Dogged Blog

Oh well if you're going to put it like THAT...

"The media has become like a six-year-old boy who, when you're sitting discussing something serious with other people, keeps interrupting to say 'Look! Poop!'" -- SensibleShoes

Quote of the Day

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence." -- Bertrand Russell

Do You Miss Me?

"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." -Gene Fowler

She Blogs

Straight Americans need... an education of the heart and soul.  They must understand - to begin with - how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.  ~Bruce Bawer

My friend Gina over on Dogma advised me to blame Typepad for the fact that I haven't blogged in a week and a half, but alas, I didn't even realize Typepad had gone down for a few days.

It's not that I had nothing to say. It's not even that I've been Christmas shopping... excuse me, HOLIDAY shopping, I forgot that as a liberal I can't use the word "Christmas."  I suppose most of the reasons I haven't been blogging are way too journally to go into here.

But I will mention that, thanks to a free one-month trial of Netflix, I recently saw the five-year-old made-for-cable-TV series "Queer as Folk" for the first time. I was talking about it to my friend Travis, getting a little worked up over something in the first episode I saw, and after  listening for a while he gently said, "You do realize this is a five year old conversation, don't you?" I guess the entire gay universe and much of the straight universe already had the debate over that particular controversial element of the series while I was stuck out here in the country without premium cable channels and totally cut off from most of the major cultural debates of the era.

So, this is not exactly news from the cutting edge, but last night I watched the final episode of the first season of the show, in which Brian, the narcissistic, rejecting older boyfriend of 18-year-old high school senior Justin, shows up at his prom and dances just once with him, to the strains of "Save the Last Dance for Me." There is no question this scene should have been embarrassing as hell. Anything that happens at a prom is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing, after all, and the picked-upon (but cute) blond gay teen dancing with his boyfriend doubly so. But somehow, it wasn't. It was, frankly, the sweetest, most romantic piece of television I've ever watched. I actually got tears in my eyes.

And then immediately afterward, in the parking lot, Justin gets his head bashed in with a baseball bat by one of his classmates.

So, there I was, sitting in the dark caught on the edge between the dance and the baseball bat to the head. I was thinking about a time I was standing in line at an ATM in San Francisco, near Kaiser Medical Center, with my friend Yvette, who had spiky hair and a leather jacket. A guy walked up who was of the opinion that lesbians shouldn't be allowed to access their bank accounts in public places, and smashed my head into the windshield of a parked car while kicking Yvette in the ribs and calling us dykes. It wasn't the first time something like that happened, starting with the word "Fag" being spray painted on my locker door at my all-girl's Catholic high school (I'm guessing there was a bit of an illiteracy problem there, but whatever), to various kicks, shoves, pinches, punches, broken car windows, slashed tires, and hateful words of varying degrees of threat being showered on me from the day I entered high school until I was in my 30s.

So, is this politics or is this journaling? I ask because as long as I'm talking about marriage equality or some other tangible, legal aspect of being gay in America, it's clearly politics. But I don't know what it is, when you're forty-six years old watching a trashy television show and start to cry because a boy is dancing with his boyfriend at his prom, and then someone tries to kill him for it, and then you remember what it feels like to have your head slammed into a windshield by a guy calling you a dyke. I just know if  politics can't encompass that particular kind of broken heart, then politics is crap.

The Sum of its Parts

Another example of a core Democratic principle -- equality under the law. And from that principle stem civil rights, gender equity, and gay rights. It's not that those individual issues aren't important, of course they are. It's just that they are just that -- individual issues. A party has to stand for something bigger than the sum of its parts. -Markos Moulitsas Zúniga

Chris Bowers quoted this gem from Kos that I'd missed earlier (obviously I'm not following the Boy Blogs quite as religiously as I should) in a much larger context.

But taken entirely out of the context of either article (though both are good and worth reading), this little piece of it seems to me to strike just the right note: It's taking the issues that matter to me completely seriously and elevating them to the "top of the pile" by identifying their underlying importance, rather than by getting bogged down in identity politics.

My rights are important because equal rights are important.

The Limits of Reason

Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.  -Sydney Smith (1771 - 1845)

And yet it can be very tempting to try, can't it?

Everlasting Error

"The aim of science is not to open the door to everlasting truth, but to set a limit on everlasting error." -Berthold Brecht

I don't believe that science, research, and medicine have all the answers. I don't believe that all vets and doctors know what they're doing. I'm not even going to PRETEND the world of medical research isn't hopelessly corrupt.

But I honestly get SO FED UP at the willingness of so many of my fellow dog-lovers to just throw all common sense and rational thought out the window when confronted with someone with a really slick sales spiel for their snake oil.

I wish I could link to the comment that has me steamed, but it was made on a private email list.  Just had to rant a bit regardless. Plus it was an excuse for sharing one of my favorite quotes.

Don't Look Now, But...

We have it. The smoking gun. The evidence. The potential weapon of mass destruction we have been looking for as our pretext of invading Iraq. There's just one problem - it's in North Korea. -Jon Stewart

The increasingly dangerous situation in North Korea is just one more thing we're all being distracted from by the Schiavothon. Three stories, two from today, one from earlier this week:

China Says No Breakthrough on Talks with North Korea
Korean Ambassador Says North Korea Ready to Go to War Over Nuclear Issue
North Korea Says It Has 'Increased Nuclear Arms'

The Baseball Experience

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward." -Vernon Law

The Koufax Awards, given for the best lefty blogging, were named after left-handed pitcher Sandy Koufax.  The quote above was made by a right-handed pitcher, Vernon Law (also father of infielder Vance Law - a baseball family, to be sure!).

Both Koufax and Law were deeply religious men. Koufax, whose nickname was "the man with the golden arm" and who is perhaps the greatest pitcher of all time, was widely criticized in his day for refusing to pitch in the World Series on Yom Kippur. Law was so religious that his nickname was "the Deacon."

Just a little baseball trivia to go with the quote of the day.

By the way - Chat Week on PetHobbyist.com starts tonight! That means that in one week I'll have my life back.

My Country, Right or Wrong?

"'My country, right or wrong'," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober'."  -G. K. Chesterton

No comment today - Chat Week starts tomorrow and I'm somewhat overwhelmed with work. I haven't found a way to get paid to blog yet.