I really hope you’re okay.  You’re like Schrodinger’s Cat sometimes, except even when you’re observed you’re still in an unknown state.  I really hope you’re okay.

-That Guy In Baltimore

This…

You’re my son, no matter what. Whether you love women or repress your homosexuality your entire life makes not the slightest difference to me. Why should it? Why should it matter if you’re straight? Why should it matter if you’re gay but pretending to be straight in every conceivable way? Why should I care who you have feelings for as long as I’m always led to believe it’s a woman? Well, I don’t care. And when the time comes to tell me, I promise I’ll hear you out: If you’re straight, great. But if you’re not, and you tell me you are even though it destroys you inside? That’s just fine, too.

From The Onion…America’s Finest News Source.  Actually, I know some people who would probably not find this funny at all…

This came across my Facebook stream the other day…

I think I’ll name mine The Network That Dare Not Speak Its Name…

This came across my news stream this morning, from The Local…

“A Bavarian town has shut its border with the Czech Republic following a spate of break-ins. The Bavarians suspect the Czechs are responsible for the crimes and they came up with the plan to resurrect the old barrier in a pub.”

Man…when Bavarians get to thinking up things to do to their neighbors in a pub it’s never good.

This came across my Facebook stream just now…

Deceptive Clichés: Oktoberfest  and Bavaria’s Recipe for  Success

Non-Bavarians and other foreigners tend to believe that the raucous festival amounts to nothing more than a collective drinking binge, a massive party with rollercoaster rides and erotic displays of tight dirndls and deerskin trousers set to the oompah-pah of brass bands. But there is something more refined going on beneath all the noise and clinking of beer mugs.   Oktoberfest is actually a 35-hectare (86-acre) stage where performances of great importance play out simultaneously.

They are about the odd, prosperous southern German state of Bavaria, which at its heart has remained a small, proud nation. They are about the state party, the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), which, in the frenzy of costumes and successful election campaigns, portrays itself as the legitimate successor to the abdicated monarchy. They are about a society’s touching devotion to tradition and local celebrities. And they are about a city where six global corporations listed on Germany’s blue chip stock exchange, the DAX, compete for power and influence — and thus as many seats as possible in Oktoberfest beer tents…

Ah yes…   the odd prosperous southern German state of Bavaria.   It is not the Bavaria you see in Epcot Germany.   Something I learned: You can take the boy out of Bavaria, but not Bavaria out of the boy.   He might flee to Disney’s Bavaria, which as you would expect is a happier, small world after all kinda place.   But that is the Disney version, in a place where dreams come true, and all the ever afters are happy, and the Bavaria in the boy will always remind him that it isn’t real, dreams are merely dreams, life is short and bitter, but at least there is beer.

Prost!

I read the English language version of Der Spiegel and get the German news magazine’s posts regularly in my Facebook stream in both English and German. The native German version usually contains a bunch more than the English translated one, and this morning the following appeared in my news page:

Im neuen DER SPIEGEL geht es besonders um die Steuerpläne der Union, mit denen der SPD eine Koalition schmackhaft gemacht werden soll. Ein weiteres Thema ist die Steueroase Deutschland: Weil in den Finanzämtern Fahnder und Prüfer fehlen, entgehen dem Staat Milliarden.

Außerdem: Schlechtere Schulnoten bei übergewichtigen Kindern, “Ermüdungserscheinungen” bei Bundespräsident Gauck, BND belauschte im Kalten Krieg führende Ost-Politker.

Facebook helpfully provides a translation link, powered by Bing which seems to be using the same translation engine that Google does. That last paragraph is translated as…

Also: Lower school grades in obese children, “Fatigue” President Gauck, BND overheard in the cold war leading East leaders.

What catches my eye is how “Ermüdungserscheinungen” is translated simply as “Fatigue”. The concept of a President of Fatigue is delightful somehow, but I know from  looking at it this is one of those massive German words made up of other German words all strung together, so I decide to try and decode it to see if I can figure out what they’re trying to say about the President of Germany.

Google also translates “Ermüdungserscheinungen” as simply “Fatigue”. Beolingus doesn’t know what the hell that word means and it usually gets German words Google and Babelfish doesn’t (Babelfish doesn’t seem to be with us anymore). But enter “fatigue” into Google Translate and you get a bunch of possible German words back for it.  Ah…of course…

Think of how it is that Eskimos have so many words for snow. It’s not that Germans are always tired, they are an existentially weary people and I guess weight of their lives gives them a need to keep cobbling together new German words every so often to describe how existence is a never ending drain upon the human soul. My Baptist grandmother was like this, but unlike Germans who just accept their lot in life, she hated everything which made her unpleasant company.

