Metro Randomness

Just witnessed one of the funniest conversations I have heard on the Metro in a while. A  couple got on with their kid, who was probably about 6, and then at another stop a young woman got on the train and  she is holding a box of crackers and some sort of salad in a container.  After a few minutes  she notices the kid is staring at her and asks if he is staring at her crackers.  He starts  talking to her, she offers him some, but he turns them down.  Then the kid starts talking  about mice for some reason, and telling her how his classroom has one and he has seen them  running around other places.  She tells him not to mess with those mice because they are the  bad ones.  They go back and forth about this while the parents sit in amusement. He was telling about trying to handle some of the "bad mice" and they would scratch him up  and bite him and such.  You could tell he was making it up and the woman was going along  with what he was saying.  A few of us on the train were trying not to laugh at the  outrageous things he was making up.  As they were getting off the train, dad remarked "You should ask your mom about some of these mice."

Ah Metro riders, they can be a source of amusement at times.

Nice Try...

Last Friday I was making arrangements to head out to dinner with a guy I've been seeing.  He suggested going to Asia Nine over near Gallery Place.  I had never been there and I wanted to see what the food was like, so I went and looked up their website and menu.  One of the first things I happened to spot when I got to their site was the following event announcements.

Whether Single or Attached, Asia Nine is the Place to be on Valentine’s Day Weekend, February 13th and 14th.

So that piqued my curiosity.  I don't have anyone in my life right now and so when it comes to valentines day, it usually means a day that I avoid going out.  Primarily it's because most restaurants and places for going out are doing specials and events that are themed for couples, not for singles.  So I pull up the event, and they display their special Valentines Day Menu.

The first thing that I see is that every single item has some sort of name that implies love or coupling.  I found myself annoyed at seeing this, because for a place to advertise that they want singles or couples to show up and then to have every menu item be more themed to couples just seems to be in poor taste.  Way to remind those of us who are single that we are just that.  Quite frankly, it doesn't make me want to go there for Valentines Day.

Oh well, I'm sure I can go find my own thing to do.

Oh For Pete's Sake!

Saturday night after my performance I went out with BD to Blowoff.  I hadn't been there for two years because I didn't have the greatest impression of it, and quite frankly, nothing's changed.  I'm really not into going to places that are more of a "meat market" but that is not the point of this story.

So BD and I are there and we're mingling with some folks outside of the dance floor and BD runs into some folks he knows, including a guy named SR.  Now SR (all of this I would learn later) has always had the hots for BD, and he made it known he was still interested because he secretly told BD while I was away that he would "like to be the one making out with [BD] by the end of the night."

Later that evening, BD and I are out dancing and getting close, and there was a bit of making out going on.  Apparently SR saw this, didn't like it, and proceeded to go by and pinch BD.

What...the...fuck?!

Really, you get jealous that someone else is with a person you want, and so you proceed to pinch them?!  Come on now, little girls do that, not grown men.  Take off the dress, put on some pants, and man the fuck up.  That means you suck it up and deal with it in a more constructive way, you don't pinch a person because you're mad that they're not with you.  It also means you learn some boundaries and don't interfere with someone else's date.  SR is lucky that BD didn't tell me all this until after we had left, because there would have been words, or worse.

Ya know what though, this is the kind of drama queen bullshit that I have seen over the last few months from enough folks that when it comes to certain "communities" that I feel that they have more issues than National Geographic.  It's sad to see, but it is reality at this point.

What's The Point Then?

A few weeks ago a health fair was held at my place of work and I did go down there to check it out.  One of the offerings was to get on the bone marrow registry to be a donor if someone needs it.  Now this is something that I would get behind, so I started reading the paperwork.  It was when I got down to the eligibility requirements that I got a nice slap in the face by the cold wet rag of old-school overprotective thinking.

I was cheerfully informed by the paper that because I am a male who has had sex with another male, they don't want my bone marrow, period.

