Only One Election
Posted on June 6, 2012 in Elections
I believe pre-election polls should be outlawed. There is no reason for them other than to provide a bit of puffery for the news. And I think they have the effect of lowering participation in elections. People see that their candidate is, according to the poll, slated to lose, so they don’t show up.
This is a constitutional amendment I would get behind. There should be only one election, not several.
What Businessman Running for President?
Posted on May 22, 2012 in Campaign 2012 Class
Honestly, please show me. A businessman is someone who makes a product, sells a product, keeps the economy going. He struggles with the day to day of keeping afloat so that he can keep serving consumers. That describes Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. It described Steven Jobs. But Mitt Romney? Give me a break.
Mitt is a corporate raider. He doesn’t care about making products or selling them. He seizes control of companies and sells off their assets. If anything, he is an anti-businessman.
Real businessmen know that he is bad for business and for the economy in general.
The Real Depravity of 2012
Posted on May 16, 2012 in Accountability Campaign 2012 Gender Hatred Propaganda
Let me get this clear: I am not gay. But according to the Radicals of the Tea Party (who really don’t care about gay marriage except to excite the fear-driven) I must be homosexual because I support same sex marriage. And I have supported it for many years — about 24 to be precise.
To tell you the truth, the idea of sleeping with a man repels me. I much prefer checking out women — adult women. But I accept that there are people who are drawn to their own sex and that it is innate to them, not the result of rape or poor parenting or whether they drink lattes at Starbucks. I do not accept marriage as a child-producing union, though it is probably a better idea that you have a partner when you start having children. This idea categorically places Lynn and I out in the cold, yet we have remained partners for 25 years.
Marriage is about choosing a person to be a relative that transcends blood relations. It cannot change facts of fatherhood: one DNA test can undo the presumption of parenthood. But what it does is ensure that my wife and I can form a financial corporation of a sorts together. It lets me say that Lynn can make medical decisions for me — recognize the fact that I trust her before most of my own blood relatives in these affairs. When I die, it ensures that my share of the wealth generated by our household goes to her. Where do there need to be children in this? ((Though marriage does help recognize children and preserve family wealth for them, too.))
Why not let people of the same sex have these same contracts without resort to legal legerdemain? Homophobia — which is hatred and fear, nothing more — just isn’t a reason.
But let’s get back to the real issues: we have a candidate for office who is a corporate raider. To hide his moral depravity, he trots out this issue. He has put people out of work, destroyed companies, and wrecked communities for the purpose of amassing wealth. Mitt Romney is a dangerous man and he is playing a dangerous game by playing the gay card.
Focus on him for what is he is: the champion of the 1%, the man who picks your pocket and wrecks your home life with his financial manipulations and favors to the rich and corporations. ((And if you are religious, God does not like the rich. And He expects the state to protect the poor. Read the prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the minor prophets. To believe otherwise is heretical and unChristian/unJewish/unMuslim.))
Whines of 2012 — Updated 12/17/2012
Posted on April 24, 2012 in Anxiety Dentition Dogs Health OCD Spirituality and Being Whines
Let me count the ways the events of the past few months have screwed me. Note that there may will be additions as the weeks pass…so keep checking this article. It will be a mega-whine!
- First, my mother dies of a glioblastoma — brain cancer — the same disease that killed her father. The oncologist told me that he doubted it was hereditary. I am waiting for the announcement of a new hereditary variety any day.
- Drake gets into a fight with a larger dog.
- Lynn begins to bleed beyond her period. I talk her into seeing a doctor. She gets referred and referred until she is scheduled for a hysterectomy which is then handed over to an oncologist who tells us that only 2% of the patients her age presenting with her symptoms have cancer. He repeats this just before he performs the operation. It is only supposed to take half an hour. An hour and fifteen minutes later, I notice the time. He comes out with a grim look on his face and tells me that he found a malignant mass on her left ovary. Two days later, we learn to our relief that it is not ovarian cancer, but uterine cancer that has metasticized up the left fallopian tube. She spends nearly a week in the hospital. I tell people, with a sigh, that someone has to be the 2%.
- We skip my mother’s memorial service. This was supposed to be our vacation.
- We now need to make the condo readily cleanable. So we have to rip out the carpet and put in new flooring. Everything small in the condo needs to be brought into the garage.
- My favorite cat — Fiona — dies.
- The bathroom sink backs up.
- I hurt my back.
- I cut my hands and my knees.
- I gain weight and fall out of the great shape I was in in the fall.