The root word in this string is “Ermüdung”, which means “Fatigue” Pulling apart the rest of it in Google Translate I get something about “these phenomena”. I think the word is trying to describe fatigue that is the consequence of localized phenomena, and the sentence is trying to tell me that poor President Gauck creates an atmosphere of fatigue everywhere he goes, or that he’s President of Germany because Germans are tired of everything.

Nap dreams are the weirdest ones.

I live on a dead end street. There is an access road that goes to the alley behind my block of rowhouses, but on the maps and as far as the city is concerned Redfern Avenue ends a few feet from my front door. But in my dreams it goes on forever. I walk down it often, though sometimes I also drive. Every car I have ever owned is parked on the gravel shoulders, and every place I have ever lived, and every school I ever went to is somewhere further on. Some nights I walk past them and keep going, just to see what’s there. If you go far enough it is always different then the last time you walked there. Time is like that the further away you get from the world we live in while awake. Just before you reach the beginning of time (or the end, I can never tell), you pass the house of the oldest handyman in the world.

He lives in a little stucco house on the side of a hill. Inside against all the walls are all the tools that ever were, going back to the age of flint, and in the basement and the attic are every spare part that ever had a catalog number. He greets you at the door with a friendly smile and you can’t help but smile back. His face is aged and full of lines and his hair is white as snow. He wears overalls that were once green but now faded and gray. His cap is wrinkled and worn because he often uses it as a handle, and the visor casts a shadow over his eyes, making them hard to look back into; but you never should because if you do you’ll wake up and forget your dream. There is a name patch sown on his shirt, but in my sleep I can never read it.

He can rewire a 1948 GE toaster, make a 1953 Muntz TV work again by passing a small fork made of pure silver over its vacuum tubes until he finds the bad one. He can straighten a crooked door frame by shaking a carpenter square at it. He can fix a Kaiser Manhattan’s seized inline six by tapping its spark plugs lightly with his fingers and humming a tune I can never recall when awake. Once he fixed a broken electrical transformer by calling down the lightning, and directing it through the winds with a magnet he keeps in his pocket.

In this dream I see my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto, beside the road and decide I want to take a drive in it. But as I get in I notice the paint on it is fading. So I go back home and look online, only to discover that nobody sells that color anymore. A boy always has a fondness for his first car, even if it was mean to him and refused to start sometimes because it was being cranky that day,   so I take a walk to see the Handyman. He is there at the door waiting for me when I arrive, and he invites me inside. I tell him about my car and scratches his chin and then pulls a straight edge razor with a white handle out of his pocket. He tells me to scrape the old sunlight off the hood of my car with it and bring it to him. Paint he tells me, only shows color by trapping other colors out of the sunlight. The reason paint fades he says, is because of all that trapped sunlight wanting to get back out. If I could bring him all the color the paint had trapped, he could make me an exact match of the original factory color. So I walk back to the Pinto and began to scrap the old sunlight off it. It takes weeks.

Eventually I have a small bar of trapped sunlight, dirty orange in color and the consistency of wet clay. I bring it to the Handyman and he puts it into a can of white paint. The paint he tells me, will free the sunlight, taking its color with it out of the white, leaving behind only the color my car was when it left the factory. He pokes a finger into the paint and begins to stir it and it turns a bright blue, exactly like my car was before.

I stare into the blue and it gets brighter and brighter…and I wake up.

Nap dreams are the weirdest ones.

The evening of my abrupt trip back home from Walt Disney World I had a dream. I’d made the trip back from Orlando in a haze of deep depression; the kind I usually endure over the winter, around February, around Valentine’s Day.

Before sleep, as I lay in my motel bed and read my Facebook stream, I saw Wil Wheaton fretting about not wanting to go to sleep for fear of having night terrors. He has very bravely and publicly talked about his struggles with depression and I assume that the night terrors are a part of that. The deep depression I feel now as I turn in for the night isn’t of the clinical sort, or at any rate I don’t think it is. The evening before I had given a small gift of gourmet chocolates to a certain someone for his birthday, and he handed them back to me. The lonely ache I am feeling this night is almost like a second home to me now, and it is not night terrors I am worried about. Some dreams scare the steaming shit out of you but then you wake up and it’s just a dream. But some dreams, not terrifying, play with your emotions like a dog plays with a stuffed rabbit.

