The Agenda:

Testing the Premise: Are Gays a Threat to Our Children?

What the "Dutch Study" Really Says About Gay Couples

Federal Hate Crime Statistics: Why The Numbers Don't Add Up

Refuting Christianity Today

  Favorites:

Still Life At Sunset

Anderson Cooper and Scooter

Wandering, Wondering

The Aperture of Memory

Easter's Birthday

The First Time I Cussed

  Photo Essays:

The Anasazi Ruins of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

Monsoons of 2004

Miracle Mile

Now Showing / Reflection on Hayden, Arizona

Confusion in Paradise
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

While I always love visiting California, I must confess that this place sometimes confuses me terribly.

Santa Barbara, where the Reagans made their home, is known as a conservative Republican stronghold. Chris and I found openly gay people everywhere downtown, but the few gay clubs we could find were closed. It didn't appear to matter since all of the restaurants, clubs and bars were perfectly integrated with gay and straight couples, and nobody seemed to be bothered by it one way or another.

Palo Alto, where Steven Jobs made his mark, is known as a progressive Democratic stronghold. Chris and I found environmentally and socially conscious people everywhere downtown, where they could go to the large store that sells Komodo dragons hand-carved from rare tropical rainforest wood. People bought these things and took them home in their SUV's.

San Francisco, where the Summer of Love was born, is known as a tolerant libertarian stronghold. Respect, acceptance and understanding are the watchwords in the Castro, where Chris and I ducked into Peet's Coffeehouse and ordered coffee. When it was delivered in ceramic mugs, I apologized and said that we wanted them to go. The two lesbians behind the counter yelled at me.

So many contradictions. I'm feeling a little dizzy.

Merry Christmas, Sam!
Thursday, December 25, 2003

Hello Sam, wherever you are, and Merry Christmas.  I was left with this dilemma: what do you give someone who, if he were still alive, would have turned 103 last summer? Well, I decided to give you a modicum of immortality.

You were in your thirties the last time anyone heard from you, before you just up and disappeared during the Great Depression. With no wife or children to carry on your memory, I bet you’d be mighty surprised that someone like me some three generations later would come along to make an effort to remember you in the 21^st century.

I suppose that you would have been astounded to learn about this thing we call the Internet which can beam information around the world with so little effort. And that someone in that distant future would find your photographs, ask about you of your last living nephew who barely remembers you, spend a considerable amount of time thinking and wondering about you, and telling the world about you using this magical tool.

So, here’s to immortality, although to be perfectly honest I’m not sure exactly how immortal you’ve become, judging by the site statistics for LookingForSam.com. But I hope you can take comfort in knowing that someone still remembers you some seventy years or so after anyone last saw you, even if that someone was born more than twenty-five years after you disappeared. You are not forgotten, and as long as you’re not forgotten, there’s an aspect of your immortality in our remembering. So, Merry Christmas Sam!

I thought of you when I heard about TWD, a former co-worker whose obituary made the rounds at work via e-mail. He was 39, single with no children, his parents passed away (his mother apparently died in January of 2002), he left the company sometime this past year (I don’t know why) and he died a week before Thanksgiving. The strange part is that the obituary didn’t run in the paper until nearly a week later, and it said that the memorial service was still pending an arrangement “at a later date.” I asked our secretary about it, and she said that the intimation she got was that he had some sort of illness and/or was depressed and/or possibly took his own life, and that at any rate his family (two sisters) weren’t going to hold the memorial until after the holidays for unknown reasons. These intimations may be accurate, or they may be complete misunderstandings. There are a lot of mysteries and conjectures, and none/some/all of them may be true, but in reality there is little solid information to go on.

I’m afraid I didn’t know TWD very well at all. We only chatted briefly for just a few times in the hallway – he thought my UNIX profile was funny, and I was surprised that he saw it. People rarely read such things so I put some irreverent stuff in mine. I’m finding out nobody else at work knew him very well either. He was rather quiet with a somewhat timid manner about him.