I hate that implication, I really truly do.  What it makes me feel like is that they have decided to assume that because I am attracted to other men and have been in relationships with them, it must mean that I am a walking disease factory, or worse, that I must have HIV/AIDS.  Never mind that I don't engage in high risk activities, nope, I must be this dirty person who is going to just go and infect other people.

What kills me about it is that folks like me are the ones actively being discriminated against.  Perhaps the medical folks have forgotten, but straight people are just as capable of catching deadly diseases from their relations as well.  It's not right that I'm not allowed to donate blood or bone marrow despite taking every precaution, but that these organizations will gladly take the same products from a straight person even though that person could be promiscuous, or even have caught something from a partner who lied to them because they didn't take proper precautions.  Seriously, what the french toast is this?

So what does that leave me?  I can't donate blood, I can't donate bone marrow, and hell, I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't allowed to donate my organs either if I was killed in a car wreck.  Unless of course I just lie to the screeners, but I just can't do that, it's a personal violation of my own ethics.  Just remember that folks, I'm not allowed right now to save someone elses life because according to the current rules, I'm going to end up killing them with something else.

Too bad, but I think when my drivers license comes up for renewal I'll just have to remove my permission to be an organ donor, they don't seem to want me.

*Raises Eyebrow*

Dear Mr Cheney, 

If gay marriage was always a state issue, then why did you support your party's efforts to make it a federal issue via a US Constitution amendment?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090601/ap_on_re_us/us_cheney

What An Odd Day

I swear this had to be one of the strangest days for me on record, but at least it's over.

Woke up this morning and I was going to drive to metro since I had plans to head up to Columbia after work.  Instead, I would get onto the main road of my neighborhood, feel something was not right, and end up pulling off into a nearby parking lot.  I discovered that one of my tires had blown its valve stem.  I changed the tire and drove to Metro to get on my way to work; a bit late, but at least I could make it in.

Then to top it off, I realized that my SmartTrip card was not in my wallet, but rather in my other pair of pants.  After much cursing I went and bought another card, so now I have a backup I can carry in my bag if for some reason this happens again.

When I left work, I dropped by the tire store and got the tire fixed.  The guy was nice enough to do it without a huge charge.  I drove back to the parking lot behind my apartment and started to switch out the spare with my fixed tire.

Some couple proceeded to have a screaming match by the supermarket, and boy did it sound ugly.  He kept on screaming for her to get out of the car, and she wouldn't get out.  I ended up calling the cops because I thought it was going to get violent, but they finished yelling and drove off before the police arrived.  I gave the officer the tag number and what I witnessed and left it at that.

Yeah, ladies and gents, if you get into a screaming match somewhere and it sounds like it could turn physical, I have no qualms about calling the cops.  The last thing I want to see is a domestic situation turn physical and I did nothing to try to stop it.

Perhaps tomorrow won't be so odd.

Free Education

I got a nice bonus today as I rode the bus home from my Metro stop, an education on "Northern White People vs Southern White People, Obama Edition"

This is what I learned:

• Southern White People hate black people.
• Southern White People are the reason we had eight years of Bush and Cheney.
• Northern White People like Obama.
• Obama is not a racist because he grew up around white people.
• Northern White People are the reason Obama is now president.
• Southern White People hate that there is a black man in the White House.
• People are going to blame Obama for all the problems that Bush and Cheney caused.
• Obama will be a great president because there are references to the number 44 in the Bible.

Today's lesson has been brought to the riders of the R12 bus route (and now you!) free of charge thanks to your local "Crazy people who ride the bus and are on a mission to educate."

Copyright Issues?

One of my hobbies is to take pictures, especially of the things going on in my life.  To satisfy some of my blatant attention whoring, I have a Flickr account where I post my pictures for folks to look at.  The pictures I put up there are copyrighted by me since I am the original photographer, and on occasion I do get asked for permission by someone if they can use a photo I've taken for their website or whatever.  I have no problem with doing so, as long as I get credit for being the one who took it.

