Monday 30 Oct 2006 2 comments
And now for something completely different.
Rather than me writing about whatever comes to my mind, how about if you suggest topic(s) this time, dear readers. Anything is fair game.
Thursday 26 Oct 2006 2 comments
A friend who's getting married in about a month is making the rings himself, casting them from white gold by a lost wax process. He's had all year to do it, but he's just getting to it now. He told me he does his best work under pressure. I said that the same used to be true for me.
I have fond memories of working under pressure. I used to like a measure of uncertainty in projects I took on, I liked taking a chance about whether all the problems could be solved even though I hadn't worked out all the details yet. Yes, this has gotten me into trouble on occasion.
If I had more energy I'd take on high-pressure projects again, but for now I'm pacing myself more than I used to.
Sunday 22 Oct 2006 1 comment
I just finished installing 205 feet of Ethernet cable in conduit in my backyard, most of it buried.
The work of
| digging, |
| threading cable, |
| anchoring conduit to rocks, |
| testing the cable, |
| filling in the trench, |
| and so on |
Most Tommyjournal readers have convenient access to broadband Internet service. Your Tommy, however, lives in the kind of remote, sparsely populated area that ISPs don't like to bother with. Only recently has decent service come to my neighborhood, delivered by microwave from a solar powered repeater three miles to the west. My house doesn't have an unobstructed view of the repeater, but a rock at the southwest corner of my lot does--hence the 205 feet of cable.
Such ordeals are part of the price one pays to live here, which is OK because by nature I tend to do a lot of things the hard way anyway. I'm used to putting effort into things that most people would avoid. On the other hand, I loathe certain ordeals that many people take in stride--stop and go traffic, for example. What can I say, I'm abnormal (as any Tommyjournal reader must have noticed by now).
And, apropos of nothing, someone in Seattle has a submarine for sale on craigslist.
Tuesday 17 Oct 2006 1 comment
Mike Rogers of blogactive.com outed Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) this afternoon on the Ed Schultz (radio) show. Senator Craig's office has since denied Rogers' allegations that Craig had sex with several men.
My thoughts:
Rogers' case would be stronger if his sources who say they've had sex with Senator Craig would speak out, but they prefer to remain anonymous. Even so--I believe Mike Rogers, not Larry Craig. Rogers has a good track record with regard to accuracy when he's outed people.
I think that whether or not to out someone is a tough call. Yesterday, Bill O'Reilly advised Rogers to concentrate on issues rather than outing people. But politics is war.
Republicans started this, not Mike Rogers. In two election years, the GOP used gay marriage as a wedge issue. Each time, in an opportunistic maneuver to get votes, they pushed for what would have been the first constitutional amendment since Prohibition to restrict freedom. I call it opportunistic because of what has come to light regarding this administration's private views about its religious base, because even some of the most rabidly anti-gay Republicans have gay senior staff members, because even a Condi Rice will refer to a staffer's gay partner's mom as his "mother-in-law", and so on.
Question is, does outing the likes of Larry Craig do more harm than good; actions like this can backfire. I'm no expert on such matters, but my sense is that the gains outweigh the risk in this case. Opponents of outing frame the issue in terms of privacy, but I think the bigger issue is truth. If Rogers' sources are accurate, Senator Craig has been living a lie--and if he now denies having had sex with men, he's telling a lie.
I think the public is served by being shown how Senator Craig's behavior contrasts with his voting record on gay issues.
The segment of today's Ed Schultz show with Mike Rogers is available here (mp3 audio).
Monday 16 Oct 2006 comment?
A few days ago, Firedoglake had a great piece about a disastrous date with a gay Republican. (You can skip the gratuitous YouBoob clip on the page; the text is the good part.)
Saturday 14 Oct 2006 comment?
It's doing that weird thing outside, where water falls out of the sky.
Thursday 12 Oct 2006 2 comments
I see that Google Earth's imagery for my neighborhood was photographed some time in the last 20 months, because that's how long I've had red roofs on my house and garage.
(click the pic for a bigger, oblique view)
Wednesday 11 Oct 2006 comment?
T cells: 420 > 350. I guess the drugs do work. I still wish I felt better though.
Monday 09 Oct 2006 comment?
I went bowling this evening.
The last time I'd been bowling was about 12 years ago, at a place near the west end of Haight Street in SF that was later turned into a huge Amoeba Records store. I like huge Amoeba Records stores, but I was sad to lose the only bowling alley convenient to where I lived. (Nevermind that I then moved to a remote little town, 55 miles away from the nearest bowling alley.)
Bowling reminds me of my friend Brian Covell, who died of AIDS. Brian and I had a lot of fun bowling together. Brian and I had a lot of fun together no matter what we were doing. I miss him.
Sunday 08 Oct 2006 2 comments
After writing yesterday's entry, I wanted to experience some more of that stepping outside of the routine circumstances of life feeling, and headed out to the Saline Valley. (I had another motiviation; this is film festival weekend, Lone Pine is overrun with people in western clothing, and I just wanted to disappear.)
