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I could've just as easily titled this entry "9½" if Fellini had found that extra digit- because yesterday ended two straight days that lasted that many hours for me, driveway to driveway. Each began with a 9:30 court appearance in Rochester, was followed by multiple and backed-up client appointments, and ended with long walks to out-of-the-way parking spots and rolling in our door just in time to eat, watch a film ( this one two nights ago, Skyfall last night), and fall down go boom. Both days, with the foot still hurting pretty badly. By late last night, I'd eroded enough of the object so it was more Just There than Really Owie- and I made it through over an hour of cardio today with no ill effect from it, so I think this, too, shall pass. That was my only venture from the grounds all day- well, gym after church, office, bank and return of Redbox. I cranked out a butt-ton of paperwork throughout the morning and almost wiped out the cash-stash in the postage meter by the time I finished posting it all. Long weekend awaits. More at-home stuffs in the morning, a hopefully quick court gig here in the afternoon, and then three days off. The third will be a travel day, as long as the downstate weather holds up- a group of Met bloggers got tickets to the Monday night Subway Series game at Citi Field, and Matt Harvey is due to pitch- he's plainly the best player (and possibly the only hope) on this team, and it will be a great chance to see him When He Was New. ---- One chance we won't be getting much more will be to see movies at the only still-surviving active movie house from Buffalo's historic past:  Originally known as Shea's North Park, after the legendary local chain of movie palaces (its flagship is still open, but acts as a Broadway musical bus-and-truck venue with occasional concerts), it has been a North Buffalo fixture since my law school days. When Rear Window and a handful of other "lost Hitchcocks" were finally re-released in the early 1980s, the North Park got the screenings, and I saw all five of the there. For years, it's been run by a small regional chain, but it never acquired the art-house cachet that the Little did in Rochester; they split their indy films to a downtown multiplex, a just-over-the-city-border 50s venue, and even a dull ex-General Cinema three-screener in a local mall. The chain is simply ending their lease, and the building's owner, a so-far-not-commenting local lawyer, might do the right thing and retain its Hertel Heritage. Or it could be knocked down for a Rite Aid. Because, you know, you can never have enough of those around here. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/128587.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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I thought that long-term married couples were supposed to look alike after many years. Maybe we do, but the other parallels of the past week or so are pretty weird. Recall that Eleanor had close to two months off from work on account of pain in her right shoulder. It originally fired up after a year-endish cardio session, and after weeks of doctors' appointments, massages and PT sessions, it got worse when she spent a pre-workday mowing the back lawn in April. So imagine my surprise when I took over the mowing duties, and my own right shoulder started hurting. Not nearly as badly, but enough to pay attention. At least we have some durable medical equipment I might borrow to help me through if it gets any worse. (This past weekend's mowing didn't aggravate it nearly as much, but then, it barely rained last week and the grass just didn't grow as much.) ---- That would've seemed oddly coincidental if we each hadn't had our other-side experiences of the past week. Not quite a week ago, Eleanor's left foot started giving her trouble. Her masseuse suspected it was a result of overcompensating on the non-dominant left side after the right-shoulder pain kicked in. Last Friday, I laid in crutches for her, and she hasn't been disabled from work, or gardening, or cardio since then. As for moi? As my right-shoulder pain eased, I wound up with left foot issues of my own. Nothing related to chronic pain or overcompensation, but just to bad karma. Three nights ago, we blowed up a fish tank in our living room, and by yesterday afternoon, the fishies were back in a serviceable (if smaller) tank, and I'd done a decent job of cleaning up all the big and not-so-big shards of glass that infested the tank's general vicinity. Alas, that effort did not do as good a job of cleaning up the fewer but further remnants of the tank explosion that had made it dozens of feet down the hall to just outside the bedroom and this office. And so it was that one of those tiny shards implanted itself in My Left Foot at 5-something this morning- as in My Calloused Left Foot, where the glass defied tweezering and scissoring and is still, these 19 hours later, down in there moderately annoying the shit out of me. I made it through a long and difficult day with it in there, but tomorrow brings more of the same and a workout at day's end, so my plan is to have it medically removed if it doesn't just fall out in response to my much-needed good night's sleep. Which begins,.... now. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/128344.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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That's the name of a business we pass almost every day-
-and while I've never been in, apparently some of it stuck to my tires yesterday.
