Monthly Archives: February 2005

6 Apart In The News

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Mena dismisses the skepticism as misguided, insisting a blog doesn’t have to be profound to be worthwhile. She believes most blogs are simply a convenient way to keep in touch with a small circle of family and friends, even if the content seems inconsequential.

You know it’s a cultural phenomenon when the Daily Harold (spelling intentional) finally gets around to covering it. The story mentions the people that got Six Apart‘s Moveable Type started as a blogware giant, such as Joi Ito.

My blog? Inconsequential. But I have fun with it.

It Is Illegal To Hunt Whales In Utah

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As US coast-to-coast crimewaves go, it is not in the league of Bonnie and Clyde. It lacks both violence and avarice and is further hindered by an overabundance of pre-publicity.

Undeterred, a couple of students from Cornwall are intent on making American criminal history by spending their summer breaking as many US laws as possible.

Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course.

In the far more conservative – and landlocked – state of Utah, they will risk the penitentiary when they hire a boat and attempt to go whale-hunting.

Excellent post fodder – it’s got the Utah angle, it’s got British cheek, it’s got whales, and it’s got some remarkably dumb laws.

I wonder if any of the Utah contingent of the family would like to help these guys out? I might be able to come up with a harpoon, through a friend of a friend of a harpooner.

Island Reads

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I’m going to do a little hacking around with the “books” portion of the left column. I’ve grown tired of seeing the “Unreadable Culls” titles and will repurpose the category to “Soon To Be Read.” As you might guess, I picked up a few books on the trip, which will eventually released via Bookcrossing

I got a “buy 2/get 3” deal at the Maui Borders, plus I got another book at the Borders Express next to the Kihei Safeway.

Read

Be Cool, by Elmore Leonard
A fast, fun read. Not as original as “Get Shorty”, of course but still breezy and light, with dialogue as bright and sharp as a razor’s edge. I wasn’t so interested in how the wimmin still wanted to be with Chil, but at least his new love interest sounded interesting (though for the movie they’ll probably make it Uma Thurman’s character and not whoever plays the mature female movie executive, Elaine).

This time, Chili Palmer takes on the music establishment while living out the plot of his next movie. And it had better be a hit, because the sequel to his first movie tanked because he let the studio talk him into letting someone plot it. It also probably tanked because nobody got taken out while taking a meeting with him.

Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, by James Bradley

Absorbing, fascinating, and quite shocking; I’d read bits and pieces about the kind of atrocities committed on prisoners by the Japanese during WWII and had dismissed them as holdovers of wartime jingoism. Well, not so much now. Guess what happens when you instill your young people with fanatical devotion to an authority figure and discourage independent thinking? Bad, very bad, very evil things.

On The Bookshelf

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire

I started reading this to give myself a break from the horrors of the “Flyboys” atrocities. It’s fascinating as fiction and also as social commentary: a very strange looking, prickly and unconventional girl isn’t inherently evil or wicked, but she’s certainly going to become just that.

And all because she has green skin and a beaky hooked nose, they make her out to be a witch or something. It’s exploring something that I’ve long wondered about – the tyranny of beauty in society, where the accident of one’s facial structure, skin, hair, and body type determine almost everything important in their lives.

Pretty? Good, nice, popular, successful, sympathetic, loveable, attractive.
Ugly? Bad, nasty, unpopular, unsuccessful, unsympathetic, unloveable, unattractive.

See that? The ugly often gets defined as what it’s not, rather than what it is. Why? Maybe because an alternative word that avoids the negative construction is just too.. negative itself for people to want to use it.

Anyway, “Wicked” is beautifully written. Elphaba, the girl who would be Queen (of those evil scary flying monkeys and the “oo-wee-oh” guys) is not yet evil herself. In fact, she’s likeable in spite of her best efforts to put people off – she has a sarcastic wit and a certain elegance of form that contrasts with her, er, less attractive facial features and startling complexion.

But even as a baby she was instinctively and dreadfully afraid of the water.