I’m in a coffee house somewhere I don’t recognize, chatting with a handsome guy who I’ve never seen before but I somehow recognize in this particular dream as an old boyfriend from many years. We chat casually about this and that and then out of the blue it seems, he asks me to marry him. Overjoyed, I tell him yes, yes I will.

Then we are in in our tuxedos standing together at the altar. The church is old, but more of a simple meeting house kind of church than the Baptist churches I grew up in. Its old wooden pews seem relaxed and comfortable, not stiff and unyielding. There are tall windows of unstained glass through which pure golden sunlight shines through, free and clear. Oddly, I see rows of old wooden bookshelves tucked between the windows, full of books. In my dream the thought of a church chapel doubling as its library delights me. It speaks to me that my boyfriend, now my spouse-to-be, brought me to this place to be married. I am overwhelmed with joy.

We make our vows and the minister pronounces us married. Oddly, he holds up the marriage license for us and everyone there to see and says that “Now it’s official”. I can’t read what the document says but that’s not unusual. I’ve written before about how for some reason I can almost never read anything in my dreams.

Everyone adjourns to a room next to the chapel where a reception is taking place. I suddenly realize there was no marriage kiss at the altar, so I walk over to my spouse and embrace him happily, give him a delighted kiss on the mouth, and tell him how much I love him and how happy I am to be married to him. As I do this I am thinking how sure I was this day would never happen for me, and it did after all. I am overwhelmed with joy.

He pulls gently away, smiling, but I can see he is very embarrassed about something. So are the people standing nearby. I step back and my spouse and our guests begin talking among themselves, as if to ignore what just happened. Something seems very wrong all of a sudden, but I don’t know what.

I step outside, confused. Didn’t I just get married? Didn’t he ask me to marry him? Then I realize there was no exchange of rings either. I am walking though an old part of town where the church is situated; a smallish main street with shops, all closed I am assuming because it is Sunday and here they still don’t open things on Sunday. As I walk I can see my reflection in the little shop windows, in my tux, walking alone down an empty main street. I begin to realize that this wasn’t a wedding after all, it was a rehearsal, and I was not the one getting married to my old boyfriend, he had merely asked me to stand in for someone else, who could not be there for that rehearsal.

But this theory is confusing too.   Didn’t he ask me to marry him?   Didn’t we have a marriage license? But I could not read the names on it.   I glance at myself in the shop windows again, and oddly, for some reason, start practicing skipping down the sidewalk, like I used to do when I was a kid.

Still not sure that was what happened, I go back to the reception trying to think of a way of asking my boyfriend if he was satisfied with how things went without admitting that I don’t actually know what is going on and getting an answer from him that will tell me. The ersatz reception has moved outside now and everyone is enjoying themselves. I walk up to my boyfriend but before I can say anything his spouse-to-be drives up in their car, towing a small hardware trailer full of gardening things.   Now I know.   The Spouse-To-Be was out buying things for their house and could not be there, so I was asked to stand in for him for the rehearsal.

They embrace and he asks my boyfriend how the rehearsal went and I wake up.

A dim morning light filters through the motel curtains. I check the clock. It’s a little after 6am. I get up to pack the car and finish the drive home, alone.

Fake eggs with odd yellow shade spotted in Singapore

“Early this morning I wanted to cook some Maggie mee, and I found that this egg looks like the kind of fake eggs I saw in videos from China.

“Is the fake egg scam in Singapore now?”

The fake potato chip, cheese and lemonade scams have been here in the U.S. for decades now.   Fake chocolate coming soon so I hear.

The dream world can be an amazing, lovely place to spend some time.   But it has its drawbacks.   Some of the following is obvious, some not so much, at least to me…

The Part Of My Brain That Can Read. I am completely illiterate in my dreams.   Whenever I come across a book or sign or anything I need to read, I just can’t.   I can see the text, I just can’t make sense of it.     This is interesting in a somewhat disturbing way: in real life I am a voracious reader, but I’ve read that others experience this same effect in dreams.   I assume it’s because that part of your brain is…well…sleeping.   Sometimes, but very very seldomly, I remember the text well enough that when I wake up I can then read it.   And as you would expect, it’s pretty odd, random and meaningless.   Like the title to the book I found on a pile of trash in a bookstore that I was so frustrated I could not read the frustration woke me up and I remembered it and it was “Old Book”

The Part Of My Brain That Sees Color. This is also something I’ve read that others experience.   My dreams are almost exclusively in black & white, though lately I’ve experienced the occasional color moment.