It’s too easy to project so many personal suppositions into all of this. I don’t think I need to delve into my own conjectures, as they may be similar to those of a number of the readers of this message. Besides, conjecture by no means becomes fact, no matter how convinced of such suppositions we may be. So, to be honest Sam, to draw a line between you and TWD may be way off base, or it may be perfectly justified. I don’t know and I will never know. But I pray that wherever you are, you know peace, love, and fulfillment. And I pray the same for TWD.

Meanwhile, I’ll do my part to make sure there is still a place for you in this world, Sam. And in remembering you, I hope the readers of this website will remember others like you and TWD who otherwise would have passed through this world without leaving a trace.

You left a trace. You were here.

So, here’s to immortality, or at least this admittedly diminished version of it that I’m able to provide for you. I hope you enjoy your present.

Merry Christmas!
Jim

More Apologies
Friday, December 19, 2003

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

I apologize for being late. I know how annoying that is, but try as I might, I just could not get here on time. The taxi was late getting to my house to pick me up because the Sinaloan driver got confused by the serious grammatical error in my street’s Spanish name. I found it annoying as well, and should not have moved here on principle, but the price was right and it was exactly what I was looking for and I’m afraid I was thinking only of myself when I bought the place. Please forgive me.

No, it wasn’t his fault he was late. He had to stock up on gasoline and churros before coming all the way out to my house deep in the fringes of urban sprawl. If I had located myself in a more sensible part of town on a sensible street named after a sensible number, I would have been able to take the bus and none of this would have happened. But I don’t use public transportation because I normally drive a kick-ass German sports car, and besides, I selfishly moved to a part of town where the buses don’t reach. I love my German sports car, even though buying it put Detroit autoworkers out of work, not to mention tire workers, car radio workers, auto glass workers, seatbelt workers and steel workers, one of whom was my very own late (deceased that is, not tardy) father before the steel mill shut down due to those infernal imports. Mom, I’m so sorry to have put you through all of that. I don’t blame you for being terribly disappointed in me.

That German sports car really moves when you punch it, although it is bad for gas mileage, which means we have to import more oil from places like Iraq because of my foolish behavior. My fast driving also is hard on the brakes, leaving brake dust all over the streets of Tucson, contributing to the accumulation of dust in the air and sneezes on the streets. I am so sorry! Can you find it in your hearts to forgive me?

Anyway, that fast driving and resulting bad brakes is why the car is now in the shop and I had to take the taxi from a badly named street in a far-flung suburb to the middle of town during rush hour in wartime. I’m so sorry to have contributed to the congestion that you had to endure, since the taxi driver had to drive through rush hour to get to my house, then drive the two of us through rush hour again. If everyone did that, rush hour would be twice as bad as it is already. How selfish of me! I’m so sorry.

I know, I know! Car exhaust is a major cause of global warming, and my thoughtlessness won’t help matters at all I’m afraid. I’m so sorry that the resulting drought caused the forests to burn and hundreds of people to loose their homes on Mt Lemmon. What was I thinking?

Words cannot express the deepest sorrow I feel for the fact that my war-inducing, global-warming and mountain-burning trip from a badly named street in sprawlsville to the middle of town during rush hour caused me to be late, only to throw thousands of American factory workers out onto the streets without health insurance, leaving them to sneeze in my brake dust and car exhaust and to compete against Sinaloans for low-paying jobs driving taxis and restocking imported merchandise at Wal-Mart. For this I offer my deepest, most profound apologies and I beg – beg, I say! – for your forgiveness, however unworthy I am of such a magnanimous gesture on your part.

If I could reverse the march of time, believe me I would. But the super-secret project I work on at Raytheon has not solved that problem yet, probably because I foolishly spent the better part of my budget on Dove Promises (dark chocolate!) and Frangelico, which of course it is probably against the law to spend government contract money on such things. My bad! Besides, if I could turn back time I’d be early and you’d be late, which really is not much better after all when you think about it.

And if you would please indulge me a bit, I’d like to point out the one and only thing in my defense which may allow me to redeem myself and set me on the road to rehabilitation: I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. That would be unforgivably wrong!