I did a small grocery run after yesterday morning's workout, and couldn't decide at first whether to hand over cash or run it on the debit card. Karma decided that one: the tab, for multiple odd-number-priced items, was exactly twenty bucks. Advantage, Jackson. (Andrew, not Samuel L.)
Karma then ran over my dogma- or at least my cat who thinks she's a dogma. I brought the bags in- Eleanor had left for work by this point- and Zoey decided to inspect the contents. By sticking her head through the handle of one of the bags, as one does when one's a cat-dog-whatever. In her travels, she knocked that bag- and herself- onto the floor, causing a ruckus and causing me to commit the ultimate human indignity: I laughed at her. She ran to the cellar, the bag coming off as she flew through the cat flap in the door (creating a nice Wile E. Coyote through a mountain effect), and I retrieved the dragged items in her wake. (Yes, Donna, this is why your birthday card envelope has a black streak across one corner;)
Eventually, she recovered, but Karma was set for a return engagement.
----
The day proceeded. Eleanor came home a bit early; she weeded, I mowed; we made dinner and went to see Star Trek Into Darkness (about which more later). For all its spoilery goodness (and beware- every Wikipedia page about every other previous franchise episode or film now includes those in blatantly obvious places), it requires pretty non-stop intensity to keep up with the story and the backstory and all the things blowing up real good. So when we got home, we were still pretty wired.
As was home- wired in brown yarn, thanks to Zoey's latest installation of macrame on the floor.
She does this fairly often when she's bored- many mornings we awaken to four-room criss-crosses of the stuff. We even filmed one from her early days and Youtubed it: This one, not as ambitious, but she did do a finer than usual job of entangling the yarn around the feet of chairs and, sad to say, one of the wheels on the base holding up our twenty-plus-gallon fish tank. As soon as we got home, we made the quick and regrettable decision to try cleaning it up before one of us tripped over it. Eleanor tipped, I tried to pull the yarn out from under the fish tank. Twenty-plus gallons later, it was rechristened as our ex-fish tank. The whole base tipped over, the contents- said gallons, several pounds of stone, two decorative plants, a freshly-electrocuted heater and the two floppy large fish contents- all spilled onto the hardwood. Instantly, Gene and Gomez began flopping around, and a cascade of the gallons began falling into the cellar. On the whole, through it all, we "wore well." (That's a term of endearment given to me when my in-laws' hot water heater blew up in their cellar the first time I ever went over to their house for dinner. Maybe we should just stay out of houses with full basements, huh.) Eleanor swabbed the decks, I shop-vacced most of the solid content and eventually the puddles below, and we both cleaned up enough glass shards to make a fully functioning IED. The two of them are now in a smaller tank, and we're seeking a new home for at least one of them, because they were getting too big for even the bigger tank we had-  (Both of them started out as pet-shop purchases to reside in the base of our outdoor fountain to eat the mosquitoes out there. My how they've grown.) ---- Today's another day of mowing, and Orphan Blacking, and finally watching "The Name of the Doctor" and hopefully not too much el.... YELLOW KARMA! This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/127821.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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We were both up around 3:30 this morning. Eleanor asked me to put the Cone of Shame back on our younger dog- she's had a boo-boo on a paw and needs to keep away from it while a wound cleaner does its thing- but next she asked me to go out this morning and get her a set of crutches. You see, after weeks of being wounded herself on her right-shoulder side, Eleanor has overcompensated over on the left and now Her Left Foot was giving her grief. I fell back asleep, eventually, but not without worry about whether we had enough disposable cache at 9 this morning to cover said crutches. Bad dreams intervened, but I was awake by 8-ish and at the Surgical Place minutes after they opened at 9. They were immensely helpful and practical and other words ending in "L," and got me out with a functional pair in mere minutes with no out-of-pocket cost today (they run $40 if they're ultimately uninsured), a promise to order the scrip from her doctor themselves, and more than a few bittersweet laughs about how quickly Eleanor met her 2013 deductible. I ran the crutches over to the store, where she'd been since 8 a.m., and she's rarely needed them since then- a far better result than if we hadn't gotten them and she had desperately needed them. She goes back to work tomorrow. I am confident it will go better on account of today's effort. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/127528.