Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

And Then the Tornadoes Came

At least in a dream last night.

Work, work, work. It’s always about work.

I was at the office, and one of those dark, ominous storms was moving in. “This is not good,” I thought as I kept glancing out the window. I looked up and saw the clouds swirling in a circular motion and saw the funnel forming.

Apparently others had too, because the office manager came over the intercom and instructed everyone to go downstairs to the inner hallways as we’d done a so many times before in drills. “Not without my laptop,” I thought as I grabbed it, shoved it in its case and then into my backpack, and joined the procession downstairs.

The twister came and went. Our building was spared any real damage, but the adjacent structure had windows blown out.

The all clear was given, and the next thing I know I was walking down the street towards a non-existent (in real life) cafe. The clouds were dissipating and the sun was peeking out. Everything was a mess. As I was walking, another band of dark clouds started to move in, and I hurried my pace. (Where my car was in all of this, I haven’t a clue. Maybe I took public transit to work that day.) I arrived at the cafe and stood transfixed in front of the television, watching reports of the devastation around Denver. I looked outside and saw the band of clouds heading northwest, where Ben was (at his old school). I took out my phone to warn him, and saw he’d been frantically texting me, trying to warn me of the approaching storms. I tied to text back but it wasn’t working.

Suddenly it was night. Nothing came of the second storm, so I left the cafe and started walking to the train station. The wind picked up and suddenly there was another twister in the distance. Buildings exploded as it touched them, causing fires to spiral up into the sky.

Somehow having managed to escape that, the next thing I remember was being in my car, with the sun brightly shining, driving west down Colfax Avenue, noting all the destruction that lined the street. I had finally made contact with Ben and he was all right. We were both heading back home to survey the damage. I worried about what shape our place would be in, but simultaneously thought, “Well, if we’ve lost everything we have insurance; we’ll start fresh in the new apartment.”

And that is when I woke up.

2 comments

Posted on

One Of The Most Bizarre Houses…

…I ever designed.

It was literally a “dream” house, a residence that popped up in a dream sometime in 1999 and so obsessed me for the next few days that I had to commit it to paper (or at least bytes). In the dream it was built on the east side of Twin Peaks in San Francisco, facing downtown.

You entered at street level. Living, dining, and kitchen were all on this level:

On the upper floor was a guest room and sitting area open to the living/dining area below. Not very practical, I know, but it has the advantage of not letting guests get too comfortable:

Downstairs was the master bedroom that I chose to call the “retreat.” The bed fit in the area between the deck and the low bookcase running between the two support columns. Since there are no other bedrooms, this house was obviously designed for a single person or couple.

There wasn’t much to the exterior; a simple stucco finish that relied more on the masses of the house than decoration to make a statement:

I showed these to my boss at the time and she was blown away that I’d do this “just for fun.” I miss those guys. Too bad the company crashed and burned…

2 comments

Posted on

I Will Answer Any Questions…


…except those related to abortion.

And Todd Akin.

And my years at Bain.

Also I will not be answering any questions about my family, my residences or my term as governor of Massachusetts.

Questions about my religion or my taxes are also off-limits, as are all questions about my vice presidential nominee’s positions, my Party’s  platform and the entire Bush Administration.

Also no questions about droughts.

Source.

2 comments

Posted on

How to Destroy Your Organization's Reason for Existence in a Single Sentence

“Because you believe something is wrong, doesn’t mean you make it illegal.” ~ Brian Brown @ 47:55

After watching this, I am convinced Bryan Brown, Maggie Gallagher and the rest of these “protector of traditional marriage” buffoons will never move out of the 16th Century, no matter how many facts are presented to them.

And y’know, I kind of feel sorry for them, living out their pathetic little lives locked in such a rigid mindset, totally unable or unwilling to admit they’re wrong.

Sad, really.

3 comments

Posted on

Mind-Numbingly Beautiful

The Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, which uses something called “drift scanning” to document the vastness of the sky, has been snapping pictures of the heavens for twelve years as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Survey’s findings have been compiled into a 3D map of space, picturing 200 million galaxies and “7 billion years worth of cosmic movement.” The map will get bigger, soon.

I don’t know about you, but watching this full screen (and happening to be listening to one of the Doctor Who soundtracks when I first viewed it) almost brought me to tears. Keep in mind that each of those blobs of lights aren’t stars—they’re entire galaxies. How can anyone seriously believe we are the only sentient life in such vastness? The thought that there is so much life teeming in the darkness gives me chills. The Universe is so incredibly huge, even if reincarnation were a reality and we “visited” only a single world during each lifetime, we could never experience it all.