Apologies in Advance
Friday, December 19, 2003

As you can probably tell, this whole web-thing is a new experience for me.  While I may be a champion web browser, I’m not much of a web-designer.  I’m HTML literate, but I mostly rely on whatever capabilities Microsoft FrontPage will provide me.  I’m enough of a control freak that I don’t want to use a commercial blogger website and live with its limitations, but I’m also not literate enough in PHP, Perl, SQL, JavaScript, CSS, etc, to provide a lot of fancy capabilities on my own.  I may take a few courses from Pima County Community College or something to pick up a few extra skills here and there.  I don’t have the patience to try to use a whole new system using books which never seem to offer practical advice.  For that, I apologize.

So, for example you don’t find a real-time “Comment” capability here just yet.  I haven’t figured out how to do it.  Someday this website will have all of the whiz-bang features of its older brethren; it will just take a while.  Until then, I apologize for the delay.

Also, I apologize for what I am sure will be somewhat infrequent posts.  I don’t want to turn this into a daily diary of my rather uninteresting life, which is what it would end up being if I were to try to post on a more frequent basis.  The daily occurrences of a defense-industry engineering manager are barely of interest to me, let alone to anyone else!  But I anticipate posting maybe a few times each week or so, or whenever the mood strikes.

Finally, I apologize for spelling errors.  I’m a lousy speller, and not a great proof-reader.  I use spell-check religiously, but sometimes it doesn’t always work.  Spell-check is still a rather unsophisticated tool that doesn’t understand exactly what I mean too say, but just examines bear words won at a time.

Random Thoughts
Thursday, December 18, 2003

If you feel the need to shoot a mime – and who hasn’t been tempted to do so at least once in their lifetime? – should you use a silencer?

What is it that feminists find fascinating about traditional Celtic music? What is it that anyone finds fascinating about traditional Celtic music?

London is old and expensive. This makes London very crowded. Every square foot of space has to count for something, and none of it goes to waste on such unnecessary things as parking lots or wide sidewalks or even space between tables in restaurants. This isn’t a complaint mind you, because it serves to add considerable charm and intimacy to the city. But if I ever write a travel essay, I’m calling it Squeezing Through London.

Movie trailers get louder and louder every time I go to the cinema. Does that make me old?

In my own better world, radio stations would disregard genres. They would not be afraid to play Rhapsody In Blue, The Ramones, Hank Williams, Spiritualized, MC 900 Ft Jesus, some local band nobody heard of, Mouth Music, The Pixies, This Mortal Coil (or for the sake of simplicity, the entire 4AD catalogue), Squirrel Nut Zippers, Soul Coughing, Dolly Parton, another local band nobody heard of, The Clash, Brave Combo, Lyle Lovett, Jooles Holland, another local band from someplace else nobody heard of, Manu Chao, John Adams, Laurie Anderson and Mahalia Jackson. All of it back to back.

In my own better world, radio stations would curtail the playing of U2, and they would avoid Sting altogether because everyone would know that Sting is a pompous ass.

Chris and I go to the gym just about every morning at 5:30, where Morning Boy is always there to offer a cheerful greeting. Okay, so Morning Boy works there and it’s his job to greet us, but I don’t think they pay him to be so cheerful so early in the morning and we really appreciate it. Golden Boy is already on the treadmill. I am not exaggerating – not even in the slightest – when I say that Golden Boy is pure perfection in every way, the physical manifestation of beauty and strength, the most beautiful man I have ever seen not in a movie or magazine, a real-life honest-to-goodness Adonis, the incredible hunk. Golden Boy ignores us.

Live music in coffee shops keeps getting louder and louder, despite the fact that the coffee shop only has a dozen tables or so and everyone can hear just fine. Does that make me old?

My great-grandmother was born in 1898 and passed into Alzheimer’s while I was a teenager in the late seventies. She once told me that in the span of her lifetime she saw everything from the horse and buggy to man landing on the moon, and that there would never be a better time to be alive than that. She’s right, you know.

My great-grandmother was an amateur painter and writer. None of her writing survives, but we all have several of her paintings. She was headstrong and quite a free spirit, decades ahead of her time. I loved her then and love her even more now. I often wondered what she would have been like if she had spent her life in Taos instead of some small Appalachian steel-mill and shoe-factory town. She and Georgia O’Keeffe probably would have been inseparable friends. Or, more likely, they would have hated each other’s guts.

