Staycation in the yard

Since I just wrapped up a project, I must burn some vacation before my next project starts (whenever that is). So next week I am staying home and working on the house and the yard. Trees to cut down, walls to knock down…the usual.

I won’t be online much next week, but I will be the week after that.

Until then.

Sales call complete

It was a late night of prep. What I could not prep for, I talked around successfully. The client was very nice and I think the call went well.

Neither of us could get anything but and evening flight home, so we hung out on the pier at Huntington Beach. There, at a seaside restaurant named Duke’s, I had the best fish chowder I have ever had.  It was thick and creamy and almost whipped in texture, full of clams and fish and potatoes. It was divine. By far the best in the world, and I have sampled a lot. When you’re in the Los Angeles area, now you know where to go.

Now I have five hours to kill. Time to catch up with my blogbuddies.

Sales call

I just left the west coast when I wrapped up my project last week. Now I’m going back, though it’s only for a day, to do a sales call. I like sales calls. I’m the expert, and I can help them, if they want to be helped. If I don’t get the job, it just means that someone somewhere else needs me more.
I mentioned that I would be out there to a friend who works there, only a few klicks from where I will be. She wanted to have lunch, because it’s been years since I saw her. Then she remembered that she’s moving to the jungle in a couple of months, and we’ll be able to see each other every weekend. We laughed about it. I really have no time to dally in LA anyway.
Off we go.

Blue Stone, “Dreamcatcher”

Now, had Whitney Houston made music like this, she might have had more of a positive impact on the world of music. I heard this on the plane the other day. Lovely.

My everyday Valentine

When I was a larva, I had to go through the exercise of exchanging valentines with my classmates. People I didn’t know, people who didn’t know me. It was always a painful exercise, because it was obvious that no one would ever have given me a valentine by choice. Thankfully after a few years, that stopped, and I was happily valentine-free for decades.

Now I am married and have a wonderful wife to exchange valentines with every year. It’s really the first period in this life where I’ve enjoyed Valentine’s Day. I told her that. It seemed to make her sad, but that wasn’t my intention. It really is nice to have her, to have a valentine of my very own, every day, and especially on Valentine’s Day.

We took Valentine’s Day off. We went to the beach, got sunburned, and found a huge number of fossils. We love our beach for its fossils. We brought home a bucket’s worth yesterday.

It was a good Valentine’s Day.

The Seatbelts, “Diggin’ ”

I don’t listen to country music much, but this bouncy tune just makes me laugh. And Steve Conte’s voice has a nice earthiness to it. I believe the lyrics start out talking about “digging” (building) stargates, but I can’t remember.

Shyness will be classified as a mental disorder

Remember what I said about the DSM-V?

I wasn’t kidding. I know some of my readers will be “pathologized” under the DSM-V. I will be too.

Well, I guess it can be nice to have a label.

Hollywood’s angst over the death of Whitney Houston

I watched the Grammy awards last night, not by choice, but because my darling wife wouldn’t let me have the controller.

I watched many of the celebrities express their shock and grief regarding singer Whitney Houston, who (it can be safely said) overdosed on alcohol and prescription medication at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Saturday.

Really. Was anyone really surprised at Houston’s death, at age 48? Really? No. Everyone saw it coming over the past fifteen years. And I think very few people did anything about it. If the people in Hollywood, particularly in the music industry, cared so much about her, I think that at least one of them would have helped her break her drug addiction, or at least helped her avoid her untimely death. But drugs (prescription and illicit) are so prevalent in Hollywood culture, it’s “normal” to be a drug abuser.

It’s a shame that Houston died relatively young. It’s a shame that she couldn’t pull out of her downward spiral. But I think it’s doubly shameful for a parade of Grammy attendees, many of whom knew Houston personally, to express their shock and dismay at her death, without ever acknowledging their guilt and complicity in it. It was their collective culture, the Hollywood drug culture, which helped propel Houston down her path of self-destruction. For them to express shock and grief at the result just seems ridiculous.

GLBT lobby forces retraction from Cynthia Nixon

I never really watched “Sex in the City,” but I know that actress Cynthia Nixon was one of the four women on the show. In her personal life, she has had both heterosexual and homosexual long-term relationships. Her hetero relationships yielded two children. Currently she is engaged to a woman. I never paid attention, nor did I care, until a few weeks ago, when she said this to “The New York Times Magazine” about her choosing a homosexual lifestyle: “”I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.”

