January 2010 Archives

Too funny! The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), consisting basically of Rev. Fred Phelps and his rather mentally askew family protested outside the offices of Twitter in San Francisco.

There were counter-protesters at the ready with some truly delightful signs.  A personal fave: God hates #tags! - a reference to the church’s official site, God Hates Fags and the hash tags used to find info about a particular topic on Twitter. Gay and geeky – gotta love it!

According to the article, one of the younger women from WBC was tweeting WHILE they were protesting Twitter. I am guessing that A) these folks didn’t have their irony detector turned on and B) she must have been chosen by virtue of having opposable thumbs and being able to walk upright, or something.

Kudos to those folks who met with the face of hatred and laughed right back at it!

Westboro Baptist Church Protests, Gets Protested Outside Twitter

Yesterday, the Westboro Baptist Church and their subtly-named picket group, God Hates Fags, brought their dog-and-pony-show to San Francisco. That's right -- the freaky people came to freak out the freaky people.
The religious group, based in Topeka, Kansas, usually pickets soldiers' funerals, reasoning that they died defending a gay-loving country. Thursday, they set their sights on a larger target: the headquarters of the social-media giant Twitter.

Westboro Baptist Church Protests, Gets Protested Outside Twitter - Asylum.com

I woke up feeling geeky this morning. Admittedly, when don’t I? It occurred to me that there is a fair amount of time we have an event at the Erie Gay News web site that has a URL to RSVP/register/buy tickets for, so why not add a field to link for that? That might help organizers better plan and since it is just a URL, I don’t have to fiddle so much with the event when I paste it in.

I made sure to not only add it to the calendar page, but the calendar RSS feed as well, which means that all of the sites carrying our calendar will also get the RSVP/registration URL's when they are filled in.

Hmm, I should probably come up with a page to request submitting an event. Maybe sometime soon. I still need to reset the newsletter.

Today, I went to the viewing of Mary Ellen, whom I knew years ago as Rannveigr when I was in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). She was a deeply kind and calm person. I can’t remember ever hear her say a harsh word. She was also very dedicated to helping others.

This is a very old photo. Her children have grown into talented and wonderful adults. (Oddly enough, the man kneeling at the right is now my brother-in-law.) Even earlier, I remember sitting on the floor of the armory in Buffalo at Ice Dragon when she was pregnant with the twins. When her husband, Alexander, won Coronet Tourney (Aethelmearc was only a Principality then, whereas it is now a Kingdom), I remember that her daughter asked her, “Mommy, are you going to be Queen now?”, she responded with “No, Mommy is just going to be Princess. And she can just barely deal with that.” It had been kind of a long day, and I think she was kind of tired.  It was good-natured. Several friends of ours got to be in their retinue at court, and that was a very great honor.

This is how I would like to remember her – smiling and surrounded by her family and people who cared about her. She was truly a class act.

Because of her service to the Society, she was made a Companion of the Order of the Pelican. For a brief time, I was her protege. (Knights have squires, Laurels – awarded for excellence in the arts and sciences – have apprentices and Pelicans have proteges.) At the time, I was Chronicler (newsletter editor) for the Shire of Stormsport and later for the Principality of Aethelmearc. This newsletter thing seems to be a very long-standing tradition for me.;) It might be getting close to half my lifetime now for doing a newsletter or being involved with some kind of periodical.

After I drifted away from the SCA, I bumped her into again when she was on the board of the AIDS Council of Erie County. Mary Ellen was a very skilled and compassionate doctor. She touched many lives in important ways and was unfailingly gracious and serene.

When I stopped at her coffin to pay my last respects, I thanked her for having been kind, for having been a shining example of service to others. Even though we hadn’t been in close contact for years, I felt that the experience of having known her added something important to my life that I hope I can pass along to others.

May she rest in peace and hopefully she knows how much folks appreciate her giving and selfless nature.

Don’t tell me I don’t know how to multi-task! I was home for lunch on Monday and was trying to get the envelopes and labels generated and set up for the folding of Erie Gay News this Thursday. (And I got notice earlier today that the order has shipped, so it looks like we are on time. Yay!)

I had run out of a prescription, and we also changed insurance providers. So, while I am printing labels and envelopes and sticking the former onto the latter, I am juggling phone calls to the doctor’s office and the insurance provider, since it seems that the prescription isn’t covered by the new provider. Fortunately, there is an equivalent, so things are cool.

After work, I headed over to the Erie Mondays at Matthew’s at Matthew’s Trattoria. It was okay. I mostly chatted with religious study faculty from Mercyhurst.

After that, I went home to grab some dinner and let the dogs out. Then I popped over to Nelson’s tavern to the going away party for my friends Jo and Josh, who just got married and are relocating to Oregon after stopping off in to visit Florida. (Okay, not the most linear travel path, but sounds like fun.)

I also stopped in at Craze to confirm that we are on for the GLBT Legislation Advocacy meeting on February 18 at 7 PM. I then went home and finished some geek tasks.

Tonight was pretty much a “I think I need to be in a coma for a little bit”, although I did get some geek stuff taken care of.

