Monthly Archives: May 2012

Too much stuff!

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This is getting to be a Thursday “thing”, isn’t it? Damn. I am a writer, I am supposed to be creative and unpredictable. Yet no matter what, order and stability always emerge from the chaos.

I am pretty sure there is something really deep and meaningful in there about chaos math and emergent systems like, for instance, life. But I got content to share and people to do, so I am not going to go into it now.

Thus, it will dissolve back into the chaos of my mind, and emerge again in a completely different form.

Creativity is so freaky!

All right, what all do I want to share?

Well, there is this pic that Weird All (all hail the Al!) posted to his Twitter recently :

SHOVE YOUR CAN INTO MY CRINKLY HOLE HUMAN!

Al’s caption is “I always get a little grossed out whenever I see a Pepsi sphincter. “. Bet most of you did not even know that is where Pepsi came from….

Just kidding. This is not Futurama and Pepsi is not Slurm.

If you haven't seen the episode, trust me, you don't wanna know

But still, there is definitely something uncomfortably sphinctoid about that design. I am sure Al was not the first person to note this.

Not that I blame Pepsi. That is the natural design for things you want to only go one way. Nature does know what it is doing sometimes.

And honestly, I am a pretty straightforward, pragmatic, direct person, but even I would have trouble being the guy at the meeting who raises his hand and says “Um…. doesn’t this look just a little too much like a butthole for something we want associated with a brown drink?”

Even if they agree with you, they are never going to look at you the same way again.

Speaking of pictures, this one had been making the rounds of the Internet because it expresses a simple truth of our times so well.

Same hate, different era

Sorry to drop the serious on you all, but this is the sort of thing that needs to be shared.

The Twitter message that went with this pic puts it perfectly.

“These two pictures will be viewed/judged identically by our children and their children. ”

Spot on, my friend. From this point onward, history will judge the two fights for civil rights, and the incredibly ugliness that the light of reason and charity drives to the surface when the fight is nearly done, to be the same. They will see no difference between people marching to prevent interracial marriage and marching to prevent gay marriage. And there is a reason for that.

Because there is no difference.

We in the GBLT community should not take the recent victory of the anti gay marriage forces in North Carolina too hard. This is the sort of thing that always happens when the fight is nearly over. The right wing reactionaries always put up the biggest fight when they realize public opinion is against them and they know that this is their last chance to try to pray the tide away.

And it never makes a bit of difference, because all their protesting and blocking entrance to schools and spewing hate into every available microphone does is further cement their image as horrible, cruel, mean, nasty people who are definitely way outside the mainstream, and hence, they lose all credibility with the massive movable middle who truly decided how things work.

They make it so that nobody who thinks of themselves as a nice person, a sensible person, or even just a socially acceptable person will be willing to associate with them, and hence the balance shifts towards the liberal side of the teeter-totter.

And it will never shift back.

What else should I share…. well, there is this thing.

It it making the rounds of Internet movie fans with remarkable speed, and I can see why, but to me, it is highly flawed. The editing is quite jerky and unnatural, the compositing is crudely done, and there are large stretches which are not comedically justified.

I mean, sure, the whole “You talkin to me?” scene is the most famous scene from Taxi Drive (for some reason), but that does not mean you have to just stick a Mickey hat on DeNiro and put it in there. That is just not funny or interesting.

And sure, what they did with the “All the animals come out at night” speech was amusing, but even then it was off pace and went by too quickly.

Again, I can see why it has caught on. But to me, it is far too sloppy, crude, and unfunny to justify its popularity. I think it gets passed around mostly on premise alone, and that is never pretty.

Finally, a depressing bit of news that nevertheless needs to spread far and wide : Mitt Romney was a vicious bully in high school.

And he went to a very expensive and exclusive high school. So those were other rich kids he was bullying. He cut off one “presumed gay” student’s hair.

I am pretty sure that makes him officially evil, right? As if his bastardly practices at Bain Capital, where he and his rich friends had tons of fun taking successful business and running them into the ground for fun and profit, were not enough.

Nope, he was also a laughing, smirking, cruel, mocking bully who made fellow students’ lives miserable and seemingly had no idea what he was doing was even wrong.

I was a victim of severe bullying as a child, so I might be biased.

But now I just want the fucker to die, die, die. Mo mercy for bullies. They show none of us. We will show none to them.

