soulful ache and wonder and joy of love, must have touched me even then, because I played these tunes over and over.

So here I am on Valentine’s Day playing a bunch of love songs from my past and wondering just what was going on my mind back in those days before I had even the slightest interest in the dating and mating game.

Here’s my Valentine’s Day iPod playlist. The stereotype for gay guys of a certain age is that they’re all Diana Ross and the Supremes fans. But you can pretty much see from this that my weakness back then was The Four Tops. Point of fact, “Bernadette” was the very first 45 I ever bought.

• Bernadette – The Four Tops
• Baby I Need Your Loving – The Four Tops
• Reach Out I’ll Be There – The Four Tops
• Walk Away RenÈe – The Four Tops
• Everlasting Love – Robert Knight (lots of good singers have covered this but…I’m sorry this is the one…)
• Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing – Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell
• You Keep Me Hanging On – Diana Ross and the Supremes
• Jimmy Mack – Martha & The Vandellas
• Scarborough Fair – Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66
• Wichita Lineman – Glen Campbell

Here’s hoping the music in your lives this Valentine’s Day was soulful and sweet. And if, like me, you haven’t found your other half yet, and it seems to you like it’s all you can do some days to keep the aloneness at bay, and you feel detached from a world you can only observe but not enter into, here’s wishing you all the luck you need, and hoping that your long walk alone is soon over, and a lover’s embrace wakes you gently from your lonely dream, and brings you back into the world.