Friday, October 1
Sign of a good commute!
Last night I dreamed that this pizza place I like to go to gave me an extremely awful experience, and wanted to charge me for an entire pie for a mediocre slice to boot, then said something about just because a slice had hit the floor that their floor was as clean as the average dinner plate. I threw down some cash and loudly declared how awful they were, and that although I had liked them before I was sorely disappointed and they had lost a customer. I was pleased with myself for stating my grievances so clearly, because I rarely complain to a restaurant. I stormed out of there. A part of me hoped that the manager might follow me to the street and apologize but I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
I figured I’d have the very last word by posting a negative review on Yelp, then realized that I was dreaming, and it would be unfair to post a negative review of a place based on a dream experience. But then, the place only exists in my dream, so . . .
I think the pizza place was actually a metaphor for the ex-wife, in which case running off to Yelp wasn’t quite the answer, either. My dreams have been somewhat anxious lately, and I’m not clear as to why.
And, yes, there were goats along my commute today, but on a side road gated off from the trail.
Wednesday, October 13
I am so happy to see these photos of the Chilean miners coming out of the ground. Goners brought back to their families. I just happened to scroll past comment 163:
“So many people are thanking God, but I want to thank all the engineers, scientists, and workers who spent months and years developing and deploying the technology and resources necessary to make this possible. Thank you for giving these men their lives back and for providing all of us with an example of triumph over great adversity.”
Thanks, Aurora!
Thursday, October 14
Most of our office is cubes. High, neutral-colored walls that evoke in my mind the cells of medieval monks. At the periphery are rooms with doors: conference rooms for meetings or private offices for managers, whose work lives are dominated by meetings. The individual contributors like me are the muscles, and the managers are the nervous system.
In my building, the naming scheme for conference rooms is famous comedians. Bill Cosby, Conan O’Brien, Carrol Burnett . . .
Any of these conference rooms / offices have a name plate outside the door, indicating either the occupant or which conference room is inside. My first confusion came when I was trying to find a quiet room for a phone call, and spotting a darkened room with a comedian whose name I didn’t recognize and sticking my head in to find someone’s unoccupied office . . .
The managers in my group know to keep their offices locked, while away.
This morning someone asked me if I knew where so-and-so was. Never heard of him. I asked, in all sincerity, “is he an employee or a comedian?”
In our monks cells, we’ll take what bland pasty humor we can get.
This morning I learned that my grand-uncle, Bill McConeghey, has passed. He had just entered hospice care following a stroke. This was his time to go and even though I never knew him so well I miss him. He was a good guy who looked after others, and had a decent sense of humor to boot. A good guy. A role model.
And as I wrote to a well-meaning Christian relative:
“This is a time for Atheists to do their thing according to their beliefs. This is a time to offer comfort to people where they are, and an opportunity for you to respect, observe and appreciate the different religious beliefs of a family who are grieving. Be quiet, listen, engage in the universal human relationship we can all share regardless of religion. In this way, if someone finds a need to learn more about your religious beliefs, your words will find a receptive audience.”
Thursday, October 21
Cisco ūmi. It is a HD webcam you hook up to your HDTV and you can talk to friends and family. Like Skype, but much better quality. Unlike Skype, which is free, you’ll need to spend $600 on the appliance, plus a $25 monthly fee. It is also Japanese for “sea urchin” and to spell this product-for-North-America properly you will need to render an unfamiliar glyph. (ū)
I’m not quite seeing how this even remotely competes with Google TV, which will do all sorts of stuff like stream Netflix, along with HD video chat. The Logitech Revue will sell for $450. ($300 for the Revue, $150 for the camera accessory.) No monthly fee, that I am aware of, at least not for video chat. No glyphs, either. Revue is French for “review.”
I might be missing something but to me it looks like my employer has missed the ball really really badly here.
Thursday, October 28
Yesterday after 4:45pm I was hustling toward San Bruno Caltrain to catch the 4:52. I hadn’t figured I would make it at first but as I got closer to the station I realized I could totally catch that train so I stepped up the pace. I hustled through an intersection, studying the cars to ensure it was safe. Then my mind went somewhere else for a moment, like I was dreaming, and I found myself on the sidewalk.
“You okay?”
There was blood on my hand. Must have cut my hand.
“Are you okay?”
I fell down? Really? Okay. Must have tripped on that curb.
“You okay?”
I was in a daze. I answered by swearing a little bit. I got up. I figured out the blood on my hand was coming from somewhere else. My face.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah. I think so. I guess. You tell me?”