There is no way a bully can be elected President.

And sure, that was a long long time ago, but I do not care.

Die in flames, you bastard.

More news from the underground

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Oy. Another of those deep dark sleepy days. I feel punch drunk and drunk on punch. Bad punch.

Today has been remarkably rough for a day in which, technically, I did absolutely nothing. Or well, I did nothing outside my brain.

Inside Brain Central, it was a madhouse.

As I tend to say at these times, I have come to accept these null days with a certain amount of grace and equanimity. They still annoy me, because I would honestly prefer to be be awake and doing something rather than sleeping my life away, but still, I don’t freak out about them like I used to do. I just grumble and endure.

Grumbling makes enduring easier.

Not a heck of a lot notable about the dream festival so far. I remember I was at some sort of lecture and/or concert in some kind of university amphitheater, and I was quite enjoying it. I was one seat from the aisle, and the guy between me and the aisle was a large fellow like myself, so it was a little too cramped for comfort. But whatever it was we were attending, I was enjoying the heck out of it.

Then there was an intermission, and the guy next to me got up so I had some room, and I noticed that there was all this stuff for sale by the university. T-shirts, buttons, snacks, that sort of thing, But in my dream, I was almost totally broke, and I still needed to have money for the bus home, so I knew I could not buy anything. But I really wanted to buy stuff.

Interestingly, during this intermission, all the music being played over the PA system was relatively obscure stuff I know and love. And so while I wandered around looking at stuff I could not afford to buy, I would stop and exlaimed “Hey, that is such and such song by so and so band!” delightedly.

I guess it is easy to get great music on the PA when your brain is the DJ.

I remember coming back to my seat, and looking around to see if there was a better, more comfortable seat I could steal while people were milling around. (I am definitely bolder and more selfish in my dreams. ) I decided there was not, but to get myself a little more breathing room, I took the coat the guy next to me had left behind, and moved it to the seat behind me.

What a little bitch!

I don;t recall anything more of that plotline. I remember that in my intermission wanderings, I came across what seemed to be a combination DJ booth and info booth for the event. And I remember asking them why all the items had two numbers for the price, and they didn’t know. Then I suggesting that maybe one number was the student price and the other was the non-student price, and they said “That must be it. ”

So even in my dreams, service people can’t answer simple freaking questions. Sheesh.

And I remember that what prompted me to ask was this really cool looking watch that had three tiny but surprisingly high resolution screens on it that played video slots. I really wanted the watch in the dream, but of course, I could not afford it.

Other dream plotlines followed a familiar “I am eating all the wonderful sweet things I am not allowed to eat in the real world due to diabetes” theme. One new thing : I have distinct memories of the highly accurate flavours of some of the things I ate. Like, for instance, a lime Slurpee. Normally, my dreams do not do the sense of taste very well. I guess the cravings have gotten bad enough that my dream life has had to up the detail level of the fantasies to compensate.

And I really do crave the sweet things I can’t have. I see other people eating and enjoying them, and I think “You people have no idea how good you have it, being able to eat whatever you want from the massive world of sweet sugary foods!”. And I resent them.

Of course, those foods are not good for those people either. But at least they can indulge in moderation without it killing them. Me, not so much.

Ever since the finger infection, I have avoided the Bad Stuff entirely. It was the least I could do given the extreme consequences of too high a blood sugar level. A massive infection from just a little nick in my cuticle? Sugar in my urine?? Those are definitely serious warning signs. And I am trying like hell to heed them.

I have also eliminated carb rich snack foods from my diet. No more chips, pretzels, and so forth. For me, it is nice low carb protein rich nuts for snacking from now on.

So my carb intake has dropped a fair bit. It is still a little high, but I think I have gotten my blood sugars down to a safer level. Now, when I skip meals or am late with meals, I get distinctly hungry and even have experienced mild hypoglycemia a few times. I take that as a sign that the base level is down to the same level it was when Avandia had my diabetes under control.

I have actually been a lot hungrier overall lately. It is frustrating to eat exactly how much you normally eat and still find yourself hungry. But I think that is just the carb craving talking. My body is still craving the much larger doses of carbohydrates it used to get, and it will take a while before it is convinced that it is just not getting that any more.

The theory is that it will then begin to burn fat to get what it wants. I sure hope so. I am still not getting any more exercise, but I can at least do the diet part right.

