glomph

Reminds me of the time I had to detour around a PFLAG parade to go meet a gay IRS agent for lunch. I have a problem with the terminology anyway. Why would someone be proud of their sexual orientation? Isn't it something one is born with? It's sort of like being proud to be an American (as stated on bumper stickers). I can see that if you risked your life to escape a country or worked hard to raise money to leave, or something, and then struggled to learn English and US civics, etc., and maybe then served in the US military for a while, and finally was naturalized a US citizen, well then, of course, you're entitled to be proud to be an American, and congratulations to you, and welcome! But proud to be a citizen just because you were born somewhere? Similarly, I guess if I believed the homosexual "cures" really worked, and someone had gone through all manner of treatments and therapies and wishing and hoping and praying and expense and even learned the secret handshake, and it was all successful, then, OK, I could see how one might be proud to be straight. BTW, for drunk and disorderly celebrations, I've read that St. Patrick's Day in Savannah (of all places) is one of the drunkest and most disorderly.

I was just pointing out some anachronisms and didn't mean to get too serious. Folks can get so carried away claiming that people were gay, especially the smart and the talented, that it becomes even more meaningless.

Applying the term "gay" to historical persons is tricky. For example, in a society where straight men had boy lovers, is everybody gay? Do you count everybody who fooled around with other guys when they were young? Do you take into account Kinsey's notion of a scale? Or what? Oh, and don't forget Alan Turing.

We used to think/hope that it would help prevent drug use if famous people would talk to young people about their past drug problems. But the message that kids often came away with was, "Well, he did drugs, and he came out OK, and so can I."

On old liner notes Rundgren expressed surprise that people completely misunderstood what the song was about. If one reads just the title, one might conclude that it didn't matter at all whether she/he loved him/her, when the song is saying the opposite, that little things wouldn't have been adequate to break them up if there had been love. I like the song anyway, but I think it is helped by Allison Krause's rendition of it and by the context in her album. The song probably means more if you've been there and done that, or if you can imagine having been.

Raising animals for food is a very inefficient use of grain, particularly the way we do it in the US. Now that so much corn is being used to make gasohol and it is displacing other less subsidized food crops, the fact that so much corn goes into meat production doesn't leave much US grain for human consumption. Our agricultural subsidies have caused economic dislocations and resettlement from farms in other countries. It's certainly a factor in the upswing of illegal immigrants. I lose count of all the vicious cycles that are generated and/or sustained by our heavy consumption of meat, our corn-based meat production, our subsidies of corn, our very petroleum-dependent farming methods, etc.

My favorite album of break-up songs is "Forget about It" by Alison Krauss. I especially enjoy her rendition of Todd Rundgren's "It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference"

I heard on the radio this afternoon that Tennessee fainting goats are quite tasty when prepared properly. (I'm not making that up.) I don't care for giant steaks, and I've about lost my taste for fast-food burgers, but otherwise, I'm pretty much of a meat eater. I like veggies a lot, too, especially if they are well prepared. I met a guy once who told me he was a Vegan, but I didn't find out whether that referred to his dietary habits, his planetary origin, or both.

Thanks for the spoiler.

When I was little, I heard about boys who were injured because they believed they could fly if they just wore a towel like a cape. I watched the Superman TV series all those years in the '50s, and it would have never occurred to me (or anybody I knew) to do that.

Go Apps!

Any Death Note fans around here? I've not seen the manga, but I have watched the first DVD of episodes of the anime. I'm looking forward to watching more soon. They seem to have taken a lot of care with the dubbing.

Alan Turing played a giant role in the defeat of the Nazis and the development of computers.

Question 4: The question that cares [i hope I can edit this without changing the post number.] This is post 714 for me, for all you Dragnet fans.

". . . in the kind of world where we belong" makes it seem to fit a gay context even better than a straight one. I just looked at the websites of the San Francisco and Washington gay men's choruses to see if either has recorded "Wouldn't It Be Nice," but didn't see it. One song I did see a couple of times was "We Kiss in a Shadow." I don't remember that one very well, but it sounds like it could easily be a romantic song that works well in a gay context. It's a ballad from the early '50s.

