Send your love electronically HERE We will read it. Platonically.
The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
All comments subject to publication. Or dismissal. Or Both.
I'm sure the team at Webcore is all over Cold Fusion, Asp and SQL, and Cisco certified like you wouldn't friggin believe. I bet their Dell PowerEdge servers with dual processors, hot-swap RAID 5 hard drive configurations really rock the block, too. When they tell me they can design and implement clustered or load-balanced solutions, managed firewalls, VPN's, multi-site failover, I not only believe it, I'd bet the server-farm on it. And finally, I'm not ashamed to say I was very much moved by their pledge to heartbeat monitor all shared servers. I'm still a little misty eyed about it.
But maybe in the midst of a viral gridlock of the net caused by Mr. Sobig hijacking the computers and address books of the less Cisco savvy, and then sending hundreds of millions of virus propagating messages under bogus sender headers, The Webcore Team would figure out that autoresponding to the identity-swapped "senders" with helpful advice really isn't very helpful at all.
I'm starting a collection of these:
The anti-virus software on Webcore's mail server has reported that you sent an E-mail to editor@ergoweb.com containing the : W32/Sobig.F@mm virus in the application.pif attachment. The subject of the E-mail was "Your details". The e-mail containing the virus has been quarantined and will be deleted in order to prevent further damage.
If there's a sweeter love/sex song than Shalamar'sA Night to Remember, it's probably also by Shalamar. Their sunshine R&B is one of the 80's lasting treasures. I looped A Night to Remember for an hour or so at work. And at the end of the hour, as at the beginning, there wasn't even a dent in the thrill of the song.
It begins with a questionable premise:
When you love someone it's natural, not demanding
It's a premise I cannot personally vouch for, in any event. It continues:
And that's one thing I'm proud to say I found in you
I'm so glad we reached an understanding
Now I know my heart is safe with you
So now my love to you, baby, I surrender
Banal? I'm proud to say....We reached an understanding, I'll grant you. But my heart is safe with you and So now my love to you, baby, I surrender, I will fight for. Of course, even the banalities are joined to music of such joy that they seem right and profound.
The delirious optimism of the song may be a little otherworldly (or maybe just rare, but nevertheless real, even in this world). It's a limerance love song, to be sure. But it's also a love duet of complete equivalence. Jody Watley and Howard Hewett trade the first two verses and join on the choruses and the last verse. Howard's the one with the more assured upper register. It's in this last verse that the song's overflowing heart brings the Los Angeles River to floodtide. We're so happy let's drink to the exes:
Let's make a toast to those who helped make this occasion
They turned their back on love
and that's what drove you straight to me
Now to you I make a lasting dedication
I'll show you all that love and life can be
And each day that I live I will deliver
The taken-for-granted equality between the two, in their love and desire, is the soft revolution under the high gloss. It's this kind of equality that is the really revolutionary implication of gay marriage. It's also the main engine of world revolution. And reaction.
It's pretty much Mullah Omar versus Shalamar, when you get right down to it.
Perhaps if we framed the debate in a new way. Not a clash of civilizations, but the click of civilizations--where the good ideas mesh. Not West versus East, but best versus least. The builders venerated over the destroyers. Creators and innovators over holy book exegetes and mnemonists.
What's the story on the FoxNews spokesmama? The one with the soothing voice, pleasant face and monumental satellite dishes. The one who gives the periodic schedule highlights for a channel that never changes. The one who's fond of sweaters and tops that reveal the massive bra scaffolding beneath. The one who looks like she's smuggling the heads of Hannity and Colmes past customs under her shirt.
Who is she ? Why is she? I keep expecting her to say her name, but she never does. Our lady of the mysterious bazookas.
Kinda cool that she's a bit past the first blush of youth. My autumn rose. Who can't see her toes.
Like a vintage Corvette. With blazing headlights. She has some highway miles on her, but she's still got it.
Hmmm, not a Corvette, the scale's all wrong. A Thunderbird.
Why do you lend your twilight lustre to such tawdry surroundings? What wrong turn landed you there?
So fair. So balanced.
Dust her for Rupert Murdoch's paw prints.
The man behind the greatest song ever written about forsensic science.
I submitted several big chunks of A. Bender pricelessness to the Gender Genie, and it figured the author out as male each time. I guess I'm not much of a grammar bender or a transtextual. According to the genie's stats, though, it was more successful with me than with most. The theory behind the genie claims 80% success, but it looks like the genie is beating the odds in the wrong direction--only 40% right so far. I imagine everyone is cheating in the same way I did. The algorithm is supposed to correctly sex-type the authors of fiction. Chances are most of the genie's supplicants have been submitting blog extracts, many of which are probably fictional enough, but technically they are beyond the genie's powers.