Therefore, I was very disappointed to learn from another Flickr user that my sports pictures were being lifted and put on a website as part of their own galleries without my permission, and without credit to me.  I am not the only one this is happening to as other users are finding their pictures on this series of sites as well.

If you are a Flickr user and you have sports picture that are publicly accessible on your photostream, you might want to take a look at the following and see if any of your photos are on the sites:
NFL
MLB
NHL

At the bottom of the sites (once you can get past the barrage of ads) are links to individual teams so you can check your teams out.  They seem to be swiping the photos and using the same titles you used on Flickr, so just use your titles in searches and they should come up.  If you find any, you could try E-mailing the webmaster to complain.  I would also complain to GoDaddy by E-mailing copyright@godaddy.com since won't be happy to hear that some of the sites they are hosting have blatant copyright violations on them.  I have already filed my complaint and hopefully GoDaddy will either kick their asses so the photos are gone, or just take down the sites. I kind of hope for the latter because clearly they're just a way for someone to try and make money off of ads, plus then it means I don't have to spend another few hours trying to search for all of my Caps and Orioles photos.

So I'll say it again, if you want to use my photos for something, you've gotta talk to me first.

WTF Yo?!

I am just curious, how many of you actually read the text of the bill of the bailout plan that was passed by the Senate tonight?

Want to hear of a good reason why it ended up being passed, despite reports that many Americans are still opposed to the bailout plan and were telling their Senators so.

It was attached to the "Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act" (H.R. 1424). That was the bill that recently passed the house and would have required insurance companies to consider mental health on the same level as physical health, and to prohibit discrimination in employment based on genetic information.

If the Senate killed the bailout plan, they would have killed this bill as well, and then people would have really been up in arms because they killed off a perfectly good piece of legislation.

I don't recall the media mentioning this dirty little detail, I only stumbled across it because I decided to research the details of the bill.

Unfuckingbelievable, they took a perfectly good bill and attached this pile of shit to it. Doesn't this mean it now goes back down to the House in this form? Now either they will have to pass it, or risk the political hit when people find out that they just killed off the mental health benefits bill.

*shakes head*

This Crazy World

I am so totally done with hearing about the economic crisis. Every day there's yet another claim that the world is basically going to explode in a firey holocaust because some asshole bankers made stupid choices when it came to loans, and now we must save them from themselves. Yeah, what the fuck ever.

No matter what happens, we'll deal with it, and I hope to God that Congress doesn't rush through a decision on the economy just because Paulson and Bernake are all ONOEZ PANIC!!!! due to the interest rates that banks are charging to loan money to one another are now higher than the average home mortgage interest rate (6.750%).

However, one idea that is being pushed absolutely floored me today, it made me angry enough to write to my House Representative (House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer) and tell him "Don't even think of doing this!" The idea is to increase the FDIC deposit limit from $100,000 to $250,000. Now I am all for extra insurance for when things go absolutely wrong, but this is something I just cannot get behind.

First of all, who does this really benefit? I can't think of anyone I personally know that has over $100,000 in their checking, savings, and money market accounts at their local bank. Therefore, they're already covered by current FDIC deposit limits. Hell, even if they weren't, there's other insurance that could kick in from a private company to make sure that people recover their money. I have also heard (but have not confirmed) that the FDIC on good faith tries to give all the money that a person had back to them, even though that portion is not guaranteed.

As banks have begun to fail and the FDIC has taken over, there has been concern that the FDIC won't have enough money to cover all of the deposits of all of the accounts, especially if several large banks fail at once. They have tons of money folks, but it's definitely not unlimited. So why the fuck would you raise the FDIC limit, which means the FDIC has to pay out even more money to depositors in the event of a bank failure, and therefore would deplete their funds even faster?! It makes absolutely no sense! Let's not forget where the FDIC gets their funds...that's right, Joe Taxpayer.