I am humbled by the immensity of it all, and makes the fact that the a group of clever apes on a grain of sand orbiting an insignificant speck of light are arguing over who they can love even sadder, doesn’t it?

Put on some music that inspires you (preferably through headphones) and watch (be sure to expand to full screen):

2 comments

Posted on

"FRC's Own Activities Are What Brought This Down On Them"

I haven’t written anything about the shooting at FRC Headquarters because frankly, the words eluded me. My first thought was, “Karma is a bitch,” but I couldn’t expand further on that thought. It comes as no surprise to me that an organization (indeed the entire Christian Right movement) that has been spewing hatred toward gays and lesbians  finally gets hit with blowback—even if it came from a mentally unhinged individual—in the exact form of violence they’ve been not-so-subtly advocating for decades.

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog has written extensively on this topic, and his thoughts expand on the “Karma is a bitch” theme much more eloquently than I could ever hope to. For that reason I’m passing on his most recent post in full, here:

Classliberal2 writes in the comments to my earlier post about the Family Research Council and the recent shooting at its headquarters in Washington, DC:

The FRC is loudly claiming the “hate group” designation brought on this attempted massacre, and I think it needs to be pointed out, much more loudly and forcefully, that their own activities are, in fact, what brought this down on them.

People shy away from that, because they think it sounds too much like apologism for this would-be terrorist fellow, but there’s no way to look at the history of the FRC and come to any other conclusion.

And even after something like this happens, which could have turned into a real horror, it didn’t inspire one moment of pause or reflection on behalf of anyone there, no thought that maybe they’d gone too far and should tone it down — instead, they’re off blaming someone else, so they can continue to do what they’ve always done.

The Family Research Council has decided to treat this tragedy as yet another opportunity to defame its victims. First, they blamed the shooting on the Southern Poverty Law Center for standing up to the Family Research Council’s decades of hate and defamation against gay and trans people.  Then they went so far as to blame President Obama for the shooting.

Since the FRC has been shameless in playing the blame game in an attempt to milk this tragedy for political benefit, then so be it. Let’s do what they’re demanding we do, and talk about whose rhetoric is to blame for the shooting.

First, the shooter is clearly to blame.  And he probably has a screw loose somewhere (I don’t care how hateful an organization is, picking up a gun and planning a shooting rampage (which is what I assume he was planning), which is almost certainly going to end up a suicide mission, is more than a bit screw-loose-y)).  It’s also interesting to note that it’s difficult to remember even one recent act of violence that involved a gay person targeting the religious right – violence on our side simply doesn’t happen.  (Though, I’m not sure we even know the shooter’s orientation.)

Second, the absurd availability of guns in our country (the shooter reportedly got the gun legally) is also to blame. We can thank conservative groups, the Republican party, and Blue Dog Democrats for making guns so easily available to nuts like this shooter, and the shooters in all the previous mass murders.

Third, since the Family Research Council wants to talk, incessantly, about what motivated the shooter besides insanity – about how, in the FRC’s mind, words can absolutely positively push someone to violence – then let’s talk about whether words could push someone to violence, including the Family Research Council’s own words.

Is it possible, as the commenter wrote above, that the Family Research Council’s own decades of hate and defamation against the gay and trans communities, and more generally the religious right’s decades of defamation, finally pushed one of its victims, who was already unstable, over the edge?

Yes.

Does that mean that the FRC deserved to be shot at?

No.

But if the Family Research Council wants to make this debate about words inspiring violence, then let’s have that conversation, and make it an honest conversation that considers their words in addition to ours.

The Family Research Council says that the SPLC, and the rest of us, called them a hate group and that that caused someone to open fire on the FRC.  The thing is, the SPLC calls lots of groups hate groups, and you don’t see people regularly opening fire on any of those groups.  These include the Klan and white supremacists, who are pretty well-hated groups. Yet, there’s little violence against them.  Thus, the appellation itself does not historically seem to lead to violence.

Second, the FRC would like you to believe that calling an organization a hate group is enough to push someone to murder; but actually being a hate group, acting like a hate group, talking like a hate group will have no impact whatsoever on some unhinged person’s decision to take up violence.

