Now, if there was only a way to join the powers of bacon with the genius of Tesla.

Anyway, go visit The Oatmeal.  Now, dammit.

JCPenney, like most middle-class focused retailers, has been watching their classic demographic wither and die. They’ve already watched as many of their contemporaries.. once proud national retailers like Montgomery Ward.. and regional retailers like Mervyn’s.. have folded. Sears is a shadow of it’s former self. And even the upscale retailers have not been exempt, as chains like The Broadway and Meier and Frank have found themselves consolidated into Macy’s, while others have just simply vanished.

JCPenney is smart to be inclusive. Increasingly, as the next generation matures into adulthood, they already carry a much higher level of tolerance to alternative lifestyles. With each passing generation American society is becoming more inclusive and more open.

For the rest of us, let’s remind JCPenney that One Million Moms.. even if they do indeed represent “one million Moms”, is 0.3% of the population of the United States. We should not allow a small, hateful, bigoted organization to dictate terms under which we all should live.

It’s time for that minority to go into the closet.

Spring appears to have arrived in Bend.  I’ve only lived here a few weeks and I can already identify the shift in the weather.  In fairly short order, the snow has turned to rain, and the rain has a.. dryness to it that reminds me of the monsoon rains in the Mojave and Sonora deserts.

It smells a little like home.  And it’s comforting.

I’m now surrounded by the odor of a desert coming alive.  This smell is quite different from the odor of the past three weeks.  It’s not as “cold” (even though the temperature still hovers around freezing at night).  It’s inviting.  It’s earthy.  It invited me to get out of my car in the middle of the desert today (some 40 miles east of downtown Bend) to experience the rain.

A lot of pain from the Long Winter I just lived through was washed away today.  Spring is finally here again.

I immediately knew it wasn’t the front desk. First off, the call audio was obviously not local.. even through this motel’s crappy PBX I could tell it was likely long distance, and even had telltale signs of Skype jitter in the audio. Secondly, I’ve stayed here long enough to have met all the front desk staff: they’re all old geezers, and this caller’s voice sounded like a juvenile punk kid. It also sounded vaguely.. familiar.

I sure wish I wasn’t asleep when the call came in. I now suspect it was the children at Madhouse Live.  It sounded like them, anyway.

OK, haha, very funny.  How droll.  And then I realized something that kinda creeps me out a little bit: they used my first name during the call.

Wait. How did they know my first name?

I walked to the front desk and had a brief conversation with the (old) man.  Turns out that our fun-loving telephone r0dent social engineered the front desk into releasing the name of the person in room 1xx using some story about somebody being ill.  Wonderful.  I informed the guy that we’d just been had, and went back to my room.

After sitting here for a few minutes, I now feel a little uneasy.  One of the downsides to having a unique first name is that it’s pretty easy to find me.  There is only one person with my first name: me.  Doing a simple Google search on only my first name gives you Everything You Ever Need To Know.  (Yeah, I’m aware that by posting this very article I’m making it worse..)

I’m fortunate: the caller could have been a phisher working a scam and not just out for a Fiber-Optic Joyride.  I also plan on making sure the hotel gets a little bit of an education on this and doesn’t fall for this flim-flammery in the future.

Oh, and a big apology to Madhouse Live (assuming that was in fact you) I didn’t provide a better show.  I was asleep.  Give me a little warning next time and you’d have had something legendary.  I could have slipped in to my “Big Dick” Stetson voice and gone all shit-howdy hick postal on you (which is probably what you expected when you called a budget motel in rural Oregon anyway, not some half-awake blogger geek).

Anyway, I’m going back to bed.  With the ringer on the phone switched to OFF.

Morsemail is, “A simple text format that encodes mark and space times to make it possible to send Morse coded messages via email” …

Am I the only one that sees how moronic this is on the very face of it?

On the one hand, there are things about it I don’t think I’ll ever understand.  I’m unquestionably male in appearance and in outward personality.  I’ve never had to cope with many of the issues that those friends of mine who are transgender have had to cope with.  I’ve never had to look at the face in the mirror and feel like the person staring back at me “is not me.”

