Speaker For The Diodes

05:25 am - QotD

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1791

"It was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1797

[To my fellow Americans and anybody else here joining in the celebrations: happy Independence Day!]

05:25 am - QotD

"God Bless America, but God help Canada to put up with them!" -- Anonymous

12:06 pm - Semantics, Gender, and 'Cis'

An Important Message About Vocabulary

While I do have a particular instance in mind, this little epistle is really in reaction to several comments, essays, loaded questions, and diatribes I've seen over the past three or four weeks in various places (though I hadn't seen it blow up into a shouting match anywhere until a couple of days ago). Note that if you don't know what the verb 'to other' means, or how the umbrella term 'transgender' is used, you may have some homework to do before getting into this. I expect that most of my readers already know those concepts.

Folks, 'cisgendered' (or 'cisgender'¹) and 'cisssexual' really are intended to be neutral terms and will be so until/unless some sort of general stigma gets attached to the concept of living / identifying / presenting as the gender society always expected of you because it was on your birth certificate. I don't see that ever being likely. (I have a hunch that I'll be responding to a lot of criticisms of this essay by pointing back to this very pragraph, starting at that "until".)

It's important to note that there's no reclaiming of an old slur involved, nor repurposing of a word with other baggage, because 'cisgendered' was coined specifically for this meaning and this purpose, and wasn't a word before that. Any baggage the word has now has to have accrued entirely over the last decade and a half.

('cisgendered', from 'cis-', "on the same side", + 'gender'; in contrast to 'trans-', "crossing over"; both from Latin, and both prefixes used in Chemistry with similar meanings.)

The reason it feels jarring -- "naming"? "marking"? -- to you, and gets your hackles up is quite simply that y'all are accustomed to being the unmarked class, and giving you any concise name is going to feel like an imposed label that, because you're not used to having to acknowledge a label at all, some of you start to suspect is somehow insulting or denigrating.

Stop a minute and ponder for a moment the magnitude and type of privilege that is contained in not having to think about or acknowledge a label. Compare that to TVs, TSes, DQs, DKs, GQs, and all other subgroups of transgendered people. You don't like it? Pick and popularize a different label, but pick one that doesn't stigmatize everybody else in contrast to it. That you now have a label doesn't 'other' you; it merely makes you like everybody else who has a label. If one group gets to insist on not having a label, that 'others' everyone else. If we remove the "default class" from you, that loss of privilege you have a gut reaction to isn't because you're being insulted; it's because the field just got a tiny (tiny!) bit more level.

(Here's a big hint: 'normal' and 'real' fail the doesn't-stigmatize-everyone-else condition spectacularly. Prefixing 'man'/'woman' with 'bio-' or 'genetic' or 'born' to denote not-trans, 'others' the rest of us slightly more subtly, but only slightly, and no less problematically. Either respect us, be an ally, and use non-othering language; or admit up front that you don't respect us -- that holding on to your privilege is more important than supporting us -- so we can classify this as a variation on the "tone argument" and write you off as Part Of The Problem.)

[1] While I learned 'transgendered' as having '-ed' on the end to make it an adjective (and applied the same pattern to 'cisgendered'), within the trans community you will find many who use 'transgender' and 'cisgender' as adjectives, without an '-ed' suffix. Some other time, I'll post a poll about that and solicit grammatical arguments. For now, if you're not already used to doing so, just consider the two forms, with and without '-ed', synonymous when used as the same part of speech.

Othering And Non-Othering Labels

This table illustrates othering combinations of labels, and non-othering or at least less othering pairs.

Note that it is generally the name for the unmarked state, and its implications of being normal/default/good/real, rather than the name for the marked state, that makes the unmarked/marked pairings problematical and othering. 'rightie'/'southpaw' would be fine, because the problem with the first example isn't the word 'southpaw', it's the claiming of right-handedness as the unmarked state. The problem with 'normal'/'regular'/'real' should be obvious; the flaw with 'straight' may be less so. If that's the case for you, consider how many different layers of meaning there are on the word 'straight': pure (unadulterated), honest (not crooked), undamaged (not bent), sober (not using drugs), clear (not confusing or obfuscating). Now reconsider what message you're sending by defining your class as 'straight' and some other class as not-straight. (I did not get this myself until a stranger took me to task for using 'straight' to mean 'het', and even then my first instinct was to get defensive about it instead of thinking about what his point was.)

Note also that some of the marked/unmarked pairs have problems of inaccuracy as well! Many people who do not identify as polyamourous, are not in explicitly polyamorous relationships, and even sneer at poly folk for being immoral, cheat on their partners. And many members of polyamorous N-ads are faithful to the promises they've made to each other. A "genetic woman" (an older usage that I don't hear as often nowadays) usually only knows her exact chromosomal makeup if something goes wrong that leads to a test -- we just assume that babies who look female and grow up to be women are XX because that's most likely, but we don't check ... and a few transsexual individuals discover along the way that they aren't the XX or XY their parents had assumed they were (for a particularly well known example, see Caroline Cossey, who is chromosomally XXXY).

Another set of terms, the cumbersome 'FAAB' and 'MAAB' meaning "female-assigned at birth" and "male-assigned at birth", attempt to sidestep that problem by digging down to what we usually mean to refer to anyhow: whether the parents were told, "congratulations, you have a daughter," or, "congratulations, you have a son," when the individual was born. Even "bio-" isn't a very meaningful label, since all humans are still biological, trans or not. Note that while 'FAAB' and 'MAAB' are useful in certain contexts when discussing the ideas of sex and gender abstractly, when used casually outside of that context they still reveal too much emphasis on the idea that initially-apparent biology = destiny, and can be used as sneakier ways of saying "real man" or "real woman" for cisgendered in order to exclude trans individuals from gendered spaces.

Finally, note that in most everyday contexts -- that is, normal social encounters and conversations and most policy matters, not specific medical or research or rights-activism contexts -- an even better version of the last two rows of the table would look like this version to the right --->

... but alas, I know there'll be a lot of pushback on that, from various quarters. Some of which really ought to know better. (There are some valid concerns there, and the conflict between different sets of rights and needs can be tricky to resolve, but more often the opposition to this idea stems from simple, conscious or unexamined cissexism.)

About Neutral vs. Non-Neutral Terms:

This started off with my observation of some same-gender-the-delivery-room-doctor-thought-they'd-be people's objections to being called 'cisgendered', and complaining that it felt like a pejorative term (and one they hadn't chosen for themelves). So let's compare some value-neutral terms to some negative ones.

The examples I'm giving here may become dated as language shifts, and may even already be subject to differences in regional usage. There is a sort of euphemism treadmill for some terms so that the more-polite phrase gradually accrues all the negativity of the original epithet and needs to be discarded for a new euphemism; and there's 'reclaiming', by which some terms lose their stigma and become mostly neutral barring tone-of-voice cues. (Also, at least with the T* community, when the community was much younger and still discovering/inventing apropriate and useful language, it embraced terms that were later realized to be troublesome. So if you read older texts, you may see trans folk casually phrasing things in ways that would attract flames today. We were -- are -- still learning and evolving.) Bear in mind that even some of the neutral terms can be suspect if used when there was no reason to bring them up in the first place. But in my dialect at this time, I think this is a useful illustration.

Here's the thing: if we meant to be insulting or disparaging in our choice of word for people who are not transgendered/transgender, you'd know. It wouldn't be this nagging discomfort over finding yourself in a marked class and worrying about having a label at all for a change. It'd be a proper insult. (And as people have noted elsewhere, expressing exasperation with an individual member of a class does not make the name for that class into a derogatory term. It's possible for a T* person annoyed at a cis person's abuse of cis privilege to call them a thickheaded, bigoted cis person without making 'cis' the insult; it's the adjectives that are negative, not the noun. In the same way, someone can refer to "an evil man" without making 'man' into a derogatory term, because the negativity is in 'evil', not 'man'. So just because you've heard a trans person complain about a cis person, that is not enough to serve as an example that "'cis' is used pejoratively".)

Similarly, I've seen plenty of men try to argue that a woman who has said anything negative about one man or an identified subset of men must hate all men (therefore her opinion can be ignored), white people who've cried 'reverse racism' when a person of colour has called them on their bullshit (therefore PoC are "just as bad" and their complaints can be disregarded), and countless cases of would-be allies complaining they feel attacked when a disprivileged person has complained about specific actions of some members of the group the would-be ally is a member of (and therefore the minority group is about to "lose an ally" because they were "mean"). Tone Argument, "it's all about me", and strawman "you people are just as bad", are derailing. Fifteen yards and loss of down. Don't go there.

And yes, some of the negative words can be used by members of the communities they're applied to, either as an early stage of reclaiming or because they have different connotations when used ironically by people who have a stake in those words. That's really a large enough matter on its own to warrant a separate essay. For our purposes here, consider uses of the words by a random cashier, cop, or passer-by who is not a member of the described group and isn't already a friend of the listener who is a member of that group. If you pull out the "Well, I heard some _____ people saying ______ once so it doesn't belong on the bad list," in this context, that'll be a five yard penalty for distraction. That is, it'll put you farther away from making your case, not closer. We can have the discussion specificaly about that phenomenon elsewhen.