- My other cat — Little Bo — goes crazy when I send her to board at the vet, so we take her out. I take her to a motel because the people Lynn is staying with don’t want a cat in their house.
- The floorers discover that our floor is not level. Either because of settling or because the builders screwed up 22 years ago or both, there are large humps all over the condo. We need to spend an additional $1000 to fix these.
- Lynn’s hair starts to fall out from the chemo. She is given a 75-80% chance to live.
- Drake runs away three times in one day from the house where we send him to stay during the remodeling. Turns out he is slipping under a gate, so we block the way. I resolve to visit him every day.
- My dentist informs me that three of my crowns need to be replaced.
- Weather report promises rain for two days, pushing back the time before we can move back into the condo.
- Painter discovers the reason why the previous owners covered the bathroom in wallpaper — there was damage to the walls that they were too lazy to plaster over. Plus they used white glue to hold it in place. (What kind of idiot puts wallpaper in a bathroom?) Add more money to the cost of the job.
- Our new maid asks for a cabinet. She puts it outside on the deck because the weather report says that it will only be cloudy and the weather report is never wrong. It drizzles heavily all night. I do manage to cover it and wipe down the wet parts before putting it in the garage the next morning.
- We put felt feet on everything except for one file cabinet which has a sharp lip that we can’t find a way of covering.
- We witness an accident when we come out of a local restaurant. One man hurt. I’m glad it wasn’t one more thing to add to this list, but I would rather it didn’t happen to these people, either.
- The dentist informed me that I needed to have a tooth pulled.
- The garbage disposal dies necessitating its replacement. (Yes, we pushed the red button, cranked the main rotor, etc. The repairman did the same things.)
- The tooth extraction will entail some painful digging around because the tooth has broken into three pieces. Plus I will have to undergo a sinus tap and bone graft three months after the first surgery. Plus insurance will only cover about $78 of the total. How about some dental insurance reform?
- Drake found a new way to get out by forcing his way through one of the front window screens.
- Just before we are to get the good news that Lynn’s treatment is going so well, they may end it before they had planned, the phone rings and someone tells me that my dog is out. “No, he can’t be out. We locked him up.” “No, your dog jumped out of the second story window….” Drake is fine, but I am angry with God about heaping so much crap and denying us the joy of the moment when we learned that things were going better than hoped for Lynn. Now we have to put out a thousand dollars for custom interior louver shutters.
- An old obsession with the number 13 has returned. If I check the time, it is 13 after. I haven’t gotten to the point of counting things to see if they add up to 13 as I do when the obsession is truly out of control, but it is getting there. I wish I knew how to break the cycle. This is not a good sign for my mental health.
- My country is going to hell.
- Last Friday afternoon, I am chewing on some licorice when I feel something hard between my teeth. It is a crown. Given the day, I can’t get in to have it looked at, so I wait until Monday. My dentist looks at it, frowns, and refers me to an endodontist. He looks at it, frowns, and refers me to a periodontist to have the tooth pulled. The bicuspid has broken down to where the nerve is. Do I feel any pain? Dare I say that I don’t?
- So now I have to have two teeth pulled, on opposite sides of the mouth! This will mean liquid diets, I dread.
- Chest pains. This led to a three day hospital stay. My roommate was a whining biker. My mother who was a nurse had warned me about these and she was right! He bossed the staff and cried when the needles hurt. (Like, duh!) I was going so crazy by day three that I threatened to check out AMA if they didn’t release me.
- Triglycerides are through the roof. No explanation yet for the chest pains.
- Doctor cancelled her appointment with me due to illness. Does this really belong here? Maybe not.
- Lynn had a blowout on the road that took out at least a third of her sidewall. She is all right. Rims were not damaged.
- I keep getting #1141 errors every time I open up Rosetta Stone. Restarting doesn’t do a bloody thing.
- We discover that the right front of Lynn’s car has been crushed. Week in the body shop.
- Night of the malfunctioning software. Can’t move Rosetta Stone to a new computer and can’t get a game program to work on a new computer.
- Friends don’t like my politics. Plus I temporarily pick up a roach who is against privatization, but sure Obama is going to push us that way. Where do these people get these ideas?
- I put on 15 pounds.
- Learn that my cousin killed himself. Attend the funeral.
- Third tooth slated to be pulled in January.
- Repairman drops an electric drill onto our wood laminate floor, leaving a dime-sized hole where it can’t be covered by a rug.
