Big Ugly Man Doll

Happy Friday! Here is, once again, another chance to catch up with your own personal astrological future. Your upcoming week will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short – but don’t let it get you down! Read on!

Aries (The Ram):   The Good:  This week you’re going to party like it’s the end of the world.  The Bad:  You might as well, because guess what?  Your high-risk disease this week:  Respiritory Syncytial Virus.

Taurus (The Bull):  The camera never lies, never blinks, and never needs to take a break to just run out for one quick cigarette and maybe a cheeseburger, which is more than you’ll be able to say this week when the film crew from 60 Minutes shows up outside your front door. 

Gemini (The Twins):   Vegetable juice figures highly in your life this week; consider adding booze to it – you’re going to need it.  Spend the week cleaning lightly – no one really notices the stains, so it’s not worth bending over to scrub them.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Filariasis.

Cancer (The Crab):  You will descend, this week, from the first enclosure, down to the sub-basement.  Be careful how you enter that wide-gated, storm filled room – you could find yourself stuck, and then where would you be?  Right there in the sub-basement, right.  Anyway, you won’t like it. 

Leo (The Lion):  The Good:  You will have your own library this week, as though you didn’t have one before.  The Bad:  You have to share it with the ravens, who feel propriatarily about many of the books.  The Ugly:  They talk, and they’re going to be offended if you don’t talk back.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Beak & Feather Disease.

Virgo (The Virgin):   Your lover will ask you to please eat more pineapple and mint leaves this week, making you seriously reconsider your plans to leave them.  Stay the course!  But you might want to wait another two weeks before you dump them on the front porch.

Libra (The Scale):  You’ve been pressing forward a long time.  It’s been a tough slog, but you’ve persevered.  Your hard work and determination will seem to be rewarded this week, when you finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  It’s not just a cliche, though – that really is a dragon coming your way.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Prion Disease.

Scorpio (The Scorpion):   This week you will be tested to within an inch of your life.  You will be out of your mind with worries of failure, of never living up to expectations, of having forgotten the capitol of Serbia.  Do everything your parents always told you to do and you might win through to the victory. 

Sagittarius (The Archer):   Will the suitors never stop throwing themselves at your booted feet?  You tell them all they are too late, but still they come, more this week, dashing themselves on the rocks of your disdain.  They were never going to be good enough anyway.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Strangles.

Capricorn (The Sea-Goat):  Tuesday, you will return a computer network cable for a different computer network cable, which will also not fix your problem.  Your problem is that you’re too fucking stupid to use that thing, and no cable is going to fix that. 

Aquarius (The Water Bearer):  There will be a knock on your door Monday.  Don’t answer.  It’s opportunity, but it’s an opportunity to buy into a great deal on an investment property with a time-share option that you really need to think about!  Just don’t answer.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Shigellosis.

Pisces (The Fish):  This week, you will write a poem.  If it’s anything like the drivel you wrote last week, remember to burn it along with the others.

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We lost the last of the giants yesterday.

I grew up on a steady diet of the four pillars of Science Fiction: Robert Heinlein, Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, and Ray Bradbury. I would usually include Frank Herbert in that list, and Kurt Vonnegut around the edges of social commentator and fabulist, but Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, and Bradbury were unquestionably greats, were giants who shaped the worlds of the future as they wrote them. Between them they wrote more than 700 books (impressive, even considering 500 of the books were Asimov alone) and countless short stories, movie scripts, novellas, plays, and television and radio shows.

But Bradbury, who died at 91 years old yesterday, was a little different. Heinlein, Asimov, and Clark were known as the “Big Three;” Bradbury was there, was part of speculative Sci-Fi every micron of the way, but he wrote closer to the Earth than the others tended to. Even one of his most well known books, The Martian Chronicles, was still within our solar system – and the stories were uniquely human stories. His Fahrenheit 451 – required reading in many schools – is not only set on our world, but increasingly describes our world. The technology of media and the decline of print publishing today holds frightening echoes of Bradbury’s dystopia.

He wrote poetry as well. As a poet and Sci-Fi buff, I was excited to find a copy of an anthology of his poems. Yes, some were about sci-fi. Some were about flowers, and children. Most of them were proof that he was a better storyteller than poet. But still, he was one of the last of the Renaissance men – creating with words in every venue in which words can carry weight.

He will be missed by many. And if you’ve never read Fahrenheit 451, go get a copy. You’ll be glad you did.

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Today is a big day.  It’s a big deal.  We’ve waited so long.  Yes, the new iPad is finally – what?  Oh, wait, sorry.  No, it’s World IPv6 Day!

