For sometime now, I have been wondering if I should bother to cast my meaningless vote this November. I have voted in every presidential election since I turned 18, but now, as I grow increasingly old and bitter, I wonder why I bother. This funny video from the Onion hasn’t helped.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

I don’t live in a swing state. I live in a red state, so actually, I do already know how my state is going to vote. My vote is meaningless. The only thing that might get me to the polls would be the hope of getting rid of Jim Inhofe, the stupidest man in the senate. Really, he embarrasses me.

Now, if I lived in Ohio, things might be different. Unfortunately, they are still using a lot of those Diebold systems there, now called Premier. I don’t think a name change is going to make them any more secure. For those of you that will have to e-vote, here’s an interesting article from Scientific American. Hey, I’ll bet your vote is meaningless, too.

We all know that statistics and polls are a bunch of crap, but here is a site that tracks polls by state for the upcoming elections. It might be interesting to look at now, and then again after it’s all over, and the nation’s overlords have pretended to count our meaningless votes.

I came across this funny post while surfing the web today. It’s written by an American who teaches English in Japan and concerns the funny English found on t-shirts there. The pictures are priceless. Be sure to scroll through to the end of the post to see the last one.

My daughter recently spent 9 months in Beijing, and while she didn’t get any pictures of funny t-shirts, she did get a couple that are worth sharing. The first is a movie poster for The Golden Compass. The English is mostly fine. The trouble seems to be with the line breaks.

Ass Willl Show the Way

Then there was this bizarre book cover found in a coffee shop. Once again the English is fine but the picture doesn’t quite fit.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition

Of course, I’ve seen shirts in America with Chinese characters printed on them, backwards. Perhaps there are Chinese blogposts out there talking about funny Chinese t-shirts seen in foreign countries.

Well, I decided to do my own Chinese t-shirt. I had recently done a drawing of Jesus using Paint Shop Pro. I based it on those big-eyed children pictures from the 60’s because I thought that would be funny. I didn’t have a good caption to go with it, but now I do. The shirt says ‘Jesus Loves You’ in Chinese. I think it came out rather well.

Jesus Loves You

My recent trip through Pottawatomie and inability to get into the John Brown museum piqued my curiosity about the Civil War era so I went to the library and checked out a book. The Age of Lincoln by Orville Vernon Burton proved to be both fascinating and informative.

I was not well-versed in this area before, but this book covered quite a bit of ground, starting with the religious reform movements of the 1840’s through the rise of capitalism and corporate wage slavery in the latter decades of the century. It is not a biography of Lincoln but a sweeping looking at the social, political and economic forces that shaped a century and still underlie modern American culture.

A blurb on the back cover refers to this work as “a major reinterpretation of nineteenth-century American history”. Burton casts the Civil War not as a war to abolish slavery, but, rather, as a cultural war to define the very notions of freedom and liberty. Even though the North won in the sense that the Union was kept intact and the Emancipation Proclamation ended slaveholder’s “property rights”, the war itself never really ended. Sure, Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9th, but then five days later, Lincoln was shot. The attempts during Reconstruction to endow freed African-Americans with the full rights of citizenship were briefly successful, but then they were thwarted by the guerilla warfare tactics of the KKK. The details of the violence and corruption during this period are enough to disturb even a hard-hearted reader.

And why wasn’t the federal government there to back up the new laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866? Well, on the one hand they were busy out west fighting Native Americans, and on the other hand they were busy toadying up to capitalistic interests in the North and making small fortunes. Within a couple of decades of the “end” of the war, the die-hard abolitionists had, well, died, and no one else really seemed to care if African Americans had any rights or opportunites. The white working class had their own troubles, becoming, as they were, a cog in the machine of the new industrial age. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which included rioting in several major cities and lasted for two months, was an abject failure. The corporations won and “progress” continued as usual.

Although it is not difficult reading, it took me three weeks to get through this book. The fog from the chemo has, apparently, not lifted entirely and I often found myself reading pages twice. But for the last year I have read almost exclusively science fiction because that was all I could handle. It was a refreshing change to read a non-fiction book, especially one like this that really makes you think. I highly recommend The Age of Lincoln to anyone interested in the roots of our current political situation. It may help you see how much and how little things have changed.

I hadn’t planned on writing so soon about gay marriage after my previous post, but then I ran across this diatribe thanks to Australian blogger Daniel Midgley and I just couldn’t say no.

As an aspiring science fiction writer, I feel personally insulted by this. As a practicing homosexual, I am simply livid. Okay, Orson, let’s suppose you’re right for a moment, and homosexuality is a horrible stain upon our nation. Then what shall I tell my children? Sorry, kids, but I am setting a very bad example for you. Please don’t do as I do. Please be straight.

