 One of the things I like about being in school is that I'm always learning unexpected new things. One of the classes I'm taking this quarter is Survey of German Literature I, a class at UD that focuses on the 19th century. In this class one would expect to learn about authors such as Goethe, Schiller, and Heine and about literary movements such as Sturm und Drang, die Weimarer Klassik, die Romantik and das junge Deutschland. Or perhaps it would be better to say that coming to this class I wasn't surprised to learn about such things; I'd never heard of die Weimarer Klassik (though I had of course heard of Weimar) or das junge Deutschland or Heine before.
We're reading Heine's "Deutschland: ein Wintermärchen", and, as often happens because of my limited but growing German vocabulary, I came across a word I didn't know, "Lorbeerblättern" in Caput IX. Using my handy dandy PocketPC German<->English dictionary (SlovoEd), I found that "Lorbeerblatt" is "bay leaf."  Given the context in the poem, I was confused as to why anyone would wear bay leaves. Dr. Schellhammer was surprised that I wouldn't have heard of Greek athletes having worn wreathes of laurel. Well I had heard of that, of course. The reason she was surprised is that she hadn't realized that in English, unlike in German, there are different words for "bay leaf" and for "laurel," and had I looked up "Lorbeer" instead of "Lorbeerblatt" I would have realized that too.
 Not all English speakers are as ignorant as I as to the source of bay leaves. The Encyclopedia of Spices, though naturally it focuses on bay leaf as a spice, tells of the history of laurel. Can you name the Greek god associated with laurel? (Hint: think god of poets or god of the sun.) |
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If you’ve visited my blog in the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed some ads by Google but you probably never clicked on them. Since September 20th, I’ve had 878 page impressions but only 3 ad clicks, an impressive clickthrough rate of 0.3%. Google pays about $0.03 per click, but it sends out a check only after a site accumulates $100 worth of revenue. At about one click per week, it would take until sometime in the year 2068 before I’d get my first check, assuming I was even still alive then.
conservative Christian movies or Catholic resources. The ads served up for my front page were even stranger "matches." I’ve never written about Katie Holmes or Jessica Simpson (before now), but AdSense thought people coming to my site would find ads about these women useful. At least my classes page got more pertinent ads about language arts and educational standards, but even on these ads no one clicked.
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I think McNaught's words were aimed primarily at the non-gay students in the audience, perhaps especially frat boys who are stereotyped as being unfriendly to gay people, to try to get them to understand what it would be like growing up gay and being unable to sing one's song and to get these non-gay people to understand how their own words and actions are songs that send messages to the gay friends they most certainly and usually unknowingly have. However, McNaught's words were also aimed at gay people in the audience to remind us how important singing our songs is both for straight people who think they don't know anyone gay and for gay people who are following us out of the closet.
| Remember how Chris Harbinson got so upset because he thought outsports.com called him gay?
Apparently Chris Harbinson is not the only one to think that being called gay (which actually he wasn't) is a horrible slur. Lynne Cheney is quite upset that John Kerry called her daughter a lesbian in last night's presidential debate. Lynne thinks that Kerry's having said that Mary Cheney is a lesbian is a "cheap and tawdry political trick." I can see why she might think that. Kerry making up something like that to further his liberal agenda really would be horrible, wouldn't it? 
Except wait. Unlike Chris Harbinson, Mary Cheney not only is gay, but she's also said so herself. Apparently Mary doesn't think being gay is so horrible. She even worked as the gay liaison at Coors. Of course one might question Mary's judgment since apparently she also doesn't think Bush having a second term is so horrible either and she also doesn't think a Federal Marriage Amendment is so horrible either, at least not so horrible that she should speak out against it. (If you want to ask her why, send her a letter.) So Mary doesn't think being gay is so bad, but perhaps Lynne has deeply held religious beliefs that homosexuality is wrong and that homosexual sex is wrong. 
