Coffee always helps.Some time back a friend I follow on twitter re-tweeted a funny headline that began with the words “Florida Man” and included a link. I clicked on the link and read a short story about a guy in Florida doing something stupid or outrageous or something. It was funny, but I noticed that the headline of the story didn’t match the tweet. The headline in the tweet described the story perfectly, but it wasn’t the actual headline of the news story.
The original source of the tweet (which my friend had re-tweeted) was an account named @_FloridaMan. A quick check of the account revealed it was a long string of headlines and links to text or video news stories happening in Florida. And not just any news stories, but specifically stories of men doing things such as trying to shoot an iguana and nearly hitting people in a nearby house instead, or calling the police to complain that he thinks his drug dealer is cheating him, or trying to steal ridiculous amounts of food by stuffing them down his pants and thinking no one will notice, and so forth. Most of the tales involved the police eventually.
A recent example from @_FloridaMan.They are funny and often extremely sad at the same time. And the stories cover such a wide spectrum of activities, you never know what’s going to pop up next. I got a kick out of reading several of the stories, and considered following @_FloridaMan right away. The problem is that I could see how that constant stream of ridiculous and thoughtless and often fatally stupid things that people do could encourage my inner cynic to the point of making me an unpleasant person.
An example from @EmergencyKittensA couple of different friends occasionally retweeted cute pictures of cats with humorous descriptions of said pictures. Yes, they’re cute cat pictures. Yes, I am aware of the widely-held belief that only shallow people share cute cat pictures on the internet. But they made me smile. Sometimes they made me roll my eyes, but most often they made me smile. One day, by chance, shortly after I had been reading a heart wrenching story about a man murdering his own teenage daughter because she was lesbian, I flipped over to twitter to try to get my mind off the story, and one of my friends had re-tweeted something unbelievably adorable from EmergencyKittens again, and I no longer felt like my head was going to burst from the combination of rage at the father and sorrow for the girl and everyone who cared for her.
I checked the entire Emergency Kitten feed again, and yes, it repeats itself a bit more often than I’d like, and yes many of the humorous comments are rather obvious. If it was the only thing coming into my feed, it would become annoying after a while. Of course, it wouldn’t be the only thing happening in my feed, as I follow a bunch of people, but still…
And that’s when I had the idea. I followed both @_FloridaMan and @EmergencyKittens on the same day. Both of them give me laughs, but they aren’t the some kind of humor. Both make me roll my eyes or groan. But while one often reinforces my inner cynic, the other just as often reinforces my inner optimist.
Both of them, in different ways, act as antidotes to the outrage that can so easily by instilled reading more serious news stories and otherwise paying attention to what’s happening in the world. So, having both feeds randomly put funny, silly, bewildering moments into my day go a long way toward keeping me sane.
But I don’t want to only write about people being clueless and/or bigoted all the time. I have to remind myself that one reason I see so many stories clustered around particular topics is because I tend to read news sites that report on topics of interest to me, and as an out gay man who was raised Southern Baptist, studied math and science at university, and have always been a sci fi/fantasy nerd, I gravitate toward news sites that cover social justice, science, technology, and nerd culture. So I’m going to see a lot of stories like Gamer Gate, or the propaganda efforts of anti-gay folks, and so on.
It’s not just which news sites I choose to go to, of course. If some sites are covering a story, similar sites will pick it up, even if only to summarize and point to the original piece. Seeing these stories, and seeing people respond to them, make the news gatherers, reporters, and editors look for similar events in subsequent news cycles.
Sometimes, of course, there really are a lot of things happening all related to a particular topic. The recent Appeals Courts’ rulings about marriage equality, and the Supreme Court’s decision to let them stand, has put a lot of states that no one expected to be dealing with marriage equality so soon into the crosshairs. This makes people who oppose same sex couples having the right to marry feel even more threatened. And because each circuit court covers a bunch of states, these people who feel threatened are scattered over a wide geographical area. You have a lot of people in a lot of places all reacting to a perceived threat, you’re going to have a lot of incidents that will rise to some level of newsworthy. A whole lot.
And of course, I’m not the only person who is reading selective news. The folks who feel exactly the opposite as I do about some of these topics are reading their favorite sites. Or should I say their favorite site, singular (Conservatives Converge Around Fox News as Main Source; No Single Source Dominates on the Left)? Where they find the same stories being couched in a very different light, fanning those flames of fear.
I had about four half-written pieces that I could have finished to post yesterday, but they were all about the sorts of stories I link to up in the first paragraph. One of my goals for the year has been to reduce the outrage, and focusing so much attention on those stories does not help me with that goal. The problem is, the only other topic I had nearly ready to publish was about people who look down on other people because of the kinds of books they like to read. Which had a very same-y feel to it.
Which all led me to here, contemplating how everything I’m writing about (other than my novel) is processing exactly the feelings I don’t want to be spending so much time on. I suppose it could be argued by writing them down, I have gotten some of it out of my system, but I’m not sure that publishing them all would further the purpose.
So I’m going to try to concentrate my attention for the next few days on my fiction writing. I’m overdue for writing about the craft of writing, any way.