That’s a bit naive (and I suspect the FRC is anything but naive).  As I explain in this other blog post, the FRC is essentially blaming the SPLC for exposing the fact that the FRC is hateful.  Are we really to believe that the shooter would have been fine with the FRC’s hateful anti-gay words and deeds – would have been fine being repeatedly mislabeled a pedophile – had the Southern Poverty Law Center not also added the moniker “hate group”?  Unlikely.

The thing is, it’s not really news to gay people, and our allies, that the FRC is hateful.  As victims of far right hatred for all these years, we knew about the FRC and its brethren long before the SPLC spoke out in 2010.  So it’s, again, naive to think that gay people, or our allies, were unaware of the Family Research Council’s anti-gay rhetoric until the SPLC decided to call them on it.  If we were motivated to violence by the fact that we thought the FRC was hateful, you’d think the violence would have happened long before the SPLC got involved because all of us thought/knew they were hateful the first time they wrongfully accused us of being pedophiles, oh so many years ago.

Second, the FRC is, in essence, (and pardon the cliché under the circumstances) asking us to shoot the messenger.  FRC would like you to believe that even if someone didn’t know about FRC’s hate before, the fact that they learned about FRC’s hate now via the SPLC, makes the SPLC responsible for any subsequent actions by any unhinged persons.  I explain the logical fallacy:

Isn’t it a bit like complaining, “Joe punched me because you told him I slept with his wife.”

But you did sleep with his wife.

That doesn’t mean Joe should resort to violence, ever. But you did sleep with his wife. So let’s stop pretending that the sinner here is the guy who caught you.

The Family Research Council has made a business out of calling out “sinners,” as they lovingly call us.  Yet when they’re called out for theirsins, their accusers are accused of inciting murder with their words, and told to STFU.  So the FRC is saying that it’s okay to intentionally mislabel an entire class of Americans as pedophiles, but it’s not okay for the so-called pedophiles to say “stop.”

Not only is the Family Research Council’s anti-gay rhetoric so hateful that I think it could inspire one of its less-level-headed victims to violence, I also fear, and have said so many times before, that their hateful rhetoric could motivate one of their less-leveled-headed followers to violence as well.  And it wouldn’t be the first time “good Christians” took up violence against gays in order to be true to their God.

The Family Research Council has claimed for 20 years that gay men are after America’s children – either to convert said children into a Satanic lifestyle of emptiness, disease and death; or we simply want to rape the kids, a lot.

Now, I’m not a parent, but I am an uncle.  And if I met someone who wanted to rape, or kill, my nieces and nephews, God help him.  That’s all I’ll say on the matter.  The suggestion that such language might not inspire violence in the defense of children is ludicrous.

The Family Research Council, and more generally the anti-gay right, can’t have it both ways.  Either words can incite violence or they can’t.  Falsely labeling someone a bad person can either provoke violence, or it can’t.  The FRC would have us believe that our admonitions incite violence but theirs couldn’t.

But if words can incite violence, then it’s fair to examine all the words of all the parties to the dispute, not just the words of one side.

And if you examine what the Family Research Council, and really the entire religious right, has said – lied – about gay and trans people for the past two decades, not only is what they’ve said is far worse than what any of their critics have said in response, but their language is so hateful, so damning, so incendiary on its face (and false, which only makes it all the more incendiary), that I believe it’s difficult not to consider the possibility that the religious right might share some of the blame for recklessly inciting the violence that finally, and sadly, unfolded this past week.

 

0 comments

Posted on

Ugh.

Here we go again.

It’s been my experience that I rarely stay more than a year at the first place I move into in a new city, and Denver is proving to be no exception to that. Ben and I were both pretty fed up with this place and when presented with a $1000 a year rent increase we said, “Enough!”

Yes, it’s convenient to our preferred shopping haunts, it’s located roughly halfway between our respective workplaces, and we’ve become quite fond of the Starbucks that’s a block away, but we just can’t justify staying here, especially since we found a two bedroom place that’s brand new and is going for what our increased rent would be if we stayed here in this one bedroom unit.

So why am I not champing at the bit to get packed, even though I am excited about the new place? Because I hate the process of moving. Once upon a time I looked upon it as a great adventure, but I’m long past that. The best thing I did when I reached my mid 30s was to start hiring people to load and unload the truck, finally zeroing-out the moving karma owed to friends. I’m rapidly reaching the point where I can justify the expense of having movers come in and do it all.

Right now I’m just keeping in mind that three weeks from now we’ll be moved—and moved in—to the new place and this will all be nothing more than an unpleasant memory.

2 comments