“That’s a pretty nasty gash. You’ll need stitches.”
Stitches? I should do that instead of catching the train. “So, I should call an ambulance to take me to the ER?”
“Don’t do that. They’ll charge you a lot of money.”
“Oh. Uhm. I have Kaiser.”
“There’s a Kaiser in South City. I could give you a ride. Would you like a ride?”
I didn’t want to impose and I was apologetic over the possibility of bleeding in the lady’s white Camaro. The guy in the red pickup truck thanked her for offering me a ride.
“There’s a Kaiser in San Bruno on El Camino by the 380,” I offered.
“That one doesn’t have an ER. It is just Dermatology and stuff.”
She explained which bus I could take back to Caltrain. I said I’d call my sweetheart to pick me up. We made small talk: jobs, where we’re from, and that neither of was “missing” the World Series. She offered to stick around long enough to see if I would be admitted. Then she conceded that there was no doubt I would be admitted. I thanked her profusely.
The lady put a band on my arm right through her teller window. I was buzzed past the waiting area to the triage nurse, who handed me a clean gauze pad and took my blood pressure. I was sent to wait a little while, and I was pleased to find my cell phone undamaged. I messaged Mei the situation, as I wasn’t sure if cell phones were all that acceptable in the ER. A nice lady cleaned out my wound and Dr Han stitched me up.
“Did you lose consciousness?”
My answer evolved from “I don’t know . . . I don’t think so” to “I must have, because I don’t remember falling, just the getting up. I’m really dazed.”
The standard for a concussion would be a brain scan, but given my youth and health, this would likely be a waste of radiation. In the car Mei explained that if I had fallen due to a seizure or something, that would be a big concern. I explained that I must have tripped on the curb, looking out for cars instead of the sidewalk, and I had been walking too fast to correct a stumble, which I am otherwise darn good at.
I marveled at the speed with which they had looked after me, that I had gotten the “express treatment” and the ER staff explained that this was because I had come in injured. “I’ll remember that for next time.” They charged me $35. I paid cash. I was happy, and grateful that I wasn’t in for worse.
On the way home I remarked to Mei that when I’d see the drawers labelled “rape information” in the various languages I felt badly about the things that happen to people, and I recalled the sad stories that Mei has brought home with her. “That’s why I have to unload,” she said.
“My life is mostly free from terrible burdens, so I’m happy to listen. I really respect you for the work that you do.”
She put me to bed early. This confused the cat, who started giving me the “breakfast call” around midnight, until Mei fed her around 8am, finally silencing our defective alarm clock. “It is probably just as well,” Mei explained, that the-cat-who-loves-breakfast was performing “neuro checks” on me to ensure that I wasn’t the worse for wear after my bump-on-the-noggin.
Our cat Maggie had been to veterinary Urgent Care just the day before. It turns out she had an asthma attack. Poor girl.
“Thank you Nurse Maggie!”
“Meow.”
Friday, October 29
Last night I held Maggie as Mei examined her with a stethoscope. Maggie isn’t big on being held, but I think after her latest trip to the vet maybe she has established causality between feeling bad, going to the vet, being examined, and feeling better. Mei thinks that she has learned “stethoscope and being scruffed means hold still good kitty.”
Anyway, Maggie was huffing a bit, as she runs through the course of her asthma treatment, but it wasn’t bad enough to head in to the veterinarian.
We watched Community and SNL from last Saturday. The Weekend Update was hilarious. The Rent is Too Damn High, then a Ferkle is a Fat Erkle. “After you’ve had one you ask yourself: ‘did I do that?!'” I also enjoyed the description of “a coked-up gay candyland.”
Obama on Jon Stewart . . . Stewart could have I don’t know, asked him a few questions maybe like “you want to go through Congress? Really? A court fulfils your campaign promise to end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and you gotta file an appeal? Could you explain that?” I think Obama handled himself well, and maybe reminded some progressive youths to schlep down to the polls and vote.
Speaking of which, I haven’t received a registration card or voter information . . . well, I got a thing from New York City explaining the issues there. I’ll tell you what the issue is in New York City: The Rent is Too Damn High. As for California I’ll figure it out and provisional ballot if I have to.
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Wednesday, September 1
This morning I skipped the bicycle ride to work, figuring that inhaling auto exhaust is less advisable on a “Spare the Air” day. Then I got double-whammied by the VTA at Evelyn station, where I arrived just-in-time to have caught a train on the platform, except I had to buy a ticket first. And of course, once the train was gone my $5 bill slid right in and required none of the usual massaging and unfolding-of-the-corners.