(I should probably note discussions elsewhere regarding 'person with attribute' vs. 'adjectived person' vs. 'just a noun' labelling styles -- e.g. "person of colour" vs. "coloured person" vs. "black" (or other 'racial' marker used as a noun); or "person with diabetes" vs. "diabetic person" vs. "diabetic". Even a cursory examination of that topic would be too much of a distraction right here, but it's something that folks preparing to discuss labels should at least be aware of.)

If this sounds like I'm saying you have to agree with me to be allowed to speak, do a Google search for privilege bingo card and see how many of these "clever" arguments have been used so many times, regarding sexism, racism, ablism, poverty, and pretty much every other topic that involves a group struggling to be treated decently, that the very existence of these tactics has become a bitter joke. The rule isn't that you have to agree with me; it's that you have to fight fairly and argue in intellectually honest ways, rather than adopting the tactics of oppressors while claiming to be on my side.

A Significant Distinction:

An argument I've heard is that since we transgendered people get to tell others what labels to use for us and which words are unacceptable, cisgendered people should not have a label forced upon them. But we never got to choose whether to have a label; we only got to argue about which labels we didn't find insulting. The 'cis' debate appears (so far) to be about whether cis-folk should be given a label at all, which is hard to see as anything other than default-class privilege.

You don't get to hold on to being "just plain [unmarked] men" and "just plain [unmarked] women" and not have a label for your class, because that continues to promote the idea that trans men and trans women aren't really men and women. I sure hope that you can understand why trying to stop that meme is important enough to risk pissing off some folks we'd been on good speaking terms with before they started insisting on turning back the clock.

So here's the deal. I obviously do not speak for transgendered people as a whole -- to be precise, I speak for nobody but myself -- but if instead of complaining about having a label, you propose a label you like better than 'cis'/'cisgender', a label that doesn't start with 'a-', 'an-', 'un-', 'non-', or 'im-' and doesn't simply translate as "real" or "normal", and you get a significant portion of the not-transgendered people who are engaged in conversations with trans folk about language to agree that the word is a candidate worth discussing (I'm not asking for a majority of that group, just enough that we're not having the same conversation eighty zillion times with a different word that has only one supporter each time), I'll listen, and I think some other T*people will as well -- we I may still have criticisms of the label you choose, and/or helpful feedback; I may wind up pointing out that you've still left in 'othering' aspects that demean trans people; but I'll listen and discuss and you really do have a shot at convincing me to try to get others in the community to use your word instead of 'cis' if it really is a neutral term (i.e., not just a sneakier way to reassert cis privilege). Oh, there'll be pushback from some quarters even if its a great word, because some people just hate having to learn new words and habits (just look at the number of people who've used, "we don't need a new word" as an excuse to oppose 'cisgendered' over the years! Or to step back farther in time, the men who used similar excuses for not wanting to use 'Ms.' when asked to), but bring labels you find respectful and acceptable that don't just go back to denigrating trans folk in contrast, that don't cast us as 'other' to your 'real', and there'll be a real conversation and maybe -- I hope -- a meeting of the minds.

But as long as what I'm hearing is, "Waah, I don't want to have to have a label," or, "I don't like 'cis' but won't suggest something better," you can shut the [expletive] up. Because that's not a polite request for the right to choose your own nomenclature, it's just incredibly privileged whining about suddenly being treated like everybody not of the default class. And clinging to your privilege at my sisters' expense doesn't make you much of an ally. And my transgender brothers and sisters (and bi-gendered, agendered, and polygendered siblings-in-arms) can hear that too, and most aren't just going to roll over and say, "Oh sure, unmarkedclass, we'll other ourselves just because you say it's impolite to try to be equally valid to you." While y'all are feeling butthurt about being handed an adjective (and not knowing which pocket to put it in), there are a lot of trans people busy just trying to get consistently recognized as human instead of being considered piñatas/targets, fetish objects, scapegoats, and comedy props.

Bring it. Bring the suggestions. Get a real conversation about this rolling. Until then, I'm going to continue using 'cisgendered' unapologetically unless someone can show me why it really is offensive beyond existing as a label at all. This essay is a rant rather than a conversation, a shout at a bunch of whiners-for-privilege, but it's also an invitation to start a conversation if there really is a meaningful conversation to be had. I'm not saying, "Here's your label, like it or suffer" -- rather, I'm saying "If you don't like it, suggest something better." Show me there is a real basis for a conversation. Or quit complaining. Either way works for me.

Some people will read this who have already progressed beyond this stage, with or without input from me. You should be able to figure out whether you're one of the people I'm yelling at or not. If you're offended because I yelled at all, then even if I wasn't yelling at you when I started, I might be once I find that out.

05:25 am - QotD

-- from the ABC television program, Castle ( ABC, IMDB ); episode, "A Death in the Family", written by Andrew W. Marlowe and Barry Schindel, directed by Bryan Spicer, aired 2009-05-11

07:38 pm - Whoops :-(

Crap. Social thing I wanted to go to half an hour drive from here starts at 19:30, and it got to be 19:20 before I managed to get my head unstuck from the project I was working on (for a small amount of money, not just one of my notions, but I'd still meant to take a little break from it), and I still need to shower before I'm fit to be around others (warm day, not running AC, planned to rinse off right before leaving). Feh. Not feeling great, but feeling well enough to drive, so this one I did to myself by losing track of time, rather than having my body screw me up.

(Then again, I also need to go to rehearsal an hour away tomorrow night, and being unable because I spent all my spoons tonight would be bad. But I still wanted to go. Might just show up late, depending on how much sense that seems to make once I'm clean and dressed. In light of message from hostess, will scramble to get there as soon as I can. So evening not entirely blown.)

I've been getting way more blogspam in the last two weeks than I used to, by a factor of twenty or so, and a surprising number of the attempted spam comments (they're getting screened, so y'all don't see 'em) are coming to one particular entry (mostly the DW copy of it, but a couple other sites as well). It's QotD for 2009-06-22. I wonder whether that one is extra-Googlable or something.

05:25 am - QotD

"[T]here are many reasonable human beings who disagree with me - but they're opponents. No, this is The Enemy, who says I'm not human." -- Zoe Brain, 2009-06-14

02:38 pm - Thinking About Power On Too Little Sleep

[Alternate title: "Didn't Sleep, So Footnotes Ate Me"]

Managed to get one hour of sleep before leg cramps woke me; haven't managed to get back to sleep since. Not expecting this to be one of my better days.

But I did manage to post an explosive photo to Flickr last night, so that's something.¹

Confirmed (alas) that when you use about three times as much virtual memory as there is physical RAM in the system, a Mac with a gig and a quarter gets really sluggish, much the way a less memory-full Windows or Linux system does when you get to a little over twice as much VM as RAM. Bleah. (Okay, okay, not the least bit surprising, I know. Nonetheless: bleah.) Still, it takes longer for me to get that far into torture-the-hardware mode on this computer than on any others in the house. And once I get a couple of the projects I'm in the middle of to easy "save, quit, and come back later" points, the machine will be nice and zippy again.

Also may have figured out why the Mac wouldn't charge from the inverter in the car (which is also the inverter I use at Pennsic²). It turns out that the reason the little square box with ears on it that gets so disturbingly hot does get so disturbingly hot is that it's rated for 127-182 VA according to the decal on the side, and the inverter's sticker says it only puts out 100 W (and ISTR that being a peak value, with a continuous rating more like 85 W, but that info was on the original packaging which I no longer have). I'm a little fuzzy on exactly how to convert between VA and W, but I can see that 100 is enough lower than 127 that if the Mac's power supply has a power factor as high as the first Google hit on "convert W to VA" found me suggests, 100 W is just not enough. Feh.

Oh, but wait, a decal on another side of the power ... (do I still call it a 'brick' if it's not brick shaped but still has cords on both sides?³) ... declares that it's a 65 W unit. Oh, right, that's probably the output after subtracting all the power that goes into making Very Warm White Square Thingie so very warm. (Hmm. 24.5 V @ 2.65 A = 64.925 W, so okay, I'm not entirely brain-scrozzled from only sleeping one [expletive] hour [whiiiiine].) So I guess I need a slightly bigger inverter or a DC-DC converter that can go from 12 V to 24.5 V more efficiently than the 12 VDC --> 115 VAC --> 24.5 VDC route. Uh, or I can take the Vaio with XP on it and try not to bore my campmates with whining about how XP isn't OS X. I'll make that an all too likely 'plan C' due to financial constraints.

(Uh ... putting two 12 V lead-acid batteries in series and sticking a voltage regulator between the battery battery⁴ and the computer ... good idea, bad idea, or "might be a good idea if Glenn knew enough electronics to get the regulator right but a bad idea under the actual circumstances"?)

Okay, let's see whether I can at least get a nap, or convince myself I'm alert enough to get something useful done despite the brain-fuzzies.

[1] Yes, I know about the deflagration/detonation distinction. :-þ And yes, it's closer to black than silver under normal light, but it's also very, very shiny and I used a flash.

[2] Yeah yeah, I know, but a computer comes in handy for the photography, and gives me something to do on the days when I'm not feeling well enough to get out of my tent and up the hill. I'm also more likely to want it for transcribing/arranging music during Pennsic than any randomly selected other fortnight of the year.

