August 2006 blogposts

Road Trip

Just got back yesterday from a two-week road trip out West with my friend John in his 32-foot RV (henceforth to be known as JRSSSC or John and Ryan's Super Size Shopping Cart ;-). I have lots of stories and some photos to share, so stay tuned. Photo taken at the Butterfly House at the Calgary Zoo.

The New Normal

On CBC Newsworld I am watching the funeral service for Major Paeta Hess-von Kredener, the Canadian United Nations observer who was recently killed along with three others by an Israeli bombing in Lebanon.

I'm also browsing the Internet for the latest news on today's thwarted terrorism attacks on American planes leaving from the U.K.  So now you can't bringanything on-board with you, even a novel (I heard that they're making an exception for personal medications in a clear plastic bag, but that's it).  And you have to dump out all the liquids and gels you're carrying--everything from bottled water to baby's milk to perfume to toothpaste.  They have to be discarded before they'll let you on the plane.  Welcome to the new normal.  I'm just so glad I'm not stepping on a plane today.

I've decided to take this week off in order to get some badly-needed cleaning done around here (which is, of course, why I am sitting here composing a blog entry ;-) and thinking about all this madness that has enveloped us.  I noticed elsewhere (via digg.com) that 30% of Americans polled could not identify the year (2001) in which the 9/11 terrorism attacks occured (Source: news.com.au, Article from Agence France-Presse, Aug. 10th, 2006).

SOME 30 per cent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.

While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3000 lives and shocked the world, 95 per cent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the date of the attacks.

But when asked what year, 30 per cent could not give a correct answer.

Of that group, six per cent gave an earlier year, eight per cent gave a later year, and 16 per cent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd - 48 per cent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 per cent were older than 65, the poll shows.

The Post telephone survey was carried out July 21-24 among 1002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

And THAT piece of news is probably the scariest one I've read today.

The best place to stay on top of this breaking story?  I have two:

1. http://newsnow.co.uk/newsfeed/?name=UK+Airlines+Terror+Threat (U.K.-based Newsnow scans over 24,000 news sources, and the page refeshes itself every five minutes; this is the best place to stay perched for the latest news)

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot (Wikipedia has a quickly-updated page on all breaking news stories; please keep in mind that the facts and details will often change as contradictory reports come in, but it is often a good compilation of currently-known information on a current news item)

And Here's ANOTHER Reason To Bitchslap Your Local Catholic Bishop, HARD. TWICE.

I haven't talked about this on the blog yet, as far as I know, but I am now on a 7-month research leave from work (one of the perks of working for a university where librarians are part of the faculty union). 

During the next seven months, I will be researching Winnipeg's local queer history for a book I plan to write.  So today I'm in the office doing some preliminary literature searching through the online Winnipeg Free Press archives, when I come across the following article:

The Winnipeg Free Press
Canada Wire, Friday, July 15, 2005, p. a17

Only one mother or dad per baptism
Same-sex couple can't sign RC certificates

By Tin Naumetz

OTTAWA - The Catholic church will not baptize the child of a same-sex couple if both parents insist on signing the certificate of baptism, the Conference of Catholic Bishops said yesterday.

The position emerged after Independent Senator Marcel Prud'homme took issue with testimony from Cardinal Marc Ouellet Wednesday at Senate committee hearings into the same-sex marriage bill.

homosexual acts, said the Civil Marriage Act will present a range of difficult issues other than the question of marriage solemnization if the bill becomes law, as expected next week.

"If I take the example of the ceremony of baptism, according to our canon law, we cannot accept the signatures of two fathers or two mothers as parents of an infant," Ouellet told the committee. "With a law that makes these unions official, situations of this will multiply and this threatens to disturb not just the use of our territory but also our archives and other aspects of the life of our communities."

His statement left the impression with several senators and observers that Catholic church rules would not allow the baptism of same-sex couples, even if the marriage bill passes.

But -- after Prud'homme expressed shock with the idea of Catholic refusal of baptism for children of same-sex marriages -- an official with the Conference of Catholic Bishops said yesterday that would only be the case if both fathers or both mothers insisted on signing the baptismal certificate.