So, I caught another train one stop out to Mountain View: the end of the line. Since it is one track at Evelyn, any train waiting to start its run from Mountain View has to wait. And wait it did, until we pulled up to the platform. The train I wanted to be on slid back toward Evelyn before my train could even open its doors. So, I waited another several minutes to leave Mountain View, but I got to pass the time reading, which I can’t do on the bicycle, so I’m not going to complain much.
When I got back from lunch I learned that the market had rallied, and my limit order to sell TSLA at $20.45 had finally executed. It actually peaked ten cents higher and then closed at $20.45. This is the second time I had rode Tesla’s fluctuations successfully and now that I’m no longer on the East Coast and the market starts its day before I wake up, I figured I’d cash out of this fancy-pants chicanery and buy DIA. But I placed a limit buy at $100, which is where it has been lately. “Name your price!”
Thursday, September 2
“The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.”
–Atul Gawande
“Letting Go”
The New Yorker
August 2, 2010
Friday, September 3
Biked to work today. Ordered a tape recorder for the99ers.net and pulled an old picture from the Tellme days for the theme’s header image. Dinner tomorrow with a friend who is moving back to Chicago. Sunday I’ll drop Mei off at the airport so she can fly to LA for the week for her boards review course.
Monday, September 6
Not much to say.
From the Catacombs, beneath Paris.
I don’t like Flickr’s new interface. It used to be that if you viewed “all sizes” you could get the HTML to link to a photo. Now you have to click on a FAQ, then navigate back to the photo, and go down a different route to grab the HTML. Would it be so wrong to support the navigation habits of users who have been using the site for over half a decade? All the buttons that used to be just a click away are buried under a menu, and I sometimes have to scroll down to beneath the photo to change the title. I also miss that tags used to each be on their own line. The new interface seems like its been labotomized so that we can be filled in with a bigger photo, and more white space.
*sigh*
Okay, just wanted to let that out.
The sweetheart is away. I am copying some episodes of The IT Crowd over to play.
Tuesday, September 7
I took a different route to work today, up Stevens Creek, over to Ellis and then tracing along 237 and 101, first on quiet frontage roads and ultimately on dedicated bike trail. It was nice and had very little traffic stress compared to my Evelyn-Wolfe-Arquez-San Thomas-Tasman route. On the other hand, I end up breathing in 8 lanes of highway exhaust much of the way. Do I prefer the quick death of a vehicle collision or the slow death of lung disease? Hopefully we can repair that stuff in a few decades.
It is not that children are just smaller adults, it is that adults are larger children.
Thursday, September 9
I have an orthodontic consult this afternoon. Consequently, I am working from home today. I took my hardware VPN back in since I don’t need it any more, and can free up some desk space and power drain. Alas, I had to jump through a few little hoops to get software VPN working this morning. I have been back at the office for just over a month now and my commutes to San Jose and San Bruno have all been via public transit or bicycle, with the occasional ride home from a co-worker. This little bit pleases me.
Sunday, September 12
“It occurred to him that life, which he’d treated as a pastime, and which he’d thought he could yet outdistance, had finally caught up with him. And he’d discovered, much as he’d suspected, that once life caught up with you, you could never quite shake it again. It endeavored to hobble you with greater and greater frequency. How you managed to remain upright became your style, who you were.”
–David Bezmozgis
“The Train of Their Departure”
The New Yorker
August 9, 2010
Mei comes back tonight. I pick her up at the airport around midnight. After too long, I have gotten my hair cut, at a Chinese place where speaking English is sufficiently awkward that the lady skipped the usual foreplay of asking what I wanted and just got down to the business of cutting my hair. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!
Compared to Brooklyn, Mountain View is a sleepy, slow town, where people spend their time waiting for turn-arrows and a trip to the convenience store invariably requires one to stand patiently in line, as the lady carefully counts out exact change and labors over the implications of whether it is worthwhile to sign customers up for the club card, while I quietly wait in line, nostalgic over all the times in the past year when I had ducked in to a store, exchanged quick cash with the proprietor, and was back on my way. Club cards be damned. They have no place at a convenience store.
Monday, September 13
From the upcoming “Social Network” movie, via The New Yorker:
“Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a tech geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
As someone surrounded by geeks, I’ve always known that if someone thinks I’m an asshole, it is because either I am an asshole, they are an asshole, or between us we’re just confused as to who the asshole is.