When I was looking for a good Soul Coughing hyperlink for my better world’s radio station, I found that their official website was down, and the two best alternatives were a link to MTV and a virtually identical link to VH1. I chose the one to VH1. Does that make me old?

After an experience at the Bamboo Club last night, I have decided: as God is my witness, I shall never again be led past perfectly good empty tables up front to be seated next to the restroom! All of you gay couples out there know what I mean. And you Maître-d’s and hosts/hostesses need to understand something: as a group, we’re wealthy, we’re big tippers, and we eat out often.

And thank you, Metro Grill. We walked out of the Bamboo Club and went straight across the walkway into your fine establishment. You always deliver excellent food with excellent service, with great atmosphere and elegance. You’re the best!

We don’t have any proof of this mind you; it is pure speculation that would be inadmissible in any U.S. courtroom, unsupported by any tangible evidence whatsoever. But Chris and I are starting to suspect that Golden Boy may be a kept man living in the Catalina foothills.

Come on, Powerball!

Innocence Lost and Regained
Wednesday, December 17, 2003

The dollar plunged again on world markets, reaching an eleven-year low against the Euro and the British Pound Sterling. When Chris and I were in London two weeks ago, our vacation was getting progressively more expensive by the day. Now I read on the BBC website, which quotes from the Independent, that the “the streets of Manhattan are swarming with Christmas shoppers from Britain – lured by the pound's 11-year high against the dollar.” Our trade deficits and low interest rates are hammering the dollar pretty badly.

But of course, that was not the big news in Britain at the end of November. Nor was Iraq, nor President Bush’s recent trip to London. All of that was shoved off of the front pages of the British newspapers by a spectacular story unfolding at Old Bailey, the Soham murder trail. I’m not sure if they are considering it the “trail of the century” – the century is still young after all – but it certainly dominated the headlines and news coverage the entire time we were there.

The story is this in a nutshell: Two ten-year-old schoolgirls, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, stop by a neighbor’s house, that of 29-year-old Ian Huntley, to play with his dog and ask about his girlfriend, 26-year-old Maxine Carr, who teaches part-time at the local school. That is the last time anyone sees the girls alive. After two weeks of searching, the bodies are found, and Huntley and Carr are arrested. Huntley is charged with murder, and Carr is charged with “perverting the course of justice”, which as far as I can tell is what we call obstruction of justice.

The most astounding moment in the trail came when Huntley took the stand in his own defense. He claimed that while visiting, Holly developed a nosebleed, so Huntley invited the two girls into the house and upstairs to the bathroom where he tried to stop the nosebleed. Somehow, he accidentally knocked Holly into the bathtub, which was full of water because he was washing the dog, and that’s when Jessica started screaming. He reached to cover Jessica’s mouth to stop the screaming and accidentally smothered her. Meanwhile Holly drowned, so now both girls were dead by accident. But then Huntley panicked, packed the girl’s dead bodies into the car, and drove out to the countryside and burned the bodies. But before burning the bodies he cut off the clothes, and later burned them in a separate location. He then returned home and joined his neighbors and other fellow residents of Soham in the search for the two missing girls.

So, you see? It was all an accident. Ian Huntley took the stand himself and told this very story in all the earnestness he could muster, apparently on the expectation that the ladies and gentlemen of the jury would actually believe him. Or so I suppose – I don’t know.

The jury found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to life in prison. His girlfriend, who wasn’t present at the time of the murder but provided a false alibi, was found guilty of obstruction.

Like I said, this was very big news there, much like the O.J. trial was here in the states. I have to wonder why we find events such as these so compelling. Certainly it is a very tragic story, involving two cute and innocent little girls. It involves treachery, allusions to sex, deceit, cunning, callousness, mystery, all of the ingredients for a great drama. But I think the interest goes a bit deeper than that. It’s more than just a prurient interest. It’s far more personal. I think the real story can be inferred behind the words of many of the residents of Soham. They refer to the profound changes that have reverberated through the community, changes that can be identified as a loss of innocence.

