Define "Glutton for Punishment"

So.... Chinese New Year.

You know, I can't even claim I didn't know what I was getting into this year; 'cause I did it last year and I remember how pretty much every single muscle in my body was aching for the subsequent month.

At least last year, our lion dancing for Chinese New Year was spread over two days.

Not so this year. We did it all in one day. Eleven hours straight of Lion Dancing. Now that may not sound like much, but I was pretty much exhausted by the time we called it a night at 8:00 pm.

But the good news is that I survived. I'm alive and breathing.

Tired, yes.

Sore, hell yes.

Every muscle in my body feels as if it's been beaten with a rubber baseball bat.

Next year, I really can't claim that I didn't know what I was getting into.

Welcome to the Year of the Fire Dog.

I worship whoever invented the RAID array.

So one of my hard drives failed on Wednesday. This was, largely, a non-event for me because I was bright in my assembly of my current computer. The hard drive of this computer is actually two individual physical drives. The two drives have the same data written to them, so effectively, one drive is an identical copy of the other.

So the short version is that a complete drive failure on my computer was a non-issue; the drive was even under warranty, so there was no cost for replacement; and now I have the drive replaced and synchronized with the source disk. Two hours later, and it's as if the failure never happened.

The Aristocrats

So I rented the movie The Aristocrats last night.

The fact that this movie managed to get an NC-17 rating, in spite of having no violence, no sex, and no nudity should tell you something.

Basically, this movie is a documentary of a joke. A joke known as "The Aristocrats" (surprise, surprise). It's a joke which is never told in front of an audience, but has nevertheless been deeply rooted in the consciousness of stand-up comedy.

The joke begins in pretty much the same way: a family walks into a talent agent's office plugging a new act. The punchline is: "wow, that's a hell of an act," the talent agent says, "what do you call it?" The Father replies: "The Aristocrats."

Now, on the face of it, this might not seem very funny, but in between the opening lines and the punch line, they can, and do, put just about anything their warped minds can dream up. We're talking everything from simply crude, to vile, to downright disgusting. As Paul Reiser put it in the film, "I believe in some countries you can be put to death for what goes on in the most tame versions of this joke."

Basically, you shift from laughing so hard you can't breathe, to looking at the screen in complete shock that the comedian they happen to be showing actually just said what you think they said.

And as one who watched Full House in his youth, I will never look at Bob Saget the same way again.

The cast is, in a word, phenomenal. They got over a hundred very famous comedians; George Carlin, Drew Carey (who has the coolest name of all the comedians they got), Hank Azaria, Tim Conway, Carrie Fisher (I will never look at Star Wars the same way either), Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Whoopie Goldberg, Eric Idle, The staff of The Onion, Kevin Nealon, Gilbert Godfreid (who, hands down, gave the single funniest rendition of the joke), Paul Reiser, Chris Rock, The Smothers Brothers, Penn and Teller (The former was actually one of the producers of the film), Jason Alexander... The list literally goes on and on, but I can't remember most of the others. Like I said, they got over a hundred comedians for this thing.

I have here a link to the South Park version of the joke. Be advised, this file is probably not something you should watch at work, and should not be viewed by anyone with delicate tastes. You have been warned.

Definitely worth seeing.

Sex

Okay, now that I have your attention....

Actually, I want to delve a little more in detail on a subject that I touched on a few posts ago. Namely, why is sex such a big issue among right-wingers?

I mentioned that several members of the Family Research Council had proclaimed that making the HPV vaccine mandatory was "sending teens the wrong message."

We're talking about a pro-life, pro-family organization which has it's knickers in a twist over a vaccine which could potentially protect the lives and fertility of thousands of women in the US alone every single year; for the simple reason that HPV is (in 92% of cases) sexually transmitted (those who object to the vaccine tend to studiously ignore the other 8%). They're particularly fond of parading HPV horror stories in front of Teenagers to terrorize them into the "Abstinence is the only option" message because unlike HIV or VD, Condoms are less effective in preventing it (to use baseball parlance; you don't need a home run; first base will do).

Give a Christian Conservative the choice between sex and death, and they'll choose death every single time. No sex for unmarried people, no HPV vaccines, no condoms for gays ('cause it's obviously better for them to get AIDS than to use a condom; God obviously never liked them anyway), no emergency contraception, no birth control pills, no abortions for anyone. When a 13-year-old girl in Florida (identified in the newspapers only as L.G.) was pregnant and wanted to terminate the pregnancy (at her doctor's suggestion), Christian soldiers rose to, quite literally, drag the girl kicking and screaming into the delivery room, tie her to the table and force her to undergo what I understand is an extremely painful process; and yes, I realize that there wouldn't have been much actual dragging, kicking or screaming involved, but I don't think I'm exaggerating by much here. Even when it was proven and accepted by the court that carrying the child to term had a threefold greater chance of killing both her and the child than the abortion would, they still insisted that the child had to be born. Pro-life my ass. Fortunately, a federal judge disagreed and allowed the abortion to proceed. The judge, specifically chosen for his conservative views, was labeled as an activist.