Tuesday, September 14
Advice sent to a loved one:
Aaaaanyway what I’d do, if anything, is thank the lady for her good intentions, and apologize that sorry, I can’t send her any money because of my discomfort over the quality of decision making made in the name of religion. It sounds like her mission is to overtly spread the idea that personal morality can not be guided by the innate human capacity to discern right from wrong, but by a confusing and contradictory corpus of Iron Age mythology mediated by a competing group of organizations which are at best patriarchal in nature and at worst openly practice terrorism and sexual violence. This approach to enriching humanity is a cause I could never support. I would explain that I would be strongly inclined to make contributions on the behalf of secular charities with morally clear missions like Habitat or MSF.
Its like, you can gently suggest that someone’s belief system is foolish and deadly without having to bring up the inquisition, the IRA, or 9/11. After all, she thinks you’re going to hell, so, whatever. If someone ever wants to throw down I’m sure you can get all Richard Dawkins on their ass.
Wednesday, September 15
San Bruno fire Captain Bill Forester’s Engine 51 was one of the first two teams on the scene; the other big truck got hot so quickly its windshield exploded. “This looks like Armageddon,” Forester recalled thinking Tuesday. “It was like they took a Saturn V rocket and tipped it upside down during blastoff.”
Terrified residents were fleeing down the hill with the fireball chasing them, firefighters recalled, many already badly burned and screaming for help. There were so few ambulance trying to keep up that paramedics began asking unhurt residents to drive people with smoldering burns to nearby hospitals. Police officers and firefighters kicked down doors to rescue anyone stranded in homes.
Even with the wail of sirens filling the background of one radio call asking dispatchers to issue a third alarm, it is the rising alarm in a firefighter’s voice that tells the truest story. “We’ve got multiple houses” on fire, he reports to the command center. “We’re trying to get close. We have extreme heat. We have possibly several blocks on fire at this time.”
There is silence on the radio for a moment. Grasping fully the nightmare that she can hear unfolding in an invisible chorus of voices, the dispatcher slowly replies, “Copy that.”
More than 15 minutes into the disaster, a dispatcher issues a fourth alarm, summoning fire companies from all across the Bay Area to respond to “a plane crash.” A firefighter asks whether it’s a “large aircraft or small aircraft,” but no one knows. This would affect the firefighters’ initial response to the blaze because the accepted method of dealing with a plane crash is to put it out at the source in order to save passengers’ lives.
Gas main fires are extinguished by shutting off a valve, and there have been reports that it took PG&E well over and hour to close this one.
“With a pipeline that big, even if you shut it off a mile away it could burn for another hour,” said Kevin Conant, a battalion chief with the San Jose Fire Department who was not involved in fighting the San Bruno blaze. “I think it was completely legitimate for them to consider that there was an airplane involved because of the amount of fire they had.”
First responders say the most frightening moment occurred when they tried to tap into the neighborhood fire hydrants and heard only a sucking sound . . .
Mike Rosenberg and Bruce Newman
“Tapes Reveal Frantic Scene”
San Jose Mercury News
September 15, 2010
Later, Bike Snob NYC made me laugh:
“Like coffee, religion props people up and gets them through their day, and in this sense I believe that religious institutions are like Starbucks in that there are way too many of them and they sell a lot of crap–the only difference is that at least Starbucks pays taxes and offers WiFi.”
Friday, September 17
I was a little surprised to see sfcitizen whining about the physical impossibility for driving 25 MPH, so I chimed in:
Once the speed limit hits 20MPH, then your chances of a fatal pedestrian accident become extremely unlikely. There is advocacy in Britain to expand 20 MPH zones:
http://www.20splentyforus.org.uk/
If you keep light on the gas, it is entirely easy to drive slowly, and a pleasure to boot, because down in this speed range your mind can almost catch up with all that is going on around you: less stress! You just have to let go of the selfish idea that you have some God-given right to drive fast.
I just returned to the South bay from Brooklyn. I have to say, driving in Brooklyn at a constant 20-25 MPH, slaloming around double-parked cars, bicycles, and the rest, is a lot more relaxing than waiting two minutes at a left-turn light so you can tear down El Camino at 40 MPH.
Open your mind instead of the throttle. you might find you enjoy driving slow. Good luck!
-danny
Yeah, I know I’m a crackpot. And when I was younger I had a more leaden foot, but over the past decade or so my driving has mellowed a great deal, possibly because of the station wagon. When you’re driving a boat it is easy enough to relax and take it easy, and I maintain that style in smaller, more nimble cars.