On the other hand, a significant part of my spiritual and cultural identity is decidedly transgender: my feminine higher self is always there, guiding my hands and words in often very subtle ways.  She is honored and cherished, and with some adjustments over the years is happy and content with the balance as it sits.

I am a member of a spiritual group that has sought out my divine feminine self, and nourishes her.  She holds a special place in their ritual structure.  They accept the fact that She is in a male body.  They accept that when she speaks the words may be coming from a male mouth.  And they honor and cherish both the male container and the female self.  They look beyond the physical into the spiritual, and see the Creature inside for what and who she is. And all are happy and content with the balance as it sits.

In a moment of clarity while meditating about the “Z Budapest Situation” last night, I bolted out of meditative state when I heard my internal voice say the following line:

As the athame is to the male, so the chalice is to the female.

.. and I realized the inherent sexual and gender bias in that very statement and in the way the Great Rite has been played out, time and time again, in just about every Pagan tradition I’ve ever been affiliated with.  And suddenly, I’m no longer content with the balance as it sits.

In the pagan display of the Great Rite as presented here, there’s no place for transgenderism.  There’s no place for non-heterosexual intercourse.  There’s two clearly defined roles: of the athame, the male, the phallus.. and the chalice, the female, the womb.  The implications are profound.  You either have a penis, and are male.. or you have a vagina, and are female.  And the only valid display of the Great Rite is a penis inserted into a vagina.  That is the Only Sacred Thing: there is no opportunity for two athames to interact, or two chalices, or any other combination.

I don’t know where I’m going with this thought, other than I’m actually now a little bit ashamed of myself for not seeing this sooner.  And I’m left with a lingering uneasiness that maybe it is time to reclaim a new ritualization of this act.. one that accepts that human sexuality isn’t black and white, isn’t just about the Pure Male penetrating the Pure Female.  One that can accept the paradigm of homosexuality, of transgenderism, and of transhumanism.

Trust me, there will be more.

EDIT: a slight change to the wording in a couple places was made at 1:15pm for prosaic flow.

It’s largely a generational thing, really. Most kids (up to people in their early 30′s, generally) seem to be pretty comfortable with electronic delivery of their content. They’re perfectly content getting the majority of their content from their game consoles’ media stores, on their iPad or phone, or from Netflix or Amazon.  The older generations are not likely to really see much advantage with any media beyond Blu-Ray.  Even now, many in the 50+ age bracket seem happy with DVD.  I know more than one person in that age range that still actively uses VHS…

I had a lot of fond memories of my father. But the best was a bit of a time-release memory, not realized until long after my father’s death.

My father, when he was in his early 20′s, was a camp counselor at a place called Camp Union, somewhere in Massachusetts, probably back in the 1950′s. This I knew.

What I didn’t know was that he kept every single piece of correspondence he ever received from the young men and the families he worked with. I found the box of letters in cleaning out his house after he passed away.

A few of the letters were actually recent. I reached out to a few of the most recent letter-writers, and discovered one of the men was now living nearby (I live in Oregon presently). We met for coffee one day, and he shared with me many wonderful stories of times at the Camp. And he shared with me many of the letters my father wrote back to him over the years.

But the best was the letter I got from this gentleman a few days later. What he could not express to me that day was that my father apparently worked with “at risk” boys from the inner city of Boston, and that my dad was one of the key reasons he straightened his life out and went on to be a “pillar of the community” when he was well on the road to being a street thug.

And suddenly I realized that my father was not only my father, but the father of a lot of other struggling young men in the 1950′s long before I came into his life. And I have a lifetime of correspondence to read and cherish, knowing that as much as my father meant to me.. that there are hundreds… maybe even thousands… of other men who’s lives he touched.

And that makes me proud of my father in ways no one single memory can ever do.

Note this does not effect the listserver.

Stop buying RIAA-produced music. Stop buying movie tickets to MPAA-produced movies. Stop supporting the content industry in general, who produces vapid mind-rotting “culture” and abuses artists and technical people alike.

10% of us doing this would do more to hurt the industry than if every website opposing SOPA/PIPA went dark for a month.