I head about this story in The New Yorker from Jenny, but it's all over the blogosphere anyways. The basic summary is two guys were flying on American Airlines together, when the flight attendant woke one up and told him to stop touching the other one (he was leaning on his boyfriend while napping). Passengers inquired about whether this was because they were gay, and eventually the captain came out and told them to stop touching or the plane would be diverted.
I have been made to feel the way those passengers probably felt by American (and other airlines), but not for such blatantly discriminatory reasons. Usually it's something like "You're late, you can't fly." But this is not acceptable. There were enough American crewmembers involved that someone should have realized it's time to kiss ass and apologize profusely. Possibly worse is the HRC response, which could be paraphrased "AA gave us lots of money, so they didn't do anything wrong." I know you're a political machine, but at least pretend you represent the gay people you claim to represent.
Screw American, and screw HRC. You have a nice logo, but I'm picking a new favicon.ico.
Last week we filled up two tables at Kabuto for sushi, at it was tasty.
Matt had never eaten mirugai, so Daniel drew him a picture on the
butcher paper tablecloth. Near the end of the meal, a sushi chef brought
us two complimentary bottles of beer, either as an apology for forgetting
to bring Daniel's fried shrimp heads, or as a token of admiration of
Daniel's artistic ability. Not sure which.
jconcep, the ex-roomie from Michigan, is staying at our house this week. The
past week or so, even before she got here, has been totally hectic, and there's no way I can keep up
with posting pictures or text about it. But it's cool living with someone
who uses flickr a lot. I'd always thought it must be easy to generate a
photostream, and now that I've watched someone doing it, I'm wondering if this may be a way to keep up with the bandwidth of real life.
Maybe I'll even put "generate a photostream"
on my list of 500 things I most wish I had time to do.
I need to stop blogging and get back to the mountain of work that has to
be done in a week.
Imagine how much more boring chatter I'd be spewing if
that little punk on Shattuck hadn't knocked my coffee cup out of my hand.
I spent the weekend with Daniel's coworkers (a welcome back party for Nellie, the company picnic, and Boris came over after the picnic) and with the fams. My mom has been wanting to go to Muir Woods for a while, so we all did the loop on the paved trail, with a brief excursion out of the national monument and into the state park. These pictures are from the state park.
I don't know why, but I get more excited by the little things. We were surrounded by these enormous sequoias, but I spent most of the hike scouring the ground for exotic fungi. We saw a bat, whose wings were translucent in the forest sunbeams, and a deer with two babies. But the only things I wanted to photograph were a banana slug and a slender salamander (Batrachoseps sp.). I found the salamander coiled under a rock; we looked at it and put it back near its home. Its legs are so tiny and fragile.
Oh yeah, people have generally stopped asking, but if you want to know what I think about Pluto's status, I have a long entry about it on my astroblog.
Daniel found this page by Sarah Hartwell at messybeast.com that helps us interpret Mao's moods. Daniel kept asking me "Does he look happy?" and I could only say that I didn't know. But now I can inform him that Mao is either saying "**** you" or he's excited/angry/irritable. Weo, Mao knows where to scratch if he gets REALLY mad, and it hasn't happened yet, so it's all good.
Also, the messybeast.com page was very instructive about the practice of "middening." Someone in the last couple months was a victim of this and I really had no idea what was going on. I wish I could remember who told me about this so that I could go back and educate them about middening:
They may use faeces to mark territory - a behaviour known as middening. Middening cats deposit their faeces in a prominent spot (often on top of a tuft of grass or the middle of a path), often choosing the same place again and again to advertise their continued presence. Middens are usually located at disputed areas of territory where challenges are likely to occur. Sometimes this is indoors, the usual place being the bed. A cat which has been upset by an intruder or unusual event middens in the place which smells most strongly of its human family, reinforcing the family bond. Humans don't see it the same way.
Ok this is really embarassing, but I temporarily messed up something in my brand new RSS feed and FeedBurner is not reflecting the fix. So things may be rough for the first few posts as I figure this out.
I forgot to mention that I was inspired to do this because of Marcus's perpetual slickness. And that's how I found about about this method of embarassing myself known as FeedBurner, and that's how come I stayed up all night coding in broken perl.
I don't even know if it was worth it, but I spent a couple days figuring out how to ... uh ... syndicate this site. What's the word, feedcast? Blogcast? I forgot. All pointless, since I hardly ever take the time to write any more.
But maybe that is the point. Why keep coming back here every day when I never write? Just click the fresh new RSS icon in the lower left, and add me to your aggregator. I promise it will be low volume.