This statement went over like a lead balloon with the GLBT “community,” which does indeed want to continue portraying homosexuality as a biological fact, not a choice. If it were a choice, it would reduce their leverage in their drive to claim various rights, such as the right to marry. And it really irritated the GLBT community that Nixon would point to the elephant in the room and talk about GLBT ideology in such blatant terms.

The pressure from GLBT activists was enough to make Nixon “clarify” her previous statement more recently in “The Advocate” magazine,  when she said: “”While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship. As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community — as well as the majority of heterosexuals — cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.” [She means "gender" when she says "sex," but many people confuse the two words.]

So she is bisexual, and at the moment, chooses to be with a woman. But her bisexuality is not a choice, it’s a fact, she says after being pressured by the GLBT community. She still holds that for some people, it is a choice, though. So it’s not the blanket clarification that GLBTs wanted, but it was something.

I think the entire episode is very interesting, especially because it gave us a peek at the ideological lockstep that the GLBT community forces upon its members.

It reminds me of a time, fifteen to twenty years ago, when AIDS was an “epidemic.” GLBT activists at the time needed funding for AIDS research and testing, and so they proclaimed loudly that AIDS was a disease which struck gay and straight people in similar numbers. AIDS-related advertising with pictures tended to show white suburban mothers, not gay black men. No one was safe from AIDS, the claim went, and everyone had a vested interest in making sure that AIDS research was well-funded to stop the “epidemic.”

It turned out later that there WAS no heterosexual AIDS epidemic. AIDS was, and is, a disease which primarily afflicts gay men and intravenous drug users. Most women who get AIDS are intravenous drug users, and tend not to get the virus through anal sex (the primary method of sexual transmission). But did the GLBT community ever retract the long-standing claim that AIDS is a heterosexual epidemic? No. It would conflict with their ideology.

That’s why I think it’s funny that when Cynthia Nixon suggests that homosexuality is a choice, the GLBT community slaps her down. It wouldn’t matter if it was a choice or not. The concept of it being a choice goes against GLBT ideology, and therefore is not permitted to be discussed in public, and certainly not in the media.

Pictures from Monterey Bay Aquarium, part 1

I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium a few months ago. It’s one of the best aquariums in the world, in my humble opinion, and I’ve seen more than a few. The MBA’s advantage is that they are perched right on the edge of the Monterey Submarine Canyon, which extends 150 km west into the Pacific, and reaches depths of 3.6 km. This means they have relatively easy access to all the life which lives in that huge water column, and they can keep it alive in captivity by circulating the plankton-rich seawater from the bay through the aquarium and back out, allowing them to maintain an environment which is very similar to the animals’ native environment.

It’s impressive.

This MBA photo page has a number of helpful tips on it. Unfortunately they left out the most important tips: “remember to charge your @#*%ing camera BEFORE you arrive” and “do not expect to get good pictures with your cellphone.”

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• They have a huge tank which is three or four stories tall. I could watch the fish in it for hours. They have several cylindrical tanks where the fish swirl in silvery tornados, endlessly.
• They had taken skate eggs, which are flat black envelopes with horns on each end, and they cut out a panel on one side and replaced it with plastic. Inside, you could see the baby skate (similar to a stingray), wriggling around as it developed. I think it takes skates more than a year to hatch…I can’t remember.
• I love cuttlefish (related to octopi). They change colors to match their surroundings. I have seen them imitate a chessboard, much more accurately than shown here. Even their skin’s texture changes to match their surroundings. Fascinating creatures. I know that you have to keep octopi tanks covered and locked, because they will escape and roam the hallways as long as they can hold their “breath”. I don’t think you have to do that with cuttlefish – they are smaller and less muscular, though still very intelligent.
• MBA has the best displays of corals and sea anemones and other colorful things that I have never seen anywhere else in such quantity or size.
• You may recognize the exterior of the MBA as the “Cetacean Institute” from the movie “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” The tank and the whales in those scenes were rotoscoped into the film. In real life, that’s the ocean itself beyond the guardrails.