I’ve mentioned before that I used to be active on Queernet, which was run as both a Usenet group and a mailing list. And because I posted and/or replied to other people’s posts on there a lot, I more than occasionally got hate mail. Because even back in late 80s/early 90s ultraconservative haters trolled the net looking for people to spew vitriol at. And one of those trolls was a member of the Westboro Baptist Church clan, usually logging in as Ben Phelps. And every single hate mail that he sent to any of us on that list included some reference to butt sex.
Even when he was yelling at bisexual women, lesbians, or people who identified as straight allies…
…and a cold cloth for my head, please.One of my biggest gripes about my body’s particular hay fever symptoms is that often I can’t tell the difference between worse than usual hay fever days and coming down with a cold.
This year’s hay fever season started out really awful in March and April. So bad that I had been bracing myself for a horrid summer. While I had almost non-stop mild hay fever symptoms for the entirety of May, June, July, and August, I only had moderately bad days every now and then, only really bad once or twice.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were all moderately bad. Then I had trouble sleeping Sunday night/Monday morning. Thank goodness the third time I woke up to get a drink of water (I always wake up thirsty several times in the middle of the night on bad hay fever days… but also when I have a cold), I became conscious enough to take some extra decongestant. Otherwise my sinus headache would be much, much worse than it is.
My husband is on an earlier work schedule for summer, so I’ve tended to get up when he leaves, which is before my second alarm. This morning I barely woke up when he kissed me good-bye. I had trouble getting out of bed to stagger to the alarm clock to turn it off for the second alarm. And similarly had difficulty staggering across the room to turn off the third alarm.
While I was trying to force myself to wake up enough to take a guess as to how many hours it had been since I took the decongestant (so I could know when I could take something else) I looked up the pollen count.
It’s low. Very, very low. And has been for the last couple of days.
It’s Friday! The first Friday in September. It’s a month full of birthdays and anniversaries. Okay, okay, every month is, but September birthdays are extra special, because September babies are superior. It’s a fact. No, really.
Anyway, in honor of this first Friday in the glorious month of September, here is a collection of news and other things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared:
The Pros and Cons of Straight Guys in Gay Bars. The guy who wrote this seems to live in a completely different universe than I do. I can’t figure out if this is a profound commentary or fluff.
Senior GOP spokesman comes out as gay. Someone needs to tell him that those “friends” who consider his sexuality corrosive to society were never his friends; they liked the person he was pretending to be while closeted, and never knew him.
(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)
(I have no idea why the decided to use footage from the 70s Saturday Morning Cartoon, “Help! It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!” but the song is very cool.)
It happens all the time. Authorities take some action which is clearly out of proportion to whatever has allegedly happened. Other people report on the incident, generating a lot of negative publicity. In response to the calls from the public, the authorities explain that there is more to the story. Those authorities then tell us that there is more “information” they neglected to mention before, and they spout of a story that sounds like a six-year-old’s excuse for why they didn’t break that lamp whose broken pieces they are standing over. Other people then repeat the excuses from the authorities as if said excuses were independently verified facts. Those of us who raised concerns about the original action are told to let it go, because “there’s more to the story.
I think it was January 2000. Michael and I were attending an anthropomorphics convention in the Bay area. As I was walking to our hotel room I passed a room that reeked of a strange smell. It was a scent I had encountered before, but I had never learned what it was.
When I got to the room, I told Michael about the smell. He described a part of the hallway and asked if that’s where it was.
When I confirmed, he smiled and shook his head in a manner that clearly indicated I was a silly person.
“Honey,” he said very gently, “that’s pot. Someone is getting extremely baked in a room there.”
“Oh!”
In other words, I didn’t learn how to recognize the smell of pot until I was 39 years old.
When I was 14 I started writing a mystery novel with perhaps supernatural overtones. I’d been writing stories for as long as I could scribble more-or-less recognizable words on paper, though by 14 I was typing on a big heavy typewriter at a decent clip.
My protagonist was a 12-year-old boy—for plot purposes I felt it was important to begin the story in the summer between his sixth and seventh grades at school. He lived in a small town that was an amalgam of all the small to medium-sized towns I’d lived in thus far.
My habit at the time was to write until I couldn’t think of what happened next (or my folks yelled at me to stop making all that clattering typing noise and go to bed). The next day I would read what I had written so far, and usually I could start typing away, writing the next scene and the next and so on.
So one afternoon, when I had several chapters finished and wasn’t sure what to do next, I re-read what I’d written thus far. It was all going well until I hit the last scene I’d written the night before…Continue reading Literary Crimes→
I don’t make coffee at home on days that I go into the office. I’m the only person in the house who drinks coffee, so it doesn’t make much sense to make a pot just so I can have one cup in the morning before I go to work. And making a single cup takes as much prep work as making a whole pot, so I just don’t make coffee at home on those days.
Font Folly 