Archive for the ‘All’ Category
How is A Same-Sex Marriage like Anesthesia?
The discovery and promotion of anesthesia [c. 1845], regardless of its true father, also demonstrated the difficulties of pursing medical research in mid-nineteenth-century America. An indifference to basic investigatory work permeated clinical practice. Most physicians, affected by poor education and training and their own financial shortcomings, sought in medicine only the immediate means to solve […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Today in Homophobic Voting
Today bigots in North Carolina managed to scare their neighbors into voting for the odious Amendment 1, a constitutional amendment that denies equality to same-sex couples in the state. Yet, I am calm, verging on the insouciant. Not long ago I had occasion to write this: When I started writing fiction, in 1998, it was […]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Getting a Job vs. Getting a Life
I was pleased to hear one of my senators, Barbara Mikulski, say nice things today about teachers: "This Teacher Appreciation Day, let’s thank the teachers preparing our students today for jobs tomorrow." But now I'm wondering about the attitude that seems so very prevalent today that the purpose of education, even the purpose of growing […]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Zinnia Jones on Dan Savage on the Bible
So, a few weeks ago the country's loudest, most outspoken ultrachristians got upset because GLAAD started publishing the things they said, verbatim. Using their own words apparently made it a "smear campaign" and an "attack". Last week Dan Savage gave a talk in which he pointed out, among other "bullshit", that the Bible gives instructions […]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Farewell to Kathy
Here is Isaac's report on what we were doing today: Today, we interred my sister Kathy's ashes in Elizabethtown, PA, where we grew up. There were about 30 people gathered for the short service at the graveside. We were able to place the ashes in the same grave as our Hungarian grandmother and next to […]
Another Piece of Another Award
It's so gratifying to be a part of an award-winning anthology. Riding the Rails, edited by Jerry L. Wheeler, has just won a 2012 Gaybie award from TLA for "Best Erotic Fiction Book" (nominations by TLA staff, voting by public; winners listed here). My story was called "One Night on the Twentieth Century", and I […]
In: All, Personal Notebook, Writing
A Small Opera
Every year Isaac plans and runs the Good Friday service where he is music director (St. Matthew's UMC, in Bowie, MD). I always attend because it will certainly feature a significant musical presentation. Occasionally I perform, more frequently I listen. Tonight's special offering was a 20-minute, two-person opera with choir called "Saturday 29 AD", by […]
In: All, Music & Art, Personal Notebook
On Not Finishing Kaku's "Physics of the Impossible"
I read a lot of popular-science books. You know I do this partly to support the Science Booknotes and Science Book Challenge projects at Scienticity. I often remark to myself how thoroughly I enjoyed a book that I chose arbitrarily at my library, maybe because the title appealed to me or the book spine was […]
In: All, Books, Explaining Things, Speaking of Science
What the Principled Republican is Believing this Week
For how many decades have we been seeing conservatives crusading under the banner that says "State's Rights"? Now, I'm sure that somewhere there are a few who actually are anti-federalist, but for the most part it's a cynical scheme employed in an attempt to derail any federal attempt at doing something distasteful to the politicians […]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Was That "Passive"?
In his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926, so not so terribly modern but still rather fun), Henry Fowler famously described the attitudes of people in regard to the split infinitive in English: The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those […]
In: All, Splenetics, Writing
Oddly Popular
The other day I was looking at some statistics for this blog, and I decided to look at the blog postings that were the most frequently arrived at. Largely, this comes about through search engines and sometimes very loosely related search strings. I'm not sure I could ever have predicted beforehand that these five pieces […]
In: All, The Art of Conversation, Writing
Snippets of Cruise Conversation
Between Christmas and New Year's Eve, we went on a pleasant Caribbean cruise, taking the Carnival Elation from the Port of New Orleans, to Cozumel, to Progresso, (both on the Yucatan Peninsula), then back to NO. Pleasantly, this gave us the chance to visit for awhile with our friend Loretta, who lives in Baton Rouge […]
In: All, Laughing Matters, Personal Notebook
The Inscrutable Muses
Last week I finished a story, known right now as "The Café Françoise". It is set in Nazi-occupied Paris during the second world war and involved a dangerous liaison between a French Resistance operative called Jean-Pierre Renard, and a Gestapo officer whose name was Klaus Nördlingen. When I was looking for a name for the […]
In: All, Personal Notebook, Writing
Frank Kameny on "Gay is Good"
The one thing I’ve said, if I want to be remembered for nothing else, it’s back in July, 1968 I coined the slogan “Gay Is Good.” And that really, it sort of, it epitomizes really my entire approach to all the issues. You have to take an affirmative approach on these things. In other words, […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Faaabulosity
Because He's Conservative
"So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative." — David Cameron, UK Prime Minister [quoted by Peter Lloyd, "PM David Cameron re-iterates backing for gay marriage at party conference speech", Pink Paper, 5 October 2011.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Faaabulosity
Literary Statistics
Tonight, for a project that I'll describe later, I put together an inventory of my fiction writing, i.e., those stories and things authored by Jay Neal, my pen-name for fiction. I found things to interest me; your mileage will undoubtedly vary. One thing : I'll refer to "stories", but it's a bit difficult to say […]
In: All, Personal Notebook, Writing
Android Wallpaper & Eye for Science Images (Again)
I'm still inspired by joining up images from the "Eye for Science" project database with smartphones, and today I implemented another way to make it easy and quick way to turn an image you like into smartphone wallpaper. All I've done is add a QR Code to the image page, i.e., the page you get […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Speaking of Science
"Eye for Science" and Android Wallpaper
You may recall my mentioning Scienticity's "Eye for Science" project, a Flickr group to which members contribute interesting and provocative images that tell a story about science or nature or something related, which images we then try to get in front of others to provide a brief science moment. One way we do this is […]
In: All, Eureka!, Personal Notebook, Speaking of Science
"The Third Man" and Artistic Inevitability
Recently I watched, not for the first time, the film "The Third Man", directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. It's an extraordinary film and one of the few that seems to stand up to my repeated viewing. This time I thought to watch it because I wanted to study some […]
In: All, Music & Art, Reflections, Writing
"Lay" vs. "Lie"
When it comes to the inscrutably arbitrary intricacies of the English language (any major variant), I am quite pleased with myself that I somehow managed to memorize the differences between the verb spelled "lay" versus the verb spelled "lie" many years ago. However, my dirty little secret is that I am hopeless at any sort […]
In: All, Naming Things, Writing