Welcome To My Blog, James Frey
Okay. I've finally done it. Started a blog, that is.
The name of this blog comes from a bit of current-event trivia that will undoubtedly be forgotten
within six months. A Million Little Pieces is a book by James Frey that has gotten him
and his publisher, Random House, into a bit of trouble. It was sold as non-fiction and picked up by
Oprah's Book Club and so sold millions of copies. There was one little catch. It turns out it didn't really happen. It was a novel.Read more-->
Victims or Gods?
Those who cling to victimhood get very angry at the suggestion they've done it to themselves, because their entire worldview is based on belief in the opposite; and none of us change a worldview easily.Read more-->
Wisdom Teeth and Intelligent Design
Yesterday afternoon I went to the dentist. More specifically, I went to the Arizona
School of Dentistry, where I get cut-rate dental work done by students. This sounds scary, but I had an emergency
tooth-pulling done there and it was a lot less painful than the teeth I had pulled when I was in Navy boot
camp.Read more-->
Bring The Broom Along
Nelly Bly! Nelly Bly! bring the broom along,
We'll sweep the kitchen clean, my dear, and have a little song.
Poke the wood, my lady love,
And make the fire burn,
And while I take the banjo down,
Just give the mush a turn.
Those words were written by Stephen Foster in 1850. Intended to be a love song, a modern listener can't help
but note that Nelly is expected to do the chores while her husband sings.
Fourteen years later, on May 5, 1864,
Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born in Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania. Yes, that's right—her parents
basically owned the town. Her father was a judge, but when he died it was without a will;
the estate was sold and Elizabeth's mother had to scramble to support the family, eventually
marrying an abusive man to do it. This produced a budding feminist in Elizabeth, whose letter
to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch rebutting a sexist article she read got her a
job as a journalist. Read more-->
Thou Shalt Not Argue
Yesterday, the new Pope, Benedict, released his first
encyclical.Read more-->
Where Are The Photos?
An Italian court is about to decide whether Jesus of Nazareth is an historical character,
or a fictional one. Italy has a law against "abusal of popular belief" and the plaintiff has
accused his ex-friend, a priest, of conning the public. The trial has sparked the usual
division of people into "believers" and "non-believers". The believers have faith on their side. The non-believers have facts. Unfortunately, faith usually trumps facts. Otherwise, why would fundamentalist Christians still believe that gay marriage would destroy the world as we know it?Read more-->
Shut Up About Human Rights!
The United Nations allows about 3000 groups to come before it and speak on subjects of concern. These groups include the International Red Cross, for example.
Which groups can be heard by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is controlled by the NGO
(Non-Governmental Organizations) committee. 18 nations are on this committee, including the United States.Read more-->
Playground Bullies
I remember a kid from the schoolyard playground. Eddie loved to play King of the Mountain. He loved it, because he always managed to be king. Our "mountain" was a one-foot high lump in the playground, and he would gleefully, and with excessive force, push anyone who tried to replace him there.Read more-->
A Sign of the Times
US Representative Bob Ney of Ohio wishes the Republican Headquarters had been
placed in another building.Read more-->
Fear of Facts
There's a concept called "suspension of disbelief." It describes a willing hold in the use of one's logical faculties so that one may enjoy a work of fiction. It's suspension of disbelief that allows us to watch Mary Poppins or Superman or Harry Potter fly about onscreen, without walking out of the theatre. Suspension of disbelief allows us to accept the idea that the Terminator has come from the future, that Marty McFly has gone to the past, that Captain Kirk can beam down to a planet, or that the Robinsons would allow Doctor Smith, who they know tried to murder them, to baby-sit their son. In our effort to get our money's worth of entertainment, we are even willing to suspend disbelief long enough to accept that Madonna can sing, or David Schwimmer can act.Read more-->
What is RSS and Why Should I Care?
If you've been reading my blog regularly, you might
have noticed a new feature in the right sidebar: the
letters "RSS" on an orange button. In fact, if you surf
the web a lot, you've probably noticed this button on a
lot of sites. If you've been wondering what the heck it
was about, you're in luck--you're about to find out.Read more-->
Bomb Hats Away!