Soon To Be Read

The Good Wife Strikes Back, by Elizabeth Buchan
Haven’t read this one yet, it’s up next after I knock off the two big ones I’m still reading. I’m slowly making my way through Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is a rich, satisfying, but challenging read. I haven’t read any of these kind of books that have the cute covers and tell of how someone ran off somewhere picturesque (Tuscany, Provence, what have you) and learned to live like a local and grow their own olives or grapes or whatever.

It sounds like a nice escape for my next book.

UPDATE

: “Revenge of the Middle Aged Lady” was the wrong title. It’s really “The Good Wife Strikes Back.” I get the feeling that the next books in the series will be “The Phantom Merry Widow,” “The Attack of the Crones,” and “Return of the Ladi.”

Music and Whatnot

Oh, this is weird. I’m sitting here listening to the Radio@AOL Hawaiian channel (a similar thing is found on Radio@Netscape, pretty much), and I’ve heard 2 performers and 2 songs so far whose concert we attended on Maui – Dennis Kamakahi (as a member of the group Hui Aloha) singing “Steal Away,” and George Kahumoku, Jr singing “Laupahoehoe Hula.” I think the latter was the one that George’s nephew did a fun young man’s hula about fishing, surfing, eating, and hanging out. Both within the last 10 minutes.

And as it’s late, I’m going to bed at last. Dammit, it’s a little too late to read before turning the lights out.

They seem to have a lock on this channel, too. The next track shows a “Kahumoku Brothers” song, and then there’s another Dennis Kamakahi song after Keola Beamer.

The Simpsons and Gay Marriage

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Darn it, I think I missed a really good episode of the Simpsons. I ran across a reference to it in Cathleen Falsani’s religion column in the Sun-Times:

Hey, remember when divorce was a sin? Not just a sin, but the sin. The big, controversial, sexy one. The one everyone was preaching about and arguing over. The one that threatened to destroy morality, culture, and, eventually, humanity as we know it.

I started to ponder the demise of divorce, and the rise of same-sex marriage as the sin du jour as the “parental warning” flashed across my television screen before the opening sequence of “The Simpsons” last Sunday night.

Fox apparently felt the need to let parents know that the ensuing episode would contain some content they might find inappropriate for their children. The episode in question was about fictional Springfield, USA, allowing same-sex marriage as a ploy to attract tourists. Oh, yeah, and Marge Simpson’s sister, Patty Bouvier, comes out as a lesbian.

Upon hearing Patty’s news, Homer said: “Yeah, big surprise . . . Here’s another bomb: I like beer!”

You know, she’s right. Divorce used to be the big bugaboo, the thing that used to be the big scandal, the unpardonable sin. I grew up in a Protestant church and so divorce wasn’t a sermon topic that I recall, but out in the pews, divorce was still somewhat scandalous but considered private. However, divorce of clergy could still get people totally het up and arguing and polarized into armed camps, and could send individual churches into schismatic convulsions. I recall, vaguely, back in the 70’s that “no-fault divorce” seemed to make the ultra-conservative religious types crazy, but I didn’t pay much attention to them at the time. Because back then, ultra-conservative religious types were on the fringe and were considered somewhat kooky and were definitely marginal. Remember?

Ah, the good old days, when the religious kooks didn’t look like they’d be running the roost for years to come.

Later on in the Sun-Times column, a study conducted by a University of Oregon researcher noted that in the mid-60’s, Oregon preachers from both “liberal” and “conservative” churches were pounding the pulpits and warning the faithful against divorce and gambling, and in favor of Sunday closing laws. By the mid-80’s, divorce had become commonplace, gambling had been safely compartmentalized and incorporated in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and only backwards communities full of hicks still had Sunday closing laws (like Utah? I remember they still had them in the late 70’s at least).

Nowadays, of course, nobody would bother to attack divorce since it’s so widespread, although the occasional fire-and-brimstone preacher might decry it so long as he wasn’t divorced multiple times himself. Many communities are economically dependent on local gambling operations (Indian reservations especially) so most preachers wouldn’t touch the issue. And Sunday closing laws? What? Not even. NO minister would dare attack stores for being open on the Lord’s day when so many of their parishioners work 6 days a week (with part-time jobs) and have to do their main grocery shopping on a Sunday.