Light Switches. Lately in my dreams, whenever I find myself entering a dark room or house and I try to turn on the lights, nothing works.   This is usually a prelude to the dream going bad on me, but sometimes it’s just frustrating. I’m writing this post just now because last night it happened again…I was walking into a house to find something, and it was dark inside and I tried various light switches and nothing would come on, and I remember in my dream getting really irritated that I was having “that damn light problem” again so I pulled open some window shades and let light in that way.   At least the sun still works in my dreams.

Bullets. While being pursued by thugs or monsters in my dreams, reliably when I reach for a gun the gun works just fine but the bullets have no effect.   I don’t get the click, click, it’s EMPTY, effect other friends of mine do.   My gun is loaded and I can shoot just fine, but nothing I hit seems to care.   It’s gotten to the point now that I usually just start beating the damn things over the head with the gun rather than bothering to pull the trigger.

Toilets. This is usually my dream telling me that I need to wake up and go to the bathroom.   When in a dream I get the urge to go, and I start looking around for a bathroom, inevitably in every bathroom I check the toilet is missing.   The hole in the floor where it connects is there alright, but the toilet is gone.

Automobiles. This isn’t something that does not work, so much as one very odd thing I almost never do in my dreams, that I would expect after having lived to the threshold of old age to have done at least once.   In real life I absolutely love driving.   In my dreams I am nearly always walking.   Which is also something I like doing, don’t get me wrong. When the weather is nice I am always out for a walk, and I bought my house where I did specifically so I would be close enough to work I would walk it.   I grew up in a household without a car, so maybe this is part of it.   But I have owned a car since I was old enough to drive and I love to drive too and it’s just odd that in my dreams I never seem to even think to drive anywhere.   And what is more, there are almost never any cars in my dreams, even parked nearby.   Trains yes.   Lots of trains for some odd reason.   Train tracks and trains show up in the strangest places in my dreams.   But the one and only time I can remember ever dreaming about driving somewhere, it was This Horrible Dream that still creeps me out.

It wasn’t often some guy I thought was drop dead good looking and sexy asked me out on a date, but that happened one day when a fellow user of a gay BBS I did volunteer work for sent me an email complementing me on some posts I’d made and calling me “intense”. I was happily taken by surprise. At the end of that email, he asked if we could meet up.

I figured it wasn’t going to go well when the first thing he told me when we met at the Dupont Circle Metro, was how much he hated my sunglasses…

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
-Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride”

Here’s another word people keep using: Homosexual.

So I’m seeing the chatter about how this new Gallup poll (you know…the folks who did so well predicting the outcome of the last election…), gives us a more accurate figure for the percentage of gay people in America than Kinsey’s ten percent, and I can only conclude they aren’t paying attention to what they’re reading, don’t understand where that ten percent figure came from and/or what the Kinsey scale actually was.

Kinsey’s scale of zero through six, where zero (exclusively heterosexual) and six (exclusively homosexual) described the sexual behavior of his subjects over the previous three years of their lives, based on extensive face to face interviews with them. The report stated that ten percent of American males were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55” by grouping the percentages of the five (Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual) and six positions on the scale together to come up with that ten percent figure. Later gay rights activists used this to claim that ten percent of the population is homosexual.

That’s an arguable, but perfectly defensible claim based on Kinsey’s data which, again, came from subjects who were only asked about their actual sexual behavior for the previous three years. But it is measuring a different thing than Gallup asked, which was…

“Do you, personally, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender?”

See the difference? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The problem has always been the percentage of people who are homosexual you get in any given study depends on how the people who did the study define what “homosexual” is.   It seems so clear cut and obvious on the surface of it and yet different people, even in all intellectual honesty about it, have different definitions…let alone those who want to marginalize us when it’s convenient (their numbers are too small for society to cater to their whims), and exaggerate our numbers when convenient (nearly all child molesters are homosexuals…it’s how they perpetuate themselves since they can’t reproduce…).

At this stage in my life, after all I’ve seen of this world, I am still comfortable with that ten percent figure.   But I’m calling it desire, not necessarily how someone behaves or how they self identify.   I Know people, and so do many of us who are gay, who would fit comfortably in either that Kinsey five or six position and yet would nonetheless have assured Gallup that they were heterosexual.   It’s called “The Closet” and a lot of people are still in it….some still in denial, some not.   In my generation and earlier especially, you see a lot of gay men who married young, as a way of turning themselves straight.   Some of these have remained in those marriages, living behind that mask still, after all that has passed by them in the struggle, and I can’t find it in my heart to blame them for that.   They love their wives very much.   Add to that those of us who are out in various stages, even out to everyone they know and work with, and who would be unwilling to answer that question from a stranger.