Does this seem like too much fuss over a few cartoons? Does it seem like the Muslims must all be crazy? Does it seem like "something must be done?"Read more-->
Sleight of Hand
As most people know, magicians do their tricks by a technique called "misdirection." That is, if the right
hand is about to grasp a card or uncage a dove, the audience will have their attention riveted to the magician's left hand or
foot or something, anything, but his or her right hand.Read more-->
Strange and Amazing Coincidences
This is the first blog entry I have not written. I came upon this information at Rigorous Intuition and couldn't possibly improve upon it. Because it is so apt and worthy of passing on, I do so here.Read more-->
Cheney's Got A Gun
Anyone can have an accident, right?Read more-->
Ghosts
My daughter, Karen, loves to watch these "reality" shows about ghost-hunting. In case you haven't seen one, they mostly take place in England, where a group of odd, but supposedly professional ghost hunters enters a haunted mansion with scientific-looking equipment and say things like, "A young girl died here of starvation," or "I sense a deranged man!" before degenerating into a series of screams as they run for the exits.Read more-->
Marguerite
It was 1970; I was nineteen and had maintained a friendship with Don and Margaret
Speck since my high school days. Margaret had been a waitress at the restaurant at
which I had been a busboy, and her husband, Don, a night clerk at a local motel.
However, he had once been a professional hypnotist and the three of us shared mutual
interests in UFOs, ghosts, and reincarnation. In fact, it was Margaret who had
recommended and loaned me the first books I'd read on Edgar
Cayce:
There
Is A River by Thomas Sugrue, and
Many Mansions
by Gina Cerminara.
Don and Margaret decided to join the
Spiritualist Church officially,
and to that end moved to a "Spiritualist camp" in the central Florida town of
Cassadaga. There they got a 99-year lease on a great,
old house, and I visited them there several times. Read more-->
A Man Without A Country
Once in awhile I am privileged to read something that says so perfectly what I want to say, I couldn't have said it any better myself. That's the case with today's post, sent to me by my friends Diane and Jock McNeill, and written by the great Kurt Vonnegut. I've edited it slightly.Read more-->
Reefer Sadness
In colonial America, tomatoes were thought to be poisonous and were grown as an ornamental plant called the "love apple." The odor of the leaves made people think it was poisonous. It wasn't until the 1800s that tomatoes made their way into American cookbooks, always with instructions that they be cooked for at least three hours or else they "will not lose their raw taste."Read more-->
Religion and Politics
My mother, who spent her life in fear that she would offend some stranger, always told me, "Never discuss religion or politics." She was very clear on this, and though she brought my sisters and me up Catholic, she rarely discussed even our own religion with us; and, except for the 1960 election, never told us for whom she voted. Kennedy, of course, was the exception--perhaps because, for her, he united religion and politics.Read more-->
Case of the Runaway Emotions
It was almost a year ago that Jennifer Wilbanks, a young woman who was about to get married, instead embarked on a cross-country journey on which she claimed to have been abducted, but in fact had merely freaked out over her impending wedding. Worse, she didn't do this on the spur of the moment; she had purchased a ticket to Las Vegas several days before and had even arranged for a friend to drive her to the bus station.Read more-->
Wolf In The Fold
In myth and in kids' cartoons we have all seen the image of the wolf who disguises himself as a sheep to infiltrate the flock and turn it into a fast-food buffet. We even use the phrase, "Wolf in sheep's clothing" to describe a person who presents himself as one thing but is, in fact, another. However, we think of this as a rare occurrence and one that is usually quickly recognized.Read more-->
Stop, Thief!
Does this ever really happen? On a crowded sidewalk,
a thief snatches a woman's purse and dashes away. "He stole my purse!"
the woman cries, and some hero takes off in pursuit, tackles the would-be
villain, and rescues the purse to the applause of onlookers who, despite
not helping, are pleased the woman got her purse back.
Read more-->
Sea Change
As you drive from Miami to Key West, down around the swamps and cypress islands of Key Largo, there's a place where the road is a causeway with water on each side . The most stunning thing about this causeway is the difference between the east and west sides. Both sides are viewed through thickets of scrubby bushes; both bodies of water are dotted with palm tree-bearing islets and, if the wind is blowing, saucy little whitecaps. In fact, it is the same body of water, or should be; occasionally the causeway gives way to a drawbridge and the water flows freely between.Read more-->
Why Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal
Being gay is not natural.
Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester,
and air conditioning.Read more-->
Gays In The Bible
Although I do not self-identify as a "Christian," I have nothing against the Bible. In fact, it's a pretty Good Book. Too bad more Christians don't read it.Read more-->
Banner Decade For Nitwits
When I was growing up, I learned to identify previous decades by the epithets that had been assigned to them by the Columbia Record Club. "The Gay Nineties", "The Roaring Twenties", "The Swinging Forties" and so on were both names of record collections and descriptions of life in those long-gone eras.Read more-->
A Novel Hobby
Sometime around 1987, I decided I needed a hobby that wouldn’t require me to change clothes. I was spending ten and twelve hours a day in front of a computer, developing software, and I needed to take occasional breaks--but nothing that would take too much time. I just needed to work my brain in a different way, so I decided to write a novel.Read more-->
Bruises and Burns
Just after our 20th wedding anniversary in 1992, my wife informed me she wanted a divorce. Although I was certainly fond of her, as a gay man in a heterosexual marriage I could neither blame her nor was I too upset. By June she had moved out, joined by two of our kids who were still under eighteen. That left me, my mother who spent half the year with me and half with my sister in Florida, and my daughter, Jennifer, who had not been getting along with her mother and thought she might get along better with me.Read more-->
What Big Eyes You Have
By October of 1992, I had settled into a routine in the new townhouse. My Mom had left for my sister's in Florida in September, so I had the place to myself. I left the walls white, except for an "accent wall" in the living room that I painted sea foam green to match my new vertical blinds. I made a cool table out of an old aquarium stand by getting a glass shop to cut a mirror to the dimensions of the top. Mom had the front bedroom; I created an office out of the "spare" bedroom. There I worked on my books and class materials and experimented with a new thing called CompuServe, which was a way to have typed "chats" with people anywhere in the world. I used it mostly to contact computer vendors and download up-to-date software patches and drivers.Read more-->
Goodbye, Mom
My mother, Edna Mae Brown/Cilwa, died today at 4:15 pm EST of abdominal cancer.
She was 93. Read more-->
The Fifth Pill
I had now been conscious for two abductions, or at least part of them; and I could only wonder how many times I'd been taken when I didn't remember any of it. Even now, I could only recall the beginning and end of two such abductions.Read more-->
Support Group
The 1990s was the decade in which Americans became aware of the alien abduction phenomenon. The media made fun of abductees, which kept most abductees "in the closet" which in turn made it easier to ridicule the ones who tried to "come out." The experience was very much like childhood sexual abuse, in that the experiencer was molested but had no way to stop it and no one to go to for support.Read more-->
Missing Time
One of the most universal aspects of the abduction phenomenon is that of "missing time." This occurs when an abductee runs out to do an errand and comes back two or more hours later than he or she should, with no memory of what occurred in the missing hours, or (usually) any idea that hours are missing.Read more-->
What Are The Odds?
My life settled into a pattern. I spent every other week or so in a new city, training corporate mainframe programmers to write Windows applications; in between I worked at home on materials for new classes or writing a technical book or pieces for Component Developer Journal, for which I was contributing Editor. Thanks to my new laptop, I was often able to write while out-of-town teaching, as well. No one seemed to guess to look at me that I was being contacted by aliens on a regular basis. Or if anyone did, no one mentioned it.Read more-->
Awakening
Abductions occur all through an abductee’s life, but there is one seminal moment when the fact of them is forced upon the abductee. Ready or not, here they come! The abductee may or may not have suspected these contacts were going on. He or she may or may not even believe in "aliens." I have received permission from several other abductees to repeat their descriptions of the first time they realized they were, in fact, abductees.Read more-->
The Morning After
Every abductee I know divides his or her life into two parts: The part before the night they realized they were being abducted, and the part after.Read more-->
Memories
Many years ago I lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and made frequent trips to St. Augustine to visit my mother and grandmother. I usually left in the evening after work and drove all night, arriving in the morning. This was before I-95 was completed, and a good portion of the route was on US 1, through parts of southern Florida which had not yet been overdeveloped. On one particular trip, I was suddenly taken by terror at the thought of driving the road I normally took, and went quite a few miles out of my way to find another road. I was just getting into psychic stuff at the time and assumed my "spirit guide" was warning me about a potential accident. Now I recognize this as a typical reaction to having been abducted along my original route on a previous trip.Read more-->
CyberDramas
And then it started getting weird.
Whenever you get a large group of people together, there tends to be drama.
Not everyone is what he claims to be; not everyone sees him or herself as others do.