Except wait. Lynne Cheney is an author, and one of her books, Sisters, features hot steamy lesbian sex. Did Lynne write the book under a pseudonym? Nope, she sure didn't, but she did write the book long before she knew her husband would be Vice President in an administration that sells a conservative Christian agenda. It's okay for Lynne to write about hot steamy lesbian sex, but it's not okay for John Kerry to tell the truth about Mary Cheney's sexual orientation? It seems to me that it's Lynne Cheney who's agreed to play tawdry political tricks. I also know a name to call Lynne Cheney that's worse than "gay" or "lesbian." Lynne Cheney is a hypocrite. |
| Andrew Sullivan points out a reason why Mary Cheney's parents are hypocrites that I hadn't remembered yesterday. Dick Cheney said that Kerry's reference to Mary's being a lesbian made him "a pretty angry father." Well, do you remember that Illinois Senate candidate Allan Keyes called Mary "a selfish hedonist" since she was a homosexual? As Sullivan points out, neither Dick nor Lynne Cheney denounced Keyes for what he said about their daughter. It's okay for Allan Keyes to call Mary a selfish hedonist but not for John Kerry to say Mary is being who she was born to be? Kerry's remarks make Dick an angry father but Keyes' remarks don't?
Well there's a dirtier name than "selfish hedonist" to call Dick Cheney. Just like his wife, Dick Cheney is a hypocrite. |
It's fireplace season again! |
My blog now uses permanent URLsIf you're not geekish, you probably won't find this interesting, and if you're über-geekish, you'll probably think I'm slow, but otherwise there's a chance you'll find it interesting that I've set up permanent URLs for my blog pages. I'd come across an article some time ago on alistapart.com that explains why it's important to have permanent URLs, but I'd never gotten around to changing my site. This week I came across another article (both articles are a few years old, but hey, I already said I was slow) that suggested a slightly different way of implementing permanent URLs.What kind of URLs did it use before?In case you're wondering, my blog's non-permanent URLs used a querystring to tell my PHP script what month to display. These URLs would be something like /blog/index.php?month=200410. Bill Humphries, in the first article I read, points out that such URLs don't get indexed by some search engines (although Google has always indexed my blog despite that) and that such URLs make it apparent what kind of architecture the site is on (I already told you, but the ".php" suffix tells you I'm using PHP scripts).What's a permanent URL?The new permanent URLs for this blog don't use a query string but use the month as the last part of the URL. For example, this month's permanent URL is /blog/2004-10. Humphries explains what to put in the .htaccess file to transform "/blog/2004-10" to "/blog/index.php?month=200410". The lines I used are:RewriteRule ^blog/(200[2-9])/([0-1][0-9])(/)?$ /blog/$1-$2 [NC,R] RewriteRule ^blog/(200[2-9])-([0-1][0-9])(/)?$ /blog/index.php [NC]If that makes any sense to you, you'll notice that you could actually get to this month's blog with the URL /blog/2004/10/ (with or without the trailing slash). If you use slashes to separate the year from the month, though, your browser will get redirected (that's what the [R] option to RewriteRule does) and display the URL with a hyphen. (Before I did that, the pictures didn't show because the server thought the page was one directory level deeper, probably something I could fix a better way, but using the hyphen avoided that.) You may notice that my .htaccess statements don't actually turn the permanent URL into a URL with a querystring. That's because Till Quack in the second article suggests having the PHP script do the work of parsing the URL instead of doing all the work in .htaccess, and that appealed to me. The PHP script has to deal with validating dates anyway. I did set up my .htaccess so that it doesn't bother to redirect for years before 2002, which is when I started blogging, but then my PHP script makes sure that the requested date has blog entries, redirecting to my 404 error page if not. Why does it matter?What made me look at all this again is that until now my current blog page has always been just "index.php". Google does index my site, and I do get some visitors, but it takes a while after a month ends before Google notices that the content that used to be on the main "index.php" page can be accessed only through a "index.php?month=x" page. That meant that, for example, at the beginning of September people searching for items on Chris Harbinson (who, by the way, loudly proclaims [protesting too much?] that he is not gay) would be directed to "index.php" instead of "index.php?month=200408", the page for August on which he is mentioned. Now, as you'll notice if you look at the top of your screen, the current month's blog is referred to by its fancy new permanent URL, which doesn't change at the end of the month, making Google have to do less work and making sure that visitors to the blog get the page they searched for. Woo hoo! |
