Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I had something to mention that seemed too short for its own entry. So I tossed it into an editor window, to add similar short things to later. Uhhh, then a couple of those quickie comments got me thinking too much and wound up being long ... but I kind of like the flow as it is, so I'm going to go ahead and post it this way.

I was startled earlier when I noticed that I was typing in rythym to the tune playing on my CD player at the time(Boiled In Lead's recording of "Fisher's Hornpipe" on Old Lead), and realizing that it must be an especially potent tune (or a particularly bouncy rendition thereof), since I don't usually do that.

Quote of the Day: metaphorge wrote I have so many irons in the fire it feels like I'm playing Foosball.

According to the television weather report, the high temperature for the day just ended was lower than the "normal" low temperature for this date. (Isn't "normal" supposed to be a range, not a specific value?) The forecast for tonight is for 260K (10F) here in Baltimore and 255K (0F) in the suburbs. Brrrr. My house is inexplicably warm though -- I haven't changed the thermostat (which is set to 50F because it's mis-calibrated and that usually turns out to mean about 58F), but the 2nd floor is at 293K (68F) and the ground floor is non-frosty. It's usually more like 288K on the 2nd floor. The house doesn't get colder in cold weather, it just burns oil faster (though I didn't expect it to get warmer either). It took a month and a half to go through the first tankful of oil this Winter, and I'm already halfway through the second tankful ten days later. Ouch. I don't mind the cold too much as long as I have someplace warm-ish to retreat to on occasion ... but the expense really hurts.

I don't really need to supply the Celsius temperatures for the preceeding paragraph, do I? After all, the Kelvin->Celsius conversion is a straight subtraction. (I hope most of you already knew that.) I already feel that I'm coddling some of my readers by supplying the Fahrenheit version. (Besides, don't the temperatures sound much warmer in Kelvins?)

Hmm. I was offered firewood a couple of months ago, but the contractor still isn't getting back to me with an estimate for re-lining the chimney and un-blocking the fireplace. (Hey, anybody got good, reasonably-priced folks they can recommend for such work in Baltimore?)

I got an answer to my question about the unusually short contrails at sunset: low humidity.

Speaking of low humidity, I'm finding it much easier to breath (and nosebleeds far less likely) if I dump a couple of gallons of water into the air in my house every day or two. (Big old pasta pot filled with water on the stove, wee splash of anise or vanilla extract and/or half a handful of lavender so that it makes the house smell nice at the same time as it improves my respiratory health, top it up whenever I go downstairs so that it never boils dry, turn it off when my nose feels okay -- that's usually about two gallons, I think (though I guess I should actually measure it sometime). I think of it as "dumping" the water into the air, it just falls up slowly instead of down quickly.) There's also a small pan of water sitting on top of the space heater in the front bedroom (one of those free-standing oil-filled radiator-style electric heaters). That doubles as a chemistry experiment because it grows crystals from the dissolved solids in city water. Mostly white stuff that I figure is probably calcium (that I haven't tested yet, so that's just a guess), and some rust (possibly from my own pipes) which has now stained the white stuff brownish-orange.

That is, the crystals were white until sometime last year, when I started collecting the initial spurt of orange water that comes out for the first one to two seconds that I run the tap in the bathtub to use for that pan. That quickly turned the whole mess orange, but lately I've been seeing fresh growth of white along the rim of the pan while the sides and bottom remain orangeish-brown. Unfortunately I bumped into it in November and turned two seasons' worth of crystals into powder. I'm fascinated by the way most of the formation is above the high-water-mark.