Some mornings I wake up, it’s dark, the clock radio may have started playing NPR’s Morning Edition, which means the alarm will be going off soon. Which does not fill me with joy, because I’m never quite ready to wake up and get out of bed.
But about then my husband comes back into the bedroom. He goes into work earlier than I do, needing to leave before my alarm even goes off. Anyway, he walks into the room, he may turn on the lights because he’s looking for something, or he may just need to grab one thing. The important thing is he walks into the room, and a fun thing happens.
I remember that I’m married to that man.
It’s not like I have amnesia or something, but there’s a part of me that is always pleasantly surprised to remember that I’m not alone. Not only am I not alone, but I have the best husband in the world. He’s smart. He’s funny. He’s sweet. He’s cute. He’s sexy. He’s very practical. One of my friends once described Michael as the most capable person he’s ever known. He can fix things—all kinds of things!—and he likes doing it. He can take a pile of fresh vegetables and turn it into several very neat piles of very nicely sliced vegetables in the amount of time a normal person would spend deciding which knife to use. He cooks. He cleans. He puts up with me (not exactly the easiest person to get along with). He puts up with all my weird hobbies and projects. He’s cheerful, even after living with me for over 16 years. His response to any disaster is not, “how can I fix this,” but rather, “I have a plan to deal with this.”
And did I mention that he’s sexy?
As if having this wonderful man in my life wasn’t already more good fortune than I deserve, my life has also been graced with a large assortment of wonderful friends. It’s hard to know where to begin, but here goes:Continue reading Feeling lucky→
After a much longer than expected (or desired) hiatus, the Cóyotl Awards are back, and we’re hitting the ground running to get caught up. Voting for the 2013 awards and nominations for the 2014 awards are now officially open. Full information here:
In the forums, we also have a thread for recommendations for the 2014 awards — something members can use to jog their memories about what was published in 2013 and might deserve to be nominated.
All FWG members (writers and associates) may nominate and vote in the Cóyotls. Remember, though — both the 2013 voting and 2014 nominations end on Friday, August 8, so don’t wait too long to make your choices!
Cover of this week’s Arkansas Times.If I thought the weekend’s events was enough to make the bigots’ heads explode, I can’t think how they’re surviving this week!
A judge in Idaho declared that state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, and refused to issue a stay, so marriages could begin Friday (depending on how the Governor’s appeal to the Circuit Court goes).
The Arkansas Supreme Court declined to issue a stay, but also pointed out that the judge’s preliminary ruling forgot to mention a third statute that prohibits clerks from issuing licenses. More on that in a minute.
The federal judge in Oregon who heard arguments about the ban last month (if you can call it arguments when the state Attorney General and every other group filing a brief agreed with the gay couples that the ban is unconstitutional) ruled that the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) could not intervene on behalf of anonymous citizens who allegedly fear reprisal, so they couldn’t be named.
Seriously, NOM’s behavior on this has been really pathetic. They issued a lengthy angry press release two months before the deadline to file a brief about the case, then they missed the deadline to file. Then the night before the scheduled hearing, they file an emergency request to be allowed to file a brief and come into the court to argue on behalf of the ban, claiming that they were caught off-guard by the hearing? The judge refused to halt the scheduled hearing, but promised he wouldn’t release a ruling until he’d had another hearing on their intervention petition.
Rumor had it that NOM had missed the deadline because they were looking for a county clerk who would agree to be their co-filer. Since marriage equality came to California because the Supreme Court rejected the case on the grounds that NOM and other groups had no standing to step in if the state declined to appeal the lower court ruling, NOM has switched to trying to recruit lower-level state officials to be their puppet petitioner. Rumors were that, with polls shows 58% of Oregon voters already wanting to repeal the state constitution’s ban, no state or county official who might arguably have standing was willing to come forward. That’s why NOM filed late.
They confirmed this in their arguments about why they should be allowed to intervene. They allegedly had several people who wanted to argue for the ban, but only if they could remain anonymous. It should have been no surprise to them that the judge denied the request. Come on! The Supreme Court had already ruled NOM didn’t have standing. Claiming you have anonymous co-petitioners who are afraid even to meet with the judge? That’s just crazy.
And then there’s Kentucky, whose ban was ruled unconstitutional a while ago, but the ruling has been stayed while awaiting the outcome of an appeal. But that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening. No, the original court has now ordered the state to pay the attorneys fees of the gay and lesbian couples who originally filed the case.
But it’s the Arkansas case that’s crazy. When the news first broke last week, I was kind of surprised to read that the Judge had to find both a state constitutional ban and a separate statute banning same-sex marriage violated the federal constitution. Arkansas had both a law and a constitutional ban? Talk about wearing both a belt and suspenders at the same time! But it’s worse than that, there’s another statute that separately prohibits clerks from issuing the licenses. Really? How paranoid can you be?
But apparently, since the state Supreme Court mentioned that third law, everyone, including the counties that had been issuing licenses since Saturday, has stopped following the first judge’s order allowing marriage equality. As more than one observer has pointed out, it seems absurd that once the ban is declared unconstitutional, that anyone could argue that an extra law whose only effect is to enforce this thing that has already been declared unconstitutional can itself remain constitutional.