About a year ago, I wrote about how stupid online polls were. One of my reasons was that some polls allowed multiple votes and thus only showed whether there were more right-wing fanatics or left-wing fanatics who cared about voting in the poll. The particular poll I was writing about was a Dayton Daily News one on gay marriage. Today the paper has another poll on a more important topic, whether October 21st is too soon to put up Christmas decorations (and yes, it is!), and it seems that DDN has finally done something right with its web site, namely to limit voting to once per day. |
Understanding Republicans
I have a very close straight female friend who voted against Bush in 2000 who confessed to me last night that she plans to vote for Bush this time. The reason? She doesn't like John Kerry. She saw a documentary that said he lied to get his medals in Vietnam, and she's offended that he spoke against the Vietnam war. She thinks if Kerry wins we'll have socialized medicine. She doesn't trust John Kerry. She thinks that Bush is what this country needs to keep it safe against terrorism. I love my friend dearly but her using Robin Williams as justification for voting for Bush seems to explain Republicans in a nutshell. She'd been forwarded an e-mail that listed a bunch of sarcastic conservative statements that Robin Williams supposedly said. See, she said, even Robin Williams is conservative. Except it just ain't so. First of all snopes.com found the original e-mail with no mention of Williams. Second of all, Robin Williams does fundraisers for Democratic senate candidates and jokes that "Bush complaining about a lack of intelligence seems sort of redundant." My friend would rather take some conservative propaganda at face value instead of examining it critically. Are all Republicans like that? The documentary my friend saw was probably the Sinclair Broadcasting program featuring information from Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal. Whether Sinclair's airing of this program was right has been covered by many other bloggers and columnists, but what gets me is that my friend criticized Fahrenheit 911 as being biased propaganda that she didn't need to see. She can make judgments about John Kerry based on one program, but it offends her sensibilities to even watch something that's critical of the president. I pointed out to her that Kerry is the man who risked his life in Vietnam while Bush pulled family strings to stay as far away from Vietnam as possible. That doesn't matter to her. She thinks Kerry lied to get his medals and then dishonored them by speaking against the war. She wouldn't put it this way, but for her a coward is better than someone brave enough to speak his mind.
I had to laugh out loud when my friend cited Kerry's plans for socialized medicine as a reason to vote against him. First, I'm not sure "socialized medicine" is an accurate way to describe his plans for reforming health care. More importantly, I asked her if she thought Democrats were likely to take control of Congress. When she finally quieted down and listened to me, she admitted that Republicans would probably retain control of Congress. How then, I asked, was Kerry going to implement socialized medicine? Were Republicans in the House and Senate going to roll over and pass whatever he suggested? Hell, Bill and Hillary Clinton had a Democratic House and Senate and couldn't get health care reform passed. My friend is a nurse and so perhaps she knows more about our country's great health care system than I do, but even if Kerry's plans for health care are bad, couldn't she hold her nose and vote for Kerry anyway, counting on political gridlock to fend off major changes? Understanding heterosexualsMy friend knows I'm gay, of course, and she has many other gay friends. She doesn't think we're evil or sinners. She's conservative enough that calling gay relationships "marriage" makes her uneasy, but not so uneasy that she hasn't gone to gay weddings. Yet she had the audacity last night to tell me that gay marriage wasn't her issue. That made me angry, it hurt me, and I feel betrayed. I told her I was disappointed in her. She tried to say that friends can have different political views, which I guess is true if you disagree about taxes or health care, but to me it's not quite the same when it comes to amending our state and federal constitutions to make