Most people are honest, straightforward and savvy; while some people have agendas,
some lie, some are gullible.
And cybergroups, such as the Abduction Support Group on the
CompuServe "Encounters" forum I started in 1992, are no different.
In fact, possibly because of the nature of the subject at hand, some of the dramas
were particularly wild. Read more-->
Whistling Dixie
Suzette was in pain. "I had a visit last night," she typed from her home in West Virginia, referring euphemistically to an abduction by non-humans. "They operated on my right knee. When I tried to get up this morning, there was such a sharp pain I just collapsed onto the floor."Read more-->
Cast of Characters
Okay...Now that we had managed to make some kind of contact with the Greys, it was time to ask some questions.Read more-->
Starry, Starry Night
Everyone reading this knows the difference between waking awareness and dream awareness. Each has a reality of its own; but each also has a "feel" of its own, as distinct as the feel of corduroy versus silk. In a dream, the dreamer generally cannot question his reality ("Wait--school buses can't dance!") and does not challenge his own actions. Consequently, in dreams we might kill a child, torture a prisoner or have sex with Laura Bush, without ever considering that these might not be good ideas or that we could choose not to. Read more-->
Strange Friend
Most people who have not experienced a UFO sighting cannot imagine anything more bizarre. Most people who have not experienced an abduction by aliens can't imagine anything more bizarre than that. One of the hallmarks of the abduction experience seems to be that, just when you think it can't possibly get any stranger, that nothing in the world could top what you've just experienced--something does.Read more-->
North Canyon Contact
In 1992, I took my daughter, Dorothy, on a three-day Grand Canyon rafting adventure. It was a short trip because I wasn't sure if I'd like whitewater rafting (I knew the camping aspect would not be a problem). It turned out I loved rafting; so in 1994, I signed up for a fifteen-day autumn trip. While I had little hope the aliens wouldn't be able to find me, I did look forward to taking a break from the Support Group and the high strangeness that seemed to have insinuated itself into my life.Read more-->
Back In The Closet
When I awoke Wednesday morning I wasn't at my best. My neck still throbbed; my head ached and I felt like I'd have had to rally to die. I downed a couple more Tylenol #3s (brought in case of migraine), gathered my stuff together, and returned to the main encampment. Breakfast helped: Eggs made to order, bacon and/or sausage, pancakes and some dark brown sludge they called "river coffee". I'm not a coffee drinker but I had some that morning. I felt I needed all the help I could get. And after we ate I did feel better. So I hunted up Robby and told him that Turtle hadn't let me row the day before. Read more-->
Not All Aliens Come In Ships
The word that there was an alien abductee among the passengers spread rapidly. By the next morning, everyone seemed to know and they also seemed to know it was me. I was surrounded by expressions ranging from sympathy to disgust.Read more-->
Living in Illusion
On the expedition's eighth day, we arrived at Phantom Ranch and said goodbye to the passengers who could only be with us for the first eight days.Read more-->
Heart Attack
As the helicopter at Whitmore Wash carried 15 passengers from the river to the rim, returning with replacements for the final three days on the Colorado River, Robby pulled aside those of us who had been on the trip for a week or two. “You guys have run Lava Falls,” he said, “And Crystal Rapid, and you’ve floated down the Little Colorado and picnicked along Havasu Creek. Now, I don’t want to say all the good parts of the trip are over, because they’re not. The lower Canyon is beautiful. But the biggest rapids are behind us, and some of the most spectacular scenery. I don’t want you to lie, of course...but if you all talk up the places you’ve already seen, it might spoil the trip for the new people. So, all I’m saying is, try and focus on where we are in the next couple of days, instead of where we’ve been.”Read more-->
Night School
I spent the nights of November and December of 1994 going to school.
Sort of.
During the day, I continued to teach Windows programming around the country.
But at night, I "dreamt" I was in a classroom setting, spending hours
being taught things I couldn't remember when I woke up.
Read more-->
Parallel Earths
In Spring of 1995, I experienced my next bit of high strangeness.
The central hub of this experience was Key West, where I had made arrangements
to spend another full week's vacation at Light
House Court. I'd been working more weeks out of the month than usual and
was really looking forward to some time off.