I think we can pretty much give up on the idea that the Pro-life, Pro-family end of the political spectrum has anything to do with the "life of the unborn" (setting aside, for the moment, whether the unborn actually is life). This is about sex; and more specifically, keeping sex firmly coupled to reproduction, at least as far as women are concerned. If they were truly protecting "the life of the unborn," they'd be handing out condoms at street corners, they'd be dishing out birth control pills and morning after pills en masse. They'd actually listen when more "liberal" (if you use the term loosely) elements of society suggest that the way to reduce the number of abortions is to educate people on making sex safer. Instead of making emergency contraception available right next to the toothpaste (which, I can pretty much guarantee, would reduce the occurrence of abortion), they applaud pharmacists who refuse to fill out prescriptions, and doctors who don't tell rape victims about emergency contraceptives. And yet interestingly enough, while they may offer lip service to the "low" (actually over 95%, if used properly) effectiveness of condoms; for some reason they're not interested in reducing their availability in order to keep the boys chaste.

This isn't about abortion. This isn't even about reducing the number of abortions, this is about the possibility that (horror of horrors) sex could be fun. That's why they object to abortion, to any form of contraception other than abstinence, to same sex marriage, and to just about anything that could make sex less risky. If word got out that there are reasons for having sex that have nothing whatsoever to do with producing spawn, women could no longer be forced to assume the role that Christian conservatives seem to believe that they should: a brood mare for the state.

Now, I admit that I don't have much in the way of solid data to back this up. At best, this is a hypothesis; but you have to admit that there is a certain internal consistency in the suggestion that maybe this has less to do with abortion than it does forcing women to produce babies.

Am I gettin' old or something?

So I made it back to Calgary, and in a move of incredible idiocy, I decided to start Kung Fu-ing right away.

Turns out that my body isn't gonna let me get away with that. It turns out that taking three weeks and not doing any physical activity means that I can't just jump straight back into it.

So I'm very, very sore right now.

The thing that bugs me about this is that when I was 18, I probably could've got away with it. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have hurt, but at least I wouldn't be unable to move.

And, no, I'm not exaggerating. It literally took me twenty minutes just to get myself out of bed this morning, and another five to make my way across my room to the computer so that I could type this.

On the plus side, my fingers don't seem to be hurting that much, so typing isn't that high on the torture scale. I do have a few muscles that aren't kiling me. Unfortunately, they aren't located in my back, shoulders, legs, arms, feet, neck or face. Dammit.

Okay. Need to go eat something, then lie down. I hurt.

The things I go through to see my folks on the Holidays

It's one of the little ironies of life that Airports are among the least pleasant places on earth to be stranded, and the places where you're most likely to actually be stranded.

I flew into Denver, intent upon flying from there to Durango, Colorado; where my family was waiting for me. My flight into Denver was delayed by three hours, which in and of itself was not a problem, except that my flight to Durango had left an hour before my flight to Denver landed.

The fact that I arrived at the gate almost two hours after my flight was supposed to leave, and it still hadn't left, should tell you something.

Of the six flights to leave for Durango, three had failed to depart, three more remained to leave, the first of which was four hours behind schedule (and counting) and two hundred very angry people were waiting by the gate. Combined, all three flights to Durango could carry approximately 75 passengers. They were in the process of booting people off of the three remaining flights to make room for the three flights which had failed to depart. And I was arriving late in the game.

This did not look promising. I had a confirmed ticket, but as I was rapidly learning, that wasn't in any way, form, or fashion a guarantee that I would be leaving Denver within the week. The next confirmed flight to Durango was on the 28th. April was planning to meet me in Durango after Christmas, and at the rate I was moving, she'd beat me there.

Don't worry; this story does become more positive. You know me; I'm Mr. Positive himself.

But at that moment, things were looking a little bleak. I called ahead and told my folks to start a pool on whether or not I was going to make it to Durango in time for Christmas, and to put my money on the 27th.

