So tempting…

So very very tempting…

After a few false starts I’ve managed the upgrade.   At some point I might start looking for another theme since I very seldom update the right column anymore.   But for now all I wanted to do was get the blog on the current version of WordPress.

I am also running a class reunion site here that has been woefully neglected and now it’s so far behind in WordPress versions it’s not even displaying anymore and I had to take it down.   That’s going to be a manual upgrade process I am not looking forward to…

One of the things I wanted to do over my holiday vacation is upgrade the blog to the latest version of WordPress.   As I have some custom code in there it isn’t the most straightforward of processes.   But I have this entire site copied over to my household network and I can always go back if there is a major problem.   I’m just giving you this heads-up because it may not come back for a while when I do it….probably over the New Years holiday sometime when everyone is too hung over to be web surfing.

Folks stumble across this little internet space of mine now and then and a few stick around and I reckon I have to keep posting this so there aren’t any misunderstandings, particularly about the blog.

This is a life blog. I started doing this before blogging became a thing, before it became a legitimate alternative to the pop media and corporate news services, before it became a kind of citizen journalism.   ‘Blog’ back in the early days of the World Wide Web, was a kind of shorthand/slang for ‘Web Log’…little online diaries people posted on their personal web sites in the days before you could update your status on Facebook.   The first blogs, started by artists, who were thought by some to be crazy putting their entire lives out there for the whole world to see, were just artistic experiments.   Then it became a thing.   Particularly during the Bush presidency, and the Iraq war, as people became frustrated and angry with the mainstream news services.   Nowadays, many blogs are topical, political, outlets of citizen journalism.

But this is not that kind of site.   This is a life blog.   It is my life blog.   I vent a lot here about politics, but I am a gay man, who grew up during the cold war, and even worse, lived most of my life in the suburbs of Washington D.C., which isn’t exactly known for its rural pastoral arcadian lifestyle…

No, Seriously.   I did my duck and cover drills in elementary school.   I listened to the monthly tests of the air raid siren behind the apartment complex mom and I lived in.   I did my pre-induction physical six months before Nixon ended the Vietnam war.   I remember sitting at the desk in my underwear with a few dozen other guys filling out this form that asked things like were we ever communists, wondering if I should check the box that asked if I was a homosexual.   I lived through the counter-culture wars in the 1960s.   I marched and took photos at the Nixon Counter Inaugural. I came out to myself on December 15 1971 somewhere between 4 and 5PM. I have marched in every gay rights march on Washington since the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979.   I wandered among the panels of the Names Project quilt when it was first unveiled on the Washington Mall in 1987, terrified that I would find one with the name of a certain someone I first fell in love with once upon a time there among them.

So I tend to vent a lot about politics here.   But this is not a political blog.   It is a life blog.   I put stuff here on the blog, mostly for the same reason I post my cartoons and photography elsewhere on this site. I am an artist. It sounds pretentious to say it, but there is no way to understand my frame of mind at any given time without understanding that I have this powerful need to Get It Out Of Me regardless of who cares or who even understands.   Mostly I do graphic art.   Sometimes words come out.   The Internet is just another way I have of putting my stuff out there.   It is not and does not function as an online publication of some kind.   It is a life blog.   Think of this place as being slightly retro…like it’s owner.   Matter of fact, apart from this blog, the rest of this site is all hand coded by me in simple HTML.   Yes, I’m a computer geek too.   That’s how I earn my living.   That’s where the artist and the Internet meet.

I have comment moderation turned on, not so much to regulate the content here but to keep spammers out of the comments.   For every real comment I get here I also get about 50 – 100 spam comments.   These are posted just to raise the rankings of a particular web site in the search engines and there’s no easy way to filter them out.   This is why we can’t have nice things.   My email box is even worse.   Send me an email and I might not even see it in the torrent of spam.   But this is not an online publication, it’s a life blog.   If you post a comment here or send me an email it might not show up for a while…maybe even a long while.   That might be because I’m not paying close attention to the blog because I am occupied elsewhere in my life, or it might be because I want to read it over carefully and post a response.

