Blarch Badness: Me!

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Put your voting shoes on! Er…that doesn’t even make sense. Moving on…

Metroblogging Seattle is kicking off Blarch Badness today. Um, what? Blarch Badness!

As I was writing my last post, I was thinking if there were a way we could figure out what the important, meaningful, and wonderful blogs in this city were. Maybe a tournament. You know, like March Madness. Only with blogs.

Sadly, the best I could do for a name was Blorch Badness. Or Super Fantastic Mega Blogger Ultimate Supremacy Championship. I need to work on names.

But a tournament! And it will be just like March Madness, with regionals. You will get to vote on matchups between the 32 highest rated, most popular, possibly best blogs the Seattle metro area has to offer. Even the Slog (if they behave themselves). And there might even be a prize at the end. (Hey! Anyone out there want to donate a prize?)

Surprisingly enough, I made it into the opening round!

3 Seattle Daily Photo vs #6 Michael Hanscom

And finally, a battle of photographers — Kim’s daily shots of Seattle vs. the most famous camera store employee to ever be fired by Microsoft.

Admittedly, I’m not quite sure how I ended up in the West Seattle round (will I have to move if I win?) — truth to tell, I think I’ve been to West Seattle once or twice, and have only lived on First Hill and up here in Northgate — but hey, no complaints!

I should also probably make sure that I actually have a photo up here somewhere, seeing as how I’m matched up against Seattle Daily Photo (some pretty stiff competition…I might not even vote for myself!). Sure, I’ve got lots of photos in various places, but with nothing on the main page…hrm.

I know! I’ll shamelessly stoop to using a photo of Jessica Rabbit kissing Betty Boop (from last Halloween at The Vogue) to court a few votes! I’m sure that’ll work!

Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit

In any case — check out todays round, and vote! Vote early! Vote often!

(Vote for me?)

Initiative 957

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This has my support, my signature if I find someone canvassing for signatures, and my vote if it should actually make it to the ballot: the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance‘s Initiative 957.

If passed by Washington voters, the Defense of Marriage Initiative would:

  • add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;
  • require that couples married in Washington file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage automatically annulled;
  • require that couples married out of state file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as “unrecognized;”
  • establish a process for filing proof of procreation; and
  • make it a criminal act for people in an unrecognized marriage to receive marriage benefits.

Absurd? Very. But there is a rational basis for this absurdity. By floating the initiatives, we hope to prompt discussion about the many misguided assumptions which make up the Andersen ruling. By getting the initiatives passed, we hope the Supreme Court will strike them down as unconstitional and thus weaken Andersen itself. And at the very least, it should be good fun to see the social conservatives who have long screamed that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation be forced to choke on their own rhetoric.

I’m in. Of course, other people aren’t so excited…

Cheryl Haskins, executive director of Allies for Marriage & Children, agreed with [I-957 filer Gregory] Gadow’s group on at least one point about the initiative: “It’s absurd,” she said.

Haskins said opponents of same-sex marriage “have never said that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation.”

“When we talk about defending the institution of marriage, we’re talking about the union of a man and a woman,” she said. “Some of those unions produce children and some of them don’t.”

With I-957, “you’re dictating people’s choices in a way that is utterly ridiculous,” she said.

Which, of course, is the point.

The [Washington State Supreme Court majority] opinion [upholding Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage] written by Justice Barbara Madsen concluded that “limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers the state’s interests in procreation and encouraging families with a mother and father and children biologically related to both.”

Gadow said the argument is unfair when you’re dealing with same-sex couples who are unable to have children together.

“What we are trying to do is display the discrimination that is at the heart of last year’s ruling,” he said.

I’d add that the language as written is also unfair to heterosexual couples who can’t (or for any reason prefer not to) have children, hetero- or homosexual couples who adopt, or any other combination or situation you can come up with that’s not the husband, wife, and two point five children scenario. I was disgusted with the ruling them, I still am, and I’m quite amused by I-957’s approach to poking at the issue.

Sign me up!

Throwing down the gauntlet…

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Bill Gates, in an interview with Steven Levy for Newsweek:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

There’s a few other doozy quotes in there as well, but that’s the one that really got my attention.

More under the jump…

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Nobody Likes a Quitter

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As we enter this first day of February, I’ve now officially been one month entirely without cigarettes.

I’d been ‘working on quitting’ for a few months now, but as anyone who’s done that can tell you, exactly how hard one is ‘working on’ it can vary wildly day to day, and ‘quitting’ is often a long way from ‘quit.’ Still, I’d done a pretty good job of drastically cutting down how much I was smoking over a few months, to the point where I went the five days of our Christmas trip to Alaska entirely smoke-free without any hitches whatsoever. I had my last few smokes while out at the closing night of The Vogue on New Years Eve, and that was that.