Finally, the claim is that by doing this it will bolster confidence. Confidence in what? If a person is going to panic and pull their money out, they're going to do it, whether they have $100,000 of coverage, $250,000 of coverage, or $10 gazillion of coverage. At the same time, most of the people making a run on the bank are people who have assets well under $100,000, so they're already covered by FDIC.

In my opinion, this doesn't do shit for the average person, except put us at greater risk as taxpayers to shoulder an even larger burden of the poor financial decisions made by so called "experts." I hope that Congress lets this idea die on the floor of the House.

They Did What?

Before leaving Pasadena on Saturday morning I was reading a copy of the Baltimore Examiner and there was an article about a police investigation into a playground that had burned down in Baltimore. It looks like that the fire was set deliberately.

I have to know, who the fuck thinks it's a good idea to burn down a playground? I just can't wrap my mind around why a person would do something like that. To me a playground is a pretty innocent place, and by doing something like that, you're robbing kids of a place where they can go and have fun.

Who does something like that?

This Ain't Right...

http://cjonline.com/stories/080208/bre_fire.shtml

So a fence and a garage nearly burned down at the Westboro Baptist Church (Home of everyone's favorite homophobe, Fred Phelps), and while it could have been accidental, it could have also been arson.

If it was arson, I don't agree with it. Just because you dislike a person or an organization (or maybe you think the building is fugly) does not give you the right to set their property on fire. What is to stop someone from setting a GLBT-friendly church on fire in retaliation for this?

The worst is seeing comments from folks that they're going to be celebrating that this happened. This is not something to celebrate people. How would you like it if they burned down your place?

I hope it wasn't arson...

Faux Nightclub

Last Friday I went to Pasadena to hang out with JH. I got there a bit late and since JH had to work in the morning, we decided to skip our original plan of going to the Baltimore Eagle. His parents were out at one of the local places, except they were getting ready to leave because they were booted off of the patio. So we made a plan to all meet at Bamboo Bernies, which was down the road.

JH and I get there, and the immediate thing that happens is that I am refused entry. Why? Because I'm wearing my Baltimore Ravens (Ed Reed) jersey and they have a dress code that says "No sports jerseys" among other things. JH is refused because they say his shorts are "too loose." So fine, we go home and we change and go back, where once again we are refused entry. This time it's because JH is wearing camouflage shorts. When we asked why, all the bouncer would say to us is "We're a nightclub." So that made the both of us say "fuck this place" and head out of there.

In my years of going to clubs and bars in DC, MD, TX, and NM, I have never had to directly deal with a club that has had draconian rules like that on what you can and can't wear. The closest I have seen anything like it would be at a nightclub in the Adams Morgan area. However, this "club" is in a small town in Maryland that is not known for having a problem with violence. To go further with it, JH's bro thinks the bouncer had something against the two of us because he saw some dyke in there with a Yankees jersey on, and apparently there were underage girls in there as well, even though there was supposed to be an ID check at the door to keep under 21 folks out. JH thinks that the bouncer kept us out because we were homos, and I hate to say it, but he might be right on that one.

Perhaps a call to the ABC folks in Maryland is in order against this place if they're allowing underage folks in there. In the meantime, we won't be going back to Bamboo Bernies, especially if they're going to selectively enforce their rules.

So JH got the idea to hit a local liquor store and buy the cheapest beer possible, just because we were considered to be too trashy to walk into a bar in the middle of redneck central. I will have to say that if you want cheap beer in MD, go with National Bohemian (Natty Boh) in bottles. This is crucial because while the Boh is a cheap beer, it isn't nasty tasting if you get it from a bottle instead of a can.

So that's how we got to spend our Friday night.

Bizzare...

I will freely admit here that if you have not already noticed while loading this blog, I use Google Analytics to keep stats about who is coming to visit and what is being looked at. I was reading through one of the reports tonight and I couldn't figure out where one of the sources was coming from, since they were another blog, but there was no mention or link on their blog to my blog.