I tried listening to that, and made it through about 45 seconds. Then I saw the link to Roberta Flack and escaped there. I guess I'm just an old fogey and prefer it the way I know it, and then, too, I've never much cared for Celine Dion, and that clip helped remind me why. Great song, though. "Killing Me Softly" is another really intense Robert Flack performance, though the audio doesn't come through very well in this posting. I guess I need to head to iTunes and buy some of her music. "Killing Me Softly" maybe is not romantic in the sense of this thread, but wow. I go with you on those songs, too. I've not heard the Carey version, but will stick with the originals. Oh, and let me suggest the Beach Boy's "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" Try listening to the song and think of it in a gay context. I think it comes out sweet and romantic and political all at the same time. Instead of teenagers not yet of legal age and independence, think of US gays in an age when their country is not ready for their marriage. And a personal, but a bit off-topic note. Thinking of what is romantic to me right now is somewhat difficult and confusing. This weekend I saw for the first time in ten years the one woman I would have married if she would have had me. She looked in my eyes and smiled and touched my arm, and I was transported back 30 years. If there were a song I associated with her, I'd be suggesting it right now. But I'm not going try to assert that there's anything romantic on the Stravinsky LP she gave me, though the music is neat.

Not relevant for gay males, but still I think Brad Paisley's song "Put That Toilet Seat Down" is incredibly romantic, and not just humorous. It assumes an intimacy and maturity of relationship which could be a hope for just about anybody.

I may have mentioned this here before. A few years back I really did adopt Brian Kinney as my role model--not really anything to do with sexuality, but attitude. I was presented with a complex of challenges that I later realized I couldn't have dealt with if I had been too emotionally invested in them. I have Brian to thank for my accomplishments.

Thanks for sharing your good news with us. Congratulations!

Most of Indiana didn't have DST until fairly recently. The northwest corner was in Central time and observed DST, as did some eastern counties in the Eastern zone. The rest of the state was in Eastern Standard year round. Now I think most of the state is in the Central time zone and observes DST. Perhaps India follows the lead of Indiana, rather than vice versa. The closer a country is to the equator, the less sense it makes for it to observe DST. Having one time zone in India would seem to me to be like having permanent DST in the western part, anyway. Isn't all of China in the same time zone as Beijing? That's worse than India.

If we stick with his hardware requirements, he could use of of the CP/M clones. They were sold under various names such as MS-DOS and PC-DOS.

There is some research that suggests that a lot of people's internal clocks run closer to a 25-hour cycle than 24. That's the "circa" in "circadian." If people were just left to do things at their own pace and didn't have to work with others' schedules, or arbitrary schedules, a lot of folk would stay up an hour later each night and get up an hour later each morning, more or less, especially if daylight clues are not a great factor (such as places/times of year with lots of or very little daylight).

During exams I'd get on a 28-hour day cycle: stay up 24, sleep 4. Then I'd catch up on my sleep during the break. I could do that then. Now, I get jet lag twice a year just from the time change.

for those of you not content just to change the clock back and forth each year

Wasn't he also a proponent of "Early to bed and early to rise" (at least in his Almanac, if not so much in practice)? Isn't that a contradiction, at least for people like farmers who do things based on daylight? But look where the divide is: between Central and Mountain time. There's not a lot there, for the most part. It's not like people are commuting to an urban center somewhere. It doesn't much matter if the next little isolated town is two hours off. It may in real life be two centuries off. Every little town could observe local sun time, and no one would much notice or care. As far as relating to the rest of the world, they're already dealing with satellite TV feeds in Eastern and Pacific times. When he was in Paris, he probably kept asking, "What was I thinking?" I was in the Central Time Zone last fall when we switched back, and then came back to the Eastern Time Zone that day. That should have been like no change at all, but I stayed confused for days.