Two major points to make:

  1. This was not a New Years Resolution. Out of long experience (both personal and vicarious), I’d never make ‘quitting smoking’ a New Years Resolution, as I rarely see a New Years Resolution that survives much beyond a week (often, they don’t survive more than a few hours). It’s for this very reason that I tend to make the same New Years Resolution every year — to suddenly devote myself to a regimen of strict celibacy. Hey, if I’m going to break a resolution, I might as well enjoy breaking it! ;)

  2. I’m not sure I’d really say that I’ve quit smoking. It was definitely time to stop, for a number of reasons — but I know myself well enough (and have read enough about the physical and psychological barriers to quitting smoking) that a flat-out statement that I’ve ‘quit’ would be foolish. At the same time, when I decided to stop dropping acid some time ago, I never claimed to have ‘quit,’ only that it was something that I didn’t want to do — and it’s been probably somewhere close to a decade since I’ve done any illicit drugs, and I certainly don’t see myself picking up the habit again. Sometimes — for me, at least — it’s simply easier to decide to stop than to QUIT.

As it turns out, once I was approaching it from a “this is something I don’t really need to do anymore” perspective, rather than an “everyone says I should quit, so I guess maybe I should try” perspective, it wasn’t terribly difficult at all. No major cravings, no major mood swings (Prairie verified this one, too, so it’s not just rose-colored glasses on my part). I am getting very tired of having colds, though — apparently one of the big side effects is a few weeks of increased susceptibility to illness, as your immune system adjusts to the sudden drastic switch in chemicals being pumped into your body. I’ve spent the majority of January sniffling, wheezing and whining my way through at least three rounds of head colds. Ick.

Still — if that’s the worst thing I have to complain about with this, I’m doing okay.

I did find a timeline that I’ve been keeping in mind during this…

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Faux Klingons

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I just heard about this through last Sunday’s ‘Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!‘ show (which I just found out is available as a podcast, since I never manage to remember to turn on the actual radio), and I think this might be the best Iraq War analogy I’ve heard yet:

One Minute Speech by Rep. David Wu, D-Oregon, 1st District, Portland:

Mr. Speaker,

Four years ago, this administration took America to war in Iraq without adequate evidence. Since that time, this administration hasn’t listened to the American people, it hasn’t listened to our professional military, and it certainly hasn’t listened to this congress.

You know, it’s said of a prominent businessman in downtown Portland that he never listened to anybody, and that if he was ever drawn in a cartoon, he would be drawn without ears. Now, this President has listened to some people: the so-called ‘Vulcans’ in the White House, the ideologues. But you know, unlike the Vulcans of Star Trek, who made their decisions based on logic and fact, these guys make it on ideology. These aren’t Vulcans! There are Klingons in the White House!

But unlike the real Klingons of Star Trek, these Klingons have never fought a battle of their own. Don’t let faux Klingons send real Americans to war. It’s wrong.

So. Very. Awesome. I love this.

Apparently, there’s a book out called Rise of the Vulcans focusing on Bush’s core advisors, who have dubbed themselves “Vulcans” after the Roman god of War. Wu just took the Vulcan thing and ran with it. In entirely the wrong direction.

No More West Wing

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Earlier this week, Prairie and I finally finished an ongoing project of the past few years and made it to the end of the seventh season of West Wing. It was such a good show, and it’s really a bummer that there’s no more on the way.

We’re almost done with Season Five of X-Files, after which we’ll be getting the movie and then exiting gracefully. I’ve had too many people I trust iffy on the quality of the post-film X-Files, so that seems to be a good place to leave off.

From here on out, we have various incarnations of Star Trek as a backup when we don’t have anything else in progress (currently somewhere in Season Four of TNG, I think, with DS9 after that already in the home collection), more Simpsons whenever a new season gets released, and we’ve dropped Season Two of Lost in the Netflix queue (as we gave up trying to keep up with their erratic schedule midway through last season and are now way behind).

For a guy who doesn’t much like TV, I’m sure enjoying some of the shows. Quite a bit after the fact, but it’s so much nicer this way!

Drama and Disappointment

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This is an entry I’m really not sure how to write…but I’ll do my best. This is going to be somewhat (and quite deliberately) vague, and no names will be mentioned (I’m far too familiar with the power of Google, and should things change in the future, I don’t want past sins to come back to haunt anyone), but overall, I hope things are clear enough for those who need to know.

Those of you who’ve been checking in here over the past year or so may remember a few entries I made regarding an old friend of mine from high school, who I reconnected with last spring (hereafter referred to as Xebeth*). Not long after we got back in touch, the news broke that she was suffering from a rare degenerative disease. For Prairie and I, much of the next eight months was spent devoting a large amount of our spare time to doing what we could to support a friend in a bad situation. It was difficult and at times extremely stressful, but we wanted to help in whatever way we could.

Unfortunately, as time wore on, doubts started to surface. At first, we brushed them off as little more than a very understandable combination of shock and denial at the situation we were dealing with. However, as events continued to progress with no sign of letting up — rather, getting progressively more bizarre — we eventually reached a point where we couldn’t simply shrug the doubts away.