Unfortunately, the NYT's article that gave birth to the genie is behind the paid archive firewall, in the firevault. And after only 10 days. What up wif dat? The NYT's changed policy without consulting me? Are they in hock for Howell Raines' golden parachute? Still paying down Jayson Blair's credit card debt? Too many dead men on the payroll?
What did Vincent Canby think of S.W.A.T., anyway?.
Even if the article explicating the theory is being held for ransom, the NYT's sidebar containing the theory is free. In case it doesn't remain so, here it is (since it's courtesy of the theorists, in the first place):
Take the Test
Take any piece of fiction and do the following:
1. Count the number of words in the document.
2. For each appearance in the document of the following words ADD the number of points indicated:
'the' (17)
'a' (6)
'some' (6)
any number, written in digits or in words (5)
'it' (2)
3. For each appearance in the document of the following words SUBTRACT the number of points indicated:
'with' (14)
possessives, ending in 's' (5)
possessive pronouns, such as 'mine', 'yours', 'his', 'hers', (3)
'for' (4)
'not' or any word ending with 'n't' (4)
4. If the total score (after adding and subtracting as indicated) is greater than the total number of words in the document, then the author of the document is probably a male. Otherwise, the author is probably a female.
— Courtesy of Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology
(genie via Blogdex--they don't get maler than him)
Some virus must be reaching critical mass today. The yahoo mailbox is crammed with emails with bogus Re: headers (application, details, approved, that movie ) and attachments. Never seen anything quite like it.
Since I never apply for anything, hate details, don't crave approval and don't care about that movie, I am safe so far. It's the re:cute! email that will finally trick me.
12:11 PM
Monday, August 18, 2003
The Salam Pax of Cable
I'm sort of watching Kismet(1944) on TCM, not to be confused with Kismet (1930) and certainly not Kismet (1955). I dunno, but Baghdad looks pretty good to me. Silk, rubies and gold everywhere you look. Nice, cavernous soundstage feel to the town, too. No sign of looting or native dissatisfaction that I can see. And Ronald Colman seems to me the model of a just and wise ruler. If that's what he is, I've got the sound down so I'm making some assumptions here.
Marlene Dietrich shows the Iraqi women how to reconcile tradition and modernity, how to balance the demands of home and the rigors of palace dancing. How to wear the veil, and how to artfully drop it. But then again, sheer as the veil is, what's the dif really.
I can't lie (ok, I can, but I choose not to right now). I didn't pay any attention to the gay Bishop story until the hostile reaction rolled in. And even then the Bishop didn't really grab my attention. Church bureaucrats just don't, as a rule. I was more interested in what the reactors revealed about themselves. Generally they showed instability at the core and structurally significant cracking of the cooling towers.
So I was surprised by many of the details of the Bishop's life when I read this bio in his homestown newspaper. Details such as:
Robinson was born in Lexington, Ky., in 1947, in a delivery that went so wrong the doctor told his father he needed a name for the baby's birth and death certificates. Charles and Imogene Robinson had counted on a girl, so Robinson's father named the baby Vicky Imogene Robinson.
Robinson survived and went home to his family's farm outside Lexington, where his parents worked as tobacco sharecroppers. The family used an outhouse, water from a cistern and did laundry in a cast-iron tub over an open flame.
I am now officially interested in the Bishop. Fascinated even. The sickly tobacco patch baby boy with the girl's name, the hardscrabble homo with the sharecropper folks. This is the guy that Lileks, Steyn, Derb and Barnes held up as a threat to the common good and public morality with his post-ethical, post modernismo--an empty and apt avatar of the times, don't you know.
Sure, his bottomlands origin doesn't earn him a Great Adventure lifetime free-pass to jump on the next ride that swings by, but it's so clear from his story that he is a decent guy, profligate only in earnestness, promiscuous only in religiosity-- not my type, in other words, but I've constructed the world with room enough for all the types (don't mention it, just doing my job). Lileks and crew look something considerably beneath craven in their misrepresentation of the man. And their astral projection of his faults.
May they be born Kentucky holler queerboys with girly handles in their next lives. And may their next lives start 56 years ago
There is an excellent response to James Lileks here. Which I found via Jeff Jarvis. Read the responses to the Mr Jarvis's post for more people who need some gay reincarnation therapy.