Benoit Bariteau, associate general secretary of the conference, suggested the parents would be to blame for the failure to obtain baptism for their child by insisting on both signatures.

"If the parents insist that the two signatures be on the act (certificate) of baptism, if we say no, it will be their choice of seeking baptism or not," said Bariteau.

Prud'homme, a Catholic, said the church should not be free to refuse baptism under any circumstance.

"It's a question of rules, but I consider a baby a gift of God," he said in an interview.

"If two mothers or two fathers come to baptize a baby, how can you turn down baptism? To me it's insane. Even if they have to change the ruling of the baptism certificate. Who tells me that two mothers or two fathers cannot raise the child in the Catholic faith?"

-- CanWest News Service

So let me get this straight.  The Catholic Church is willing to fight tooth and nail to ensure that any baby conceived is born, and then you're willing to turn that same baby away from baptism (a step you consider essential to salvation), simply because the two people who sign the baptism certificate are the same sex???  And exactly WHAT does that have to do with how you treat this baby?  You're punishing the baby for the partners' supposed "sins"!

It's not the same-sex couple who should be ashamed here, it's the Catholic church.  Write this asinine ruling underneath the one that forbids use of condoms in a full-blown global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

For a long time I had wanted to watch Long Day's Journey Into Night.  I finally had my chance when it was on Turner Classic Movies several nights ago, when I "taped" it using the PVR feature in my new desktop PC.

Wow.  I can see why Katharine Hepburn wanted to do this role so badly that she took a pay cut. 

What a haunting portrait of addiction and family dysfunction this play was.  I might actually go do a bit of reading of comment and criticism of Eugene O'Neill's work, now that I've finally seen it.  And I won't erase it from my hard drive, just yet.  I think I want to see it again.

Not-so-gay.com (or, A late night meditation on the folly of online chatrooms)

Honestly, I don't even know why I bother.

Every so often I think I'm missing something and I sign back on to gay.com.  And every time I do, I get hit in the face with all the reasons why I left in the first place. 

Tonight I decided to check it out again, updated my profile with a new pic (below) and launched into chat.  To be immediately assailed by chatbots who want you to sign up for porno websites.  And then ignored by the people you used to chat with.  And then realizing, once again, what a hollow, shallow place the chat room is, and that you haven't missed a God-damn thing in all the time you were offline.

One of my best friends, who is online a lot, chatted with me for a bit and agreed that it's bad in the chatroom.  I'm afraid I just can't understand why he hangs out on gay.com every evening for hours and hours.  It seems to me all it does is get him more tired and depressed and cynical about "the gay scene".

Meh, maybe I'll peek in again in 2007 sometime.  Or 2008.  The time I would be wasting online I'd rather put towards research for my book, or losing a few pounds at the gym, or adding tracks to my personal Last.fm station, or evening out my suntan at the beach, or folding and putting away my laundry, or going for coffee or supper or a funny movie with a some friends.

Sometimes I wonder if it's the same over on the straight boards like lavalive or eharmony. 

From Digg.com: Mindstorms NXT: New Lego Robotics

The $250 Lego Mindstorms NXT is somewhere between a really cool toy and a robotics lab in a box. The combination of a computerized controller, sensors, servo motors, and hundreds of Lego Technic pieces lets kids of all ages design and build sophisticated robotics.

My brother and my nephews are gonna love this :-) the whole family is LEGO builders.

read more | digg story

From Digg: Scientists Watch Supernova in Real-Time

For the first time a star has been observed in real-time (well, O.K. real time plus the 440 million light-years it took for the light to reach us) as it goes supernova – a mind-bogglingly powerful explosion as the star ends its life, the resulting cosmic eruption briefly outshining an entire galaxy. UK scientists, in collaboration with international colleagues, used NASA's Swift satellite and a combination of orbiting and ground-based observatories to catch a supernova in the act of exploding.

read more | digg story

The Golden-Bitchslap Award

Well, thanks to this nifty website, I now have an official seal for the next presentations of The Golden Bitch-Slap (formerly known as The Golden Two-By-Four), which is presented to those people who really, really  need a smack upside the head for something stupid they said and/or did.

The wheat sheaves are a l'il prairie touch :-)