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Believe It Or Not (NSFW)

I dated this one back in the day—about a year after these photos were taken for his spread in MEN magazine. We even lived together briefly. Very briefly. About three weeks after he moved in with me, he met some floozy at The Midnight Sun and became as smitten with John as I had been with him. He moved out shortly thereafter, and while I ran into him occasionally around town during the months that followed, we never spoke again.  When I run across his pictures on the internet like I did here, I wonder whatever ultimately became of him.

He has such a common name that even in our internet-connected age it would be all but impossible to track him down—not that I have any desire to.


And just in case you don’t believe me…

These were taken on Mt. Tamalpais shortly after we met and before he moved in and the ensuing drama occurred. I don’t remember much about this particular outing other than I was sick as a dog—but wasn’t going to let that get in the way of me spending time with him.

Michael Rose, aka “Justin Banks” is just one of several personal Tales of the City…

Maybe one of these days I’ll share them all.

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Dear Apple, FIX YOUR SHIT

Stolen, but reflects my own feelings to the letter:

Okay, so iOS 7.0.6 happened – the short version is that Apple broke SSL. Oops. Oh well, it happens, apply the patch yadda yadda yadda.

What didn’t happen was the corresponding OS X patch. At least not yet.

WHAT THE EVER LOVING F**K, APPLE??!?!! Did you seriously just use one of your platforms to drop an SSL 0day on your other platform? As I sit here on my mac I’m vulnerable to this and there’s nothing I can do, because you couldn’t release a patch for both platforms at the same time? You do know there’s a bunch of live, working exploits for this out in the wild right now, right? Your advisory is entirely focussed on iOS so we know nothing of OS X yet (other than the fact that the exploits work) – could you tell us what in OS X is vulnerable? Is mail.app vulnerable? Should I be worried about malicious SSL/TLS mailservers? How about your update system itself – is that vulnerable?

Come the hell on, Apple. You just dropped an ugly 0day on us and then went home for the weekend – goto fail indeed.

FIX. YOUR. SHIT.

Soon.

Please?

Love and hugs as always,

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Quote of the Day

“You gotta respect everyone’s beliefs? No you don’t! That’s what gets us in trouble! You have to acknowledge everyone’s beliefs, but then you have to reserve the right to go, ‘That is fucking stupid! Are you kidding me?'” ~ Patton Oswalt

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The Batshittery is Strong in this One

“This is a full-scale assault against Christianity and the followers of Christ. When prayer is banned from the public square, when our President fails to defend biblically defined marriage, and he openly and zealously advocates for gay rights; when legislators rush to overrule existing laws to promote gay marriage; when schools and courts consistently suppress religious freedoms; we know we are locked in a war against the Christian faith, not culture. The architect behind this offensive is none other than Satan himself. The Scripture says that the devil, our archenemy, is bent on as much destruction as possible. Satan knows that one day very soon, he will be cast into the lake of fire and sulfur in hell (Revelation 20:10). As that day draws near, his malicious, hellish activity is intensifying.” – Franklin Graham, writing on his daddy’s website. (Via Good As You)

I don’t know about any of you, but I stopped having invisible friends when I was 4 or 5 years old, and the monsters living under my bed and in my closet also disappeared only a couple of years later.  This guy, however…

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The Walgreens from Hell

I dreamt last night I went to Walgreens to pick up a prescription. This in itself is odd because I haven’t used Walgreens for scripts in years because their service (at least in Denver) is so uniformly appalling. But yet here I was, and not unusual for them, the pharmacy wasn’t open even though a half dozen employees were milling about inside.

I was near the front of an ever-increasing line of people when they finally started accepting customers. At first they had only one window open, but when I was finally at the head of the line they opened a second. A large, at first friendly, black clerk asked for my name. “Oh yes, I just saw yours here,” she said, while rifling through a huge pile of bags strewn across the counter. “I’ll need to see your ID,” she said.

I opened my wallet and could not find my driver’s license, even though I’d just had it out a second before. My wallet is a huge mess, so I ended up pulling everything out in an effort to locate it. As it took longer and longer for me to find it, I could tell the clerk—not to mention the crowd behind me was getting annoyed. I finally found it and handed it to her. She took it to the back counter, turned around and asked, “What kind of Canon printer do you own?”

I thought, WTF? “What kind of Canon printer do I own? What does that have to do with picking up my medication…and how do you even know I have a Canon?”

“They’re running a promotion and I need your information.”

“I don’t know,” I said, becoming increasingly annoyed that I’d been there for such a long time and still hadn’t gotten what I came in for. “Pixma something-or-other. I’m not interested. Just write down ‘customer refused to provide information.'”

“I can’t do that, she said. You have to tell me what model it is.”

“I DON’T FUCKING REMEMBER!”

At this point I’d caught the attention of the woman standing at the window next to me. She gave me a wry smile.

The clerk then pulled something out from under the counter that started shining lights into my eyes. I noticed it had “cognitive assessment” and “memory recall” buttons on it that were lit up. “What the fuck are you doing?” I said.

“You’re acting impaired. I can’t release your meds without verification that you’re capable of taking them as instructed.”

“Because I can’t remember the model number of my printer, something that’s none of your damn business to begin with? I never consented to a medical test!”

The woman to my left now got involved. “He’s fine. He just doesn’t remember his printer model number. Hell, I don’t even know what kind of printer I have!”

The clerk then turned the device on her.

“Now you’ve done it,” I said.

At that point I woke up.

This followed an earlier dream where I was walking around North Beach in San Francisco attempting to take pictures with my iPad! (Even though I had my old Pentax SLR with me. I think it was out of film.)

I guess this is what I get for having had such a late dinner last night.

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Synchronicity

I was at Einstein’s the other day having lunch and slowly making my way through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I was at the point in the book where Job was waxing poetic about his love of Bob Dylan’s music and how he finally got to meet the man who so profoundly influenced him. I was immediately reminded of my dear friend Beth in Phoenix, who in her younger days actually dated Dylan for an extended period:

Me: “You should’ve seen my Mom’s face when I brought home my first Bob Dylan record.”

Beth: “You should’ve seen my Mom’s face when I brought home Bob Dylan.”

At that exact moment, one of Dylan’s songs (I don’t know which one; I recognize his voice but not his complete catalog) started playing over the sound system.

There is a lot about the nature of reality that we simply do not understand—and probably never will.

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