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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Pretty damn close to a 12-hour day today. Out the door just before 9:30 a.m. (after getting word late yesterday that my 9:30 court appearance had been postponed), back in moments after 9 p.m. (ending with a workout and a church meeting). Before those last two, at just about everything I had scheduled today, I got postponed, stood up, miscommunicated with or disappointed. At least that was true for everyone coming to see me. The people I went to see- at two dentists' offices and two banks- went much better. I ended the day far more solvent than I began it, and that's not without taking any of the refi proceeds into account. One of those two dentists was my own. While getting scaled by the RDH, I got to thinking about whether dentists actually have the better business model. I don't use the service, but many dentists in this area advertise that they specialize in various forms of "sedation dentistry," where they put you under for even routine procedures. And so, I described my idea to my own dentist: Introducing "sedation lawyering," for those clients who are just afraid of going to their attorney's office. Just swallow one little pill, and we can correct years of legal neglect while you peacefully snooze. We'll draft your will, transfer all your real estate (to ourselves, of course, for your own title protection), and give you post-hypnotic suggestions about not getting into bad business deals. When you're almost awake, we'll gently walk you out to your car, and then, when you get in a car accident, you'll know to call us for the resulting personal injury case.
I got out five minutes later after he excused himself to laugh his fool head off. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/127235.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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Another day of Musical Cars. Last Friday, we brought Eleanor's truck to the mechanic to replace a leaky power steering line, and they didn't have the part, so it had to go back there today. Eleanor's pretty whipped after a Sunday afternoon spent in a cold wind tending to a grill full of bigass pork ribs. (Yes, it was Mother's Day. Yes, she wanted to do this. Yes, they were scrumptious.) So I decided to repeat a drill from last September: I dropped the truck at the repair place, three miles away, and walked home. As with the previous trip, I had a backup plan of taking the bus if it suddenly got rainy (or, as yesterday, snowy:P) or if I just lost my personal drive. This time, at least, I knew the name of the route and when the bus would allegedly arrive. Once again, I beat it to my "stop" by a good five minutes just by walking down the street myself. The route I took both times- Sweet Home south to Sheridan, past Millersport and Harlem and then into our subdivision- isn't the quickest, but the alternate route we take when driving there- Maple over the 290, then the cut-through to Millersport past the Marriott and around Frankhauser (German for "drunken suburban street planner")- is decidedly less pedestrian-friendly. No sidewalks, deadly commuters, and worst of all no coffee en route. Mere minutes and 79 cents later, I had a large coffee handwarmer from Mickey D's a third of the way into the walk. I needed it- it was barely 40F out there. I also had a smile most of the way, because my soundtrack the previous weekend's This American Life, and in particular the story of a 23-year-old east coaster who decided to walk across America, a south-then-west route covering over 4,000 miles in all. No rides, no prearranged shelter, just stories, and especially answers to his standard question to those he met: If you could go back in time, what would you tell your 23-year-old self?
At the end of the piece, having reached the Pacific, he gave his pre-walk self his three answers to that question: You know exactly what to do.
There's no need to be afraid.
Keep walking.This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/126928.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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I know, I've been spamming y'all today. We just finished last night's Orphan Black installment, seventh out of ten, which moved things along quite nicely with suspense and tying-up of some cophouse loose ends and all, and previewed even more of what's to come next Saturday, but.... Sorry. 140 character limit here. If you're watching BBC America in real time, or, um, later? Pay attention to the Twitter reference in the lower left corner. Usually it says just @OrphanBlack to link to the show's official Twitter feed- but during this ep, it changes at least twice. To hashtags tied to significant plot points. Neither of them reveals anything especially spoilers!y, but it's interesting that they're using the site references to both tease their fandom and expose other random hashtaggers to what's going on here. Tatiana is more amazing than ever, even as she only plays three versions of herself (by my count) in one episode. And we adore Felix more and more with each passing week. That's enough clonespam for one night, and day. Hastas.