Life has this nasty habit of taking you in directions you never expect it to. If you had told me on the morning of the 23rd, that I'd be renting a car with three complete strangers to take an unplanned seven-hour road trip through the wolf creek pass to spend Christmas with my family, I'd probably have said that you were fricking nuts. But lo and behold, in the midst of the chaos that was Gate B61 at the Denver International Airport, four complete strangers finally said, "screw this, we're gettin' home for Christmas."

But I digress.

My brother happened to travelling on the same day, and he had a confirmed ticket to Cortez. So he was gonna make it home in time (lucky bastard). At the moment, it didn't look like I was. He asked me what my plan was. I was on standby for the next two flights; I was also on standby for the flight to Cortez. Plan C was to rent a car and drive.

That's when I met Carla.

Carla was a 38-year-old writer from San Francisco who had been waiting at the gate since about 11:00 that morning. She was flying to Durango to spend Christmas with the closest thing she had to family; a friend who lived in Pagosa Springs; a town about an hour out of Durango. She couldn't help but overhear me mentioning to my elder brother that driving to Durango may end up being my only viable option, and offered on the spot to split the cost of a car with me. I think we were both hanging onto the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe we could get out of there before the week was over.

That hope seemed only slightly less desperate when we found out that they were finally going to get a plane which could potentially fly to Durango.

That hope was dashed when the pilot grounded the plane. Normally, I suppose I'd be happy about that; but normally, I haven't just spent four hours trying to get onto a plane that I already had a ticket to get onto, at least in theory. But at 6:00 pm, three and a half hours after the plane theoretically should've left, thirteen hours more than some of the people waiting at the gate should've been waiting, we were informed that the absolute earliest that we'd get out of the airport was 8:55 pm; and even then, the odds were that we would be waiting at least until tomorrow. Maybe later.

Carla and I took one look at each other and pretty much decided on the spot that we were driving.

We decided to divide our efforts. Carla made sure that our bags got on the plane (ironically, they were going to reach Durango before we did), I was going to get a car.

First, though, I was going to try one last hail mary pass.

I walked to the gate for the last flight to Cortez to see if I could get my butt onto the last flight, leaving at 9:05 pm.

No dice.

I was walking back from the concourse that time forgot, Carla called me to let me know that she'd got another passenger for the car.

That's how I met Jeremy. Jeremy was a 22-year-old undergrad in commerce at Colorado State University, just trying to get home in time for Christmas. He'd been seeing a young woman for almost six years and was planning to upgrade that status to "Fiancee" in the near future.

So the three of us (happily) left the airport, and one by one, checked each of the car rental counters to see who would rent us a car for a one-way transit to Durango.

The fact that this was a seven-hour drive we were signing up for (it was now approaching 8:00 pm) was not lost on us; but at least it beat waiting at the gate for a plane to show up.

And that's when I met Sydney. Sydney had been trying to get out of New York for three days, and had found that to be somewhat difficult with the transit strike. She'd arrived at the airport at 8:00 that morning. She was coming upon hour twelve in the airport. The way she put it, she'd run into Jeremy in front of the gate, who'd mentioned that we were renting a car. She'd basically said that she was still going to try to get onto the next plane.

That was around about the same time that the pilot announced that he was going to ground the plane. Faced with the prospect of having to wait until at least 8:55 before she even had the remotest chance to get out of the airport exclaimed to the young woman behind the desk "Oh (expletive deleted), I'm such an idiot! What's that guy's name!?"

The woman behind the desk, understandably, didn't understand what the hell she was talking about. Her confusion deepened when Sydney leaned across the desk, and, fueled by the frustration of getting the hell out of New York; followed by twelve hours waiting to get on a plane; demanded to know where we would most likely go in the airport if we wanted to rent a car. That's when she met us and asked us, pleaded, really, if there was still room for one more in the car.

Sydney had had a rough day.

She high-tailed it out of the building to meet the three of us, just as we managed, for the bargain price of $200 US, to rent a car to get to Durango. Split four ways, and seen as an investment in our future sanity, we decided that it was a bargain.

So we piled the four of us into a Ford Five Hundred; and headed south.

It was a rather impressive encounter by anybody's standards. We took turns driving; which means that each of us would drive for about two hours at the most. Two of us could sleep; and the other would stay awake to keep the driver alert.

That was the theory, but it didn't end up working out that way. All of us were pretty wired; well, except for Sydney, who was just bushed. The rest of us were up basically trading life stories.

Consider this for a moment. The four of us had met barely hours ago, and now we were embarking on an intense, seven-hour drive to Durango. Four complete strangers unified by a desire to spend the holidays somewhere other than the Denver International Airport. And here we were, trading pretty much the stories of our respective lives.

I mentioned earlier that Carla was a writer. From her perspective, this was gravy. This was the kind of material that makes books. So fueled by her insatiable hunger for information, the four of us learned more about each other than some people who have known each other for years.