I don’t particularly care if you need to tell me why something I posted here is wrong.   I might argue or I might just eventually post your comment and say nothing. I might even agree I was wrong, or at least clumsy.   But I won’t endure a long heated argument either.   Obviously outright abuse won’t get posted, but I seldom get that here for some reason, probably because a troll wants a bigger audience than just me and the few regulars here.

This isn’t a political forum.   I am not a citizen journalist.   I am a software engineer for the Space Telescope Science Institute.   I am a computer geek.   I am a technology nerd.   I am a science geek. I am a photographer.   I am a cartoonist, I do political cartoons for Baltimore OutLOUD. I am a painter.   Sometimes I write stories.   I am an artist.   This is my life blog.

Days are getting shorter now.   A month ago an early walk into work still meant daylight, morning people walking their dogs and birds chattering.   Now it’s night skies and lights on over quiet city streets.   City night shift just getting home, day shift taking to the streets.

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.

I will probably not bother with the new Superman flick. I only watched one of the recent Batman movies because of Keith Ledger’s stunning Joker. Mark Hamill does an equally good voice characterization for the cartoon series (go find the YouTube where a fan asks Hamill to do his Joker saying that “Why so serious?” line and the crowd goes wild.)

It’s that Batman cartoon series that’s clarifying for me. It works because its setting is a Gotham City that stylistically could be both today and yesterday. That 1930s-ish styling makes it work and that’s because that’s the period that character emerged from in the comics. These characters, Superman, Batman, and so forth, belong in the timeframe they were created in. That is where they make the most sense. Notice how modern film makers (and comic book producers) struggle with updating their costumes. Those costumes reflected those of circus strongmen and trapeze artists, and were instantly recognizable and believable to the readers of that time. Nowadays they just seem…weird.

Instead of updating the old superheroes we should set their stories in the times they were born, and create new ones for our own. Were I to do a Superman series I would start with his being found by a childless couple in rural Smallville, sometime in the 1920s, when the information highway was the daily newspaper and the vacuum tube radio in the living room. You wouldn’t have to make him a god to make him believable as an awe inspiring figure in a world that didn’t know what we know about time and space. He was a child from a lost world raised on Earth to be one of us. But he was different, he could fly, he had x-ray vision, he could bend steel in his bare hands, bullets just bounced off him. That was amazing back then and I believe there are still lots of good stories, relevant stories, you could tell about that character without having to make him more than he was to fit into a 21st century he really does not belong to.

They say cats don’t have owners, they have staff, and the same might be said of little Baltimore rowhouses…like on days like today when the sky is blue and the air is clear and clean and crisp and your car says Come with me and see what we can see and your cameras say Oh, Oh, Take Us, Take Us Too! and the house says Not On Your Life You Don’t you have grass to mow and railings to paint and concrete to patch and seal!

…still in it.

Something I try to do to Spirit once a month is clean and condition its vinyl and leather upholstery and the rubber gaskets around the doors, hood and trunk. The steering wheel is wrapped in a nice soft leather but the rest of the car is the legendary MB Tex upholstery which a lot of Mercedes affectionados will recommend over the leather because it lasts longer and is easier to clean. But something in my body oils dries up and hardens vinyl severely.

I discovered this effect back when I was a teenager, on the Koss Pro 4AA headphones I happened to love the sound of.   I was always having to buy new ones every a couple years because of what my skin oils did to the ear pads.   Those really nice soft vinyl ear pads would become rock hard and useless after a couple years just from contact with my skin and you couldn’t just buy new ear pads. Eventually even the cable connecting the headphones to the stereo would harden and start coming apart wherever my fingers touched it and then the headphones were finished and I would have to buy new ones.

So, decades later and two years after I bought it, the driver’s seat on my ‘C’ class, Traveler, began to harden and crack where my bare legs touched it in the summer while wearing cutoffs and when I took it in for repair my dealer said he’d never seen that happen to MB Tex before, and I remembered what my skin oils did to all the Koss headphones I used to own.

So now that I have Spirit, my ‘E’ class Dream Come True car, I do a careful cleaning and conditioning of my driver’s seat and while I’m at it I do the rest of the car too.   I have it down to a routine now.