Today’s the day Internet Protocol version 6 is being rolled out worldwide.  IPv6 is the way and the light – it will bring peace and stability to East L.A.,  solve hunger in lower Manhattan, and help the US Department of Education finally find something constructive to do with its time.  It will secure your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of the latest download from Angry Birds.  It will turn your home router back into a router and let you take all the parts that make it a gateway and make a bird’s nest out of them.  (OK, you can make an Angry Bird’s nest if you must.) 

IPv6 will let you listen to Katy Perry’s greatest hits for hours without tiring of them, once you’ve paid for them – she needs that money for nail polish.  And, as an avid Katy Perry fan, I’m proud to announce that the Big Ugly Man Doll has been IPv6 ready since before it was cool. 

So what are you waiting for?  Change your stack, change your life!  Route your packets the v6 way – start today!

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So there I was, on a 10-K hike around the local lake early in the morning with the Human Tape Recorder.  This was remarkable in itself, not because she’s not into hiking 10 kilometers, but because she’s 13 and usually sleeps past noon on weekends.  Nevertheless, she had agreed that getting up and stepping out seemed like a good plan that morning, and there we were.

We’d been walking a little over an hour with about 2 kilometers to go, when I noticed that the trees – it’s a full canopy – cleared out in about 300, maybe 400 yards.  It looked like the light at the end of a long, green tunnel, and I said, “Ah, there’s freedom!” 

Then I looked at my 13-yr-old daughter and, thinking to perhaps add some extra PT to our already industrious walk, asked her, “So, from here, looking at that break in the trees in the light there, if something big and hungry started chasing us right now, do you think you could run all the way to the light?”

She turned her head, looked me up and down, and said, “I wouldn’t have to.”

Well played, nasty evil wicked child, well played. 

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This evening my friend Momedy posted on Facebook a link to an interesting article about prejudice.  Based on the article, she posed the question, “Is Mormon bashing socially acceptable?”  Unfortunately, the answer still seems to be “Yes.”  

Should it be, obviously, is “No!”  It’s a good article, and there were great comments on her thread.  I made a study of the LDS Church in college, and since then have been to visit the public parts of the Temple in Salt Lake City.  I should note (while many of those who know me well are saying “Wait, what?”) that I was raised Roman Catholic, and I have studied a LOT of religions – I find belief and faith fascinating, largely since I have very nearly none myself.  I think of myself as a militant agnostic:  I don’t know, and you don’t either. 

I’ve found that the important part of any such study is to respect not only the beliefs in question but also the people who hold those beliefs, no matter what religion they identify with.  Robert Heinlein said that one man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh – and it’s true, but it needs to be a belly laugh behind closed doors, in private, because the other guy is laughing just as hard at your beliefs.  In the end, it is our ability to be simply polite to one another that will save us.

(Go read the article now, it’s short.  I’ll wait.)

So, why do people still think it’s OK to disparage Mormons?  I think it’s because the LDS church is still very young, in the broad sweep of history, and can still be considered to be in a “cult” stage of its evolution.  The difference between a cult and a religion is time and money.  The last time I checked on such things the LDS Church as an institution was able to keep several billion in cash on hand – these days, not as much as the Vatican, but a respectable sum.  The money’s there, and over time, money can buy respectability.  What the LDS Church hasn’t had is 2000 years of training people to expect that, hey, lots of people are Mormons and that’s fine.  Christianity was a cult to start with, just as Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam were.  That these are all considered mainstream religions now has everything to do with the numbers of faithful of these faiths and with the number of years that “everyone’s heard of them.”   I have several friends who attend Unitarian services; the Unitarians don’t have much of an organization, but they’ve been around for nearly 500 years.  Nobody really blinks anymore. 

The good news?  The LDS Church is growing up at a time when all the world’s connections are growing together faster than they ever have before.  It won’t take 2000 years for Mormons to be completely mainstream and for Mormon bashing to be socially passé – it might take 200, but hopefully even that may be guessing wide.  I believe in the power of the Internet to highlight this kind of irresponsible prejudice, shine a light on it, and get people to think before they talk. 

You know who we can sit around and tell jokes about?  Intolerant people.  I met this guy once, he was so intolerant, he wouldn’t let his kid have a sherbert because all the store had left was rainbow.   He was so intolerant, he had to ask for a different straw for his soda because he couldn’t bring himself to use one that might bend.  He was so intolerant, he asked his wife not to discuss sex while they were having it.  He was so intolerant, he was the only man Will Rogers didn’t like. 

Are there better intolerance jokes out there?  Any thoughts on the main point?   Can’t we just all get along?

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