[3] I feel funny calling it a wall-wart even though I know it can be configured as one, because I don't have the little folding plug module that replaces the AC power cord, so at present, this one isn't a wall-wart.

[4] Intentional, though if I were feeling more obscure I could've just said 'battery' and let folks wonder whether the singular was accidental or I was thinking of the two heavy black boxes as one 24-cell battery; and if I were feeling less smartassy I could've just said 'batteries'. But then I wouldn't have this excuse for yet another footnote, would I?

05:25 am - QotD

"Just talked to a girl named Alison. When it first started she went up to a cop and said thank you for coming out to keep us safe. This is a rough neighborhood. He said that's not why we are here. She asked why they were there and he said a disgruntled employee had said that the bar was overserving people. She told him she had been drinking but that she had a designated driver. He told her that she was fine. She said they only arrested men and seemed to be targeting effeminate men" -- Tammye Nash, 1969-06-28 (whoops, my bad, but I'm sure you can understand my mistake) 2009-06-28, regarding a raid on a gar bar just coincidentally on the 40th anniversary of that more famous gay-bar raid

More at ONTD-politics, Daily Kos, and, of course, Twitter

I had a different quote in mind for today, before news of this weekend's raid came across Twitter.

04:35 am - Earworm

Earworm. Beatles. "I Will".

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-02:

"The story of English spelling is an improbable one in every sense. It is a tale of a process of evolution that contains so many curious accidents and bizarre twists of fate that the end result -- how we spell English today -- must be regarded as one of the most absurd, ridiculous, and protracted (1,500 years and counting) accidents of human culture.

"Yet no matter how accidental and ridiculous the story of English spelling is, and no matter how many suggestions have been made for "improving" English spelling (which is normally taken to mean making it more consistent), the ridiculous accident of English spelling has continued on its merry path much as before, and it's the would-be reformers who have, largely, been forgotten."

-- James Essinger: Spellbound - The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling.

(submitted to the mailing list by thom newlin)

05:25 am - QotD

"The great thing about Photoshop is that you can senselessly butcher your models for the sake of composition without getting blood all over the place." -- Cosmo7, Photoshop Disasters, 2009-04-28 [site as a whole pointed out by sabotabby]

05:25 am - QotD

[Story of a young cancer patient facing diffucult choices follows.]

-- from the PBS television program, Charlie Rose, 2009-04-01

08:19 pm - Feeling Especially American Today[*]

Someone posted some questions to the abcusers mailing list, that had the side effect of alerting me to a tool I have a use for. First problem: I can't get it to work for any chords that have sharp signs in their names (either as the root or as an added bass note; e.g., F#m7, E/G#). Second problem: while the file has extensive comments, including an explanation of the syntax to use, the comments and the (Postscript) variable names are all in a language I don't know. I think it's Italian.(Babelfish seems to think it's Portugese) So there's a pretty good chance I just need to RTFM, but Google Translate didn't help. (I'll try Babelfish next.) (Got an intelligible translation but the clues I sought are not in the documentation.)

Worst case, I dive into debugging in a programming language I only almost kindasorta know, with cryptic-to-me variable names and no readable-by-me comments. Best case, the file's author pops up on the mailing list and tells me a really simple fix before I get into the headache zone.

Had a plan for the day, until I stayed awake all night tossing and turning nd trying to uncramp my right calf and finally crashed at 9 AM. Slept a few hours at last, but not enough, so I'm not at my clearest-headed this evening. Big plan for tonight: try to manage to sleep at such a time that tomorrow I'll be awake during the hours when folks at City Hall answer the phone. Big plan for next year: be well enough (and be able to afford) to go to Baitcon and Conterpoint (unless their dates overlap), and more than one evening of Balticon.

In the meantime, I'm already focussed on not letting Pennsic get screwed up for me.

If I'm going to bother shaving my legs, I need to get some shorter skirts. (Or lose enough weight to fit into the short skirts I used to wear, tens of pounds ago.)

[1] The European riddle goes, "If someone who speaks two languages is bilingual and someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, what do you call someone who speaks one languge?" -- and the expected answer is, "American". I know a few phrases in Greek and can make a little sense of really simple written Greek on a good day, et je parle Francais un petit peu,, but today I'm feeling painfully stereotypical-American.

05:25 am - QotD

"There are so many people under repressive regimes for whom filesharing and the Internet is the link to the rest of the world that inspires, gives hope and makes it endurable to fight for human rights and democracy. The state's control system is expanding. We used to heavily criticize the intrusions of privacy and control systems in place behind the Iron Curtain, but now we are building this ourselves." -- Akko Karlsson, member of the Swedish Green Party's executive board, "Filesharing is not theft" [editorial published in two Swedish newspapers, I don't have a link to a copy of the entire editorial], as reported on TorrentFreak 2008-02-09

07:24 pm - From square one I'll be watching all sixty-four

I have "The Arbiter", from Chess, stuck in my brain.

HCB rehearsal will probably knock it out though.

05:25 am - QotD

"The typical left-wing person knows as much about weapons as the typical right-wing person knows about being nice to people not of his own kind." -- fidhle (aka fidhle), 2009-06-20 (private conversation, quoted with permission)

[Happy birthday to starmalachite!]

07:03 pm - Weeoo Thumpa Thumpa Weeoo Thumpa Thumpa Weeooo

Earlier, I heard a THUMPA THUMPA car stereo go by, and from as near as my ears could tell the same direction, moving at the same rate (higher than the speed limit), a siren.

So I wondered which is more likely: a cop trying to pull over a speeder with a big-ass car stereo, or was it a cop with too-big subwoofers in his or her cruiser, groovin' on some tunes on the way to a call?

Alas, I couldn't see, so I have to guess.

05:25 am - QotD

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
 It's a wonder I can think at all
 And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
 I can read the writing on the wall"
  -- from "Kodachrome" by Paul Simon (b. 1941-10-13), on There Goes Rhymin' Simon, 1973

[My big question: will I manage to scrape up the money to get my last several rolls of Kodachrome developed before Kodachrome processing entirely goes away? The clock is ticking.]

05:25 am - QotD

"Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country." -- Bill Moyers (b. 1934-06-05), 2005-05-15, speech at the National Conference on Media Reform

[via WikiQuote]

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-03-10:

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." -- Harry Truman, U.S. President, from his Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, delivered August 8, 1950.

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=836&st=&st1=]

(submitted to the mailing list by BK Read)

[Happy Solstice, and happy Fathers Day!]

11:49 pm - Uncooperative Machines and Body, But I Got A Cute Line Out Of It

So there I was, at two in the morning, turning a blender with a socket wrench ...

I accepted a spur-of-the-moment invitation last night from fidhle for Chinese food and a chance to watch that episode of The Unusuals that I'd missed. This was a good thing. (OT1H I worried that going out yesterday might reduce the odds of my getting anywhere today; OTOH I knew I felt well enough to go out last night, but had no way to be sure I'd feel well enough to go out today whether I stayed in last night or not.)

On the way home, my "check engine" light came on, and my average fuel economy reading for the trip so far was only 16 mpg instead of the expected low 20s for highway travel. I pulled over at a rest stop halfway home to let the car cool off in case that would get the warning light to turn off, since there was no chance of actually figuring out what it meant and fixing it. When I started up again it was still on, but went out three miles later, and my overall average fuel economy for the trip was 18.6 -- so the second half of the trip was about 21 mpg, back in the expected range. Not sure how worried to be, but given that pretty much anything going wrong with the car is automatically a big deal with my budget, I worry. (I still need to get the brakes done, too.)

The other thing that happened on the way home was that I got an intense craving for a milkshake, and while I knew where to get one at that hour, I knew my blood sugar was a bit high and it wouldn't have been a good idea ... but then I remembered, "hey, I have a blender; I can make a healthy milkshake when I get home."

But once I'd put yogurt, milk, a banana, cocoa powder, etc., into the blender, and switched it on, all I got was a rasping buzz, the sound of an AC motor generating heat instead of rotation and threatening to generate smoke. Sure enough, when I looked at the underside of the pitcher and tried to turn the thingie by sticking the handle of a spoon into the socket, it wouldn't budge. So I went looking for something with better leverage. I wanted my milkshake, and didn't want to waste the ingredients, and while it did occur to me to just shake the milkshake very hard, that wouldn't have chopped up the banana...

Fortunately, the 3/8" to 1/4" drive adaptor for my socket wrench fit the bottom of the blender's pitcher. (*whew*) So there I was at two in the morning, turning a blender with a ratchet wrench.

Even more fortunately, once I'd gotten it to move a little bit, the electric motor was able to spin it when I stuck it back on the base, and I got my darned milkshake. But I knew I had to tell the story just to use the line, "There I was at two the morning, turning a blender with a socket wrench."

Slept fitfully, woke in way too much pain to even roll over, eventually managed to get up, take meds, finish the poem I'd started writing in my head while I was hurting too badly to move, and grab some breakfast, but I still wasn't really in much shape to try going anywhere ... an hour and a half ago I finally got to the "moving well enough to get up, and get ready to go out" level, but looked at the time, realized how late it would be once I showered and dressed and drove forty minutes or so, wished it were at least two hours earlier, and decided to write this entry instead.