When we confronted Xebeth with our questions, rather than simple explanations, we were met with anger, denial, and stonewalling. Repeated attempts to verify those aspects of the situation we found questionable were met with everything from outright refusal to ‘clarifications’ that outright contradicted things we had been told earlier.

In short, to the best of our knowledge, most to all of what we’ve been dealing with for much of the past year has been a series of lies.

A short and not at all comprehensive list of what we believe to be fabrications:

  • Xebeth is not suffering from a rare and little-known form of malignant hyperthermia. She may have malignant hyperthermia, but we have not been able to find any information on any form other than the admittedly somewhat uncommon, but known, treatable, and preventable form of MH that is generally triggered by anesthetics during surgery.
  • She is not facing immanent death. Not this week, month, year, or in the foreseeable future (at least, no more than any of the rest of us are).
  • She does not appear to be a published author in the education field.
  • She did not legally change the spelling of her name to use a ‘y’ instead of an ‘e’ shortly after either her eighteenth or twenty-second birthday (each of which were presented at one point or another).
  • She did not receive an extremely rare, virtually unheard of nearly full-body muscle transplant that replaced around 80-90% of her degenerating muscle mass with healthy donor muscles from an organ donor.
  • She did not get divorced from her husband after he
    • locked her away from access to her finances while she was in the hospital,
    • cheated on her as she was in the hospital,
    • viciously beat her as she lie half-paralyzed in her hospital bed,
    • was discovered to have faked his own vasectomy (by going to a movie during the assumed day surgery, then ‘faking’ the discomfort for the next few days) after a prior friend of Xebeth’s was discovered to be pregnant with twins fathered by him.
  • All in all, we think that while we were led to believe that she and her husband were having some rather major issues culminating in the dissolution of their marriage due to his being a complete and utter shlub, we now believe that he’s probably a good guy overall…he just happens to be married to someone who’s not able to live in the world as the rest of us know it.
  • We’re pretty sure that e-mail conversations that we believed we were having with Xebeth’s husband, two close friends, her mother, and one lawyer were actually false identities set up by Xebeth using multiple e-mail accounts at various free vanity domains.

There are other bits too, but these cover the major issues. Laid out in a list like that, it seems mind boggling that we believed any of it, let alone got strung along as long as we did. However, as the majority of our communication was via e-mail, and as we thought we had no reason not to believe what we were being told, it was easy for stories to build on prior stories. Every house of cards falls over eventually, though, and we’re just glad this one didn’t wait any longer than it did.

Even after it became more and more apparent that we were dealing with a situation extremely different than we had believed, we made every attempt to assist. If Xebeth had at any point admitted to us what was going on, we would have accepted that and done what we could (within reason and ability, both of which would be far different by this point) to help her get past the need to lie to us. However, in the end, she instead chose to entirely cut off contact with us.

At this point, we’ve attempted to do what we can to help her, only to be rebuffed. We even attempted to contact her husband without her as an intermediary, in the hope that he’d be able to help her where we couldn’t. That also seems to have gone nowhere, as we’ve still heard nothing from either her or her husband.

In the end, it appears that we spent roughly eight months going through emotional hell trying to support someone we thought was a friend, only to discover that it was all a lie.

As I mentioned Xebeth and her situation a few times on this site, I’ve gotten a few inquiries as to her current situation, as it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned her. This is why. She’s not dying — but, I’m sad to say, it appears that she’s not well, either.

For those of you who know Xebeth and have her e-mail address, I’d strongly ask that you not attempt to contact her about any of this. First off, she’d be likely to either ignore any such messages. More important, though, is that harassing her about this would do nothing to help either her or anyone else. She needs to find help — but if that’s going to happen, it will need to come from those actually close to her. Angry missives from old acquaintances scattered across the ‘net aren’t likely to do anything but cause more problems — and I don’t see any need to make things any worse for her or anyone else than they might already be.

Thanks for your consideration in this, and my apologies to those of you who I unwittingly worried about her situation.

Not with my $300 million, you don’t…

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The Sonics — who used to be the Seattle Sonics until Seattle voters passed Initiative 91, “which prohibited the city from using tax dollars to subsidize a pro team unless the subsidy generates a certain profit for the city,” and are now searching for another city to house them — want to build a $530 million dollar arena…and they want taxpayers to pony up for $300 million of it.

The Sonics can kiss off, as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve always been flabbergasted at the amount of money poured into professional sports, and especially the amount of money thrown at professional athletes. It just makes my head hurt when those people in charge of such things then ask that the public — many of whom couldn’t give two figs for professional sports in general, let alone any particular team — essentially be required to pay to support them.

You want $300 million of my tax dollars? Put it towards education. Put it towards actually doing something to improve transit in Seattle, instead of half-assing your way through a series of stopgap measures, or instead of bickering about what to do for so long (or stubbornly insisting on ridiculous, expensive, impractical options, like the [thankfully, now dead] tunnel replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct) that nothing ever gets done. Put the money towards something — or anything — that would actually benefit everyone, not just those who get their rocks off by watching other people play a game.