Dolphin's Dock » General

That’s not MY Future

dolphin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:20:24 +0000

I have a long drive into work in the mornings so I occasionally call in to the morning show of the radio station I listen to. This morning they had a “psychic” on, and I thought, “What the hell?” So I dialed up and actually got through. Now, while I tend to think psychic ability is at least possible, I definitely think most “psychics” are full of it. My “reading” didn’t really change that suspicion.

Psychic: Are you aware that someone loves you?

Me: Yes.

Psychic: You’re married, right?

Me: Well, not exactly…

Psychic: Well then don’t have sex anymore until you are because you’re very potent and I’m seeing a family addition.

Me: Umm… I don’t think that’s very likely…

As she goes on with her reading (I should expect financial improvement at work within 7 months but should get to know a mechanic on a first name basis, neither of which I’m putting alot of stock in), I can hear the DJs in the background have figured out what the psychic still hasn’t. At least it made for good radio

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The Prodigal Returns

dolphin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:41:31 +0000

I realize that this title could be as easily applicable to my presence here, which is partly why I’m making this post. I’ve been particularly busy lately, working into the evenings frequently on employed work and spending a bit of time ripping apart the horribly done back porch to close it into a new a laundry room (ok, well, properly framing in the wall and replacing the screen with the old windows, now that we’ve had all the house windows replaced; moving the plumbing and electrical for the washer & dryer will be a later project). I’ve actually got a post saved as a draft that I’ve been adding a sentence to once in a blue moon when I, mistakenly, think I’m gonna actually have 5 minutes to devote to blogging. That’s not a great way to write I gotta tell you. But all that said, I figured I’d fire off a quick and dirty post about, not my return to blogging, but my return to the bar scene after several years.

First you have to know that in all of southwest Virginia, there is only one gay dance club/bar (there’s at least one other gay bar-bar I know of and several that are not “gay bars” but have sorta been claimed by gay folks as the place “we” hang out). It’s not all that exciting, but it’s the only one so it really doesn’t have to be to draw a crowd. We hadn’t been in years because, while it was somewhat fun, it wasn’t so much fun as to justify the longer than one hour drive each way from where we were living, and coming home reeking of smoke.

Well now we’ve moved within a couple miles of the place, so at the request of a friend, we went ahead and headed there Saturday night. We arrived around midnight, when the place would have usually been packed as we recalled. It was maybe half-full. It did pick up a little bit later, but never to what I remember it being like when I used to go. I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, a club isn’t a club, without the energy of a packed house. On the other hand, there was more room to move about without bumping into people or worrying about getting burned on a cigarette (which never happened to me, but I remember seeing those glowing tips floating around the dance floor in the past and always being worried about it). Speaking of smoking, if we’d have held off on our visit a couple of weeks, we could have avoided it. Since VA is going smoke-free in Dec (which is something I philosophically oppose as an intrusion on the rights of business owners to decide what goes on on their own property, and would vote against, but I can’t say I’m distraught over it’s passage), they’re going ahead and making the switch on Nov 20th. Now THAT will be a change that might even get me in there a little more regularly (though still not too often; it’s a “fun every once in awhile” kinda place for me). The music has been switched from 80s Techno to Top 40. I think that’s over all a good thing, but I’m hoping it was a recent change and that’s why the DJ hadn’t yet discovered that it’s more or less impossible to dance to Pink’s “So What?”

I was less than impressed with security. The security guards who used to wield metal detectors now use a substantially less effect “pat each pocket” method for weapon detection. I’m not kidding; I could have had a handgun in my waistband and they’d have never been the wiser. For a place that had an anti-gay shooting there about 9 years ago, you’d think any change to their security policies would have been to make them stricter, not looser. I initially thought the average age of the crowd had seemed to drop some, and it in fact wasn’t until I was actually leaving that it occurred to me that (horror of horrors), it may not have been a younger crowd, just me observing them through older eyes!