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As one civil state after another opens its doors in the name of love- from Rhode Island to Minnesota, and New Zealand to France just within the past few weeks- I continue to see them slammed shut in my religious denomination of lifetime attendance and almost 40 years of formal membership. Best as I can tell, the United Methodist Church stands alone among the ordinarily progressive branches of American Protestantism in continuing to ban the marriage or ordination of its gay members. Episcopals do it; Presbyterians do it; Unitarians, of course, do it, practically ordaining gay couples who pass by on the street.
Let's do it, Methodists! Let's fall in love!
Or not.
Rev. Dr. Thomas W. Ogletree, a United Methodist clergyman and distinguished scholar of Christian ethics, will be charged and tried in a church trial for officiating at the wedding of his son, Ogletree and Methodists in New Directions (MIND) announced today. Because the wedding, legally performed in New York State, was between two men, Ogletree’s participation in it is barred by church law, which holds that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” and explicitly forbids its clergy from performing same-sex marriages or holy union ceremonies. The trial will be the first since a nationwide movement of clergy and lay supporters emerged within the church to publicly defy the ban and to extend their ministries to all couples, gay and straight, on an equal basis. “I could not with any integrity as a Christian, as United Methodist or as a specialist in Christian social ethics refuse my son’s request to preside at his wedding,” explained Ogletree, who is a retired professor and a past dean of both the Yale Divinity School and Drew Theological Seminary. “Performing Tom and Nick’s wedding was one of the most significant ritual acts of my life as a pastor,” he added, referring to his son, Thomas Rimbey Ogletree, and son-in-law, Nicholas William Haddad. “That Tom Ogletree – a lifelong faithful Methodist and theologian who wrote a section of the very rule book now being used to prosecute him – could be brought up on charges for officiating at his own son’s wedding shows just how far off course the United Methodist Church has gone from any effort to live up to its slogan ‘open hearts, open minds, open doors,’ to say nothing of following Jesus’s commandment to ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’” said Dr. Dorothee Benz, chair of MIND. Ogletree’s service to the United Methodist Church (UMC), which dates back to 1952, includes a term served on the UMC’s Episcopal Committee, during which he authored “Our Theological Task,” the section of the UMC’s Book of Discipline that explicates one of the foundational pieces of Weslyan theology. This discussion of the role of scripture, tradition, experience and reason in the life of the church forms one of the key parts of the Discipline, the text that outlines both the UMC’s doctrine and its rules. “Tom’s actions were quintessentially pastoral,” said Rev. Vicki Flippin, associate pastor of The Church of the Village in Manhattan. “No minister should be required to discriminate against those they are charged to care for.” The wedding took place on October 20, 2012, and a complaint was filed on October 24 with the bishop of the regional church body that Ogletree is part of, the New York Annual Conference (NYAC). The complaint set in motion a formal disciplinary process that has now resulted in the bishop referring the case to church counsel (the equivalent of a prosecutor) to draw up charges, which are the first step in initiating a church trial.
Missing from that last paragraph is who filed that complaint. But the New York Times reports it: several of his fellow United Methodist clergy, a mere four days after the recognition of this union in the sight of God and of his congregation.
Jesus, fellas, could you at least have waited for the kids to get back from their honeymoon?
Under our denomination's dysfunctional structure, changes in doctrinal position can only come every four years at General Conference, a nationwide (and increasingly worldwide) gathering of so-called United Methodists- United Statesian and African-Asian, but not the more accepting followers of Wesley within its formal church homes in Canada (which welcomes all to sacraments and clergy) or even Wesley's original home of Britain (less affirming but only bans same-sex blessings, not ordination). Because the right-wing pews of the denomination are growing faster than us filthy liberal Northeasterners, the attempts to change the policy in 2012 were shot down; to my great disappointment, though, at least one pastor from this very area, in whose church I did lay speaking classwork, came out after the vote (see what I did there?) and gloated, in so many words, about how the Southern and African factions saved Jesus from the icky gay people.
I spoke up in church against such twaddle the following Sunday, using, not my words, but those of John the Apostle.
