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.

Beware of lovers bearing gifts…

I’m seeing in my web server logs that people are finding a previous Mark and Josh Valentine’s day cartoon, one I did in 2003…this one:

…and so I’m getting another wee traffic spike around here. What’s interesting is that they’re finding it via Yahoo Image Search for Valentine’s Day cartoons. Sure enough, you go to Yahoo and click on images and search on “valentine’s day cartoon” and that cartoon is the very first image in the list. But there is no plain text anywhere on the page containing the word “valentine”. The caption is part of the image file. There is no clear text in the image binary besides my copyright notice.

So how is the Yahoo search engine indexing that page to the words “Valentine’s day?” Is it OCR-ing the caption? Is it indexing it based on the date of publication? The information systems geek in me is curious.

Just for grins I tried the same search string on google images and that cartoon does not show up at all in the results. Yahoo’s doing something different.

Anyway…I feel a tad gratified that I could give same sex couples a little Valentine’s day presence, if only in a search engine. Not my intent…I basically preach to the choir here…but it’s satisfying all the same. Yes, this should be our day too.

[Update…] Josh had somewhat longer hair in that cartoon. But just for that one day. I was drawing their hair mussed up and I must have gotten a little carried away. Swear I didn’t even notice it until just now…

So I was…like…over at the Love In Action site…doing a little online research…and I came across the new staff photo…and my jaw drops a little, and I stare at it for a little while, thinking has Smid gone completely nuts or what..? And then it dawns on me…

Well…the money’s got to come from somewhere…

All in all, I’d rather not have to. Far as I’m concerned the only redeeming thing about having to sleep is that you get to dream. Dreams are very cool things. But having to skip eight hours or so out of every day is something I could live without. Life is short enough as it is to be playing dead for about a third of it.

But our bodies demand it, and you never know that more then when you can’t sleep. I’ve had this chronic insomnia problem now for nearly a decade. It started out with occasional bouts of sleeplessness and now it’s at the point where a single good night’s sleep is a rare thing. My night consists of alternating periods of restless sleep and wakefulness, followed by a day that consists of many little naps that don’t refresh me at all.

It’s taking it’s toll. For the past year I’ve felt as if I’m living half a life and as I said, life is too short to be missing a lot of time out of it. I’ve tried meditation. I’ve tried diet adjustments. I’ve been prescribed sleeping pills, but the ones that actually work for me are horribly addictive. Something is wrong here. It’s taken me years to convince a doctor of the seriousness of it, but recently I finally managed it, and got referred to the sleep clinic at Johns Hopkins.

I went for the initial interview last month. They took my vitals and medical history, and asked me a battery of questions, not only about my sleep habits but my personal lifestyle. What kind of work do I do? How to I usually spend my evenings? Do I smoke? Do I drink? Do I exercise? How often and how much? Then they scheduled me for a sleepover, where I’ll be wired up and monitored as I (try to) sleep.

That happens tonight. Hopefully they’ll see it all happening, and then I’ll know what the problem is. They asked about snoring and since I’m single I haven’t a clue whether I snore or not. But the snoring question is I think, about sleep apnea, and I’m hoping it’s that, and not some kind of brain/sleep problem that requires drugs to treat.

See…the thing about my sleeplessness is that my mind is almost hyperactive while it is happening. It’s the oddest, most uncomfortable feeling you can imagine: my body is dead tired, almost immobile with tiredness, and yet my mind is quite active. I want to get up and do things but I can’t because I’m so dog tired. So my mind just wanders and wanders until I finally get a few moments of sleep and then I’m awake again. A diagnosis of sleep apnea would be a relief actually.

I pack an overnight bag and check in tonight. They said I could bring my laptop and books to read. I’m hoping there’s a wireless access point there somewhere I can connect to, but it isn’t required. I can live without Internet for one night. My iPod comes along but my white noise maker doesn’t because they need to listen to me. I don’t think that will make much of a difference since I expect this room to be pretty quiet. They say it’ll be like a motel room. I had to buy pajamas (ugh! But I’m modest around strangers…) but I don’t think that will make a difference in my being able to sleep or not either. They say the wiring won’t bother me. I suppose they have it all down.

I’ll post about it when I get back. I’m curious to see how it all works. But then that kind of thing keeps my mind active, and my active mind is what I think is keeping me from getting sleep…

Tom Tomorrow has found an utterly charming way of dealing with comment thread bilge:

Also, a comments week rule arising from the Colbert thread: anyone who suggests that the hostís choice of a given topic is too frivilous when there are Serious Issues in the World To Be Solved will have their comment run through a pirate translator and reposted.

Sample comment: How can you waste time writing about your new book when there are children starving in the world?

Sample comment run through pirate translator: Yarrr! How can ye waste time writiní about your new book when thar be sprogs starviní in tí world?

Like that.

Yeah. Like that. But more so. I want people to feel free to speak their mind here, but you need to be engaged in what you’re talking about, even if I regard it as just a lot of mindless idiotic babble. Morons on the other hand, who just want to flit around from web site to web site posting crap in random comment threads like a bunch of bored street taggers can expect to be treated in my little corner of the world wide web as idle sport for carefree ridicule. It’s just the kinda guy I am. Hi Brian. Arr.

Spammers will be shot on sight, deep fried, rolled in sunflower seeds and fed to the birds.

Policy.