me a second class citizen. I pointed out to my friend that she's been divorced twice (a low blow, perhaps, but it's the truth that she, like so many heterosexuals, is hardly in a place to tell gay people anything about how sacred marriage is) and asked her how she'd feel if these amendments were about restricting marriage to people who'd never been divorced. That thought had never occured to her, because heterosexuals just take their rights for granted. It doesn't matter that she's failed at two marriages; she automatically assumes that she should have the right to marry again if she wants. That I would not have the right to any recognition of a relationship, not even civil unions, is less important to her than feeling safe against terrorists. "Marygate" came up, and my friend, who doesn't think homosexuality is a choice, said she was offended by Kerry's having brought up Mary. Never mind that Mary was already out, never mind that Dick Cheney himself mentioned Mary specifically when asked a general question about gay marriage, my friend was offended by Kerry. Why would she be offended by Kerry but not by the fact that Bush and the Republicans have demonized homosexuals? I truly do not understand. My friend is not alone, however, because most heterosexuals, even those who say they have no problem with homosexuals, were offended. I've already accused Lynne and Dick of being hypocrites about the matter. They're also quite sly, too. Tap into the latent homophobia that most heterosexuals have and divert their attention from real issues. It works well, and I have a very personal example of it. Feeling tiredI was angry at my friend, but now I'm really just tired, and yes, a bit bitter. Tired, because I really don't feel like wasting the time it will take to try to get my friend to think, to read information she wouldn't go out to find on her own, to see other points of view, to make an informed decision about whether she can really trust Bush more than Kerry. Bitter, because if my friend hadn't let her intentions slip, she would have gone on to vote for a man who uses oppression of people who are her friends as a way to retain power. This is not an apt comparision (at least I hope it's not), but I feel like a Jew in Germany in 1932 whose Christian neighbors held their noses about Hitler's anti-Semitism because they liked the feeling of security and national pride he brought them. Ironicially in 2004 I think I'd rather live in Germany than the United States. |
| Okay, some people are tired of Jon Stewart, but I still enjoy him. His take last night on President Bush's suddenly being in favor of states allowing same sex couples to have civil unions was classic. Stewart lamented, "Gee, if only the President had some influence on shaping the platform of his party," and noted that Bush is not a flip flopper but instead is "a versatile top."
If you want to see this for yourself, here's a clip. |
Why this little advertisement for the library? Because this week I’ve been feeling a bit down for various reasons, but I got one of those unexpected e-mails. I was bad, though, and set all these other authors aside for a few hours Tuesday and Wednesday nights for Timothy James Beck’s newest (okay, published last year, but new to me) book, He's the One. You can read what I thought about it on my books page. It’s just the thing for a brief escape from the real world. |
Understanding Republicans, part 2
Less conceivable is that even this year, when the Log Cabin Republicans refuse to endorse Bush and when famous gay Republican pundit Andrew Sullivan risks alienating his core audience by endorsing Kerry, there are still some gay people who not only are voting for Bush but aren't in the closet about it.
Still I wasn't terribly surprised to see a Bush sign in the yard of a single gay neighbor of mine, but I was surprised to see in that same yard a sign for Jane Mitakides. Okay, in case you've never heard of her, she's the Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress for Ohio's 3rd district. Sorry to say, she has no chance of winning, despite her being endorsed by former Texas governor Dolph Briscoe (I think that in Ohio, Briscoe, Mitakides and senatorial candidate Eric Fingerhut all have name recognition issues). I plan to vote for her, of course, because I think her opponent, I don't know if my neighbor is a Democrat for Bush or a Republican for Mitakides or just an independent (I did e-mail him to ask why he was supporting both George and Jane but he never answered). I guess it means I should cut my straight Republican friend some slack. (Or then again, maybe not, considering the photographic proof this week that Bush's campaign isn't above lying to win votes.) |
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