In actuality, what I told them was “I’m gay, and it’s fine with me if you are, too. But if you’re straight, that’s also okay. I love you unconditionally.” Well, what do you suppose happened? They both turned out straight.

Now, this doesn’t seem right to me. I mean, they have been raised in a homosexual household since the ages of 5 and 8. My partner and I have been very demonstrative of our affection. Why haven’t we been able to turn these kids gay? I guess it’s for the same reason that our straight parents couldn’t turn us straight. I guess it’s not just a choice but something inborn.

So I guess I’ll just continue my life as a gay married woman with none of the legal rights that heterosexual married couples enjoy, because really what the fuck else can I do? I mean, how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that I would choose this? I mean, just what sort of idiot are you, Orson, to think that the way I raise my kids has any relevance on the way you raise yours. I mean, so what if the elementary school teachers should happen to mention that some kids have two mommies? Because the fact is that some of them do, and they mix in the public schools with the straight children of straight parents, and, uh, frankly, it’s really not that much of a problem.

A few weeks ago, I asked my daughter to draw me a picture of a cartoon dinosaur. This is the same daughter that drew the picture of the sad, little robot for me as shown in a previous post. She asked me what kind, and I said a brontosaurus or a stegosaurus would be nice. Unfortunately, she got her first job soon after I asked her, plus she’s a procrastinator by nature, so she never got around to making the drawing.

The other day she apologized to me for not doing it. I said, “Oh, that’s okay. I know you’re busy. But look at this thing I found while travelling the web.”

velocirapture jesus

Now I happen to think this is a very well done drawing. I’ve linked it to the owner’s Cafepress shop. But when I showed it to my daughter she said “Oh, that reminds me of the Raptor Jesus.”

“”The what?” I said.

Apparently, she’s known about the Raptor Jesus for at least two years, but she never told me about it. I typed Raptor Jesus into google and the first hit was on the Encyclopedia Dramatica. This is some seriously funny stuff. To truly qualify as a Raptor Jesus, it has to be badly photoshopped. So the drawing above is much too polished, although it still makes a nice t-shirt. Here’s a picture of the true Raptor Jesus.

True Raptor Jesus

There’s even a prayer that goes along with this. , based on the Lord’s Prayer. It’s filled with inside jokes that I don’t understand, but I love the first three lines.

Our raptor,

Who art in /h/eaven,

shopped be thy face.

So Raptor Jesus is part of a meme spread by a website called 4chan. And 4chan was started by a 15-year-old five years ago. I haven’t been able to get into the 4chan website as it is currrently down, but I did find this article in The Guardian which talks about the founder and some of the pranks he’s played.

Just when you think you’ve lost faith in the younger generation, something like this comes along and restores it all.

I saw this over at The Lavender Newswire about the Census Bureau editing out data on same-sex couples. I’m certainly not surprised and I’m not sure just how much I care. Before the GLBT community in hip places like Massachusetts and California started demanding their marriage rights, I figured it would be about 20 years until we had gay marriage in this country. That was 4 years ago so I now estimate it will be another 16 years. Fine with me. I expect to live just long enough to see it, so I can die happy.

What happened, of course, after we achieved our “victories” on the far-flung coasts is that the bigoted folks where I live were so scared and yes, disgusted, that they had no choice but to do the righteous thing and vote for a gay marriage ban. Some 78% of Oklahomans voted for that ban, compared with 56% who voted for Bush. So I guess a lot of Oklahoma Democrats are homophobes. Again, I’m not surprised, but somehow seeing those numbers on the TV screen the day after the election filled me with a mindless rage.

Since then, I’ve made a killing. No, not homicide. About 8 months after the ban, my company forced me to attend a Diversity training. I won’t tell you the company name, but the initials are BCBS. I told my boss that I was gay and if I went to that training session, I would be fired because I would say things that the people there would not take kindly. The diversity training was as lame as I expected it to be, talking mostly about people’s different hobbies and a bit about skin color. I pointed out that even though there was a gay marriage ban, I was still gay and I was still married. The next day I was asked to resign.

I guess I did the wrong thing. I cut a deal and resigned instead of letting them fire me. I really hated that job and I was afraid if I got fired, it would be hard to find another one. As it turned out, I still couldn’t find another one. I knew I could never return to office work, so it took me five months until I found a part-time job repairing vacuum cleaners. In the meantime I was burning through all my IRA savings which I’d been forced to withdraw. Six months later the repair center shut down and I was laid off. I decided to declare bankruptcy, thus writing off $20,000 in credit card debt. It was a great deal of fun!