Tomorrow is the State of the Union Address Watch Party at Matthew’s Trattoria and Thursday is folding at the Zone Dance Club.

Three cheers for my 3rd cousin! He found the grave site of our great great grandmother, Anna Mahler, in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester NY. The stone had sunk into the ground.

A blogger friend in Germany has been very kind and helpful in trying to get more info.

A cousin found this and sent it my way. This is a page from the 1880 census.  On line 42 is my great-great grandfather, John Mahler, who was a blacksmith. He was born about 1844 or so, and died about 1888. His wife was Anna Mahler, and the census lists their 3 kids (as of 1880) - Frank, Ferdinand and Anna.

My great grandfather, John Joseph Mahler, was born in 1881.  (Hmm, just realized that meant that he was 7 when his dad died.)

John Joseph married my great grandmother, Lovinia Fremouw, who was born in the Netherlands. She died giving birth to my grandfather, Richard John Mahler. Lovina's dad, Cornelius Fremouw, died in a mining accident before she was born.  I never really knew my paternal grandfather, or very much about Dad's side of the family. Hmm, interesting that I have photos of my great grandparents, and no images of my grandfather, nor any real memories of him. There does seem to be a history of parents and children on that side not being close.

I was going through rather a whirlwind of posting and geek stuff tonight, when I got an email from a friend. She informed me that someone I knew fairly well years ago, but with whom I have lost touch, has been diagnosed with a very serious illness, and things do not look well for her at all. I feel bad for her and her entire family. It sounds like they would prefer privacy, so I am just wishing them the best at a very difficult time.

Nate Silver rightly points out here that it is not clear where causation might lie. However, I think that anyone could find meaningful statistical data that supports the absurd claim that denying same-sex couples equality under law IN ANY WAY harms the marriages of opposite sex couples.

To put it more simply, the same folks making this claim are the very same folks who didn’t get Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Neal Patrick Harris and other folks before they came out. If you can’t reliably identify a population or a phenomenon, then it is exceedingly silly to claim that you will be affected by it.

Using gay couples as scapegoats doesn’t help heterosexual marriage. At the end of it all, any relationship is about the people involved in it, and not about some group of outsiders. Duh.

Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans

by Nate Silver @ 4:12 AM

Over the past decade or so, divorce has gradually become more uncommon in the United States. Since 2003, however, the decline in divorce rates has been largely confined to states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. These states saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent between 2003 and 2008. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban as of January 1, 2008, however, saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period.
The table below details the divorce rates for the 43 states that reported their divorce statistics to the CDC in both 2003 and 2008. It is calculated by taking the total number of divorces in the state that year, and dividing it by the number of married persons, as reported by the Census Bureau. The result is then multiplied by two, since each divorce involves two people. This is different than how the divorce rate is sometimes calculated, which may be as a share of the overall population rather than the number of married persons; I prefer my approach because it will not penalize a state for having a lot of marriages (and therefore more opportunities for divorce). However, there are also more complicated versions of the divorce rate calculation that account for the age of the married couples, and so forth; these are probably superior, but mine is intended to be a simple approach. The table also lists the percentage change in the divorce rate between 2003 and 2008, and the current status of gay marriage and domestic partnerships within each state.

(More at the link below)

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans

I had some problems with the update to Movable Type 5. I think it is dumb stuff that I did. Shortened URLs from old tweets seem to fail, but new ones seem okay. Going to the main blog page and clicking on an entry now seems to work. I am using this as an opportunity to play around with set up. I was up WAY too late last night futzing with this.

I also got the Google AJAX Feed implemented on the Erie Gay News page for News from Other Sites. I have gone back and forth about implementing it for the individual feeds versus grouping them by category.

I also had some last minute futzing for the code that sends tracking emails for contests. I think that is now working.

So, does this prove that God is a Democrat, given how the election turned out? God doesn't like Lieberman either? Or maybe God just wanted to give Tina Fey's career a boost. Who knows? It is more than a tad arrogant to claim that God was behind your candidacy, particularly when you didn't win.

McCain strategist: Palin thought candidacy was mapped by God

Yahoo! Buzz

Sarah Palin believed that Sen. John McCain chose her to be his running mate in the 2008 presidential race because of "God's plan," according to a top political strategist in the Arizona Republican's campaign.

In an interview with the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes," Steve Schmidt described Palin as "very calm -- nonplussed" after McCain met with her at his Arizona ranch just before putting her on the Republican ticket. McCain had planned to name Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) as his choice until word leaked, sparking what Schmidt called political blowback over selecting the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee.

McCain strategist: Palin thought candidacy was mapped by God - washingtonpost.com

I think that I have had variations of the actor's nightmare before. Odd, as I haven't done theater in 5 years, and I never did that much of it. I was in some form of musical comedy that was a period piece. (The real world antecedent might have been seeing the film version of The Producers musical a few weeks ago.) I was playing a stereotypically gay guy. At first, I only realized that I didn't know what my lines were. I think that we all had small colored books with the lines and notes in them. At one point, I had to sing some kind of number while dancing with another guy. I couldn't dance, sing and read at the same time, so I just sort of ended up making it up, figuring that that the lyrics would be so many verses of such a pattern of syllables. We could se the audience. It felt awkward being so unprepared.