So as midnight rolled around; as the 23rd turned to Christmas eve, we were weaving our way through the Wolf Creek Pass and talking as if we were life-long friends.

I spent four hours flying, I spent another four in the airport. I spent seven hours driving from Denver to Durango.

And I found out in hindsight, there was room on the flight from Denver to Cortez.

I'm glad I didn't get on that plane.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Quick Question:

This is gonna be a short post, but I'm wondering; am I the only one who sees Stephen Harper on the news and thinks to himself: "So that's what happens when you don't let gay guys touch your hair?"

When did "liberal" become a dirty word; Part II

I feel the need to clarify that I don't consider myself to be liberal. Actually, I call myself apolitical. I vote for the person who I believe best represents me (even if that happens to be nobody). In fact; I don't even vote for parties in federal elections; I try to remain as ignorant as possible of what a given party platform is, and focus upon the individual I'm voting for. That's probably part of the reason why I'd vote for my current MP, if I were actually planning to vote in the next Canadian Federal Election (which I'm not). Not because he's a member of the Conservative party; but because he's doing a decent job as MP.

For my Canadian readers, I also feel the need to specify that when I mention liberals and conservatives, I mean lower-case "l" and "c" respectively; I'm talking about the political view, and not the political party.

And finally, I feel the need to quote someone smarter than me; so I will:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "liberal?" If by "liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "liberal." But if by a "liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "liberal."

John F. Kennedy said this in what was arguably a more enlightened time; when being labeled as a "liberal" wasn't the political kiss of death that it apparently is today.

But seriously; why is being labeled as a "liberal" such a bad thing? It's such a bad thing, apparently, that they've had to come up with a whole new name for themselves: "progressives." Liberals ended slavery in America; got women the right to vote; got African-Americans the right to vote; they gave same-sex couples the right to marry in Canada and in Massachusetts (and hopefully, coming soon to a neighborhood near you); they created medicare; they passed the Civil Rights act and the Voter's Rights act; they ended segregation.

Now, I feel the need to again clarify, I'm not a liberal; but frankly, many who eargerly label themselves as such have accomplished some pretty decent things. All of those things I listed above: they were actively blocked by conservatives.

In the interest of fairness, conservatives have also accomplished great things. Nixon ended the Vietnam war, Reagan ended the cold war, Bush (Sr.) ended Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and then did something that Bush Jr. hasn't yet figured out how to do: he went the hell home. Nobody likes to send their country to war, but at least Bush Sr. had a decent excuse for doing it.

I've had some people ask me what my political views are: my answer is pretty simple: I do what makes sense. I don't believe that "because it's always been done this way" is a good reason to keep doing it. Sometimes "the way it's always been done" is still a good way of doing things; sometimes it isn't. Either way, I don't belive that we can make decisions based upon tradition. Saying that we need to keep doing something in one particular way because that's worked in the past is, frankly, stupid. For example: I support government-sponsored daycare; something which is viewed as a typically-liberal position, provided that there is a requirement that those using the service have a job while they're using it. Frankly, I'm not gonna pay taxes so that someone out there can unload his or her kid, then sit at home and watch Oprah. But, if provide daycare service to people who are not working because they have to stay home and take care of the kids; we now have people who are making taxable revenue; thereby increasing government income, allowing the government to provide more services like government-sponsored daycare.

I like to call myself a "reasonist." I do what's reasonable; no more, no less.

This space for Rent

April and I went to catch the movie version of Rent on Saturday night.

Broadway musicals are a hard thing to translate from the stage to the screen. Something is always lost in the translation; it's not the director's fault, or any of the actors', but there's just something about that interaction between the audience and the performers that you just don't get with a movie; so it should be mentioned that Columbus had the deck stacked against him from the moment that he decided to put this musical on the big screen.

I don't mean to sound as if I didn't like the movie; because I did. The music was well-performed, the actors were comfortable in their roles, and if you like musicals, this was a good one. But having experienced the show when it came to Calgary, then seeing the movie, there's really no comparison.

This is another of the better films I've seen this year, and like the last one, this one will be a hard sell to audiences everywhere. Those who don't like musicals won't like this, and those who have seen it on stage will probably be overly critical of the movie version; whether it's deserved or not. I'm apparently one of those very rare guys (according to April) who a) likes The Sound of Music and b) isn't gay.

All that notwithstanding, if you go to it with an open mind, you'll enjoy it. It's a raucus, energetic film, and if you're at all musically inclined, your toes will be tapping by the time the first song has played its final chords.

