Raccoon eating Cracker Jacks.Legal argie bargie can be fun. But sometimes, it’s just sad.
During the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), the government of the state of Georgia had purchased a large amount of goods on credit from a merchant who lived in South Carolina by the name of Captain Robert Farquhar. At the end of the war, Georgia refused to pay the amount owed Captain Farquhar on the grounds that Farquhar had been a British Loyalist—not on the grounds that the supplies they received had been defective in any way, or that he had otherwise failed to deliver what he promised. It seemed to be nothing more than spite…
Napping otters…My immune system has been battling this con crud (or post-con crud of whatever it is) for many days. Since it hit me really hard Thursday, and then by the weekend I was beginning to feel a lot better, I thought I was getting over it.
Michael came down sick the day after the con, and more than a week later is still not well. So he had commented Monday evening that I had really lucked out. I didn’t disagree with him outloud, because I did think I was recovering faster than he was, but I also knew I wasn’t well, yet.
Then Tuesday morning we both slept through both alarms, and my head and throat hurt way more than they had on my worst day previously, and I had a fever. So I didn’t go into the office. I worked a bit more than half the day from home, took a couple of naps, and tried to take it easy.
This morning, I woke up before the first alarm. I went to the front door and looked outside, and the day was beautiful: a hint of recent rain in the air, a cool but clear day. I took a shower and proceeded with getting ready. I got to the front door and opened it and it was raining super, super hard, flooded street, and there, trying to maneuver a beautiful, green 1969 Corvair Convertible through the flood waters, was Whoopi Goldberg. Of course, I ran out to try to help her!
And then I started coughing so hard I woke myself up. I rolled over and saw that it was almost time for the second alarm to go off. It took me about five minutes to get it through my head that everything I just wrote about in that paragraph was a dream. I had dreamed that I got up, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously the Whoopi Goldberg part was a dream, but everything before that had been so real.
I still have a fever. Today I have a cough. I’m going to work from home, again.
But the worst part of the dumb dream thing isn’t the disorientation I felt this morning while I trying to wake up and figure out what was real.
It’s the fact that there is no green Corvair convertible parked on our block.
A star-spangled rainbow flag.Symbols are important.
My coming out process had been slow and incremental. I spent most of my teens wrestling with the idea, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t gay. For a long time I tried to be either bisexual or resign myself to a life a celibacy. I don’t want to get into the psycho-social reasons that some of us gay people cling to a bisexual identity for a while (and the disservice that does to actual bi people). Julie and I became active in a very out lesbian & gay chorus while we were still married to each other. By then a lot of people knew that I wasn’t heterosexual. But a lot of people didn’t. Most of my friends who knew seemed to be all right with it, but no one in my family knew.
I had wanted to come out to the family (and some old friends who were still in the dark at the time) earlier, but had been talked out of it. After Julie and I legally separated and I was finally able to admit aloud that I was definitely not bi, I felt a need to make a definitive statement.
Raymond Burr as Chief of Detectives, Robert T. Ironside.Reboots/remakes are tricky things. The current BBC re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes starring Benedict Cumberbatch is altogether awesome, for instance. The remake of the classic Spencer Tracey Father of the Bride with Steve Martin was also pretty darn awesome.
The recent remakes of V and True Grit, on the other hand…
So NBC has launched a remake of the ’70s detective series, Ironside, and they cast Blair Underwood in a role based very loosely on the character originated by Raymond Burr. I’ve watched the pilot, and it wasn’t awful. I’m not even sure I would call it bad. But mediocre certainly springs to mind. Supporting characters completely lacking in anything resembling a personality does as well.
Sometimes series (whether books or television) take a while to find their footing, so I’m going to probably give it a few more episodes. But by the time I finished watching the pilot, I needed something to cleanse my brain, and by chance I’ve had the TiVo recording re-runs of another Raymond Burr iconic series, Perry Mason. It was truly a joy to watch a 1962 episode.
