August 2011 Archives

only
three
albums

a tragedy.

sorry i haven't been posting lately. too busy loving life.

and visiting missouri.

over the weekend in MO, we had a couple of martinis. we found a bar called "the drink" that had a martini glass on the logo, and sure enough, they had two whole different gins to choose from! both choices sucked.

tonight i made some at home, using a mixture of leftover north shore 11, leftover blade, and dolin blanc vermouth.

holy cow this tastes delicious, so very unlike the rubbing alcohol we drank in waynesville.

yum.

to amuse myself, i completed the final half mile or so of my ride without pedaling. my last crank turn was to get over alameda de las pulgas at crystal springs. there's a steep downhill after that, and i conserved the momentum from that to traverse the 3 or 4 mostly flat remaining blocks (and intersections) to home.

there was more body jerking than usual, but i managed to do it without pissing off any drivers.

i've been following amanda's blog for a while now. initially, i frequently found her posts boring and focused on things i didn't care about. now, for the last couple of months, i've found her to be incredibly insightful and well written. i dunno if she's changed or i have. this post is perhaps the best of her's that I've read:

The illusion of control. Do yourself a favor and read it.

(It causes me to wonder: I find VD's blog posts horribly illogical and poorly written (in the sense that he usually puts his contradictions in adjacent sentences, rather than separating them by clever misdirections), but AM's well reasoned and well presented. I wonder if this is because I tend to agree with AM's conclusions and don't go searching for mistakes and illogic (or because she tends to write longer posts, and separates her contradictions so the lazy cannot find them). I wonder, yes I do, but I suspect she's just smarter and a better writer than VD, which isn't saying much.)

The chickenhawks have a valid point. If society accepts the redefinition of homosexuality as "normal" on the basis of its practitioners being "born that way", then it has absolutely no reason to condemn pedophiles who are also "born that way".

No, they're still wrong.

A society can condemn whatever it pleases. The DSM can redefine murder as a psychological disorder, and society can still lock people up when they do it. Likewise, a society can still forbid sex with minors (or sex with same gendered adults!) no matter what psychology has to say about the matter.

The panic exuded by crap like this, and the total lack of logic, is stunning. Our society is run (allegedly) on the basis of the Constitution and our democratic laws, not the edicts of a small group of psychologists.

What's more, arguing about imaginary slippery slopes of people marrying horses and sleeping with children has never distracted rational thinkers from the fact that two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they please with each other. Only minds clouded by illogic and hatred can come up with the contortions necessary to claim libertarianism while denying (or begrudging) consenting adults the rights to behave, in private, as they please.

I've always found the "conservative" obsession with anti-gay nonsense to be curious. Actually, I've always found most single-issue non-issues to be curious. While VD is screaming and whining about society being dragged to hell by teachers suggesting to middle schoolers that it's okay to be gay, just several years later, those same middle schoolers will be eligible for recruitment into our war machine, sent over to the meat grinder to suffer the rest of their lives with both disenfranchisement and lack of proper medical care.

but rather than focus on injustices that are actually happening right now to real people who actually exist, VD and his ilk obsess about fantasy-world scenarios involving people who do not actually exist doing things that nobody is actually suggesting (like "normalizing" pedophilia).

There are bigger, more pressing, and less imaginary problems in our world. They tend to be ignored by demagogues, because they do not generate votes or page views.

UPDATE:

Here's exactly what I'm talking about:

The innocence of a child should not be required to wrestle with the complexities involving same-sex orientation.

The "complexities" of same-sex orientation are no more complex than the "complexities" of opposite-sex orientation. Some men marry short women, some men marry fat women, some men marry tall women, and some men marry old women, and some men marry other men. It is not complex at all. Even a child, or an Evangelist pastor, or a MENSA member even (well, maybe) could figure it out.

A month ago there was a video (now removed) on youtube of an 8 year old learning about same sex marriage. He said something like "okay, so Bob and Fred are married. cool. now can I play ping pong?"

I think he managed the complexities just fine. He might have even overthought it a little.

tomorrow morning, for the first time in my own life, and possibly for the first time in all of recorded history, i will finish a bottle of shampoo and a bottle of conditioner... at the same time.

i will not be left with extra of one or the other.

mark the date!

angry about the economy, the wind, the cold (it's august, when are we going to get a hot day around here?), work, lunch prospects, and my itchy back, i decided to take my anger out on... myself. so i abused myself on the bike.

i turned right and went up bunker hill, then down ticongeroga or whatever that is near the top of BH, back down to polhemus, up over horseshit bridge, cañada to edgewood, edgewood back to alameda, then up and over the alameda hill at ralston, down that, and then, just because i could still breathe, up hillsdale. some dude at the top said "tough hill huh" or something, to which i replied, "argheleabraaarrgh...". i managed to do all this not at high speed, but hardly at low speed, and certainly not in my granny gear.

i sold my kegerator yesterday. it sat in the kitchen, unused, for 2 years prior to that. i tell anyone who asks that the kegerator killed my interest in homebrewing. before the kegerator, i'd brew, and bottle, and put the bottles in the closet, and brew again, and again, until my closet was full, and then i'd find another closet.

i never really had to drink the beer.

but with the kegerator, i had to drink beer, 5 gallons of it at a time. throwing parties was too much trouble and i never really had the kind of friends that would come over, hang out, and drink beer. in fact, i myself would never really hang out and drink beer. so, the beer piled up, i couldn't brew any more until i drank gallons over gallons, and the hobby died.

and then i started biking on weekends, and that really killed it extra dead.

so now the kegerator's gone and we have a nice kegerator sized hole in our kitchen space. what will it become? i am excited to see.

is the "where did i leave my pants last night?" game. still MIA right now...

hops and i were demotivated by the weather and didn't get out until well past 10am. we decided to do our sawyer camp out and back for quickness and ease, and because the signs had said it would only be "closed" until 10. but it turned out the TdP was still ongoing. so we went up the hill, and up sawyer camp, and at the top we agreed it'd be too dangerous to go back -- so we kept on with the TdPers and followed their route.

we ended up at an unmarked intersection with the choice of going into coyote point or bgame. we went to bgame and apparently lost the tour. still, it was loads of fun. i saw a dude with really nice carnacs and asked where he got them. alas, they were his dad's, and dad got them many, many years ago. the glory days of comfy carnacs are well behind us, i think.

the last time my morning routine was interrupted, by the presence of my brother staying with us, i banged the crap out of my head on my way down for morning coffee. i was turning left when i normally turn right.

today, hops made me breakfast, which means i had only been awake for 2 minutes rather than the usual 10 when i ascended the stairs to my breakfast spot. being awake for only 2 minutes, i dropped my crumpets.

still ate them, though. 5 second rule.

whoopie for me.

somehow or another i found a group called "air france", and i dig their music tremendously. so i did a bit of research, and now i'm tremendously digging "avalanches" album "electricity".

hooray for music reviews! i did it all without the help of itunes.

EDIT: holy crap, this album has "frontier psychiatrist", which i have loved for years. for some reason i never picked up the album. better late than never.

watch the video it's great