Missed another party (three parties, all tonight, in fact, not counting the convention I already knew I wasn't going to get to, but even in the best case I was only going to get to one) -- bleah -- but I did manage to do something fun and social last night. Missed Baltimore Pride, too, for that matter. Argh. Maybe I can get down to Bowie to see Mom and do laundry tomorrow, which won't exactly feel like "being social" (family's a different category, y'know?) but will get me out of the house and feel like I've done something. Or maybe I'll manage to knock off some to-do list items.

I did manage to slowly edit a couple of photos to upload to Flickr and schedule for future Shutterchance postings, while waiting to see whether my body was going to let me do the other things I'd wanted to do ... and throw out a pile of other photos that turned out not to be worth showing anyone once I saw them at screen size instead of back-of-the-camera size. Some are macro subjects I can try again; others were grab shots ("a picture just jumped up in front of me needing to be taken -- good thing my camera is with me") that I either screwed up or decided weren't so interesting after all once I had a second look.

(Some of the ones I blew, I don't feel all that bad about: if I see something while I'm driving, I just wave the camera in the general direction but don't take my eyes off the road to aim and frame it, hoping that I left the camera in a useful mode and the autofocus (if I've got an AF lens on at the time) does its job. When one of those turns out to be the car's headliner and windowframe, or blurry trees, oh well, so be it. Controlling the motion of my vehicle is way more important than getting the shot. When you see a photo I shot from a moving car, and I wasn't a passenger, it's one of the times I got really, really lucky with the "wave the camera in roughly the right direction and hope real hard" technique, and will usually be seriously cropped.)

Oh, that reminds me, I should've stuck my photo of an arabber next to this morning's poem. Lemme go edit that entry to include that. (Regarding that poem: I don't know whether the arabber i heard this morning was one whose cart is pulled by a pony or one whose cart is pulled by a horse, but one of those words scanned better than the others, which I deemed more important.)

I really do need to get out more, see friends face to face more often. Somehow.

02:53 pm - Sounds of a Saturday, Missed Opportunity

A sound gently calls me from sleep,
Unique cry with indistict words,
The jangle of bells on a horse;
The arabber goes up my block.
I want to go out there and ask
If he has bananas for sale,
But I'm in too much pain to stir.
I listen as he passes by.

05:25 am - QotD

"The thing is it should be decades now since anybody was surprised by animals making and using tools. Oh, it used to be trendy to say humans were the only animals who used tools to blush, but that crashed once animal researchers tried actually looking at the animals they were researching. Today we know that humans are the only animals who toss the warranty registration cards for their tools in the kitchen drawer that will never be cleaned out because it's too hard to fully open and too depressing to sort fully through.

"Meanwhile we see animal tool use all over the place and providing an important part of the economy such as it is. For example, nearly two-thirds of all Craftsman tools are sold to tree-dwelling creatures not more than eighteen inches long. Nearly the entire world supply of rotary sanders have been purchased by squirrels, which is one of the ways to distinguish them from chipmunks, who prefer belt sanders."

-- austin_dern, 2009-05-29

05:25 am - QotD

[In a discussion of whether Twitter is a pointless waste of time or not, on That Mailing List...]

"A little while ago, Tim O'Reilly had this talk he gave at a bunch of conferences (I saw it at a Boston 'Ignite!') where he was complaining about hackers wasting their time on trivial techno-tchotchkes. (His pet example was an 'iBeer' app for the iPhone that displayed a picture of beer in a glass, and used the motion sensors so that the person holding the phone could pretend to take a sip.)

"What struck me was this: as technical pursuits go, it doesn't get a whole lot more trivial than baseball statistics. But some of the best political coverage available anywhere during the last election was from a top-flight amateur baseball stats-freak who took the same tools he was used to using on baseball stats, and starting applying them to polling data (Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com).

"Playing around is how people learn to do the serious stuff..."

-- Robert Thau, 2009-06-15

11:48 pm - Arguments What Hurt My Brane

Shelby County (Tennessee) Commissioner Wyatt Bunker was quoted in an article about a proposed antidiscrimination measure (published 2009-05-06) thus: "I don't belive people are born gay. I don't agree with discrimination against them, but I'm not going to give them a lot of protections that give legitimacy to homosexual behavior."

So let's see whether I've translated this correctly: "I don't agree with discrimination but I think it's important to make sure the county that I help run is allowed to discriminate." (Why, Mr. Bunker? In case you change your mind about discriminating ... or get caught at it?)

Elsewhere, unrelatedly, I observe that reading (paraphrased, but only barely), "Maybe if you weren't so rude and hostile as to call what I said 'the Tone Argument' and label it derailing, I'd be more inclined to listen to your objections to it," really makes my head hurt.

(The thought that I may have been that clueless sometime in the past does not help.)

05:25 am - QotD

"This is part of why I really dislike politicians. They will say one thing, do something else with their left hand, and do something completely and utterly different with their right. (And let's not go into what their legs are doing while all this is going on... or their kidneys... or their gonads... or their spleens....)" -- caraig, 2008-09-05

03:35 am - That Kind Of Day

WTF? Before I left for rehearsal I very carefully programmed the DTV converter to tune in to The Unusuals and then The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (I didn't try to record Great Performances ("Chess in Concert") because I planned to catch the rebroadcast tomorrow -- ah, today). I even told it to switch channels fifteen minutes early, because at least one television station from which it's updating its clock gives it wonky-ass data (no idea which one(s); the process is invisible to the user). Then I carefully programmed the recorder to record at the right times (because I can set its clock myself). But when I got around to looking at the television just now, the DTV converter was off (I disabled the inactivity-timeout shutdown because it kept turning off in the middle of shows I was recording -- which it knew I wanted all of, because the timer event setting screen includes a %@#^ing duration for the event -- so it should have still been on from those two events earlier).

Sure enough, two hours of black screen got recorded. And when I turned on the DTV converter, those two events had been erased from the timer event list, while Charlie Rose at 9AM was still showing as a future event -- so I did program the timer (otherwise Charlie Rose wouldn't have been there either), and I programmed them for the right day and got the AM/PM part right (because otherwise they'd still be in the list as future events (this converter will not allow me to set events in the past (which makes sense, but annoys me when I go to set the time for a show tomorrow before I set the date, and have to go back and do things in its order instead of mine))). So why. the. [expletive]. did it not turn itself on at the designated time and tune in those two shows? (And no, neither was on a channel that goes away when it rains, not that I think the rain got heavy enough for that tonight anyhow.)

DTV is not enhancing my television-viewing experience. It's mostly just making me much more frustrated, much more often. Getting a classic-movies channel and the second channel of MPT is not quite making up for All The Ways It Goes Wrong.

(And yes, I do understand that making my life better -- or at least shinier -- was not the reason for the change. Reallocating frequencies in the radio spectrum was the reason. Making television better for everyone was just the marketing spin to mollify everyone who hadn't planned to buy a digital television on their own as long as NTSC was still being broadcast. Knowing that does not make me any less annoyed.)

The kind of day I'd already been having before I noticed that:

This morning I went to check my blood sugar, and the lancet device (aka "the clicky-jabby thing") I was going to use is cocked by holding the front half, and pulling the rear end backward. The very front is a shroud that covers the lancet itself, with a little hole for the pointy end to poke through when the spring is released and make a smaller hole in me for the purpose of getting some blood out. Well, I grabbed it too far forward and had an attack of the clumsies, and wound up shooting that shroud across the room, where it disappeared, in the process of cocking the device. I wound up using the clicky-jabby thing from a different glucometer instead.

I did not manage to get out to the nail salon and supermarket before rehearsal, so I went to rehearsal still missing the useful part of the nail on my middle finger, and with the acrylic on my thumb and ring finger in precarious condition. On the way, I realized that I'd forgotten to put a tube of Krazy Glue in my purse, but remembered that I had a tube in my music bag anyhow. After I got to rehearsal I discovered that the never-used / never-opened tube of Krazy Glue in the music bag was old enough that it had solidified (all the way through, as far as I could tell). So after catching the back edge of the thumb acrylic on an upstroke and narrowly escaping ripping off half my thumbnail, I adjusted my right hand technique to use only downstrokes for the rest of the evening. (The ring finger held up, fortunately.)

And on the way to rehearsal, I spent most of the I-95 portion of the trip in what looked like the tail end of rush hour traffic. But I'm not sure that was part of "having that kind of day" or not -- the last four or so times that I've gotten on I-95 south out of Baltimore in the evening, it's been like that. So have I just been really unlucky the last few outings, or does the trailing-off-but-not-done-yet part of rush hour now extend until around eight o'clock in the evening or later? (Used to be, any time after about a quarter past seven it was uncluttered evening/nighttime traffic density and room to get up to a good cruising speed.)

On the plus side, I did get to a supermarket after rehearsal, so I've got cat litter, and some groceries for me (and no more money, because when you put off buying stuff for a long time, just replacing the essentials that have run out / are running out adds up to a whole lot of dough, even without any frills or fun stuff).