Okay; shutting up now.

Compassionate Conservatives

Am I the only one who's starting to think that one of the identifying characteristics of people who identify themselves as "compassionate conservatives" is a complete and total lack of compassion?

Recently, the Family Research council has denounced the possibility of vaccinating teenagers against two different strains of Human Papilloma Virus; which, combined, could prevent approximately 70% of all cervical cancer. This vaccine has the potential of saving the lives of 3700 women in the United States alone every single year; and the FRC has gone on record claiming that they don't want it offered to teenagers with their standard set of immunizations.

Why? Because HPV is sexually-transmitted. The FRC and Focus on the Family have both released statements voicing concerns that vaccinating teenagers could be the equivalent of telling them that it's okay to have sex. Neither have openly denounced it just yet, but neither wants the vaccine given to adolescents around 13 years of age; which happens to be exactly when it's most needed.

In a telephone interview with the Washington Post, Reginald Finger, a former medical analyst for Focus on the Family said: "There are people who sense that it could cause people to feel like sexual behaviors are safer if they are vaccinated and may lead to more sexual behavior because they feel safe."

Now, maybe I'm a little nuts, but isn't that like saying "we should only sell bicycle helmets to people who are planning on riding their bikes into a brick wall?"

Now, interestingly enough, both Focus on the Family and the FRC have been very vocal in the Pro-Life end of the spectrum. Again, I stay out of that particular debate simply because I don't believe that it can be boiled down to a black/white, pro-life/pro-choice debate, but suffice it to say that they seem to think that allowing abortion under any circumstances whatsoever is tantamount to murder.

So why is potentially allowing thousands of women to face the possibility of death or infertility suddenly okay?

If you want to reduce the number of abortions, the way to deal with it isn't to make abortion illegal, it's to educate the people who may potentially have them. Teach them about birth control; abstinence; teach them to be responsible for themselves sexually; and if they choose to have sex, make sure that they're safe about it.

But as far as they're concerned, that's no good, 'cause it still allows for the possibility that (gasp) people might actually have sex! So, they oppose just about anything that could make sex less risky: birth control pills; condoms; morning-after pills; HPV vaccines; I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that if you looked for it, they probably opposed use of Hepatitis vaccines too. As far as they're concerned, abstinence is the only option; which means that they're either seriously delusional, or they have their kids under 24-hour surveillance. The point is that if this vaccine is sending the "wrong message" - that we expect that they'll have sex - what's the "right message?" That we care more about their maidenhead than their lives? Why are those who are so adamant that abstinence is the only way to go so convinced that fear is the only way to promote abstinence? If not gettin' it before marriage is such a wonderful thing, it seems to me that the last thing you'll have to do is terrorize teenagers into not doin' it.

See, I really didn't get the reason why the far right wing have this unhealthy obsession with sex. They don't seem to want anybody havin' it. They oppose homosexuality; not because being attracted to someone of the same sex is wrong, but because they might actually have sex with someone of the same sex. They preach abstinence, rather than promoting the teaching of responsible sexuality. The overwhelming message: SEX CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE! While flatly rejecting just about any medical advancement that goes even partway to ensuring that sex doesn't ruin their lives.

It wasn't until a friend of mine provided me with a rather brilliant hypothesis. It's so simple, so elegant, and rather beautiful in its simplicity.

They're not gettin' any; and what they're gettin', they're not enjoyin'.

I have to admit, I don't have any data to back this up. For all I know, they could spend their evenings banging the hell out of the local college football team; but you have to admit that there does seem to be a fair amout of sexual frustration inherent to the far-right. Seriously: what issue have they been more vocal about than sex? They're against homosexuality, but not against the idea that someone could be attracted to the opposite sex; they tend to focus on the act itself. They're not against people dating, they're just against the idea that the daters may be having sex in the process. They're not against sex after marriage; but they object to any kind of birth control being used. And they've gone to the point where they are so adamant that nobody have sex before marriage that they've endorsed so-called abstinence-only programs; tax-funded programs which promote abstinence, and only abstinence. How do they do it? You guessed it: fear mongering; even if that fear is completely unfounded. For example, contrary to research, these programs insist that "touching another person's genitals can lead to pregnancy," that "there's no such thing as 'safe' or safer' sex," and (this is my personal favorite) "loneliness, embarrassment, substance abuse, and personal disappointment can be eliminated by being abstinent until marriage." I hope I don't actually have to say this, but for the record, not one of these are supported in the least by any empirical data.

In short, the only reason why sex is really an issue is because the far right sees a need to make it one. Why, I'll never know. Guess there are a few things that even I don't get.