And who knows? If I get my body working better, maybe I will feel like being more active!

It could happen.

Back behind the wheel?

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Well this is weird. On a whim, I decided to check to see if my FatCow account had magically come back to life, and what do you know… it had.

Dunno what the deal is there, but what the heck, I will take advantage of serendipity and write this blig entry in the interface to which I have become accustomed.

Writing in a Tumblr window is not too bad. It has a lot of the same little HTML helpers that a WordPress input window has, although in not quite as sophisticated a form.

But what I really missed was the constantly updating word count that a WordPress window has right in the lower left of the text input window. I have spent the last three years or more training myself to write to a specific word count every day, and until I lost my WordPress access I had no idea how handy that little word count thing was for that and how much I would miss it when it was gone.

Honestly, for a while, I was a little mystified as to the popularity of Tumblr, to be honest. Seems to be that even Livejournal has a better blogging system. I mean, Tumblr doesn’t even have comments. What kind of crap blogging system lacks comments?

But then again, presumably most people do not shop around when looking for a blogging platform. They just go where all the other cool blogs are, and deal with it as it is.

And while Tumblr may be lacking in features, it does have a very clean and user friendly interface, making it the low entry ramp for people to get into the world of blogging.

In fact, what it is best for is not blogging in the sense of “writing words like I am doing right now”, but simple content sharing. It makes it super easy to share a photo, a link, a video, or whatever with a minimum of hassle. And that is why, I think, it has been ground central for things going viral. A person can blog some cool content and then everyone following them can “reblog” it to their own blog, and their follows can reblog it, and so forth and so on, all with each person just having to contribute a few clicks. Could not be easier.

Plus, the fact that each user can start a new blog on a whim, and have as many blogs as they like, makes it a great incubator for wacky ideas. If a person had to register a whole new domain name and set up a whole Wordpess (or whatever) account for every little idea they had, they probably would not bother.

But if it just takes a handful of clicks on Tumblr, why the heck not? Make a blog to extoll your love of asparagus. Or to talk endlessly about Spirit of the West. Or vent about how much you hate taxis that smell like patchouli. Or whatever.

And who knows, you might find like minded people and start a whole thing going!

In the news, the world is saddened today because children’s author and full time cantankerous curmudgeon Maurice Sendak has died of cancer at the age of 83.

He was mostly known for the seminal children’s book Where The Wild Things Are, which has sold over 17 million copies worldwide and which hold a special place in the minds and hearts of many of today’s grownups, as it was published in 1963. So many generations have grown up with it.

I suspect the fact that he was mostly only famous for one book he wrote over fifty years ago (as of this writing) might have contributed to his being a tad grumpy. He would have been like Leonard Nimoy saying “You know, I have done many things since Star Trek. Want to hear about my poetry or my big books of pictures of naked fat chicks?”

But no, people just want to talk about that One Thing You Did, if they talk to you at all.

Myself, I remember Where The Wild Things Are from when I read it as a kid, but it made no special impact on me. I did not identify with Max, the protagonist (it would be many years before I found my own “wolf suit”) and his adventure did not resonate with me at all. I wonder why.

Maybe it was just plain because I was such a weird kid. I was always, to borrow a phrase from Anne Of Green Gables. “too old for my age”. I was a very civilized and well behaved (if very stubborn) kid. I never ran around the house screaming shooting my toy raygun slaying imaginary bug eyed aliens. I never spent hours playing with action figures making up scenarios of battle and victory. I never even played with toys hardly at all.

I was a strange, quiet, yet precocious child. Definitely not like the other kids at all, a fact to which they responded with predictable ire.

So a book all about how little boys are in many ways closer to the animals and wild things was not going to work for me. I was not a little wild thing. I was a very tame thing.

Ergo, for me, my reaction to the book was somewhere between “Meh.” and “Ick.” I certainly did not like the art. The wild things were weird and sort of scary to me. It made me want to go read some of my beloved Doctor Seuss books again. Nice, clean, wacky, yet adorable art. That was more my speed.

Then again, at that time I was already reading Asimov and Bradbury and had a certain amount of contempt for the “kiddie books” in that section of my elementary school library.

I mean, those books talked to me like I was an idiot! Like my brief exposure to the Dick and Jane books. Am I the only one who thinks these two are retarded?

Apparently, the answer was “yes”.

Man I was a weird, weird kid.