Google could do a bit of a better job of capturing what page a visitor is coming from because it turns out that this blogger subscribes to an RSS feed of one of my blogger friends, and it's likely that he clicked on a link from my friend and it took him to my blog. However, all I had was the main site name so it did cause some confusion.

Also while we're on the subject of bizzare stuff, I can't believe an entry I wrote in April is still generating hits and the occasional comment. Okay, maybe it doesn't hurt that if you Google "Taylor Swift homophobe", "swift homophobic", or other similar terms, my blog is the first thing that comes up. However, considering how long ago the song came out, and that it was changed for radio play, I'm surprised that it still gets Googled at least once a month.

The comments are what crack me up a bit because some people don't quite get it. So it becomes a matter of "Do I answer these folks and explain and maybe they'll understand" or "Why bother, they aren't going to listen." Hard to say, but considering these were also anonymous comments, I doubt they're going to come back to check up to see if I responded.

Wait...what?

"There's whores standing in front of the church"

--Me, yesterday, passing by a church on the way to the festival site.

Yes, these clearly were women who were "working." I can't think of too many folks who would be standing on a corner with a tube top and booty shorts just looking around, and they weren't facing the church looking like they wanted to go inside.

Taylor Swift = Homophobe?

Has anyone heard Taylor Swift’s new single "Picture to Burn"? I happened to catch it on Surius Hits 1, the song has to do with a breakup gone bad, the way it is written is the typical crap that high school students pull on one another when there’s a breakup and drama behind it. However, my jaw dropped to the floor when I heard these lyrics:

Lyrics Page

So go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy
That’s fine I’ll tell mine you’re gay

I couldn’t believe that this was what I was hearing. I know that it may be a song and it’s all about the drama, but damn, that’s screwed up to sing that you’ll go around telling your friends that your ex-boyfriend is "gay" just because you two broke up. The worst part is that I have known people who have done that kind of thing, and in high school when you're in that awkward stage of trying to fit in and such, words like that can be very destructive.

If Taylor Swift is really condoning that kind of behavior, well then she’s several unprintable derogatory words in my book. You can say I'm being overly sensitive, but before you do, think about your own life, I'm sure somewhere someone spread a false rumor about you just because they were mad at you, and I bet you were pretty upset about it.

This Is Just Strange

It's a very strange thing when the siren of the fire truck going by actually is in time with the dance remix you're listening to.

I actually had to pause the song to see if it was part of the music or if there was a real siren outside.

Dumbasses...

State Dept. Fires 2 for looking at Obama File.

Oy, what idiots. The worst part is that they probably have a warning appear on their computer every morning when they would log in at work that essentially said "Only authorized activities are permitted, by using this computer, you consent to be monitored and recorded. THERE IS NO RIGHT TO PRIVACY ON THIS SYSTEM!"

I know that's what I have on my computer at work. I also know that if at any time I access confidential information, there is a log being kept of what I accessed and I can have my ass nailed to a wall if I step out of line. Besides, I can only access private information on a "Need to Know" basis, and guess what, I have no "need" to "know" if Barack Obama (or anyone else for that matter) answered any Decennial Census or other survey.

I know for me a violation like that will cost me $250,000 in fines and up to 5 years in jail. It also means I have a big fat felony to follow me around for the rest of my life, boy don't those look good to an employer? :-P

Fucking idiots.

I Don't Get It

Ya know, there is something about many of the gays that I don't understand about y'all.

Your fear of the genitalia of the opposite gender.

It's invariable, I'll be reading comments on a message board, and a guy will say something along the lines of if there is a picture of a vagina, they'll be scarred for life, or a woman says they'll be scarred for life if they see a penis.

Is it really that traumatic? I'm not bothered if I see some vajayjay in a straight porn.

Wow

I'm reading about the tornado that hit downtown Atlanta and it sounds like things got crazy, I hope no one was killed by them.

Ironically it means I'm going to have to find out if our regional office is still standing, since I'm supposed to fly into Atlanta next month to do a field observation and a training observation.