Read more-->
Final Exam
Only my naiveté had saved me from the psychic attack that may or may not have originated with the now-unreachable Arcadia. It was, likewise, only my naiveté that kept me from realizing a second attack would be inevitable...and more subtle.Read more-->
Chain of Coincidence
By the time June rolled around, I had relented somewhat on my ultimatum to God. He didn't have to provide a lover, I decided, as long as I could find someone to use the already-purchased rafting trip in Grand Canyon. However, no one I knew could go. For once, even my kids all had jobs they couldn't get away from. Even my ex-wife was working!Read more-->
Standing Wave
I picked David up, as arranged, at Las Vegas' McCarran Airport. He kissed me at the gate, which I thought was sweet and also indicated that he was proudly “out”—a good sign. We got into the car I had rented and headed for Flagstaff, where the Grand Canyon rafters gather prior to the trip.Read more-->
The Green Room
Eyes blurring, I stumbled to a side canyon and sat heavily on a cliff some two hundred feet above a dry wash. I sobbed and sobbed. It was so weird. I wasn't in love with David. I would never have fallen in love with David. But this wasn't about David. It was about God and me. I had challenged God, and God had basically told me to fuck myself. Read more-->
Michael's Smile
On a Thursday in late November, 1996, I met Michael.Read more-->
Unexpected
As you must have heard by now, yesterday's tragic shootings at Virginia Technical Institute claimed the lives of 33, including the shooter. Unsurprisingly, some mainstream media pundits were already calling this the "worst mass shooting" in the history of the United States, although a few of those outlets qualified it as the worst mass civilian shooting, which conveniently brushes aside various massacres of Native Americans such as those at Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and Marias (and others). In those massacres, the shooters were Army soldiers and the victims were people of color, and the media tends to ignore the entire act of genocide of this nation's first inhabitants, except for the occasional blockbuster movie.Read more-->
Ancient Visitors
Michael quit his job and moved in with me in March, 1997. We made a trip together to Arizona and put down a payment on property in Snowflake, then drove a trailer full of our stuff across the country in July and September. The Snowflake property had an old single-wide mobile home on it that we'd been told was habitable. After four months we had to admit it wasn't, and moved into a rental home a few miles away. We also had to rent office space in town. And, each week, Michael drove me to Phoenix to catch a flight for wherever I was teaching that week, or to pick me up when I arrived from my previous week's class.Read more-->
Knowledge and Belief
In my night classes, one of the visitors' key points was the difference between knowledge and belief. In today's media-saturated world, nearly all of what we think we know, we actually take on faith. Unless you, personally, have measured it, the "fact" that the speed of light is about 186,000 miles per second is actually a belief--and, even if you have performed the measurement yourself, do you know of your own experience that the measuring equipment is correctly calibrated?Read more-->
Loose Lips Sink Shitty Politicians
Arizona Republican Congressman Rick Renzi has introduced an amendment into the bill authorizing intelligence programs for the coming year, that makes it illegal to leak secret information to the press. The amendment is non-binding, but urges the White House to take "firm action" against government employees (and ex-employees) who leak secrets to the press.Read more-->
Language of the Heart
Today's crisis is the fact that someone has sung the United States' National Anthem in Spanish.Read more-->
The Celestine Prophecy
We watched the new movie, The Celestine Prophecy, yesterday. By "we" I mean Michael and I, my ex-wife Mary, daughter Karen, friends Barbara and Peter, and Michael's sister Surya. The movie is still in limited release, so we had to see it in Tempe; and afterwards we gathered at Islands, an adjacent restaurant, to have dinner and discuss the movie.Read more-->
Crazy Abductees
"Normal" people, that is, people who haven't been abducted by aliens or ever seen a UFO, are notoriously limited in what they accept as normal. A "normal" person can't be (or at least, act) gay, a member of another race or culture or religion or political party. Anyone who presses the edges of the box that passes for normalcy for these people must be explained away. They can be sinners, animals, wops or spics or kikes, liberals or wingnuts or whatever--any label serves the single purpose of pushing its bearer far enough outside that box of normalcy so they (and what they represent) can be safely and handily ignored, rejected, dismissed.Read more-->
Big Mouths
Among my friends, I have for years been known as a wit. People love the way I tell jokes, and laugh heartily when I tell one. Although most of my blog entries are not humorous, they are usually written in a  light-hearted way, and the email response I get, mostly from strangers, is gratifying. My ability to make people laugh is not a new development, either. My third-grade teacher once laughed out loud, and in spite of herself, when she read a cartoon I'd drawn. (A figure with a protractor-shaped noggin says, "I'm going to have my head examined.") I know she liked it because she saved it, and mailed it to me just a couple of years ago, with some other stories and drawings of mine she'd kept for four decades.Read more-->
How Big Is Too Big?