- Massive struggle to install Windows 8. Headphones decide not to work. I buy a new pair, only to discover that the problem is still there. Then I discover a simple fix.
- Extraction of second tooth has complications — one root takes an hour to pull. Fortunately, I am well sedated.
YES I KNOW IT CAN BE WORSE AND THAT IS WHAT WORRIES ME!
Everyone is telling me that “things will get better”. I sigh and reread Job.
At least Lynn’s chemo is over and the scans are looking good. And Obama won.
Fiona is Gone….
Posted on March 23, 2012 in Cats Grief
We put Fiona down at 5:45 PM Pacific Daylight Time.
She appeared to have pancreatitis and something that was damaging her liver in a big way. It was going to cost us $2000 to have a 50-50 chance of keeping her alive. We had already put down $2500.
I think the vet encouraged me because he did not want me to lose her in the middle of my wife’s cancer crisis.
I chose to stop trying. I feel bad.
Cancer Threat
Posted on March 3, 2012 in Anxiety Body Language Whines
Lynn is seeing an oncologist tomorrow because of an abnormal number in a blood test that might indicate ovarian cancer. It could also indicate anemia (which she has had) or fibroids (the problem which brought her to see a doctor in the first place, two months ago.)
Everyone is rallying around her even though she is the least concerned of any of us. I am sick with worry and irritable. The main reason for this are my fears that this will prove to be a malignant tumor. Society is well possessed when a woman’s is faced with the prospect that her husband is going to die, but I have to say that few seem to understand or care about the reverse.
The Universe appears to have taken on the role of the Mafia in my life. Instead of striking me directly, it has gone after the one I love.
I am faced with the prospect of losing my best friend. You don’t come across these easily. I have to say that few measure up to Lynn’s level of compassion and confidence. Others might be my friend, but they do not possess the virtues I have come to crave in her. Then there is the matter of my life support. If something happens to her, I will gain a small amount of insurance and see the mortgage paid off. But I will not be well off, given that I will have to pay my own medical bills. This is the price I have paid for being a deadbeat.
Maybe that is why few have offered to talk to me about my fears.
Mitt Romney and the “Politics of Envy”
Posted on February 9, 2012 in Campaign 2012 Class
My city consists of a variety of economic communities. In my neighborhood alone, we have one bedroom condos, two bedrooms, townhouses, regular houses, and fine mansions on the hill. What you don’t see is the condo owners griping about the better circumstances of the people with the best houses. Most of us accept our fate. We don’t necessarily feel life is unlivable without a mansion. That, I dare say, is a fault of the weathiest of the wealthy.
Yet when we complain about the way the wealthy have manipulated our Supreme Court and our Congress to serve their ends above ours, we are accused of “envying” the wealthy. Let’s evaluate this:
- They don’t like it because we feel that everyone should have a vote. Wanting a vote for every citizen is envy. Only the rich should have a vote.
- They don’t like it because we feel that our office holders should care most about the people they represent and serve, not some plutocrat with a huge checkbook living in a distant state. Wanting fair representation is envy. Only the rich should have audiences with these.
- They have apoplexy when we declare that we want a say in what happens in our neighborhood. Saying that we want to control the quality of the air and the water that we breathe and that we drink is envy. Clean air and clear water is only for the rich.
- They don’t like it because we want health insurance for everyone. Giving everyone access to a doctor when they are sick is envy. Only the rich deserve to prolong their lives.
- They don’t like it that we can talk about our grievances and organize using the Internet. Having easy access to one’s peers is envy. The rich should control who gets to say what on the Internet.
- They don’t like our calls for a fair tax rate for those who gain wealth by stock market manipulations or the luck of having wealthy parents rather than hard work and the production of goods made in America. Only the rich deserve to have money.
Fairness is always envy in their book. Never mind that they envy gods and do everything they can to ensure that they become like them.
Mitt Romney stands for the top 1%. He appeals to those of the 99% who think they might become part of the 1%. Look, he hints. “They want what you have. They want your house, your car, your swimming pool. They will take it away from you if you don’t vote for me.”
He is another agent of the politics of Fear, as insidious as the Tea Party who he appeases.
And this message makes him the most divisive politician in America today, more than the racialists and faux libertarians. He is at best, no better than them. He represents greed and lies.
Wendell the Bear
Posted on December 30, 2011 in Cats North Carolina
This is how I acquired him. My cat, a lovely calico by the name of Brandy Whine or Ms. Whine, went into heat. (Brandy had the talent of turning away when I tried to photograph her.) Several males from the Durham, North Carolina neighborhood — where I shared an abode with four room mates — gathered around the house. The most dominant of these was an orange tabby who I called William the Orange and a piebald Manx-cross who I named Wendell after a friend in high school.