And I still had enough spoons left to deal with the litter box and the garbage and even give Perrine a good brushing -- I wonder how many grams of fur I took off her with the brush and the comb tonight.

Alas, I don't think I'm going to manage to get up to Boston (well, Worcester actually) this weekend like I wanted to. But I'd started to resign myself to this because it had already been looking less and less likely. Between not having any money left, and probably needing until sometime Friday to recoup spent spoons, I think that trying to work things out at the last minute is going to use up whatever energy I'd need to enjoy the con with, even if I could pull it off. *sigh*

But there's something closer to home that I'd said "probably not" to when I thought I still had some chance of getting to ConCertino, and I still have three quarters of a tank of gas, so maybe I'll be feeling well enough Saturday to go be social like I'd really wanted to do this past weekend. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, I'm getting behind on my friendslist again -- checking the most recent entries now and then but not getting very far down the page -- so, ah, I'm not ignoring you, I'm just not paying very good attention. Oh, wait. Uh ... if I've been ignoring you, it's not because I'm trying to; just not enough braincycles to spare in the last few days. Er ... several days. Ah, that is, I've lost track. Bleah.

Anyhow, if I leave a comment a week after everyone else, or fail to hear about something nifty/important/upsetting/personal/fascinating, that'd be why.

05:25 am - QotD

"Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure a airplane." -- Republican US Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah (b. 1967-03-26), regarding whole-body imaging at airports, 2009-04-22

04:12 pm - Whine

Need to buy groceries and get nails fixed. But it hurts to move. Bleah. Maybe I'll feel better this evening; maybe I can get my nails done before going off to rehearsal tomorrow and buy groceries on the way back, if any of the 24-hour supermarkets I knew are still 24-hour now. (Broke one of my strumming nails off right at the if-I-trim-extremely-carefully-maybe-it-won't-hurt-much edge of the quick a few days ago, have been meaning to get to the nail salon since; another strumming nail needs less dramatic repair. Plumber spilled a cleaning solution into the half-used bag of cat litter, so I need to replace that before tomorrow night (trash night) regardless of how I can stretch the bread and cheese and chocolate I've got (not dire). And the two nearest formerly-24-hour grocery stores have cut their hours, so when I was feeling well enough last night they were already closed.)

When I went to bed this morning I had what looked like a solid plan for the day. Argh. Tomorrow.

05:25 am - QotD

"Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but it's very difficult to learn to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

"To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

-- from "A Poet's Advice", by Edward Estlin Cummings (aka E.E. Cummings or e.e. cummings; b. 1894-10-14, d. 1962-09-03) ( thanks to thespian)

[Also: happy birthday to Erica, and belated birthday greetings to twistedchick

05:25 am - QotD

"The guitar bled for about a week afterwards and the blood was
ooh...
dark and rich like wild berries.
The blood of the guitar was Chuck Berry red!

"The guitar bled for about a week afterwards
but it rung out beautifully,
and I was able to play notes that I had never even heard before. [...]"

-- from "Love And Death And An American Guitar", by Jim Steinman (b. 1947-11-01) on the album Bad For Good (1981)

[Because I was recently reminded of the piece by a discussion thread about the 1980s that reminded me how much I like it and how much fun it is to recite.]

[Happy birthday to dmk!]

01:05 am - Earworms a Few Decades Apart, and My Weekend

My oh my, "Skullcrusher Mountain" is a persistent earworm, isn't it? What finally chased it out after forty hours was, of all things, an ice-cream truck that went by playing "Music Box Dancer" (which was high on the Top-40 list during a period when I actually listened to a olt of Top-40 radio, and was one of the few tunes I tried to learn to play on my family's electric chord organ before I ever got my hands on a guitar).

Why can I get a much stronger signal from my next-door neighbour's WiFi -- one floor down and a room over in addition to being in the next house -- than from the WiFi router in the very next room to where I'm sitting? (Okay, they're different models -- different brands -- and probably not the same protocol (next door is 802.11g; I'll go look at what I've got when the cat moves off my foot mine is 802.11b, I think) so there are probably good reasons for this ... it just seems Wrong Somehow to be that big a difference when mine is physically that close by. Though maybe I should try putting mine on the ground floor as well, just in case it's all about direction.

I wonder whether it'd be feasible/easy/legit to set up a low-power analog television transmitter to send whatever I've got tuned in on DTV-converter in the bedroom or whatever videotape or DVD I've got playing there, to the currently-just-furniture large analog television in the kitchen. Usefulness would be somewhat compromised without a series of mirrors to beam remote-control signals back to the bedroom, but it'd be nice for the times when I'm in the mood to watch what happens to be being broadcast, but also want to go cook something. (That is, I set up to record most of what I want to watch, and watch it time-shifted instead of being locked to the broadcasters' schedules, but sometimes I do wind up watching a show as it's being broadcast and rewind the tape immediately, saving space on the tape, when my television-watching mood fortuitously coincides with the broadcast schedule.) I could easily live not being able to conveniently change the channel when I've already settled in for the whole hour anyhow.

Huh. I think I have some television-grade coax lying around, so if it's long enough maybe I can just run that through the house insted of going antenna-to-antenna. Now if I can remember where I left it ... (I think I know where my stash of Thinnet Ethernet cable is; I don't know how similar that is impedance-wise, or how wrong that can be and still basically work).

In any case, it looks like I can't watch Fox or WB when it's raining heavily. Hope for good weather on House, Bones, and Dollhouse nights when the fall season comes around.

Friday, I called a plumber after I'd contacted Mom to make sure she was ready (i.e. willing and unsurprised) to pay for it. The magically re-reappearing two-meter puddle that kept showing up again every time I thought I'd sorted out the source, is no more. *whew* And I no longer need to prop a bucket at a precarious angle under the hot-water fitting for the tub when I want to take a shower.

Friday was stressful and I hadn't really slept the night before; I finally crashed a bit before sunset. Since I then did sleep, I hoped that meant I'd actually make it to the housewarming/birthday party I wanted to go to Saturday ... Alas, it was one of those days when the act of getting myself ready to go out used up most of my spoons. I hoped that I'd recover enough spoons to go anyhow if i just skipped the first half, but I didn't get back to feeling good about standing up and moving around again until too much later. The effort of getting ready to go out wasn't entirely wasted, as later still I got a phone call inviting me to meet a friend at a mall and then go for dinner, and by then I was starting to feel like standing up and moving around might not be so bad again. I wasn't really moving all that well, but I wanted to take advantage of the chance to do something social after all, after having gotten my hopes up earlier, and while it wasn't the party I'd been planning to attend, I did get out of the house, get fed, and get to spend time in fun conversation with a friend.

Despite not sleeping more than a couple hours again last night, I had a productive day today, in that I did accomplish something that had been on my to-do list for too long. Then I kinda fell over, not quite managing to nap but not really getting any more done, but hey, I'd gotten something done before that, so I'm counting this day as not being a loss. Alert again for the moment, but hoping that after eating and taking my bedtime meds I'll manage to get proper sleep tonight (which would make decent sleep an every-other-night thing).

Finally: while tossing and turning earlier this evening in that "not quite able to nap but way too sleepy for anything else" period this afternoon/evening, I grabbed my classical guitar to noodle on. I'd forgotten how sensuously that guitar throws the vibrations of the low strings back into my chest. Mmmmmmm.

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-01-09:

"I happen to believe that competition rather than money is the root of all evil." -- Glenn Gould, pianist, in a 1967 interview.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

05:25 am - QotD

"Serving a life sentence when you're immortal has to suck..." -- jsbowden, 2009-06-07, responding to theweaselking's observation that, "When confronted with 'I went to prison, and it was there that I found the Lord Jesus' the correct response is not 'Really? What was he in for?'"

10:18 am - The Perversity of Plumbing

Oh $%^#, I made it worse.

I stripped something in the toilet's shut-off valve -- I'm hoping all I've damaged is the plastic handle. And, of course, I've now got no idea whether getting the plastic nut on the underside of the tank to turn did any good or not.

Gonna take a break, calm down, come back to it and see if I can tell whether all I broke was the handle or not, attempt a kludge and/or try to find a replacement if so, and then decide whether to ask a less plumbing-klutzy friend to do me a big favour, based on whether it turns out that I improved anything before I broke things.

I should not be so easily defeated by something so primitive, considering the more complicated stuff that I can deal with.

I was going to try to fix the shower today as well, but I'm wondering whether that'd just be asking for trouble.

Grumpy now. *pout*

08:29 am - Famished Feline Photos, and Discovering Yet Another Self-Accompanying Sampling Musician

Doh! If you rearrange the Applications folder on a Mac, shoving apps into subfolders by category, the apps that were running while you were doing this get all confused and can't find parts of themselves (such as the "save as JPEG" part, or the "open a new window" part). Fortunately I was awake enough to figure out what I'd done before too long, and exit/restart those apps to de-confuse them.

There are a few cats I see on my block occasionally, all pretty shy -- none will approach for a scritch, and in general a human across the street is too close, if they know they've been spotted. Last night, I spotted this white-and-black kitty worrying a chicken bone that somebody had dropped on the sidewalk next to my front steps^[1], and too hungry to scamper away from it when I walked up after parking my car on the far side of the street. The cat even stuck around long enough for me to run upstairs and grab the flash cable so I could move the flash off the camera, and a handful of dry cat food to offer instead of the mostly-bare bone.