One of the things I loved about the classic Mason television series, as well as the books, was how often Mason would quote specific principles of law. For instance, in the episode I watched that night, Della Street, Mason’s secretary, has been accused of aiding and abetting a felony murder which may have been committed by an old friend. Mason points out to the officer that in order for her to be found guilty, they have to prove that she knew her friend had committed a felony before she acted, that she willingly assisted the friend, and that both she and the friend were doing what they were doing with the intent to avoid arrest for the crime.
Which is true of many of our laws. What you’re thinking and why you’re doing what you are doing determine whether the act is a crime. It is seldom just the action, but also the intent. This is a legal principle that has been with us since at least the times of the Ancient Sumerians…
Running lynx by Daniel J. Cox (www.wildthingsultd.org)When I got the first email responding to my post earlier in the week about a weird search term that had been used to find my site, I figured I had just phrased something weird.
The person specifically referenced the post and said they hoped I would keep writing. I hadn’t intended to say anything that indicated I was considering not posting, but I know that sometimes when I’m writing a post in a hurry that I phrase things weird. Even when I’m not in a rush, I make odd typos (the words I type are correctly spelled, but they are the wrong word, usually a related word, but wrong), which can also lead to misunderstanding.
So I re-read the post, and read it again, and couldn’t find anything weird.
Then I got a second email from a different person, with the same sentiment…
I’ll be on my way out the door and realize that I left the travel mug full of coffee that I just made to take with me behind, so I go to get it, and it isn’t in the kitchen where I thought it was, so I have to wander around the house trying to figure out where I set it down. I’ll eventually find it near a light switch I turned off before leaving, and then when I get to the door I’ll realize that I don’t have my keys. The keys that were just in my hand a minute ago before I started looking for the coffee. And don’t think I set the keys down where the coffee mug was, because that would be too easy, no they’re going to be somewhere else entirely.
I’ve managed to waste an entire hour sometimes just trying to find things I had a second ago that I need to take with me on an errand.
So back in August I wasn’t that surprised when I received a box in the mail from a hotel I had stayed at the week before…
I’ve been a bit out of it all week, recovering from the convention, trying to get back into the swing at work, and then coming down with a head/nose/throat thing. So this week’s links are a bit shorter…
This is from early in the week, so you may have seen it, but Amelia (mother of a 7-year-old who came out when he was 6) asks, “Who is in a gay family?” My favorite line: “And to those who think that my baby boy needs to be fixed: Fuck you. My kid is perfect just they way he is.”
Secret ‘Ex-Gay Awareness Dinner’ Fails Miserably Money quote: “Because.. making a belty, Broadway/Disney-style music video is the perfect way to prove to the world that you’re no longer gay.”
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Lots of people were sharing the “I quit” video posted by Marina Shifrin. This work from home Mom decided to film her own version:
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Lynx and Cub Wallpaper (downloadable from National Geographic, Photograph by Norbert Rosing) It’s mildly amusing seeing, on the stats page of the blog, search terms that people used to get here. Although most often I feel guilty, because it’s obvious that my silly blog did not have what they’re looking for.
Other times, I’m more than a little bit glad that my site is not providing what they’re looking for, such as earlier in the week when I noticed that someone came to my site using the search term: “moms who want their sons to be sissies…
Walking on water’s easy, if it’s cold enough!We broke a bunch of weather records, again. Saturday was the wettest September day ever recorded in Western Washington. Not the wettest day, but the wettest ever in a September. And before Saturday, we had already gotten enough rain that 2013 was going to be at least the third wettest September in Seattle on record. Then we had the record-breaking Saturday, and Sunday was almost as wet, and it rained more on Monday…
Asleep on the job again.Every year I promise myself that this time it will be different. This time, I say, this time I will get my dad’s birthday card into the mail by my birthday. That way it will arrive before his birthday. Not like every other year where I forget until his actual birthday, so he gets it late.
And most years, despite all that, I forget.
Forget isn’t quite the right word, because I set reminders on all of my devices. But those reminders invariably show up while I’m in the middle of something. “Okay, when I get home, I’ll take care of it,” I think.
Font Folly 