Wendell didn’t leave once Brandy had had her fill of tomcat. He stuck around, mooching off me and my room mates. One day, I broke down, and decided to claim him as my own. I bought a collar with an ID tag and put it around his neck. Wendell, who’d been looking depressed in the weeks before, suddenly raised his head and strutted around. No more could you call him an alley cat. He was owned!
You might guess that given his street roots he didn’t take guff and he didn’t. I would often find him facing off with another tom. When I broke it up, he would turn to me and mew his deepest apologies.
As a father, he was amazing. We had heard that tomcats often kill kittens, so we took pains to keep him outside while they were growing up. One day, however, he sneaked in. I came into the kitchen to find him with kittens crawling all over him, purring happily. Afterwards, he helped Brandy watch the kittens when they were outside and helped me herd them back in the house when play time was over.
We moved around a bit, but when we did, we always followed this habit. A little before sunset, I would walk around the neighborhood. Wendell would follow me, huffing and puffing until he was out of breath. He would refuse to let me carry him and always made his own way back, though I had to stop frequently to let him catch his breath.
His other romance — beside Brandy who I had fixed to ensure that she would not grace us with more kittens — was with a room mate’s tiny tortoise shell named Friday. I cherish a picture I took of him lying with her on the bed after they had done it. My shadow catcher was a Champ Kodamatic, Kodak’s brief challenge to Polaroid’s hegemony in the instant photography field.
I brought him back to California with me, but he died two days later — the shock of the relocation had been too much for the little guy.
He set a high standard for my other cats, but most of them did not disappoint me. (The exception was a spoiled Persian Lynn and I nicknamed The Mad Cat. We quickly found her a home where she could be the only cat of the house.) Sometimes I dream of those summer nights, with Wendell following me and talking as he walked.
Oh the years. And the cats.
Depression Finds References Everywhere
Posted on November 23, 2011 in Depression Grief
Sorry for my absence. I got word a few weeks ago that my mother had a [[glioblastoma]] growing in her head and had only a few weeks to live. Since then, I have been swinging from depression to mania and back again, with a day or two here and there where I feel neither condition. When I feel [[hypomanic]], I feel curiously happy though without reference to anything in the world. Depression, of course, finds references everywhere.
So I am waiting, scanning negatives, cleaning out boxes. I don’t know how much longer this will go on.
Electronic Frost Bite at Yosemite
Posted on October 30, 2011 in Photography Photos Silicon Valley Travels - Past
I had a particularly crapulous and petty boss. One year, he gave me two days off at the holidays: Christmas and New Years. I worked up until 5 p.m. on both Christmas and New Year’s Eve, then came back to do pretty much nothing the days after.
This fellow just hated people who saw more to their lives than the enrichment of his personal income. I had been looking forward to the holidays as a time when my wife and I could relax and maybe see some of the parks. His crude maneuver of granting us only the minimal holidays threatened this.
But I found a way around it. Yosemite was only three hours away. I made up my mind to go there.
I announced this as I left the office. He mumbled something about the impossibility and foolhardiness of the venture. The next morning, I rose at six, loaded my camera and spouse in the car, and crossed the San Joaquin Valley to Yosemite.
I discovered a serious limit to what my camera could do. 8008s run off ordinary AA batteries. They can go a long time on four of these. But as I discovered when I stopped to photograph a beautiful waterfall, the batteries freeze up when it is too cold. As other people snapped away using their older SLRs, my state-of-the-art technology balked. Fstop and speed numbers flashed on the tiny screen ((This was no digital)) and then disappeared. My precious camera had died.
The Nikon came back to life when we parked in the village. I quickly figured out that if I kept the camera warm, it would keep taking pictures. So I rattled off two quick shots of the place where Yosemite Falls should have been ((The first time I laid eyes on the wonder was on this January day. And they weren’t there. Instead, the wall was covered by a long icicle. The next time we tried was on the last day of a trip — December 1 of the same year. Tioga Pass was still open, so we crossed the Sierras there and decided that while we were in Yosemite, we would slip into the Valley. This time the situation was even worse because the year had been especially dry. There was only the gray wall! We waited several years before we tried again and this time we went in the spring. Finally, we saw cascade after cascade thundering down the Valley walls. It’s all a matter of timing.)) and started on some closeups.