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.

They made it a necessity.   Matthew Yglesias links me to this…

Ask Umbra: Can I have a kid and be car-free?

My husband doesn’t like me to take our baby on the bus, even to visit friends who live near the bus line. He thinks buses are dirty, that my time is too valuable, and that it makes us look poor.

I stare at the screen and a much younger inner me looks at that entire conversation in wonder at how thoroughly the creation of the suburbs made the automobile so dominant.   Now it’s if you have to take the bus you must be poor.   But we always took the bus and we weren’t poor.   Not very well off exactly, but never poor.

I was raised by a single working mother and we didn’t have much, but there wasn’t that automatic assumption back in the 50s and 60s that if you took the bus you were poor, and actually back then having more than one car in the household meant you were pretty well to do.   Dad went to work in his car and mom stayed home to take care of the kids and do her housework and if she went shopping it was usually via the bus.   So seeing me and my mom sitting on the bus going somewhere was no stigma…mother and child on the bus in the afternoon going shopping was the usual thing.

Cars were expensive things, and especially so for single working moms.   We didn’t have one in our household until I was fifteen.   Suddenly our world opened wide. We could drive the the store and pack back lots of groceries and I didn’t have to pilot a full grocery cart all the way home.   We could drive to the beach.   It was instant liberation.   I still remember how that felt, to have all those distant places suddenly within reach.   Probably my itch to get in the car and just go somewhere for the shear joy of driving has its roots here…not in the fact of our carlessness, but in how the car opened up the world to us.   90 percent of the miles I have put on every car I have ever owned have been pleasure driving.   I love the automobile, and perhaps it may seem a bit paradoxical that this is why I would not want to live somewhere I had to use the car for everything.   I hate traffic and I hate using the car for mere commuting.   The same boring route and traffic jams over and over and over and over and over…   It seems disrespectful somehow.   The car is for exploring.

This is why the suburbs have always felt suffocating to me.   You can’t walk to anything.   There is no good public transportation for the common chores of life.   You’re trapped inside a spaghetti tangle of twisty roads and cul de sacs that are specifically designed to thwart drive through traffic, that also make it impossible to walk to anything.   City life is good precisely because you don’t need a car for every little thing.   That used to be the norm.   I remember it.   I still think that way.

Saw this flit across my Facebook stream this morning…

There’s a surprisingly fine line between laziness and vanity, and sometimes they enable each other in a good way. Following the herd is too much work. Being different just for the sake of being different is too much work. Eventually you see that it’s faking it either way. I never worried about my artistic “style” because I knew the moment I started obsessing about that it would stop being genuinely me. Morals aside (which you really do need to think carefully about) you really needn’t worry about Who You Are. What you do is follow your bliss, take the path with heart, and the person you are just happens.

…just to not be completely negative.   That’ll be an easier, funner post.

…it’s almost exclusively to prevent spam in the comments.   Those of you who don’t run your own blog would not believe how much spam tries to invade blog comments these days.   It’s amazing.   I suspect most of it is simply to jack up Google rankings.   Anyway, that’s why you have to wait for me to approve comments.   It isn’t about controlling what opinions get expressed here, though if I see post or thread highjacking taking place I’ll put a stop to that too.   The moderation is about blocking spam.   Sorry.   This is why we can’t have nice things.

I bought the ‘E’ class diesel, Traveler II, last December.   It wasn’t exactly the kind of money I had in mind to spend…I would have been thrilled to own a ‘C’ class diesel…the smaller car seemed more reasonable for a single guy…but Daimler still won’t import those for some reason.   As it turns out, I really Really like the ‘E’ class after all.   It is a solid, beautiful car, very nice on my occasional passengers, has lots of extra trunk space (which is nice for people who take road trips with lots of camera equipment), and yet gets absolutely great fuel economy.   It has been an absolutely solid and reliable ride all the way.

It’s already time for Traveler IIs 20,000 mile ‘B’ service.   Since the plan is to eventually become one of those wirey old codgers with a Mercedes diesel that has half a million miles on it I feel off to a reasonably good start.