The original judge had only issued preliminary ruling, not his final orders, so he could mention the third law in those final orders. No one knows if the justices on the state’s highest court did this to make certain everything is covered, or it it’s a delaying tactic to avoid having to decide whether to issue a stay. I’m not sure what the delay would accomplish. Do a couple of them hope that if they wait a few weeks this will all blow over?
Between thr time I started writing this and now, the judge has issued a revised order, and specifically ordered clerks to issue marriqge licenses. So it’s back in the state Supreme Court’s lap. There comes a point where you wonder when the bigots will admit the fight on this is over…
Except I’m too grumpy to remember to say please.It’s been a while since my eyes were so red, swollen, and itchy that sunlight through the curtains on the bright side of the house hurts my eyes. And rarely is the sinus congestion and pain so bad that my teeth hurt. But this week I get both!
There’s never a good time to be incapacitated by allergies, but this week I have a zillion deadlines at work, and my boss is out of the country under circumstances where he’s not available even via e-mail. So I’m scrambling to make my deadlines and hoping that my brain isn’t too fogged up to get things done.
Which means what mental energy I have is all going into work this week, and not to my personal writing or to any non-work projects. I only took three naps to get through Tuesday and two showers. It’s amazing how good it feels to hold your head under a stream of hot water when you’re so congested that even your teeth ache.
A shower is truly a magical invention.
I wish I had something profound to say. Other than, pass me a kleenix, please?
Always check the dictionary.It was reported some weeks ago (on a Christian news blog), that Mars Hill megachurch had spent about $210,000 to place a book written by their head pastor, Matt Driscoll, on the New York Times Bestseller list. Several people had been suspicious when the book first made the list, since it shot onto the list the first week after it was available, and then completely dropped off the list never to return the very next week.
The church emphatically denied everything, calling the allegations ridiculous. Doing such a thing was antithetical to their mission.
The original accusation was soon corroborated when someone got hold of the contract (which outlined the procedure) from a particular marketing firm that does this on a regular basis for religious books. And more evidence began piling up, including allegations of crates of the book gathering dust in church storage rooms, and so forth.
While not uncommon or illegal, this unwise strategy is not one we had used before or since, and not one we will use again. The true cost of this endeavor was much less than what has been reported, and to be clear, all of the books purchased through this campaign have been given away or sold through normal channels. All monies from the sale of Pastor Mark’s books at Mars Hill bookstores have always gone to the church and Pastor Mark did not profit from the Real Marriage books sold either at the church or through the Result Source marketing campaign.
In other words, having insisting that they would never do such a dishonest and immoral thing, when they admit they did do it their excuses are that everyone else does it, it isn’t technically illegal, they are never going to do it again, the “true cost” isn’t as much as people say, and they gave the books away, so no harm. Oh, and the pastor didn’t profit from this unwise thing they did which they had swore up and down they had never done.
At a later point the statement commends the pastor for enduring these false accusations with grace. Except, of course, that they are totally not false.
This pastor has demonstrated, again and again, that he is one of the world’s biggest attention whores. So whether he actually made any money from it was never the point. The point was to be able to brag that he was a New York Times Bestseller writer… which (until now) had been plastered all over the church web pages, his personal web page, his twitter profile, on every single press release the church had issued since it happened, on posters for their various conferences and seminars, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Over the weekend a non-apology letter has surfaced, where he spends a lot of time explaining how the pressures of trying to fulfill the mission that god has repeatedly called him to do forced him to do things he’s not proud of. He never says what any of those things are, though he did say things like, “my angry prophet days are over” and “I must learn to be humble.”
It’s hard to take the humble comment, or the apology, seriously when every other sentence is some kind of bragging about his calling from god, what a humble man he is, how he doesn’t deserve all the talent that god has given him, and so on.
Besides the blatant contradiction between first claiming that they never paid to manipulate a bestseller listing, then admitting they did it, they’ve lied many times before. I wrote before about their press release that (while equating all gay people with people living with AIDS) lied about working with the Lifelong AIDS Alliance. They issued several clarifications that just compounded the lie as the Alliance denied any relationship. No one from the church even called the Alliance to get basic volunteering information until after about the third clarification statement.
Pastor Mark has made too many misogynist and anti-gay sermons over the years to list, though I am particularly fond of both his sermon that compared wives to waterboarding, as well as the times he explained that his wife has to ask his permission if she wants to get her hair cut. Besides the dozens of times he’s made fun of, mocked, and otherwise denigrated effeminate men, there’s also his famous assertion that masturbation is clearly an act of homosexual sin.
And let’s not forget that several Christian news sites and scholars have been slowly demonstrating that large proportions of all of the pastor’s books are plagiarized from other, more obscure, Christian authors.
Driscoll commands a megachurch, which is a bunch of large congregations that meet in several locations around the region. His congregation tends to be younger and more well educated than the typical evangelical crowd. I’ve never really understood the appeal, particularly since he is so transparently egotistic. I understand why he, and the other leaders keep doing what they’re doing. Jesus himself had something to say about people like them:
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said to them, ‘It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.'” — Matthew 21:12-13
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