No doubt, Jennifer and Holly stand as the very personifications of innocence, and the community of Soham grieves that loss. Great Britain as a nation was experiencing that same loss as well, as evidenced by the fact that people still had the capacity to be shocked at what happened.

I find it to be rather encouraging to think that we can look at a point in time, point to it and say, “that is when we lost our innocence” because we’ve done it over and over again. It appears that the very nature of human experience is the perpetual loss of innocence. The ancient Hebrews made a point of placing that experience as among the first human experiences in Genesis. When Adam and Eve, in an act of perfect allegory, ate of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they were no doubt shocked by the knowledge they acquired. It would be impossible to acquire that knowledge without loosing one’s innocence and feeling ashamed for having been so “naked”. This resulted in the loss of paradise, which is incompatible with such an awareness. Those ancient Hebrews, who today we tend to deride as backwards and unsophisticated, had it all figured out!

The experience of nakedness continues today. It is amazing that we can continue to find opportunities to decry our loss of innocence. Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy Assassination, Viet Nam, Watergate – all of these watershed events were, in their day, looked upon as moments when we lost our innocence. But if we truly lost our innocence on any of those occasions, how is it we were able to loose it all over again on 9/11? You’d think we would learn after a while. Surely we’re not that dumb.

But let’s not be too hasty – it’s not a matter of being stupid or slow. I think the fact that we can continue to be shocked at horrendous events is a point of hope for the resilience of humanity. When we feel a loss of innocence, we mourn the passing of paradise. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that we find ourselves in a position of looking at the “before” as being a more idyllic time, and we are mourning the loss of what we perceive to be a better time. It’s a sort of paradise that was lost, and often it’s a paradise we didn’t really know we had.

But the point is, we will mourn the loss, we will maybe learn something from it, and given time, we will carry on. At some point, we will go about our lives. We may have a permanent scar from our tragic experience, but the scar will cover the open wound and allow us to continue. And when something new and terrible happens to us at some point again in the future, we will look back on today as a more innocent time, and mourn the loss all over again. And when that happens, when we look at today as being an age of innocence – today! – it means that on this very day, as I write this and you read it, we are truly living in an age of hope, for hope can only exist in the innocence that we will recognize as having lost in that future moment of tragedy.

Knowing that we will surely lament our loss of innocence all over again should give us encouragement that today we are living once again in renewed innocence and hope. Otherwise, the only alternative is that we must be living in hope’s opposite state, in constant fear. While it is true that fear is widespread among our leaders in the aftermath of 9/11, things are largely different among ordinary people. We are going back to our lives and we are slowly, surely starting to look at things anew in optimism and faith in better times ahead. You may dispute me on this today and call me a naïve fool, but remember this the next time we are shocked by something horrendous that happens to us: only the innocent can be horrified as you will be horrified, and you surely will be horrified. Just ask the people of Soham.

So the next time we mourn a shocking blow and pundits start talking about a loss of innocence, it is useful to remember that we’ve all been through it before. Somehow, we survived. We changed no doubt, but we managed to survive. That’s something we can do only in new-found hope and renewed innocence.

Literature in the New World
Tuesday, December 16, 2003

I just got one of those clever joke E-mails a few minutes ago:

'Twas The Night Before Christmas
(as written by a technical writer for a firm that does US government contracting)

'Twas was the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period preceding the annual Yuletide celebration, and throughout our place of residence, kinetic activity was not in evidence among the possessors of this potential, including that species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus. Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward edge of the wood-burning caloric apparatus, pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an imminent visitation from an eccentric philanthropist among whose folkloric appellations is the honorific title of St. Nicholas.

It goes on and on in the same vein for several pages. I couldn’t endure the pain of reading it all, but I was impressed at how much work must have gone into this. I wonder if the government contractor in question did it on company time, and if the US government was billed for it? I hope so. I had been led to believe that the time-honored practice of noblemen acting as patrons of the arts was nothing but a quaint relic of the past. It makes me smile to think that our very own DoD could serve as modern-day Medicis for the New World.