It took another five months to find a job through a temp agency wiring electrical control systems. I thought I was going to make a fresh start, maybe go back to school and get an Associates Degree in Electronics Technology and work my way back up to my old pay scale. Target sued me for fraud, but there was one little problem. For the last two years, I had a lump growing in my breast. It was actually there before I left my job at the health insurance company, and I had a mammogram and was told it was nothing. I checked Web MD which said most breast lumps are benign and so I didn’t worry about it. But still, it kept growing.

Now, America being what it is, it’s quite possible to work full-time and not have any health insurance. I was working in the factory for two months when one day I discovered a small bump under my armpit. I figured it would take at least another 1-3 months to get hired on permanently, and three more months after that to get health insurance, but now I could no longer wait. I was able to schedule a free mammogram and a $25 biopsy through a local charitable organization. And that’s how I found out I had stage III cancer. This is the best thing that ever happened to me!

Due to my wage of $8.00/hour, poverty level for a family of three, I qualified for Medicaid. It was a simple matter to get Target off my back after that. Plus I got eight rounds of chemo, a bilateral mastectomy, a bunch of pain and sleeping pills, and six weeks of radiation practically for free.

Compare this with what would have happened if I still worked at BCBS. I would have still had all my credit card debt plus I would have been hit with $10,000 in copays, plus I wouldn’t have been able to work very much to pay all this off. I would have been forced to declare bankruptcy anyway.

As it is, I was able to qualify for disability which ended up paying as much as I would have earned working 50 hours a week at the temp job. Plus, I still work there, only about 10 hours a week, but that’s all I want to work right now.

Oh, did I mention that my 15-year-old daughter wanted to spend her junior year in Beijing? We found out she was accepted about a month after I received my cancer diagnosis. The program cost $38,000. She received $37,000 in financial aid. She’s already gone and come back now, and she had a great 9 months.

The trip to Beijing and all the medical care I’ve received would not be possible if I was actually married to my partner. But as long as the possiblity for us to be legally tied together does not exist, I certainly don’t feel any need to declare her income.

Even if they made gay marriage legal in Oklahoma tomorrow, I would not tie the knot. My kids are both bright and get good grades, and I’m planning on sending them to expensive private colleges, tuition-free, of course.

In the meantime, I do feel bad about some of the stress I’ve put my partner through these last few years. We’ve been together over eight years now, and our relationship has only grown stronger. So it’s fine with me if the Census Bureau wants to edit out same-sex data. I’m still gay and I’m still married, and I know we’ll get ours in time.

When my youngest daughter was still a toddler, I trained her to answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with the word ‘entomologist’. This was purely for my own amusement. I know you can’t live out your dreams through your children. (The older daughter was trained to say ‘astronaut’). Besides, people don’t usually ask that question of toddlers.

But somehow, my daughter managed to regurgitate that word when her kindergarten teacher asked her that question. I saw the teacher at back-to-school night, and she very excitedly told me of my progeny’s entomological leanings. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d taught her to parrot this. The teacher thought she had a little genius on her hands. As it turns out, my daughter is quite smart, but she’s 13 now and wants to be a baker, mostly of cakes. I’ve no doubt she’ll succeed.

Still, I’ve always been fascinated with insects. Bees, ants, mosquitoes and cockroaches are my favorites. So I was quite disturbed back in October of 2007 when I saw a show on Nature about the disappearance of the honeybees. Colony Collapse Disorder made lots of headlines after that show aired. But then, of course, it kind of disappeared from the news.

I’ve been trying to keep an eye on it, but while there are lots of theories, there don’t seem to be many answers yet. When the clover patch in my yard turned green in the spring, I actively looked for bees and only saw a few. There should have been more.

So today I came across an article called The Bees’ Needs on the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) website. It offers tips on what individuals can do to help such as planting local vegetation rather than exotic imports. The last tip on building nests for wood-nesting bees looks simple enough. I’m going to give it a try.

My kids, my partner and I recently took a trip to Kansas City. On the way home, we drove down highway 169, passing through Pottawatomie, Kansas. There’s a brown road sign, very official-looking, that informs you of the John Brown Museum located right there in Pottawatomie. We already knew about that, though, because we’d passed through a few years ago and didn’t have time to stop. Now, we were all excited. The kids were sleeping in the backseat, but the John Brown Museum would be worth waking up for.

We pulled off the highway and then we realized it was early on a Sunday afternoon, and the museum would probably not be open. How right we were. Except for the Sonic drive-in, which was the only place to eat, the town was completely dead. We finally passed a rickety old store front with a hand-lettered sign in the window saying “Do You Know Who John Brown Is?” I don’t know what I was expecting, certainly not the Nelson-Atkins, but this was a bit disappointing. We drove a little further along Main Street, wondering what the hell people did for fun in Pottawatomie, and then we left.