Thursday, September 23
So, we decided to spend Thanksgiving with Mei’s folks in Hawaii and Christmas with my folks in Chicago, so I set up our Hawaii vacation for November. I have never been there myself but it should be easy to enjoy.
On Monday they opened up a long-closed bike trail up North of Moffett Field. This has been a long-awaited link in the Bay Trail project, and I am pleased because now instead of riding on streets and on a 237 frontage road I can ride up the Steven’s Creek trail, then around the North side of Moffett Field, then East along the Bay Trail and then along a canal to the office. That’s a bicycle commute that is over 90% off the street.
But . . . a lot of this new route is gravel. It takes more concentration to ride safely, and getting a flat on my road tires is more likely. The salt flats smell of salt, seaweed, and decay. But I’ll take the occasional flat tire and maybe a gravelly wipe-out or two over being killed by a distracted SUV driver, and the wetlands scenery is a greater pleasure for the eyes and the nose than riding through high-speed suburban street traffic and waiting for red turn signals. I feel lucky.
When I rode the trail home on Monday people would smile and greet each other as they passed, because hey, we had a new toy.
The other new toy I have this week is Civilization 5. I was able to play the first half of a game last night, and so far I really enjoy it. It is a pretty huge change in a lot of ways from Civ 4. Civ 4 is more of a simulation game with lots and lots of variables thrown in to keep a player challenged. I think the developers leaned back and said “Civ 4 is great, but it is pretty dang complicated. Let’s make it easier for new players.” So, Civ 5 has streamlined a lot of things. The graphics are really beautiful, and the tech trees and units are pared down. Diplomacy is re-worked and the whole religion-civics thing has been consolidated into a new set of “Social Policies” which you can enact as you amass more culture.
The interface has moved from the traditional sim-manager style to more of a “builder” paradigm. For example, happiness is now an aggregate for your entire Civ instead of something managed in each city.
Aaaaaaanyway . . . . . I want to understand the military and diplomatic interfaces better, and just get a few games done and out of my system.
Friday, September 24
“I think we are making a transition, the most important in the history of Homo sapiens — more important than our long walk out of Africa and across Europe and Asia. This is our moment. Anyone who died before 1930 never lived through a doubling of the human population. Anyone born after 2050 likely won’t either. We are in a 120-year transition that will require an emerging consciousness if we’re going to make it through.”
Wes Jackson
“Farmed Out”
The Sun, October, 2010
Monday, September 27
We purchased a humming bird feeder this weekend. Within about ten minutes of installation, the first little bird flitted over. They catch on quicker than the larger birds, who we can occasionally hear at the other feeder, spilling a steady trickle of seed on to the balcony.
Thursday, September 30
It is nearly noon and I am relaxing with the ever-studying Mei at my favorite coffee shop. My work hours today are going to be around 1pm-9pm, due to afternoon and evening deployment windows for software on our production networks. That’s my day job. Well, today my day job is slacker, and my evening job is deployment engineer.
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I wasn’t comfortable taking too many pictures of the deceased, so this pile of femurs is all you get.
The sign says “Bones from the Cemetery of the Innocents, deposited July 2, 1809”
Long story short, Paris has had a lot of people buried in it, and every so often they needed to clear old cemeteries–often the mass graves of the very poorest people–and store the bones underground in retired quarries. It was a grim job that was eventually turned in to a spectacle, because once you’ve shuffled hundreds of thousands of femurs you have a lighter perspective on the whole life-death cycle.
The modern catacombs aren’t so garish as they once were. All the same, there’s a cop waiting at the end to reclaim “souvenirs” inappropriately retrieved by tourists.
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From the August, 2010 issue of The Sun Magazine:
Cook: You’ve said that if executions were made public, people would realize the brutality of this system and work to end it. Yet, in our past, crowds would show up for public executions, some with picnic lunches. In our age of violent media, what makes you so sure average citizens wouldn’t applaud the execution of a killer they were certain was guilty?
Prejean: There would be some, no doubt, who would pull out a beer and cheer that this terrible murderer had been killed. But for most people who see it up close, capital punishment is very unsettling. The head of the Department of Corrections in Louisiana has to arrange the protocol for executions, and part of that is gathering witnesses. At first he thought he’d have a line of people stretching across the Mississippi River waiting to get in, but soon he realized that no one who witnessed an execution asked to come back. When you’re in the death chamber, you see when they have to jab the needle eighteen times into the arm of the condemned. You hear the stumbling last words of those who are killed: “Mama, I love you,” or “I’m so sorry.” Imagine an ordinary American family having their evening meal, and the news comes on, and the kids ask their parents, “Isn’t that murder too?” and, “Why are they putting antiseptic on his arm if they’re going to kill him?” It would not take long for people to cry out against this, and that’s why it will never be public. You have to keep it from the eyes of the people.