I stumbled into queerchoice by following a link I found in rampling's journal which I started reading to learn more about Rampling after seeing a post in the "friends of" page for the genderqueer community. I fell into a discussion from September 2002, which I figure most of the participants have nearly forgotten about by now, but I tossed in a couple of comments anyhow (and got a response). One person made a comment about not understanding monosexual orientation, "just the way [monosexuals] claim not to understand bi/multisexuals", and it occurred to me that I don't really understand the whole monosexual thing even though I am one. Bisexuality makes sense to me; the fact that I'm only attracted to women is just one of those "that's how the world is" things -- it's familiar, but not really something I understand. Similarly, on the whole "is being gay/bi a choice" thing, I'm willing to accept that maybe it is for some people, but if I had a choice, I'd be bi, and I'm not. Well, back when I was thinking about this a lot more because the the concept of bisexuality was relatively new to me (I'd just met my first openly-bi friends -- this would've been about 23 years ago), that's what I would have chosen. Since then I've stopped really caring much, 'cause there doesn't seem to be much point to worrying about it or spending a lot of time thinking about it after having figured out that my orientation is "attracted to women". So if someone had offered me a magical transformation to bisexuality just before I went off to college, I probably would've taken it, but if someone offered me that now, I'd probably just shrug and say, "whatever".

Hmm. In case anyone's wondering (I'm sure it's obvious to many of you) why I phrased my orientation as "attracted to women", it's because whether that translates to "gay" or "het" depends on what I am, and I am transgendered (currently identifying as intergendered). I actually do think of myself as heterosexual because, although I don't consistently (or even often) think of myself as male, I do think of myself as "perceived as male". Which means my attraction to women would be perceived as het (ignoring for the moment the group of lesbian friends who got together several years ago and presented me with a button that says, "honorary lesbian", which I consider quite an honor -- it reflects how I often feel, but there are enough slightly-creepy guys out there proclaiming themselves to be "male lesbians" that I dared not say aloud that I felt like that until women with proper credentials said they accepted me as one). But at the same time, how I see myself fluctuates -- male, female, mostly-female, in-between, both, neither (usually a bad sign indicating severe stress), and sometimes just "unspecified Glenn-gendered" (with thanks to the first friend who said that was the gender she saw me as and put the idea in my head) -- and I know that there are a few people out there (God bless them) who also think of me as female (despite the beard), in-between, or both male and female simultaneously. Sometimes my attraction to and interaction with the women I love "feels like heterosexuality" ... and other times it "feels lesbian" ... and sometimes I'm not paying attention to that kind of detail and just enjoy the moment, of course. If I ever shave the beard and try to pass -- basically if I ever transition, my orientation would not change but the label for it would -- from het to lesbian. And for many transgendered and intergendered people the "lazy choice" of label isn't as obvious as it is for me. (If being het means that one is attracted to members of the "opposite" sex, then what is the opposite of someone who's in between male and female?)

So the whole gay<->het single-axis model of orientation (as typified by the Kinsey scale) doesn't seem like a very good model to me. I prefer a two-axis model (attraction to women on one axis, attraction to men on the other), which is still inadequate to model reality (how do you graph someone who is specifically attracted to transgendered people?) but much more useful than the Kinsey scale and similar conceptualizations. At least with my two-dimensional orientation graph, we have a place to put folks who are asexual in terms of orientation, in addition to not having to figure out what the opposite of "both" is.

Hmm. Somebody posted a link to the "What Venomous Egg-Laying Mammal Are You" personality test. Somehow, I think I've got a pretty good idea what it's going to say... I am definitely amused by the idea.