Sturm und Twang
Friday, December 12, 2003

Chris and I are sitting in one of my two favorite coffee shops, the Raging Sage on Campbell Avenue. We like going there during the afternoon because it is powerfully air-conditioned (much unlike our other favorite coffee shop, the Epic on 4^th Avenue) and because it is near two awesome used book stores that we enjoy spending our lazy afternoons, although we probably won’t today. Right now, Chris is reading a book on English cathedrals he picked up in London, while I’m about to laugh myself silly over David Sedaris’ Barrel Fever.

The Epic is more of an evening coffee hangout. Its tepid swamp cooler offers a more languid setting that is more suited for winding down after a long day. The open night microphone on Thursdays usually offer some half-way decent free entertainment. But today is Saturday, so the plans for this evening are still wide open.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

I guess my life is filled with a lot of little, inconsequential things which really are a hoot, but most of the times you would have had to have been there to appreciate it.

Like last week when we were coming back from London. We arrived bleary-eyed in Dallas after a 10½ hour flight from Gatwick, and joined two other large planeloads of stiff-jointed, bleary-eyed people tromping through the long corridor on the way to Customs. We were following signs which said “Immigration”, which is what they call Customs in nearly every airport I’ve ever been in, foreign or domestic. But apparently that was too confusing for one poor old fellow who was complaining to a female guard that because he was an American, there was not need for him to immigrate. Now, before I tell you how she handled him, I need to take you back a little to where we had just come from.

We spent ten days in England, enjoying what has to be the single most gracious nation on the face of the earth. The people are unfailingly friendly, helpful and above all, calm and courteous. They are very mindful of propriety and manners. I think it has to do with the fact that all of the cities and towns are so crowded, making do with their medieval horse-cart lanes untouched by master planning and homeowner associations. Even in London the widest boulevard is barely four lanes across. And in all of the restaurants and clubs, space is at a premium and every square foot has to function in some manner. Tables are pushed very close together in restaurants in a way that would be very uncomfortable for most people in America. Britain would be utterly unbearable if everyone acted as they do in this country. Yet I can’t think of a more charming, cozy or intimate city anywhere than London, in the very heart of one of the world’s largest metropolises. The word is “gracious” – living a life with grace and poise. And the people we encountered always exhibited it effortlessly. It was genuine, not put on in such a snobbish way as to make you feel small or unwashed, but in a truly solicitous and accommodating manner, a reassurance that everything was fine and you needn’t worry.

So we were still fresh from that delightful existence when I looked up and saw the immigration guard lady at DFW airport having to deal with this ignorant old fool. She looked just like Ann Richards, very grandmotherly in that Texas sort of way with an accent to match, her white hair piled up as you only find in Texas or a John Waters’ movie. And this tiny little woman, standing firm in front of this big ugly American who was insulted at the idea that he had to pass through Immigration, simply yelled back with that accent as big as Goliad, “Honey, I got news for you! Everyone has to immigrate!”

God I loved her!

Then, with our late arrival and the long lines through Customs – er, Immigration, we barely had fifteen minutes to catch our next flight, which was boarding from a completely different terminal. We found a lady from American Airlines waiting at the exit from International Arrivals with a clipboard in her hand, similarly piled up hair (except hers was colored Clairol brown), horned-rim reading glasses, and the same warm Texas accent. “Now dears, calm down, we’ll get you to your plane – maybe – but ya gotta do exactly what I’m gonna tell you to do, and ya gotta run…”

Welcome to America. These are my peeps.

Hello World!
Friday, November 21, 2003

Whenever computer programmers begin to learn a new programming language, it is something of a tradition for their first program in that language to be what is known as a “Hello World!” program. It is a simple program used to illustrate some of the elementary features of the language, and generally all the program does is display the words “Hello World!”

This website is pretty simple for now, and there are still a few functions missing, but over time I hope to get my programming legs going and put some more features into this site. Meanwhile, I'll post a few thoughts and musings from time to time. I don't plan on making this some sort of a diary, so there won't be anything close to being a daily update, although I think I can manage to visit a few times a week.

So here is my weblog debut. Hello, world. How do you do?