It seems like only yesterday that my friend John showed me, with pride, his brand-new AT&T 6300 Plus computer with a 10 megabyte drive. The manual that came with it said, "You may think that you'll never be able to fill up a hard drive that holds 10 mb, and you may be right! However, it's a good idea to delete files you no longer need, just to be safe. Here's how..." followed by a description of the DOS DEL command.Read more-->
Michael's Graduation
Michael just graduated from Glendale Community College ...for the second time.
Read more-->
Mining the Da Vinci Lode
By now there can't be many people who are unaware that the book and movie, The Da Vinci Code, is a thriller that proposes that Jesus survived the Crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene and had children, and that the Catholic prelature Opus Dei will stop at nothing--not even murder--to suppress this fact.Read more-->
Terrorists On The Line
So now that we know the NSA is building the "world's largest database" of all our phone calls--from all time, according to the source who leaked the story to USA Today(presumably not over the phone)--many of us are mentally reviewing every phone call we've ever made, wondering if one of them will eventually come back to haunt us.Read more-->
Zachary's 7th Birthday Trip
We decided to celebrate my grandson Zachary's birthday with a trip.
The original plan was to rent a motor home, drive it to California, spend Saturday
at Disneyland, Sunday at McGrath State Beach, and return in time for work Monday morning.
I did the math about six weeks ago, and started putting aside the money for it, paying
in advance where possible.
Read more-->
Identity Theft
A cute series of ads running on TV these days shows a regular person--a guy at the gym, or a barber, or a housewife--speaking in a voice that clearly doesn't belong to that person. A black guy at the gym will have the voice and accent of a Valley girl, or a white housewife will sound like a Japanese teenager. The ads are intended to raise awareness of the new phenomenon of "identity theft" and a particular credit card that claims to insulate its customers from such a crime.Read more-->
Beauty and Tragedy
Our friend, Tallulah, came by for a visit last night, just before she leaves to visit one of her daughters in Kansas. She showed us photos from her previous trip East, including a couple of her sister. Tallulah and her sister were not raised together, and in an attempt to become closer to her, Tallulah spent a six-month visit with her. Although her sister apparently wasn't one of the most likeable people on Earth, Tallulah persisted in attempting to reach her and establish a relationship.Read more-->
The Ex-Dem Movement
 Read more-->
The Fact of Difference
The place I work has occasional "morale-building" (read: non-compensatory) events. The one we're in right now is "shorts week". We can wear shorts to work, and T-shirts, and even sandals. Considering the outside temperature is above 110°, I would call this more "survival-enabling" than "morale-building" but, whatever.Read more-->
The New Pool
My oldest daughter, Dottie (who now prefers to be called by her middle name, Elizabeth), with her daughter, Cailey, will be coming for a three-week visit starting Thursday. We're very excited about that, but are also concerned that she will be hit like a brick by the 100+ temperatures out here. (She lives in Virginia.) So the rumblings of getting a pool have grown louder.Read more-->
Predictions
In October 2000, having looked at the evidence, I emailed pretty much everyone I know and told them that if Bush were elected, we would face a near-bankrupt government before he was gone, a protracted war in Iraq, and an end to many of our civil rights. Almost all my respondents replied that I was crazy; even the folks who planned to vote for Gore (something I didn't want to do, either) didn't think that Bush could do that much harm in a few years. Now, of course, our budget deficit is so high our great-grandchildren will still be paying it; Bush himself has declared that the war in Iraq will go on until some other president ends it; and the so-called Patriot Act, plus the newly-conservative Supreme Court, have already begun dismantling the Bill of Rights so many Americans died to protect. My prediction was right.Read more-->
Vermont: 1958
In June of 1958, as soon as school was out, my parents and sisters and I piled into our old Buick and drove from Garfield, New Jersey, to a century-old house in Victory, Vermont. At 7, I had no idea where Vermont was or even what it was, much less why we were going. All questions were answered with, "You'll see." Read more-->
Salt River Weekend
Probably the most unexpected bonus of moving to the house in Mesa was finding that the Salt River passes within 15 miles of us. Our nearest major cross streets are Crismon and Baseline; the first major road to the west of us, Ellsworth, runs straight north to the Tonto National Forest and the Salt River Recreation Area.Read more-->
Stonewall