Tossing cat food on the sidewalk wasn't exactly kosher from a don't-encourage-the-rats perspective, but given how well the rats have been eating from my new neighbours' garbage, I don't think a single application of one handful of kibble, most of it consumed on the spot by the intended recipient, is going to be a huge factor. (The rats mostly (not entirely) leave my trash alone^[2] -- I'd see them explore it once in a while, but not enthusiastically and they didn't seem to be getting much from it, or shredding the bags open. I don't know how much this is due to the used cat litter in my garbage and how much is a rat preference for meat scraps which my garbage lacks. I'd ascribed it entirely to the cat waste, until the new neighbours, who seem to be typical American omnivores, moved in, and I noticed way more rat activity in and around their garbage bags than I'd ever seen around mine^[3]. It may still be entirely a cat-waste matter, but it did get me wondering whether rats prefer meat scraps over vegetable matter or not.) Unlike Perrine, who was pretty friendly even before I fed her the first time, this cat wanted to get plenty of distance between us as soon as its tummy was full. Admittedly, I didn't try very hard to coax it closer -- in our past encounters, all of which took place at much greater range, I'd gotten the message that pretty much anything I did that showed I wasn't completely oblivious to the cat's existence constituted a threat. Then again, Perrine had obviously been around humans before she became a stray, since she was wearing a collar when she found me. Whether this cat and the even more skittish black cat I often see across the street are completely feral or abandoned ex-pets, I really don't know.

I do know that I've been trying to photograph them, and a dark grey one, for a while, and they usually manage to get behind or under something before I can bring a long lens to bear. This time I was within a couple meters, easy reach with the 28-135mm zoom, and the subject having to stick around to eat the kibble meant I had time to compose and get off a few frames. The camera angle I got doesn't really show how skinny the cat is, but I couldn't move around much to re-compose the shot without scaring it away. Not a small cat -- somewhat longer than Perrine, I think -- but clearly too skinny when not scrunched up, hunched over food.

Glad I got to photograph one of the neighbourhood strays and provide a little nourishment ... but still not particularly thrilled about chicken bones being tossed next to my steps (nor about the occasional half-empty plastic cup sitting on my top step). Then again, as distracting elements of my local environment go, it's pretty small potatoes. The noise from dump trucks on Fulton Ave. (legal, however annoying) and the occasional semi on Lombard St. (where there are signs prohibiting trucks over 3/4 ton) affects me a lot more than bones on the sidewalk.

[1] I've got a good idea where the chicken scrap came from, as the new neighbours were sitting on their front step and mine for much of the afternoon, with their kids playing on the sidewalk and a tub of canned sodas in ice next to them, in a time-honoured approach to dealing with too warm a house. When I opened the security door to retrieve the mail from the entryway, they jumped up from my step in a hurry. I'm guessing that the chicken bone was from lunch, dropped by either a lazy adult or a careless child. It's possible that a rat dragged it there during the night, but I doubt a rat would have left enough behind to interest the cat.

[2] I'm going to try to pick up that proper garbage can with a lid this afternoon, so I can set a better example by making my trash even less rat-friendly, as much of a PITA wrestling the can in and out of the house will be. It's one of the many things on my to-do list that fell by the wayside during the two months of dizziness, and I'm still trying to put my to-do list back in some sort of order even now.

[3] The rats are also getting fed more often now, as the new neighbours don't seem to have figured out which days are trash-pickup days.

I think I want to be Theresa Andersson. I'd never heard of her until I saw her on The Late Late Show the night before last, starting off by playing a drum pattern into a loop pedal then layering in backing vocals, lead vocals, guitar, and violin, performing barefoot to work controls on the electronics with her toes, it looked like. There was an Appalachian Dulcimer on a stand behind her as well, but she didn't pick that up. It looked like she was enjoying herself. I joked to realinterrobang that she apparently couldn't afford to hire a band, but her Wikipedia entry suggests that I may have hit closer to the mark than I intended: "[...] Theresa overcame the financial impracticality of touring Europe with a band by learning to play with a loop pedal."

She's far from being the only one to get a lot of mileage out of that trick (the first person I saw do something like that on television was Les Paul, and several folks have taken it farther since), but gosh, she looked like she was having so much fun.

OT1H, I really do enjoy playing with other musicians -- there's a chemistry, an energy, in a band that would be missing in a solo act even if I could play all the instruments at once. OTOH, being a multi-instrumentalist, there are times when I have trouble making up my mind which one part to play out of a bunch of ideas in my head.

(Some combinations are easier to manage -- even without fancy electronics -- than others. maugorn routinely combines guitar, harmonica and tambourine at once, and when I was in Wild Oats I played drums and bass (or drums and guitar) together. But playing recorder, bass, and guitar all at the same time would, I think, require a sampler ... and I never did get around to implementing a kick-snare for the drum kit, so for some tunes I had to put down the bass and pick up the sticks.)

As usual, I'm paying for getting stuff done on good days with a few bad days in a row afterward. I think I'm recovered from my last bit o' activity, and thus hope to get to at least one thing on my calendar for this weekend. Between finances and spoon-deficit, getting all the way up to Boston the following weekend for ConCertino is looking pretty unlikely. (I'd briefly entertained a fantasy of being organized enough and energized enough to go up for ConCertino, spend the week visiting various friends up thataway, then go to Baitcon before coming home. Fortunately I didn't invest too much emotional energy in what was clearly a daydream from the outset, but I do hope to regain the ability to do things like that someday.) I do hope that I can at least make it to Baitcon, but even that is looking logistically challenging.

So today I've got some phone calls to make, and another attempt at dealing with the leaky toilet tank w/o breaking it, and hope that I don't burn up too many spoons to be able to go to a party tomorrow.

I'd feel a bit more confident of this if my sleep cycle weren't already out of whack again (as evidenced by my being awake to write all this and upload a few photos).

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-27:

"I had been merely a by-stander, a bit-player, while Anna did the dying." -- John Banville, in his novel The Sea, from the character Max recalling his wife's death from cancer over a year.

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

[I still miss butterfluff, who had been a RL friend far longer than an LJ one.]

05:25 am - QotD

"Canada is like your attic, you forget that it's up there, but when you go, it's like 'Oh man, look at all this great stuff!'" -- unknown [probably someone in the US, from the sound of it]

05:25 am - QotD

[Regarding a community moderator's reference to transgendered people as "the gender confused community" in a response to a request for a non-binary gender tag:]

"I don't really know a single gender confused person who is actually all that confused about gender. Most of us think pretty thoroughly about it.

"I do, however, find that exposure to gender confused people causes cis people to have gender meltdowns of their own."

-- lisaquestions, 2009-05-24

["Cis" here is short for "cisgendered", which is the opposite of "transgendered".]

12:25 am - Windows and Weather; Windows and Money; Lights and Lessons; Plumbing and Problems

This morning I fell asleep later than I wanted to, and slept for less time than I really needed, but without intense chemical assistance this time -- here's hoping that my legs stay calm enough tonight to do that again.

A thunderstorm blew in, and cooled the house quite a bit before the rain started, which was good -- all too often lately, the rain-going-sideways phase has come before the temperature drop, meaning I close the windows and the house gets even more muggy, without the benefit of cooler outside air. This time the temperature drop and the rainfall came in the proper order. *whew* Though it did get kinda muggy when the post-storm humidity increase more than made up for the temperature drop, sunset started to set things right again.

I had a lot to do, but wanted to go be social anyhow, since I was feeling more human than usual (yay sleep), but I wound up having enough spoons to either make myself fit for the company of others or to get myself out the door at a useful hour, so I wound up showered and dressed and trying to figure out why it was suddenly ninety minutes later than I would've had to leave the house to go to movie night. Bleah. Back to the to-do list after all.

Maybe I can dredge up enough spoons to deal with replacing the bedsheets before I crash.

I tried to make a video this afternoon. The storm clouds had already rolled in, so I'd lost daylight. So I wound up trying to do it with hot lights ... well, one hot light -- I found a halogen floodlamp bulb left over from an old project I never got around to finishing, and stuck it in a table lamp resting on its side. Lessons: hot lights are hot even when it's just one and not a whole theatre-ceiling full (this'd be a good winter project); and I need more lights, and stands and reflectors. Need 'em for still photography too, but was kinda hoping to eventually wind up with studio strobes with less-hot modelling lights in 'em, rather than constantly-on hot lamps. How long until LED studio lights go through enough generations for the first models to start showing up as hand-me-downs? Eight years? Fifteen? Another lesson: scratch out at least an outline of a script, dammit. And double-check the audio before hitting the record button. Oh: and get either a nice, lightweight camcorder or a big-ass tripod capable of properly handling an old video camera.

*sigh* In the why-I-shouldn't-have-people-over column, there's the toilet problem. What I thought was a simple flapper-valve replacement turned out not to be a leaking flapper valve making it run constantly after all. No, the fitting on the underside of the tank where the inlet pipe connects is leaking, and the constantly running sound was the fill pipe trying to replace the water that was dripping onto the floor, running under various things, and when the leak got bigger, eventually making a womdigious puddle that couldn't be mistaken for spillage from the bucket that catches the leak from the hot-water feed to the shower. I'd thought the towels on the floor were too wet too often, but it wasn't until the toilet leak got worse that it became clear. Feh.