Cook: You have served as spiritual advisor to six men who were executed. What were their last days, their last hours, like — for them and for you?
Prejean: Being with someone who is about to die is surreal. When you’re with someone in the hospital who is dying, it’s at least a natural process; you can see them leaving you. When someone is fully alive, and you’re talking to him in the way you and I are talking, you can not get your mind around the fact that in two hours, now one hour, now forty-five minutes, he’s going to be killed.
The death itself is almost scripted: Now they’re walking in. Now I’m telling him goodbye and kissing him on the back. I’m praying for him and asking him to remember me to God. Now the guards have me by my arms. They are sitting me down in a witness chair. There’s the big clock on the wall. There’s the exhaust fan, already turned on, that will suck from the room the stench of the human body burning. There’s the blank glass with the executioner on the other side. They’ve already tested the chair. It’s run on a seperate generator, so nobody can prevent the execution by throwing the main switch. The lights are bright floursecents. There are two red telephones on the wall: If one rings, it is the court issuing a stay of execution. If the other rings, it’s a pardon from the governor. Neither phone rings. The victim’s family is sitting in the front row to watch. The other witnesses and I are sitting behind them. There are two newspaper reporters writing vigorously on narrow spiral pads. And the condemned man is looking at me. And I put my hand out. And he can see my face. And they put the leather mask over his face, so tight I worry he can’t breathe. How quickly they strap him in the chair and step away. It’s an oak chair. They put a cloth soaked with saline solution on his shaved head and then the metal cap. A thick, curled wire runs from the cap to the generator. And then the strap goes across his chest.
I didn’t look the first time, because with the mask I knew he couldn’t see me anymore. With lethal injection he can see me, but not with the electric chair. I closed my eyes and heard the sound of it. The huge, rushing, powerful sound of the fire being shot through his body. Three times. They run 1,900 volts, then let the body cool, and then 500 volts, and then 1,900 volts again. What’s terrifying is that they’ve done autopsies of people who have been electrocuted, and the brain is mainly intact. We don’t know what they feel. We really don’t know, when we kill a human being, what’s going on inside, the pain of it.
Cook: You believe that the days leading up to an execution amount to torture.
Prejean: I don’t say this lightly. According to Amnesty International, torture is “an extreme mental or physical assault on someone who’s been rendered defenseless.” Just imagine if somebody took you hostage in a room and said that in twenty-four hours they were coming to kill you. And, when the time comes, they put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. It clicks. It is an empty chamber. They laugh and walk out and say, Not today. Maybe tomorrow. That’s torture.
Everybody I’ve known on death row has had the same nightmare: they dream it is their time, and the guards come and drag them out, and they are screaming and sweating, and then they wake up and realize they are still in their cell. Just think about when you have to go to the dentist for a root canal. If the appointment is for Friday, all week you are living in dread. That’s just for a root canal.
You can read a longer excerpt at the Sun’s web site.
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(In my dream) Tim Gunn referred to two separate folks with the N word. Not in a hostile manner, just as if n*gg*r were just another perfectly acceptable word for referring to someone. The whole world was upset. In my mind I worked to conjure a sufficiently witty rejoinder around the F word. Really, Tim, you should know better!
So, we were all of us walking down a mosaic-tiled road, as if towards the city of Oz, where we expected to learn from an all-knowing wise man why it was that Tim Gunn had become a racist potty-mouth. The mosaic-tiled road began to break up in to sand dunes, finally coming to an end. I looked around the desert and saw mushroom clouds blooming behind us in a regular pattern like a planted forest. The Earth was being carpet-bombed with nuclear weapons and I briefly wondered to myself if that was possible and practical: why would you carpet-bomb a desert?
I knew the end of everything was at hand, so as the bombs drew near I wrapped my arms around my lover and smothered her fall to the ground. As the heat arrived and I woke from my dream I wasn’t sure if I was holding my sweetheart or a large sack of cat food. I think my brain was trying to plan ahead, because I often feed the cats after I wake up.
Anyway, Tim Gunn, if you ever read this, please don’t ever start to use the N word, especially if Sarah Palin gets elected president.
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