Living so close now, and with them going smoke-free, we may just make a trip out there a bit more regularly, but I think we’ll invest in some discreet ear plugs first.

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I Don’t Think I’ll Crash this Party

dolphin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:02:03 +0000

I was a bit perturbed to hear on the radio this morning that apparently some parents (it’d be bad enough if these were adults doing it to themselves) are throwing “Swine Flu Parties” if their youngster comes down with H1N1, so all the other parents can bring their own child to get infected. W. T. F. What kind of parent would intentionally infect their child with the flu (any flu)? Influenza (yes any influenza is hardly benign. It’s miserable no matter what and high fevers can be deadly, especially in children.

I get the idea behind the Chicken Pox Parties, apparently much better than the parents throwing Swine Flu Parties do, or the distinction between chicken pox and swine flu would be obvious to them. You throw a chicken pox party, because it’s incredibly likely that a person will become infected with the chicken pox at some point in their lives, and if that infection happens as a child, the resulting illness is less painful and more manageable (usually requiring no treatment, unlike an infection in an adult).

Flus are different on two counts. First, a person is more likely to NOT become infected with any given strain of Flu than they are TO be infected. I’ve never had a flu shot in my life, and while I think I may have had a Flu as a child, I’ve certainly never had one as an adult (knock on wood). And because the most prevalent strains of flu vary year to year, if you’re fortunate enough to avoid a strain of flu during it’s peak time, you’re even less likely to get it in the future. If you take your child to a Swine Flu Party, you’re exposing your child to a virus that they may otherwise have never come across otherwise. Sure, they’ll gain immunity to it, but only after suffering through the very illness you’re hoping to avoid. I don’t have actual numbers but, for the sake of argument, let’s say your child has a simple 50-50 chance of contracting H1N1 flu without your intervention. If they don’t get it, then they didn’t need the immunity in the first place; and if they do get it, they will have the immunity from that point forward. If you intentionally get your child infected they have a 100% chance of getting H1N1 flu (clearly some children will have a natural immunity or simply won’t pick up the germ, even at a party, so it’s not truly 100% but for ease of discussion). So you’ve effectively destroyed your child’s chance at being flu-free for no measurable.

But let’s say H1N1 is especially hardy and hangs around as a dominant influenza strain for a long time. Not much chance that your child will “miss the bullet” if H1N1 hangs around that long, right? So what? There is no benefit to being infected early. In fact, there’s a good argument that you’d be better off getting it as an otherwise healthy adult than as a young child. The argument that H1N1 might come back with a vengeance later (so why not get it while it’s mild) is spurious as well because if they virus mutates enough to be significantly more dangerous, there no guarantee that your immunity is going to be any more effective to the new strain than it would be to any other strain.

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Sears Tower’s New Attraction

dolphin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:56:46 +0000

No way. Not in a million years. Even just looking at these pictures make me a little queasy.

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Trust Me, They Know

dolphin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Last Independence Day (and other than the date I don’t know what brings this story to mind), a friend of ours brought her two kids (I don’t know their exact ages but I think the younger one is like 9ish and the older about 11 or 12) over our place to watch the fireworks because you can see the fireworks from the city stadium from our backyard. During the course of the evening, Harry Potter came up (probably a commercial for one of the movies came on our something, but I don’t really recall), and I casually asked if she’d heard the (at that time) news that J.K. Rowlings had announced that the character Dumbledore was gay. She mouthed “They [her children] don’t know what gay is” to me before loudly stating for her children’s benefit, “Yep, Dumbledore is happy as a lark.” To her credit, she wasn’t upset with me for using the “g word” in front of her kids or anything like that, she just didn’t want to explain to them what it meant.

I would never give unsolicited parenting advice or otherwise interfere with a parent raising their child the way they see fit (outside of an abusive situation), but I’d sure love to have sat down and had a talk with her about it. Even if gay marriage, adoption, DADT, etc weren’t such major news items, I’d still find it incredibly naive to assume that an 11 year old doesn’t know what “gay” is. I’m not suggesting that a child knows the ins and outs of gay relationships (or frankly straight romantic relationships) or is all that aware of the political issues surrounding them, but when “that’s so gay” is a common way of responding to something undesirable, you can be sure that by age 11, they are familiar with the word.