I haven't managed to have any effect on it in my attempts so far, and sticking a plastic container under it only worked for a day and a half, after which the leak sped up too much for that to be manageable ... so I've mostly turned off the water going to the toilet (guess what -- the shut-off valve doesn't shut all the way off ... hypothetical if-I-played-the-lottery winnings might be well spend just having a plumber replace every single valve of unknown age as a preventative measure) and propped up the float arm to close the fill-valve in the tank, and I'm flushing the toilet by filling a bucket from the bathtub and dumping that right into the bowl, until I can figure out how to fix the leak for real, or give up on doing it myself and recruit help.

I feel so primitive. It's one thing to go with reduced technology and convenience when camping or doing an SCA event; it's another matter when it's because one's home is falling apart.

I'm tempted to wait for it to get nice and dry and then just encase the whole fitting in a big ol' blob o' caulk. But that would probably just make the proper repair nearly impossible for plumbing-enclued people at some future date, wouldn't it?

I didn't get out to be social, alas, but I did make it as far as a grocery store. I picked one with an ATM from my credit union, so I could check my available balance before shopping, so I'd know whether the deposit had cleared. But they'd had a power outage earlier, and the Diebold (hack - ptui!) ATM had not rebooted correctly:

Oy vey. I did try pressing buttons just in case any of the front panel switches were mapped to the Windows keyboard enter key. No luck.

So I grabbed just a couple of urgent items and went to the checkout to see whether my card would work or not. It did, so I also bought gas on the way home. (That was the other question mark WRT my being social tonight -- not being sure whether I could buy the gas I'd need to get there or not.)

So. It was a day. With any luck, tomorrow will be another. (Well, subjective-tomorrow, since I took long enough finishing this that subjective-tomorrow is already calendar-today. But you know what I mean.)

03:46 pm - On Anonymous(ish) Comments That Needn't Be

This is about unintentionally anonymous, and signed but technically 'anonymous', comments on my journals -- mostly at Dreamwidth.

At most of the journalling sites I use, I have anonymous comments set to be screened, as a response to the spambot problem. So when you leave a comment without signing in, your comment is hidden until the next time I look and notice that I've got legitimate anonymous comments to unscreen. If you post your comment while I'm asleep or out of the house, it could be a while.

I understand that some folks really don't want to create yet another account/online-identity to keep track of, and a few people wish to specifically avoid particular sites for personal or political reasons. My first suggestion there is OpenID.

I also understand that some folks already know about and understand OpenID, and for whatever good or bad reasons really don't want to use it. To those people who are deliberately using the anonymous-comment feature and identifying yourselves in other ways, I say, thank you for sticking your name in your comments somewhere, at the bottom as a signature or at the top or in the subject line as a "hey, this is me", so that I have more clue than just word-choice and punctuation[1] to figure out which of my friends is writing, and please carry on as you have been doing.

This message is for the rest of you, who would leave not-anonymous-in-the-technical-LJ/DW-sense comments if doing so were really easy, but either don't know about OpenID or haven't gotten around to experimenting with it. Because depending on your personal threshold for the "really easy" category, it is in fact really easy[2].

That sounds like a bit of a hassle just to leave one comment, eh?

Here's the thing: you can do this once and then not worry about it.

Oh, and if you do want a DW account, I have a couple DW invite codes.

One caveat: while I was typing this I was going through all the steps to make sure I was describing things correctly, and I couldn't get it to work using my IJ identity, though commenting at DW using my LJ and CommieJournal identities worked perfectly. I don't know whether this is a temporary DNS glitch, a bug that needs to be fixed, or what.

Of course, if your comment is really just a personal note to me and doesn't need to be visible in the discussion thread, then leaving it technically-anonymous and therefore screened doesn't matter so much (though of course some sort of human-readable identification is appreciated unless you really are trying to be really-anonymous.

A separate issue regarding comments:

Ideally, I'd like all the comments on all the copies of my entries to show up together, not scattered around with some on IJ, some on LJ, and some on DW. But I also know that if I turn off commenting on all but one site, some friends are just not going to bother going to the trouble of commenting someplace other than the journalling site they call home, and I value your comments more than the convenience of seeing them all in one place ... and equally importantly, since the reason I mirror my journal to so many places at once is to avoid having all my eggs in one basket should the site I pick become evil, get bought out, suffer catastrophic failure, or wither due to founder's loss of interest, having all the comments in one place would defeat that. So until I work out a way to automatically mirror comments cleanly[3], I'm afraid any discussions my entries spark will be fragmented, with most people only seeing one fork at a time.

[1] And no, this is not a snark at the friend whose signature is punctuation -- that's clearly a signature. :-)

[2] Except for one friend who just couldn't get it to work, which warrants a bug report, but I'm not sure which site the bug report needs to be filed with.

[3] My current idea is to clone them (using the email notifications) to a central non-LJ-like site, and maintain linkages so that attempts to reply there get redirected back to an appropriate LJ-like site. I haven't worked the kinks out of the design in my head yet, and have an awful lot more pressing on my to-do list.

05:25 am - QotD

"Even the 'ick' factor is a cover for something else. Despite the pretended revulsion for 'gay' sex acts, the fact is that homosexuals do nothing sexually that heterosexuals don't do. One only has to look at the amatuer porn posted by gays and straights alike on sites like xtube.

"The real motivation of those opposed to gay rights is simply meanness. They opponents are bullies. They like being able to look down on others. They enjoy the fact that they have 'special rights' that gay people don't. In other words, the opponents of gay rights are not nice people. One doesn't have to demonize them to realize that they lack the kind of moral compass one gains from being able to empathize with others not like oneself."

-- Crookedtimber commenter JayJonson, 2009-04-12

11:54 pm - Mom, Food, Laundry, SLEEP

I saw Mom yesterday, got some grocery+utility money, saw for myself that she doesn't seem troubled by her eye surgery a few days ago, showed her how to unplug every phone in the house at once the next time she gets a Verizon operator who asks her to unplug her phones as a troubleshooting measure before scheduling a service call, ate mom-prepared food which was especially yummy -- mmmmmmm, fried halloumi in pita! and good, strong, wrinkly, bitter black olives! mmmmmmm ... such a change from my recent diet of peanut butter and cheddar -- and oddly lowered my blood sugar instead of raising it, and did three loads of laundry. Sheepie came over bearing gifts, so she and my youngest brother and I chatted until my laundry was dry. Stopped on the way home only to deposit money to make my checking account balance non-negative again and buy bread, chocolate, and cat litter; scopped the litter box and took out the trash when I got home, and revised my diagnosis of the toilet problem (not the flapper valve as I'd thought; rather, it's running because of a leak from a fitting on the underside of the tank -- so I've got an old yogurt container there now to catch it, but am not sure yet how to go about solving it), and tried to go to bed.

Well into daylight, after many, many rounds of nearly falling asleep and getting jerked back awake, I really, really wanted sleep. Unwilling to take two doses of Klonopin in the same month (I don't know how often I can take it w/o the psych effects showing up, and really don't want to find out), I tried three Unisom capsules (which comes to 150mg Benadryl[1]), 40cc ethanol (contained in 100cc whisky), and an antihistamine that actually works as an antihistamine for me. Took a damned long time, but it did put me to sleep. I'd entertained some hope of sleeping eight hours and then going to 3LF rehearsal, and set an alarm for that purpose, but instead slept until 22:30, at which point I woke up from a dream in which I was explaining the path I took to my religious faith to two high-schostudents (one a Catholic, the other Lutheran), feeling actually well-rested for a change but in a shitload of pain all over my body (let's see, I've missed how many doses in a row of my pain meds at this point?) and a little dizzy.

The good: I slept, enough to cancel some portion of my sleep-debt and really feel like I've slept. Yay!

The bad: I slept clear through not only the time I should have been getting ready for 3LF, but the entire rehearsal and then some, and now my sleep pattern for the day is nigh π radians out of phase with the day/night cycle for my spot on the planet. And I'm not going to pull a similar chemical stunt just to realign; I'm saving the risky drug combinations for when I've been awake so long that it's making me crazy with desparation to sleep.

The trivial: I hope there wasn't anything on television that I wanted to record...

I really need to get some sort of health coverage that includes stuff like sleep specialists and pain clinics. (And in an ideal world, gender stuff.) Alas, my being able to afford such in the forseeable future is extremely unlikely (slightly less likely than it would be if I bought lottery tickets, but ...), and I can't see Obama and Congress having the collective balls piss off the health-insurance parasites by replacing them and forcing them to go into some other business. It might, maybe, be possible to talk Obama into it if enough of us peons raise a fuss, but he won't try unless there's a chance of having it pass the legislature, and talking enough of them into something like they have in Ontario seems only the slightest bit more likely than my getting a windfall that allows me to pay for care/insurance under the current so-called system.

In the meantime, it feels kind of wierd to feel simultaneously so crappy from pain and so well from being rested and alert. Let's see whether I can get the pain level down a notch, then get back to the two projects I need to make real progress on.