Since then, I've heard of efforts by bishops, congregations and individuals within the church to work within these bounds of slavish thinking. Of hints of a "don't ask don't tell" practical reality coming from the episcopal level; of pledges by whole congregations to not celebrate ANY weddings within their walls until all can be welcomed there; and of movements at the national and conference level to speak up in protest. Our own will be at our Annual Conference's annual conference (named by the Department of Redundancy Department), but I was more visibly touched by the group in the downstate New York Annual Conference, in which Reverend Ogletree will be tried and burned at the stake. Theirs is called MIND- for Methodists in New Directions- and their name and message play on our denomination's professed mission statement of "open minds, open hearts, open doors."
I am not personally affected by these oppressive positions- neither I nor anyone I am related to will be barred from the ministry or the marriage altar on account of them- but I wish my brothers and sisters to do unto our gay and lesbian members and clergy just as they would do unto Jesus. While I may not be affected by it, I did get the stinkin' t-shirt, which I intend to wear proudly to our own sanctuary and, if they'll let me in, to our annual conference's ordination of one of our (very straight but very supportive) members:
And all of God's children said, Amen. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/126599.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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Just about everybody knows Hyperbole and a Half. It goes back to 2009, but the memeworthy entries started showing up a year or so later, around ALL THE THINGS and CAKE and, maybe most famously,
And then she went away. The Internet is a cruel bitch, and has claimed other brilliant souls like the creator of I Harth Darth and the metaquoty magic of  active_apathy, but Allie, at least, told us what was going on:
She was depressed.
Clinical, DSM-IV stylee depressed. Like me- and many of you. She told the tale with bravery and wit and, of course, the cutest stick figures in the universe. We responded- over 4,200 times to that 2011 entry- to sympathize and empathize and wish her the best on her journey back to the PARP!
I knew her real name from someplace, and she's Facebooky friendly with a longtime friend of mine (not real-lifey that she knows, but they did both grow up in the same small town in Idaho), so I'd occasionally get to see a friend-of-friend posting there. A couple of weekends ago, after I went for my ROUN in the PARP! here, I took a look and saw that she'd surfaced, briefly, in mid-2012, just thanking everyone for their patience as she tried to finish her followup post to her 2011 one.
It took her nine months- as many good things do- but it finally arrived last week. And it's beautiful. A snippet will not do it justice, but a thread within it, presented here without the artwork, is what nailed it for me, and many others who read it:
At some point during this phase, I was crying on the kitchen floor for no reason. As was common practice during bouts of floor-crying, I was staring straight ahead at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about myself. Then, through the film of tears and nothingness, I spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator.
I don't claim to know why this happened, but when I saw the piece of corn, something snapped. And then that thing twisted through a few permutations of logic that I don't understand, and produced the most confusing bout of uncontrollable, debilitating laughter that I have ever experienced.
I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months, and it had impulsively decided to unleash all of it at once in what would appear to be an act of vengeance. That piece of corn is the funniest thing I have ever seen, and I cannot explain to anyone why it's funny. I don't even know why. If someone ever asks me "what was the exact moment where things started to feel slightly less shitty?" instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I'm going to have to tell them about the piece of corn. And then I'm going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor... it was so alone... and it was just sitting there! And no matter how I explain it, I'll get the same, confused look. So maybe I'll try to show them the piece of corn - to see if they get it. They won't. Things will get even weirder.
Anyway, I wanted to end this on a hopeful, positive note, but, seeing as how my sense of hope and positivity is still shrouded in a thick layer of feeling like hope and positivity are bullshit, I'll just say this: Nobody can guarantee that it's going to be okay, but — and I don't know if this will be comforting to anyone else — the possibility exists that there's a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it's just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit. I don't know. But when you're concerned that the miserable, boring wasteland in front of you might stretch all the way into forever, not knowing feels strangely hope-like.
That post quickly achieved Blogger's 5,000-comment maximum, most of it, again, full of support and appreciation. Not all of it, though. The first comment on LJ's RSS feed of the post called Allie out for not putting the pictures behind an LJ-cut.
REALLY?