There’s just no support for it. Right? But it’s still possible to preach against gay marriage (and against gay clergy) because although a lot of people voice support for their gay friends and family members, they’re just a little bit afraid to rock the boat and REALLY speak out, for fear of causing offense to people who feel differently. On the other hand, the people who feel differently don’t hesitate to speak out against gay marriage and risk causing offense, because they’re so busy being offended by gays that they don’t stop to think how their actions might hurt someone (or worse, result in someone’s death). Or perhaps they don’t think it matters if someone “not like them” is hurt by their words.

I wonder why that is? And how sad. As long as there’s plenty of support for the anti-gay marriage stance, it’ll continue to be a favorite talking point for sermonizing.

Anyway, Cathleen Falsani is now working on a book called “The God Factor” that will have some interesting and provocative things to say about faith – in the words of a number of celebrities who’ve been interviewed by her in connection with a Sun-Times feature of the same name. I’ll look forward to reading it.

The researcher in Oregon, Benton Johnson, has promised to try to revisit the question in 2012 if he’s still alive – what will be the bugaboo issue in the fundy pulpits AFTER gay marriage becomes as much of a commonplace as divorce is now? As he likes to joke, “”I like to kid that when every ninth evangelical pastor’s son or daughter comes out, you’ll hear less on that subject, too.”

Yep, it’ll all come down to that old standby – hearts and minds. The sooner everyone realizes that they’re related to or friends with gay people, the sooner everyone will realize “hey, why can’t my kid marry her girlfriend? They love each other – and God wouldn’t create a love that was wrong.”

As weird as it is to say it, I’m paraphrasing a quote by Mancow Muller there, from the Sun-Times collection of interviews. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Franken Further

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It’s been a while since I’ve listened to AAR – I think the mourning period is over and it’s time to get back into it.

Al Franken’s show is about to start so I’ll tune in via the Internets link at their site. I used to listen to Majority Report every night before the election, too (except for Fridays, when Janeane’s dad Carmine was on).

Dammit, I should have listened last night – Archbishop Desmond Tutu was on.

Herzelein

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Here’s a picture of our first Geocaching success story, Herzilein. We took him (her?) out to dinner at Hanafuda, then went to the village of Hana a couple of nights, went to the store, and finally said farewell somewhere on the south coast of Maui.

I’m currently reading up on the whole geocache game, hunt, boondoggle, or what-have-you at Geocache-U.

For instance, most geocachers have to print out the information, but there’s a way to download the page information to a Palm – this method is pretty complicated, but might work better than the way we were doing it in Maui (which was write stuff down since we didn’t have a printer or a cable to download the basic waypoints to David’s Palm). So, our success rate was piss-poor, because we just didn’t have the intel. Needed the info.

However, back to our few, proud successes. Meet Herzelein, a world-traveling (maybe) bear. It appears from a reading of the rules that we made an elementary newbie error – in the future, need to remember NOT to take a picture of travelbugs with the number showing. Don’t know why, but I’m sure there’s a good reason.

Geocachers are pretty funny. The FAQ says:

Unless you have a tracking system implanted by aliens, you should be safe from the satellites above. As an extra precaution, however, you can put aluminum foil on your head to deflect the “gamma” beams.

Yippee! We’re all set! David actually has a working tinfoil hat!

(yes, he does. It’s a camping/hiking hat with a Mylar top layer that supposedly reflects UV/IR wavelength and is designed to keep him cool and comfy on a hot day).

Useful links for this new hobby/sport/obsession:
FAQ
Creating your first cache
Cache listing guidelines

And now, back to work. Dammit.

It’s A Gas, Gas, Gas

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So we drove up to the top of Haleakala, the House of the Sun, on Maui. And then we noticed that we had 1/16th of a tank of gas and we were 20 miles from the nearest gas station.