• A poem about one of the best known spelling mnemonics
• An electrical -- not electromechanical -- "Because I Can" Crusher (the author, Sam Barros, wrote, "Why? Because I can! (Sorry, couldn't think of a better reason.)", which makes about as much sense as most of the other Really Cool projects I've seen on the web and wish I'd come up with first). Crushes a full soda can without physical contact using 22.7 million Watts of electricity (yeah, that means there are big capacitors involved).
• Don't Link to Us!, a collection of links to sites with stupid linking policies (with "stupid" being defined by the maintainers of the DLTU site, of course). For the most part they're pointing at sites which try to prohibit or regulate exactly what makes the web so much more than a flat collection of isolated documents.
• "Fool Me Twice", a story in Slate (2003-01-09) using one current news story as an analogy for another...
• "Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Jews", which I include here mainly in case someone wants to know where to find Bob Dylan song lyrics translated into Hebrew. (I have no idea how good the translations are, since that's not one of the languages I speak.)
• Ever need to look up a particular TLA? There's over a thousand of them defined here.
• I just liked the alliteration, honest ... okay, and I'm really easily amused and it seemed to fit with an unusual lingerie link from an earlier post: Punk Panties. No info about what makes them especialy punk other than being labelled as such and having someone with punk-cred involved in the venture.
• Continuing the clothing theme ... Look, pants are dangerous! Okay, I'm deliberately overstating that because I'm in a silly mood; it's specifically about tight hiphuggers.
• The Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ mentions that there's actually a native English (i.e. not a neologism) gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun: ou. (I use "sie"/"hir" myself because those are the most familiar to me; the author of the FAQ prefers "ey"/"em", which I find jarring but suppose I could get used to if they wind up catching on.) Section 6.1 lists some papers I'd love to read, about whether using "he" as the default, inclusive pronoun matters.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Greek Hero Revisited, by Laurel Bowman, connects Buffy to Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey".
• Yahoo News story about a method for looking up tunes: "It's called 'Query by Humming,' a type of melody recognition software program on display at this week's Midem music conference in Cannes that identifies a song by title and composer based on a person humming a few bars into a microphone." I could use something like that. I imagine it'd be really useful for searching sites such as Ceolas.
• Blurb about a design for an inflatable space station at BoingBoing, with links to additional information.
• Christian Science Monitor story about a schools first integrated prom ... in 2002!?
• This "Photoshop unlikely Slashdot articles" contest at Fark.com takes abso[expletive]lutely forever to load, so I'm going to deep-link to the single image I wanted to share (which I think I found via BoingBoing) even though I generally avoid snarfing images that way:
• So I won't forget where I bookmarked it: DragonBear's Pennsic Links (which includes a link to my own Pennsic page

Forgot to mention this earlier:

A couple of days ago, when I was grabbing a bite to eat with the Sheepie, I had to run out to the car to fetch something. On my way out, I was spotted by a mother and children on their way in. And I heard a tiny voice pipe up ... but instead of hearing the usual, "Look Mommy, that man is wearing a dress," or "Is that a man or a woman?", the child said, "That man is pretty!"

Made me smile. Made me smile a lot.

(The last fifty or sixty hours have not been especially good for me physically (despite the very good exciting news Saturday evening) -- muscle pain, severe headaches, stretches of insomnia broken by really poor sleep ... trying to get things done in the times between taking drugs and the drugs wearing off, trying to rest in the times between drugs wearing off and it being long enough since the last dose to take more drugs, not doing especially well at either of those. Weeks like this happen, unfortunately. I try to deal. (Not very well, but I try.) In the meantime, I get frustrated and decide to distract myself with LiveJournal every so often.)

Anyhow, I found a cassette containing a recording of a performance by a band I used to be in (a while before the performance that got made into an album), so I played it to see just what was there while I've been trying to get some work done, and it's a pretty terrible recording, and the performance is a little uneven on some songs, but it turns out that there's some good playing there (obscured by the poor recording). That's rather reassuring.

(Note: It's easier to listen to my own playing a long time after a recording was made than it is while I still remember where all the mistakes are to listen for. I can actually judge my playing, if it's been long enough.)

Well, I got to the end of the tape and reached to flip it over, and I noticed that there was no label on side B. Looking more closeley at the label on side A, I saw where it said "Yamaha MT100" ... which meant it was recorded on a borrowed four-track, and I'd just listened to two of the four tracks. Whoops. I went ahead and flipped it over to make sure it was what I thought it was, and sure enough, there's another track (apparently only three tracks were used that night), that I'm now listening to backwards.

Harmonica doesn't sound terribly strange backwards. Guitar does a little, but in a familiar way because it's a trick that's been used a lot -- it doesn't register as wrong. Human speech and singing is quickly identifiable as backwards-voice; the wrongness gets classified quickly ... but hearing someone laugh backwards really caught my attention as being a really odd sound.