It seemed like while I was frantically trying to read from the book with the lines that the text was changing, or I couldn't find what other people were reading from.

Then the writer/official writer came in during the middle of thing and presented us with some kind of award and sarcastically labeled us as being the worst performers ever. Everyone left, feeling embarrassed and shamed.

We were then eating in what seemed like a basement of the theatre that felt like as cafeteria/restaurant. Everyone was sitting at tables with a few friends from the cast.  Maybe because I cognized that text changing on you was indicative of being in a dream, I asked the entire room if anyone remembered having gone to a rehearsal or reading. A young girl mentioned about having seen the national production. I said "Yeah, but how about this one? This is a dream. I am dreaming all of this right now." I tried to say more, but my voice got all muddled, like I had peanut butter filling my mouth, and then they couldn't hear me. I wanted to prove to them that this was a dream, so I turned everyone into an ear of corn, which here all husked. I think I turned them back. Then I woke up and the alarm to wake up went off.

Weird. I don't recall my dreams very often, but I do occasionally get lucid ones.

When I came home from work today, I was sorting through the mail, and I noticed that I got a  pitch from the National Rifle Association to become a member. I guffawed out loud when I realized what it was.

Bear in mind, I have never used a real firearm in my life. I don’t even recall being particularly interested in toy guns when I was a kid. Not especially opposed or repelled by it, you understand, but it is something that I have no particular interest in, sort like football. I am sure that when I get excited about some of my interests, other peoples’ eyes undoubtedly glaze over in the same way.

In addition to never having used a gun, I also don’t drink or smoke, so from the perspective of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, I pretty much don’t exist.

I wondered if the NRA was just clueless or if someone was trying some kind of prank. (It wasn’t a “Dear Occupant” thing – it had my name on it.) If it was intended as a prank, it didn’t really work, since I find the whole thing a hoot.

I am quite curious as to how elections will go this coming year. I got an email that Rep Joe Sestak will be in Erie this Thursday for a meet and greet with the Erie County Democratic Party, so I will be checking that out, hopefully.

I also posted the event to the Erie Dems Facebook group.

For those who can’t make this, Ron DiNicola is having a reception just before the event at 5 PM at 4134 Commodore Drv.

One of the last major tasks I had set for myself while on vacation was to come up with an RSS feed partners page for Erie Gay News.

About a year ago, I noticed that one of the local bars had pasted in the calendar from our web site onto their site. However, the calendar was out of date. I figured that it would be kind of a pain for them to have to copy and paste new entries and take off old ones every time that I made a change, so I hunted for a script that would consume the RSS feeds that I already had. I found a rather nice one at Landmark Project. Apart from the webmaster initially pasting in the code, there is no further work – we maintain the content, and the other site stays updated.

It occurred to me that there were other relevant sites that could also carry the same code, which meant that the original research and development for the code paid off. I saw it as a mutually cooperative and beneficial arrangement: the more sites that carried the RSS feeds, the more likely that folks would be to find news and events. If I am looking at this correctly, everyone wins! And since it is an automatic thing, no one has to do any additional work past the one time pasting in of the JavaScript snippet.

I wanted to give the sites that carry our RSS feed some extra love, and I also wanted to get the code out there to make it easier for other sites to paste in. I did some database design and coding, and added it on to the existing resource section of the database and also created the new RSS feed partners page. I added a drop down to the page so that I folks could easily jump to the other feed. I have only pushed the calendar and news RSS feeds, but there are others as well.

Hmm, just realized that I should add some kind of indicator about RSS stuff to the resource page. Oh well, that should be pretty quick to do. I should also try to write some kind of article for the web site to let folks know about the new feature.

I have some social stuff for tomorrow, which is good since I should balance out. But I do feel pretty good about getting this done.

Around 11:20 PM last night, it occurred to me that I had pretty much spent that I had pretty much spent most of the day doing computer stuff, so I figured that it would be good to go out and actually socialize with other human beings. (Yeah, I know: “Thanks, Captain Obvious!”)

So, I headed off to the Zone and had a pretty good time. I bumped into a co-worker, who was out with her parents. Just after midnight, I mentioned that when folks were talking about this being the new decade, it was not exactly accurate. (Although, obviously any date/time could be used as the start of an arbitrary decade – October 7, 1982 was the end of a decade that began 10 years earlier.)

When co-worker and I were talking, I mentioned about another co-worker who referred to January 1, 2000 as the start of the new century/millennium. I pointed out that since the years would have been denoted with Roman numerals, and since there is no Roman numeral for zero, therefore, the first year would have been the equivalent of a 1, not a 0, so 2000 was therefore the last year of the 20th century. (Assuming that when folks switched from Roman numerals to Arabic, they didn’t take into account that they were also changing what the lowest possible starting integer could be.)

The co-worker I was talking with went from talking about I (the Roman numeral) to i (as in the imaginary number representing the square root of –1.) I instantly knew what she was referring to.

Who says we geeks don’t know how to cut loose and be all wild and crazy?? I had a fairly good time chatting and dancing, so it was pretty good.