I danced with oak leafs, maple seeds, and a dead bee for about half an hour before we realized that if we didn’t leave soon, we’d have to drive the twisting road off the mountain in the dark. So we left the Yosemite Valley, stopped for dinner at a Golden Corral in — was it Merced or Modesto? — and made it home by nine in the evening.
I had had my holiday.
Thoughts on Models
Posted on October 9, 2011 in Morals & Ethics Photography Social Justice
Models need to understand that they are part of the creative process and photographers need to treat them as creative peers.
I’ve gone to two photo-shoots with models in the last two months. It’s a new world for me, he who has practiced most of his photography on hiking trails in the Santa Ana Mountains. ((Don’t worry. This will continue.)) I’ve found the world of glamor photography to be quite different from what I have expected. The women are treated well. One professional photographer I know includes a morality clause in his licensing agreement. This prevents him from reusing the photo in venues that might harm the model’s career such as politics, religion, hate, and pornography. ((Note that just because a model does nude work does not mean she wants her image to turn up on a porn site.)) I think this kind of respect is essential, but there’s another kind of respect that needs to be practiced as well.
Models have a reputation for being dumb. I think that what we perceive as imbecility is often reserve and self-protection. Youth also plays a part. You don’t want to say anything that will irritate your prospective employer. So if you ask a model her opinion on a photo, she will either tell you it is wonderful or she will tell you that what is important is what you like.
Models have successfully dictated some reasonable restrictions on what their images may be used for. It’s disturbing when a photographer takes a picture of a woman and then grafts her head onto a nude body for use in the skin trade or when he uses a woman who agreed to pose in a bikini as a barker for more meretricious web traffic. No modeling contract should allow for that and no one should be held for ransom when they find their photos appearing in career-killing places. ((Show up in a porn site and it is goodbye to Vogue.))
It is the timidity which is bred into models that disturbs me. I was taking photos of one young woman. I was having particular trouble because she was black and I don’t have much experience shooting that skin tone. Which was why I chose to work with her. But as I showed her my photos, her answer always was “Whatever you like.”
Now, I like to do justice to a person. I think the problem was she had been conditioned to always go along with the photographer. When one asked her for input, she didn’t know what to do except go into the broken record the modeling school taught her. Which I find tragic.
More experienced models have no trouble responding to this, at least the ones I have met. But this might be because they have been lucky to meet with progressive photographers who see their models as human beings. These models are wonderful to work with. I’d like to see more modeling schools and more photographers promote the idea of a creative interaction between models and the other creative persons who engage in a photo shoot. There’s this idea of photographer as mad genius who must be appeased that I think can and should be done away with. Working with a model should be something more than shouting out positions and moving her body around. ((You should never touch without the model’s permission, BTW, even if it is your girl/boyfriend.)) It should be a synthesis of the kinetic and the visual.
On Rudeness and Obliviousness
Posted on October 6, 2011 in Photography Vacation Spring 2007
Watch where you stand when taking a photograph
She yelled at me. “Get out of the way so the rest of us can see the rainbow.” I muttered something about her solving the problem by standing next to me and slinked off to the next stop on our five mile walk around Old Faithful.
The Universe meted out its punishment over the next few days in various ways. I saw plenty of examples of similar rude behavior by photographers. There was, for example, the guy at the overlook for the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone who hogged the best spot for about ten minutes. I stood by patiently, tapped my foot, cleared my throat, but he kept pulling out cameras and ever so carefully lining up the shots. When I finally got in with my tripod for an HDR shot, I finished in a minute and got out of the way.
Move the scene to the Oxbow Bend at Grand Teton National Park. These people didn’t just get in the way, they walked down into the foreground of everyone’s picture! So the rest of us were left waiting for several minutes while they mucked around down there. When they finally finished and climbed back up, no one said anything. We just waited on the hilltop and as soon as they were clear, took our pictures. Again, even though I was shooting HDR, I was finished in less than a minute. But they had held me up.
Final example (with evidence) was the woman who kept zig-zagging in front of the Chapel of the Transfiguration at Grand Teton. She just stayed in the shot. Never minded the rest of us. Just gaped at the scene and stopped to take one photo after another.
I finally thought that I had got rid of her when she moved to one side. But as soon as I pressed the shutter, she did a fast backtrack right into the shot:
Lady, if you surf the Internet like you take photos, there’s a chance you’ll find yourself here and feel shame. But I suspect you’ll be too busy seeking the next new experience to care.
