BrettCajun comes in to visit DC tomorrow. TJ and I are hosting him, and are desperately looking for tennis venues or places with chickens to keep him happy. A visit to Blowoff is in order on Saturday at the very least.
The photo at left is a knitted (or crocheted?) version of an alien from the new Dr. Who called an Adiposian. Adiposians breed by emerging from the fat of other species, such as Earthlings. Apparently the knitter is in a knot with the show due to possible trademark and copyright infrongements.
Alien knitting patterns undo Dr Who fan.
This Saturday at 1pm we're up against our friends from Pax River at at Colmar Manor Park for the last home match of the season until we go to Dublin in June for the big gay rugby tournament.
If there's time I hope to get over to the Long View Gallery for Scott Brooks' Mid City Artists Open Studio Tour.
When I hear the phrase "carbon footprint" thrown around on The Today Show and start seeing compost for sale at Whole Foods, I start to cringe and think, "Oh dear, here we go again." You can poop in a bucket and add some grass clippings, and that's compost too. But I suppose paying for compost makes people feel better.
I saw this renewed interest in a "green movement" coming a few years ago, and stand by the comparisons to the environmental movements of the 70s and 90s, and points I made back then.
"Together, we can make an unbelievably negligible difference."
Seriously though, it's important not to make Chicken Little claims or people will throw their hands up in the air and give up. Don't ovewhelm the public with too many things they MUST do to save the environment. It's important to try to make changes, but they must be achievable as well. And scaring the public with unrealistic claims that the earth is going to blow up tomorrow will reduce the impact of the importance of trying to do something at all. And people will always have a greater interest in trying to fix local problems over problems they can't directly experience. But with the media as sensationalistic as it is today, declaring our doom on the news almost every day for a variety of reasons, I'm afraid this decade's environmental movement will merely be another blip on the radar.
If you start telling people to stop travelling by plane, they'll start to buck the idea of trying to change their lifestyle to improve the environment. Granted, we can now telecommute easier, and telecommuting is a wonderful idea in many ways. I'm guessing there's a lot of people who could travel less and work more from home or a home office. But there are a lot of people who won't want to stop flying, and making no-fly demands on these people will only result in a backlash.
This issue reminds me of a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where the crew of the Enterprise came across a group of aliens who claimed warp travel through the same area of space in their system over prolonged periods was creating a weakening of space-time continuum. This "warp pollution" was causing dangerous rifts in time and space to open up, sucking in unwary space travellers. The Enterprise crew found the aliens' claim to be valid, and for a short time the Federation banned warp travel above warp 5 unless it was absolutely necessary in an emergency. However, the development of a safer variable geometry engine allowed space travel beyond warp 5 to be safer to time and space.
In Battlestar Galactica, can also assign multiple uses for a sewage treatment ship, like re-using it to find Earth. But my question here is, if the poop ship is off looking for Earth, is untreated sewage being jettisoned into space instead of being reused on the food processing ship? I love it that the fleet's (no pun intended) poop ship is a major part of the storyline.
This is interesting: Green Porno, staring Isalbella Rossellini.
Anyway, things can be fixed, and behavior can change, but usually only gradually. With focus, a more positive outlook, doing what you can and birth control, things can get better. I'm doing my part by being a nonbreeding homo, for starters.
My bus stop is just east of Dupont Circle on P Street, NW. I realized the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq was just across the street from where I wait for the bus. It was kinda deserted:
It has been raining much of the week with heavy downpours. No need to water the plants anytime soon.
Yesterday I went out to see Sean's installation at Artomatic, at Capital Plaza I - corner of First & M streets NE - near the NY Ave Metro. I thought the setup for all the artwork was pretty impressive. The building they're hosting the event in is an unfinished office building several stories high. Coordinating the timing of the installations must have been tricky to get the show in while the building was still unfinished, yet ready for more construction. Artomatic will be showing for a month, and is a pretty cool thing for DC. Here's a crappy cell phone pic of Sean's installation:
Early, early this morning I went out with Michael and Bryan to the Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland for the International Migratory Bird Day Bird Count (Census). I'm still pretty worn out from the hour, and it was raining hard, so I can't recall too many species spotted at the moment. But my barred owl call did not fail to bring the boys to the yard. I am the best barred owl caller in the DC Metropolitan region, wings down. We also saw yellowlegs, lots of bluebirds, and many warblers identified by call. The beehives were still mostly unpopulated:
But again, it was very wet outside. I would have slept in too if I were a wise busy bee.
Madonnarama is tonight but I think I've spent all my party points for the week. And it's a nice, cool, cloudy day for several naps. I'm goin' to bed.
It's a veritable Q Street Renassance on Friday, with upstairs unholy Sean showing his work at Artomatic, and OMG DJ TM™ spinning at Apex. I'll be sure to hit the club after a Disco Nap following the art show.
I've been remarkably busy despite the lack of a job. But the spring planting is almost done, although I still have a list of things to do indoors as some tasks have been ignored since I moved in this place a year ago (like cleaning the toilet). A focused job search can only take so much time, so I'm keeping my brain busy by being busy. Although I sense I could start going koo-koo for lack of human interaction. I probably shouldn't consider a job working from home full time, although one or two days working from home doing things that require concentration and thought (writing, editing, layout, etc.) would be nice. I do crave coworker interaction.
The irony of my current situation is that I have plenty of leave time for travel, but flights are gawdawful expensive all of a sudden, so I'm stuck here unless I go on a spending spree for flights. Then again there's always backpacking which I haven't done in a while, and is relatively inexpensive and close by.
Since I'm in a Mommie Dearest way around the house, here's the Joan Crawford Megamix by master of the montage Dan-O-Rama.