[1] The first time I tried Benadryl, I felt it start working as an antihistamine a while after I took it, and fifteen minutes after that it stopped working. Fifteen minutes relief from a "12 hour" pill didn't seem useful. The next time I took it, no noticeable effect at all. Neither did it make me drowsy. But having come into a supply of the stuff recently by chance, I thought this morning that maybe even though it doesn't make me drowsy on its own, it might amplify the soporific aspects of alcohol[2]. Which it apparently did.

[2] I did try drinking myself to sleep once. It took forever, involved a not-inexpensive quantity of inexpensive whisky, and I was still drunk when I woke up, making it a worthless solution if my goal is to use sleep to go from addled-by-lack-of-sleep to clearheaded-and-awake ... and I personally don't even like the sensation of being drunk. So ethanol alone takes too long, takes too much, and has unacceptable side effects ... but does have some soporific qualities that may be leveraged, as long as whatever combination I concoct doesn't result in respiratory failure.

05:25 am - QotD

"The purpose of art is to elicit emotion, is it not?

"But while emotion is a humanly interactive experience, the vehicle of art is strictly one-way. It is the cruelest humbuggery to force unattributable sadness, anger, or love upon an observer. We inevitably are left empty, unable to return emotional feedback to an artist unaware of our specific existence."

-- Danny, in the comic strip Nukees by Darren Bleuel, 2008-12-29. (The quoted passage sets up a punch line in the net panel ...)

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-17:

"Then it struck me, that here in this crazy, consumer world, here was a Man who drives no car, who flies no planes who heats no home; in a Time of global warming his Co2 emissions are pretty much zero. So Right here, and right now this homeless man in Hollywood is a model Urban citizen.

"I on the other hand, live this life of good intentions, travelling the World, trying to be aware of the earth, singing songs, and looking and Hoping for change. But out on the road, I fly every day; drive Everyday, heat my home, and burn up so much fuel that if everyone Lived like me we'd need about 4 planets to keep it all Going"

-- Luka Bloom, from his song Homeless, from his 2007 album Tribe.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

06:43 pm - Effects and Side Effects; Danger and Desperation

(I could've sworn I had something more specific planned for this weekend, but I can't figure out what ... I know there are parties the next two weekends, and an out of town con and an out of town party and then it starts getting really close to Pennsic... Thinking carefully about both my spoons-budget and my odds of being able to pay for stuff, including gasoline. Wheee.)

This morning, feeling like I was losing my mind after the eighth or ninth time a leg cramp jolted me awake just as I was finally starting to nod off (and after the usual mineral supplements, pain meds, sell-massage, really tight elastiic bandages, and beating on my calves with an empty 750ml glass bottle I keep by the bed for just that purpose), I finally decided to experiment with an uncomfortable drug cocktail.

It worked. I slept. Now I feel halfway between hung-over and stoned, and wondering whether different drugs can undo both of those feelings enough for me to get out of the house and drive to Bowie before my mother's bedtime, so say a long overdue hello and see how she's doing after her eye surgery.

Or is adding any other chemical at this point, with the exception of ordinary foodstuffs, just asking for trouble?

I was feeling well and tryuly desparate for sleep last night, wondering whether the ER folks would a) laugh at me for ahowing up to complain about insomnia, or b) commit me if I asked whether amputation would solve the leg cramps or just continue them as phantom-limb effect. I had some leftover klonopin, which I can't use as intended because it changes my personality to someone neither I nor my friends like and makes me feel like I'm going crazy, but that took many doses ramping up over time, last time, so I decided I was desparate enough to try three grams as a one-shot and hope the psychiatric effects don't show up from a single dose. But if I punch anybody in the face, smash up a car or a television set, or unload a pile of vitriol of somebody who doesn't deserve it, remind me to flush the remaining pills down the toilet, okay?

(No, I'm not joking. I don't think this is likely from a single dose after years of not touching it and no plans to take it again any time soon, but if I'm wrong, those are the signs to watch out for. I didn't strike any person in that hellish summer when I was taking it regularly, but I did damage a bunch of relationships, punch a hole in a wall, smash all the windows of a car that had been frustrating me, and cross the line from vehemence to outright intimidation in an argument with a housemate. I was seriously not the me that folks who know me would recognize, and I hated it. I really thought I was headed for the loony bin until a pshrink identified a paradoxical reaction to the klonopin and had me taper off it -- when I got down to a quarter-milligram a day I felt like me again, and one of the first things I tell a new doctor or a hospital triage nurse is: no antidepresants, no klonopin, nothing that works on those pathways; you might as well label me 'allergic' to them if that's the surest way to make sure they don't get prescribed. So even trying it as a just-this-once dose reflects how deparate I was for sleep last night.)

So: Klonopin, a Requip tablet that I'm not supposed to have (and fear a bit because of the part of the brain it works on IIUC and my history of paradoxical reactions there), and I improvised a rolling paper to smoke the contents of a teabag (my reaction to xanthines[1] is coplicated and problematic, and also appears to depend on the delivery mechanism -- the intent was to have the soporific effect take effect quickly enough that the can't-fall-asleep effect would arrive too late to mess things up), along with an extra dose of ibuprofen and about 10cc alcohol (a bit under an ounce of clove-infused whisky -- though I was mostly soaking a toothache in that (I usually spit the clove-infused stuff, but I must have absorbed most of the alcohol through my gums) -- I might have tried taking enough to be relevant to the sleep issue, but for having such a tiny amount in the house and wanting to reserve it for toothache management until I can get more.

( a digression on toothache-management chemicals )

No, this did not strike me as an especially safe way to experiment, even at the time. I was feeling that desparate. It worked, sort of. I slept for enough hours to be able to tell that I had slept, waking groggy and achy and more dizzy than I've felt in a while. My head hurts, my legs still feel twitchy, and my back, shoulders, arms, and hands ache, but dammitt, I slept. Now the question is: what will it take (time? more meds?) to feel safe to drive down to Bowie this afternoon -- early enough to spent some time with my mom being awake, not just borrow her laundry machines and ask her for money -- in a car with marginal brakes. (I'd planned to go yesterday but it's just as well that I didn't, hearing the traffic reports about congestion caused by the weather.)

A morbid thought, meant not to frighten my friends but to reasure you (not that I can see a way of saying it that won't also frighten you: if I die way too early and the autopsy reveals that I had taken a fatal combination of drugs, I'd like it on the record that unless I leave a suicide note (very, very unlikely!) then the cause will neither have been intentional ssuicide nor careless recreational use, but rather the result of knowingly mixing dangerous combinations in a desperate attempt to get effective results from what chemicals I had access to. Less stupidity than desparation. But I sincerely hope it never comes to that, and after I die a non-stupid death at an extremely advanced age, this parargraph can be written off as my being melodramatic on a day when I'm fighting dizziness and headache and frustration. Still, I wanted it out there to refer to just in case the "why did she do something so stupid?" questions ever do come up when I'm no longer around to answer them.

Of course, what I really want is for doctors to find me solutions to the pain, the leg cramps and jerks, and the general insomnia, that are safe and effective for me. The sleep aids I've tried have, at best, worked for three nights in a row and then never again.

Anyhow...

*sigh* Now to see whether 50mg of meclizine, an antihistamine, and a dozen ounces of a strong basil+lavender tea will act well and quickly enough for me to feel competent to drive down to visit Mom. Before it gets to be too late in the day to count as a proper visit. Wish me luck.

[1] Xanthines -- the general class of drugs of which caffeine is the best-known member; often all referred to as caffeine, incorrectly. Other common examples are theophylline, found in tea, which was what I smoked last night; and theobromine, the much weaker xanthine (I see citations that it is "one seventh as powerful" as the others), which appears in chocolate. As do most people, I react very similarly to theophylline and caffeine, in that either will make me feel drowsy, either can be useful in treating a migraine, either can produce classic stimulant effects of increased heart rate and respiration despite making my brain feel sleepy, and either can give me a mild headache if I didn't start out with one; but the "cannot fall asleep even though it made me drowsy" effect is slightly less with theophylline (still potent enough to warrant avoiding it in general), and theophylline can ease breathing difficulties in a way that caffeine does not appear to (which isn't just me -- that's consistent with what I've read about theophylline). The only effect I notice from ordinary consumption of theobromine is that the cravings for it go away for a little while, but in absurd quantities it has acted as a mild stimulant and resulted in my producing short stories that readers found intriguingly disturbing.

05:25 am - QotD

"I'm not smug, ma'am; it's just the unfortunate shape of my face." -- Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (played by Laurence Fox) responding to a superior, on the ITV television program Lewis (in the US: Inspector Lewis, on PBS), episode "Expiation", written by Guy Andrews and directed by Dan Reed (originally broadcast 2007-03-04; aired on the nearest PBS station to me 2008-07-06).

05:25 am - QotD

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." -- John Maynard Keynes (b. 1883-06-05, d. 1946-04-21)

05:25 am - QotD

-- from the PBS television program Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-04-03

05:05 pm - Sticky Greeting

My cat, her fur is full of cobwebs and now she wants to cuddle. What have you gotten into, Perrine?