I still think ten percent is probably right. But even those of us who are militantly out and proud don’t always seem so to the passing stranger.   There is no gay lifestyle.   You likely won’t know unless you are close enough to a person to know, and even then you might not.   And still, even today, many people simply don’t want to know it about themselves. It does not surprise me either that perhaps only three to four percent rather than ten are willing to live openly just as they are, and fight the fight for our human dignity that still needs fighting.

“Do you, personally, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender”, is a question worth asking of course, and maybe someday better researchers than the louts at Gallup will ask that question.   But it’s really not the point.   The word does not mean that.

You can sit here in the waiting room, or you can wait there in the sitting room…

Via The Local – Germany…

‘Ice cream parlour killer’ chopped up two men

…She cried as she explained that she only chopped up his body with a chainsaw once it had started to decompose – and temporarily put the pieces in a freezer before taking them to the cellar and encasing them in concrete…

Something to tack onto my refrigerator to remind me not to get romantically involved with a married German…

Danger…deep thinking ahead.   Sorry…but I’ve been chewing on this since my last post about “Why is there something rather than nothing”. Probably it’s all the Science Channel stuff I’ve been watching lately.

Run it backwards. The question I mean. Or…forwards let’s say.   Instead of why is there something rather than nothing, ask how do you get nothing out of something. I’m serious here. Supposedly matter is never destroyed, it’s simply converted into the energies it sprang from, and energy is never lost, it simply goes to entropy…a state where you can’t do anything with it. That, as I understand it, is the rule by which our physical universe works.   The following is from Wikipedia…

The four laws of thermodynamics are:

• Zeroth law of thermodynamics: If two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they must be in thermal equilibrium with each other. This law helps define the notion of temperature.

• First law of thermodynamics: Heat and work are forms of energy transfer. Energy is invariably conserved but the internal energy of a closed system changes as heat and work are transferred in or out of it. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind are impossible.

• Second law of thermodynamics: The entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium — the state of maximum entropy of the system — in a process known as “thermalization”. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.

• Third law of thermodynamics: The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches zero. The entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically zero, and in all cases is determined only by the number of different ground states it has. Specifically, the entropy of a pure crystalline substance at absolute zero temperature is zero.

Okay…so as I read this, and as I have always understood it, you can’t destroy energy.   Energy is invariably conserved… You just move it from one place or form to another.   You need energy that hasn’t degraded into entropy to do work, but when you do the work, transfer energy, entropy increases.   No transfer of energy is ever 100 percent efficient.   Some is always lost to entropy.   Eventually entropy is all there is.   But as I understand it, the energy is still there.

So…the thinking these days as I understand it, is given that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing as the universe gets bigger, the end game of our universe is The Big Chill.   That is, it spreads itself so thin the energy in it approaches absolute zero and it’s all entropy nearly all the matter in it has decayed and maybe there are a few protons left but even those will eventually decay and then time simply stops.   (the best definition I ever heard of time was when a physicist on a science program I was watching ages ago said that “time is one damn thing after another”.)   Fine.   I’m told physicists working in the standard model will basically dismiss questions about “what happened before the “Big Bang” as meaningless since time did not exist before there was a universe.   There was no “before”.   Okay.   Fine.   So no time before there was time, and time will stop eventually.   But at the end of time and beyond if energy isn’t gone (let alone the space) then you don’t have a state of absolute nothing.   You still have a “something”.   And from all I can grok here you can’t make it go gone.

So once you have something you can’t make it nothing again.   You can move the something around but you can’t make it simply disappear.   Energy is invariably conserved.   If that’s true, then you can’t ever reach a state of absolute nothing.   Not in this universe, not in any universe.   If you could find a way to drain all the leftover energy out of this universe, all you’re doing then is just putting it somewhere else.   If it cannot be destroyed then how do we say it nonetheless had to have been created at some point?   If the question is where did the something in the Big Bang come from, then it’s looking to me like the answer is, it was always there.

So maybe we’re back to the concept of forces that are simply eternal.   Which is as hard to wrap your head around as absolute nothing, but then you pretty much had to figure whatever the ultimate answer is it would be.