To the comment troll who has already read far too much of this blog, taking far too much of it way too seriously: do like I do when anything having to do with either Obama or Clinton comes on TV - change the fucking channel. I see from the server logs that you've scoured this site on a frightening scale. If you are so fascinated and enraged by what you read here, go elsewhere and I guarantee you'll be in a better mood. Go visit Steve and Warren's blog (never safe for work), for example. I love those two - their sex life is dynamite, they're from Minnesota, always say nice things about everything, and they keep me updated on the weather in the land 'o lakes.
I'm a lounger, not a fighter:
Great shot by Brettie of a scuffle at the Rites of Spring tournament this weekend in Baltimore. In the photo they appear to be attacking the person in the wheelchair, but that is not the case, just a trick of the camera. I didn't get to play much, but the team played some good rugby against tough competition.
How does Matthew Foxxy-Fox's chest hair disappear on Lost? I'm guessing it's a nutrient deficiency from a diet heavy in island fruits, or some evil force is waxing people while they sleep.
The big paper I wrote last week for my marketing ethics class was about direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements in periodicals marketing anti-HIV medications to the gay male target audience (marketing distribution channel, to those in the business). While chatting with a guy at a fun Baltimore Bear party this weekend, the topic came up again. He kind of shook his head ruefully when the subject of pharmaceutical ads came up, since he was an HIV social worker, and inferred that those ads are a problem.
According to my research, the HIV medication ads showing happy, healthy HIV+ people at the beach or climbing mountainsides feed a surveyed perception that your life is not altered radically under these meds. Also, HIV+ people who read those ads tend to believe that the risk of transmission is reduced (not true) and that they can proceed with unsafe sex practices. Sadly, those ads also affect the perception of the above two issues in HIV-negative people as well, contributing to a rise in unsafe sex and HIV transmission. So basically those sunshiney ads from companies who claim to be helping, actually harm those people who read the ads. Several perception surveys support the above claims, so it's not conjecture.
Such ads by pharmaceutical companies were only allowed in the U.S. after 1996. New Zealand and the United States are the only two countries in the world that allow such advertisements on television and in publications. New Zealand is considering a ban on them as well. The reason most countries don't allow such ads to be printed or broadcast is that they are frequently misleading, or lead to an over-medicalization of daily life. In other words, you can just pop a pill and all your problems will be solved. It's not just a problem with HIV medications, but with parmaceuticals across the board.
In many of these ads the side-effects are frequently not quantified or prioritized. That is, if suicidal thoughts are one side-effect of taking Hivetra (or whatever), it needs to be put on the top of the list, in bold, underlined or whatever. But too often it's listed between headaches and diarrhea (other fun side-effects of HIV medications) in no particular order of severity.
Again, I've stated before that HIV medications are no picnic, and it's not like taking Lunesta or Benadryl. And they don't cure HIV, only treat it and extend your life. The first round of combination drug therapy my roomate was prescribed caused all his mucous membranes to blister - including his lips, nasal lining, rectum and throat. And since many drugs are rushed through the clinical trial period, many longer-term effects of the medications are not discovered until many years later (facial wasting, distended belly, fat redistribution to wierd places).
To me, the creepy part is that it's not uncommon to see these medications take up three pages of ad space in our beloved community publications, like The Advocate, Instinct and Genre. Two facing pages, or three pages is a LOT of ad space to purchase in a color glossy publication. And advertising dollars help pay for the printing and distribution of said publications. These publciations purport to speak to our community, yet are owned by pharmaceutical manufacturers who spend more dollars on marketing than they do on treatment research, and far more on marketing than on research for a cure. I checked: well over $40 BILLION by now. How critical do you think the writers of these publications are about the hand that feeds them?
You do the math - pharmaceutical companies are happy to keep supplying you with a barrage of medications as long as you are alive. And as long as people keep contracting HIV, they're still in business, and so are our community publications.
So there's another reason to continue to keep it safe, it's that in playing safe I'm stickin it to Tha Man. I'd rather not support companies that are profiting so much on a disease, so I will continue my efforts in not contracting the disease.
When Brett Favre retired from the Green Bay Packers, there really wasn't any reason to go on. But as fate would have it, the Washington Redskins signed on Colt Brennan as part of their wooftastic quarterback lineup. With Maryland's former QB Sam Hollenbach also part of the upcoming QB roster, there's definitely something to look forward to. I've seen college football and it was fun, but maybe it's time for me to check out a Redskins game at RFK.
It's been a busy week, with a major paper completed for the spring semester on Tuesday. I learned some interesting things, perhaps I'll comment on it later. For the summer I have Crisis Communication Management to look forward to, which should be fun.
Amateur personal journal blogging is over.
For those of you still on Friendster, Cylon's birthday was May 1st. Many apologies to you, Cylon Warrior, for the belated birthday wishes. And may you experience many more pleasant cycles, and that you project the most wonderful realities from here until your next rebirth on a basestar.
From Josh over at The Conjecturer: the U.S. Peace Corps program has been getting some constructive criticism lately. It appears that the age of flip-flopped and tie-dyed volunteers is over, and countries are demanding more skilled and experienced U.S. development assistance. From my personal experience in Kazakstan, I saw that older volunteers were more respected by host country nationals, and their development work was far more succsesful than post-undergraduate's efforts. With State Department diplomatic budgets shrinking, representation out in the field has fallen under more intense scrutiny. Good will on behalf of Birkenstocked Earth Goddess represenation just isn't good enough anymore in light of major health crises like AIDS in Africa, or food shortages. Countries are demanding experienced and aged assistance these days, and I agree that the Peace Corps program is long overdue for a makeover.
And no Crocs overseas, please. Apparently, someone feels more strongly about this than me!
Finally, Ask Alexyss (wash yo' nutz). Always classy. Guys, please clean your foreskin and behinds.