It’s actually what they don’t know that strikes me as the reason to talk to them about it. Whether you (as a parent) choose to acknowledge it or not, your kids are going to receive messages about homosexuality; from their peers, the news, and other adults. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to suggest that alot of those messages are going to be very vague and negative. If “gay” is the worse thing a person (or thing or incident) can be called, then how is that going to effect the child’s perception of gay people when they learn what “gay” actually is, or even scarier, if they hit puberty and start realizing that the label may well apply to them!

So here’s my advice to parents out there: your children ARE being taught about homosexuality; if you’d like to have any input into what they’re learning and the attitudes they are exposed to, you’d better make sure one of the voices they are hearing from is yours. I’m not saying you need to go into the details of gay sex or anything, but what’s wrong with noting that those two guys whose house we went to to watch the fireworks love each other the same way mommy and daddy do?

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Nudity ≠ Obscenity

dolphin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:38:18 +0000

Note to art-illiterates: Nudity, on it’s own, is not obscene. Or is this another case of “naked woman = art; naked man = porn?”

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There are Times I Like Getting Hot & Sweaty

dolphin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:26:07 +0000

But simply sitting in my house watching television is not such a time. If you live in Virginia, you now that summer has struck with a vengeance. No subtle creeping up of the temperature, just 66 one day, 96 the next. And the NEXT was Saturday. We do our best to not use the AC through the spring temperatures, and even in the summer we leave the thermostat set at 78. But once it’s in the 90s we obviously gotta have the AC to even maintain that temperature and that temperature is a little hard to handle when you’ve had no time to adjust (for example, an over night 30 degree increase!!). So we finally gave in Saturday evening and switched on the AC

Then we went out to dinner, expecting that by the time we got back the house would be nice and comfy. We were wrong. While the fan was blowing air out of our vents, the AC compressor never cut on, so the air coming out of our vents was the same temperature as the air already in the house (which at that point in the evening was slightly warmer than the air outside).

The nice part: we rent, so we can get it fixed no cost to us. The not-so-nice part: It’s Saturday night and the rental office isn’t open til Monday. Call went in first thing Monday morning, but I was told I may have to wait until Tuesday as they’d gotten 18 calls already about broken ACs. Yet Tuesday came and went, no visit from a repair person. This morning I get a call “to make sure [my] AC got fixed.” “Um, not unless it’s been done since I left for work this morning.” They are going to check into it to see why it wasn’t done yet. So yeah, we may have AC by tomorrow, once the temperature has cooled back down to where we don’t need it anymore.

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Snoozing

dolphin — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:02:30 +0000

Apparently, my alarm clock no longer sounds after the initial wake up (when I hit snooze, it snoozes but never resounds). I was late yesterday; made it on time today, but this is still going to be a problem.

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Where the Wild Things Are

dolphin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:35:05 +0000

It was one of my all-time favorite books as a young child. Now it’s a movie. I don’t really recall there being a movie’s worth of plot line and in fact a quick wiki search confirms that the book contained only 10 sentences of text; still, I must see this. Trailer below.

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Crack

dolphin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:16:09 +0000

Awhile back, no terribly long after I got my new car, a little rock must have flown up and hit my windshield causing a little chip in it. That’s what must have happened, though I don’t recall the impact, just found the chip while washing the car. It was just a small chip, and off to the side, out of my viewing angle and it wasn’t growing. I knew that I should go ahead and call insurance and get it fixed, but, out of sight, out of mind, so it sat there.

Last night, it seems, the temperature must have hit that perfect sweet spot to make the glass expand and contract just right, and I woke up to find that the little chip in the glass that could fit under a dime is now a foot and a half long crack! What a way to start a week…

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