Bits and pieces

Sometimes the thoughts that come unbidden don’t form enough to make a complete blog entry. Here are a few things that I’ve been noodling with over the past few months that I haven’t gotten a chance to expand upon.

• Being news free: STB has said that he is going to try a news blackout in 2006. It’s not an entirely bad idea. The thing of it is, the world goes on whether you’re paying attention to it or not.

  Mark Morford is operating on the theory that we all need to put out positive energy to avoid being sucked under by the three soul-sucking years that are left the current administration, and to prepare for the future (do we really want another decade of Republicans in the White House?).

  The simple fact is that most of us are too small to make any change alone in the things that really matter on the grand scale. I can’t affect environmental policy. I can’t change the fact that BushCo. is one step away from having me deposit my tax money directly into Halliburton’s off-shore bank accounts. There isn’t anything I can do by myself to make the war stop. And, frankly, I’m sick and tired of being made to be afraid, which is really all the news in the U.S. does. And yet, I can’t quite justify opting out of all news just yet.

  Where we can make a difference as individuals is in the little things: helping a stranger with a dead car battery on a rainy day; holding the door for the person behind you; being aware of the fact that you’re not alone on the planet. And you don’t need to read the New York Times every day to do any of the small things.

• We need more reality in our reality: Remember when I said this: “From iTunes blurb about the single of the week “Rock & Roll Queen” by The Subways: If you’re a fan of coolly disaffected pop with stylish punk energy, then you’ll understand why “Rock & Roll Queen” is our Free Single of the Week” would be important? Just a random thought: do we really need more things that are disaffected in this increasingly fractured world? All this great technology was supposed to make the world smaller yet we seem more divided than ever (well, give me another reason for the fact that Billboard has 18 separate genres for sales charts). Maybe instead of things that are coolly disaffected we need things that aren’t afraid to be earnestly real.
• Jimmy Carter has TiVo: How freaking cool is that! It’s amazing what you can learn watching The Daily Show
• Fighting for gay marriage is pointless: The fight for gay marriage in the U.S. is based on an unhealthy desire for acceptance. You can never get people to accept something they believe is wrong. And, frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck if the bible thumpers think I’m going to hell when I die. Maybe I am, but if they’re right and their God exists then I’ll pay the price for my life and how I’ve lived it.

  What the leaders in the glbtiq community fail to realize is that the homophobes of the world, both in and out of the community, will never be comfortable with anything but Kinsey 0 heterosexuality. What our vaunted community leaders need to do is what the Republicans do so well: follow the money. They’re so fixed on calling it marriage equality that they’re losing sight of the fact that money is power and that without the benefits of recognized partnership under the law we’ll continue to get screwed over. Although, you’d think that given their focus on the almighty dollar the Republicans would be lobbying for single-sex marriage instead of trying to reform the tax code. After all, more couples where both members work means more money to spend.

• (And while we’re at it) When are the lawyers going to realize we’re already protected under the law and all these stop gap measures are just pissing people off? : We don’t need any special additions to state constitutions or housing laws to protect gay and lesbian people against discrimination. If someone is discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation that person is, by default, discriminated against on the basis of sex (after all, you can’t be a lesbian without being, under the law, female and sex is a protected class under U.S. law).
• With all these movies available on DVD, why no two-channel stereo mix?: I’ll take a plain vanilla DVD that includes an audio option for a two-channel stereo mix over the most loaded DVD that includes nothing but the 5.1 channel surround sound mix. It doesn’t matter how good the rear channel effects are if they’re being shoved out the same two speakers as the rest of the mix. Lazy audio mixers need to realize that while DVD players are cheap, surround sound systems are not. Have a bit of mercy on those of us with only two speakers in the living room.