Archive for the ‘Personal Notebook’ Category
The Liberal-Activist Olympics
It may not be common knowledge, and I don't try to hide it, but I have an attitude about the "Special Olympics", and I've had this attitude for, oh, at least 25 years. It has nothing to do with nominally adorable special children, but saying so just sounds defensive so I usually don't. Largely I [...]
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The Orthography of Equations
Every now and then this little image appears on my Facebook page, as a sponsored ad, with the headline "Become a Physics Teacher". The sponsors claim that they will help me get a master's degree online in education so that I can become a physics teacher. Now tell me, if you were considering paying someone [...]
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NWS Pictures Hot
When I want to know a weather forecast, I get it online from the National Weather Service (for "Baltimore/Washington", search for Bowie, MD). I usually don't want a lot of detail in my forecast and I don't need to hear it or see it every ten minutes, so this suits me. Today the NWS says [...]
Share on FacebookAmis on Morality
Secularism contains no warrant for action. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the head of hostages, they shout, "God is great!" When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout? [Martin Amis, from The Second Plane; quoted by Richard Dawkins, "I [...]
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Grilled-Cheese Sandwiches
I just read a blog posting somewhere (I don't think there's a reason to single it out specifically) that wanted to talk about grilled-cheese sandwiches. Alas, they ended up talking about some unrecognizable food-from-Mars made with hearty textured artisanal breads made of grains with unpronounceable names and–worse!–insisted on a big block of "real" cheese, banning [...]
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Prunus 'First Lady'
A few weeks ago (28 March 2010, actually) we took an afternoon to visit the US National Arboretum, happily not at all far from our house. Daffodils in our neighborhood were blooming so we thought to see the Arboretum's collection. They were going full tilt and we enjoyed them very much. I was also delighted [...]
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Stories Old & New
Some of my stories have been published lately and I thought I'd mention them. Two of them are reprints; one has not been previously published. Let's start with Bi Guys: The Deliciousness of His Sex, R. Jackson, editor, just published by Lethe Press. In 2004 I wrote the story "Duck Tails [...]
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Beard of the Week LXXXVIII: Doppelgänger
Today's beard belongs to a man named Phil Jackson (b. 1945), unknown to me until today. A native of Montana (I like this bio in the "Cool Montana Stories" section of montanakids.com), Mr. Jackson is the current head coach for the LA Lakers basketball team; a position he held once before, Grover Cleveland fashion. He's [...]
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Adopt a Greyhound
Isaac tells me that April is National Adopt-A-Greyhound month, a concept sponsored by The Greyhound Project ("Adopt a greyhound, make a fast friend!"). They have a nice website with information about greyhounds as pets and adopting a former racer, as well as a database of adoption groups around the world, so there's no reason you [...]
Share on FacebookLammy Finalists for 2010
The finalists for this year's Lambda Literary Foundation awards ("Lammys"), the 22nd annual event, were announced recently; winners will be announced on 27 May. I am delighted to report that I am again nominated for about 7% of a Lammy. My memoir, "Tom Selleck's Mustache" (written under my usual nom de plume, Jay Neal), is [...]
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95 – 21 = ?
This is a fine development in UK news for people LGBTness, but my interest in this excerpt is in the second sentence/paragraph: The House of Lords voted to lift the ban on civil partnership ceremonies in churches and other religious premises last night. Peers voted by 95 to 21 – a majority of 74 – [...]
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Moyers, Boies, & Olson
I've just listened to the segment of Bill Moyers Journal in which he talks with David Boies and Ted Olson about their case for marriage equality. He talks to them for nearly fifty minutes, not just two minutes for the juicy soundbites. I don't think I can embed the video, but here's the link to [...]
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Hearing Wedding Bells
When I was very young, my age in single digits, I once declared that I would marry my best friend. Said friend, of course, was also a boy. In those days parents did not get hysterical at the idea because, then as now, young children always say this and it is an announcement that really [...]
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Way To Go, Wayne!
I want to congratulate my long-time friend Wayne on being recently named the Wolfskin (Oglethorpe County, GA) Volunteer Fire Department "2009 Firefighter of the Year". Wayne is dedicated and enthusiastic about his work for the department, and I think it's a well-deserved honor. The plaque is cool too; you can see a picture at his [...]
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The Return of Civilization
Releasing Us from our Snowy Confinement The sound of this machine, clearing snow from the road in front of our house on Friday last (12 February 2010), was what we woke to. At that point it was a sweet, sweet sound, the tune of our deliverance from cabin fever, our return to suburban civilization. The [...]
Share on FacebookShopping Attire
Just this week I was having lunch and a man came into the shop wearing unusual flannel trousers, green flannel that was printed with little figures of some sort that I couldn't quite make out but that might have been teddy bears. Well! I thought, that's unusual. I hadn't seen flannel trousers quite like these [...]
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Spring Flowers at the Arboretum
Sometimes–okay, most times–spring can't come soon enough to suit me, so the arrival of crocuses, then daffodils, is always most welcome. When the daffodils appear I love to visit the US National Arboretum to take a walk in "Fern Valley" (where the daffodils used to be, but where one still sees a nice collection of [...]
Share on FacebookA Few Days Away
Gosh, take a few days without blogging and all sorts of things rush in to fill the void. One of those things is that I've been getting some of 2009's photographs processed and posted. The "few days away" was a little day trip we made. The two combine in this one post! Thomas Jefferson's Monticello [...]
Share on FacebookBirding at Blackwater
As you may remember, Isaac and I like to make day trips on federal holidays. In 2009 we had the pleasure of making a Presidents' Day outing (16 February) with our friends Lisa and Byron,‡ who shared with us one of their favorite day trips: birding at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, near Cambridge, MD, [...]
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Staying Creative
Thanks, I'm pretty sure, to Alex Ross ("Unquiet Thoughts", his blog), I read what I found an interesting piece by composer Anne Gosfield ("The Score: Advice to Young Composers", New York Times, 5 December 2009). She said in her introduction that, via an email interview, she was surprised by the question "Any advice for young [...]
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