Most the people who go to the Saline Valley love it (to be expected, considering what a pain in the ass it is to get to) but it's been a hit-or-miss place for me. I do OK there if I'm in the mood for it and if I'm there with people I like.
It's funny. The Saline Valley is (for lack of a better word) a Zenlike setting: austerely beautiful desert scenery, nicely arranged grounds (primarily organized by visitors, not the Park Service), natural hot springs, and all that--but the conduct of people there strikes me as decidedly un-Zenlike. Most people are on one drug or another at least part of the time (I count alcohol as a drug), and there's hardly any silence where people are. I get burnt out listening to chatter all day long. I liked the people I met there this time, but--as usual--it was talk talk talk talk talk. I always had the option of going off on my own for a while (and I did), but I like sharing silence with other people.
The Saline Valley doesn't draw a particularly gay crowd, but I did hang out all last evening with two other gay men. (No, it wasn't sexual.) We gravitated toward one another before knowing that the others were gay. Interesting, how that happens.
This time, I was around several Burning Man devotees and I got to listen to them compare notes about their Burning Man experiences ("do you remember the such-and-such camp", ...). I also got some unsolicited advice that I ought to go to Burning Man, and that reminded me of unsolicited advice I got about nine years ago that I ought to go to the Saline Valley ("you'll like it, a lot of people like you go there"--said by someone who didn't know me well at all).
I run into so few people anywhere that I feel really in sync with, but it's very special when that happens. The downside of that being so special is that interactions with people I'm not that much in sync with can pale by comparison.
So. Did this weekend excursion to the Saline Valley generate the stepping outside of the routine circumstances of life feeling that I was looking for? A little bit.
Friday 06 Oct 2006 comment?
I like moments that give a feeling of temporarliy stepping outside the circumstances of my life and viewing it from a fresh perspective. I can get that feeling when I travel; it tends to happen on long drives on roads with no traffic (California route 190 to Death Valley, for example). I'm not talking about profound revelations, just a sense of seeing one's life from a more detached viewpoint.
I got that kind of feeling earlier tonight, I got a sense of clarity about some concerns I've had lately (specifically, concerns about where to live and what work to take on). It didn't happen while driving, it happened while watching a movie I was bored with. My mind wandered.
While I'm on the subject of movies: I like scenes that make their points without being too graphic. E.g., I like how Alfred Hitchcock could suggest a murder without showing it to you (I have in mind the scene from Frenzy where the camera dollies away from a door that had just closed, and back down a staircase).
On the subject of graphic sex in movies, Hitchcock said (37 years ago)
Everyone's waiting for the one great scene on a super-sized Cinerama screen of the ultimate sexual scene where a man's instrument enters a woman's vagina. Well, I've done that. I did it long ago. In "North by Northwest", at the end, I have Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in the same train berth and then in the very next scene, which is also the last scene of the film, I have the long train entering a dark tunnel.(I love his use of the word instrument.)
Thursday 05 Oct 2006 4 comments
Note: what follows is geeky, and is intended to be of interest to people referred here after typing something like day of week code in C into a search engine.
If you ever need to code a function to return the day of the week (given month/date/year), a perversely compact way to express the "30 days hath September" rules is
(64160388 >> month * 2) % 71
or, if
month is zero-based,
(16040097 >> month * 2) % 71
Add the date and an appropriate function of the year, then reduce modulo 7. For sample code, see the JavaScript in the HTML source for this page.
Sunday 01 Oct 2006 comment?
A few weeks ago, I wrote that I was thinking about spending more time in civilization, i.e. among more people, i.e. away from my remote desert habitat. I'm still thinking about it.
I sometimes have a hard time making big decisions. When there's a long list of pros and cons, I can get deadlocked.
In a way, I lucked out when I moved here. I looked around Lone Pine for an afternoon (almost exactly nine years ago) and saw that the only house for sale that I liked had just come on the market. I figured I had to grab it or lose my chance. I came, I saw, I grabbed. I could have agonized over a decision like that for months; I'm glad I just sprang for it.
I have mixed feelings about spending some time away from here. On the one hand, I miss the interaction with (certain kinds of) people. On the other hand, every time I walk to the mailbox in the morning I am in awe of the mountains and the rocks and the sage and the sky and everything else that I would miss if I weren't here. What to do, what to do.
Maybe an opportunity will appear that I'll have to either grab or lose, and I'll be saved from agonizing over this decision. Or maybe not.
Dark clouds rolled in today, too exhausted from the ride over the Sierra Nevada to storm on us. I climbed for about four hours in peace and quiet: no one but my partner and the ravens. Do I want the stimulation of city life enough to give this up, even for a while?
current journal
contact
FAQ
archive
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |
| jan | feb | mar |
| apr | may | jun |
| jul | aug | sep |
| oct | nov | dec |