Several people (Eleanor included) shot that idiot right down. Yet there were other voices concerned about the message of the post- that Allie's struggle, and the overwhelming popularity of the Internet response to it, would diminish the importance of the issue, or trivialize it, because, hey look! funny pictures! (I think that's the gist of it.)
What I think went missing in that analysis is how unique Allie's situation is in at least one respect. She got the reaction she did because she was already Internet-famous, and then went away, and then came back, with bookends of bravery on both ends announcing her problem and the bare beginnings of her solution to it. And she did it through the medium of visual humor that made her Internet-famous in the first place. That doesn't trivialize the condition- for me, at least, it universalizes it, and gives me, as a fellow sufferer, some brilliant and tangible pieces of hope to keep me going on my own journey...
even if the tangible part is only a piece of corn on the floor.
----
But it isn't. It's a car mirror, of all things.
A couple of weeks ago, Eleanor and I got into a Car Accident of Stupid. In a moment of simultaneous combustion, she rolled her truck into our driveway at the exact second that I was (a) backing out of the garage and (b) looking over my shoulder to the right to ensure that I didn't whack my passenger-side mirror against the edge of the garage door.
Instead, I heard the horrific crunching noise and realized I had instead whacked my driver-side mirror against her truck. Nothing else was damaged beyond cosmetics, and she quickly glued the frame back to the driver's side door (as she did six years ago when she backed into ME on a very bad day), but this time the mirror itself was beyond repair. For a week or so, I relied on duct tape and ducking to see out of it from its fixed position, but clearly that was not gonna last, so I sucked it up earlier this week and asked our mechanic how bad it would be.
Answer: not too. I'd heard other people telling me to expect close to 500 bucks, but those gizmos are apparently the high-end, heated SUV kind; mine clocked in a bit over a Benjamin, but Erin had to order it. I went over midweek after it came in, and, turned out, it hadn't. The third time was the charm, though, and after he put it on, I adjusted it, looked behind me to my left, and felt almost as insanely happy about this silly little piece of reality as Allie did about finding a piece of corn on the floor.
I don't know what caused it, either. Maybe there's just something about the tangible, the limited, the familiar- not tied to any memory or obligation- that makes you just Focus (yes, that's what I drive) on something that's just There, doing what it does, without expecting anything of you in return. Maybe it's the erasure of that horrid moment of crunch that those hundred bucks magically atoned for.
All I do know is, it made me happy- and her return toward the PARP! (if not actually to it) made me even palpably more so.
Find your piece of corn. Or don't even look for it. In all likelihood, when the time is right, it will find you. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/126261.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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Still have lots of MOARS to post, but since it's late and I've just had Neil Gaiman AND Orphan Black mess with my head, I'll go with the old reliable for internet posts and just give you cute kittens:  That's them- the ones a coworker of Eleanor found, abandoned in that paper bag, in the parking lot of her Wegmans yesterday afternoon. One of the Helping Hands guys saw the bag move, and that got him to check the contents, bring the milk and food, and generally care for them until the SPCA could take over. Eleanor asked a manager if the store was going to give him some kind of recognition for the random act of kindness- and she couldn't get a straight answer out of them. Instead, she's going to get him a gift card, because that's the right thing to do. After something as wrong as this, we need all the right things we can get. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/126096.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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 Placeholder after a long day, to remind me that I need to post MORE TO COME about several things, including: - MOAR TO COME detail about our refi finally finalizing, and how we pulled it off; - MOAR KITTEHS, or at least two of them, who Eleanor and her coworkers discovered to have been abandoned in a paper bag in the Wegmans parking lot this morning; - MOAR MIND, a group I discovered (and added my name to) tonight after reading about a New York Conference Methodist minister who's facing a church trial for daring to marry his own son in a same-sex wedding in a state where such unions are now legal; - MOAR CORN- or, at least, my own equivalent of the piece of corn on the floor that Allie of Hyperbole and a Half found, and found to be liberating. (And why I will argue with anyone who argues with the MOAR ROAR of approval that the Internet has given her for it.) There might also be MOAR movie reviews, MOAR references to things I'm reading, and who knows what MOAR else. Stay MOAR tuned. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/125780.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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We're on the verge of several bits of news that I hope will be good- I've spent much of the past 24 hours stalking people essential to them happening- but when I got to my part-time office late this morning, nothing had popped on them yet. As I walked through the office door, I was not in the best of moods.... Except, that is, for what was on the door:
That may not seem like a big deal, but I've been doing this for over 28 years now and I've never had the semi-permanence of my name painted on an office door. I've had little name signs slotted into boards, and my other office has one of those white-on-black church sign jobbies, but this? Not quite as cool as meeting the Dalai Lama- which a friend of ours did today- or seeing an Oscorp truck blow up in a Spider-Man 2 action sequence- which I almost did-but I'll take it:) Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone. Tags: via ljapp
Current Location: US, New York, Erie, Clearfield Dr, 348
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My Sabre-less plans for following playoff sports this spring got dashed pretty quickly. At least the ones did that involved switching my interest to basketball. Of the three playoff teams I held vague past rooting interests for, two (the Nets and Clippers) lost their first-round matches in short order, despite each of them having the better record and thus home-court advantage for each series. The third team, the Knicks, did advance out of the first round, but only after majorly pissing off the Celtics and the entirety of New England by wearing black "funeral" uniforms at home for the fifth game of the series after going up 3-0. It got reduced to 3-2 before they finally polished off the Chowds, but they're already down 1-0 to Indiana in the second round and I really don't care about them anymore. Again.
Hockey? Mostly meh. The Bosnywashto matchups seem interchangeable, Ottawa and Montreal seem determined to kill all the players on the ice (and then hurl insults at the coaches who ordered the murders), and as far as I can tell the 15 teams in the Western Conference have gone off and formed their own league, since I haven't seen any of them play here in over a year.
That does leave one tournament of interest, though, and this piece at Grantland captured it nicely, as this weekend brought the bittersweet return of playoff hockey, for the first time in seven years, to that Cakebox of Champions we fondly referred to as the Nassau Mausoleum:
The Islanders haven’t won a playoff series in 20 years and hadn’t won a home playoff game since 2002. During this fallow period, Islanders fans have come to define themselves almost totally in opposition to Rangers fans. Rangers fans are captains of industry; Islanders fans are working class. Rangers fans have lofts in Tribeca; Islanders fans come from the kind of towns you have to spell for a visitor (“Ronkonkoma: R-O-N-K … ”). Rangers fans derive their smugness from their eight-decade history; Islanders fans, whose franchise dates back to 1972, like to point out they won the same number of Stanley Cups in half the time. “We’re realists,” James Edmonds, another fan, told me. “They’re fantastical.” The Islanders entered Sunday’s game with the series tied 1-1. The Rangers dropped their first two playoff games against Washington. This fact made Islanders fans happy.
Making them less happy, though, is the resignation of their fate to points west. After sneaking into the final playoff slot in the East this year, they have only this series and the next two seasons to bring a Cup back to the heart of Nausea County. In 2015, they will rejoin their longlost Roy Boe-owned basketball cousins at the Jay-Z Arena in Brooklyn, and the Real Long Island will lose its first, and now only, major-league sports team. Grantland talked to one of the Jack Daniels chugging fans:
This is how Islanders fan generally feel about the move to Brooklyn: It sucks for fans but is good for the team. Plus, going to Brooklyn — rather than Kansas City or Quebec, as had been rumored — is as about as painless as a franchise relocation gets. “I learned this in elementary school,” said James. “Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk — they’re all part of Long Island. They didn’t put dynamite on the border between Queens and Nassau.”
This is largely but not entirely true. The world changes when you cross that border. Parkways change their names, the rules of the road veer into different lanes, and you may still be on an island that's long but you are either On The Island or you're not. At least that's how it was when I lived there. My old home town, one zip code over from Uniondale, is far more Queensified than it was even 10 years ago, but it's still as far removed from the 718 as it is from my current 716. You live in and for your car, public transporation being a sick joke; your political machine is Red State Republican, not Nanny State Bloomberg; the newspaper and cable news network are local, jointly owned and have little journalistic value left in them; and you root for the Mets, the Jets and of course, YOUR New York Islanders.