So went back down Haleakala, the House of the Sun, in neutral. Whee! And singing the Adventurer’s Song. Typically, we bust out singing when things are going really, really well on a trip and we’re feeling a little chuffy about it, or things are not going very well and we’re trying to raise our spirits for being goofs on parade.

We pulled up to the Shell station in Kula on fumes. We’d already had lunch in Kula, we’d had enough of Kula, we bagged the hiking we’d planned to do and moped off to Costco to buy obscene amounts of snack foods and supplies for the rest of the stay (some of which we consumed, much of which we abandoned in the rental car at the end of the trip). In this shot I was trying to document the incredibly expensive prices we were paying for gas.

And then later that day we went all the way up to Kapalua for a concert – more than an hour’s drive. Not the best managed of travel days.

But at least we’re Adventurers!

Dogged Determination

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I have had 34 years’ worth of mutts and all but one of them is gone. Their ashes sit in nice little cans or pots on a bookshelf. Every once in a while, one of the containers catches my eye and I find myself saying, “That was a great dog,” even about the one who was crazy as an outhouse rat. The first one, who went to live with the mailman when I moved to Russia long ago, seemed to understand nothing but peeing and chewing up apartment quarter round, which he meticulously removed and diligently placed in piles. He lived a long and happy life on a farm.

Words to consider, as David and I are thinking about buying a dog. The “Rambling Gleaner” goes on to say:

Head on over to the local humane society or dog pound and there you see them, lined up in cages, many dogs caught in a hopeless bind because they don’t seem cute, don’t seem puppy like, don’t seem pretty.

We’re actually thinking about adopting a somewhat older dog – one that’s already been housebroken and so on. Dang it, I forgot to talk to David this morning about dogsitting this weekend for Jill. It seems like a good way to figure out if we can handle the responsibilities of doggie care.

TiVo Hacker Snacks, Anyone?

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Bloggers who watch television love TiVo. And TiVo’s just announced their TiVo Developer Challenge. If you’re a Java hacker, check out the Sourceforge project to get the SDK, and win yourself a share of the available prizes.

Via 6A/ProNet

  • Blogger. Check
  • Loves TiVo. Check
  • Java hacker. Check

Sounds like a job for my husband David, AKA Super Hubby!

Hmm. Okay, some of the prizes are kind of “meh.” I mean, who wants a Segway? And some of the “prizes” require purchase of a cell phone plan. Double meh.

I’m Here All Week

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Talking on the phone just now with some guy who was booking a trip to Las Vegas. He was on the hunt for a cheap sleep, so we checked different choices. I noted that the account’s “preferred” hotels in Vegas were a mixed bag, including a chain whose nam is frequently translated from Spanish to English as “next to Denny’s.” We discussed the availability and rate at this property, and he mumbled along while I waited for the computer to catch up with real-time rates: “I’ve heard that hotel is a little…”

I jumped in to cut him off. “This hotel might be a little ‘dumpy.’ As in ‘I’d like a video and a hooker to go, please’ dumpy.”

Big laugh. ‘I’m killing, here,’ I’m thinking. I went on to clarify (for the online phone cops) that it was located on a back street in Vegas, which most people prefer to avoid (we get complaints now and then about “inexpensive” motels in Vegas when some guy has tried to cheap out a little TOO much and gets confronted by some girl’s fancy man in the parking lot). He agreed and we went on with the rest of the booking conversation. He was still laughing about “hookers to go.”

“Thank you, I’m here all week,” I muttered. I had a brief mental vision of me as a female Wayne Newton, pattering along in some has-been hotel showroom on the Strip with bad jokes and a few chestnutty old tunes. AND I’d have better hair and hit deeper notes than he’d ever hope to meet. Yeah.

The guy laughed even harder at my “ba-dum-bum.” remark. “I’d love to meet you.” Heh, right. In your dreams. I’m not half so funny in person as I am on the phone (or online). Alas and so forth.

The truth is, the truth is funny. I AM here all week, and a very long week it’s going to be.