Today, June 27, is the 37th anniversary of the birth of the Gay Rights movement.Read more-->
The Annoying Power of Prayer
In 1999, the prestigious journal Archives of Internal Medicine published the results of a double-blind study in which it was shown that coronary patients who had been prayed for—even though they didn’t know it—were more likely to recover than those who were not.Read more-->
The Return of Prissy Pamela
When I was in 5th grade, we moved to Florida. The kids there were resistant to newcomers, and I had trouble making friends. I was told I was a “creep” and had “cooties”. This was new terminology for me and I didn’t know what to do about it.Read more-->
Changing The World
A few days ago, Dear Abby printed a letter from a man who was about to be married, and who had asked his gay brother to be his best man. The brother refused, on the grounds that, since he couldn't legally get married, he couldn't in good conscience attend a wedding until the discriminatory laws are changed.Read more-->
Freedom
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July. I'll have the day off--sort of (I don't get paid for holidays, but I can't go to work since the building will be closed) and we'll be having grilled hamburgers and hotdogs and watching the fireworks in the evening like most other Americans. The biggest difference is we probably won't be drinking any beer--none of us really likes beer.Read more-->
Good Mourning
Sometimes, premonitions can be so subtle we can make fools of ourselves by not recognizing them for what they are. Read more-->
Superman Returns
We finally got in to see Superman Returns. It took two tries before we could get in. Originally, we wanted to go on Saturday, but the showing we planned to attend, and the two following, were sold out. So we went on Sunday morning, arriving an hour before the movie started so we could have some assurance of getting decent seats.Read more-->
A Week In Sedona
Although we live in Phoenix, some friends who are going to stay in Sedona soon have asked me to compile a list of things that might be fun to see and do while they are there. Since Sedona, and Arizona, are so awesome, I thought I'd share that list with everyone.Read more-->
In Favor of Panic Defenses
Every now and then, a man who happens to be straight murders a man who happens to be gay, gets caught, and finds himself before a judge and jury for his crime. His defense lawyer must then try to get him off the hook. Failing in any attempt to disprove the defendant did, in fact, murder the victim, defense counsel must try and come up with a rationalization for the murder that will convince the jury that the defendant was justified in killing the victim and is not, therefore, a threat to society at large.Read more-->
The God I Don't Believe In
I believe in God. So does my co-worker, Ben. But the similarity ends there; because the god Ben believes in is as different as the God I believe in, as is possible. (Yes, I admit it--I'm capitalizing my God, and not Ben's, to help distinguish them. Really, that's the only reason.)Read more-->
Still Breathing After All These Years
Our friends, Barbara and Peter, offered to take Michael and me to a one-night-only Paul Simon concert as our upcoming anniversary present. The concert was last night. The four of us drove across the Valley to Sun City West, where the concert was being held.Read more-->
Say What?
We've been told for at least three decades, with increasing stridency, that "intellectual property" is entitled to government protection; that corporations are entitled to hoard ideas, and that promoting this concept is the only path to innovation and prosperity that can be enjoyed by all.Read more-->
The Electric Ear
Continuing my series on the historical technology of sound recording...Read more-->
One Of Our Planets Is Missing
My goodness, such a fuss they're making! It's been a week since Pluto was demoted from Planet to Dwarf Planet, and this morning while riding in to work NPR had yet another essay--this one linking Pluto's downgrade to unsuccessful sports teams.Read more-->
Listen To The Music
Continuing my series on the historical technology of sound recording...Read more-->
Voting At The Primary
Yesterday, Arizona held its election primary. Arizona holds just one for both Democrats and Republicans; when we show up, we tell the person at the desk which we are and they hand us the appropriate ballot.Read more-->
Cattle Free, People Caged
Long before the Farmer and the Cowman decided they should be friends, cattle roamed the wild West as freely as had the buffalo before them. Of course, the buffalo, which fed, clothed and housed the Plains Indians, were killed to make way for those cattle.Read more-->
Loathing
There was never a better Catholic than me. I spoke (privately) to Jesus and felt His part of the conversation in my heart. I went to Confession every Saturday (even though I had nothing to report) and Communion every Sunday. I paid attention in Catechism class. In fact, when other students came up with difficult questions, the nuns often turned to me for the answers.Read more--> |