The Islanders are moving because the Coliseum lacks amenities — right? Well, I go to a lot of stadiums, and I always sit in the stands, and I have yet to use an amenity. Here is an amenity of the Nassau Coliseum: It has no upper deck. Even in Section 324, on the blue line, you can see the whole ice and not feel you’re staring down from the top of the Chrysler Building. Season tickets in that section cost $40 a seat per game, and if you buy two, a third can be had for half price. This confirms my long-held belief that the “worst” stadiums in America are often the best, and the “best” are defined as the ones where you can buy sushi.
Mets fans felt the same way about Shea Stadium, compared to the much nicer surroundings of Corporate Field, which has an atmosphere that's sterile enough to operate in. But that, at least, was right next door. You can get closer to Shea's pitching rubber and baselines now (they're marked with plaques in the parking lot) than you ever could when the old dump was still standing. In two years time, the Coliseum will still stand. Springsteen and Billy Joel will still pack the rafters, and there will probably be tractor pulls or some similar demolition-based entertainment.
Twice last year, I drove by the place- even into its empty parking lot while getting lost. That crappy old cakebox- built on the cheap during early 1970s fiscal-crisis days and never completed per its original lofty plans- sits, old and sad, in the middle of what once was a major World War II air base. Grand plans for building around it have come to slight fruition- a "Museum Row" occupies mostly converted 1940s airplane hangars, and office parks now dot much of the once open landscape. The neighboring community college has grown like topsy alongside it, but it, too, has never quite outgrown its reputation for being "Turnpike Tech." The Islanders' owner floated grand schemes to redevelop the building and vicinity, first through his own money and later through a public-private consortium, but when the owners of the newspaper and cable news station also own the competing New York Rangers, you can imagine how well THAT was pitched, and the plans went down to defeat.
The Penguins’ Chris Kunitz scored the game-winner 8:44 into overtime. It was on another power play: Islanders coach Jack Capuano later gave a portentous no-comment about the officiating. The Islanders' crowd instantly powered down, and as everyone filed out back onto Long Island there were a few meaningful “Fucks!” As I filed out, I thought of what Matt Smyth, who was drinking in the parking lot with his brother Ray, had told me before the game. “In two years, we’ll be drinking on a street corner in Brooklyn,” Matt said. “It’s better than a street corner in Kansas City.” That Ray is not this Ray- but the feeling's about the same. Especially since, two springs from now, chances are very good that this Ray will again be looking for something else to watch after the rebuilding Sabres file back out to their golf courses.
This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/125438.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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We finished watching Circumstance yesterday. It's an independent film, the debut of its Iranian-American director Maryam Keshavarz , which gained accolades at Sundance in 2011 but also resulted in being banned in Iran (as well as in a lifetime ban from the country for Keshavarz). As it shows the realities of sexual repression, government corruption and especially Islamic extremism in that country, it really got me wondering: Why do our Fundies hate Muslim extremists so much? You'd think they'd get along thick as thieves, from the looks of this depiction. Not only does their country allow public prayer, they mandate it five times a day. They have a government sanctioned Morality Police that is charged, among other things, with "enforcing the wearing of the hijab; arresting women for violating the dress code; prohibiting male-female fraternization; monitoring citizens' activities; confiscating satellite dishes and `obscene` material; intelligence gathering; and even harassing government critics and intellectuals." We see these officials doing many of these things, stopping the female leads as they dance, smoke, drink and dub pornos into Persian- and they conduct trans-vaginal probes as part of their "investigations" that you'd think would make a southern Republican state legislator proud of them. Beyond the physical trappings, the men are plainly in charge. Even one of the younger men in the story makes clear that he does not want his wife, or even his sister, singing in public. Nobody challenges him. The mullahs encourage spying and snitching on any who disagree with these precepts- and they publicly villify and conduct show-trials of those from that Other Horrible Country who they allegedly catch in their acts of terror against the people. They do all this in the name and spirit of their Revolution, which they cite as permanent and divine justification of the righteousness of their cause- no matter what infidel gets in their way. Maybe when the next Bush gets back into office, he'll invade Iran just so he can surrender to them. Kinda like The Mouse that Roared, only far less funny. This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/124896.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
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