Still, it was fun, driving through Kansas and trying to picture John Brown with his sons and followers riding through the area on horseback. Everything I know about John Brown comes from reading Russell Banks excellent novel “Cloudsplitter”. Here’s a link to a great review if you don’t mind finding out what happens in the end. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98may/brown.htm.

I’ts not a spoiler because the real story is inside of the character’s minds. Russell Banks tells you right from the outset that he changes some historical facts to improve the flow of the story. And that’s okay. Except that when reading it you’re always wondering what is true and what isn’t. The important thing is that it brings history alive in the way that dry textbooks can’t.

Before reading Cloudsplitter., I’d never thought much about the civil war. Now I’m thinking about things like the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. What divided times the 1850’s were. It almost reminds me of now. The main difference was that the earth was still whole then and the weather wasn’t so weird. There’s a strange optimism in the works of Russell Banks, an optimism I’m not sure I can fully share in.

Currently, I am reading Jem by Frederick Pohl. It’s all right, quite interesting really, a very dark view of humanity with some well-rounded characters. Of course, characterization has always been science fiction’s missing link, but that never seemed to stop Frederick Pohl.

I am reading this novel because my favorite science fiction novel ever is Gateway. I guess I could even take away the words ’science fiction’ and call it my favorite novel. Of course, it is also by Frederick Pohl. And Frederick Pohl was a great writer.

There has always been an academic divide between what is considered literature and your so-called genre fiction. I am here to tell you that this divide is illusory. The best genre fiction is on a par with your so-called mainstream crap, and perhaps even superior. Well, okay, I really enjoyed Blue Angel by Francine Prose, but how does that compare with Orwell’s 1984. Even Wells’ War of the Worlds is still immanently readable one hundred years after the fact. I’m not sure that will be true with the Prose novel.

The problem that most people have with Gateway is that the main character is an alcoholic. If you read the negative reviews on amazon.com, the people who gave it one or two stars are wondering where is the action. The people that rated it highly seem to appreciate the chapters where the main character is talking to his robot psyochotherapist.

As for me, I like novels with a fully realized main character and Robinette fits the bill, even if certain aspects of him are not very likable. I think the alternate chapters with his robot psychotherapist are the weak link in the book, although it does all come together in the end.

Quite frankly, I identify with Robinettte. Life is a crapshoot, and I think the deciding factor has more to do with the family you are born into than your innate abilities. (Thus, George W. Bush.) Robinette won his way into this incredible situation through the lottery. And once there, he had a failure of nerve. But you know, who really wants to be a ‘winner’ anyway? Science fiction would be much better perceived if more of its novels invoked this sort of humanity.

My partner gave me a Zune for Christmas. I’d asked for an MP3 player because my job is really dull and this would help get me through it. I’d only wanted a 4 gigabyte device, but I ended up with 30. It took me over a week to get all my CDs loaded onto the computer and still I had over 20 gb left. So I decided to get myself a Zune pass and listen to all the music I’d always wanted to hear but couldn’t afford and wasn’t played on the radio.

So I downloaded a bunch of Lou Reed and Sigur Ros, Television and the Residents, Wire, John Cale, Alien Ant Farm (they sucked), more Brian Eno and Patti Smith’s latest. I also discovered a great band called Ladyhawk that Carrie Brownstein mentioned in Monitor Mix. It’s great having access to all this music, and as long as I pay the monthy fee, I can keep it.

I really don’t buy many CDs these days but last summer I went to my local gay-owned CD store and one of the co-owners, Curtis, mentioned the name Electrelane to me. I’d never heard of them before. But I managed to get a few downloads off the internet, enough to know I liked them, and I went back just before Christmas and bought myself their Axes CD. Perhaps it’s not one of their best, but I do love the third track. Overall, I find the album to be a bit uneven. The jazz influence is a little too strong for my taste, although I do admire the piano player.

But now that I have the Zune pass, I can go in and check out their influences. So I started listening to a bunch of Stereolab. This is band that I’d heard of, but never heard. During the 90’s I was too busy raising children and dealing with a failing marriage to pay much attention to new music. I feel lucky that I was able to find Sleater-Kinney during those days.

But further research revealed a band called Can from the late-60s and 70s. Now where did this come from? I have never heard of Can and neither has my partner. But I already love one of their earliest albums, Soundtracks. I’ve also listened to Tago Mago a few times, and the first half is great but some of the latter pieces are a bit trying. O Peking reminds of the Resident’s song about Westinghouse which really is not very pleasant to listen to. I need to listen to more of their stuff, and it is so exciting to discover this band from so long ago. How could they have been so thoroughly buried? Why are most people content to listen to pop crap? I doubt that these questions can ever be satisfactorily answered.